Misruled by the Planets and Unfound by Bread December 7, 2016
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This is the kind of tragic little story that is worth absorbing, because it shows how certain superstitions survived deep into the nineteenth century in the UK and the strange mélange of learned with popular superstition. Let us start with Sarah Evelyn Walker, 24 and a governess, daughter of a farmer from Everdon (Northamptonshire)
the 12th inst. the young woman left the house, saying she would return shortly, but she was not seen afterwards. A day or two later a letter, in her handwriting, was found locked up in her workbox in her bed-room. It was addressed to an old schoolmate, living at Frome, Somersetshire. The writer said: ‘Last night, as I lay in bed, miserable and hopeless, like any other nervous person, I took to studying my hands again. I had given it up, for, I suppose, superstition is wrong. I found out too plainly to misunderstand. You know I told you I was born mad, with my fate line upside down. I found this line repeated in the other hand. I saw in it all that is happening to me now. I remembered that I had changed planets, and that Saturn and not Luna is the predominating planet. Now, consequently, the currents have changed, and where Saturn is now there is a fatality of death. l am just coming to a fatality, and being a Saturn girl it is a Saturn fatality. This fits in exactly with my state of mind. I have found out from a good deal of study that self-murder is better than deadly sin. There is only one sin. There is excuse for every other sin, but not for one, and rather than submit to it I mean to be drowned. If you study the Bible you will find that it is so. I do not want to die. I am too fond of life — animal life. But there will be just as bad a cross for me if I stay alive.’
This kind of superstition, of course, could be found today and working on an imbalanced mind could lead to similar results: the person who wrote this sad letter certainly seems to be unbalanced. We now turn though to the local popular superstition, one that has often been noted on this blog before: corpse bread fishing.
After the discovery of this letter all the ponds and brooks in the neighbourhood were carefully searched without result. It was generally thought by the country people that the deceased had drowned herself in Sir Charles Knightley’s great fish pond, in Fawsley Grounds. Edwin Bird, a farm labourer employed by the deceased’s father, told the Coroner that his master ordered him to take a leaf and some quicksilver down to the pond to find the body. The Coroner. ‘How were you to do that?’ Witness. ‘My master was told that if he got a penny loaf, and put some quicksilver in it, it would show where the woman was drowned.’ The Coroner. ‘What did you do?’ Witness. ‘I made a hole in the loaf and put the quicksilver in, stopped the hole up, and then threw it into the pond. Master was told that when the loaf floated over the body it would jump about.’ The Coroner. — How absurd. Witness added that the loaf floated about the pond, but it gave no indication that the body was there. Ultimately the body of the deceased was found in a brook, some distance away, in about four feet six inches of water.
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