the year 1850,[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 Oxfordshire, 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 1st 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 differentiated, 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 Légendes 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
- ↑ First series, vol. ii., p. 36.
- ↑ Notes and Queries, first series, vol. vi., p. 145.
- ↑ Notes and Queries, first series, vol. xii., p. 201.
- ↑ Cf. Baring-Gould, Strange Survivals, 1892, p. 244, and Black, Folk-Medicine, 1883, pp. 100, 101.
