threshold

   Symbolically, a threshold marks the boundary between a household and the outer world, and hence between belonging and not-belonging, and between safety and danger. Guarding the doorway is an important aspect of magical *house protection, which can involve the threshold. In Tudor and Stuart times this (rather than the door itself) was the usual place to fix *horseshoes, and in some cases the threshold itself was an *iron slab (C. F. Tebbutt, Folklore 91 (1980), 240). Later, there was a custom in some areas of making patterns on well-scrubbed doorsteps, which some people regarded as simply decorative, but others as defensive. Thus, in Herefordshire a pattern of nine *crosses kept witches out (Leather, 1912: 18), and up to about 1900 every Shropshire farmhouse and cottage had its doorstep and hearthstone decorated with patterns made from the pigment produced by squeezing elder or dock leaves, and some still did in the 1930s.

   [They] are for the most part very simple - a border of crosses between two lines; a series of vandykes with or without a circle in the wide part of each vandyke;

   two large crosses, divided by a vertical line I can remember that when I was a child, one of our maids used to decorate the back doorstep with a border of loops, and it is an interesting point that these loops had to be done straight round in an unbroken chain. It would have been 'unlucky' to do the top of the step and then break off and do the bottom of it before the sides These patterns were said to keep the Devil away.... Nowadays they say the patterns are 'laid' for luck; or a young woman may say that she does them to 'plaze granny, who dotes on 'em, bein' as they've allus bin laid 'ere'. (L. H. Hayward, Folk-Lore 49 (1938), 236-7)