crosse likewise, and the Lords and Noblemen likewise.” In 1536, when the convocation under Henry the Eighth abolished some of the old superstitious practices, this of creeping to the cross on Good Friday, etc., was ordered to be retained as a laudable and edifying custom.[221] Even in the dark ages of superstition, the ancient British kings do not seem to have affected to cure the king’s evil or _scrofula_. This gift was left to be claimed by the Stuarts. The Plantagenets were content to cure the cramp. In our own time we find three young men in England subscribing sixpence each to be moulded into a ring for a young woman afflicted with the cramp. In Berkshire, England, there is a popular superstition that a ring made from a piece of silver collected at the Communion is a cure for convulsions and fits of every kind.[222] Another curious British superstition, by way of charm, is recorded: that a silver ring will cure fits if it be made of five sixpences, collected from five different bachelors, to be conveyed by the hand of a bachelor to a smith that is a bachelor. None of the persons who give the sixpences are to know for what purpose or to whom they gave them. While, in Devonshire, there is a notion that the king’s evil can be cured by wearing a ring made of three nails or screws which have been used to fasten a coffin that has been dug out of the churchyard. There is a medical charm in Ireland to cure warts. A wedding-ring is procured and the wart touched or pricked with a gooseberry thorn through the ring.[223]