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.