by Sylvia Kent
As many as 20 villagers are known to have taken part in the wrestling match and all were eager to win the head. The outright winner would be awarded the boar’s head which he then carried in triumph to his favourite hostelry where he and his friends feasted upon it with great merriment.
Easton Lodge was for many years the home of Lady Warwick, known as Darling Daisy, who was a friend of King Edward VII. She organised a Christmas party for her employees (50 house servants and 100 outside workers), together with their families and children from the village school. They gathered around a huge Christmas tree grown in Easton Lodge park. Lady Warwick enjoyed distributing presents, particularly to the children.
Boxing Day
Boxing Day on 26 December takes its name from the old and widespread tradition of giving a money tip, known as a Christmas box, to tradespeople or employees on this day. In 1846, Witham farmer Robert Bretnall gave £1 14s in Christmas boxes, which included gifts to his maidservant, the postman, singers, church bell-ringers and the church clerk and beadle.
In Clacton, for many years the Boxing Day Marathon took place on 26 December. This was organised initially by the Clacton Athletic Club. It is believed to have stemmed from the activities of a few Scouts in 1908, who decided to work off their Christmas excesses by going for a run on Boxing Day morning, covering a route from their meeting place in St Charles Hall, following the Holland Road out to Sea Lane and running back along the cliffs and coastline to their headquarters.
An ancient custom in which (usually) young village boys took part on Boxing Day or St Stephen’s Day, 27 December, was known as ‘hunting the wren’. It took place in various parts of Britain and was a cruel ritual which involved killing the bird, spiking it on a gorse branch and parading it around the village. In Essex, however, so the writer Humphrey Phelps tells us, the bird chosen was often a robin:
The robin and the redbreast
The robin and the wren
If ye go tak’ out of the nest,
Ye’ll never thrive again.
There are several versions of this piece of folklore. One origin of the custom is a Norse legend concerning a beautiful enchantress who bewitched men and lured them to their deaths in the sea. When an attempt was made to capture her, she took the form of a wren or robin and managed to escape, though not before a spell was cast upon her. As a result of the spell, she was compelled to reappear in the guise of a wren each St Stephen’s Day, whereupon she would be killed by mortal hands.
FOUR
CURES AND REMEDIES
Excellent herbs had our fathers of old
Excellent herbs to ease their pain
Alexanders and Marigold
Eyebright, Orris and Elecampane.
Rudyard Kipling
If the early herbalists are to be believed, the huge variety of plants that were grown in Essex could cure every ill – real or imaginary. There is hardly a substance known to man which has not at one time or another been taken as medicine, nor is there any disease for which folk-healers have failed to prescribe a cure. There seems always to have been a thriving interest in healing with plants; the herbalist’s craft has a recorded history dating back more than 4,000 years.
Scholars tell us that when the Romans arrived on Essex’s shores, they brought with them plants native to the Mediterranean, which must have previously been unknown to the indigenous Britons. Early herbal books outline numerous plants attributed to Roman gardeners, such as the rose, artemesia grapes, hops, clary (salvia) plus the herbs we use today, such as rosemary, bay, basil, thyme, dill and fennel. Contemporary Essex garden designer Stephen Hall used some of these plants in his prize-winning Roman garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2002.
Perhaps the Romans would have been interested in the plants growing naturally in our Essex clay soil. One plant that surely intrigued them is the one we know as woad (Isatis tinctoria) which, when the leaves were left to ferment, produced the blue dye that the Britons smeared over their bodies to frighten off the invaders. In 54 BC, Julius Caesar noted: ‘All the Britons, without exception, dye themselves with vitrum (woad)’. Woad is a member of the mustard family and, as well as being a strong dye, woad’s leaves were also included in ointments to soothe inflammation and ulcers.
Steve Hall in his award-winning Roman garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Herbal medicine is a broad and fascinating topic of study, involving an accumulation of many different techniques, beliefs and superstitions, on which layers of cultural history have left a mark. A good knowledge of plant lore and herbs would have been necessary to cure a wide range of illnesses and diseases. Monasteries and abbeys, such as the first established abbey at Barking, founded in AD 666, were known to keep still rooms stocked with dried plants hung from rafters. Aromatic herbs were kept in pottles and other containers. Even small houses and farms had a special place, usually in the rafters, for keeping their dried plants in readiness for use.
