The Hawthorn Archive
Stories, customs and beliefs preserved as individual records, with place and context kept attached wherever the evidence allows.
Astrology could form part of learned medical consultation in early modern England. Simon Forman and Richard Napier used horoscopes in diagnosis while clients also supplied symptoms and, in some cases, bodily evidence such as…
Open archive record →Research using Richard Napier’s early seventeenth-century casebooks has examined how women’s work in childcare, sick care, household medicine and livestock management could place them close to moments of illness, infant death or unexplained animal…
Open archive record →Much everyday healthcare in early modern England began within the household. Families prepared syrups, poultices, foods and remedies, and knowledge circulated through relatives, neighbours, manuscript recipe books and printed texts. Domestic medicine could combine…
Open archive record →Cambridge University Library preserves a manuscript associated with Thomas Wort, a fifteenth-century informal healer. It contains more than two hundred Middle English medical recipes. The manuscript is evidence that practical medical knowledge did not…
Open archive record →The surviving casebooks of astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and Richard Napier record roughly 80,000 consultations from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and name more than 60,000 people, from servants to nobles. Most consultations…
Open archive record →British and Irish fairy traditions include stories in which supernatural beings take a child or adult and leave a substitute behind. Changeling narratives could become explanations for illness, disability, failure to thrive or sudden…
Open archive record →A recurring fairy-lore motif describes people hearing music or dancing from a mound, field or distant place and being drawn towards it. In some versions they join the gathering, struggle to leave or discover…
Open archive record →In parts of Britain, prehistoric monuments and prominent earthworks later acquired reputations as fairy places or mounds. The archaeological structure and the supernatural explanation can belong to very different periods while occupying the same…
Open archive record →Museum Wales preserves oral testimony from Ifan Gruffydd, born in 1896, recalling childhood fear and fascination surrounding fairy stories on Anglesey. He remembered his mother warning him not to pass a particular boundary near…
Open archive record →British regional traditions preserve respectful collective names for fairy beings: the Good Folk, Good People, Fair Folk and People of Peace among them. Scottish Gaelic tradition includes expressions associated with Na daoine sìthe, while…
Open archive record →Later Arthurian tradition does not always end with an ordinary royal death. After the catastrophe at Camlann, Arthur passes towards Avalon, leaving open the possibility that his departure is not final and that the…
Open archive record →Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, composed in the fifteenth century and printed by William Caxton in 1485, gathered a wide range of Arthurian material into one of the tradition’s most influential English forms.…
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