6♦ The Drawn Breath · Relief

An illness could be drawn whole out of a suffering body, if the healer was willing to take it into her own. In Northumberland in 1653, a child fell sick with something no one could name, and Margaret Stothard put her own mouth to his and sucked the sickness out with her breath. The chirping and sucking noises she made were loud enough, and strange enough, that the boy’s own mother stood by convinced Stothard had sucked her son’s heart clean out of him along with whatever ailed him.

The going rate for a cure like this was a penny, the standard fee owed a charmer for her trouble. Stothard was offered exactly that and took something else instead: a fleece of wool, handed over in place of coin. It was common enough for cunning folk to be paid this way, in wool, in eggs, in whatever a household actually had to spare, and no less binding a payment for it.

Nothing about the method was gentle. Nothing about the fee was fixed either. Between them, the cure and the wool tell the same story: relief could be bought, but not always in the currency you expected, and not always without a cost to the person willing to take it on.

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Sources
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), p.36. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p.249.