As a cure for arthritis, Saxon physicians recommended an ointment made of goat’s gall and honey. If that failed, they suggested incinerating a dog’s skull and powdering the patient’s skin with the ashes. For strokes, which they called the half-dead disease, they recommended inhaling the smoke of a burning pine tree. Many people still believe that the smell of burning pine cones improves their asthma.
The earliest information we have on the folklore of plants is found in the writings of herbalists and antiquaries. Black Notley, near Braintree, is proud of being the birthplace of the celebrated botanist John Ray (1627-1705), who, after studying at Cambridge University, produced not only the first book of flora covering the British Isles but also the Historia Plantarum, published in 1686.
A medieval herbalist.
Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654), a contemporary of John Ray, was also educated at Cambridge and many of his plant cures were published in the Complete Herbal and English Physician, which has never gone out of publication. In the words of Dr Samuel Johnson:
Culpeper, the man that first ranged the woods and climbed the mountains in search of medicinal and salutary herbs, has undoubtedly merited the gratitude of posterity.
A locally famous nineteenth-century Essex herbal doctor was Thomas Bedloe of Rawreth, who was known as the Dropsy Doctor and the Cancer Quack. A sign outside his cottage carried the advertisement: ‘Thomas Bedloe, hog, dog and cattle doctor. Immediate relief and perfect cure for persons with the dropsy’.
‘Essex has always been renowned for the great number and variety of its folk remedies,’ wrote Alison Barnes in Essex Countryside magazine a decade ago. ‘The most efficacious of these were the herbal cures, such as thyme tea for coughs, dandelion wine as a digestive and witch-hazel ointment for sprains, which can still safely be used today.’ These cures were used by some Essex folk centuries after many of them appeared in the popular herbals of the time, and are probably still used today. Although many of the concoctions printed therein seem practical, many more are nonsensical, and others frankly unpleasant and even dangerous.
Essex pargetter Fred Willett finishing off a John Ray house panel.
John Ray’s cottage at Black Notley.
In later times, Essex country folk became knowledgeable about plants for both culinary and medical needs. Of foremost importance was their power to treat and cure both injury and illness, for in isolated communities it was often costly and difficult to obtain medical help. There is little doubt that plants, trees and herbs would have been used as natural therapeutic aids. When medical knowledge was at a premium, folklore knowledge rose to the surface and individuals either treated themselves with family recipes, visited travelling bonesetters and herb women, or were helped by those in religious orders, who were sure to have herb gardens which provided the necessary substances for the treatment of ailments. Mary Gardiner, who was born in 1914, was brought up on a farm near Saffron Walden. She remembered:
We rarely went to the doctor as he cost money. We learned how to use the plants growing in the countryside that had a host of oth
er practical uses as well as being always there when money was short. We used dandelions, nasturtiums, sorrel and chickweed instead of vegetables. Seeds and flowers were used to make herbal teas and dandelion-roots and goosegrass could both be roasted to make a quite pleasant coffee. I seem to remember that the brambles could be used as a substitute for string and I think they were used in broom and basket making. Nettles were used as vegetables and soup, and mother considered them a good spring tonic. Some people used them as flavouring for tea and beer, and I’ve even heard they were used in making army uniforms. Nettle leaves were also useful in dyeing material and wool.
County pamphlets and chapbooks are useful records of methods that were handed down through generations. Old wives’ tales include the chewing of willow bark, the forerunner of aspirin; poultices and dressings made using mouldy bread, today’s penicillin; boiled barley for water problems; and honey for open wounds. The medical journal The Lancet has, in recent times, published papers on studies using honey for the treatment of ulcers. St John’s Wort (Hypericum) is also being studied as a treatment to combat depression. And that wriggly little black friend, the leech, is again being used in the treatment of blood disorders.
