nny was used for healing purposes, a vessel was filled
with water, the stone was drawn once round the vessel, and then dipped
three times in the water. In his _Account of the Penny in the Lee_,
written in 1702, Hunter states, that "it being taken and put into the
end of a cloven stick, and washen in a tub full of water, and given to
cattell to drink, infallibly cures almost all manner of deseases. The
people," he adds, "come from all airts of the kingdom with deseased
beasts."

One or two points in its history prove the faith that was placed in the
healing powers of the Lee Penny in human maladies of the most formidable
type. About the beginning of last century, Lady Baird of Saughtonhall
was attacked with the supposed symptoms of hydrophobia. But on drinking
of, and bathing in, the water in which the Lee Penny had been dipped,
the symptoms disappeared; and the Knight and Lady of Lee were for many
days sumptuously entertained by the grateful patient. In one of the
epidemics of plague which attacked Newcastle in the reign of Charles I.,
the inhabitants of that town obtained the loan of the Lee Penny by
granting a bond of L6000 for its safe return. Such, it is averred, was
their belief in its virtues, and the good that it effected, that they
offered to forfeit the money, and keep the charm-stone.

About the middle of the seventeenth century the Reformed Protestant
Church of Scotland zealously endeavoured, as the English Church under
King Edgar had long before done, to "extinguish every heathenism, and
forbid well-worshippings, and necromancies, and divinations, and
enchantments, and man-worshippings, and the vain practices which are
carried on with various spells, and with elders, and also with other
trees, and with stones, etc."[229] They left, however, other practices,
equally superstitious, quite untouched. Thus, while they threatened "the
seventh son of a woman" with the "paine of Kirk censure," for "cureing
the cruelles (scrofulous tumours and ulcers),"[230] by touching them,
they still allowed the reigning king this power (Charles II. alone
"touched" 92,000 such patients);[231] and the English Church sanctioned
a liturgy to be used on these superstitious occasions. Again, the Synod
of the Presbyterian Church of Glasgow examined into the alleged curative
gifts of the Lee Penny; but, finding that it was employed "wtout using
onie words such as charmers and sorcerers use in their unlawfull
practisess; and considering