The Cunning Folk Cards

Because… look at these people. A man who painted his face vermilion and knew what you were going to say before you said it. A woman who healed six hundred people a day with fasting spittle and prayer and charged nothing. A cunning man who called himself “the Devil’s Master,” wore iron goggles, and predicted the exact hour of his death. A woman who went to the gallows at eighty and told her jailer: “be you ready, I am ready.”

These are not legends. They are in the record. And almost nobody knows they exist.

Every piece of content on this site begins with the same question: what did they actually say, and what was actually said about them? The cunning folk left a record… in court documents, pamphlets, parish accounts, personal casebooks, and the memories of the communities that consulted them. That record is extraordinary and this site tells their stories as they were told. The history and the magic are not in tension here. They are the same thing.

Getting that balance right took real trial and error, in both directions. The easy mistake, twice over, is either inventing atmosphere the sources don’t support, or being so careful with the citations that the people underneath them disappear. Every choice on this site is held to one test: does this bring the world of the cunning folk to life, or does it stand in the way of it. This project is what’s left once both temptations have been resisted, card by card, fact by fact, as much as possible by my own judgement.

The deck intends to act as a passage into their world. Fifty-four cards, each one a door: the practitioners, the objects they used, the spirits of their world, the powers they moved between. Draw three and you are already there.

The Cunning Folk Cards is built on several hundred hours of research and design, drawing on named scholarly sources. I have attempted to provide sources and am constantly reviewing and updating them, let me know what I’ve missed. It is an ongoing, evolving and expanding project and likely to change as more content and sources are added.

Tools used in this project include writing and research assistance with Claude, an AI made by Anthropic, and image generation in Midjourney using a custom woodcut aesthetic I created based on seventeenth-century English broadsides. Content was further edited in tools including Apple Pages, Pixelmator Pro, DaVinci Resolve and BBEdit. The website is built in WordPress using the Ona theme and contains several sections of custom html.

I am very proud of this project and hope it has meant something to you. Thanks for stopping by.

Robert Mealing – June, 2026