Category Archives: Early Modern

The Pudding Pinching Heifer Heisters

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This post is part of a series marking the print and online Open Access (free) publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and myself (Taylor Aucoin). It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. This post first appeared on the Forms of Labour Project website in 2020.

About a month before Christmas 1626, a company of men approached the house of one ‘Duck-wife Lucas’ in Hoghton, Lancashire, knocking at her door and demanding ‘to come in and drink’. Being ‘about ten of the clock in the night time’, the whole family were then in their beds. Nevertheless, Henry Lucas, the duck-wife’s son, arose to let the company in and fill them some ale. After a time, members of the party, particularly two named James Garstang and Edward Cattrell, grew ‘outrageous and unruly’, and demanded Henry ‘give them some pudding’. Henry answered that ‘he could give them none’, and then fetched his mother out of bed.

Duck-wife Lucas quickly moved to placate the rowdy group, assuring them they ‘should have anything in the house that was fitting’, as long as they would ‘keep good order among themselves’. This proved too much to ask. No sooner had she taken ‘water & set over the fire & boyled two puddings’, then someone filched them ‘out of the pan…before they were half-ready’. Then the company began taking down cheeses ‘from the shelf’, cutting, eating, and absconding with them ‘at their pleasure’. But Garstang and Cattrell soon went beyond discourteous cheese-eating and pudding-pinching. Evidently feeling affronted in some way, they gave ‘fowle words’ to Henry Lucas and his mother, before finally levelling this ominous threat: ‘they would be even’ with Duck-wife Lucas, ‘before hunting time went out’.

Such was the information Henry Lucas gave to a justice of the peace on the last day of May 1627. His testimony, along with those of five other men, provided evidence for a criminal case that had been the talk of the township for half a year, and would now be heard at the Midsummer Quarter Session in Preston. For as Henry concluded in his deposition, a few nights after her threatening treatment Duck-wife Lucas had ‘a black heifer [young cow] stolen out of her ground’.[1]

Illustration of April in Michael Beuther, ‘Calendarium Historicum’ (Frankfurt, 1557) ©The Trustees of the British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Aside from the intrigue of the hijacked heifer, Henry’s one-page deposition contains much of interest to the social historian. There’s information about time-use (what hour the family was abed) and time-reckoning (the reference to ‘hunting time’). There are signs of atypical household structure in the descriptions and interactions of Henry Lucas (a husbandman) and his mother (a duck-wife). ‘Husbandman’ would normally imply Henry headed his own household and farm, yet he seems to have lived in the house and under the authority of his mother. Unlike most women in early modern court records, she was described by her occupation (someone who keeps ducks), rather than her marriage status (spinster, wife, widow). Beyond duck-keeping, it’s heavily implied she was an alehouse keeper (though that’s never stated outright), and she certainly owned some cattle. Clearly, Duck-wife Lucas was a woman of some economic position and power.

The distinct work activities listed in Henry’s blow-by-blow account speak to these questions about gender, labour and authority (our project’s primary interests). Why, for example, did Henry decline to provide puddings after otherwise catering to these guests? Did he lack the necessary cooking skills? Was this a task thought unfit for a husbandman? Was it outside his authority to portion out his mother’s goods? Or was he simply fed up dealing with these annoying drunks alone? Whatever the case, Henry went into obsessive detail about his mother’s cookery, recounting each step of her work and lingering over the great scandal of the purloined puddings, snatched from the pan before their time, ‘but by whom [he] kneweth not’. To Henry this seemingly small matter was no mere trifle!

Diego Velázquez, Old Woman Frying Eggs, c. 1618, National Gallery of Scotland. Public Domain.

What’s less clear is how such ostensibly irrelevant minutia pertained to the case of the stolen cow. Perhaps Henry was trying to establish the context of the threat against his family, and the ill-fame of those he suspected of the heifer theft. But regardless of their value as legal evidence, these little particulars provide rare insight into the experience and specifics of early modern food production, and are exactly the kinds of ‘work activities’ we collect for our project database. Work practices also suffuse the other case depositions, which pick up the story in later months.

