Seventeenth-century English Practice
John Aubrey wrote of it: Young wenches have a wanton sport which they call 'moulding of cocklebread' - they get upon a table-board, and then gather up their knees and their coates with their hands as high as they can then they wabble to and fro with their buttocks as if they were kneading of dough with their arses, and say these words: 'My dame is sick and gone to bed/ And I'll go mould my cocklebread'. I did imagine nothing to have been in this but mere wantonness of youth ... but I find in Buchardus's book Methodus Confitendi ... one of the articles of interrogating a young woman is, if she did ever subjugere panem clunibus, and then bake it, and give it to the one she loved to eat ... So here I find it to be a relic of natural magic, an unlawful philtrum . .
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