Valuable modern medicines are derived from herbal folk remedies: from the moldy bread used on wounds to speed healing came penicillin; from willow bark, used for fevers, came aspirin; foxglove, used to treat various complaints, led to digitoxin for heart trouble.
In March 2015, scientists at the University of Nottingham in England reported that they had tried a thousand-year-old Anglo-Saxon remedy for sties, or infections of the eyelids: Take crop leek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together. . . . Take wine and bullocks gall [bile from the gall bladder of a steer], mix with the leek. . . . Let it stand nine days in the brass vessel. The bizarre-sounding potion was then tested on skin taken from mice infected with the antibiotic-resistant superbug MRSA. It killed 90 percent of the bacteria! And the Anglo-Saxons knew about it more than a thousand years ago.
Not all ancient remedies were actually helpful, however, and some sound loathsome—fried mouse for whooping cough, for example, or boiled sheep droppings for smallpox, or boiled onions carried in the armpits to cure pneumonia.
Folk Magic
Herbal healing, like life in general long ago, was mixed with magic and superstition. Charms or amulets, objects believed to have magical powers (like a rabbit’s foot), were carried to ward off illness or misfortune. Specific actions or gestures, such as hand motions against the evil eye, were assumed to have magical powers. Think of Auld Nancy waving her broom at a rainy sky.
Spells, chants, and incantations are magical words or phrases intended to bring about a specific result. “Hocus-pocus” and “abracadabra” are magic words used by many magicians. The Amazing Mumford on Sesame Street used “A la peanut butter sandwiches!”; Ali Baba in the Arabian Nights called out “Open Sesame!” and the door opened. Auld Nancy, Pansy, and Sylvanus all use spells or chants, with varying results. Grayling’s song to the grimoire is a magical incantation.
Divination
Used in various cultures throughout history, both ancient and modern, divination is the practice of seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown by reading signs or omens. In contemporary society, it is encountered in the form of astrology, tarot cards, the I Ching, and the Ouija board. Reading tea leaves or the lines on one’s palm are other types of divination.
For more than five thousand years, diviners, such as Sylvanus, have read prophecies in all manner of objects, including dust (abacomancy), spiders (arachnomancy), entrails of animals (haruspicy), the howling of dogs (ololygmancy), and, of course, cheese (tyromancy). Their prophecies were taken seriously and probably changed the course of history more than once. Today, although few read the future in animal entrails, millions of people practice a form of divination by consulting their daily horoscope or flipping a coin to make a decision.
September
12TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
I am commanded to write an account of my days: I am bit by fleas and plagued by family. That is all there is to say.
13TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
My father must suffer from ale head this day, for he cracked me twice before dinner instead of once. I hope his angry liver bursts.
14TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
Tangled my spinning again. Corpus bones, what a torture.
15TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
Today the sun shone and the villagers sowed hay, gathered apples, and pulled fish from the stream. I, trapped inside, spent two hours embroidering a cloth for the church and three hours picking out my stitches after my mother saw it. I wish I were a villager.
16TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
Spinning. Tangled.
17TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
Untangled.
18TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
If my brother Edward thinks that writing this account of my days will help me grow less childish and more learned, he will have to write it. I will do this no longer. And I will not spin. And I will not eat. Less childish indeed.
19TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER
I am delivered! My mother and I have made a bargain. I may forego spinning as long as I write this account for Edward. My mother is not much for writing but has it in her heart to please Edward, especially now he is gone to be a monk, and I would do worse things to escape the foolish boredom of spinning. So I will write.
What follows will be my book—the book of Catherine, called Little Bird or Birdy, daughter of Rollo and the lady Aislinn, sister to Thomas, Edward, and the abominable Robert, of the village of Stonebridge in the shire of Lincoln, in the country of England, in the hands of God. Begun this 19th day of September in the year of Our Lord 1290, the fourteenth year of my life. The skins are my father’s, left over from the household accounts, and the ink also. The writing I learned of my brother Edward, but the words are my own.
Picked off twenty-nine fleas today.