_Fernseed._--I find in Dr. Jackson's works allusions to a superstition
which may interest some of your readers:
"It was my hap," he writes, "since I undertook the ministery, to
question an ignorant soul (whom by undoubted report I had known to
have been seduced by a teacher of unhallowed arts, to make a
dangerous experiment) what he saw or heard, when he watcht the
falling of the _Fernseed_ at an unseasonable and suspicious hour.
Why (quoth he), fearing (as his brief reply occasioned me to
conjecture) lest I should press him to tell before company, what
he had voluntarily confessed unto a friend in secret some fourteen
years before, do you think that the devil hath aught to do with
that good seed? No; it is in the keeping of the _king of Fayries_,
and _he_, I know, will do me no harm, although I should watch it
again; yet had he utterly forgotten this king's name, upon whose
kindness he so presumed, until I remembered it unto him out of my
reading in _Huon of Burdeaux_.
"And having made this answer, he began to pose me thus; S'r, you
are a scholar, abut I am none: Tell me what said the angel to our
Lady? or what conference had our Lady with her cousin Elizabeth
concerning the birth of St. John the Baptist?
"As if his intention had been to make bystanders believe that he
knew somewhat more on this point than was written in such books as
I use to read.
"Howbeit the meaning of his riddle I quickly conceived, and he
confessed to be this; that the angel did foretell John Baptist
should be born at that very instant, in which the _Fernseed_, at
other times invisible, did fall: intimating further (as far as I
could then perceive) that this saint of God had some extraordinary
vertue from the _time_ or _circumstance_ of his birth."
_Jackson's Works_, book v. cap. xix. 8. vol. i. p. 916. Lond.
1673, fol.
In the sixth and seventh sections of the same chapter and book I find
allusions to a maiden over whom Satan had no power "so long as she had
vervine and St. John's grass about her;" to the danger of "robbing a
swallow's nest built in a fire-house;" and to the virtues of
"south-running water." Delrius also is referred to as having collected
many similar instances.
I have not access to Delrius, nor yet to Huon of Burdeaux, and so am
compelled deeply to regret that the good doctor did not leave on record
the name of the "king of the Fayries."[8]
[Footnote 8: [_Oberon_ is his name, which Mr. Keightley shows to
be identical with _Elberich_. See _Fairy Mythology_, p. 208. (ed.
1850).--ED.]]