The Aces — The Gifts
The Four Gifts
The fifty other cards in this deck are built from the objects, practices and people of the English cunning folk tradition. But the four Aces are different. An Ace is not an object, and it is not a practitioner. It is the question every practitioner’s story eventually answers: where did the power come from in the first place?
The domains each Gift serves are as follows: Hearts are Hearth & Home, Diamonds are Health & Healing, Clubs are Fortune & Finding, and Spades are Soul & Shadow.
The historical record describes four distinct ways cunning folk were believed to come into their power: born with it, given it by something not of this world, earned through years of study, or passed to them at another’s death. Each Ace names one of these. Not a person, and not a single incident, but the shape of an origin that repeats across many names and many centuries.
Turn the Ace and you are at the root of everything that follows.
A♥ Innate Power · Received by Blood
The Gift received by Blood.
Some children arrive already marked.
The seventh son, the seventh daughter: across England this was no idle superstition but a working credential. Mary Cox, a nineteenth-century wise-woman of Plymouth, defended her trade to the local Board of Guardians on exactly this ground, she was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and the healing was hers by right of birth alone. John Wrightson, the cunning man of Stokesley, made the same claim. No apprenticeship explained it. No encounter granted it. It was simply there, counted into the family line before the child had done a single thing to deserve it.
Its name in this deck is Innate Power. Not luck, and not inheritance in the ordinary sense, the specific, documented belief that some are born already carrying what others spend a lifetime trying to earn.
That is what Hearts is. The household is owed nothing. It simply has, already, what it needs.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), p.70. Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History 8:1 (1997), p.98. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), pp.200-202. Simon Young, “What’s Up Doc? Seventh Sons in Victorian and Edwardian Lancashire,” Folklore 130:4 (2019), pp.395-412.
A♦ Otherworldly Gift · Received by Contact
The Gift received by Contact.
Some are taken, briefly, by something that does not belong to this world, and return changed.
A cunning man from the North of England, at whose trial the Yorkshire schoolmaster John Webster was present, said it happened on the road home. He was walking back from his labour one night, “being very sad and full of heavy thoughts, not knowing how to get meat and drink for his Wife and Children,” when a “fair Woman in fine cloaths” stopped him and asked why he was so sad. He told her it was his poverty, and she said that if he would follow her counsel she would help him. Webster thought him “a very simple and illiterate person to any mans judgement,” and recorded what her counsel came to: a man “formerly very poor,” afterwards keeping “himself, his Wife and diverse small children, by his cures.” He confessed the whole of it in open court and was acquitted anyway.
Its name in this deck is Otherworldly Gift. It cannot be studied for, and it cannot be inherited. It simply arrives, once, from outside, and does not leave again.
That is what Diamonds is. The body wants to heal. Sometimes it is only by what visits it.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.70-71. Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), pp.60, 66-67, 68, 82, citing John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (1677), pp.301-302.
A♣ Earned Mastery · Received by Graft
The Gift received by Graft.
Some gifts are made, not given. They are built, alone, over years no one was watching.
George Clegg, a cunning man, had studied astrology since he was fifteen, forty years of calculating nativities and locating lost goods before a stranger ever saw him do it easily. Anne Bodenham, questioned by an eyewitness near the end of her life, put the whole method plainly: “she could raise Spirits by reading in her Books.” The libraries of cunning-folk like “Owd Rollison” of Worsley held worn, heavily used copies of Agrippa, evidence not of sudden insight but of decades spent with the books open.
Its name in this deck is Earned Mastery. The only one of the four that asks something of the person who receives it, before it will answer.
That is what Clubs is. The thing you are looking for was never going to be found by chance.
Sources
Edmond Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived (London, 1653), p.25. Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.43-45, 136-137, 145. Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), p.78.
A♠ Inherited Craft · Received by Choice
The Gift received by Choice.
Some gifts exist only because someone has died and passed them on to a chosen one.
This was one of the most common ways cunning folk were believed to come into their power. Margaret Ley, a Liverpool witch tried in 1667, testified that when her mother died she had nothing else to leave her two daughters but her two familiar spirits, one named to Margaret, the other to her sister. Cunning practice passed the same way more than once. Richard Morris was trained in his youth by his aunt Deborah Heathcote, and took up her practice after her death. Hannah Spence succeeded her own mother, the celebrated Yorkshire wise-woman Hannah Green, when Green died in 1810. One of Timothy Crowther’s sons took over his father’s trade.
Among charmers, a closely related tradition, the belief ran further still: a charm could be withheld entirely until the charmer’s final hour, and was thought to fail completely unless it passed to someone of the opposite sex. Not automatic. Not given to whoever happened to be standing nearest. Chosen, and only at the very end.
Its name in this deck is Inherited Craft. It is not loss. It is the one moment a gift can change hands complete, entire, with nothing of it left behind.
That is what Spades is. Something ends, so that something else can finally begin.
Sources
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press, 2005), pp.60-61. Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.72-73, 82-83. Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History 8:1 (1997), p.97. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999), ch.6.
The Twos — The Mixing
The space where things meet.
2♥ The Love Potion · Attraction
A love potion was exactly what it sounds like: a drink, given to someone, meant to make them fall in love with whoever gave it. Cunning folk made them to order. A client’s wanting went into the cup, the other person drank it and without knowing why felt an attraction that had not been there a moment before.
Margery Jourdemayne, this deck’s own Queen of Hearts, sold drinks like this to courtiers for years, long before the wax figures and the plot against a king that would later cost her life. It was simple, steady work: someone wanted another person’s affection, and she supplied it.
Ordinary people used the same method. In Margate, Kent, in 1582, a woman named Goodwife Swan was brought before the courts for boasting that she could brew a drink strong enough that any young man she fancied would fall in love with her the moment he drank it. Nine years later, a gentleman named Edmund Calton paid a man named John Prestall for the same thing done the other way round: a drink to win the affections of a woman he wanted.
A drink for a feeling that wouldn’t come on its own, given quietly, and left to do its work.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), p.1. Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (2024), Ch.2. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (2023), pp.67, 167, 196.
2♦ The Pestle & Mortar · Preparation
A pestle and mortar was how a cunning man or woman turned raw plants into medicine, alone, with one tool in each hand. The mortar held the plant steady. The pestle ground down into it. Neither did anything on its own, but together they took what went in whole, root, bark, or leaf, and brought it out crushed fine enough to steep in ale, boil into a decoction, or drink outright. The grinding itself was part of the cure, not just a step before it.
The herbs were not picked at random. Cunning folk followed herbalists like Nicholas Culpeper, who held that bay was the strongest of all: it “resisteth witchcraft very potently, as also all the evils old Satan can do to the body of man.” An affliction was rarely just an illness. Something had caused it, and the right herb, properly prepared, was believed to fight that cause directly, not only ease its symptoms.
Named remedies survive from across the country. Ursula Kemp, the Jack of Diamonds, steeped three leaves each of sage and St John’s wort in ale. William (Billy) Brewer, the Jack of Clubs, made a decoction of dried bay leaves and peppermint. One Exeter cunning-woman claimed her own medicine was made from eighteen ingredients at once, liquorice, alder and rum among them. Joseph Blagrave, a Reading physician, distilled marigold, rosemary and angelica together.
Everyone reached for something slightly different. Everyone ground it fine before they trusted it to work.
Nothing was ready until the grinding was done.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.110–111. Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick (1671).
2♣ The Divining Rod · Finding
A divining rod was a forked branch, often of hazel, held loose, one arm in each hand. Walked slowly over ground believed to hide something, water, metal, or buried treasure, it was said to dip and pull downward on its own the moment it closed the gap between the person holding it and whatever they were looking for.
Richard Kitch believed treasure lay buried somewhere in Bridgwater, Somerset, and went looking for someone who could confirm it and find it. He first consulted a cunning-man named Old Leigh, who heard the report, agreed it was probably true, and sent him on to someone better suited to the actual finding: a cunning-woman named Anne Kingsbury. Kingsbury took up the search herself, working her rod over the ground of a house on St Mary’s Street until it answered her.
She said she had learned the method from William Lilly, the country’s most famous astrologer, and the claim held up. Decades earlier, in 1634, Lilly had worked hazel rods himself, in public, in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, on a treasure-hunt organised with the King’s own clockmaker.
One man’s search, passed from hand to hand until it reached someone who could actually answer it, and a branch of hazel that closed the last gap on its own.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.95–96. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), pp.235–236. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era (2023), p.83. Edward B. Tylor, “Malay Divining Rods,” Man, Vol.2 (1902), pp.49–50, via Chris Wingfield, “Searching for the Main Spring: the Tylors, the Freemans and the Divining Rods,” Pitt Rivers Museum.
2♠ The Barrow · Spirit Counsel
A barrow was an ancient burial mound, and cunning folk believed it was one of the surest places on earth to reach a spirit. Not by chance, on purpose, at a set hour, with the right preparation made first.
In 1566, a Dorset cunning man named John Walsh described exactly how it was done. He went up onto the hills, to the great heaps of earth raised there long before his own time, and waited for noon or midnight, the only hours the spirits would answer. He carried a book with circles drawn in it, and at the mound he set two candles of virgin wax crosswise on the ground. By that light, inside that circle, he raised the spirit and asked it what he needed to know.
Another cunning man, from the north of England a generation or so later, kept the same kind of visit going for years. He went to a particular hill whenever he needed help, knocked on it three times, and said, “I am coming, I am coming.” The hill opened onto a great hall, where a queen received him and had her attendants give him a box of white powder, a few grains enough to heal the sick. When the powder ran low, he went back, knocked three times again, and was let in the same way.
Nothing about either visit was casual. The ground had to be the right ground, the hour or the words had to be exactly right, and the mound gave up nothing until they were. Get any part of it wrong, and nothing happened at all.
A barrow answered only those willing to meet it on its own terms, and not before.
Sources
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (2005), p.79 and footnote 54 (Webster, 1677, p.301). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.93–96. J.C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish: Reminiscences and Researches in Danby in Cleveland (1891), pp.137–141.
The Threes — The Charms
The cunning craft as minor magic.
3♥ The Love Charm · Rekindling
A love charm was not always for winning someone new. Just as often it was for a marriage already made, gone cold, and wanted back. Cunning folk sold a written charm for exactly this: words set down on paper, folded small, sealed, and carried against the body until the feeling it named came back.
In Oldham, a woman named Sarah Ann Tomlinson learned from a cunning man called Clayton Chaffer that her husband had been unfaithful for six years. Rather than let her leave him, he sold her a charm for seven shillings, sealed with different coloured wafers, to be worn next to her heart under her stays. She was to put herbs in his tea besides, and burn his urine in the fire while saying the Lord’s Prayer. He promised to make him one of the best of husbands, as he had done, he said, for scores before her.
Some charms were not bought once but rented. A Newcastle cunning man named Peter Banks drew up magic leases binding a husband to good behaviour, the way a landlord binds a tenant. A woman named Jane Crossby paid ten shillings and two new shirts for one, and for a year her husband was loving and kind. When the year ran out and she let the lease lapse, he turned ill and untoward again, exactly as before. The charm was never a cure taken once. It was a precaution, renewed on schedule, or it stopped holding.
England’s own law took the whole business seriously enough to name it outright. The 1542 statute against conjuration and witchcraft named only three crimes worth the gallows: hunting for buried treasure, detecting a thief by magic, and provoking any person to unlawful love. Decades before that law existed, a widow in London had already gone looking for a cunning man to win her a rich husband, and another woman had already been hauled before the courts for the books she kept to brew love potions from. Getting a heart back, it turned out, needed just as careful tending in the eyes of the law as it did on the page.
The lease always ran out eventually. The trick was renewing it before anyone noticed it had.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.193-194. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England (1879), pp.183-185. Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898), pp.176-177. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.2-3, 102.
3♦ The Abracadabra Charm · Diminishing
Abracadabra was written eleven times, once for each letter, and every line after the first lost one more letter than the line before. By the last line, nothing was left. The word had disappeared off the page entirely, and whatever illness it had been written against was meant to disappear along with it. Worn folded around the neck against the first sign of a fever, it was one of the oldest preventions on record, taken up before the sickness could properly take hold.
A Roman physician named Quintus Serenus Sammonicus prescribed it centuries before England existed as a nation to write for: fold the word into a papyrus cone, wear it on a thread, and the fever would shrink as the word did. The instruction crossed a thousand years and a language without losing its shape. Reginald Scot recorded it plainly in his own time: written on paper with the proper figure and hung about the neck, it helped the ague. During the plague years of 1665, Londoners wore it and pinned it to their doors in triangle and pyramid form, hoping the same shrinking trick would work against something far worse than a fever.
By 1850, a Lincolnshire cunning man named William Martin of Bratoft was still selling it, though not entirely in earnest. He took ten shillings from a man named Tobias Davison, whose wife was unwell, and handed over a little parcel. Opened before the magistrates, it held the word, the twelve signs of the zodiac, and a rhyme so cheerfully irreverent that the court plainly wondered whether Martin believed a word of what he was selling.
Whether the seller believed it hardly mattered to the buyer. What mattered was catching the trouble early enough that eleven lines were still enough to finish it.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.149-150, 154-155. Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, Liber Medicinalis (c. late 2nd/early 3rd century AD), ch.51. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).
3♣ The Luck Charm · Tipping the Odds
Luck, in a fishing town, was not something you simply hoped for. It was something you went and bought, before every voyage, the same way you’d buy rope or salt fish. A cunning-man’s charm did the asking on your behalf, in words plain enough for anyone to understand: “I charge you and all of you, in the high sword name, to assist and blesse Cuthbert Burrell belonging to [his ship] from all rocks and sands, storms and tempests thereunto belonging, for this yeare.” Cuthbert Burrell paid to have his own luck spoken for, by name, for the year ahead.
It wasn’t only sailors, and it wasn’t always tied to an object at all. One Tudor magician, already paid handsomely to build a nobleman a gambling ring, charged nearly £8 up front for something separate first: “various spells for luck” at the gaming table, no ring, no charm to carry, just the luck itself, sold outright. Twenty shillings, or eight pounds, or whatever the trade could bear, luck had a going rate.
It wasn’t only the professionals, either. Among Lancashire farmers, buying cattle without the seller handing back a small coin “for luck” was asking for trouble. One farmer, well into his eighties, remembered doing it just the once as a young man, forgetting to ask for the coin back. The cow was found dead in the field not long after. He never went without it again, not for fifty years.
Nobody waited for their luck to turn. They went and asked for it, or paid for it, or simply refused to close the deal without it.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum, 2003), pp.91, 102-104. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure: Service Magic in England from the Later Middle Ages to the Early Modern Era(Cambridge University Press, 2023), p.94. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), p.120.