Dr Cornelius Butler (1789-1871), who kept a surgery at Cockayne House in Brentwood High Street for many years, as well as attending the paupers six miles away at the Billericay Workhouse, was a much respected larger-than-life character. On his huge white horse, he would make his visits to patients in the neighbouring villages. It is believed that he made his own medications and ointments and used leeches to treat his patients when he felt they needed relief in this way. He was once heard to say, ‘I never believe in bleeding a man more than three times a day.’ Modern research has shown that the leech – a mainstay of medicine from ancient times to the nineteenth century in the treatment of almost every disease, from whooping cough to madness – has an important role to play in plastic surgery. These bloodsucking worms are capable of absorbing three to four times their own weight in blood. They also produce a natural anticoagulant that stops blood clotting. When plastic surgeons transfer or graft new skin onto a damaged area, the tissues usually become severely bruised and congested with blood. Applying leeches to reduce the swelling is considered by many doctors to be the safest way of dealing with the problem.
Dr Cornelius Butler on his rounds.
In the Cater Museum in Billericay High Street, there is a complete set of eighteenth-century medical instruments, which were highly regarded by the physicians of times past, displayed in an apothecary’s cupboard.
Mary Clarke, who was born in 1910, remembered her grandmother using some strange ingredients from her ‘household book’, such as hedgehog fat, which was believed to be a good remedy for earache. A drop or two of the hot melted fat was poured into the affected ear at bedtime. It was held that certain types of deafness could also be cured in this way, as the fat would dissolve the hard wax and relieve the eardrum. If hedgehog fat was unobtainable, goose fat was sometimes used in its place and was said to be almost as good. Wild garlic was used as a cure for the first signs of a cold and it was invaluable for whooping cough.
Strange as it sounds, mice were included in some old ‘receipt books’ as remedies to cure whooping cough. There is an account from Colchester describing how mice were skinned, chopped up and fried and, in another case, baked ‘in their jackets’ and given to sick children to swallow whole. One school of thought maintained that the young patients should be told what they were being forced to eat; another that the utmost secrecy should be observed and the cooked mice cunningly disguised in the food.
An apothecary’s cupboard at the Cater Museum.
East Anglian writer Eliza Vaughan discovered, while researching herbal cures in Essex, that two young brothers suffering from ague (shivering fits) were cured by taking ‘four fat spiders in a glass of gin, three times daily for a fortnight’. Their young sister had the unenviable task of collecting the spiders. A cure for whooping cough was to tie a caterpillar in a bag round the neck of the afflicted person. As the creature wasted away, so the sickness also disappeared. A variant of the spider cure was used by Elias Ashmole in 1681 when he became ill. He wrote on 11 April that year that he ‘took early in the morning a good dose of Elixir and hung three spiders about my neck, and they drove my ague away’.
Cures to rid the body of warts and calluses come by the dozen and make fascinating reading. A Witham farmer’s wife suggested that burying a piece of red meat in the garden and walking over it every day will make the warts disappear. Another remedy from Braintree during the eighteenth century stated: ‘Do take and steal a bean pod without being seen and rub it on your warts. Then take and bury that where no man walketh. Do not let anyone see you a-doing of it and tell no one.’ By this means, one Essex woman claimed to have been rid of twenty-two warts. Bathing warts with tincture of thuja or hops has been known to make them disappear. Fred Eales, the last harness-maker, who lived in Billericay High Street until he died in 1958, was the last of Lord Petre’s ale-conners (inspector of ales). He was proud of his country origins and plant knowledge and, even when he was in his late eighties, could reel off many country recipes to cure rheumatism and warts.
Culpeper’s wart cures were well known in seventeenth-century Essex. He advocated ‘rubbing a black snail over the warts, nine times one way and nine times the other, then stick the snail on a blackthorn tree’. Paul Stevens, a contemporary Essex Romany gypsy remembers his mother using a very similar remedy to rid him of his childhood warts – and it worked.
