The place of Love Divination in Shropshire

 

Of all of the forms of divination found in English folklore, perhaps the most commonly practiced concerns love, and all of its intricacies. This is no different in Shropshire. Indeed, one can find a whole corpus of folklore in the county which is associated with romance. Love divination has a long and fascinating history, and its presence can be seen cross culturally, it has made its mark historically and throughout geographical borders. For example, during the Roman period, women would visit the temple of the goddess Juno, patron of marriage and childbirth to guide them through the affairs of the heart. In the medieval period practices included various charms, herbs and even amulets to influence affection. Throughout its history, the power of love divination was often linked to calendrical customs, holding particular potency on days such as Midsummer, St Agnes's Eve, All Saints Eve and New Year. This is not to suggest such practices were only performed on these occasions, as there are a number of instances of everyday divination that pertained to finding ones soulmate. I want to explore love divination in more detail, focusing on its prevalence in Shropshire. This is by no means an exhaustive account, but it serves as an insight how Shropshire women (and men) attempted to peer beyond the veil and witness their future lover.

Let us first turn to divination practices associated with specific days.

Divination was known to be particularly potent when practiced on All Saint’s Eve, and this is especially the case for love divination. Charlotte Burne recounts a number of ways in which young women could peer beyond the veil and witness a future beau, from mundane acts to frankly quite bizarre ones. An example of one of the weirder practices sent eager young women to Shropshire’s cemeteries. In pursuit of love, women were told to visit the cemetery at midnight, walking there without a light, to then stumble around in the darkness until they found half a brick. Upon returning home, the woman must place the brick under her pillow. This promised both an uncomfortable night’s sleep, and dreams of their future marriage. As with any folk belief, it is difficult to quantify how widespread such a practice was, however one cannot help but smile when thinking of young woman wandering around a cemetery, partaking in this midnight rite of passage, with hopeful hearts.

One of the more popular forms of love divination took place exclusively on All Saints Eve. To complete this ritual one would need a hairbrush, a mirror or reflective surface and an apple. The eager maiden would stand in front of the mirror, and let her hair fall loose over her shoulders. Whilst gazing at her own reflection, she would brush her hair with one hand, and eat an apple with the other.  Soon enough, it is said that in the mirror’s silver surface, the face of her future partner would be visible. Caution must be exercised here, for it is said that as soon as you lock eyes with your love, you must turn your head and look over your left shoulder, to avoid harm befalling that person. Similarly, if love was not on the horizon, unlucky women would witness a coffin. They too should look away, lest harm come to them. There is something so powerful about this ritual, which is almost sensual in nature. The consumption of the apple invokes Eve’s temptation, and it demonstrates a preoccupation for the affairs of the heart. The fact that there were two outcomes for this ritual, love or death is interesting, and as you will soon see, a common motif in love divination. Certainly, during the eighteenth and nineteenth century we start to see a growth of negative stereotyping in folklore with regard to being single, and how certain behaviour will leave you a spinster. For example, women who nurse cats upon their laps, or women who are fond of cats were said to grow to be old maids, never finding love or companionship (Which of course completely negates the often less complicated bond one can have with an animal). This suggests the importance of finding love in the minds of many young women (and men) and perhaps goes some of the way to explain the development of love divination and its associated rituals. Humans are ritualistic in nature and whenever there is a space in our knowledge, curiosity drives us to create meaning through ceremonial or ritualistic practices.

The custom known as ‘Plucking the sage tree’ was also a form of All Saints Eve love divination. Just before midnight on All Saints Eve, young women would enter their gardens, with love firmly set in their minds. It was important to set your intension here and focus completely on love.  Many Shropshire gardens were not ornamental, rather they served the purpose of growing herbs and vegetables to supplement the families diet. Thus, as one could imagine, sage was often readily available. Having entered the garden, under the light of the moon they would pluck nine sage leaves, timing it perfectly for when the clock struck midnight. After picking the nine leaves, the woman would be taken over by a vision. If she was due to wed, she would witness the face of her future husband, however just as in the previous ritual, if she was to remain single, she would witness a coffin. Again, we see the juxtaposition between life and death. Sage as a plant is rich in symbolism throughout British folklore and worthy of discussion in its own right, however it has been linked to love divination and spells in other parts of the country.

