The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser].

  • Bonser, Wilfrid, 1887-1972.
Date:
1963
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The medical background of Anglo-Saxon England : a study in history, psychology, and folklore / [Wilfrid Bonser]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it and prayed to the four points of the compass, turning from left to right and reciting portions from the Rigveda. 1 The Roman shep herd, when commending his cattle to Pales in spring, prays towards the east: Haec tu conversus ad ortus Die ter, et in vivo prolue rore manus. 1 2 Before the seed was put into the soil in Uist, ‘the person reciting the consecration hymn went sunwise ( deiseil) and chanted, “I go forth to sow the seed In name of him who makes it grow. I will set my face to the wind, And throw a gracious handful on high.’” 3 The practice of taking unknown seed from beggars, Meyer says, was to ensure that the field did justice to every kind of seed that was put into it, whether known or unknown. This is paralleled by, if not derived from, a similar practice in the time of the Vedas, where the sower put a stone on the cornsack, and sang three verses, sprinkling the stone at each verse. He put a handful of corn on the stone, and ‘another person’, the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon beggar, had to put three handfuls on it. The Anglo-Saxon put incense, fennel, hallowed soap, and hallowed salt into the hole he had bored in the plough-tail. In Prussia the peasant puts fennel and field cummin with salt and dill, or bread and honey, into the cloth containing the seeds in order that the seed may grow and that the envious neighbour may do it no harm. 4 Many other modern German ploughing customs of a similar nature are described by E. H. Meyer. One from south Germany includes the bath of the plough in the Danube, which is remini scent of that of Nerthus’s chariot. This took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on Shrove Tuesday. 5 Gregory of Tours tells a similar story of the image of Berecynthia at Autun. ‘Bishop Simplicius was present when they were carrying this [image] about in a waggon to secure the welfare of their fields and vineyards, . . . and saw them at no great distance singing and 1 E. H. Meyer, Indogermanische Pfliigebrauche, pp. 6-7. 2 Ovid, Fasti, 4, 777-8. 3 A. Carmichael, ‘Uist Old Hymns’, Trans. Gaelic Soc. Glasgow, 1887-91, i. 4i. 4 Wuttke, op. cit., § 652. 5 E. H. Meyer, Indogermanische Pfliigebrauche, p. 144.