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.