by Lorraine Boissoneault

Have you lost anything recently? Maybe something important but small, like your house keys or your phone or, in my case, my sunglasses. Or maybe one of your possessions wasn’t lost, but stolen, and you’re determined to get it back. Or maybe your stomach has been upset for weeks and doctors can’t explain it. If you lived in Britain in the Middle Ages, you’d probably turn to cunning folk. These Middle Ages-magic practitioners are the subject of the new book Cunning Folk, by historian Tabitha Stanmore. This little-known corner of magic comes packed full of wild stories. From a man who was caught with a human head for use in a ritual to tell the future (his only punishment required swearing on the Gospels that he’d never do it again), to a recipe for a love spell that involves kneading bread with one’s buttocks, this book has it all. After being thoroughly entertained by the anecdotes, I sat down with the author to talk about how she conducts her research, what she thinks of magic, and what to read next. 

I really enjoyed this book, it was so much fun. I’m very curious how you got interested in the subject? 

Firstly thank you, I’m really glad you enjoyed my book, that’s so lovely to hear. Originally I was interested in the gender aspect of witchcraft, why people suddenly got obsessed with prosecuting mostly women but also men sometimes. I thought I was going to do my PhD on male witches to see what the gender difference was and how society had squared the circle of being intensely misogynistic, but also made mental room sometimes for prosecuting another type of person. 

I started looking at that and then I realized there were all sorts of other practitioners who kept cropping up who didn’t fit into the witchcraft mold of somebody who harms their neighbors, sells their soul to the devil, that kind of thing. That made me realize there’s this whole other type of magic being used throughout England which isn’t really turning up in the standard prosecution court papers. And it was being used by men and women. I discovered there’s this whole world in which magic is being practiced and not prosecuted and is being used on a day-to-day basis. So now we’re here. 

The tension between what counts as witchcraft and what counts as service magic is so fascinating. How did they draw a distinction between what was lawful witchcraft and what wasn’t? 

It depends on the time period. Before 1542, magic of most kinds wasn’t illegal in England, so you could practice pretty much anything as long as you weren’t murdering people. That said there’s also some mental gymnastics going on in terms of things that aren’t technically ok, like using demons and talking to fairies and that kind of thing, which you could definitely argue was blasphemous, but if it’s not causing harm to anybody, it’s not really going to be a priority. 

It’s recognized that it’s not something that’s really socially acceptable, but it’s also filling a gap in people’s lives and helping them get through the day. Therefore it’s not really a priority. A lot of clients would defend the cunning person they’d consulted and say, yes I know what I did was illegal, but my child got better after they were sick, so maybe it’s not all bad. And courts would often recognize that as well and accept it as a fairly convincing argument for why you would go to a cunning person. 

It just feels so contrary to what I have learned and read about witch trials. It seemed like most of the accusations were made without clear proof, such as claiming you got sick because of a witch. It seems like the same accusations could be made against cunning folk, in reverse. They were supposed to do this spell and it didn’t work, so it caused me harm, you know? 

I know what you mean, and it is a strange one because there does seem to be a distinction in most people’s minds of a cunning person vs. a witch, that witches are the ones that do harm, and cunning people, even if their spells don’t work, are intending to do good. I think a lot of it does come from intention. Bear in mind that a lot of people weren’t traveling very much at this time and they would be living in their community the whole of their lives, so somebody would get a reputation as a good person who could do magic or as a bad person who could do magic, and I think that’s a lot of the reason you get accusations of malevolent witchcraft. That character reference would be very important for explaining whether somebody was a witch or not, and would help a lot of cunning folk avoid a witch accusation because they’ve got this good reputation in the community. 

Would the cunning folk have been so widespread so as to have a person in every little village? Would it have been like going to the drugstore, only, I’m going to see this person about some magic, I need to find my spoons. Or was it less widespread than that? 

