And good Saynt Frances gyrdle, With the hamlet of a hyrdle, Are wholsom for the pyppe.[551]
Some older charms are to be found in Bale's Interlude concerning the Laws of Nature, Moses, and Christ, 4to, 1562. Idolatry says:
For lampes and for bottes Take me Saynt Wilfride's knottes.[552]
The "girdle of St. Bridget," mentioned by Mooney[553] and by other writers, through which the sick were passed by their friends, was simply a "survival" of the "Cunni Diaboli" still to be found in the East Indies. This "girdle of St. Bridget" was made of straw and in the form of a collar.
The custom prevailing in Catholic countries of being buried in the habits of the monastic orders, of which we know that the cord was a prominent feature, especially in those of St. Francis or St. Dominick, is alluded to by Brand.[554] This custom seems to have been founded upon a prior superstitious use of magical cords which were, till a comparatively recent period, buried with the dead. The Roman Catholic church anathematized those "qui s'imaginent faire plaisir aux morts ou leur mettant entre les mains, ou en jettant sur leurs fosses, ou dans leurs tombeaux de petites cordes nouées de plusieurs nœuds, & d'autres semblables, ce qui est expressement condamné par le Synode de Ferrare en 1612."[555] Evidently the desire was to be buried with cords or amulets which in life they dared not wear.
We may infer that cords and other articles of monastic raiment can be traced back to a most remote ancestry by reading the views of Godfrey Higgins, in Anacalypsis, to the effect that there was a tradition maintained among the Carmelites that their order had been established by the prophet Elisha and that Jesus Christ himself had been one of its members. Massingberd, speaking of the first arrival of the Carmelites in England (about A. D. 1215), says: "They professed to be newly arrived in Italy, driven out by the Saracens from the Holy Land, where they had remained on Mount Carmel from the time of Elisha the prophet. They assert that 'the sons of the prophets' had continued on Mount Carmel as a poor brotherhood till the time of Christ, soon after which they were miraculously converted, and that the Virgin Mary joined their order and gave them a precious vestment called a scapular."[556]