The Real History of British Folk Magic: Who the Cunning Folk Actually Were

Somewhere under a threshold not far from you there is probably a stoneware jar packed with urine, bent pins and a knot of human hair, buried upside down by someone who was frightened and knew precisely what to do about it. They are still being dug up. So are the shoes in the walls and the dried cats in the chimneys. All of it is the residue of a trade that operated in British villages for four hundred years, served nearly everybody in them, and has been almost entirely misremembered since. What follows is the short account. The Lost Folk Magic of Britain is the full one, and you can download it using the link below.

There is a habit in modern witchcraft of reaching backwards for ancestors. It is an understandable habit and mostly a harmless one. We want lineage. We want to feel that what we do at a kitchen table on a Tuesday evening connects to something older than us, and so we go looking through the historical record for people who look a bit like us and we claim them. The cunning folk are claimed more often than almost anyone. They appear constantly in modern pagan writing as the village witches of old England, the keepers of the hidden tradition, the ones who kept the flame alive through the persecutions. It is a lovely story.

It is also, more or less, backwards. The cunning folk were not witches, did not consider themselves witches, and would have been appalled by the suggestion. They were the professionals you paid to protect you from witches. Their single most lucrative service was breaking curses. If you had asked a Cornish pellar or an Essex wise man in 1780 whether he was a witch, you would very likely have been shown the door, because you had just accused him of the thing his entire trade existed to oppose. And the moment you understand that, an enormous amount of British magical history stops making sense in the way you were told and starts making sense in a much stranger, much more human way.

Start with what they actually were, because the word is unfamiliar now and it was not a title anyone advertised. Cunning is an old word, related to the German kennen and the Scots ken, and it meant knowledge. To be cunning was to know things. The cunning folk were the people in a village who knew things, and the things they knew were practical. They went by dozens of local names across these islands and the names tell you how ordinary the role was. Wise men and wise women across most of England. Pellars in Cornwall, from the word repeller, because their business was repelling harm. Dyn hysbys in Wales, which means simply the knowing man. Conjurors. Charmers. Blessers. And occasionally, confusingly, white witches, a phrase that was used mainly by educated outsiders and clergy who wanted to lump the whole business together, rather than by practitioners about themselves.

What they did was service work. This is the crucial thing and it is the point most modern accounts miss. Cunning folk were not spiritual seekers pursuing personal transformation. They were tradespeople, and their trade was solving specific problems for paying customers. You went to a cunning man for the same reason you would go to a solicitor or a doctor or a locksmith, which is that something had gone wrong and you needed someone with specialist knowledge to fix it. The historian Tabitha Stanmore has called this service magic, which is exactly right, and her work along with Owen Davies’s is where anyone serious about this subject should start.

The problems they solved were remarkably consistent across four centuries. Finding lost and stolen property, which was probably the bread and butter of the trade, because in a world without police forces or insurance the disappearance of a silver spoon or a cow was a genuine catastrophe and there was nobody else to ask. Identifying thieves, usually by divination and often, one suspects, by knowing the village well enough to have a decent guess. Healing people and livestock, using herbs and charms and prayer, at a time when a physician was unaffordable and frequently no better. Love magic, which was in constant demand and always has been. Detecting whether a run of bad luck was natural misfortune or deliberate malice. And then, at the top of the tree, unbewitching, which meant identifying the witch responsible for an affliction and breaking what she had done.

That last service is the one that reorders everything. The cunning folk existed in a functional relationship with the belief in witchcraft. Where people believed that malicious magic could sour milk, sicken a child, lame a horse or ruin a marriage, somebody had to be able to undo it, and that somebody was the cunning man. He was the counter-force. His authority came precisely from the fact that witches were real and dangerous and he could handle them. Which means that far from being persecuted alongside witches, cunning folk had a professional interest in the witch-belief continuing, and in some documented cases their diagnoses helped point a village’s suspicion at a particular unpopular woman. That is not a comfortable thing to sit with. It is also true, and I would rather tell you than not.

Which brings us to the persecution myth, and this is the part that genuinely surprises people. The standard modern account has cunning folk hunted and burned along with everyone else, the wise woman dragged from her cottage, the old knowledge driven underground. The documentary record does not support it. Owen Davies’s research on English cunning folk found that only a small proportion were ever charged under the witchcraft statutes, and the reason is straightforward once you see it. Ordinary people drew a very firm line between helpful magic and harmful magic, and they placed the cunning man firmly on the helpful side. He was useful. He was known. The village magistrate probably used him. Church authorities disapproved, sometimes strenuously, and theologians argued that magic was magic whatever its purpose and that a man who broke curses was as much in league with the devil as the woman who cast them. But that was a clerical position, not a popular one, and prosecutions followed popular feeling far more often than they followed theology.

The cunning folk were also, almost without exception, Christian. Not nominally, not as cover, but actually. Their charms are stuffed with scripture. Psalms, particularly, and the names of the Trinity, and fragments of the Latin liturgy half-remembered and worn smooth by repetition. They worked from grimoires that mixed ceremonial magic with Christian invocation, and many of them owned and used a Bible as a working tool, sometimes for bibliomancy, sometimes as a physical object of protective power. A cunning man in 1750 would not have recognised the modern separation of witchcraft from Christianity as meaningful. He was a Christian who knew things, and the things he knew were the accumulated practical craft of his region.