As the carpenter William Dawson deposed, not long after the heifer went missing, ‘ the matter was spread abroad and in everybody’s mouths’. During Lent, masons, stonemen, wallers and husbandmen working at stone delfs (quarries) in nearby Wheelton and Withnell, ‘did falle in talk about the said heifer, wondering who [did] steal her’. This seventeenth-century watercooler gossip – a glimpse of intersecting labour and sociability in the local industrial economy of upland Lancashire – soon brought damning evidence against the culprits to the surface.  One stoneman, William Horrobyn, ‘did of his own mere motion’ report that James Garstang, with some accomplices, had done the deed and given the heifer to Edward Cattrell. Garstang would later confront Horrobyn about the matter a few weeks before Easter, digging himself a hole even deeper than the stone delf when he angrily confessed: ‘I have done the said Lucas wife wrong & if she complayne I will do her a further injury’.

But the Lucas family would not be cowed. Nor were they content to simply wait for justice to run its course. According to Dawson, Henry Lucas travelled some 25 miles to Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, to meet ‘with a wiseman to know which way the said heifer was gone’. The ‘wiseman or witch’ showed Henry ‘in a vision, those persons that took the said heifer’ and told him it was being kept ‘between two corn moughs [stacks]’. As several surviving recognizances (bonds to appear in court) demonstrate, the Lucas family would later move to prosecute Garstang, Cattrell and their accomplices at the quarter sessions, though it’s unclear whether the magical consultation (itself a form of work) influenced this decision.

While the evidence appears stacked against Garstang &co, the depositions (as is typical) do not provide a verdict for the Midsummer trial. Related sources like indictments, when they survive, sometimes contain such information, but even with them we are always left with but part of a story. Frustratingly, many questions remain that will never be answered. Was the wiseman’s vision accurate? Did Duck-wife Lucas ever get her heifer back? And of course, the burning question on everyone’s lips: who pinched the puddings from the pan? Whoever that villain was, we can only hope he got his just deserts.

[1] Lancashire Archives, QSB/1/25/31.

The Magiconomy of Early Modern England

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This post is part of a series marking the print and online Open Access (free) publication of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England. The book is co-authored by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and myself (Taylor Aucoin). It uses court depositions to explore everyday working life between 1500 and 1700, with a particular focus on how gender shaped work. This post first appeared on the Forms of Labour Project website in 2020.

On the night of 8 April 1693, a burglar broke into Thomas Masterman’s house in Stokesley, making off with the hefty sum of £2 10s. To identify the thief and reclaim his money, Masterman trekked south through the north Yorkshire moors to Byland Abbey. There he met with William Bowes, described by Masterman as ‘a man who pretends to discover stolen goods by casting of figures or otherwise’. Bowes proceeded to do just that, and ‘in a glass did show…the likeness & physiognomy of Richard Lyth’,  a tailor to whom Masterman had recently repaid a small debt. Bowes advised to look no further than Lyth for the thief, adding that, ‘he could not have power to dispose of the money, but within a few days it would be brought again & thrown in a corner near [Masterman’s] house’. For this information and service, Bowes received one shilling in payment.[1]

Masterman’s story, captured in a court deposition from the North Riding of Yorkshire, is not altogether unusual for the time. We know that many premodern English men and women similarly consulted and contracted local magical practitioners (variously called wisemen, cunning folk, or soothsayers) to cure ailments, find lost or stolen property, or fix other problems. While reading through court depositions from quarter sessions of the peace for counties of northern England, I’ve come across a number of references to such ‘practical magic’, as well as more classic examples of malicious witchcraft. And since it’s Hallowtide, it seems the perfect time to survey these magical findings and discuss their relevance to the project: what they suggest about the relationship between work and magic during this period, and the ways in which some magical activities could constitute ‘forms of labour’ in their own right.[2]

In the northern quarter sessions at least, I’ve found that depositional evidence of magic usually derives from just a few types of criminal cases.

Most obvious are those of witchcraft, where the very crime concerned was the use of black magic to harm people or property.

