Goats with Cattle and Hands from Graves: Towards a Fresh Look at Our Insular Superstitions

Abstract

According to Pliny, a lioness gives birth once only, because her womb is torn by her young as yet unborn. A variation on this is that her first litter consists of five cubs: each year after that she bears one fewer, finally becoming barren. In the late nineteenth century, strange offshoots of such beliefs began to come to light. In 1895 the old women of Wellington Workhouse in Somerset were reported to claim that, if a lioness died in whelping, the year would be a bad one to be confined in. As late as the 1980s, speaking of the death of a neighbour in childbirth, a woman at Syresham in Northamptonshire said: ‘A lioness must have died this year.’ Clearly the belief had its uses.