3♠ The SATOR Square · Warding
SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS. Five words, arranged in a grid, and however you read them, forward, backward, top to bottom, bottom to top, they come out exactly the same. Cunning folk scratched the square into walls, wrote it on paper worn folded against the skin, and carved it into wood, always before trouble arrived rather than after, because a shape with no weak side and no way in has nothing for harm to grab hold of.
A Somerset charm from the end of the nineteenth century opened with the square as its very first line, before running on into a string of divine names for good measure. Cornish cunning-folk wrote the same square on parchment, folded small, for the same protective purpose. The square itself is far older than either of them: it turns up scratched on Roman wall-plaster at Cirencester and on a broken pot in Manchester, and in 1614 someone carved it into an oak board and fixed it to the wall of the parish church at Great Gidding, in Cambridgeshire, where it stayed. One example survives today in a museum’s own collection, incised on slate, kept for exactly the reason it was made: to overcome danger and difficulty before either had the chance to properly arrive.
Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, printed in 1584, did more than any other book to carry charms like this one out of private hands and into wider English use. Whatever Scot himself thought he was exposing, the effect was the opposite: readers came away with the very formulae he meant to debunk.
Nothing in the square points a way through it. That was always the whole idea.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.125, 153-154. Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle, object 1583. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584).
The Fours — The Foundations
That which should be consulted.
4♥ The Nativity Chart · Destiny
A nativity chart mapped the sky at the exact moment of a child’s birth, the planets fixed in position for that one instant and never again. Cast properly, it did more than predict a life. Read afterward, it could explain what had already gone wrong with one.
In 1795, a Chichester mathematician and astrologer named James Hallett advertised himself as “the original curer of all diseases” and offered nativities cast specifically “for the cure of witchcraft.” His handbill, printed with an engraving of himself seated among the tools of his trade, promised that the same chart used to foretell a life could be read backwards too, to find the moment misfortune had entered it.
Simon Forman, this deck’s own King of Clubs, cast nativities among the thousands of charts he drew up each year. Most were cast for the instant a client’s question reached him, but when the event in question was a birth rather than a question, the method held: a chart fixed to one unrepeatable moment, read for everything it could tell. The same skill served ordinary business too. Calculating a nativity could settle whether a venture would prosper, when a marriage should take place, or where stolen goods had gone, a trade John Steward and John Vaux were both still running a century apart.
By 1600, the skill had become the very measure of learning itself. “Nowadays among the common people,” it was said that year, “he is not adjudged any scholar at all, unless he can tell men’s horoscopes, cast out devils, or hath some skill in soothsaying.”
Once cast, the chart did not change. What it showed had already happened. The only choice left was what to do with the knowledge.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), p.115. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2023), pp.59-60. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p.227. Lauren Kassell, Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley and John Young, “Early Modern Astrology,” A Critical Introduction to the Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634 (Casebooks Project, University of Cambridge).
4♦ The Measuring Cord · Accuracy
In 1566, a Cambridgeshire cunning-woman named Elizabeth Mortlock explained exactly how she diagnosed a case of fairy-affliction. She prayed first, five Paternosters and five Aves, then measured the sufferer’s own girdle from her elbow to her thumb. If the person had truly been “haunted with a fairy,” she said, the band would come up shorter than it should, “and her cubit will reach further than commonly it doth.”
Girdle-measurers were recognised as their own kind of specialist, distinct from cunning-folk and charmers both, credited with the power to tell whether someone was bewitched or troubled by fairies simply by measuring the fluctuating length of a belt. The practice was already old by Mortlock’s time and would not survive much past the eighteenth century, but for two centuries it gave a wasting illness something a family could actually watch shrink and grow.
The method kept changing hands. In 1590, a woman named Mistress Bolton was hauled before the York church courts for measuring a girdle, and confused the judges so thoroughly they could not decide whether she counted as a charmer or not. Unlike Mortlock, she wrapped the band directly around her patient rather than simply holding it. Two years later, Matilda Allin was doing the same with kerchiefs and other lengths of cloth, and had widened the practice further still: not only sick people came to be measured, but sick swine.
Once the band came up short, there was no arguing with it. The measurement did not lie, whatever it turned out to mean.
Sources
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), p.37. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2023), pp.48-49. Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), p.84.
4♣ The Almanac · The Right Day
Cunning folk did not compete with the almanac. They kept one, alongside the ephemeris and the herbal, a printed reference to work from rather than calculate fresh for every client.
A Lincolnshire cunning-man examined by a magistrate in 1695 could barely read or write, “understood no Latin, nor no art or science, nor could scarce spell words right,” yet he kept several almanacs and a book on mathematics prominently on display. Whether or not he could really use them, their mere presence was enough to convince his clients he held knowledge they didn’t.
Others went further and published their own. The astrologer Sarah Jinner ran her own practice and folded it straight into print, including in one of her almanacs a remedy for impotence she attributed to a witch’s curse, the same advice she might otherwise have sold across a table. Better-known practitioners like William Lilly drew up astrological figures for individual clients investigating suspected witchcraft, the identical skill that filled a printed almanac’s pages turned to one person’s particular trouble.
The stars did not change depending on who was asking. Printed for everyone or drawn up for one, the method held.
Sources
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (1979), p.129. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), p.70.
4♠ The Spell Book · Guidance
Not every cunning person’s book was learned Latin ceremonial magic. Many kept something plainer: a single manuscript, added to over years, meant for their own eyes and one chosen apprentice’s, never printed at all.
Arthur Gauntlet, a cunning-man working out of Gray’s Inn Lane in London through the 1620s and 1630s, kept exactly this kind of book. His circles were cut wider than the standard nine feet found in other grimoires of the time, fourteen feet across, and where most conjurors favoured a sword, Gauntlet worked almost entirely with a wand. Small, deliberate departures from the books he’d copied out of, the mark of someone who had actually used the thing, not just owned it.
He worked with a skryer named Sarah Skelhorn, who saw angels crowding every room of a house until she grew tired of them, and called them to her crystal with her own private words: “Oh ye good angels, only and only, &c.” The astrologer William Lilly, who knew them both, thought little of Gauntlet himself, “a very lewd fellow,” but had nothing but admiration for Sarah, “the best eyes for that purpose I ever yet did see.” When Gauntlet died, Lilly bought his books outright and sold them on to his own pupil. Rare notions, he said, worth having.
Not every book came from years of use, either. In 1856, a Staffordshire cunning-man named James Tunnicliff told a client plagued by witchcraft that the only cure now required a proper spell-book, and that he would have to send to London to get one.
Whoever held the book held the method already solved. The only decision left was whether to follow it, or write one of their own.
Sources
David Rankine, ed., The Grimoire of Arthur Gauntlet (Avalonia, 2011), citing William Lilly’s own autobiography (1668, 1774 edn) throughout. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum, 2003), p.141.
The Fives — The Wounds
Harm.
5♥ The Soured Churn · Disruption
Cream that sat in the churn for hours, worked and worked, and never turned to butter, was not read as bad luck. In a farmhouse kitchen it was an attack, and the household usually had a fair idea of whose door needed knocking.
At Upleatham, on the North Riding moors, Hannah Rothwell’s butter had refused to come for three weeks running, and her neighbour Mary Parker’s cow had gone dry at the very same time. The two women walked over to see Jonathan Westcott, the district’s wise man, who named the cause straight away, a local woman called Peggy with a known grudge, and set Hannah a cure that left nothing to guesswork. The churn was scalded through three times over, first with salted water, then with water boiled with rowan berries, then with plain water again, and two rowan pegs driven into either end. On the last filling, turning the churn nine strokes between each line, she said over and over, “This tahm it’s thahn, t’ next tahm it’s mahn, an’ mahn foor ivver mair.” Only then did the butter come.
Other counties kept their own methods for the same complaint. A hot iron dropped straight into the churn did it in Lancashire, a crooked sixpence in Northumberland, and in Cleveland it took two pinches of salt, one thrown into the churn and one into the fire, nine times over. Whatever the county, the churn was one of the last places cunning folk had steady work. Thief-finding and love charms faded from most of their trade generations earlier, but a stubborn churn was still bringing a wise man or woman to a farmhouse door well into the twentieth century, right up until the churns themselves went out of use.
Nobody argued with a churn that had been put right. They just went back to churning.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), p.193–194. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England (1879), p.184.
5♦ The Elf Shot · Affliction
A worked flint arrowhead does not belong in a freshly turned field, not one shaped and finished like this, and whoever struck it with the plough rarely thought it had landed there by chance. It was named on the spot: elf-shot, proof that an illness with no visible cause had a cause after all, small, sharp, and already spent.
At Bowness-on-Solway, on the Cumberland coast, the Bishop of Carlisle was shown a handful of them in 1712, kept in a house near the shore. His hosts would not part with a single one. Cattle that sickened without warning were elf-shot, they told him, and the arrowhead itself was the only proven cure, touched to the animal or steeped in water for it to drink.
The idea was old long before that visit. An English charm against a sudden violent pain names three unseen attackers who might be to blame, gods, elves, witches, and treats the wound without ever settling which one fired it. Six centuries later, a woman confessing to witchcraft in Scotland described the devil shaping elf-arrows with his own hands and passing them on for exactly this purpose. The words changed. The shape of the fear did not.
Sources
William Nicolson, “Bishop Nicolson’s Diaries,” Transactions of the Cumberland & Westmorland Antiquarian & Archaeological Society, New Series, vol. 4 (1904), p.58. Diary entry, 27 June 1712. Alaric Hall, Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (Boydell, 2007), pp.112-114.
5♣ The Lost Spoons · Entrapment
Mabel Gray of Westminster lost the only spoons she owned in 1637, and her friends, wanting to help, sent her somewhere no respectable woman went alone: the worst parts of London. That was where the people who could find things were said to live.
She went first to a cunning woman in Southwark, who heard her out and passed her straight on to a cunning man on Lutners Lane. Mabel paid him a shilling in coin and a shilling in drink for his trouble. He did not send her home with a cure, he passed her on to someone else who could help. He walked her south past Fleet Street and deeper into the city’s worst quarter, to Ram Alley, a stretch so overrun with thieves and debtors seeking sanctuary that it was known simply as a place of evil reputation, and there handed her on to a third man, one Mr Tunn. That is where the record leaves her: two fees paid, two strangers deep into a district built for hiding, and still no spoons.
She was not the only one led on by a recommendation that went nowhere. A widow named Margaret Geffrey once handed over the only property she owned to a neighbour who promised to find her a cunning man on her behalf. He found none, and it took a lawsuit to get her own goods back. Losing a spoon and going to a cunning woman about it was so recognisable a situation that Elizabethan audiences watched it play out as comedy: in John Lyly’s Mother Bombie, a servant girl asks the title character who stole her silver spoon from the buttery, and is told it was never stolen at all, only mislaid, somewhere she would rather not admit to. On stage, at least, the cunning woman always has an answer.
Every step of Mabel’s path cost her something. As far as we know, none of them ever brought her spoons any closer.
Sources
Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk (2024), pp.1-3. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2023), pp.96-99, 172. John Lyly, Mother Bombie (1594 edn), Act 3, Sc.4. London Metropolitan Archives, WJ/SR/NS/50/22 (1637).
5♠ The Wax Figure · Manipulation
Eleanor Cobham was Duchess of Gloucester, married to Humphrey, the king’s own uncle and, since the young Henry VI had no children of his own, next in line to the throne after him. By 1440 Eleanor was forty and more than a decade into that marriage without a child of her own, her safest years for bearing one now behind her. She turned to Margery Jourdemayne, this deck’s own Queen of Hearts, who had already been supplying her with love charms since before the wedding, and asked for something stronger. Questioned later by a panel of bishops, Eleanor admitted what it was for: to “have borne a child by hir lord, the duke of Gloucestre.”
Around the same time, two men in Eleanor’s own household, her physician Thomas Southwell and an Oxford scholar named Roger Bolingbroke, had cast a horoscope for King Henry VI and read in it that he would fall dangerously ill within the year. That was not an innocent thing to have predicted. Because Humphrey stood to inherit the throne if the king died, anyone close to Humphrey’s wife foretelling the king’s death looked less like astrology and more like a wish, or worse, a plan. Southwell and Bolingbroke were arrested. And when the investigation turned up Margery’s wax figure, made for Eleanor, it stopped being read as a fertility charm and started being read as part of the same plot: an image shaped, so the accusation went, to waste away as the king’s own life waned with it.
The three of them paid for it unevenly. Southwell died in the Tower before his sentence could be carried out, probably by his own hand. Bolingbroke was hanged, drawn and quartered, his head set on London Bridge and his limbs sent to four English cities. Margery, the only one of the household with no rank to protect her, was burned alive at Smithfield. Eleanor herself, protected by her title, was spared execution and sentenced instead to public penance and life imprisonment.
Historians still argue about what that image was actually for. Some read it exactly as Eleanor herself did: a fertility charm, wax shaped and warmed to help a marriage bear fruit. At least one reads the very same object the other way entirely, as something meant to harm a king, not help a duchess conceive. Nearly six hundred years on, nobody who never saw the thing has managed to agree on what it meant.
It was not the only wax figure whose purpose got argued over. Decades after Margery’s death, a small wax doll turned up in England with the name “Elizabeth” scratched into it, and given who sat on the throne by then, some feared it was aimed at the queen’s own life. Not long after, a play called Fedele and Fortunio, performed for Elizabeth herself, acted out how such a doll was really supposed to work: pricked or held to a flame to make somebody fall in love, not to kill anyone. Nobody could prove which one that doll had actually been for either. The method itself was already old even in Margery’s day. Back in 1324, two men shaped wax images of King Edward II and spent months sticking them with pins in a house outside Coventry, a plot to kill a king by wax that predates Margery’s own case by more than a hundred years.
What the figure was made to do and what it was found to mean were never the same question.
Sources
G.L. Harriss, “Cobham, Eleanor,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Jessica Freeman, “Sorcery at Court and Manor: Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye Next Westminster,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004). R.A. Griffiths, “The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 51 (1969). Gemma Hollman, Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England(2019). Francis Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England (2018). Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2023), pp.64-65, 119.
The Sixes — The Remedies
The cunning craft that sets things right.
6♥ The Cleansed Shirt · Mending
Joan Squyer lived near Canterbury, and in 1474 she admitted to something she had already been telling her neighbours to try for themselves: she had taken holy water from her own parish church and washed her husband’s shirts in it. Nothing else changed. She gave him no potion, spoke no charm over him, confronted him with nothing. He simply grew, in her own words, “humble and obedient to her will,” and stayed that way.
Church officials heard about the theft and were not amused by it. Squyer was made to perform public penance for taking what belonged to the church, whatever good it had done her marriage. Whether her neighbours took the method up anyway, once she had shown them it worked, is not recorded.
