adopt the following
remedy. A new waggon-wheel was taken and twirled round an axle, which
had never been used before, until the friction elicited fire. With this
fire a bonfire was next kindled between the gates of the town, and all
the cattle were driven through the smoke and flames. Moreover, every
householder had to rekindle the fire on his hearth by means of a light
taken from the bonfire. Strange to say, this salutary measure had no
effect whatever in staying the cattle-plague, and seven years later the
sapient Joh. Koehler himself was burnt as a witch. The farmers, whose
pigs and cows had derived no benefit from the need-fire, perhaps
assisted as spectators at the burning, and, while they shook their
heads, agreed among themselves that it served Joh. Koehler perfectly
right.[691] According to a writer who published his book about nine
years afterwards, some of the Germans, especially in the Wassgaw
mountains, confidently believed that a cattle-plague could be stayed by
driving the animals through a need-fire which had been kindled by the
violent friction of a pole on a quantity of dry oak wood; but it was a
necessary condition of success that all fires in the village should
previously be extinguished with water, and any householder who failed to
put out his fire was heavily fined.[692]

[Method kindling the need fire.]

The method of kindling the need-fire is described as follows by a writer
towards the end of the seventeenth century: "When an evil plague has
broken out among the cattle, large and small, and the herds have thereby
suffered great ravages, the peasants resolve to light a need-fire. On a
day appointed there must be no single flame in any house nor on any
hearth. From every house a quantity of straw and water and underwood
must be brought forth; then a strong oaken pole is fixed firmly in the
earth, a hole is bored in it, and a wooden winch, well smeared with
pitch and tar, is inserted in the hole and turned round forcibly till
great heat and then fire is generated. The fire so produced is caught in
fuel and fed with straw, heath, and underwood till it bursts out into a
regular need-fire, which must then be somewhat spread out between walls
or fences, and the cattle and horses driven through it twice or thrice
with sticks and whips. Others set up two posts, each with a hole in it,
and insert a winch, along with old greasy rags, in the holes. Others use
a thick rope, collect nine kinds of wood, and k