Cunning folk and folk magic

Every English village had someone who found lost property and broke curses — and they were usually the ones identifying witches, not the ones being burned.

What it is

The practitioners of everyday magic in Britain and Europe from the medieval period into the twentieth century — professionals, working for payment, embedded in ordinary communities.

They were called cunning men and cunning women, wise women, conjurors, wizards, and in Cornwall pellars. "White witch" was sometimes used, generally by others.

Their trade was practical:

Finding lost or stolen goods, and identifying the thief — probably the commonest job
Healing, of people and livestock
Love magic, and predicting marriage
Detecting treasure
And above all unbewitching — breaking curses and countering the malefic magic of witches

Where it came from

They are attested throughout medieval and early modern Europe and are documented in England with particular richness because of court records, newspaper advertisements and the notes of nineteenth- century folklorists.

Comparable figures existed everywhere. Scandinavian kloka gummor and the Norwegian svartebok tradition of magical manuscripts. Iberian and Latin American curanderos. German Hexenmeister, whose tradition crossed to Pennsylvania and became braucherei or powwow, which is still practised.

And the benandanti of sixteenth-century Friuli — "the good walkers", who told the Inquisition that their spirits went out on certain nights to fight witches over the harvest. Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles (1966) reconstructed the case from the trial records, and it is one of the most remarkable documents in this whole field: an inquisition slowly, over decades, persuading a group of people that what they did was witchcraft, until they began confessing to it.

How it is practised

With written charms and paper amulets; herbs; astrological timing; mirrors and crystals for scrying; and grimoires — often owned, sometimes merely displayed, and frequently more useful as a prop than a manual. Literacy itself was part of the authority.

Folk magic beyond the specialists is well evidenced physically. Historic England and equivalent bodies have catalogued apotropaic marks — protective symbols scratched near doorways, hearths and windows in buildings across Britain, including compass-drawn daisy wheels and interlocking VV marks invoking the Virgin. Witch bottles containing urine, pins and hair have been recovered from under thresholds. Shoes were concealed in walls, and horse skulls set beneath floors.

Ordinary people were doing this in their own houses, in large numbers, for centuries.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the most important correction plainly: cunning folk were generally not the people executed as witches.

This is the central finding of Owen Davies's work, and it inverts the popular picture. Cunning folk were the remedy for witchcraft, not its practice. When a family believed itself bewitched, it went to the cunning man — who would identify the witch, often a neighbour already disliked, and supply a counter-charm.

Cunning folk therefore frequently generated accusations. They were consulted, respected, paid, and largely tolerated by authorities who prosecuted witches. There are cases of cunning folk being prosecuted, but they are not the bulk of the trials.

The modern "burning times" narrative, which imagines wise women and herbalists persecuted for their knowledge, conflates two different social roles. The witch trials article covers who was actually accused.

We can say the trade survived far longer than most people assume. Cunning folk were advertising in English newspapers into the nineteenth century and practising into the twentieth. What ended it was not persecution but literacy, mass-market medicine, insurance and the police — a decline in demand rather than a suppression.

We can say the law was odd. The Witchcraft Act 1735 did not prohibit witchcraft; it prohibited claiming magical powers, on the settled view that such powers do not exist, making cunning folk fraudsters rather than sorcerers. It remained in force until 1951, and was replaced by the Fraudulent Mediums Act, itself repealed in 2008.

We cannot say what the practitioners believed about their own work. The records show what they did and what they charged. Whether the pellar of a Cornish village thought he could really break a curse, or thought the belief was the remedy, is not recoverable — and may not have been a distinction he made.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading