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.

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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.