Executed Criminals and Folk-Medicine

Author(s): Mabel Peacock

Source: Folklore, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Sep., 1896), pp. 268-283
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1253229
Accessed: 03/02/2010 01:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=fel.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Folklore.

http://www.jstor.org
 EXECUTED CRIMINALS AND FOLK-MEDICINE.
BY MABEL PEACOCK.

IN Mr. W. Wollaston Groome's article on Su1folk Leech-

craft, published in Folk-Lore, June, I895, he tells his
readers that wens or fleshy excrescences are treated by
passing the hand of a dead man over the part affected, on
three successive days. To work a perfect cure, the invalid
ought to visit the corpse unaccompanied, and place one of
its lifeless hands on the morbid growth.
Further northward, in Lincolnshire, two similar ideas
are to be met with among the remedies unrecognised
by medical science. A piece of the rope with which a
criminal has been hanged is good against epilepsy. And
wens and goitrous swellings may be cured by passing a
dead man's hand seven times, or nine times, across them;
the dead man being, if possible, an evil-doer who has
suffered death at the hands of justice, or a person who has
died by drowning.
The Stamford Mercury, March 26, I830, p. 3, recounts
that the execution of three men at Lincoln, who had been
condemned at the late assizes, drew an immense concourse
of people, and that two women came forward to rub the
dead men's hands over some wens or diseased parts of
their bodies, one of them bringing a child with her for the
same purpose. The Sporting Magazine, vol. i., p. 295 (I793),
also bears testimony with regard to a similar scene which
happened at Newgate when a man named Hubbard was
one of the delinquents who suffered. After the bodies
were suspended, a child was brought beneath the gallows, to
which the convulsed hand of Hubbard was applied, under the
idea of its curing a wen. "On execution days at Northamp-
ton," says a correspondent of Notes and Queries, writing in
 Executed Crimizzals and Folk-medzczie. 269

the year I850,1 " numbers of sufferers used to congregate

round the gallows, in order to receive the ' death-stroke' as
it is termed. At the last execution which took place in that
town, a very few only were operated upon, not so much in
consequence of decrease of faith, as from the higher fee
demanded by the hangman." At Cuddesden in Oxford-
shire, in the year 1852, a goitrous woman was desirous of
trying the remedy, if opportunity ever allowed, as her
father, who had been similarly afflicted, was cured by it;
the swelling which troubled him decreasing gradually as
the hand of the dead man mouldered away.2 Devonshire
appears to be the home of a belief closely akin to this,
although not absolutely identical. Early on the ist May,
1855, the grave of the last man interred in Plymouth
cemetery was visited by a respectably dressed woman
accompanied by an elderly gentleman. The woman, who
had a large wen on her throat, rubbed her neck three
times each way, on each side of the grave, and then
departed before sunrise.3 Similar superstitions, and others
intimately connected with them, though somewhat differ-
entiated, such as that concerning the "Hand of Glory," are,
it is needless to remark, common throughout England.4
Beliefs of the same character also occur in many parts of
the continent. In the French province of Berry, Laisnel
de la Salle relates in his Croyances et Legendes du Centre
de la France, 1875, vol. i., p. 165, that the rope with which a
man had been hanged was formerly in request to procure
good luck, and to combat against many maladies; while the
peasants consider the fat of an executed criminal a specific
against scrofula and rheumatism. In Poitou, country lads
i First series, vol. ii., p. 36.
2 Notes and Queries, first series, vol. vi., p. 145.
3 Notes and
Queries, first series, vol. xii., p. 20I.
4
Cf. Baring-Gould, Strange Survivals, I892, p. 244, and Black, Folk-
Medicine, I883, pp. 100, 101.
 270 Executed Crzminals and Folk-medicine.

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
Dzictzonnazre Infernal, under the heading Bourreau, that
"le maitre des hautes ceuvres " 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.l 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 invalu-
able 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 yutland, the Danish Isles and
Copenhagen, I860, vol. i., pp. 266, 267, " even in the present
century, when an execution takes place, either in the
island of Amak or M0en, the epileptic stand around the

