The Cunning Folk Cards

Most people, when they think of magic in old England, think of witches. Pointed hats. Broomsticks. Cauldrons. But there was another group of magical practitioners, nearly forgotten now, who were for three centuries as familiar a presence in English life as the doctor or the priest. The cunning folk. In the records they go by a wonderful variety of names: wise man, wise woman, wizard, conjuror, charmer, blesser, magician. In Cornwall, pellar. Cunning once meant wise, not sly. The word comes from the Old English cunnan, to know, and the cunning folk were the knowing ones. Magic was their trade. They named their services, and they charged for them.

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, in most parts of England, there was one within five villages of wherever you stood. They healed, they found, they named. And the stories told about them travelled.

It was said of James Murrell of Essex that he called himself the Devil’s Master, that he wore iron goggles to see what others could not, and that he named the exact hour of his death in advance and died on it. Moses Pitt recorded in 1696 that Anne Jefferies of Cornwall fell senseless in a garden, woke claiming six small people clothed in green had carried her somewhere she could not describe, and spent the following months healing the sick without eating and refusing every penny offered. Richard Blakeborough set down in 1898 what the people of the North Riding still remembered of John Wrightson: that he knew what you were going to say before you said it, that he travelled the moors in a black cloak hung with bottles and jars, and that he was more accurate than anyone who laughed at him.

These were not isolated figures. At their peak, several thousand cunning folk were working simultaneously across England, each one known by their community, each one sought out across parish boundaries by people who had heard the stories and needed the help. They did not advertise. They did not need to.

The line between a cunning person and a witch was not where most people imagine it. It was not a line between good and evil, nor between the godly and the diabolical. It was a line drawn by circumstance, by accusation, by who was asking and what they needed from the answer. The same practitioner who unwitched a farmer’s cattle on Tuesday could find themselves named as the one who witched them on Wednesday. Most considered themselves Christians, doing God’s work by means that God had placed within reach. What the courts called devilry, they called knowledge.

And they left traces. They appear in court records, pamphlets, and parish accounts, but they also kept their own: casebooks recording their clients’ troubles, almanacs annotated in their own hands, printed charm books marked up with use. These were working practitioners, operating openly, in communities that knew exactly where to find them.

They have largely disappeared from the history books, crowded out by the more dramatic story of the witch trials. That was never really their story. This is.

Read more about Cunning Folk History.