carry the bone of a dead man with them on going to the tirage, in the hope that through its agency exemption from military service may be secured, or that they may be drafted for a short time only; and J. Collin de Plancy states in his Dictionnaire Infernal, under the heading Bourreau, that "le maître des hautes œuvres" had the privilege of curing certain forms of illness by touching the sick with his hand when returning from carrying out an execution. This fact, taken with its allied superstitions, shows it to be probable that the old French custom of the monarch touching for the king's-evil with a sign of the cross, dates, in essence, from a period long anterior to the reign of the pious king Robert, to whom, or to whose near kindred, its origin is ascribed, just as in England it is most frequently imputed to Edward the Confessor. The opinion that certain people are endowed with the gift of healing by touch for the reason that virtue or power is incorporated in them is of great antiquity.[1] Still more revolting remedies than the English wen-cure are, or till within the memory of people yet living were, in vogue in other countries. In Sweden and Denmark the blood of an offender who has been beheaded—the legal form of capital punishment—is invaluable for the treatment of a variety of disorders, if the culprit has granted the sick person leave to drink it while yet warm.[2] Christian IV. of Denmark is said to have taken powders partly composed of the skulls of criminals as a cure for epilepsy; and according to Mr. Horace Marryat, who mentions this fact in Jutland, the Danish Isles and Copenhagen, 1860, vol. i., pp. 266, 267, "even in the present century, when an execution takes place, either in the island of Amak or Møen, the epileptic stand around the
Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/296
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Executed Criminals and Folk-medicine.