1 For a note on the Duke of Monmouth

touching for the king's-evil, see
Notes and Queries, eighth series, vol. viii., p. 278.
2
L. Lloyd, Peasant Lzfe in Sweden, I870, p. 129, and Notes and Queries,
second series, vol. ii., p. 325.
 Executed Crziminalsand Folk-medzicie. 271

scaffold in crowds, cup in hand, ready to quaff the red

blood as it flows from the still quivering body."
"Warm blood as a preservative against the usual loath-
ing for water in cases of hydrophobia," is mentioned by a
medical correspondent of the third volume of the Transac-
tions of the Moscow Physico-Medical Society (see the
Athenxum, 1829, p. 30), and another authority attests that
a similar restorative of health is used in China. "Dr.
Rennie states," says Mr. Dennys in the Folk-lore of China,
p. 67, " and I can myself confirm the assertion, that after an
execution at Peking certain large pith-balls are steeped in
the blood of the defunct criminal, and under the name oj
'blood-bread' are sold as a medicine for consumption. It
is only to the blood of decapitated criminals that any such
healing power is attributed."
Kohler mentions in his Volksbrauch im Vozgtlande,
1867, p. 418, that a wonder-powder used to be prepared in
Voigtland, from the bones of those who had been put to
death by the law, which was probably used for magical pur-
poses; and Rochholz asserts 1 that a belief in the efficacy
of a draught of human blood is yet firmly fixed in the inner
consciousness of the modern European who lives by faith in
old tradition. In the seventh decade of the present century
human blood, especially that of those who had died by
capital punishment, was a well-known remedy for epilepsy
in Switzerland. The same author also relates on the autho-
rity of Pliny, that the Egyptian kings took baths of human
blood to cure elephantiasis, and that the blood of the
gladiators who fell in the circus at Rome was drunk to
cure the falling-sickness; epilepsy, it would appear, being
the disease most favourably influenced by this gruesome
antidote,2 probably from its demoniacal character.
A correspondent of the Intermediaire, 30 Aout, I895,

Deutscher Glazbe und Branch, I867, vol. i. p. 38.

2
Cf. Folk-Lore, vol. vi., p. 92.
272 Executed Crimzinalsand Folk-medicine.

col. 218, says that Buffon states in the fifth volume of his
Natural History that women of the people have a singular
superstition: those who are barren imagine that to have
children, they must pass under the bodies of dead criminals
hanging on the gibbet: and the writer adds further instances
of cognate beliefs from Jacques Grevin's Imposture des
Diables, one of which is connected with that notorious
gallows-plant, the mandrake. Then, after quoting evidence
of the use of a piece of the rope with which a criminal has
suffered death, for the cure of quartan fever, colic, sciatica,
and tooth-ache, he continues: "At Rome the people believed
it to be an assured remedy for the most violent mzgraine
(Pliny. lib. xxviii., c. 4). At the present time hanging is no
longer employed by us, but we have still the expression:
avozir de la corde de pendu, for all very fortunate chances,
notably for luck at play."
Among the Wallachians there is an idea that people can
be rendered bullet-proof by eating the heart of a young
child. This superstition is also found on the Austrian side
of the border,1 and a yet more cruel mis-belief probably
gives rise to many of the atrocious crimes dealt with in our
own law-courts. Among the English, as among the German
speaking peoples, oral tradition, descending from time im-
memorial, teaches the ignorant and debased that certain
cures are only to be effected by doing violence to a girl yet
in her childhood.
The notion that the blood of a person who has undergone
the last penalty of the law possesses healing qualities has
arisen, it can scarcely be doubted, from the old reverence
for blood as the very seat of life itself. Like milk, which is
the vital fluid in another form, and like corn-the bread of
life-on which the existence of nations emerging from
savagery depends, it is sacred and wonder-working; as

' J. G. Kohl, Austria, 1843, p. 290.

 Executed Criminals and Folk-nedzcine. 273

may be seen from the important position it holds in all

mythologies.
Rochholz asserts that there is reason to believe the legend
of the Holy Grail itself, elevating and poetical as it is, had
its sources in heathen veneration for blood no less than in
Christian mysticism. The custom of drinking the blood of
men to bring about the disappearance of physical disease
has, it may be surmised, come down from hoary antiquity.
When once the natural deduction had been formed that the
life principle, or the chief among several life principles,
existed in the blood, it became quite reasonable to have
confidence in its power to revivify an unhealthy person, or
to bestow fertility, and even to give strength to the dead in
another existence.2
The New Testament bears evidence to the fact that the
Jews and Greeks to whom St. Paul preached, regarded
clothes which merely touched him as capable of influencing
in a favourable direction the physical and mental condition
of those to whom they were carried. It is related in the
Acts of the Apostles, xix., I , 12, that special miracles were
wrought by the hands of Paul "so that from his body were
brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the
diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out
of them." Among the early Christians the blood of their
martyrs was carefully wiped up on cloths, collected in vials,
or otherwise preserved, to be used as relics; and even to the
present time the " standing miracle" of the blood of St.
Januarius liquifying and boiling up when the head of the
martyr is brought near it on days of grand ceremonial, or
of danger to the community, is one of the marvellous sights
afforded to the world by the Latin Church.
Among uncivilized races the imperceptible principle
attaching to flesh and blood is often of the highest impor-

Deutscher Glatibeund Branch, vol. i., p. 35.

