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‘we cleansed, limed, and burned out a hundred foul poke-holes, sinks, slews, and corners of unvisited filth in and about the houses in the village, and by good fortune (mark here that Mars was in opposition to Venus) burned the corn-chandler’s shop to the ground. Mars loves not Venus. Will Noakes the saddler dropped his lantern on a truss of straw while he was rat-hunting there’… |
This is from ‘A Doctor of Medicine’ in ‘Rewards and Fairies’. Nick Culpeper, the seventeenth century physician and herbalist, tells the tale of how, with the help of astrology, he had defeated an attack of the plague in a Sussex village by destroying the rats. |
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