What do you do when one of your possessions goes missing? Search behind the sofa cushions? Ask other members of the household where they put it? If you lived in Renaissance England, there’s a chance you would have consulted a local magician for advice, especially if the lost item was of value. In the absence of police to investigate theft or insurance to cover a loss, a wizard tracing the item seemed like a fair choice. Nor was it the entirely foolish idea it might seem now. In a time when belief in magic was widely held, making it known that a magician was on the case could prompt a guilty party to come forward.
In Tabitha Stanmore’s Cunning Folk, these figures played an important social and cultural role in Britain, from the medieval to early modern period. Consulting a local wizard to address life’s challenges was not only a rational decision, but one made by people up and down the social scale. Leaders regularly consulted astronomers and court magicians for guidance, while poor people would turn to cunning folk for healing and answers.
Stanmore recounts the tasks for which cunning folk were hired, from finding lost spoons and table linens to discovering spectacular plots of group assassination designed to vault the client up the royal line of succession. Her account is illuminating, giving us clues to the role that magic practitioners held. It is somewhat meandering, with digressions into royal politics and other non-magical shenanigans. Her survey covers hundreds of years, during which tolerance of magic waxed and waned.
Official attitudes to cunning folk meant there was a tension in which being a witch was illegal but being someone who used magic somewhat helpfully was not necessarily criminal. Stanmore explains that ‘both the Church and the worldly authorities could turn a blind eye when the spells were harmless’. But they didn’t always.
This leaves us with a partial view of the world of everyday magic. Many of the accounts we have are from court records – when cunning folk and their clients were tried for witchcraft, or when purported magicians were sued by disappointed clients for fraud. Given the legal grey areas, it goes without saying that people who were happy customers probably didn’t bring this to the attention of the authorities.
From today’s vantage point, the magic we think of in the past is often that of witches, as opposed to the ‘service magicians’ that most people would have encountered. Stanmore tries to redress the balance in our understanding of magic in our ancestors’ lives. ‘Our focus on witches and the sensationalism of witch trials makes us forget that there was a whole host of magical practitioners in the late medieval and early modern periods.’ And, as she points out, there was a lot of blurring between the types of mysticism tolerated or endorsed by the Church (holy objects, talismans), and that practised by lay magicians.
To a desperate client wanting to find a lost item or help a sick relation, the cunning folk at least could seem to be trying. To say the least, many of the techniques were laborious:
Apparently the favoured method of Katherine Thompson and Anne Nevelson, two healers from Northumberland, was to put the bill of a white duck to a patient’s mouth and recite charms until the disease was drawn out. Others would take a bewitched patient’s urine, mix it with flour, then feed the resultant ‘urine cake’ to a stray dog. The curse would thus pass out of the human and into the animal. If the spell was successful, then sadly the dog would die, but the patient would recover.
Bearing in mind that ‘proper doctors’ of the period were unlikely to offer much of real help, this again was probably no worse (except for the dog).
Interestingly, unlike medieval physicians, the cunning folk also tended to be specialists:
By and large, cunning folk restricted themselves to curing particular ailments, even specialising in a single condition. Some practitioners would only cure fevers or stomach worms; others would limit their help to children or animals. The reason for this is probably largely practical: if they knew only one incantation and it specifically referred to one kind of illness, it would make sense to focus on that affliction alone.
It also suggests there was enough business to simply be ‘the toothache wizard’ rather than a magic generalist.
In today’s rational world, many people still believe in astrology and dubious healing practices, or stick to ancestral superstitions. Our need for someone to tell us our fate or solve our problems has not changed (how-ever much we think it has). Cunning Folk shows us that our forebears were seeking answers through the tools they had.
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