John Aubrey’s Natural History, Part 4: Reading Water

In 17th-century Hampshire a beggar woman knew the cure for breast cancer. It involved a cow's footprint, boggy water and a stick. John Aubrey, the antiquarian and natural philosopher, recorded this remedy alongside chemical tests of well water, observations of petrifying springs, and deductions about the location of iron deposits. For Aubrey, investigating water for his Natural History meant combining folk wisdom with experimental science, beggar women's knowledge with the methods of the Royal Society.

Aubrey was fascinated by the health benefits of wells and springs. He tested the waters of many examples in Wiltshire, generally, either by precipitation (adding a chemical solution to it, which reacted with the dissolved minerals and made them separate out as solid particles) or utilised powdered oak galls to detect mineral content. This latter test used the natural plant tannins in the galls to create a colour reaction indicative of iron dissolved in water. Aubrey also collected observations of local people on the properties these waters were reputed to hold and occasionally catalogued specific cures. Thus, Hancock’s Well at Luckington, he noted, ‘does much good to the eies <eyes>. It cures the itch and scabbe, and heales in young people legges and thighs... It cured one that I knew that had flabby legges’.

The properties noted in waters around the county and beyond also included whether the water was good for boiling peas or washing the skin. The production of useful information was important in the creation of his Natural History. When Aubrey tested Stock Well at Rowde, near Devizes, the sediment formed following precipitation was a white powder, ‘like nitre’. It did not change with the powdered galls, and Aubrey wondered if it could have the same effect as the waters of Epsom, Surrey, already famous for their therapeutic qualities. The inhabitants of Rowde told him, he noted, ‘that it is good for the eies and that it washes very well’ and that it was locally used for making medicines.

The positive, or negative, effects of water did not just result from drinking, washing or bathing in it. It could arise indirectly. At the George Inn at Biddestone the well water was used in brewing the inn’s beer. But it made the beer so diuretic, Aubrey recorded, ‘that it makes one urine shortly after he hath dranke it. I knew some that were troubled with the stone and gravell goe thither for that reason.’ Thus, the beer offered relief to those afflicted with mineral deposits in the kidney and bladder. However, water did not need to be contained in a spring or well to have a positive effect on human health. One of the most notable cures noted by Aubrey appears twice in the text. An unnamed lady suffering from breast cancer was advised, by a beggar woman, to thrust a stick or staff into the footprint of a cow, or other beast, in which water had collected in a boggy area such as Bradon or Windsor Forests. The water needed to resemble burnt copper or changeable taffeta, seemingly something with an iridescent hue. When the stick was drawn out of the ground, an ‘unctuous earth’ would be attached to it, which the lady was told to apply to the affected area, and was thereby cured.

The water from wells and springs was influenced by the earth from which they came. Aubrey observed an oily, iridescent film on the water from the well at John Sumner’s estate at Seend and deduced that the water had flowed through coal deposits underground. The land had previously been covered by an oak forest, in Aubrey’s environmental determinism, a sign of iron. Furthermore, he observed coal and iron deposits often intermingled, and noticed iron ore on the surface around Seend, a suggestion of what lay beneath. As the waters passed through the iron rich earth it absorbed its properties, and so Aubrey had the waters tested with powdered galls which turned black. The reaction's intensity, in his mind, indicated the presence of a rich seam of the metal. His servant found that ‘all the wells of the south side doe turne with galls more or lesse, but the wells of the northside turn not with them at all’, further suggesting the iron deposits ran in a particular direction. In this way Aubrey used water to determine Seend’s mineral deposits.

In his writings on water, Aubrey also considered the effects of drought, the meaning of the appearance of springs, the smell of water and the mists arising from them; and what it meant when a well or spring contained petrifying water, water that turned things to stone. Or more accurately, water so rich in dissolved minerals (usually calcium carbonate/limestone) that it deposited a stone-like coating on objects placed in it. At Devizes, for example, he noted a rivulet on the northside of the castle ‘which doth petrifie leafes, sticks, plants and other things that grow by it.’ For Aubrey, this phenomenon raised questions. The Aristotelian view held that things grew only by apposition - adding material to the outside of an object. But Aubrey argued that petrification proved growth could also occur by susception - internal transformation through absorption. As he reasoned, ‘if the stick did not suscept some virtue by which it is transmuted, we may admire what doth become of the matter of the stick.’ If the stick merely gained a stone coating on its surface the wood inside should remain wood. Yet petrified objects seemed to have their very substance transformed. This connected to debates about whether minerals grew like living things, whether matter could be fundamentally transformed, and how substances could change their nature.

For Aubrey, water was not merely something with which to cook, bathe or drink; it was something that healed, a tool for reading the landscape - revealing what lay beneath the surface- and a means for testing theories about matter and transformation.