Hers was not an isolated case. A Canterbury diocesan court book of the same period logs another instance from the same decade, a woman using holy water for the identical purpose, husband’s obedience secured with nothing more than washing. Elsewhere in the same run of church-court cases, other women were buying charms to carry against their skin or renewing yearly contracts with a cunning man to keep a husband’s temper sweet, paid for in coin and shirts of their own. Against those, Squyer’s method cost her only what she could take unnoticed on a Sunday.
No confrontation, no bought spell, no credit claimed. The man wearing the shirt never worked out why he had softened. He only knew that he had.
Sources
Tabitha Stanmore, Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic (2024), p.55. Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2023), p.62. Canterbury diocesan court book, DCb Y.1.10, fol. 209v, via Karen Jones and Michael Zell, “‘The Divels Speciall Instruments’: Women and Witchcraft before the ‘Great Witch-Hunt’,” Social History 30.1 (2005), p.54.
6♦ The Drawn Breath · Relief
An illness could be drawn whole out of a suffering body, if the healer was willing to take it into her own. In Northumberland in 1653, a child fell sick with something no one could name, and Margaret Stothard put her own mouth to his and sucked the sickness out with her breath. The chirping and sucking noises she made were loud enough, and strange enough, that the boy’s own mother stood by convinced Stothard had sucked her son’s heart clean out of him along with whatever ailed him.
The going rate for a cure like this was a penny, the standard fee owed a charmer for her trouble. Stothard was offered exactly that and took something else instead: a fleece of wool, handed over in place of coin. It was common enough for cunning folk to be paid this way, in wool, in eggs, in whatever a household actually had to spare, and no less binding a payment for it.
Nothing about the method was gentle. Nothing about the fee was fixed either. Between them, the cure and the wool tell the same story: relief could be bought, but not always in the currency you expected, and not always without a cost to the person willing to take it on.
Sources
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), p.36. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p.249.
6♣ The Horseshoe · Expulsion
A horseshoe is iron, and iron has always been trusted to turn evil away. Joseph Blagrave, a Berkshire astrologer-physician who spent much of his career diagnosing witchcraft as the cause of illnesses doctors couldn’t otherwise explain, prescribed two of them for a sufferer past the point of simple warding. The first was heated red-hot and quenched in the patient’s own water, then nailed straight into the inside of the threshold with three nails, heel end pointing up. The second went into the same water once it was set over the fire with a trivet, horse-nails and white salt added, quenched in it again and again until the whole lot boiled away to nothing.
The horseshoe was never a lone remedy. It sat inside a whole catalogue Blagrave kept of rituals for exactly this purpose, rules for making the affliction travel back to whoever had sent it. Elsewhere in the same section he describes burning thatch or roof-tile soaked in the patient’s water and white salt, timed to the phases of the moon, the smoke and ash doing to the absent witch what the horseshoe did at the door. His own explanation for why any of it worked: the patient’s blood and water carried something of their vital spirit, and a witch’s magic could never be worked on a body without a trace of the witch’s own blood mixed into it. Burn that trace, and the witch burned too.
Blagrave’s own patients were not the only households doing this. Up in County Durham, farmers nailed a horseshoe over the stable door specifically to stop witches riding their horses ragged in the night, a defence one correspondent’s own family still kept up, paired with a sprig of broom hung over the rack for good measure. Yorkshire households did the same at their own front doors, plainer protection than Blagrave’s aggressive counter-strike, and held that any maiden lucky enough to find three horseshoes in a single year, thrown one by one over her left shoulder, secured herself, and later her own children, against ever being witch-held at all.
Nailed quietly over a stable door or boiled down to nothing in a sickroom, iron did the same job everywhere it hung. Get it out, and keep it out.
Sources
Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick (1671), leaf 141, Wellcome Library copy (archive.org/details/b30330610), quoted in Daniel Harms, Witch Bottles: History, Culture, Magic (2020), pp.35-36. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England (1879), p.193. Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898), p.158.
6♠ The Pierced Heart · Repaid in Kind
Sticking a heart full of pins and burning it was, by one Yorkshire witness’s own account, “perhaps the most widely adopted anti-witch charm” going, worked at midnight behind closed doors and windows, in absolute silence, with no one let in until it was done. Whatever had caused the trouble was expected to feel every pin.
In 1843, Charlotte Horn of Plymstock went looking for help for her mother Ann, who had been ill for some time, and found it in Agnes Hill of Plymouth. Hill’s cure came with a shopping list: fasting water, a live cock, and ash wood gathered from three separate parishes. Once everything was assembled, Ann cut the cock’s throat herself, over an earthen pan already holding the fasting water, letting the blood mix in. Hill cut the bird open and drew out its heart, then told Ann what to do with it, stick it with new pins, new needles, and blackthorn prickles, and hang it to roast before a fire built on the ash wood they’d carried in. When it was done, heart, pins and needles together went into the flames.
Witchcraft was never named outright, not once, but everyone involved understood exactly what they were fighting. Hill’s other remedies for the household ran just as far, whole pieces of Ann’s own furniture burned on her instructions. Word got out. The Plymouth court fined Hill for it, and by the time the case was over she had to flee the courtroom to escape a furious crowd waiting outside.
Devon was nowhere near alone in it. In Yorkshire, a farmer named William Dawson used the same remedy on a beast’s heart, nine new nails, nine new pins and nine new needles driven in, then burned on a rowan-wood fire at midnight to answer a run of cattle deaths. Somerset kept the practice going through the 1880s and 90s, sheep and pig hearts pierced and burned the same way at Ashbrittle, Staplegrove, a Wellington workhouse, and East Quantoxhead, four separate cases inside twenty years. One of the actual hearts survives: a sheep’s heart bristling with iron nails and steel pins, collected in South Devon by Edward Lovett and bought by Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum in 1911, still catalogued and kept.
Whatever had taken hold of that house in Plymstock, it was answered exactly as it came, measure for measure, right down to counting out the pins. The same reckoning was being made in farmhouses and workhouses the length of the country, in whatever heart came to hand.
Sources
Daniel Harms, Witch Bottles: History, Culture, Magic (2020), pp.27-28, citing a contemporary account, “Extraordinary Superstition at Plymouth.” Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire(1898), pp.164-165. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England (1879), p.219. F.T. Elworthy, The Evil Eye (1895), pp.53-56. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, accession 1911.75.1.
The Sevens — The Sacred
The influence of the divine.
7♥ The Psalm · Intercession
Cunning folk never pretended to work outside the church’s own authority. Many borrowed it outright, reading psalms and prayers aloud as part of a cure, or setting their clients to do the same. One Yorkshire cunning-man prescribed a bewitched patient a fixed course of scripture: Matthew’s tenth chapter and Psalm 70 read together, then Deuteronomy’s twenty-eighth chapter read over seven times, always at eleven at night. Clients rarely saw this as borrowed authority at all. One of a clergyman’s own rustic witnesses insisted a local cunning-woman “did more good in one year than all these scripture men will do so long as they live,” and a Cornish vicar complained that even his most churchgoing parishioners believed only Scripture words, or words just as good, ever went into a real charm.
Reading scripture aloud was one way to use it. Writing it down and hiding it was another, and one particular Latin charm had an unusually long life. Reginald Scot printed it in 1584: a line from St Luke’s gospel stitched to a line from Psalm 68, “Let every spirit praise the Lord: they have Moses and the prophets: Let God arise and his enemies be scattered.” His own instruction was to write it on virgin parchment and hang a copy in each of the four corners of the house.
The charm outlived him by centuries. A popular chapbook, sold as a “night-spell to catch thieves” and falsely credited to the astrologer William Lilly, carried the same Latin into print shops in Newcastle, Warrington, and Coventry, running through at least eleven editions in Newcastle alone. A Nottinghamshire cunning-man was still handing a version of it to a client in 1866, sold as protection against witchcraft. Both the chapbook and Scot’s own text agreed on where it belonged: the four corners of the house, garden, or orchard.
One household went further. Around 1900, a farmer near Pendle, in Lancashire, kept his own copy, the Latin worn down to near nonsense by whoever had copied it out in an unpractised hand. He had moved it from the corners to the doorway itself, tucked into the gap above the frame, doing its work quietly on everyone who passed beneath it. He kept a second copy for the fields, with one line added: a plain command that the cattle there should prosper. When an old cow-house in neighbouring Yorkshire was pulled down around the same time, more copies of the same charm, garbled further still, turned up tucked into holes above the stalls, standing guard over animals rather than people.
The doorway itself drew more than one kind of charm. Near Burnley, another household kept a written protection over its own door with no scripture in it at all, just the planets and the astrological aspects named one after another, “Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, Trine, Sextile, Dragon’s Head, Dragon’s Tail,” charging them to guard the house from evil spirits and keep the family in health and wealth. Whatever filled the paper, the gap above the door was where people trusted it to work.
Whoever had written it down never had to stay and watch it work. Three hundred years and half the country later, the scripture was still doing that on its own.
Sources
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584, ed. Brinsley Nicholson, 1886), p.295. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), p.62, pp.150-152. John Harland and Thomas Turner Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore (1867), pp.80-81.
7♦ The Blessed Ring · Many Hands
Once, only a king could do this. Every Good Friday from the reign of Edward III to that of Mary Tudor, the monarch blessed a plateful of gold and silver rings at the altar of the Chapel Royal, rubbing them between royal fingers said to carry the same healing touch that cured the King’s Evil. Given freely, without money or petition, they were believed to cure epilepsy, cramp, and palsy in whoever wore one after. When Elizabeth’s reign ended the custom, the cure did not end with it. People simply began making the rings themselves.
A farmer travelled from village to village near Ilsington, in Devon, collecting sixpences, one from each of seven unmarried women in seven separate parishes. His son had suffered for years from “the falling sickness,” and medicine had done nothing for him. Someone had told him the coins had to pass through seven hands before a silversmith could melt them down into a ring, and the boy would have to wear nothing else. He didn’t know how many miles he’d walked collecting them by the time he reached the last house on his list, only that he meant to finish.
The method varied by county, but the principle held everywhere it was practised. In Yorkshire, the coin had to come straight from the church collection: the Vicar of Danby, near Whitby, was once asked by one of his own most respectable parishioners for a halfcrown taken from the plate, thirty pence tendered in exchange, so it could be reforged as a ring for an epileptic relative. A Lincolnshire account-book from 1754 records a poor woman at Barton paying towards “a silver ring” for her fits. Rings made the same way, from money blessed by passing through the church, were still being worn against epilepsy in the Forest of Dean when this custom was first written down. Hereford had its own version by the mid-seventeenth century, Berkshire by the eighteenth. In Cheshire, the shilling came from twelve pennies begged from twelve people of the opposite sex to the sufferer. In Suffolk, no coin was melted at all, twelve scraps of broken silver did the same work.
None of it worked by the metal alone. What did the work, in every version of the story, was the money’s journey first, through a church collection, through a chain of strangers’ hands, through whatever passage made it belong to something larger than the person who carried it afterward. A commoner’s ring, made by begging round a parish, was doing in miniature exactly what a king had once done at the altar of his own chapel.
Some cures don’t come from your own hand. They come from what the coin passed through on its way to you.
Sources
William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), pp.146-147. Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford University Press, 2003), “Cramp rings” entry.
7♣ The Bible & Key · Honesty
Write a name on a scrap of paper. Slip it into the hollow barrel of a house key. Lay the key across a chosen verse of an open Bible, bind the whole thing shut, and balance it on two fingers. Read the verse aloud over the name, and wait. Nothing. Draw the paper out, feed in the next name, read the verse again. Somewhere down the list, book and key will turn together, of their own accord, and that is the name you wanted.
In 1549, a London cunning-man named William Wycherley was called on to find a thief in the King’s own slaughterhouse. A woman’s purse had been picked of ten shillings, and the household’s suspects were written out for him name by name. He put each one, in turn, into the hollow barrel of a key, laid the key on a chosen verse of the psalter, and read the verse aloud over it. At one name, a woman’s, the book and key turned round together. He never claimed anything mystical about the gift itself, only that he had done it so many times he could no longer count the occasions, and that people pestered him for it daily. Reginald Scot, writing a generation later, described the very same technique down to the wording, names “orderlie put into the pipe of the keie” until the guilty one made the book fall from the fingers holding it, proof this was no private trick of Wycherley’s but a known and trusted method. In the same set of examinations that caught Wycherley out, another practitioner turns up doing much the same thing under a different name: Sir Robert Bryan of Highgate, a former hermit turned priest, who worked the sieve and shears for some clients and the psalter and key for others, calling on Saint Paul and Saint Peter as he went.
The method outlived them both by centuries, though later hands found a shortcut. Rather than feeding in name after name, most later practitioners tied the key into the book just once and simply spoke a suspect’s name aloud, trusting the same shiver of movement to answer. A Gloucester vicar worked it this quicker way in 1551, naming a servant, Margaret Greenhill, as a thief, tying the book shut with string in his own church chancel before the party went off to search her bed-straw. A London gentlewoman did much the same at home in 1704, a key balanced on her finger inside a closed Bible, murmuring a suspected maid’s name until the book turned in her hand. In 1832 it reached the Thames Police, when a Mr White and his neighbours hung a Bible and key from a nail, the fiftieth Psalm sealed inside, and pronounced a Mrs Blucher guilty by name, a verdict that ended in her marching round to beat Mrs White and a charge of assault. Not every verdict held. A Southampton collier accused a lad by the same method in the eighteen-sixties, and the magistrates threw the case out on the spot. As late as December 1878, a Ludlow court still heard testimony of the key jerking in its owner’s hands at the mention of a guilty name, the same ritual, the same result claimed, three hundred years after Wycherley first described it under questioning.
By the 1740s the ritual had drifted somewhere stranger still: a boarding-school, where no one needed naming at all. A girl suspected of theft was tried alongside her classmates with “the Bible and key, as was the custom,” each one holding it in turn, guilt read straight off a shaking hand rather than a turning book.
Any book might have carried the trick. The Bible carried an authority no other book in the house could match, and people went on trusting it to answer questions long after they had stopped being able to say why.
Sources
Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.100-101. John Gough Nichols, ed., Narratives of the Days of the Reformation (1859), pp.332-335. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), pp.214, 221. William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), pp.234-236. Jim Baker, The Cunning Man’s Handbook: The Practice of English Folk Magic 1550-1900 (2014), p.99.
7♠ The Three Biters · Deliverance
“Three biters have bit him, heart, tongue and eye; three better shall help him presently, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.“
That is the whole of it. Twenty-six words said over a man who believed himself bewitched, with a little oil smoothed onto his skin, and nothing else required.
The charm names its enemy with a precision worth pausing over. The heart is the ill-will someone holds and never says. The tongue is what they do say, the bitter word let loose behind your back. The eye is the look itself, the glance that withers what it lands on. Between them they cover the whole anatomy of malice, everything a neighbour can do to you without ever laying a hand on you. And the charm’s answer is not to argue with any of it. It counts the enemy, three, then counts what is coming against them, three, and lets the reader work out which three weigh more.
