wordmeal (“one word at a time, word by word”)

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the cunning man’s medical dealings was his readiness to diagnose a supernatural cause for the patient’s malady by saying that he was haunted by an evil spirit, a ghost, or ‘fairy’, or that he had been ‘overlooked’, ‘forspoken’, or, in plainer language, bewitched. Thus if any inhabitant of mid-sixteenth-century Maidstone suspected that he had been forspoken, he would go off for advice to one Kiterell, a sorcerer who lived at Bethersden, and specialised in such things: …

As they gazed, a white face, wet with the sweat of fear, poked out and stared down upon them with eyes in which the late terror still lived.

Boxer could not get beyond the letter D. He would trace out A, B, C, D, in the dust with his great hoof […]