2
Folk-Lore, vol. vi., p. 277.
274 Executed Criminals and Folk-medzczne.

tance. With some savage peoples, eating the body of a

defeated enemy is far from being simple anthropophagy.
It is an act securing the transfer of the fallen warrior's own
admirable qualities, with all those similarly taken in pos-
session by himself from defeated foemen, to the conqueror
who has at last overcome him. The ritual cannibalism of
the ancient Mexicans, which took the form of what appears
to have been a communion feast on the corpses of prisoners
dedicated and offered to the gods, implies a similiar belief.
The flesh of the unfortunate who was by a kind of myste-
rious transubstantiation at once the victim and the earthly
manifestation of the deity honoured, was no ordinary food;
and apparently among European nations the blood of a
felon is no ordinary blood, although the reason for its
special association with the restoration of health has yet to
be satisfactorily explained. It may be that the miserable,
misbegotten wretch who pays the forfeit of his outrages
on society by death, fills to the popular imagination the
place once occupied by some victim whom our remote
ancestors regarded with mingled severity, awe and pity, as
they slew him and sent him to their gods. Perhaps too-
for as people say in Lincolnshire, "A many things go to
everything," and the current of belief is commonly a stream
formed by the union of many rills of conjecture and senti-
ment-a sprinkling of the dead man's blood, or failing that a
touch of his hand, to work the decay of disease by sympathy,
is efficacious because he died by violence, and therefore
presumably in health and strength, with the warm red tide
of life beating vigourously in every vein. If so, physical
contact with one who has perished by drowning is also of
signal advantage, because he too has been cut off from
existence with his vital powers in full action; but this opinion
may have also received further support from another concep-
tion, namely, that those who die by water are in some sort
the sacrifices claimed by the element which has slain them,
and are therefore sacred as the prey of the entity in union
 Executed Criminals and Folk-mediczne. 275

with the stream, lake or sea in which they have met their
fate.
Returning, however, to the occult influence supposed to
be exercised by the corpse of an offender put to death by
legal authority, it is remarkable to find that the Sicilians
yet indulge in a kind of criminal-worship, a cult of their
most notorious felons and cut-throats. Mr. Leland says in
Etruscan Roman Remains in Popular Tradz'tion, 1892,
pp. 245,246, that in old times those souls of men who had slain
many victims were invoked above all others, the belief being
that they carried into the other world the audacious power
which they had won by blood. "This . . . . worship of
dead criminals is to-day in full action in Sicily .... as
the reader may learn in detail from a chapter in the Biblzo-
teca delle Tradizionipopolari Siciliane, edited by Guiseppe
Pitre, vol. xvii., Palermo, I889. In it we are told that when
murderers and other atrocious criminals have been beheaded,
if they do but confess and receive absolution before death,
they are believed to become a specially favoured kind of
saints, who, if invoked when anyone is in danger of being
robbed and slain, come down from heaven and aid the victim.
And this is carried so far that there is actually a chiesa delle
anime de corpi decollati (a 'church of the souls of beheaded
bodies') in Palermo, with many pictures of the holy miracles
wrought by the sainted murderers." Mr. Leland adds that
these saints have frequently been the very scum of Sicilian
brigandage, outrage, robbery, and wickedness-incarnate
fiends-yet they are adored, and their relations are proud
of them, while no word is said as to their unfortunate vic-
tims who have very probably expired without the benefit of
ecclesiastical rites. The church of the Madonna of the
Drowned is, like that of the Souls of the Beheaded Bodies,
also visited by those praying for protection against danger.
This custom is illustrated by the dialogue and action in
Rosa: A story of Sicilian Customs, by G. Pitre, which
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, vol. lxxiv., pp. 624-640;
276 Executed Crzininals and Folk-nmedcine.