The man who said them was a London practitioner named Robert Booker, and the year was 1622, but he did not invent a word of it. This was a standard formula. Copies survive in manuscript, tucked into commonplace books and quarter sessions papers, one of them written out by a Lancashire charmer questioned in 1634. Other cunning folk kept to the written version of the same idea. A Nottingham sorcerer called Groves sold his clients copies of St John’s Gospel as a preservative against witchcraft. A century after him, the cunning-man Richard Walton was writing out much the same thing on scraps of parchment, the opening of St John’s Gospel and many of the divine names belonging to God and his Holy Angels, ending with a request that the angel of God preserve the bearer from witchcraft or evil tongues. Walton’s charm was read out in court and misread there, taken for a spell to keep a horse-thief from arrest. He was bitter about it afterwards. If the gentlemen of the jury had read the thing properly, he said, they would have seen it only ever concerned witchcraft.
There was something quietly out of step about all of it. The Church of England had no place for this. When these charms turn up in a cunning person’s hands their Catholic ancestry is written all over them, in the Latin, in the Aves and Paternosters counted out in fives and fifteens, in the old assumption that holy words are things you can hold and carry and set to work. This was power from a religion the country had officially left behind, still doing business in back rooms two hundred years after the fact, because people had never stopped believing it was the strongest thing available.
What runs through every version is the same refusal to fight on the enemy’s terms. Somebody wished you harm, and the answer was never to wish harm back, never to hunt for who it was, never to send anything into the dark after them. The answer was to stand behind something that had never lost, and let it do the standing.
Sources
Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in the Medical Market-Place during the Nineteenth Century,” Medical History 43 (1999), p.71. J. R. Chanter, “North Devon Customs and Superstitions,” Transactions of the Devonshire Association (1867), pp.38-42.
The Eights — The Turnings
A desired change.
8♥ The Witch Cake · Reversal
A witch cake was made of two things: flour, and the water of the person who had fallen ill. It was baked on the household’s own hearth like any other bread, and never meant to be eaten. What made it a cure rather than a loaf was that it was made out of the patient. Whatever had got into them had got into it.
From there it could go one of two ways.
Laid back onto the body, it worked on the sufferer. In 1616 Edward Drake, of King’s Lynn, had a daughter sick in a way nothing had touched, and rode out to a cunning-man about her. This was no ordinary illness, he was told: the woman responsible would have consumed the girl’s heart, and much longer would put her past saving. The quarrel behind it had begun over a hen, which Drake had never heard in his life.
The instructions were exact enough to be printed the same year. Flour from the bakers, mixed with the girl’s own water instead of any other liquid, baked on the hearth. One half laid to the region of her heart, the other to her back directly opposite, so the two sat facing each other through her. An ointment, a powder and a written charm went on top. If she had not amended within six hours, there was “no health or recouery to be looked for.”
And say nothing to anybody, because the woman who had done this “would know any thing.”
Drake rode home. His daughter lay next door to Mary Smith’s, and as he came down off his horse Mary Smith was leaning over her shop window, watching him arrive. She cursed him as he passed, then told his daughter her father had been to see a wizard.
He had been told to keep it to himself. He had not yet got through the door.
Put in the fire instead, the same cake worked the other way about. It stopped being a medicine and became a summons. Whoever had laid the sickness on would feel the burning herself, past bearing, and come to find out what was being done to her. The remedy walked up the path and knocked.
In West Yorkshire, in 1683, a physician called Dr Thornton arrived uninvited at the house of Judith Higson, whose son had lain a long time in bed, swollen in the throat, unable to stir, looking, she said, as one affrighted. Thornton said it was no natural distemper: the boy had been hurt by an evil tongue. And he would prescribe nothing at all until the water had been tried by fire. Wheat meal, the boy’s own water, some of his hair worked in, and stumps of horseshoe, made into a cake and put on the fire.
Higson balked, though not at the strangeness of it. No words were to be said over the cake at all, and she thought a thing that worked without words might still be a charm. She walked to two ministers and asked. They told her it was no way of God, and sent her to fasting and prayer instead.
The fire was never lit. Nobody came up the path. What Judith Higson wanted from that cake was never really medicine: she wanted to stand in her own doorway and see who arrived.
Sources
Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London: Nicholas Okes for Samuel Man, 1616), p.53. J. A. Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (2001), pp.53-54, pp.114-115, printing The Rev Oliver Heywood B.A. 1630-1702; his Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner (Brighouse, 1882-85), vol.4, pp.53-54. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.109-110.
8♦ The Cast-Off Stone · Casting Off
Nothing about the stone mattered. It was an ordinary pebble off an ordinary road, and there was no charm spoken over it and nothing written on it. What mattered was the counting. One pebble for each thing wrong with you, and the trouble went where the count sent it.
In Northumberland, a man with warts counted them, put that many pebbles into a small bag, and carried the bag to where four roads met. He dropped it there and left. The warts went with it.
Then the part that gives the charm its edge. The affliction had not been destroyed. It was lying in a bag on the ground, in working order, waiting. Whoever picked up the bag would get the warts.
The same charm turns up in the West of England, and in the North Riding of Yorkshire they made it stranger still: take a pebble from as many different graves as you have warts, tell nobody you are doing it, and throw the bag back over your left shoulder without looking to see where it lands.
It belonged to a whole family of English cures built the same way. Rub the wart with a black snail and hang the snail on a thorn, and the wart goes as the snail dies. Rub it with stolen meat and throw the meat away. Cut an apple, rub it, tie it shut and bury it. Cross the wart nine times with a new pin and fling the pin over your shoulder. Put the trouble into a thing, then get rid of the thing.
Francis Bacon set the whole principle down as a common experiment: taking away warts by rubbing them with something “that afterwards is put to waste and consume.” He believed it, he wrote, “the rather because of mine own experience.” A hundred warts, gone in five weeks, including one he had carried since he was a boy. Their going, he admitted, “doth yet stick with me.”
So somewhere, where four roads met, a small bag sat on the ground. And the worst thing anyone passing could do was wonder what was inside it.
Sources
William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), p.139. Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898), p.146.
8♣ The Mirror · Revelation
Cunning folk had a choice of surfaces to work with. A crystal, a bowl of water, a cup of ink, a well-polished thumbnail. Again and again they reached for a looking-glass instead, and it is not difficult to see why. A mirror is the only one of them that already has a face in it before anybody starts. The client came to it looking at somebody, and the only question left open was who.
In 1578 an Essex man went to a cunning man because someone had stolen his linen. He was taken into the hall of the house, where the cunning man hung a looking-glass up over the bench on a nail and told him to look into it. What he said next was carefully worded, and it survives in the deposition: as far as he could guess, the man should see the face of him that had the linen.
As far as he could guess. Not a promise. Naming a neighbour aloud could put a cunning man before the magistrates for slander, and handing over a glass could not. Whatever came up in it was the client’s own business.
Anne Bodenham worked outside Salisbury with a green glass held up to the sun, in which she said she could see a thief at their business wherever they happened to be. She found a lost gold ring that way, and a stolen spoon. Once she showed a servant girl a scene going on in a house miles off: a woman standing at a window with her hands tucked into her sleeves, other people drinking beer. The girl went home and found it had been exactly so. Bodenham turned clients away, too. One came on a day when the wind did not blow, nor the sun shine, nor Jupiter appear, and she said plainly that the glass would give her nothing.
Two centuries later, in Essex, a boy came to James Murrell about money gone from a box. Murrell told him not to worry: it had been taken for a purpose and it would be put back. Then he asked the boy to promise never to speak of it while the woman who took it was alive. The boy promised. Murrell had him look into a glass, and there he saw his own mother, on the hill nearby, carrying bundles of wood. The money was back in the box not long after.
Not everyone saw anything. Maria Giles worked at Newbury with a piece of glass backed in black. Her client Emma Gregory, a hawker who had been robbed, described the session to the Newbury magistrates. Giles “pretended she had brought him in the glass.” Gregory’s friend Ford looked first and said he could see himself, “and could discern someone else, but he could not say who.” Then Gregory looked, and the court asked whether she had seen the thief. “I could see nothing but myself.” She had not felt satisfied, she said, and she wanted to go.
A boy looked into a glass and saw his own mother. A woman looked into the same kind of glass and saw nobody at all.
Sources
Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), p.39, quoting an Essex deposition of 1578. Edmond Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived, or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham (1653), pp.2-3, 25-26. Eric Maple, “Cunning Murrell: A Study of a Nineteenth-Century Cunning Man in Hadleigh, Essex,” Folklore 71 (1960). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), pp.99-100.
8♠ The Hag Stone · Reprieve
Nobody made it. A pebble with a hole worn clean through by water, picked up off a beach or turned over in a field. They were called self-bored stones, and that was the point of them: the hole had to have made itself. In the north-east they were adder stones, in the North Riding a lemmel-steean, elsewhere a witch stone or simply a holey stone.
What they were for was the night.
To be hag-ridden was to surface in the small hours unable to move, with a weight on your chest and the certainty that something was in the room with you. The earliest English mention of the stone comes in a charm against nightmares from the fifteenth century. Small ones went in a pocket or hung over the bed, and one from Exmouth was kept hanging on a bedstead for exactly that.
But the hag did not only ride people, and a horse could not tell you what had happened to it. You knew because you came out at first light and found the animal standing in its stall wet through and trembling, having been somewhere all night without ever leaving the building.
John Aubrey wrote it down in 1686. “In the West of England (& I beleeve, almost everywhere in this nation),” he said, “the Carters, & Groomes, & Hostlers doe hang a flint (that has a hole in it) over Horses that are hagge-ridden for a Preservative against it.” A Devon charm was more exact about it: eight holed stones on a string tied with five knots, hung up in the stable, and the pixies would not be able to night-ride your horses.
Two hundred years after Aubrey, a carter called Kimber, working for General Pitt Rivers at Rushmore in Wiltshire, nailed a holed stone to his own cottage door to keep the witches off. The stone is in a museum in Oxford now, and his name is still on it.
They spread well past the stable. At Whitby people tied small ones to their front-door keys to keep the household prosperous. At Weymouth the boatmen fastened them to their bows. In Brighton the women of the fishing families wore necklaces of little holed fossil sponges, sold along the front for luck.
Whatever the water had done to those stones, people trusted it more than anything they could have made themselves.
Sources
Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud, A Dictionary of English Folklore (Oxford University Press, 2003), “holed stones” entry, quoting John Aubrey (1686) and Notes & Queries (July and August 1894). William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (1879), p.166. Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898), p.158 and glossary. Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, catalogue no. 540/12191, via Ellen Ettlinger, “Documents of British Superstition in Oxford,” Folklore 54:1 (1943). Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle.
The Nines — The Dominions
The cunning craft as major magic.
9♥ The Sin-Eater · Unburdening
A loaf of bread was carried out of the house and passed across the body of the person who had just died. Everything they had done in their life went into the bread. Then a man ate it, and it was his.
In Herefordshire, John Aubrey knew of one living in a cottage on the Ross highway. When the corpse was brought out of the house and laid on the bier, the loaf was handed to him over the body, along with a maple bowl full of beer, which he was to drink, and sixpence. In return he took upon himself, there and then, “all the sinnes of the defunct, and freed him or her from walking after they were dead.”
In Shropshire they called him the old Sire, and word was sent to him as soon as anybody died. John Bagford wrote it down in 1714, within the memory, he said, of their fathers. The man came to the house and stood outside the door. Somebody brought him out a cricket, a low three-legged stool, and he sat down on it facing the door. They gave him a groat, which he put in his pocket, a crust of bread, which he ate, and a full bowl of ale, which he drank off in one draught. Then he stood up and pronounced, with composed gesture, the ease and rest of the soul departed, “for which he would pawn his own soul.”
He never went inside. That was the arrangement. He was fed at the threshold, took what he was given, and went, and the family carried on with the funeral of somebody who was now free to rest.
The last of them in England was not a beggar at all. Richard Munslow farmed at Ratlinghope in Shropshire, was comfortably off and well thought of, and seems to have taken the work up late in life. In one week in May 1870 he lost three of his children to scarlet fever. He died in 1906 and was buried in his own parish, and a century later the village paid to put his grave back in order and held a service for him.
Fourpence for a crust of bread, and a soul pawned to pay for it.
Sources
John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (written c.1686, ed. James Britten, 1881). John Bagford, letter of 1714, printed in John Leland, Collectanea.
9♦ The Witch Bottle · Permanent End
A witch bottle showed nothing from the outside. Sealed inside sat the sufferer’s own water, with pins, nails or needles dropped in after it and a little white salt. Corked shut and buried upside down at the threshold, it was made to work the affliction back onto whoever had sent it.
Joseph Blagrave, a Reading astrologer, printed the method as a plain recipe in 1671: “stop the urine of the Patient, close up in a bottle, and put into it three nails, pins, or needles, with a little white Salt, keeping the urine alwayes warm.” Leave it there long enough, he wrote, and it would endanger the witch’s life. They would be “grievously tormented making their water with great difficulty.”
Joseph Glanvil printed the fullest account, told to William Brearly of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who was lodging in Suffolk around 1640. His landlady had been ill a long time and could not sleep, haunted, she said, by a thing in the shape of a bird that fluttered close about her face. An old man who travelled up and down the country called in, told her husband it was only a dead spright, and set him a cure: bottle her water with pins and needles and nails, cork it fast, and stand it by the fire. The bottle began to joggle. He worked the fire shovel over it, on and off, until the cork bounced out and the urine and the pins and the nails flew up and went off with a report like a pistol. His wife was no better. It seems it was too nimble for you, said the old man on his next visit. Bury it in the earth instead, and that will do the feat. This time she recovered. Some while afterwards a woman walked over from a town miles away crying that they had killed her husband, a man they had never heard of. He had told her on his death-bed what he had done. He was a wizard, he had bewitched the wife of that house, and the thing in the ground had killed him.
In 2004 workmen in Greenwich turned up a sealed stoneware jar, still rattling. Opened later under laboratory conditions, it held urine that proved to be a smoker’s, along with sulfur, brass pins, clumps of hair, ten manicured fingernail clippings, and twelve iron nails, one driven straight through a small leather heart. It had been buried upside down, exactly as the books said, within a generation of Blagrave printing the recipe.
The habit outlasted the recipe. A small silvered flask, corked and sealed over with brown wax, was collected near Hove in 1915 from an old lady who explained it plainly enough. “They do say there be a witch in it”, she said, “and if you let him out there’ll be a peck o’ trouble”. It sits in Oxford now, still sealed.
