Healing wells, which were often associated with the saints, were key
targets of religious reformers in Protestant countries, but the authorities
failed to suppress the continued resort to them just as they failed to extir-
pate the worship of saints and other aspects of Catholicism engrained in the
ritual framework of popular belief and practice. While some renowned
pilgrimages sites were suppressed, many, such as Holywell, the ‘Lourdes of
Wales’, survived the Reformation. It remained a centre of Catholic activity
despite its illegality, and generated numerous accounts of the miraculous
healing properties of its waters.16,17Thousands of more humble healing
springs also continued to function as an integral aspect of the geography of
folk medicine, many losing their saintly associations but retaining their
healing reputations. It has even been suggested that in Denmark the popular
resort to holy springs and wells, mostly for eye complaints and rickets,
became even more widespread after the Reformation, despite the condem-
nation of the country’s Lutheran church.^18 The authorities eventually toler-
ated them as long as no ‘superstitious’ rites accompanied their use, while the
country’s medical establishment, as elsewhere, attempted to rationalise the
properties of these healing waters by analysing their mineral and metal
content.
The vogue for spas in the eighteenth century gave a boost to some old
healing wells. The reputation of St Elian’s Well in north Wales, described in
1700 as being resorted to by ‘papists and other old people’ who offered
‘either a groat or its value in bread’, was, 60 years later, exploited by the
building of a ‘respectable’ medicinal bathing house close by. Around the
same time, the well curiously began to attract a reputation in folk culture of
having the power to curse as well as cure, generating a thriving trade for its
custodians.^19 By the early nineteenth century, however, the role of healing
wells in folk medicine had attenuated considerably across much of Catholic
and Protestant Europe. The fate of Mag’s Well in Surrey, England, was prob-
ably shared by many. It went from being widely resorted to for a range of
human skin complaints in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to its
final use for washing dogs to cure the mange, before falling into complete
neglect by the twentieth century. In western and central western France some
850 holy springs were resorted to for their healing properties at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century, but by 1980 only around 50 were still in use.^20
Yet the picture is not one of inexorable decline in the face of secularisation
and modern medicine. At the end of the nineteenth century numerous holy
healing wells in Ireland were reinvigorated as part of a wider discourse on
national identity fostered by the Catholic Church, politicians and folk-
lorists.^21 With the emancipation of Catholicism in nineteenth-century
England, the healing waters at Holywell also experienced a massive boom in
attendance thanks to the concerted efforts of the Church to invigorate its
influence.
30 |Traditional medicine