While witchcraft was legally a felony and should have been tried at higher courts like the Assizes, cases could initially be examined at the county quarter sessions.[3] And so we sometimes get depositions like those against widow Dorothy Bentum of Coppull, Lancashire, who in 1676 allegedly ‘did harm by her tongue’, bewitching one women into madness and another to death.[4]

Evidence of magic also crops up in defamation cases, when plaintiffs brought suits against those who slanderously accused them of witchcraft and thereby harmed their public reputation.

Like witchcraft, defamation was usually handled by other courts in England, namely those of the church.[5] Nonetheless, similar cases could be brought up at the quarter sessions, like when Anne Harrison, a widow of Burland, Cheshire deposed in 1662 that her daughter-in-law had uttered the following defamatory words against her: ‘God blesse me against all witches and wizards and thou art one’.[6]

In such cases of defamation or witchcraft, magic was either integral to the crime or the crime itself. Yet magic could also be more incidental or tangential to a case. Accusations of witchcraft, for example, sometimes prompted retaliatory breaches of the peace. In a 1690 physical assault case from Idle, Yorkshire, Martha Thornton attacked James Booth and ‘dasht his head against a cupboard’ because the latter man claimed Martha had ‘destroyed’ his daughter ‘by witchcraft’ and also ‘did ride on witching every night’.[7]

But as Thomas Masterman’s story implies, not all depositional references to magic were negative. Theft cases – the vast majority of business handled by the quarter sessions –  sometimes yield references to practical, helpful magic, as plaintiffs sought to track down their missing goods. In a case that I’ve already covered in detail for a previous blog post, Henry Lucas of Hoghton, Lancashire travelled across the county border in 1626 to consult with a ‘wiseman or witch’ in Yorkshire about his mother’s stolen cow. The wiseman provided a vision ‘of those persons that took the said heifer’ and told his clients where the cow might be found.

Similarly, in 1612, when a servant-boy named Thomas Aston went missing in Over, Cheshire, his master and mistress went to ‘blynd Burnie, to know whether he were quicke or dead’. Blind Burnie obliged, and ‘told them he [Aston] was alyve and lustie and was in Torpley parish and that at Michaelmas he would come home again to fetch his cloathes and the rest of his hire’.[8] Blind Burnie’s foresight proved myopically off target – not altogether shocking considering the wizard’s name!

It is these references to soothsaying and consultation that most clearly qualify as ‘magical work activities’ for the purposes of our project. They were transactional in nature, and although technically illegal, the magical acts themselves weren’t usually under criminal investigation. While rare, they hint at a much wider service industry of magic – what we might call a ‘magiconomy’. Like much else in early modern society, it was underpinned by reputation. As Alan MacFarlane demonstrated in his classic study of witchcraft in early modern Essex, people would travel long distances to consult specific cunning folk because of their famed skill, and not necessarily those practitioners nearest to them.[9] The same seems to have been the case in the north: Thomas Masterman and Henry Lucas each travelled over twenty miles to remote locations for their respective magical consultations.

Cunning folk also had a complex relationship with remuneration. Although many were poor characters living on the periphery of society, some refused payment for their services, claiming that compensation disrupted their abilities.[10] Interestingly, this represents something of an antithesis to work by commission or piece-rate, challenging the assumption that the quantity/quality of labour or service necessarily increased with the incentives offered. It also reinforces an argument that our project champions: that unpaid work was still work.

All that being said, many practitioners of ‘good’ magic did indeed charge for their services. William Bowes of Byland Abbey certainly received one shilling for his prognostication. We don’t know if Blind Burnie or the Wiseman from Yorkshire also had going rates, but one large and complex case, from our sample of quarter sessions depositions in eastern England, suggests the potential complexity and variance of magical service transactions.