the betrothed of a young sailor, and her mother being repre-

sented as invoking both the Beheaded and the Drowned on
his behalf, since both classes of the dead are practically
beneficent tutelary genii.
A custom not distantly connected with the medical use
of criminal blood is that of turning the skulls of the vener-
ated dead into drinking-vessels from which to take hallowed
wine. "He who drinks out of the skull of an executed
malefactor thereby aids himself against epilepsy," says
Rochholz;1 and he furnishes instances of the barbaric
observance as connected with church ceremonial in his
account of the bone-worship of pagan and superficially
Christian .Germany.
Among other examples he quotes the silver-enchased
brain-pan of St. Theodul at Trier, which served in the cure
of fever cases, and that of the similarly ornamented skull of
St. Sebastian at Ebersperg in Upper Bavaria, which secured
the neighbourhood against the pest, in consequence of the
pilgrims visiting the place drinking from it wine which had
been blessed.2 The Rev. R. Polwhele, author of that quaint
collection of information, the Enthusiasm of Methodists
and Papists Considered, I820, (p. 29I), tells the story of
a girl, who, being deemed epileptic, "was sent to the
monastery of Nonhert to drink out of St. Cornelius's scull;
whereby the nuns told about, but falsely, that she was
better."
It is curious to note in connection with these pseudo-
religious drinking-vessels that at St. Teilo's well, near the
church of Llandeilo Llwydarth, in the Welsh half of Pem-
brokeshire, a skull is used as a cup. The water, according
to Professor Rhys, must be lifted out of the well and given
to the patient to drink by somebody born in the farmhouse

I Deutscher Glaubeund Brauch, vol. i., p. 231. Cf also vol. i., p. 268.
2 Deutscher Glaubeund Brauch, vol.
i., p. 230.
 Executed Criminals and Folk-medicine. 277

close by. It is given in a skull-St. Teilo's skull-which

Teilo Professor Rhys is unable to decide.l
This instance, in all likelihood, does not stand alone. I
have, indeed, heard that a skull is similarly used at one of
the Irish holy-wells, but the name of the spring has escaped
my memory. Among the "remedes exterieurs" condemned
by Thiers in his Traite des Superstitions, 1777, vol. i., p. 339,
he mentions that of drinking spring-water by night from the
head " d'un homme mort ou brule," to free oneself from
epilepsy, and also refers to the allied practice of making
pills from the head of one who has been hanged, to cure
the bites of a mad dog. Among the Nootkas of British
Columbia, it may be added, the inside scrapings of a human
skull prevent too rapid family increase.2 This opinion,
however, seems to be founded on the feeling that the dead
matter, and the force attaching to it, will prove antagonistic
to its opposite, and therefore exercise adverse influence on
the development of new life. The would-be mother in
France used to walk under the gallows to acquire aid from
the still-lingering vital essences of the trepasse. The Nootka
woman acts from the opposite point of view. For her the
skull has lost all connection with life and life-giving qualities,
and its powers are the powers of death.
The oil-exuding bones of saints were relics of great value
in European Christendom during the middle-ages, and they
are still treasured by the religious communities which are
fortunate enough to posess them. A writer in the Atlantic
Monthly lxxiv, pp. 480-493, gives an account of the miracu-
lous, chrism-dripping skulls still preserved at Kieff, and
describes how a Russian pilgrim visiting that holy city
knelt, crossed himself devoutly, and received from a priest
the sign of the cross on his brow, administered with a soft
small brush dipped in the oil from a skull.
I Bye-Gones, vol. iii., p. 24; Folk-Lore, vol. iv., p. 75.
2H. H. Bancroft, The Native Races of the Pacific States of North America,
1875, vol. i., p. 204.
278 Executed Criminals and Folk-nzedicine.

The question has been debated whether the vikings at

their solemn festivals ever, in reality, drank from the skulls
of their conquered foemen; but it cannot be denied that the
custom was followed by both Teutonic and Celtic nations
in the days of unameliorated barbarism; 1and it is indubitable
that long after the petition relative to the fury of the North-
men had become out of date in the medieval liturgies,
Christians continued to employ the crania of their saints,
and their malefactors, as cups from which to imbibe health-
securing draughts: those of the saints, one may suppose,
from the idea that there went a virtue out of them, and
those of the sinners, it may be, because in the days of far-
off eld, men who died by solemn decree were most com-
monly neither violent transgressors against social duties as
then understood, nor pitiful scoundrels, but valiant foemen
whose gore-imbrued career excited admiration rather than
horror, or noble blood-offerings yielded up to the gods to
ensure favourable seasons and prosperity.
Examples of blood-sacrifice and of cruel burial-cere-
monies are to be discovered in the early history of all
the Indo-European races; these traces of savagery in-
variably tending to disappear as each nation is observed
to advance along the path of civilisation, and to gain in
humanity from contact with peoples less rude than itself.
Every earnest desire, and every novel undertaking of
European barbarism appears to have had its success safe-
guarded by a gory tribute,2 but it has yet to be settled
whether the life-stream of the condemned was applied
remedially, although it is certain that as late as the period
of the viking-raids human sacrifices were still resorted to
by Scandinavian kings to lengthen their own life. Of the