Snail water was a well-known Essex remedy for consumption (tuberculosis). Hannah Woolley, who lived in Newport during the seventeenth century, gives a recipe for it in her book The Queen-like Closet, published in 1670. This involved grilling a peck of snails ‘with the houses on their backs’, crushing them in a mortar and then boiling them up in a mixture of ale and white wine, along with various herbs, a pint of earthworms, four ounces of hartshorn and ivory to make a porridge. By the late nineteenth century, snail water was usually known as snail gruel or broth and was made by simply boiling a few snails and a little barley in milk and adding honey to taste.
Honey Cure
Honey was plentiful in Essex and was an important ingredient in many country remedies because of its curative properties. There were more beehives listed in the Domesday Book in Essex than in any other eastern county. Honey is steeped in superstition and country lore, and rural folk depended on it for food and cures.
The old custom of ‘telling the bees’ was well known in Essex until the twentieth century and may still be observed in parts of the county. Kathleen Curtis from Colchester remembered:
We knew we had to tell the bees whenever something important happened in the family. You were supposed to tap the hives and whisper to the bees, very gently, letting them know of the news such as a wedding, birth of a new baby or most sadly a death in the family, when a black ribbon was hung over the hive.
John Whittier’s verse provides an atmospheric peep at the bee world of long ago:
Just the same as a month before
The house and the trees,
The barn’s brown gable, the vine by the door,
Nothing changed but the hives of bees.
Before them, under the garden wall,
Forward and back,
Went drearily singing the chore-girl small,
Draping each hive with a shred of black.
Trembling, I listened: The summer sun
Had the chill of snow;
For I knew she was telling the bees of one
Gone on the journey we all must go!
The late Brother Adam of Buckfast Abbey, one of the world’s most famous beekeepers and a friend to Essex mead-makers, once commented: ‘Bees are the most mysterious creatures; they have a tendency to take offence if you don’t include them as part of the family, in which case they will stop providing honey and may even desert you.’ Bee stings were believed to ease the pain of arthritis
and rheumatism.
Today, snakes still bask in the sun on the sea walls at Leigh when they eventually emerge from hibernation. They also live in the ditches and thickets of Essex, as in Moore’s Ditch in the woodland behind the Viper pub at Mill Green, near Ingatestone. A television programme recently dubbed Essex ‘the county of adders’. Information dating back at least two centuries indicates many beliefs about adders. They were said to be deaf, on the authority of Psalm 58: ‘They are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear, which will not hearken to the voice of the charmer’. It is believed that if you kill an adder, its mate will seek you out, and that female adders swallow their young when danger lurks, then vomit them up once the danger is past. An adder coming to the door of a house is a death omen. Adder’s oil was prized as a remedy for earache.
There is an unusual cure for the sting of an adder in the Commonplace Book written by Dr Benjamin Allen, a friend of botanist John Ray: ‘the head of the same that bitt, bruised and laid to the place’ or ‘the flesh of the adder, given inwardly’. Dr Allen goes on to tell of his experience with a boy who was bitten by a mad dog. He was certain that the boy could have been saved by eating the mad dog’s liver, fried.
Ralph Williams, in 1652, suggested a cure for yellow jaundice: ‘Take elecampane roots, and the inner bark of the Barbery, of each six ounces; of Salendine root eight ounces; of English saffron the weight of a groat; seethe all these in a pint of white wine, strain it, and drink thereof four spoonfuls morning and evening.’
Talismans and amulets played an important part in folk medicine. Until the mechanisation of agriculture, labourers using the scythe often carried bloodstone, which they used for the treatment of cuts. It was also carried as an amulet against nosebleeds. Natural bloodstones are said to fall from the sky during nights when the Perry Dancers, or Northern Lights, can be seen. They are held to be the petrified congealed blood of the supernatural warriors whose combat appears as lights in the sky. The more usual bloodstone is a holed bead of glass or crystal worn as an amulet around the neck on a red silk thread that has knots tied in it at intervals of three inches. When someone is cut, the bloodstone should be rubbed against the wound to stop the bleeding. The bloodstone is an ancient Germanic tradition, which goes back at least 1,700 years. Bloodstones can be seen attached to the scabbards of Anglo-Saxon, Alemannic and other Germanic swords preserved in our museums. A similar tradition may account for the magic scabbard of King Arthur, who could not die of wounds as long as he wore it.