In 1590, the Hertfordshire quarter sessions heard a case against Thomas Harden of Ikelford, who was ‘rumoured to be a wiseman and skilful in many matters’. The depositions include a veritable laundry list of magical work activities and corresponding prices: 6d (with more promised) to cure a ‘changeling’ child who could neither speak nor walk; 5s worth of money, bacon and pigeons to find a stolen parcel of clothes; 12d (with 20s more promised) to discover two lost horses; 40s (with an extraordinary £20 more promised) to divine who had burned down a house.[11]

There was clearly a pattern of paying a smaller sum upfront, with more promised upon the (presumably) successful completion of service. It was this last criterion that seems to have landed Harden in hot water, essentially for fraud. The problem was not so much that he illegally practiced magic or witchcraft (the deponents gladly and openly consulted him) but that he provided faulty prognostications and cures and then refused to refund customers. Thomas Masterman may represent a similarly dissatisfied client, since his deposition at the beginning of this post was actually levelled against William Bowes and pointedly stated that Bowes merely pretended to discover lost goods.

In Thomas Harden’s case, he eventually confessed to the charges of fraud. He admitted ‘that he could do nothing’, but added that ‘there was a time when he could do much’, before a ‘nobleman of the realm’ tricked him out of his ‘familiar spirit’ and a ‘great many books’. Such cases of fraud imply, as many scholars have been at pains to point out, that practical magic was a craft like any other: it required skill, tools of the trade, and a reputation for effectiveness, with avenues in place for quality control.[12]

And just like many other early modern forms of labour, magic was gendered, with discovering lost property generally coded male, and charms, incantations, and curses usually coded female.[13] This division of labour, and the types of quarter sessions cases most likely to contain evidence of magic (i.e. witchcraft, theft, fraud), help explain the overrepresentation in our depositional references of men as positive practitioners and women as negative ones.

Much more could be said about these magical work activities. For example, as our research proceeds apace on samples of court depositions from northern and eastern England, there may be scope in the future for comparisons between regions or types of courts. But regardless, practical magic demonstrates the diverse forms which early modern labour could take, and the incredible richness of early modern depositional material for a wide range of research topics.

[1] North Yorkshire Record Office (NYRO): QSB/1693/230.

[2] The literature on magic and witchcraft in premodern England is obviously vast, but on popular or cunning magic in particular see Tom Johnson, ‘Soothsayers, Legal Culture, and the Politics of Truth in Late-Medieval England’, Cultural and Social History, (2020) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2020.1812906; Catherine Rider, ‘Common Magic’, in The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West: From Antiquity to the Present, ed. David J. Collins (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 303–31; Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (London, 2008); Alan MacFarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (Abingdon, 1970), ch. 8; Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London, 1971).

[3] On early modern legal jurisdiction over magic and witchcraft see MacFarlane, ch. 3.

[4] Lancashire Archives (LA): QSB/1/1676/ Information of Richard Fisher, Examination of William Millner.

[5] For some examples from the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishop of York: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/causepapers/results.jsp?keyword=witchcraft&limit=50

[6] Cheshire Archives and Local Services (CALS): QJF/90/1/100.

[7] West Yorkshire Archives Service (WYAS): QS1/29/9/ Examinations of John Thornton, James Booth, Lawrence Slater.

[8] CALS: QJF/41/4/71-73.

[9] MacFarlane, pp. 120-1.

[10] Johnson, p. 6; Rider, p. 321; MacFarlane, pp. 126-7.

[11] Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies: HAT/SR/2/100.

[12] Johnson, p. 10; Thomas, pp. 212-52; Davies, ch. 4.

[13] On the gender of magical practitioners, see Johnson, p. 5; Davies, ch. 3; MacFarlane, pp.127-8. And for cutting-edge work on the gender dynamics of practical magic, as a craft and service industry in premodern England, see the research of Tabitha Stanmore, particularly Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (2023) and Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (2024).

Common Wealth Games: Civic Shrove Tuesday Football in Medieval and Early Modern Britain

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An adapted version of this post was published as Pancakes and football: a brief history of Shrove Tuesday in the UK for The Conversation.