Sources
Joseph Blagrave, Astrological Practice of Physick (1671), pp.154-155. Joseph Glanvil, Saducismus Triumphatus (1681), pp.205-207. Daniel Harms, Witch Bottles (2020). Samir S. Patel, “Opening a Witch Bottle,” Archaeology (2009). Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, accession 1926.6.1, via Ellen Ettlinger, “Documents of British Superstition in Oxford,” Folklore54:1 (1943), pp.231-232.
9♣ The Sieve & Shears · The Guilty Party
A pair of shears was driven into the rim of a sieve, the whole thing hung from the points, and two people held it up on their fingertips. Then the names were spoken. John Aubrey set the words down as a call and an answer, one side saying “By St Peter and St Paul such a one hath stoln it,” the other answering “By St Peter and St Paul he hath not stoln it,” name after name, until the sieve was said to turn in their hands and settle the matter.
It needed no skill and nothing you did not already own, which is why it turns up for so long and so far apart. In 1554 William Hasylwoode, a cleric of Hornsey, stood before the Commissary’s Court of London and explained himself. He had lost his purse with fourteen groats in it, and he remembered that when he was a child he had heard his mother say that when any man had lost anything, then they would use a sieve and a pair of shears to bring to knowledge who had the thing lost. So he hanged the sieve by the point of the shears and said the words, “By Peter and Paule, he hath yt,” naming the man he suspected. He had done it once in his life, he told them, and mentioned it to one acquaintance. He was given penance. Forty-four years later John Casson answered for the same thing before the Archdeacon of Nottingham after a wether went missing, saying he had tried it with his sister, once, without any ill intent. Casson had called on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost rather than the two saints. The words were interchangeable. What mattered was that something was invoked and the sieve moved.
In London it made reputations. William Wycherley, questioned in 1549, listed the men he knew who worked it, Thomas Shakilton of Aldersgate Street among them, who had “doon therwith many praty feates, and many trouthes tryed out.” Eighty-four years later a Worcester woman named Ann Bellett was up before the quarter sessions for “the evil art that she useth with the juggling trick of the sire and sheves,” calling on Peter and Paul, the court said, in profane manner. The formula had barely shifted in three generations. Neither had the charge.
The fullest account of it working comes from Castleton in Lancashire in 1641, where three women were examined. Alis Scholfield had learned to set the sieve and shears off Jane Brearley. It was held up on Jane’s finger and Mary Fielden’s, and Alis spoke what Jane could only describe as many strange words. Mary remembered them better: that if Samuel Greame did steal the hen, then St Peter said so, St Paul said no. The same two saints as Aubrey’s, worn down into a rhyme. The sieve turned about at the name, Mary said. It had already been asked who took James Newbold’s sheep, and while they had it in hand they asked it whether Mary and Jane were themselves with child. The hen, the record adds, had left the house in John Chadwicke’s breeches.
By the nineteenth century the whole practice had simply stopped. Nobody wrote down why. It was tried less, and then it wasn’t tried at all.
Whoever held the shears never had to say the guilty name themselves. The sieve said it for them, and everyone in the room understood exactly what had just turned.
Sources
John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (written c.1686, ed. James Britten, 1881), p.25. William Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes (1847), p.139. Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), pp.99-101. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). Tabitha Stanmore, Love Spells and Lost Treasure (2023), pp.53-55, 79-80. John Gough Nichols, ed., Narratives of the Days of the Reformation (1859), pp.334-335. Deborah Lea, Witchcraft, Possession and Confessional Tension in Early Modern Lancashire (2011), pp.60-61.
9♠ The Toad Bone · Dominion
The bone was small and forked, a crotch bone, one of the bones of the pelvic girdle. A man who had one was said to be able to do anything he liked with any horse he met. There is a detail in it that nobody invented: the bone is the same shape as the frog, the horny elastic pad in the underside of a horse’s hoof. The thing taken out of the toad matched the thing already inside the animal it was meant to command.
Albert Love, born 1886, of Wortwell in Norfolk, told George Ewart Evans how it was got, and gave the whole business its name. He called it the Water of the Moon. The toads came from around Fritton, near Yarmouth, the sort with a ring about the neck that the horsemen called walking toads. They were killed and set on a whitethorn bush, and left there a day and a night until they dried. Then they went into an ant hill and stayed a full month, until the moon came round to the full again, and the ants left nothing but the bones.
Then the hard part. You took the skeleton down to running water at midnight, and you watched it. One bone leaves the rest and floats uphill, against the current, and that is the one you want. What you must not do is look away. That, Love said, is where the power comes from, keeping your eyes on that particular bone. And while the bones are parting you hear the trees and every noise you can imagine, buildings coming down, a traction engine running over you. Across East Anglia the same warning ran through every account of it: do this carefully, because the Devil is looking over your shoulder.
Love got two lots through. The third time there was a crackling in the noises, as if somebody had fallen, and it made him take his eyes off the water. He was plain about what that cost him. There was no answer, he said. The bone had no power. He wouldn’t answer.
What a bone that did answer bought was total. It was taken home, baked, dried and broken to powder, kept in a tin, or mixed with oil in a bottle and carried in the pocket. A little on the finger, wiped across a horse’s tongue, his nostrils, his chin and his chest, and, in Love’s words, he is your servant and you can do what you like with him. Other horsemen kept the bone whole instead, cured, wrapped in linen and hidden somewhere about the body. Touched in the pit of the shoulder a horse would stand and not move; touched on the rump he was let go again. One of them said a horse dealt with that way couldn’t pull a duck off its nest even if he wanted to.
Nobody sold these. A month of waiting, and one night of not looking away.
Sources
George Ewart Evans, The Pattern Under the Plough (1966), pp.217-219. George Ewart Evans, The Horse in the Furrow(1960), ch.23. Norfolk Record Office, MS 21630/47 502X2 (c.1958).
The Tens — The Wishes
The Four Wishes
The fifty other cards in this deck are built from the objects, practices and people of the English cunning folk tradition. But the four Tens are different. A Ten is not a documented incident, and it carries no named practitioner. It is the thing every spell was for in the first place: the wish, granted.
The domains each Wish serves are as follows: Hearts are Hearth & Home, Diamonds are Health & Healing, Clubs are Fortune & Finding, and Spades are Soul & Shadow.
No cunning person was ever recorded sitting quietly in a happy home, a healthy body, a full purse, or a settled soul. The record only ever shows the trouble and the spell that answered it — never the years afterward when nothing more needed doing. That silence isn’t a gap in the evidence. It’s the shape of what an outcome is: the point where the story, and the need for a practitioner, simply stops. The four Tens sit outside the incident-by-incident standard that governs every other card in this deck, the same way the four Aces do at the deck’s other end. Where the Aces ask where the power came from, the Tens ask what it was all for. Turn the Ten and the spell is over.
10♥ The Warm Hearth · Happiness
A fire banked low and steady, everyone who matters gathered under one roof. Nothing more is wanted. Nothing more is needed.
Contentment, simply arrived at. This is what was hoped for, finally here.
That is what Hearts wished for. The household, sealed in warmth, owing nothing further to fortune.
10♦ The Open Window · Health
A casement thrown wide, light and air moving freely through a room that no longer needs to be guarded. Strength has simply come back.
Vitality, returned in full. Whatever was weakened is strong again.
That is what Diamonds wished for. The body, restored past the point of needing a remedy at all.
10♣ The Full Purse · Wealth
A purse left open, coin spilling loose at its mouth, more than was ever asked for. This is windfall, not wage.
Abundance, arrived all at once. There is more than enough, and it is already here.
That is what Clubs wished for. The search, ended not by finding the thing looked for but by finding more.
10♠ The Steady Flame · Peace
A single flame, undisturbed, burning steady in a still room. Whatever troubled the soul has been quietly set down.
Peace, simply found. The soul rests, untroubled.
That is what Spades wished for. The ledger closed, nothing left owing on either side.
The Jacks — Notable Cunning Folk
The Four Jacks
J♥ Anne Jefferies · Wonder
Anne Jefferies was born in December 1626 in the parish of St Teath in north Cornwall, the daughter of a poor labourer. She never learned to read.
At nineteen she went to work as a servant for the Pitt family. One afternoon, knitting in the garden, she looked up to find six small people in green coming over the hedge. The fright dropped her into a fit, and she was carried inside and put to bed. She did not recover quickly, drifting in and out of fits for months, insisting each time that the fairies had “just gone out of the window.”
By harvest time, still weak from the fits, she healed someone for the first time. The mistress of the house had fallen badly in a lane, alone, and Anne knew where it had happened, and how, before anyone told her. She took the injured leg onto her lap, stroked it, and the pain eased at once. She refused to let anyone send for a surgeon. The leg was whole within days. From that same harvest time until Christmas she ate nothing anyone in the house could see or provide. On Christmas Day she came to the table and ate roast beef with the rest of them, because it was Christmas.
Word spread. People came from across Cornwall, then from London, healed with salves she said the fairies had given her. She could curse, as well, when it suited her. She never took a penny, and yet never wanted for money, and no one ever discovered where it came from.
A neighbour once came looking for her and searched her chamber by hand in the dark, calling her name, and found no one there. She walked out a moment later and said she had been at her table the whole time, eating her dinner, watching him fail to find her. A later account flattens this into a claim that she could turn invisible at will. What actually happened is smaller and stranger: a man patted the air of an empty room while she sat and watched him do it.
The ministers came eventually, to tell her the fairies were devils. She went to her chamber alone that night and came back with the family Bible already open to a single verse she could not have found herself, not being able to read: believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God. Around the same time it was said her fairies had told her the King would have his throne again, an unsafe thing to be overheard saying in the most royalist county in England. A local justice, John Tregeagle, sent for her. What exactly she was charged with was never made clear, sedition and witchcraft both circled her at once, and the record does not settle which brought Tregeagle to her door.
The fairies told her the constable was coming before he arrived. When she asked if she should hide, they said no, to go with him. She was taken to Bodmin gaol and kept without food. She did not starve. She was later held in Tregeagle’s own house too, again without food, and again came to no harm.
She was eventually released, kept healing, and married, though even now the name will not quite settle, Warden in the earliest record, Warren in most that copy it, Werrin in the one drawn from the parish register itself. Nobody wrote down when the fairies stopped coming, or why. Pitt, asked, said only that he did not know.
Fifty years on, Moses Pitt, grown and a London publisher, sent someone to find her and ask her to tell it all again. Anne was seventy by then. She denied every part of it and told him plainly she would not have her name spread through books and ballads for five hundred pounds. That, she said, was final.
She had told her story once, to the people who were there, and considered that sufficient.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Moses Pitt, An Account of one Ann Jefferies, now living in the County of Cornwall (1696), full text at quod.lib.umich.edu. Pitt’s letter to William Turner, reprinted in William Turner, A Compleat History of the Most Remarkable Providences (1697). Joseph Morgan, reprint of Pitt’s account, in Phœnix Britannicus (1732). C.S. Gilbert, An Historical Survey of the County of Cornwall, Vol. I (1817). Robert Hunt, Popular Romances of the West of England (1865), including the 1903 edition’s appendix reprint of Pitt’s letter. G.C. Boase and W.P. Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis (1874). Henry Richard Tedder, “Pitt, Moses,” Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900). Sabine Baring-Gould, Cornish Characters and Strange Events (1909). Barbara C. Spooner, John Tregagle of Trevorder: Man and Ghost (1935). Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005). Peter Marshall, “Ann Jefferies and the Fairies: Folk Belief and the War on Scepticism in Later Stuart England,” in Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (eds.), The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, Vol. 1, ed. Ogle and Bliss (1872), letters dated 1647. Katherine Briggs, An Encyclopaedia of Fairies, entry “Jefferies, Anne” (1976). Anders Ingram, “History of St Teath woman who claimed to have had encounters with fairies comes to light,” thepost.uk.com (2019).
J♦ Ursula Kemp · Undoing
Ursula (Ursley) Kemp was a cunning woman of St Osyth in Essex, a poor parish on the flat coastal edge of the county where the sea fret rolls in off the Blackwater and people’s lives were lived close to the bone. Ten years before anyone accused her of anything, she was already curing it. Crippled herself with a lameness in her bones, she learned a real charm from a woman in the next parish, hog’s dung and chervil held in the left hand, a knife pricked through it and cast into the fire, sage and herb of grace steeped in ale night and morning, and got well. She used the same charm on her neighbours for a decade after, at their own asking, and made her living by unwitching, finding the source of harm and taking it off again. She insisted, more than once, that though she could unwitch she could not witch. That distinction would not save her.
The trouble properly began with Grace Thurlowe. Grace had once let Ursula nurse her sick son back to health, then refused to let her nurse her newborn daughter, Joan, and the two fell out over it. When Joan later fell from her cradle and died three days after, of a broken neck, Ursula’s reported answer was that it served Grace right, she might have let her keep and nurse the child. The women fell out again not long after, this time over money: Ursula cured Grace’s own lameness for a promised twelve pence, Grace refused to pay, and Ursula told her she’d be even with her. Grace was struck lame again that same day. A neighbour’s infant, carried past Ursula’s house soon after, was heard crying “wo, wo” and pointing at her window, until its mother’s own conscience gave out and she went to complain.
It was Ursula’s own eight-year-old son, Thomas Rabbet, who first said aloud what she’d kept quiet: four spirits, fed on beer, cake, and her blood, Tittey a grey cat, Jack a black cat, Pigin a black toad, Tiffin a white lamb. Promised mercy by the magistrate Brian Darcy if she confessed plainly, Ursula broke down and gave him everything, then added something nobody had asked: she’d sent Jack to kill her own sister-in-law, for calling her whore and witch. Nobody had to take her word alone for that. Her brother-in-law swore independently, at the same trial, that as his wife lay dying, cold and barely breathing, Ursula arrived at the house uninvited, lifted the sheets, and took her by the arm, and she drew no further breath after. When another suspect was searched for the marks a spirit’s feeding was said to leave, the searchers held her body up against Ursula’s own, so well known by then were the marks on her skin. She was formally charged with three deaths, not one dispute over an unpaid fee. Darcy’s promised favour never came. She and one other woman, Elizabeth Bennett, were hanged in 1582.
Fourteen women stood accused in the St Osyth panic that year. Only Ursula and Elizabeth were hanged. Alice Newman, the neighbour Ursula’s own confession named alongside her, wasn’t executed at all. She sat in gaol for six years and was released under a general pardon in 1588.
