Warts and All - A Little Bit of Magic?

I have previously written about the importance of turning oral family history and personal memories into written remembered stories so that they are preserved for future generations.

Here is a story of my own ...

From as early as I can remember until I was about 10 years old, every summer we had a week's holiday in Mablethorpe.

Mablethorpe is on the Lincolnshire coast of England.  We were living in Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire at the time.  I grew up in Melton Mowbray until the age of 13 when my family emigrated to New Zealand.

I have many many memories of our holidays in Mablethorpe. One in particular stands out

I was probably about 9 years old (so about 1962).  That year, like every other year at Mablethorpe, we stayed at a ‘Bread and Breakfast’ place and hired a chalet on the beachfront for use while at the beach during the day. This provided a place to store our buckets and spades and other beach apparel.

A couple of months before, I had been given a ring for my birthday. I was generally flashing my hands around showing off my ring at the breakfast table.  I have long since forgotten what the ring looked like but it must have been important to me at the time. What I do remember is that a woman sitting at a breakfast table adjacent to ours noticed that I had 5 warts on the middle finger of my left hand. 

The woman told Mum and Dad that her husband charmed warts away. She said that if Mum and Dad gave her our home address and the date we would be getting home, she would give her husband this information along with a description of where the warts were on my hand.  He would then charm them away. As I recall, Mum and Dad were a little sceptical but gave the woman the information anyway. About three days after we got home I noticed that the warts had disappeared. 

I love this story for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it really did happen to me. Also, because it is an example of English folk lore and folk medicine. Of course, my educated and very rational brain tells me it was just a coincidence. Warts do come and go sometimes. Perhaps they would have gone away anyway?

In the course of writing this, I had a very quick (and not so thorough) search for relevant articles. I found various items written about the charming of warts in British folklore.  One such article suggests: "The charming tradition outlived most other aspects of folk magic, and charmers remained in demand in parts of the country up until the 1970's"[1]. From my quick reading, it seems that charming a wart from a distance was only one of the methods for charming warts; and perhaps the least bizarre of them all. There were any number of weird and wonderful folk medicine cures. Most of these entailed transferring the warts to some other person, animal, plant or object[2].

So, were my warts really charmed away?  I still have the memory of how in earnest the woman was. She clearly did believe that her husband would charm my warts away. I am sure he believed it too. Perhaps he did charm my warts? A little part of me would like to think so! 

Note: I have now moved my blogging efforts from this platform to WeAre.xyz so that I can integrate building my family history archive with blogging. This post, or an updated version of it, can be found at:  https://app.weare.xyz/blog/the-dual-genealogist/blogposts/warts-and-all-a-little-bit-of-magic

Notes

[1] Davies, Owen. ‘Charmers and Charming in England and Wales from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century’  Folklore, vol. 109, 1998, pp. 41–52. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260569 Accessed 14 Mar 2021.

[2] Castelow, Ellen ‘Folk Remedies’ Historic UK (Website) - https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Folk-Remedies/ Accessed 14 March 2021; Sandles, Tim – ‘Wart Charming’ Legendary Dartmoor (Website) - https://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/warts_moor.htm Accessed 14 March 2021