For nearly a millennium, Brits have celebrated Shrove Tuesday with food and sport. Today, pancakes have become the chief focus of what was once a more elaborate pre-Lent festival called Shrovetide. But during the medieval and early modern periods, a spirit of communal play and competition pervaded almost every aspect of Britain’s Carnival. Shrovetide games ranged from cruel animal blood-sports like cock-fighting, to tug-o-wars and skipping. Yet no Shrovetide sport was more widespread and long standing than football.

According to players from the Scottish Borders town of Duns in 1686, it was ‘an ancient custom throughout all this kingdom to play at football upon Fastens Eve [i.e. Shrove Tuesday]’. And indeed, Shrovetide ball games are documented from the 12th century onwards, in scores of communities throughout Britain and northern France, with several surviving today in England and Scotland. Despite legal bans on football in pre-modern Britain, many Shrove Tuesday matches benefited from the support of those in charge, like the bailiff and elders of Duns. Why did some civic institutions and leaders embrace this game in the face of prohibition, and what can this tell us about the social value of football, sport and festivity in the past?   

Shrove Tuesday football in Ashbourne, Derbyshire on 9 February 2016. Two games are played every year. One on Shrove Tuesday and the other on Ash Wednesday. Evidence for the tradition may date back as early as 1683. Photo Credit: Taylor Aucoin

‘Football’ in this pre-modern sense refers to a loose family of games where players contested a ball with hand and/or foot, usually towards a goal. As ancestors to our modern football codes (association, rugby, American, etc.), ‘folk football’ matches varied considerably in manner of play. Shrovetide games were often the marquee match-ups of the day, mass games with scores or even hundreds of participants. Whether town versus country, or married against bachelors, teams battled to move the ball through streets and countryside, towards goals like mills, streams, or even the kirk.  

Due to its destructive potential, football oft fell afoul of authority. Medieval royal prohibitions called it ‘vain, unthrifty and idle’, while Puritans deemed it ‘a bloody and murdering practise’. But others in power obviously saw its appeal, to judge from its festive sponsorship in many cities and towns. Tudor Chester provides a detailed and prototypical example. Every Shrove Tuesday in the early 16th century, the Merchant Drapers’ Company received a football from the Shoemakers’ Company, a wooden ball from the Saddlers’ Company, and a small silk ball from each city freeman married within the last year. Under the mayor’s supervision, the Drapers tossed up the balls (which doubled as prizes) for the craftsmen and crowd to play from the common field to the city’s Common Hall.

The particulars of Chester’s Shrovetide sponsorship were mirrored throughout the British Isles. Craftsmen and guilds played key roles as participants and providers of the ball. On Shrove Tuesday 1373, skinners and tailors played in the streets of London, while butchers did the same in Jedburgh 1704. The Skinners’ and Shoemakers’ companies paraded the ball to the match between married and bachelor freemen in late 18th-century Alnwick. Indeed, leather-workers like shoemakers were especially important, crafting Shrovetide footballs in 15th-century London, 16th-century Glasgow and 17th-century Carlisle.  

Newlyweds also fronted the ball in many communities. As in Chester, recently married freemen of Dublin had to present a ball to city magistrates every Shrove Tuesday during the 15th and 16th centuries. Newlywed members of trade guilds in Perth and Corfe Castle (Dorset) also paid a Shrovetide ‘football due’, while a similar custom seems to have existed in medieval London. These were part of a broader folk tradition, where new married couples owed a ‘bride ball’ or ‘ball money’ to their community. Since weddings were customary during Shrovetide (and prohibited in Lent), it was an ideal time to collect.

Behind all this, civic governments might collect the ‘wedding ball’ dues, hire drummers and pipers to pump up the crowds, or pay for equipment. Gradually, authorities in most major cities did withdraw their support from Shrovetide football. Some cities like St Andrews simply banned it; in 1537 the burgh provost and university dean cancelled the annual match because of its ‘many ills’ and ‘disorder’. Others ‘reformed’ the games into less dangerous entertainments, like foot and horse races in 1540 Chester, or a public display of the city fire-engine’s capabilities in 1725 Carlisle. By the middle of the 18th century, officially sanctioned Shrovetide ball games were mostly confined to smaller market towns and villages. But why did official support for an ‘unlawful game’ linger as long as it did?

