Apple Peels and Snails to Snare a Husband in the Eighteenth Century?

by Diane Scott Lewis

Folklore abounds in the villages of England around the single girl’s search for a husband—as in the eighteenth century marriage was what most young women had to look forward to, or they’d be ridiculed and regulated to spinsters, farmed out as governesses, or forced to live on the charity of their family.

Most of these search-for-true-love customs revolved around the seasons.

At the ruined Abbey of Cerne Abbas in Dorsetshire, girls flocked around the wishing-well in all seasons. To obtain their heart’s desire, they’d pluck a leaf from a nearby laurel bush, make a cup of it, dip this in the well, then turn and face the church. The girl would then "wish" for presumably a man she already has in mind, but must keep this wish a secret or it wouldn’t come true.

Other customs included, in Somersetshire on May Day Eve or St. John’s Eve, a lass putting a snail on a pewter plate. As the snail slithered across the plate it would mark out the future husband’s initials.

On another ritual to this end, writer Daniel Defoe remarked by saying: "I hope that the next twenty-ninth of June, which is St. John the Baptist’s Day, I shall not see the pastures adjacent to the metropolis thronged as they were the last year with well-dressed young ladies crawling up and down upon their knees as if they were a parcel of weeders, when all the business is to hunt superstitiously after a coal under the root of a plantain to put under their heads that night that they may dream who should be their husbands."

Throwing an apple peel over the left shoulder was also employed in the hopes the paring would fall into the shape of the future husband’s initials. When done on St. Simon and St. Jude’s Day, the girls would recite the following rhyme as they tossed the peel: St. Simon and St. Jude, on you I intrude, By this paring I hold to discover, without any delay please tell me this day, the first letter of him, my true lover.

On St. John’s Eve, his flower, the St. John’s Wort, would be hung over doors and windows to keep off evil spirits, and the girls who weren’t off searching for snails in the pastures would be preparing the dumb cake. Two girls made the cake, two baked it, and two broke it. A third person would put the cake pieces under the pillows of the other six. This entire ritual must be performed in dead silence-or it would fail. The girls would then go to bed to dream of their future husbands.

On the eve of St. Mary Magdalene’s Day, a spring of rosemary would be dipped into a mixture of wine, rum, gin, vinegar, and water. The girls, who must be under twenty-one, fastened the sprigs to their gowns, drink three sips of the concoction, then would go to sleep in silence and dream of future husbands.

On Halloween, a girl going out alone might meet her true lover. One tale has it that a young servant-maid who went out for this purpose encountered her master coming home from market instead of a single boy. She ran home to tell her mistress, who was already ill. The mistress implored the maid to be kind to her children, then this wife died. Later on, the master did marry his serving-maid.

Myths and customs were long a part of village life when it came to match-making.


In my novel, Ring of Stone, which takes place in eighteenth-century Cornwall, my heroine Rose will experience magic on All Hallows Eve and glimpse her future husband-a most inappropriate man-over her shoulder.

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For more on Diane Scott Lewis’s novels, visit her website: http://www.dianescottlewis.org

Source: English Country Life in the Eighteenth Century, by Rosamond Bayne-Powell, 1935.

Tudor Superstitions: The 'Witching Time of Night'

‘Tis now the very witching time of night - Hamlet

Tudor superstitions were an expression of total belief. And when you consider how the Tudors experienced the hours of darkness, that is hardly surprising. Despite the growth of London, the streets would remain unlit until 1684. Just like their country cousins, Londoners would wake in the middle of the night, in the pitch-dark. Imagine a mini-Halloween every night, in a city made of creaking timber, where criminals and outlawed religions conducted their secret meetings. Add into that a medieval psychology that absolutely believed the ghosts of the dead walked the earth.

The night was a time when witches flew and communed with their familiars. Decent folk stayed abed until dawn, and said their prayers to ward off spirits from their curtained beds.

Witchcraft was a fact of life, not something only a few believed in. If your milk soured, a witch's curse was to blame. If your pregnancy miscarried, your elderly female neighbour was behind it, especially if she lived alone and knew how to heal the sick. Witches were hanged in England, burnt in Europe. But they were not the only bugbears of the Tudor imagination. Suicides were still buried at crossroads to confuse their way back from the land of the dead, stakes were put though their hearts to pin them to the ground. What the modern mind sees as psychological, the Tudor perceived as real exterior force. Sin was a living thing, and sin-eaters would be employed to consume food that had been passed over the corpse of a dead person.

If you could imagine it, it existed, however evil and perverted, and you needed to protect yourself against it.

The very dreams that disturbed you were the product of the night – mare, an evil spirit entering your head, and the things that you saw on waking, or heard in the night, really were right there with you.

In response to this supernatural assault, the Tudor mind devised rituals and charms to protect the disturbed soul. Fire, iron and salt were protectors. Tudor entrepreneurial skill created a thriving business where people could buy charms to ward off evil and vermin, change luck, prevent drunkenness, encourage children to sleep, even put out fires – all of which were deemed to be under the control of outside forces. This was part of everyday life, not seen as evil, and apparently compatible with religious belief of the day.

That is until things went wrong, and an accusation of witchcraft was made. Then all their belief in supernatural forces was turned onto the outside world with a vengeance.

Victoria Lamb is the author of Witchstruck, first in the Tudor Witch series with Random House, set during Princess Elizabeth's imprisonment at Woodstock Palace.

She is also the author of The Queen's Secret, a novel of the Tudor court, also with Random House.