uch appears to have fallen into disuse in
France, reappearing, however, in the reign of Louis IX (1215-1270), and
we have the authority of Laurentius, physician to Henry IV, that Francis
I, while a prisoner at Madrid after the battle of Pavia, in 1525, "cured
multitudes of people daily of the Evil."

The Royal Touch was a prerogative of the kings of England from before
the Norman Conquest until the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty, a
period of nearly seven hundred years, and the custom affords a striking
example of the power of the imagination and of popular credulity. The
English annalist, Raphael Holinshed, wrote in 1577 concerning King
Edward the Confessor (1004-1066), that he had the gift of healing divers
ailments, and that "he used to help those that were vexed with the
King's Evil, and left that virtue, as it were, a portion of inheritance,
unto his successors, the kings of this realm."

But the earliest reference to this king as a healer by the touch was
made by the English historian, William of Malmesbury (1095-1143), in his
work, "De Gestis Regum Anglorum." The story, wrote Joseph Frank Payne,
M.D., in "English Medicine in the Anglo-Saxon Times," has the familiar
features of the legends and miracles of healing by the early
ecclesiastics, saints, or kings, as they are found in the histories and
chronicles from the time of Bede, the Venerable (673-735). But there
appears to be no real historical evidence that Edward the Confessor was
the first royal personage who healed by laying on of hands.

John Aubrey, in his "Miscellanies," asserts, on the authority of certain
English chronicles, that in the reign of King Henry III (1206-1272),
there lived a child who was endowed with the gift of healing, and whose
touch cured many diseases. Popular belief, as is well known, ascribed
this prerogative also to a seventh son.

Pettigrew, in his "Superstitions connected with the History and
Practice of Medicine and Surgery," said that Gilbertus Anglicus, the
author of a "Compendium Medicinae," and the first practical writer on
medicine in Britain, who is believed to have flourished in the time of
Edward I (1239-1307), asserted that the custom of healing by the Royal
Touch was an ancient one.

In the opinion of William George Black ("Folk-Medicine," 1883), the
subject belongs rather to the domain of history than to that of popular
superstitions.

Thomas Bradwardin, an eminent English prelate of the fourteenth century,