1 V. HIehnand J. S. Stallybrass, The Wanderings of P'ants and

Animals,
I885, pp. 32, 413.
2 V. Hehn and J. S. Stallybrass, The Wanderings of Plants and Animals,
1885, pp. 414, 419.
 Executed Criminals and Folk-medzczie. 279

frequency of such bloodshed, for various motives, in com-

paratively modern times, there is no doubt, so far as northern
and north-eastern Europe are concerned; and it is worth
noting that the Scandinavian temple, or the dom-ring,
where men were immolated, was often at no great dis-
tance from the blot-kelda or sacrificing spring into which
prisoners of war were thrown after being slaughtered like
animals. Not far from nearly every one of the twenty
dom-rzings of Nerike there is a spring tending to confirm
the Icelandic tradition of their use.1 Not only were
enemies bestowed upon Odin to win success in arms: on
occasions of great need and distress the Norsemen devoted
and slew their own nearest and dearest, as the case of
Hakon Jarl offering his son Erling for triumph over the
Jomsvikings shows. Eirik the Victorious fighting against
Styrbi6rn gave himself to Odin to get the victory; and up
to the year Iooo so-called Christians in the far north
recognised the efficacy of human sacrifice, a fact placed
beyond doubt by the splendid self-abandonment of Hjalti
before the meeting of the Icelandic Althing in that year.
When the heathens held a meeting and resolved to sacrifice
two men from every district in the land, there being four
such districts, and to invoke their gods that they should
not let Christianity spread over the country, Hjalti and
Gizur had another meeting with the Christians, and declared
they would have as many human sacrifices as the heathen.
"They sacrifice the worst men," said Hjalti, "and cast
them down from rocks and cliffs, but we will choose them
for their virtues, and call it a victory-gift to our Lord
Jesus Christ; we shall live the better and more warily
against sin than before. Gizur and I will give ourselves
as a victory-gift on the behalf of our district." 2 A man of
robust self-confidence, and robuster faith, this. But in

1 P. B. du Chaillu, The Viking Age, vol. i., pp. 368, 37I.

2
Biskupa Sdour vol. i., as quoted in The Viking Age, vol. i., pp. 368, 371.
280 Executed Crimnzialsand Folk-mediczine.

spite of his ardent adherence to the new creed, it is plain

that the Christian doctrine of the one sufficient sacrifice
had little hold on him. Though the blood of the Highest
Himself had been shed, to Hjalti's mind other life-offerings
were, if not absolutely necessary, at least seemly and
acceptable. No less than his theological adversaries, he
placed his confidence in the efficacy of sanguinary rites,
and in the special security attaching to blood-bought
successes and benefits. The cause hallowed by the
willing death of the true and the stalwart, who yielded
himself utterly to the deity invoked, must be triumphant;
and to this present century it is evident that a freshly
executed corpse, or the blood from it, possesses inherent
virtue. The invisible and impalpable principle of life may,
when ousted from its native abiding-place, still serve to
vitalize and restore to health some languishing bodily
frame. It even appears that purely moral attributes are
likewise capable of being transmitted thus in modern
England. A writer in the Church Times, February 13,
1891, publishes the following archaic, but still-existing
folk-belief as he received it from the minister of a colliery
village in the far north. "I had not been in the parish
long before I was struck with the circumstance that when
a funeral took place there was almost sure to be a baptism
party at the church at the same time, sometimes the bap-
tism party arriving with the funeral party without the
accustomed notice beforehand. On inquiry I found it to
be a superstition in that part (I have not met with it else-
where) that should a child be brought to the font at the
same time that a body be committed to the ground, that
whatever was 'good' in the deceased person was trans-
ferred to the little child; that God did not allow any
(goodness' to be buried and lost to the world, and that
such goodness was most likely to enter a little child coming
to the sacrament of Baptism." Alphonse Karr's celebrated
epigram: "Plus pa change, plus c'est la meme chose" is
 Executed Criminals and Folk-medzicine 28]

