“They come in a day and a half, they cost the parish nothing, and they finish. Nobody who has not had to send for them is entitled to an opinion about what it costs, and everybody in the county has one.”
As the vestries of Kent tell it
Kent does not say possessed. It says that somebody has been in the ground, and by the time it says so the village has already made up its mind. At Otham, in 4613, somebody sent for the Grey Nails. The vicar never found out who. A party came within a day or so, as the order does, and listened to the village, and then it named a woman of seventy-one. The county tells the rest in a lower voice, because it has the shape of a handful of cases Kent would rather not discuss: she was old, and poor, and without connections, and she had been complained of for years about other things.
Her charm house was burnt, and the fire took a neighbouring byre and its fodder with it. She was cropped and turned out. The party went away as it always goes away, having charged nothing and written nothing down.
The deaths in the parish did not stop. They went on for two months after the fire. Nobody in Kent says what that proves, and everybody in Kent knows what it looks like. The Brethren houses say in private that a person is only the symptom and the ground is the complaint. The vestries do not say it at all, and most of them, when the next call comes, send for the order again.
What is known
The phrase is about four hundred years old and the same in every parish of Kent, said of a person rather than a place. No indictment in the realm uses the word possession and no bench has ever agreed to rule on it; the hanging offence is proved dealing with demons or spirits. Most parishes send for the Grey Nails, a sworn order of sixty to ninety laymen. A party of four to seven comes within a day or so, listens one to four days, names who is responsible and deals with them. It charges nothing and keeps no record.
A Brethren house attends ground, not people, takes a fortnight to come, and a full working can cost a vestry eleven to twenty-six pounds. Perhaps six cases in forty years share the Otham shape. Four parishes that called the order in the last decade called a house within three years, and in three of the four the ground was where the person the order dealt with had been buried.