If we leave the darkness of All Saints Eve now and journey through the year, we shall turn to a form of love divination that was associated with Midsummer, specifically, Midsummer’s Eve. On Midsummer’s Eve enquiring minds were told to take a piece of white cloth to an Oak tree at midnight. There they would then lay this cloth under the tree, and not come to collect it until the following morning. This form of love divination is rooted in a belief found in Shropshire that the Oak tree blossomed but one day a year, on Midsummer’s Eve. These blossoms were fragile, short live things and would wither before daylight. By placing the cloth beneath the tree, one could collect the residue of such blossoms, which was imbued with magical potency. Indeed, after collecting it the following day and carefully transporting it back home, one could sleep with the cloth beneath their pillow, and be subjected to intense visions of a future love. Midsummer is a time of love and fertility, and the Oak tree often sits at the centre of Midsummer customs. In many cultures the Oak tree is seen as a steadfast guardian, filled with magical potential as well as being a doorway to the mystical realms, thus it is little wonder how such came to be linked with divination.

I want to now focus on forms of Love divination that are not linked to a specific day or event in the calendar, the everyday practices that allowed inquisitive minds to uncover their future spouse. The first of which was described by Charlotte Burne as ‘The famous and universal hempseed charm’ which hints at it being a fairly common practice, and found throughout Shropshire, as well as further afield. Burne states that it was certainly practiced commonly by the women all along Wenlock Edge, which itself is an area with a long history of magic and divination. This practice told women to gather hempseeds and then sow them in a circle at midnight. It’s interesting to see how many of these practices take place at midnight, which perhaps adds to the mystique or suggests that these customs would have been frowned upon. Midnight often takes on the mantle of being ‘The Witching Hour’ when witches and supernatural powers run rampant, so perhaps this is a further reason why so many of these practices are undertaken then.

Once the woman had sowed these seeds, she must chant the following-

‘Hempseed, I sow, he that is my true love come after me now’

After completing this ritual, the woman would either dream of her love, or bump into him soon after, depending on which source informing us.

One could practice love divination with even the simplest of tools, for example Shropshire folk believed that nuts could be carried as a charm to encourage true love to reveal itself. Similarly, the Ash tree was heavily involved in divination, including love divination. For concerns of the heart, one should take a piece of Even Leafed Ash and repeat the following-

‘The Even Leafed Ash in my hand,

The first I shall see will be my man’

 

If this didn’t work, one could place it to their chest and repeat

 

‘The Even Leafed Ash at my bosom,

The first I meet shall be my husband’

After completing these and discarding the Ash, your future love was said to reveal themselves to you.

 

Women could also inspire dreams of a future spouse by the way in which they hung their stockings. If they hung the right stocking over the left and repeated the following charm on a Friday night, they were sure to dream of their new love.

 

‘This is the blessed Friday night,
I draw my stocking to the right,

To dream of living, not the dead,

To dream of the young man, I am to wed’

We are provided an insight into Shropshire love divination by a man known as Mr R. C Warde, writing into ‘Notes and Queries’. He offers us with several means of procuring a lover that were popular in Shropshire, including the brick charm that was mentioned earlier. Warde writes that additional way to uncover your future spouse is to take the first laid egg of the white Pullet chicken and place it under your pillow. One should leave it there before going to sleep. Apart from a rather messy pillowcase and eggshells everywhere, this would guarantee you an insight into your future partner.

 

Another means of finding true love involves a knife, and the blade bone of a lamb. One should stay awake until midnight, and then prick the bone with the knife repeating the following charm.

 

‘Tis not this bone I mean to pick

But my loves heart I wish to prick.
If he comes not and speaks tonight,

I’ll prick and prick till it be light’

 

When the chant had been completed and the lamb bone pricked, it would be safely placed under the pillow before sleeping. Dreams of love and marriage would hopefully ensue. Its interesting to see the commonality between these practices, whether they happen on a specific day or not. Many of them emphasise the prophetic power of dreams, harnessing this for their own benefit.

 

A further example of love divination quoted by Warde is as follows. The eager young woman must write down the names of six young men who she knows fairly well on a piece of paper. Each piece of paper should then be wrapped in a small soft piece of bread, until you cannot see the paper. These pieces of bread should then be placed into a glass of water and watched carefully. The piece that rises first, contains the name of the man you are due to wed, and thus he who you should probably devote more attention to. This feels like a practice rooted in girlhood crushes and long conversations with friends on who would be the best husband, a bit of fun and excitement but still provides us with an example of the preoccupation with love and all its intricacies.

