British Cunning Folk

To find what was stolen, to heal and protect, to identify and undo bewitchment, and to give ordinary people a means of redress they could not get at law

The cunning man or woman was the village practitioner of England and lowland Scotland: an astrologer, a finder of stolen goods, a healer with herbs and charms, a seller of protective papers, and sometimes a figure who would name a witch for a fee. The tradition drew on late medieval Catholic ritual, on the astrological and Solomonic print culture of the seventeenth century, and on a deep oral charm lore, and it survived the Reformation by keeping the Catholic forms in fragments. Its last well-documented generation worked into the early twentieth century, and a few practitioners were still being consulted between the wars.

Cunning work was mostly client service: diagnosis by astrology or by the sieve and shears, the recovery of stolen property, the writing of protective papers and amulets, the cure of bewitched people and animals, and counter-witchcraft against a named enemy. It used the psalms, the Bible, Latin fragments, herbs gathered at set times, and the practitioner's own 'book' - a personal manuscript of charms that was the working capital of the trade.

The cunning folk were a service trade with an ambiguous legal standing: after 1736 the Witchcraft Act punished anyone who 'pretended' to conjure, so the same practitioner who was needed by the village could be prosecuted by the magistrate. Their ethics were the ethics of a small economy - a fee for a service, a reputation for results, and a real line against work that would be read as malefic - and the twentieth century's romanticisation of them as pagan priests has obscured that.