Somewhere in between I think. Owen Davies, who has worked on cunning folk before, estimated there was a cunning person for every five villages. I think it’s probably a little bit more than that because the records we do have surviving from this period are to do with the courts and prosecutions, so you only get evidence for these kinds of things when something’s gone wrong. Probably a lot of the time it’s just flying under the radar. It’s a bit like how we don’t really mention drugstores or pharmacies in our records now, because why would we? They’re just so common. 

Similarly cunning folk are probably all over the place, or we’ve got one person in each village who had one particular spell they could use, so part-time cunning folk. They’re probably a lot more common than we can find evidence for. That said, the reason why I say maybe one in three villages instead of one in every one is because we do have records of clients traveling quite a long way sometimes to visit cunning folk, you know 10 or 20 miles. And that could be because this one particular cunning person has a very good reputation, or it might be that there’s nobody closer, or alternatively because what they have to ask is quite embarrassing or delicate so they want to go to somebody who’s quite far out. 

You mentioned the records that we have are mostly when it’s gone to courts because something went wrong. A lot of the references you make in the book have the case brought forward, but not the conclusion. I’m curious how frustrating that was as a scholar. Because as a reader, I wanted to know what happened!

Honestly it drives me mad. My editor had to cut out quite a few of my rants going, ‘I would like to say this happened but I actually don’t know.’ You’re absolutely right that we just don’t know in so many cases. There’s one case for a man called William Witcherley who gave the most extensive confession I’ve ever seen, it’s about three pages long, and he was being interrogated by the ecclesiastical courts (the church courts), who had no jurisdiction over things like torture. At the time he was being interrogated between witchcraft acts, so there wasn’t a particularly harsh punishment he would receive. So there’s no real pressure on him to confess as much as he does. He basically relates his 20 year career as a cunning person, all the fields he’s dug up looking for fairies guarding buried treasure, he talks about all the friends he has that he does book swaps with to find different spells. He’s clearly a very prolific man and we have no idea what happened to him. He never appears in the record again! I think if I could go back in time and meet one person it would be him just to ask why he said all these things and what happened next! So I feel you, it’s very frustrating! 

I think that would be one of the hardest things about doing the research. Where do you look for these stories? Is it literally in old court documents? What is your research process? 

Old court documents are a feature and they are literally written on parchment, they’re 400 years old. Sometimes I think about the number of people who touched them and how many of them might have had plague. Possibly quite a few. I know, disgusting, but it’s true. They’re handwritten, they are dirty, they are incredibly hard to read because handwriting from the 15th and 16th centuries is just terrible. It’s interesting, a lot of the accounts are often court documents but they’re not specifically about the practical magic being used. 

For example, if it’s about a theft case, a cunning person might be referenced in passing to say, this was stolen, I’m now prosecuting this person for stealing it and part of my evidence is that I consulted a cunning man, for example. It’s often not the cunning person who’s being prosecuted, or the client, which makes it interesting to research because there are so many different offhand references that could involve magic that you have to troll through. 

Another thing is, god bless the Victorians, a lot of Victorian antiquarians went through archives and transcribed anything they found interesting. So there’s quite a few sort of transcriptions of court records and diaries and church administrative documents which blessedly have been typed up. Because it’s such an incidental thing and people used cunning magic so casually, you can sometimes find it in recipe books, you can sometimes find it in diaries. Spellbooks also survive from the period, sometimes you can just find one of those in the archives, have a dig through, see who it was owned by, which is delightful. There’s a really really big range of things. 

Do you have any sense what the training would’ve been like for women vs. men who wanted to be service magicians? 

Education is very class based, especially in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods. The training  you received would depend on your class as much as your gender. Members of the laboring class—farmers, carpenters, that kind of thing—anybody from that class who’s practicing magic, whether male or female, would have similar access to the spells they’re using. It’s often little bits of Latin, the kind of thing you might pick up in church before the Reformation and the ending use of Latin. Bits of herb lore, maybe a particular spell that’s been passed down from generation to generation or something you’ve learnt from the other local cunning man that he’s passed on to you before passing away. 