Carlisle chamberlain account expenses on ‘Shrovetewsday for the plaies’ in 1663, including 12 pence for a football. CRO: CA/4/3, 1 Mar. 1662-3. Credit: Image reproduced with kind permission from Cumbria Archive Centre, Carlisle.

Partially, sponsorship let officials (somewhat) contain a rowdy game that might happen with or without their consent. Certainly, outright bans were rarely effective, to judge from repeated mayoral ordinances ‘against football play at Shrovetide’ in the streets of Elizabethan London. Yet, the appeal of patronage went beyond social control. The often exclusive participation of guild or burgh members (known as ‘freemen’) in Shrovetide ball games reaffirmed corporate status, with its privileges and obligations. These obligations could include football itself. In January 1590, the shoemaker John Neil was made a ‘burgess’ or freeman of Glasgow in exchange for supplying ‘six good and sufficient footballs’ every Shrove Tuesday during his lifetime.

Failure to participate in or furnish football, via payments of the ‘wedding ball’ for example, could result in imprisonment, heavy fines, or the forced closing of a craftsman’s shop. The goods of maltman Robert Dykes of Rutherglen were distrained in 1626 because he failed to join the rest the burgesses on the town green for the annual Shrovetide match. These harsh consequences reflect the worth of Shrove Tuesday football to these pre-modern communities. To them it was not a ‘vain and idle’ game, but an ‘ancient and laudable custom’ of ‘goodly feats and exercise’. Rather than ‘unthrifty’, its value equated to the ‘benefit of the Company’, and the ‘common wealth of the city’, ideals which civic officials deemed well worth preserving.

The Politics of Pancakes

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On Shrove Tuesday 1270, the monks of Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest rewarded their lay manorial workers with pancakes, with the youngest employees also receiving a feast of beef, cheese and ale in the great hall of the abbey’s infirmary. This is the earliest known evidence of Shrove Tuesday pancakes in England.

The general origins of this tradition are familiar: medieval Europeans used up their meat and dairy in anticipation of the Lenten fast and its many prohibitions, gradually developing a festival of joy and raucous play, known by various food-related names like Carnivale (leaving off meat), and Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday). 

Yet the practices of medieval Beaulieu Abbey hint at another layer of meaning baked into the foods of Shrove Tuesday: a power to inform social relations, convey privileges to certain members of premodern society and even symbolise radical action. 

Read the full article in History Today.

May-Dew’s Medicinal Uses: An Early Modern Top Ten List

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I suppose that he who would gather the best May-Deaw, for Medicine, should gather it from the Hills.

Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum (1626)

Yesterday, I climbed Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh at daybreak to gather May-Dew – an old tradition that from what I could see has mostly fallen into abeyance. For those not in the know, May-Dew is the moisture that collects around dawn during the month of May, but especially on May Day. According to folklore, the dew can convey (variously) luck, beauty and health for the coming year, usually through direct contact with the skin.

These last two ideas about beauty and health first show up on record in the late medieval and early modern period, when, as Francis Bacon’s quote suggests, the medicinal properties of May-Dew were taken quite seriously. To give this old tradition a proper 21st century treatment, here’s a Top Ten List of the Medicinal Uses for May-Dew, pulled from sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources.

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May Day morn atop Arthur’s Seat

Before beginning, we need to know the proper way to gather and prepare May-Dew so that it works effectively. Fortunately, the German surgeon, botanist and alchemist Hieronymous Brunschwig lays this all out in detail in his Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, published in 1500 and translated into English in 1527 as The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes.

 

Cover of Hieronymous Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, 1500
Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, 1500 (Wikimedia)

According to Brunschwig, one must rise before the dawn on a night in the ‘myddest of maye’ when the moon is almost full and it has not rained. You should find a pasture or field ‘where as growe many flowres’. It should be far from ‘watery places’, but the nearer to ‘the montaynes the better’. Once there, ‘drawe a great linyn clothe’ over the field, wringing the dew out into a glass until you have enough for your purposes. Then, ‘strayne the dew thrughe a fayre lynyn clowte [cloth]’ before distilling it in a glass and setting it out for 30 days in the sun. Now it’s ready to cure what ails you.

