A tiny post for today courtesy of Fenland Notes and Queries. For local historians the journal, dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is a wealth of seemingly random historical facts clipped together in what was a regular and frequent journal. Thankfully a large number are available online, or you can find them in the occasional local library. My favourite place to read them is Senate House Library, but for now the scanned versions online will suit me well.
Today I came across the most fenland of anecdotes: a cure for fen ague. It was a troublesome illness that wasn't well understood, but we now know it as malaria. The boggy waters were perfect homes for mosquitos that spread the debilitating disease through the fenland communities. Naturally, there were some odd cures and this one involved spiders!
For reasons never explained some people, particularly in the northern fen areas, believed that spiders could cure the fever associated with fen ague. Some ate them; some placed spider webs on their foreheads. If you decided to eat one it was your choice as to whether you ate it live, rolled it in flour, covered it in butter, or popped it in a sandwich. It was also your choice as to whether you pulled all of its legs off, or left them dangling. In some areas they carried spiders around with them as a sort of talisman too. One thing that we can all agree on is that opium would have been a much more effective treatment for a fever than a spider, but there is something wonderfully gothic about lying in your sick bed under a dewed cobweb.
Research and Resources
Fenland Notes and Queries: https://archive.org/details/fenlandnotesque01sweegoog/mode/2up?view=theater
Cliffe's History: https://www.cliffehistory.co.uk/the-ague-or-english-malaria.html
Images from Pixabay by Traphitho and fietzfotos
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