If you go up to the clerical classes, that’s where you start getting more complex magic and much more training. That is much more masculine because it is priests and they have knowledge of how to access the divine and how to exorcize demons, which is a big deal. If you can exorcize a demon and send it away from you, you can reverse that spell and bring it to you and bend it to your will, in theory. Which is something the church got very upset about, because that’s beyond bad in terms of Christian practice. Didn’t stop priests doing it though. 

And then you do get formal education, university education where you’ve learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew, lots of different languages which were all seen as quite magical languages and would then be incorporated into the spells. And that’s something women obviously really didn’t have as much access to. Women get held back, I suppose, in terms of their magical education, unless they’re of a very high class. 

For example Queen Elizabeth I, she did have an excellent education, she spoke several languages and was very interested in mathematics. And if you understand maths you can understand astrology pretty easily. So she would’ve been one of the kinds of women who would’ve been able to access this much more highly ritualized, complex magic. We know that she did employ magicians and we’ve also got some records of the nobility or noble women using magic like that. But there is a big disparity in terms of gender and class in terms of what kind of magic you learned. 

It seems the use of service magic really crosses class boundaries. What are your thoughts on that? 

I think it’s really endearing, to be honest. It’s so human. I’ve started thinking of magic as possibly one of the most human aspects of our existence because it speaks to hopes and fears. There’s nobody in the world who’s ever thought, oh my life is perfect and I want nothing to change. When you’re very scared or very desperate, or just very discontented, it makes sense to want to change your life. People will turn to lots and lots of different methods to do it. I think that’s what makes magic the great leveler in many ways. You can be the most powerful person in the entire country but you’re still scared of things, you’ve still got things you want to do. Using magic becomes part of your arsenal, especially if you can employ a very powerful magician to do it. 

There’s the case of Eleanor Cobham, who was the wife of the Duke of Gloucester. She was the second wife of the duke and she was from a lower class background, lower than would normally be expected for a noble to be marrying. She married him relatively young and managed to make a place for herself in this world by being intelligent and beautiful and charming, but she didn’t have any children. As a woman trying to keep her position in a society which is trying to drag her down, that’s very very scary. She’s meant to be providing an heir and people are circling to take her place. So she decides to use conception magic. It’s just such a fundamentally human thing to do. I completely get where she’s coming from. And people much lower down the food chain to her were also using conception magic because it was incredibly important in their society and would affect their status and their future and their old age. So yeah, I have a lot of sympathy for people who used it. 

Do you have a favorite example from the book about magic being used? 

There’s a woman named Elizabeth who has a sick child. You can just imagine being a young mother with a young child and the sense of helplessness you must feel if they’ve got a fever and they’re not eating, and there’s no hospital to take them to, you’ve tried all the methods you’ve been taught by your mother or your neighbors, and there is nothing that you can do. And then this cunning woman gives her hope, and the child recovers. It’s such a lovely example of communities looking after each other, and also of the things that magic could apparently do. It’s not a very detailed record we have, but it does say that the cunning woman put her all into the healing spell and she got incredibly sick herself while she was doing it. She was doing the spell at distance, she was far away from the child who was ill, but she was still managing to suck all of that illness into herself and deal with it in her adult body, which could potentially survive this debilitating sickness better than the child could. 

I really liked the idea of sympathy magic where something that you experience in your body either affects another person or draws them out. Another example was the ‘black fast,’ where a woman decided, ‘I’m so pissed at you that I’m going to starve myself and you’re going to suffer, too.’

I agree. And the black fast is amazing. The way that you can try to assert control over your own life by doing something to yourself, but knowing it’s gonna hurt someone else, like you say. It’s sort of juicy and gross and awful, and also, Ooo, you go girl, you do this. 

Did doing this research change your perspective on magic, or did it confirm feelings that you’d already had? 