TOP TEN MEDICINAL USES FOR MAY-DEW

1. Acne

May-Dew’s curative properties are most often associated with the face and head, and this  is evident from the earliest references. Brunschwig explains that May-Dew is useful ‘whan a body hath an unclene hede & spottes in the face’. Wash the face with distilled May-Dew at morning and night, let air dry, and ‘than it wyll go awaye’.

2. Rosacea 

According to Brunschwig, the same May-Dew treatment could also cure ‘Guttam roseam’ – a skin condition involving red discoloration of the face, which seems to describe the modern rosacea. He explains that the condition could come from overheating, but also ‘frome hote blode and frome the lyuer’. Since it was sometimes associated with the onset of leprosy, it was not something to write off.

3. Wrinkles 

The final use Brunschwig suggests for May-Dew is more cosmetic than strictly medicinal – ridding the face of wrinkles. Washing with the distilled liquid at morning and night should ’causeth a fayre & clene face’.

Page on 'Water of the Maye dewe' in Hieronymous Brunschwig, The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527
‘Water of the Maye dewe’ in Hieronymous Brunschwig, The vertuose boke of distyllacyon of the waters of all maner of herbes, translated by Laurence Andrew, 1527 (Early English Books Online).

4. Small Pox Scars and Redness 

Similar to the cures above, Simon Kellwaye wrote in A Short treatise of the small pockes (1593), that May-Dew could help with the ‘rednes of the face and hands after the pockes are gone’.

5. Sore Eyes

Hugh Plat’s Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, printed in 1602, recommends May-Dew for a variety of cosmetic and medicinal treatments. In a section on ‘How to gather and clarifie May-dewe’, which broadly repeats Brunschwig’s advice, he adds:

‘Some commend May-dew gathered from Fennell and Celandine, to be most excellent for sore-eyes’.

Plat_Hugh_Sir-Delightes_for_ladies_to_adorne-STC-19978-1733_06-p93 (4)
‘How to Gather and Clarifie May-dewe’ in Hugh Plat, Delightes for ladies to adorne their persons, tables, closets, and distillatories with beauties, banquets, perfumes and waters, 1602 (Early English Books Online)

6. Lesions

Printed in 1659, The Queens closet purportedly contains ‘incomparable secrets in physick, chyrurgery, preserving, and candying &c. which were presented unto the queen’, including a method ‘To take away Freckles or Morphew’. A morphew was a skin lesion, but it was nothing that a little May-Dew and tartar couldn’t fix!

Take four spoonfuls of May dew, and one spoonfull of the Oyl of Tartar, mingle them together, and wash the places where the freckles be, and let it dry of it self, it will clear the skin, and take away all foul spots.

7. Gout

In his Natural History of Wiltshire, published in 1691, antiquarian John Aubrey extolled the virtues of May-Dew for relief of gout, something corroborated in contemporary medical treatises.

Maydewe is a very great dissolvent of many things with the sunne that will not be dissolved any other way: which putts me in mind of the rationality of the method used by Wm. Gore, of Clapton, Esq., for his gout, which was to walke in the dewe with his shoes pounced; he found benefit by it.

Aubrey sought further confirmation by telling this story to a surgeon in Shoe Lane, London, who replied that it was indeed ‘the very method and way of curing’ used on Oliver Cromwell for the same ailment.

8. Tooth Ache 

May-Dew was also an essential ingredient in Robert Boyle’s remedy ‘for the tooth ach’. Printed in his Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies (1693), it involved sprinkling the dew over a mixture of herbs before putting a few drops of the solution into the afflicted’s ear whilst they chewed some bread. 

Boyle_Robert-Medicinal_experiments_or_A_collection-Wing-B3990-1479_14-p154
‘For the Tooth-ach’ in Robert Boyle, Medicinal experiments, or, A collection of choice and safe remedies for the most part simple and easily prepared, useful in families, and very serviceable to country people, 1693 (Early English Books Online).