The physical evidence for what they did is one of the great pleasures of British folk magic, because so much of it is still coming out of the ground and out of the walls. Witch bottles turn up constantly under thresholds and hearths, stoneware jars packed with urine and iron pins and bent nails and sometimes hair or cloth, buried inverted at the entrance to a house to trap and injure whatever meant it harm. Dried cats bricked into chimneys. Shoes concealed in walls, hundreds and hundreds of them, worn shoes belonging to particular people, placed where a house was thought vulnerable. Written charms folded small and sewn into clothing. Rowan crosses bound with red thread hung above a byre door. These are not the remains of an underground pagan religion. They are the everyday protective infrastructure of ordinary Christian households, and the cunning folk were the consultants who advised on them.

The trade lasted longer than most people assume, and it did not end with anything so dramatic as a persecution. It ended with literacy, the railway, the county police force, cheap newspapers, professional medicine and the Post Office. When a stolen cow could be reported to a constable and a sick child could be seen by a doctor whose fee was within reach, the cunning man’s market disappeared. There were still recognisable practitioners working in English and Welsh villages well into the twentieth century, but by then they were a curiosity rather than a service. It was the modern state, not the church and not the witch trials, that finally put them out of business.

There is one legal irony worth noting, and it connects directly to something we have written about before. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 did not make witchcraft a capital crime. It did the opposite. It declared that witchcraft did not exist, and made it an offence instead to pretend to magical powers. Which means that after 1735 the person legally at risk was not the accused witch but the cunning man, because he was the one publicly claiming to find lost goods and break curses for money. The law that ended the witch trials was the law that criminalised the cunning folk, and it stayed on the books until 1951. If you want the full story of that Act and what it did to divination in Britain, we have covered it separately.

So what does any of this offer a modern practitioner? Rather a lot, and none of it requires pretending the cunning folk were something they were not.

The first thing is a model of practical magic that is refreshingly free of self-improvement. Cunning craft was aimed outward, at concrete problems with concrete outcomes, and it was judged on whether it worked. There is real discipline in that, and if your practice has drifted into vague intention-setting, working like a cunning woman for a month is a corrective. Pick actual problems. Define what a result would look like. Write it down. This is the reason a grimoire matters and always has, and our journals at divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/grimoire-spell-book-journal are made for exactly this kind of running working record rather than for decoration.

The second is protection as a maintained system rather than a one-off. The cunning folk treated a house as something with weak points that required attention, and the weak points were always the same: the threshold, the hearth, the windows, the boundary. Iron, salt and stone did most of the work. Black tourmaline, jet, obsidian and smoky quartz are the modern equivalents and you will find raw pieces at divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/raw-crystal-stones. Put them where the old practice put its attention, which is the door rather than the altar. A charm bag carried on the person is the other half of the same system, and the sacred pouch sets at divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/sacred-esoteric-pouch-sets are the direct descendant of what a pellar would have sewn shut and told you never to open.

The third is divination as a working tool rather than a ritual. When a cunning man was asked to find a lost ring, he did not meditate on it. He used a method, got an answer, and gave it. Scrying was common, and a crystal ball from divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/crystal-balls-on-stand sits directly in that lineage, as does the sieve and shears and the swinging key on a string, which is essentially what a pendulum from divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/crystal-magic-pendulums is doing. Rune stones from divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/rune-stones-uk serve the same purpose if you prefer a cast. The discipline that makes any of these work is the cunning folk discipline: ask a closed question with a real answer, and accept the answer you get.

The fourth is herb work, which was the substance of the trade. Rowan for warding, mugwort for sight and dream, St John’s wort for protection, vervain for ritual, garlic and angelica for driving off harm. These are British plants with British uses and none of them are borrowed from anyone. Our herbal and incense range at divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/ancient-witch-spell-incense covers the smoke side of this, and if you want the cleansing practice done properly and locally, read our post on saining rather than reaching for white sage. Ritual waters at divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/ancient-witch-ritual-water cover the other half, because British folk practice used water at least as much as it used smoke, and a great deal more than modern practice remembers.

And the fifth is candle work, which needs least explanation. Fire and light at a threshold, at a specific time, for a specific named purpose. Our ritual and spell candles at divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/ritual-spell-candles are made for that job, and a cauldron from divine-warrior.co.uk/collections/ritual-bowls-cauldrons will hold the burning of a written charm, which is the oldest and simplest disposal method there is.

The cunning folk deserve better than being flattened into ancestors of a movement they would not have recognised. They were sharper than that, and stranger, and considerably more interesting. They were Christians who worked magic for money in a country that had made it illegal, they were the reason ordinary people survived misfortune with their sanity intact, and they left their fingerprints under half the doorsteps in England. That is a real inheritance, and it does not need improving.

If you want the whole of it — the regional traditions, the charms as they were actually written, the archaeology, the named practitioners and the trade as it really operated — it is the subject of our book, The Lost Folk Magic of Britain, which is where all of the above comes from and a great deal more besides.