That wasn’t quite the end of her story. In 1921, a skeleton was dug up in a St Osyth garden, its joints pierced with iron, in the old belief that this would stop a witch from walking after death, and it was taken to be hers. It was sold, displayed, and passed between a Cornish museum and an eccentric painter’s private collection, before finally being reburied in the village in 2011, still believed to be Ursula. The best modern scholarship on the case says otherwise: a man’s skeleton, misidentified from the very first dig. Ursula, apparently, is still out there somewhere.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
W.W., A True and Just Recorde of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches, taken at St Oses in the Countie of Essex (1582), full text via the Text Creation Partnership. Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), p.116. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003), p.63. St Osyth Museum, “1921: The Witches’ Skeletons,” stosythmuseum.co.uk. Marion Gibson, The Witches of St Osyth: Persecution, Betrayal and Murder in Elizabethan England (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Jonathan Durrant, “A Witch-Hunting Magistrate? Brian Darcy and the St Osyth Witchcraft Cases of 1582,” English Historical Review 136:578 (2021).
J♣ Billy Brewer · Charm
Billy Brewer sold sugar from a grocer’s shop on Alfred Street in Taunton for fifty years, and the whole town knew exactly what else was on offer. He read planets. He found lost property no one else could trace. He cured cattle that everyone else had given up on. And when he went touring the villages of the Somerset Levels, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, every household gave him the best bed in the house, because it was thought the greatest luck alive simply to share a room with him. Farmhands are recorded actually quarrelling over whose turn it was.
He was born at Lyng, five miles off, in 1818, the son of a shoemaker, and started out walking the roads selling clay pipes door to door, which is how the whole region came to know his face as Billy the Piper, years before he ever told a fortune. By the time he had been fifty years in Taunton, the chestnut tree he’d planted outside his new shop the day he arrived was still flourishing. A letter addressed simply “Brewer, Taunton” found him without trouble. The Post Office needed no more than that.
His most famous job says everything about how he worked. A farmer’s cattle were dying, one after another, no cause anyone could find. Billy arrived, pronounced it witchcraft, and named the cure: one week. He then spent ten unhurried days being fed and watered like visiting royalty before finally declaring the herd safe. He went home to Taunton five pounds richer and not remotely embarrassed about the extra three days.
That was the trick: charm, never force, and he never overplayed it. Eleven shillings was his standard fee, with a shilling handed straight back to anyone who paid him promptly. Even the newspapers that despised his trade admitted, once he was safely dead, that he showed none of the grasping greed so common to men in his line of work. Billy once treated a sick woman named Sarah Smith by tapping her palm several times, telling her each tap was a stab to the witch’s own heart, dosing her on steeped bay leaves and peppermint, then having her nail a donkey’s shoe to her own front door. When the cure failed, her husband had him hauled before the magistrates for it. The case fell apart: he had handed over the money admittedly without any faith in Brewer’s powers, so technically nobody had been deceived. This is not folklore. It is a Somerset magistrate’s own case record, January 1881. He walked out of it the same way he walked out of every other summons in fifty years of practice: entirely free.
He was hard to miss doing any of it. A long Inverness cloak, a sombrero hat, rings crowding every finger, and in later years a dishevelled brown wig sitting oddly against his own grey whiskers. He turned up to every village club feast for miles around in his finest, lavender gloves included. He never married. He kept cats.
His post came from everywhere, and he answered all of it. Women wrote about soldiers who had stopped writing back. A tongue-tied farmer wrote wondering whether he dared send a note of his own to a girl who wouldn’t talk to him. One woman waged a running war on a rival she called only Jezebel, three separate letters demanding he “keep her down, for God’s sake.” A man’s best clothes had turned an inexplicable yellow, again, and he wanted it undone. A widow near Bristol wanted only to know whether her son, gone to America, was still alive. Nothing was too small for him, and short of raising the dead, not much was too large.
Not that he was always so mild. A lodger nicknamed Wax Candles by the neighbours once got a broom broken across his head hard enough to need hospital treatment, over some quarrel nobody wrote down the cause of. Billy was hauled in for assault. The case collapsed when the man simply never turned up to testify against him.
He died on the 28th of December 1890, and the town could not organise so much as his funeral without something going wrong. The hearse waited outside his door the better part of an hour because the police and the parish’s own relieving officer simply didn’t turn up. The crowd that gathered got loud enough that the local paper primly reported them talking “not in the choicest of language.” The driver set off for entirely the wrong cemetery. The vicar very nearly refused to bury him at all, over a missing certificate nobody had thought to bring. Owen Davies, who has done more than anyone to bring this man back into the light, put the whole shambles in one line: Billy Brewer was “buried with less ceremony and less care than would have been bestowed on a favourite dog.”
Every other crisis in Taunton, for fifty years, he could charm his way through. His own funeral was the one job Billy Brewer never got to finish.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Owen Davies, “Billy Brewer: the Wizard of the West,” from A People Bewitched: Witchcraft and Magic in Nineteenth-Century Somerset (1999), full text at uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/12332/1/Billy_Brewer.pdf. Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History 8:1 (1997). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003). Ronald Hutton, Triumph of the Moon (2019 rev. edn.), Ch.6.
J♠ Timothy Crowther · Assurance
Timothy Crowther was Skipton’s parish clerk for most of his adult life, and its most celebrated conjuror besides. A century after he died, people in the town were still saying “as cunning as Crowther” when they meant the highest compliment they had. He earned it.
In the summer of 1760, two neighbours from Bradford came to his door about a man missing twenty days. Crowther would not discuss it until they brought him a boy, twelve or thirteen years old. They returned with Jonas Rushford, fourteen. Crowther had him lie down and covered him over completely, a looking-glass placed in his hand, then asked what he wanted to see. Rushford asked for his mother, and saw her at once: a lock of wool in her hand, standing exactly where she was standing, dressed exactly as she was dressed. Only then did Crowther ask him to look again, for the missing man.
Rushford saw him riding drunk towards Idle, stopping at an alehouse for two more pints, a guinea out to pay for them. He saw two men, one big, one small, fall in behind him on the road, arm themselves with hedge-stakes, and pull him from his horse at the top of Windle Common. He watched them kill him and put him in a coal pit. The next day he led the search party to that exact spot. The body was there, the handkerchief tied about the mouth and fastened behind the neck, precisely as he had said. This is not a traveller’s tale, smoothed by a century of retelling. It is John Wesley’s own journal, in his own hand, dated the twenty-fourth of July, 1761. Wesley wrote the whole account down and closed it with a line that still splits opinion two and a half centuries on: “They that can believe this may believe a man’s getting into a bottle.”
Crowther kept a notebook, found on a Skipton bookstall a hundred years after he died, full of the working parts of his trade: astrological tables, weather signs, aphorisms on sickness and the revolutions of the stars, and his charms in his own hand. One, for stolen goods, calls on Sathan and four other named spirits, by the power of Heaven, to bring the thief before a wax plate marked with the planets and buried in the ground, repeated day after day until the thief or the goods appear. Another, for cattle harmed by a witch, takes hair from each of the beast’s four quarters and each hoof, sews it into a pin-stuck cloth ball, and boils it until the pan is fit to crack, while the charmer says three times over: “Witch, witch, witch, thus shalt thou burn in hell.” A man does not write his own incantations, in his own hand, in a book meant for no eyes but his, unless he believes in what he is writing.
He could also just be a nuisance, when it suited him. As parish clerk, he decided Skipton’s church bells were cracked and beneath the town’s dignity, and asked the churchwardens for a whole new peal. They refused outright. So he asked, more modestly, whether new clappers might at least be allowed. That seemed reasonable enough, and they agreed. The clappers he ordered were enormous. The first time the bells were rung with them, every one of them cracked. The peal the wardens had just refused him was now, suddenly, unavoidable.
He died in February 1761, five months before Wesley ever wrote down Rushford’s account of him. It made no difference to the proverb. A hundred years on, Skipton was still saying it.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, ed. Nehemiah Curnock, entry for 24 July 1761. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003). Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales,” Rural History 8:1 (1997). Owen Davies, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009). Daniel Harms, Witch Bottles: History, Culture, Magic (2020). Ronald Hutton, Triumph of the Moon (2019 rev. edn.), Ch.6.
The Queens — Great Cunning Women
The Four Queens
Q♥ Margery Jourdemayne · Hope
For decades, Margery Jourdemayne lived and worked from the manor of Eye, a stretch of marsh and meadow beside Westminster that her husband William administered for the Abbey for about twenty years. People who wanted a husband to love them, or a child they could not otherwise conceive, came to her there. She never advertised. She did not need to.
Her first brush with the law came in 1430, when she was arrested for sorcery and held at Windsor Castle for about a year and a half. She was let go in 1432 on her oath to stop. She did not stop. She went back to Eye and, more quietly than before, went back to work.
Among her clients, for at least ten years before anyone outside her circle knew it, was Eleanor Cobham. Before Eleanor married Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1428, it was said she had gone to Margery for medicines and drinks to make him love her and marry her. After the wedding, wanting the child that marriage never brought her, she went to Margery again. This was not treason. It was not even, under the law of the time, a crime at all. Wanting to be loved, and wanting a child, were not things a woman needed the church’s permission to want.
The trouble came from elsewhere. In 1441, two of Eleanor’s own household scholars were accused of casting a horoscope that predicted the young king’s death, a charge that reached toward treason because it reached toward the throne Humphrey stood to inherit. On 15 July that year, London was struck by a violent hailstorm, and its people blamed witches. It may have been in the chaos of that same week that the authorities came for Margery too.
Eleanor denied plotting the king’s death, but admitted, before a panel of bishops, what she had used Margery for. It was the safer thing to admit to. It also finished Margery. She was burned at Smithfield on 27 October 1441, the day after one of the accused scholars died in the Tower, and three weeks before the other was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn. A London chronicler writing at about the same time set her death down in a single line, and did not trouble to give her a name: on the eve of St Simon and St Jude, “the wycche be syde Westemyster” was burned in Smithfield. A third man, Eleanor’s chaplain, was pardoned outright and lived out his life undisturbed. Eleanor was sentenced by the church courts to public penance at three London churches on three days that November, at St Paul’s, at Christchurch, and at St Michael’s in Cornhill, and she kept her life, a castle, and a pension besides. Of everyone swept up in the affair, Margery was the only one of no rank at all, and she was the only one who burned.
The men who wrote about her afterward could not resist her. A verse written more than a century later called her Old Mother Madge, and swore she could command “feendes and fayries” and call the dead up out of their graves. Shakespeare put her on stage under her own name, conjuring spirits for Eleanor. None of it was true to what she actually did. What she actually did was smaller, and in its way harder to shake: for decades, she gave people what they came for. Hope, mostly. It was the one thing nobody ever proved was a crime, and the one thing they burned her for supplying anyway.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
G.L. Harriss, “Cobham, Eleanor,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Jessica Freeman, “Sorcery at Court and Manor: Margery Jourdemayne, the Witch of Eye Next Westminster,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004). Gemma Hollman, Royal Witches: Witchcraft and the Nobility in Fifteenth-Century England (2019). R.A. Griffiths, “The Trial of Eleanor Cobham: An Episode in the Fall of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 51 (1969). Francis Young, Magic as a Political Crime in Medieval and Early Modern England(2018). Edward Hall, Chronicle (1548). Richard Grafton, Chronicle (1569), and Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France (c.1516). William Gregory, Chronicle of London, in James Gairdner (ed.), The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century (Camden Society, 1876).
Q♦ Bridget Bostock · Vocation
Bridget Bostock healed her neighbours for years before anyone outside the parish noticed, sore legs, aches, the ordinary complaints of a working village. Her method never changed: spittle taken before she’d eaten anything that morning, believed to carry a particular virtue, worked into the sufferer along with touch and prayer, and a little liquor of a red colour she never once explained to anyone who asked. Her own minister, William Harding of Coppenhall, said his son’s lameness was cured the moment he’d been in her company, “when all other doctors could do him no service.”
Then, in August 1748, a local newspaper printed a piece about her, and Coppenhall stopped being a place nobody had heard of. A year earlier she’d had perhaps forty visitors in twelve months. By spring it was a hundred a week. By late summer, a hundred and sixty. Then, within days of each other, six hundred in a single day, then seven hundred. A letter to the Whitehall Evening Post listed what she’d cured: the blind, the deaf, the lame of every kind, King’s Evil, fits, dropsy, palsy, leprosy, cancers, “and in short almost every thing,” by nothing more than stroking with her spittle and praying over the sufferer. She turned away only one complaint, syphilis, what the period called “the French disease.” The letter went further still: of everyone who came to her, it claimed, not one went home uncured.
That claim didn’t survive the year after. A gardener from Thame, Christopher Lucas, brought three people to the great hall house she’d lately taken: his own wife, palsied; a woman blind five years; the wife of a London grocer, given up by the city’s hospitals as incurable. Only the grocer’s wife walked away well. The other two, the record says flatly, remained exactly as they’d arrived. Not every story about her ends in wonder. This one is told anyway, because it happened.
The walls of her house were papered floor to ceiling with the names of everyone she’d treated, near a bushel more stored above stairs. Not proof of any cure, she said. Only reminders to pray for them.
A grieving widower wrote to her that December with the boldest request anyone ever put to her: come to Wales and raise his wife from the dead, or, if the journey was too much to ask, simply pray her back to life from home. Sir John Price of Buckland had lost his wife Eleanor, and for a full year he pressed his case letter after letter, building an argument from scripture, Moses returned at the Transfiguration, Ezekiel’s dry bones, the graves that split open at the Crucifixion, proof, he argued, that no length of time was too long for God to undo. She never made the journey. Price came to believe it was the travel itself she balked at, not any doubt in her own power, and offered that her prayers alone, worked at whatever distance she liked, would do just as well. She refused him every time, never once suggesting the power wasn’t hers, only that it wasn’t hers to use that way.
A Methodist minister, John Bennet, watched her work twice and wrote up both visits, unable either time to explain what he’d seen. John Wesley heard it from him directly and didn’t doubt a word.
After 1749 she vanishes completely: no death date, no burial, not another line. She’d spent barely a year as one of the most talked-about women in England, healed what she could, admitted plainly what she couldn’t, and asked nothing back for any of it. Then, as suddenly as she’d arrived, she was gone from the page.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Jane Shaw, “Bostock, Bridget,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Gentleman’s Magazine, vol.18 (1748) and vol.19 (1749). Whitehall Evening Post, August 1748. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (1999), ch.6. Monthly Magazine, vol.25 (June 1808) and vol.26 (August 1808). H.D. Rack, “Doctors, demons and early Methodist healing” (1982/1993). W.H. Chaloner, Bridget Bostock: The White Witch of Coppenhall (1948).
Q♣ Anne Bodenham · Defiance
Anne Bodenham was eighty years old, and she wore spectacles, and she insisted that everyone call her Mistress. Not Goodwife. Not Widow. Mistress Anne Bodenham, wife of a Wiltshire clothier. She could read. She owned a whole shelf of books, rare enough for a woman of her station to be worth remarking on. She wrote her own letters. She taught the local children their letters too, in a cottage just outside Salisbury, close enough to the gallows that she could see them from her door. That closeness would turn out to matter. She had spent decades building this life, a cunning woman of real standing in her corner of Wiltshire, not a marginal figure scraping by but a respected one. She had earned the distinction.