It massively changed it, because I didn’t realize how common it was. I was brought up with the trope of the burning times and the idea that witchcraft was relentlessly prosecuted and anyone that could heal was labeled a witch. I think it is an important distinction, it’s why my Twitter handle is “@magicnotwitches”. It’s really important to recognize that society in the past was really complex and there were different perspectives and people were good and kind to each other as much as they were brutal and harmful. I think sometimes we scapegoat the past to say we’re better than the people in the past and therefore we can be a little lazy when we’re talking about our own morality. But by recognizing that magic was used for good, people celebrated it, people used it to help each other, we have to remind ourselves that actually we need to live up to those expectations as well. We haven’t escaped our own irrationality and fears anymore than they had. 

This material, these anecdotes are out there, they’re in the records, so why is it that for so long we’ve heard about the witch trials and the burnings? 

I think partly it is that we’re all attracted to sensational stories. I guess also they’re a little easier to find in the archives. You don’t get many pamphlets published about cunning folk, but you do have plenty about witch trials and hangings and executions and things.  There’s also the fact that in the 1960s we had second wave feminism and that was timed with more women going to university and the birth of Women’s Studies in the arts and humanities, so that came with a real critical look at history and who has been left behind by it, who has been hurt by it, and that led people to be more interested in the witch trials as a flagship example of misogyny throughout history. It’s a very powerful image and some really good research was done back then and informs a lot of people’s research now. But that does mean that witchcraft was given a much bigger pedestal than it should have within the wider historical context. 

It’s still mind-blowing to me. 

Absolutely. I do also recognize that my argument is relatively controversial. 

Really? 

Well just because there is so much research into witchcraft and there is such a strong argument that’s been built up about how it was such a gender-defining moment in our history and almost prompting the Enlightenment. Because the burning times happened and shortly after that, courts went, this has gone a bit too far. Then we start trying to find a more rational way of living. I feel like my arguments are a bit of a bomb in the goldfish bowl for that kind of thing. Because I say, well it wasn’t actually that, witch trials were a big deal but it wasn’t as big a deal as maybe we’ve made out. 

Has your research ruffled any feathers? 

In a very academic way, just discussing things and going, ‘Well I think it’s a bit more complicated than that,’ and then an argument over sources, that sort of thing. Overall we’ve always reached a happy conclusion, so that’s good. 

As I was reading your book, it was making me think of a lot of other things I’ve read about magic, including the novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. If you could pair your book with another book that you wanted readers to experience together, what would you pick? 

I think it might actually be Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I adore that book. It’s obviously a fictional work, but it incorporates so much folklore and that combination of high- and low-brow magic and how they interact. Lots of characters in the book go, ‘Actually I don’t think we’ll touch practical magic, thank you very much, that’s not very British,’ but then when it comes to the war effort, all of a sudden Wellington says, ‘Oo, do you think we could employ this magician? That could be handy.’ And that very cynical approach to magic I think is very accurate. I just love the way that Susanna Clark made magic human. She’s one of my favorite writers ever. Broadly, historically I think she’s right. 

Tabitha Stanmore, PhD, is a specialist in medieval and early modern magic. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, UK, the first university to offer a master’s degree in occult history. She has been interviewed on BBC Radio and TV. Her monograph, Love Spells and Lost Treasure, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. Cunning Folk is her first book for general readers.

Lorraine Boissoneault is a Chicago-based writer who covers science, history, and human rights in her journalism, and explores more fantastical worlds in her fiction. Previously the staff history writer for Smithsonian Magazine, she now writes for a wide number of publications. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, PassBlue, Great Lakes Now, and many others. Her fiction has appeared in The Massachusetts Review and Catapult Magazine. Her first book, The Last Voyageurs, was a finalist for the Chicago Book of the Year Award. She is currently working on a book about chronic illness and climate change for Beacon Press, which won the Lukas Book-in-Progress Prize.