"A divination strange the Dutch-made English have
Appropriate to that place (as though some power it gave),
By th'shoulder of a ram from off the right side par'd
Which usually they boil, the spade-bone being bar'd;
Which when the wizard takes and gazing thereupon
Things long to come fore-shows, as things done long agone
Scapes secretly at home, as those abroad and far,
Murthers, adulterous stealths, as the events of war.
The reigns and death of kings they take on them to know,
Which only to their skill the shoulder-blade doth show."
"Take this," says Selden,[1] commenting, "as a taste of their art in old time"; and he goes on to give an example from the Itinerarium of Giraldus (i. cap. 2) touching one William Mangunel, who, in Henry the Second's time, resided in the district of which we are speaking, and was unhappy enough to have doubts as to the fidelity of his wife. He determined to resolve them, and dressing a shoulder-bone of one of his own rams for dinner, pretending the while that it came from his neighbour's flock, he asked the lady to divine thereby. She examined the bone, and laughed heartily. Her husband inquired wherefore, and she answered that she had detected unfaithfulness on the part of the spouse of him from whose fold the ram had been taken. "But why she could not as well divine of whose flock it was as the other secret, when I have more skill in osteomancy I will tell you," promises Selden.
In the infancy of Notes and Queries,[2] M. E. F. showed that Denbighshire had not altogether forgotten the virtue of a blade-bone in 1850. Some natural curiosity having arisen in a family as to the sex of an expected baby, an old woman asked permission to use a harmless charm to learn the secret. "Accordingly, she joined the servants at supper, where she assisted in clearing a shoulder of mutton of every particle of meat. She then held the blade-bone to the fire until it was scorched, so as to permit her to force her thumbs through the thin part. Through the holes thus made she passed a string, and, having knotted the ends together, she drove in a nail over the back-door, and left the house, giving strict injunctions to the servants to hang the bone up in that place the last thing at night. Then they