 

We are also told that snails hold potential for love divination. Indeed, if one takes a black snail ‘By the horns’ (one can only assume this means by the snails eyestalks) and throw it over your shoulder at midnight, the trail that it has left come morning is the route in which you need to take to meet your future husband. Other than being rather cruel to the snail this is interesting because the snail is found universally in divination practices, from Ancient Greece and beyond. They are often associated with the journey of life, and thus it seems fitting that one would guide you to the next chapter of your life, from girlhood to married woman.

 

As you have probably already noticed, many of our divination practices are heavily gendered, and seem to be a female pastime, however this is not to suggest that men were not concerned with affairs of the heart. Indeed, one of my favourite forms of Shropshire love divination was a practice kept exclusively for men, which we will now explore. This was known by the rather tongue in cheek name of ‘The Magic Sword’.

 

The Magic sword was a form of love divination found on both sides of the Welsh border, and parts of Shropshire. Sarah Mason provides an account of the practice said to date from ‘before her grandmothers time’ (perhaps around the 1700s) but also states that it stems from a period where people more commonly carried a sword, which suggests earlier origins. The practice told young men to go to the local churchyard at midnight and walk (or run) three times around it. Every time that he passed the porch of the church, he must enter and thrust his sword into the keyhole of the building, saying –

 

‘Here is the sword, but where is the sheaf?’

 

This is such an evocative image, almost ‘Blackadder-ish’ in nature, with the poor man fumbling around in the dark searching for a key hole to thrust through. When he had completed this ritual, he should wait until the light began to grow, before journeying home. On this journey home we are told that he would bump into his future spouse. I love everything about this procedure, from the obvious phallic imagery to the tongue in cheek bawdiness of it all. Imagine bumping into a man early one morning, only to be told you were his future wife, because he had put his sword in a keyhole… madness.

However, we are told that not every man is successful. An informant known only as ‘An old Shropshire woman’ related the story of an unfortunate soul who completed the ritual. Having gone through with the performance he was returning home when he met a funeral, which moved so close to him that he had to crouch down in a hedge to allow it to pass. What the man did not know was that this was his own funeral, and when he returned home to bed, he soon died. The motif of the phantom funeral is more common in Wales, but folklore tells of the eponymous Rattlinghope phantom funeral and recently I’ve heard that one may haunt the area surrounding Benlawnt in South Shropshire, thanks to a friend from the area. This story takes the idea we’ve explored previously to the extreme. There are two outcomes when partaking in such a ritual, love or death. I think this is an interesting addition to Shropshire’s love divination and provides us with a potential insight into a male practice.

 

If sword play isn’t your thing, Shropshire folklore mentions on other way in which men can secure a lover. If a young man had a particular interest in a woman, he was encouraged to wear a flower known as a ‘Batchelors button’ in his pocket, wrapped in a piece of moss. If this flower continued to grow, he would be assured a successful date with the woman he had in mind. Interestingly, there is not one specific plant known as Batchelor’s button in Shropshire folklore, but rather it is a name given to over a dozen plants. One of which is Periwinkle which is known to have associations with love. Batchelor’s buttons were also worn on shirts or blazers as an outward symbol of availability.

 

This is by no means a definitive account of love divination in Shropshire; however, I believe the examples I have shared demonstrate some of the ways in which young Shropshire folk tried to discern their fate. At first glance it would be easy to scoff at such, labelling it as irrelevant to modern audiences or a product of superstitious minds, but I feel this is far from the case. By looking at the ways in which the people of the past interacted with such rituals, we are given a unique insight into their minds as well as their preoccupations. By studying love divination in the historical context, we are provided with an insight into people’s motivations and also the world they inhabited. The transition from girlhood into courting and falling in love was and is a massive event in ones life, met with excitement and heartache and a myriad of other emotions. Love divination serves as a conduit for these feelings.  I am not suggesting that those who followed the snails trail or carefully carried their brick home for an uncomfortable night’s sleep believed verbatim in their prophetic powers. Certainly, some would have believed it held credence but for many it would have served as some light-hearted fun or a game that signalled the first steps into adulthood. Love divination should be seen as a way in which we can invoke this experience, feel for ourselves the excitement and potential which ripples through the centuries. Therefore, instead of seeing love divination as silly, we should focus on how it enhances our understanding of social history, providing us with an insight into the minds of our ancestors. I think this is electrifying, and when one considers it not that far removed from today, when even rational folk may still dabble in oracle or tarot cards, horoscopes and other forms of divination to unpick one’s love life. People tried their luck with such practices because they were curious, they wanted to understand what was instore for them, and I believe that is special.

Perhaps through reading you have been inspired to explore the topic further, or even try your hand at one of these customs. You never know, they might even guide you to your hearts true desire.