as applicable to folklore as to political history. The ground-

ideas on which popular mysticism lays the foundation of
its tenets are identical among all people unhabituated to
abstruse thought. To the savage, "courage" is no abstract
conception; it is a thing to be got hold of and appropriated
by carrying out the quasi-obligatory act of devouring the
courageous adversary whom he has killed: and equally, to
the English collier, " goodness" is a transferable article, a
something he cannot actually see and handle, but which
may, nevertheless, be passed over from one person to
another. The latter belief, it is true, clothes itself in a
touching religious shape, while the former startles and
revolts the cultivated mind, but the intellectual ground-
work on which the two ideas are based is the same.
A practice which affords another illustration of this mode
of thought is said to be followed in Upper Bavaria. When
a dead person is laid out, a cake of ordinary flour is put on
his breast, which is supposed to absorb the virtues of the
deceased, the cake afterwards being eaten by the nearest
relatives.l
In Wales, as is generally known, the sins of the dead
used to be similarly taken into possession by the sin-eater.
But it is a fact worthy of mention that the characteristics
usually taken over from the dead are those regarded as
laudable. The uncivilised warrior, and those like-minded
with him, are desirous of assuming the nobler traits of a
corpse's ebbing individuality, but as a rule they lay no
claim to its weaknesses: they have no inclination to
become the scape-goat of the departed and make them-
selves responsible for his evil qualities. A natural prone-
ness to shun what is contemptible and of ill report seems
to be the chief cause of this tendency; but it may also be,
in some degree, attributable to the feeling that defects and
faults are, as these words really imply, failures, lacks, and
IAm Urquell, vol. ii., p. ioi.
VOL. VII. X
 282 Executed Criminals and Folk-medzcine.

omissions in human character,voids unfilled by virtues, in

fact,

POSTSCRIPT.
A member of the Roman Catholic communion tells me
that the hand of Margaret Clitheroe, a martyr executed in
1586 or 1587 for refusing to plead when accused of harbouring
priests, is preserved as a precious relic in the Convent of the
Blessed Virgin at York. It is believed to cure maladies of the
throat. Some years ago, as my informant heard from a priest
between 1887 and I890, the hand was taken to London to touch
the throat of a priest who was dangerously ill, but it proved
ineffectual. The sick man died.
One of the hands of Father Arrowsmith,who suffereddeath for
his religious convictions in 1628, is still kept with veneration
at the Catholic Church of Ashton in Makerfield,and is visited
by many devout persons, it having the reputation of working
miracles, "some of which have been carefully examined and
attested."
Were a detailed description obtainable of the annual secret
sacrifice of a man who dies for Christ-which still
prevails in
a village in the Abruzzi1-it is probablethat
striking exemplifica-
tions of the persistence of rites connected with the venerationof
human flesh and blood would be given to the world. Such a
descriptionseems unattainable,however. The grimmerusages of
heathen superstition owe their survivalin pseudo-Christianform
to the inviolate silence of the devotees, who reveal the
mysteries
of their faith to none but the initiated. Regardingthe
possibility
of cures worked by touch, or by a draught of blood, I
may add
that a physiologist of experience informs me that he believes
goitre may possibly be influenced by suggestion, especiallyif the
faith-cureadopted causes nervous shock. Such shock modifies
the nervous and vascular system favourably or
unfavourably,
according to circumstances,and the application of the hand of
an executed criminal might be as effective as the
application of

Folk-Lore,vol. vi., p. 57.

 Executed Crinzinals and Folk-medicine. 283
the galvanic battery,which is sometimes used for goitre with a
certain amount of benefit. That it is as effective has yet to be
proved.
The relationship existing between the falling-sickness and
death by beheading appears again in a French superstition.
Miss MargaretStokes mentions, in ThreeMonths in the Forestsof
France, I895, p. 50, that in that country the wells placed under
the guardianshipof St. John the Baptist are good for epilepsy.
An instance of oil oozing from the burial-place of a saint is
mentioned in the ArchceologicalJourna,vol. lii., p. 277. In this
case, however,there is no mention of its being applied medicinally.
"After the battle of Agincourt,on the day of which battle the
tomb of St. John [of Beverley]is said to have exuded oil, Henry V.
did not fail to come and renderthanks there for his victory."