MUIRHEAD`S MYSTERIES: THE IMPOVERISHED FROG-EATERS OF RURAL CHESHIRE OR STAFFORDSHIRE

The following piece of curious social history/folklore came from an account by Fletcher Moss in 1901(1) of his travels through rural Cheshire and Staffordshire. We join the story as Fletcher meets a poor man and some of his family.

“ Then with difficulty I learn that he is looking for a frog.He reiterates repeatedly that he wants a frog,because he has a child with the frog [i.e. cough or sore throat-R]. This is puzzling. I should prefer a sum in algebra or double practice to this puzzle. When the Mormon from Salt Lake City wished me to give him the names of many of his ancestors as I could, so that he might be baptized with total immersion for each one of them separately when he got back to Salt Lake , it was very astonishing,and now a man wanted a frog to cure the frog. Gradually it dawned on me that he wished to cure some ailment, and I remembered the thrush in a horse`s frog. He said this was thrush or frog in his child`s mouth, and gave me the valuable information that if any one has a child with the frog and will hold a live frog in the child`s mouth while it sucks it all away, the child will be cured.

Outside the garden gates,waiting for their father,there were four children,aged about seven,six,five and four.They were pale and bloodless, with sunken cheeks and big flat mouths like frogs.They all hopped about on their hind-legs just like the pictures of the dressed-up frogs in the children`s picture-books,and they all cried in chorus as if they were ravenously hungry. “Dadda, av oo got a fwog? Dadda, av oo got a fwog?” It was a horrible sight, enough to make one shudder if there had been any shudders left.(2)

1. F.Moss Pilgrimages in Cheshire and Staffordshire  1901
2. Ibid pp 273-4