She said she had learned her craft as a young woman from Dr Lambe, a London astrologer so tangled up in the affairs of the Duke of Buckingham that a mob eventually beat him to death in the street. By the time Anne was standing trial in 1653, he had been dead for around twenty-five years. She knew exactly what she was doing by claiming him: naming the most notorious sorcerer of the previous generation as her own teacher, long after he was safely beyond contradicting her, while she herself was still working, still respected, still Mistress Bodenham. Nobody can prove the story true. It hardly needs to be. It is a magnificent thing to say about yourself, and she said it more than once.
What she actually did, day to day, was practical. People came to her cottage with a specific problem, usually something stolen, and she solved it. Her tool was a green looking glass, held up to the sun, in which she said she could see the thief at their business, wherever they were, like a window opening onto somewhere else. She found a lost gold ring this way. She found a stolen spoon. Once, a visitor arrived and she turned them away flat: the wind was wrong, the sun wasn’t right, Jupiter wasn’t showing its face, so the glass would give her nothing that day. She told them they’d be back before long over something far more serious. She was right.
She wrote small paper charms folded into squares to keep debt collectors from a poor man’s door. She prayed to the planet Jupiter, which she called the luckiest of all the planets. She once boasted to a young clerk that she could pull a live toad out of an empty bag, for the price of a few pints of ale. “I have cured hundreds,” she said of herself, and nothing in the record suggests she was lying about the number.
She also raised spirits, and here the stories get bigger. More than one person who saw her at work described the same ritual: four names spoken aloud, always in the same order, calling on Beelzebub, Tormentor, Lucifer, and Satan. Asked directly what these spirits actually were and what she wanted with them, she gave a plain, matter of fact answer: those who wished to do it need only read the right books, and she had read them. She knew the preparations, the consecrations, what the invocations actually said. And she said there was no harm in the spirits themselves. They did a person nothing but good, watching over them, keeping them from evil, their whole life long. She said this while she herself stood accused of witchcraft, with her life on the line. It’s the one moment in the whole record where we get to hear, in something close to her own words, what she actually believed she was doing. And what she believed was that she was doing good.
The stories other people told about her went further still. One says a boy was carried bodily through the air to a snow-covered field, where a black boar showed him where to dig for magical herbs. Another describes a candlelit gathering where ragged boys danced with a cat and a dog while she sat paring her fingernails, and fresh herbs pushed up through the snow at her word. A cheap printed pamphlet, cashing in on her fame after the trial, claimed she could turn herself into a dog, a lion, a bear, a wolf, a bull, and more. Anne herself, under questioning, made an equally wild claim of her own: that she could travel through the air at forty miles an hour. People said doors opened by themselves when she approached. They said a black dog crossed a particular bridge just ahead of her, every time.
Her downfall came through a servant girl named Anne Styles, who worked for a wealthy family nearby and came to Bodenham for help with a plot to poison her own household. It wasn’t Styles’s first visit. Bodenham wrote her a charm. She also, Styles later said, had her sign her name in blood in a red book kept as a record of everyone who’d bound themselves to the devil. When the poisoning plot was discovered and Styles was arrested, the girl turned on Bodenham at once and blamed her for everything.
Bodenham had already seen this coming. She said plainly, before any of it happened, that Styles had undone her and that she would hang for it. She was right on both counts.
She was tried at Salisbury in 1653, searched for a witch’s mark by four women who swore they’d found it, found guilty on every charge, and sentenced to hang. Through all of it she never once confessed, not to the clergyman who prayed with her in her final days, not to the man pressing her for a confession right up to the foot of the ladder, not with the rope actually around her neck. When the moment came to leave her cell for the last time, she called out to the man come to fetch her: “Be you ready, I am ready,” in what witnesses called a jolly manner, as though she were the one keeping everyone else waiting. Given one last chance to admit her guilt before she died, her final words were fury, not surrender: “Forgive thee? A pox on thee, turn me off.” She tried to jump before the hangman could do it for her.
The strangest ending belongs to someone else. Anne Styles, whose evidence had done more than anything to hang her, broke down afterwards and begged that Bodenham be spared. She said she had felt herself falling toward hell and had been saved, in the end, by nothing more than what she called one little twig, holding her up. It is the most human moment in the whole case, and it very nearly wasn’t written down at all.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Edmond Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived, or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham (1653). Anon. (“James Bower, Cleric”), Doctor Lambs Darling: Or, Strange and Terrible News from Salisbury (1653). Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, Book III, ch.7 (2nd edn, 1655), pp.203–204. ‘The Salisbury Assizes, or, the Reward of Witchcraft’ (ballad, 1653), in Hyder E. Rollins, ed., Cavalier and Puritan (1923), pp.329–335. John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, ed. James Britten (1881), pp.260–261. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003), pp.63, 145. Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft, Politics, and Memory in Seventeenth-Century England’, The Historical Journal, 50:2 (2007), pp.289–308.
Q♠ Mary Bateman · Guile
Mary Harker was baptised on 15 January 1768 at St Columba’s Church in Topcliffe, one of six children of a small Yorkshire farmer. She learned dressmaking in York, fled to Leeds after being caught stealing there, married a wheelwright named John Bateman, and raised at least five children with him. By 1799 she was practising as a cunning woman alongside her needle, and for the harder cases she claimed a distant wise-woman named Mrs Moore worked through her. Mrs Moore never existed. A second correspondent, Miss Blythe of Scarborough, took over later, writing letters that always had to be burned the moment they were read.
For a decade the deception cost her clients dearly. The Steads lost their savings to a rival Mary invented purely to work on a jealous wife. Judith Cryer, an old washerwoman, was shown a letter from the fictional Miss Blythe containing a drawn gallows, warning that her living grandson would hang before he turned fourteen unless she raised four guineas and had them sewn, unlooked at, into her bed. The Misses Kitchin, two Quaker sisters, died within ten days of each other in 1803 alongside their mother, all three under Mary’s nursing; a physician suspected poison and was refused the chance to look.
In 1806, while living at Black Dog Yard, one of her hens laid an egg inscribed “Christ is coming.” She arranged for two more to follow it from the same nest. Leeds was gripped that year by rumours that the world was ending, and crowds paid a penny each to see the eggs for themselves, some of them frightened into sudden, violent piety. It held only as long as no one caught her at it.
The case that hanged her began in 1806, when Rebecca Perigo came to her convinced an evil wish sat in her breast. For two years Miss Blythe’s letters set the price of the cure, money, linen, guineas sewn unopened into silk purses, and finally, in May 1808, six days of a doctored pudding, a powder added daily, with strict instructions never to call a doctor whatever happened. Both Rebecca and William ate it. William found it foul and stopped after a mouthful. Rebecca ate on, and died within the week. The powder was corrosive sublimate of mercury, a poison whose danger in quantity was well understood at the time. A decade of practice at keeping a fraud from close examination, set against a rising dose and a standing order to keep every doctor away, makes wilful poisoning the likelier reading of what happened in that kitchen, not a remedy that simply failed.
At her trial in March 1809 a surgeon identified the poison by taste, by the residue left on a blade, and by a dose fed to a dog that died as Rebecca had. She was sentenced to hang, claimed a pregnancy a jury of matrons found untrue, and spent her final days confessing to a prison chaplain fraud after fraud while refusing him a confession to murder, right to the gallows, with nothing left to gain either way by the lie. She wrote to her husband the day before, enclosing her wedding ring for their daughter: “I have made my peace with my God, and am easy in mind. To-morrow will end all here, and the Lord will care for me hereafter.” She was hanged at York on 20 March 1809 before a crowd of thousands.
What followed had more of the crowd in it than the court. Her body was sold for viewing at Leeds General Infirmary, threepence a head. Her skin was tanned and sold on as protective charms, the very object her own trade had dealt in for years, now made from her. Two books were bound in it. Her skeleton stood in a museum case into the twenty-first century. History has settled on calling her a witch and a poisoner. She was certainly the second. The first was never a charge the law could bring by 1809.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
The Extraordinary Life and Character of Mary Bateman (1809, 12th edn. 1811). William Knipe, Criminal Chronology of York Castle (1867), pp.145–149. Owen Davies, “Bateman [née Harker], Mary (1768–1809), thief and poisoner,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History(2003), pp.49–51, 72. Sabine Baring-Gould, “Mary Bateman, Witch and Murderess,” Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events (1874, cited edn. 1900). York Museums Trust, “Prisoner Stories: Mary Bateman” (blog). Summer Strevens, “The Yorkshire Witch, Mary Bateman: using family history sources to research the trial and execution of Mary Bateman,” family-tree.co.uk (2016).
The Kings — Great Cunning Men
The Four Kings
K♥ Richard Morris · Mischief
Richard “Dick Spot” Morris was born in Bakewell, Derbyshire, the son of a soldier who died when he was six. His aunt Deborah Heathcote, a fortune-teller, raised him and taught him everything she knew. By the age of twelve he was already being consulted about lost cattle and stolen goods. He kept at it for nearly eighty years.
At the White Horse Inn at Frankwell, near Shrewsbury, on a market day, some men in the house urged Morris to make sport for them. An earthenware seller had set out his wares by the door. Morris said nothing. Within moments the man was smashing his own pans and pitchers with a stick, then ran off as if chasing something. Asked afterward what had come over him, he said, with tears in his eyes, that he had seen a great dog striding over his goods, pissing on them as it went, and that he had lost it in the pursuit, and he could not help lamenting that he had been under the Devil’s delusion.
The most celebrated story concerns a public house at Henllan in North Wales, where Dick stopped for refreshment on his way to Llanrwst and was charged fourpence for the ale and sixpence for the bread and cheese. He considered this outrageous. He paid it anyway. Before leaving he wrote a spell on a slip of paper, tucked it quietly under the leg of the table, and rode off into the dark, whistling.
That evening the serving girl began dancing around the kitchen, leaping and spinning, shouting “six and four are ten, count it o’er again.” The landlord came down to stop her and immediately began dancing himself. The landlady came to stop them both and immediately joined the dance. All three of them were spinning and stamping and shouting, unable to stop, when the noise woke the neighbours. One recognised the work of Dick Spot, saddled a horse, and rode after him. He found Morris some miles down the road, taking his time, still whistling. There was no need to hurry back, Morris said. Just burn the paper under the table. They burned it. The dancing stopped.
He once trapped a malicious spirit named Cynon beneath a rock in the Llanwddyn Valley, sealing it there until the water should work its way between the stone and the dry land. Many years later, the valley was flooded to supply Liverpool with water. The Welsh workmen refused to blast the rocks on the valley floor. When the stone was finally dynamited, a frog appeared on the rubble, sitting up and rubbing its eyes as if waking from a long sleep. The men stood at a distance and argued over whether it was truly a frog, or Cynon himself, freed at last. For nights afterward, people passing the spot said they heard the sound of chains dragging where the stone had stood.
He was tall and muscular, with a dark spot on the side of his face from whence his nickname took its life. He travelled the length of Derbyshire, Shropshire and North Wales on foot and later by carriage, reading stars, finding lost things, righting wrongs. The anonymous acquaintance who wrote his life, and who had observed him closely for nearly fifty years, declared that “a country conjuror is more useful in the place he resides in, than the fat vicar, who only sleeps and stirs about his tythes.” In later life his fee in all cases was a piece of gold. He owned the White Horse Inn itself, the very building where he had made his sport, and left it, with his other properties in Frankwell, in trust to the newly founded Manchester and Salford Lying-in Hospital.
Every story told about him is a story about a wrong turned into a joke, worth telling rather than nursing. The mole, presumably, went with him.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
The Life and Mysterious Transactions of Richard Morris, Esq., Better Known by the Name of Dick Spot, the Conjuror (London, 1798). Elias Owen, Welsh Folk-Lore: A Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales (1896). Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History 8:1 (1997). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003). Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (1999).
K♦ John Wrightson · Extravagance
On Trinity Fair day in 1808 a man walked into Stokesley market place with his face coloured vermilion and his long brown hair loose across it. Red coat, white waistcoat, black small clothes, white stockings, a drab hat. One who saw him thought he looked more like a maniac than a wise man. Nobody forgot it, and that was the point.
He had come from Sedgefield the year before, about forty-five, selling gingerbread from a thatched cottage at the west end of town. He was the seventh son of a seventh daughter, which settled the question of his abilities before he had done anything at all. He said himself he had no power beyond any other man, except when fasting.
His trade card gave nothing away. J. Wrightson, cow doctor, a seventh son, Stokesley, offering to relieve any inward disorder by the sending of water. It said nothing about witchcraft, the one part of the trade no cunning man put his name to in print. They came anyway, and not only the poor: to have a thief named, a beast cured, a fortune told, or to be kept out of the militia ballot. Whatever the complaint, he laid it at the door of witchcraft.
He kept a dark room and read aloud there from an ancient folio in black letter, and people came out of it saying he had told them what marks were on their own bodies, having never set eyes on them before. In his consulting room he wore a long robe and a strange head-covering, a skull and a globe and dried herbs about him. On Sundays he put on a scarlet coat and crimson knee-breeches and went to church to stand godfather to the children of Stokesley, which he was asked to do constantly, despite a private character those who knew him called very bad. They asked him anyway.
He knew before you spoke.
Two cattle buyers lost two cows on the road from Northallerton fair and came to test him, agreeing to say it was a horse. They were barely through the door when he shouted from the scullery that if they could turn two cows into a horse it was no use coming to him, for he could not turn a horse back into two cows. Then, after a long silence: they are both in the beck, and have been since last night. Both were found a mile below the bridge, drowned in the swollen Leven.
John Unthank rode eleven miles over the moor about his uncle’s sick beast and got no chance to speak. Thou’s come to ask me about Tommy Frank’s black beast. Then Wrightson gave him his uncle’s parting words before he could recall them himself: mind and see t’ galloway gets her whoats afore you leaves t’ stable. He described the animal better than Unthank could, said it was past saving, and said they would find the growth that killed it when they opened it. They did.
A lady in South Durham lay dying of a lump in her throat and her son rode for Stokesley. Before he reached the door Wrightson called out to him. Bait your horse, get something to eat, and go home. The lump has burst. She is all right now.
Old Nathan Agar hid five golden guineas in a stocking foot under his thatch, went to add a sixth, and found the lot gone. He told nobody and went straight to Wrightson, who reminded him first that he had been warned, at sixty, against marrying a girl not quite nineteen. Then: lift the flag at your doorstep when the house is empty, lay a certain leaf of the Bible beneath it, and watch who stumbles coming in. The lodger stumbled. Then the wife. Agar was told where his guineas lay in the pig-sty, along with a watch he had not missed, and other and more serious things besides, which ended his marriage that week.