9. Weak Back

Although there aren’t known records of this for the early modern period, by the nineteenth century some believed May Dew could strengthen weak backs, particularly those of sickly children. Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, published 1808, put it this way:

Great virtue is ascribed to May-dew. Some, who have tender children, particularly on Rude-day [3 May], spread out a cloth to catch the dew, and wet them in it.

10. Pretty Much Anything

Beyond specific ailments, May-Dew was a key ingredient in many recipes, both medicinal and alchemical.  For example, the Thesaurus & armamentarium medico-chymicum – written by Adrian von Mynsicht in the early seventeenth century and translated into English in 1682 – called for ‘water made of May-dew gathered from the standing Wheat’ to facilitate his recipe for ‘Pearls Trochiscated’. Apparently, this powerful concoction could cure just about any problem, psychological or physical:

It is a most excellent Comfortative in all affects of the Heart, as Pain, Sorrow, Trembling, Pulsation, Palpitation, defects of the Mind, &c. Also in pains of the Head, Vertigo, Epilepsie, Apoplexy, Palsie, Contractures, resolution of the Nerves, Convulsion, Phrensie, Melancholy, Madness, Gout, and Gouty pains in the Joynts, Consumption, Blasting, the numbness and decay by Age, Stone, Dropsie, Scurvy, French Pox, and Feavers, &c. It purifies the Blood; it comforts all the Senses, Brain, Memory, and Heart, and preserves the whole body sound….

Etc., etc., etc.

And there you have it. If you’ve got a problem, May-Dew’s probably got you covered.

MAY-DEW AND MANNA FROM HEAVEN

Early moderns clearly respected this liquid’s efficacy, and the power the festive year could give them to influence their own lives. It wasn’t just a superstitious practice of the ‘folk’, either. Hieronymous Brunschwig, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle – these were leading thinkers and experts of their respective days. Even the Royal Society commissioned Some observations and experiments upon May-dew in the 1660s. While the division between folklore and learned knowledge certainly increased in the eighteenth century, such a divide was not necessarily so pronounced before this: folk practices could often be grounded – at least in part – in the prevailing learned theories of the day.

Francis Bacon’s own theory about May-Dew, quoted at the top, connected the substance to contemporary discussions on ‘manna’, the Biblical food which nourished the Israelites during their forty years in the desert.  At the end of the seventeenth century, Thomas Pope Blount compiled some of these theories, including Bacon’s, into a section called ‘Observations concerning manna’ in his Natural History (1693). Since manna was described in the Bible as arriving with the dew in the night, it was often called the ‘Dew of Heaven’. According to Blount, the substance still collected and congealed on plants and trees. It could be (and was) harvested and used for ‘physick’. Though more plentiful in hotter climes – where dew collected thick throughout the year – it could be found in England too: ‘In those hot Countries it Coagulates, with us it is liquid’. 

Blount was building on the ideas of Bacon, who argued that the best manna could be found in Calabria, at the tip of Italy’s boot. Based on the harvesting practices there, where manna was gathered from trees in the mountains but not the valleys, Bacon thought that, in its descent from heaven, manna collected first in the highland areas, and dissipated before it could reach the plants of the valley. He drew the conclusion that it would ‘not be amiss to observe a little better the Dews that fall upon Trees, or Herbs, growing on Mountains’.

Echoing Brunschwig’s advice about collecting ‘nearer…the montaynes’, Bacon suggested the best May-Dew for medicinal purposes would come from the hills, presumably because it mingled with manna from heaven, or was perhaps manna itself. This may also explain the importance of May in this equation, at least in the minds of these thinkers. Since May is the month in northern climes when weather turns warm and dews increase (but do not evaporate too quickly), it would be the best opportunity to soak up powerful manna.  

Theorizing aside, I can now say from experience that it was not easy to find and gather May-Dew at the top of Arthur’s Seat (there’s far more of it on the lowland Meadows). But perhaps this is really the point: the greater the challenge, the greater the reward, the more powerful the May-Dew.

Happy Maytide!

Searching for manna…
Easier said than done