Two men coming down the moor road above West House turned aside for a bit of sport with Auld Wrightson. He welcomed them warmly, sat them at the fire, gave them pipes and tobacco, and heaped on the fuel. When the heat grew past bearing they went to edge their chairs back and found the chairs would not move and they could not rise from them. He let them roast, then remarked that Auld Wrightson reckoned it a sport differing somewhat from the one they had settled on coming down West House bank, and another time they might think twice. And now, good do to you. As he spoke they came loose.
A young bull went down too weak to stand, slung in ropes to keep it off the ground. Wrightson came, refused to look at it, lit his pipe and strolled out alone to the byre. When the men followed, the bull was standing without the slings and eating with a hearty appetite. How it was done, he never said.
A quarryman came about stolen tools and was told at once that nothing could be done, they had been carried across water. But he could be shown. Put before a looking glass in a darkened room and warned not to look away, he saw his tools lying in bracken in a wood he knew at once. He was told not to touch them, and to bring back a live magpie. He could not catch one, and no boy would give up his. Without it, Wrightson said, he could work the thief no harm.
His household worked for him as hard as he did. An elderly housekeeper, an odd-job man, an ally among the ostlers at a Stokesley inn, and a code of signals between them, so that everything worth knowing about a visitor reached the master before the visitor did. A stranger who stabled his horse before walking round had already told more than he knew. Whether that accounted for all of it, nobody who knew him could agree. Some came away certain he had real and marvellous power, others that he was a swindler and nothing more, and one who could not settle it wondered whether men of his trade practised something like electro-biology, knowingly or not. Seventy years after his death they were still arguing.
He could not pass it on. He said plainly he could not give his powers to his own son. The books went to a nephew, remembered in Stokesley as Jacky Dawson, who took up the trade and was never thought worthy of it.
The end came in custody. He had been committed to the House of Correction at Northallerton for an assault, and the officer taking him there found him dead in the post chaise. Nobody recorded the year, or the cause, or where they buried him.
He was, said one who tracked down everyone still living who had known him, undoubtedly a man endowed with marvellous psychic power, and with the smallest amount of charlatanry possible. Another, who thought a great deal less of him, called him little better than a huge swindler.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Henry Wilson, Wonderful Characters (London: Walker and Co., 1842), “The Wise Man.” William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England (1866). Richard Blakeborough, Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898). Canon J.C. Atkinson, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish (1891). Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, accession 1893.18.8, Wrightson’s handwritten cattle-curing charm, presented by Rev. J.C. Atkinson, 1893. Owen Davies, “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Rural History 8:1 (1997). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003), pp. 53–54, 85, 114. Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (2019 rev. edn.), ch. 6.
K♣ Simon Forman · Ambition
Simon Forman was born in Quidhampton in Wiltshire on the last day of 1552, the son of a farmer. When his father died, his mother pulled him out of school at eleven and put him to work in the fields. He never forgave her for it, and spent the rest of his life educating himself with a ferocity that suggested he was making up for lost time. By the time he died he had produced thousands of pages of guides to astrology, compendia of alchemy, histories of creation, medical records, personal diaries, and notes on the plays of William Shakespeare. He was one of the few people in Elizabethan England to leave a first-hand account of watching Shakespeare perform: his notebooks record attending Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline at the Globe, along with a fourth play about Richard II that scholars believe was not Shakespeare’s.
His casebooks survive from 1596 to 1603 and document up to two thousand consultations a year. His clients came with questions about illness, pregnancy, stolen goods, career prospects, unfaithful spouses, and marriage. He recorded all of it in meticulous detail. He also recorded his own dreams, his own ailments, the best time to visit friends, the best time to send letters to patrons, and the whereabouts of his missing socks. He cast horoscopes to find his missing socks. This is not a colourful exaggeration. It is in the Bodleian Library.
The College of Physicians repeatedly fined and arrested him for practising without a licence. He kept practising. He eventually obtained a licence from the University of Cambridge in 1603, by which point he had been doing it for years and had no intention of stopping. He treated the poor and the rich with equal thoroughness. The Countess of Essex consulted him. So did people who could not afford to eat.
He dreamed that he offered to impregnate Queen Elizabeth in order to stop her skirts from dragging in the muddy London streets. He recorded this dream in his notebooks without apparent embarrassment.
Those who have studied him closely have not reached agreement. Barbara Traister found his ambitions unlimited. The Cambridge casebooks project called him pugnacious, ambitious, and controversial. A third scholar concluded he was a humourless, anxious man trying desperately to become something he was not. All three assessments are accurate. None of them is the whole picture.
In September 1611, on a warm Sunday afternoon, he told his wife that he would die the following Thursday night. She argued with him. On Thursday evening he went out onto the Thames in a boat and collapsed. He was dead before they got him to the bank. His casebooks, his manuscripts, and everything else he had ever written passed to his protege Richard Napier, and eventually to the Ashmole Collection at the Bodleian, where they remain. After his death he was implicated in the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury through his former client the Countess of Essex, a scandal that kept his reputation buried for centuries.
He was fifty-eight years old. He had written down almost everything that had ever happened to him. The socks were never found.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Sidney Lee, ‘Forman, Simon’, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 19 (1889). Lauren Kassell et al., The Casebooks of Simon Forman and Richard Napier, 1596–1634, casebooks.lib.cam.ac.uk. William Lilly, History of His Life and Times, from the Year 1602 to 1681 (1715). J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, ed., The Autobiography and Personal Diary of Dr. Simon Forman (1849). Folger Shakespeare Library, ‘Forman’s account of seeing plays at the Globe: Macbeth, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale’, Shakespeare Documented (2020), shakespearedocumented.folger.edu. Mathew Lyons, ‘Simon Forman fantasises about Elizabeth I’ (2012), mathewlyons.co.uk. A. L. Rowse, Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s Age (1974), pp. 210–211. Owen Davies, Popular Magic (2003), p. 95.
K♠ James Murrell · Command
James Murrell was born in Rochford, Essex, in 1780, the seventh son of a seventh son, which in the folk reckoning of the day meant his gifts were settled before he had done anything to earn them. He was apprenticed young to a surveyor in Burnham, worked for a time as a chemist’s stillman in London, and by about 1810 had set up as a shoemaker in Hadleigh, on the northern shore of the Thames Estuary. There he stayed for the rest of his life, mending shoes with one hand and, by common local agreement, ruling as the most formidable cunning man in Essex with the other. He married Elizabeth Button in London in 1812 and fathered as many as twenty children.
He called himself the Devil’s Master, and by every account meant it as his daily boast, not a modest claim. He argued theology with the clergy who called on him and generally won: one parish rector, pressed to say which he thought Murrell was, a very good man or a very bad one, admitted he could not make up his mind, since the wizard knew his own Bible better than the rector did. Murrell was, by every surviving account, a very small man: hard hat, bobbed tail coat, hands clasped behind him, walking the lanes humming loudly and lost in thought, a basket and a whalebone umbrella never far from his hand. He wore iron goggles that gave him a frightening appearance and scared off children, of whom he was actually very fond. Among his effects after death was found a trick telescope, once boasted to let a man see clean through a brick wall.
He preferred to travel by night, and was said to cover impossible distances doing it. One story has him crossing the River Crouch on a broomstick. Another has him vanish from a crowd of old men on Canvey Island and reappear, at almost the same moment, in his own village, miles off.
He told many witch-bottle stories in his time; this is one of them, told in full here rather than blended with the others. A young woman found an old gypsy hiding in a barn and turned her off the property. The gypsy, a witch, cursed her for it, and the girl began to scream like a cat and bark like a dog. Murrell was sent for. He set a bottle holding the girl’s hair and nail clippings on the fire and told the room to stay silent while they waited the witch out. A hammering started on the door, and a woman’s voice begged him to stop, the test was causing her agony. The bottle burst. The next morning an old woman was found burned to death outside the Woodcutters’ Arms, three miles away. It was the gypsy. The girl recovered.
His reputation reached both banks of the Thames Estuary. He told the people of Leigh, Hadleigh and Canewdon what the future held for witchcraft in each of their parishes, and they were still repeating it generations later. The gentry despised him as a dangerous quack in public and consulted him in secret; the poor never bothered with the pretence. When he died, the registrar recorded his occupation with the same disdain: “Profession Quack Doctor: Natural Causes.”
He predicted his own death to the minute, and died on 16 December 1860 precisely when he had said he would. His trunk of magical books and papers was buried by his landlord and dug up again by his son. Arthur Morrison examined the contents before they were dispersed: astrology and astronomy books, old medical texts, home-made manuscripts on conjuration and geomancy, an annotated Culpeper in Murrell’s own crabbed hand. His correspondence was burned in 1956 by people who did not know what they were destroying, but the trunk survived, and so did one notebook of astrological records, later examined by a folklorist and found to carry nativities cast for Queen Victoria, Melbourne, and Wellington among its pages.
He is buried in Hadleigh churchyard in an unmarked grave, beside most of his own children. Years afterwards his son led Arthur Morrison to the spot, by then no more than a faint discolouration in the turf. Murrell would probably have thought an unmarked grave beneath his dignity.
The image is a whimsical imagining based on the historical record, not an authentic portrait.
Sources
Arthur Morrison, “A Wizard of Yesterday,” The Strand Magazine (1900). Eric Maple, “Cunning Murrell: A Study of a Nineteenth-Century Cunning Man in Hadleigh, Essex,” Folklore 71 (1960). Eric Maple, The Dark World of Witches (New York: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1962), cited via Rosemary Ellen Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Witches, Witchcraft and Wicca(1999/2008), p. 239. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History (2003). Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon (2019 rev. edn.), ch. 6.
The Jokers — The Powers
The Two Powers
The fifty-two cards of this deck describe the objects, practices and people of the English cunning folk tradition. The two Jokers describe something different: the world those people inhabited, and the two powers between which every one of them operated.
These were not obscure forces known only to practitioners. Every man and woman in sixteenth- to nineteenth-century England knew them. Providence: divine will moving through events, ordained and unstoppable, forever restoring the world to what was meant to be. And Opposition: the power that ran counter to it, met in bargains struck out of desperation, that would bend what was meant to be, for a price. Church and chapel named them from the pulpit. The cunning folk met them in their work.
The cunning folk identified with Providence. They healed in God’s name, worked their charms in Christ’s authority, and presented themselves, honestly for the most part, as people who worked with the divine, not against it. But they stood closer to the boundary than anyone else in their communities. Some moved toward Opposition, consciously or not. Some were accused of it regardless. The two cards that follow give these powers their most historically documented faces: the forms they took when they became visible enough to be recorded.
Joker The Man in Black · Opposition
He is the face Opposition wore when it became visible enough to write down.
In Huntingdonshire in 1646, a spirit appeared to Jane Wallis as she made her bed and gave his own name as Blackman, standing before her “in the shape of a man in blacke cloaths.” In Somerset in 1665, Elizabeth Style and Alice Duke called him only the man in black, the same phrase the record repeats every time he appears. He brought the wax image to be baptised in a child’s name, stood godfather to it, and supplied the wine, the cakes and the roast meat while the company danced. A year before that, in the same county, a different group met a lighter version of him: “a little Man in black Clothes” who tipped his hat and asked, low voiced, “How do ye?” before he asked for anything at all. In Lancashire in 1634, Margaret Johnson’s own demon came to her better dressed than most men she knew, “apparelled in a suit of black tied with silk points.”
These are witch trial records, not the records of cunning folk practice, and that distinction should not be blurred. But the world was small, and cunning folk and their clients moved through the same landscape these trials describe. Very few cunning folk were ever prosecuted under the Witchcraft Acts; ordinary people drew a clear line between a witch’s familiar and a cunning person’s craft. The Man in Black stood on the far side of that line, the adversary the whole trade existed to counter, not a figure any of them would have claimed as their own.
He comes closest to their actual practice in the case against Anne Bodenham, a Salisbury woman who found stolen goods in a green glass and charged twelve pence for it, and who is named in the record itself as “the cunning woman.” When her accuser Anne Styles fell into her fits, a boy in the room, too frightened to leave, saw “a spirit in the likeness of a great black man, with no head,” come to claim her soul. Awaiting her own trial, Bodenham gave her account of such spirits to a friend who visited her, in her own words: there was no hurt in them, she said, only that “they would doe a man all good offices, attending upon him and guarding him from evil all his life long.” Two witnesses, describing the same kind of figure from opposite ends of the same case, and neither one uncertain about what they had seen.
Sources
John Davenport, The Witches of Huntingdon, Their Examinations and Confessions (London: W. Wilson for Richard Clutterbuck, 1646); Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus: or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (London, 1681); Edmond Bower, Doctor Lamb Revived, or, Witchcraft Condemn’d in Anne Bodenham(London: T. W. for Richard Best and John Place, 1653); Doctor Lambs Darling: or, Strange and Terrible News from Salisbury (London, 1653); Henry More, An Antidote Against Atheism, 2nd edn (London, 1655); Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005); James Sharpe, “In Search of the English Sabbat: Popular Conceptions of Witches’ Meetings in Early Modern England,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 2 (2013): 161–183; and Deborah Lea, “Witchcraft, Possession and Confessional Tension in Early Modern Lancashire” (PhD thesis, University of Liverpool, 2011).
Joker The Angel · Providence
She is the face Providence wore when it arrived in person: vivid enough, documented enough, that she stands here as the embodiment of the divine power the cunning folk claimed. Not the only form that power took. But the one that gave it a presence, a figure, a face.
Joan Willimot, a Leicestershire cunning woman examined in 1618, described a spirit that stood upon the ground in the shape of a woman, sent by a mysterious master to do her good. James Murrell, the last great cunning man of Essex, summoned good spirits and angels to fight the bad ones. These were not theological abstractions. They were presences: encountered, described, worked with.
But the Angel was the visible face of something much larger. Providence expressed itself in ways that had nothing to do with angelic visitation: in the words Christ, Trinity, Holy Ghost spoken over the sick. Bridget Bostock healed six hundred people a day with fasting spittle and prayer. She never mentioned an angel. She did not need to. Providence was already moving.
This was the register the cunning folk’s communities recognised, the framework that kept most of them from the gallows. Not because it was a performance, but because it was real. Providence was genuinely what most of them believed they were working with, most of the time.
There are powers at work beyond your control. Trust them. Allow Providence to guide what comes.
Sources
Joan Willimot’s examination, in The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (1619), full text at quod.lib.umich.edu. Arthur Morrison, “A Wizard of Yesterday,” The Strand Magazine, vol. 20, no. 118 (October 1900), pp.433-442. Jane Shaw, “Bostock, Bridget,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (Hambledon Continuum, 2003). Emma Wilby, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (Sussex Academic Press, 2005). Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971).