An Entertaining New Book Will Tell You Something You Never Knew About Witchcraft
In 1637, a Londoner named Mabel Gray lost her spoons. After looking everywhere, she set off to consult a wizard. That wizard directed her to a second, who sent her to a third, and she wound up taking a lengthy trek around the city, paying for ferries across the Thames and tromping through livestock yards and sketchy neighborhoods. According to Tabitha Stanmore—who opens her charming book Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic with this account—the whole process would have cost Mabel the equivalent of a skilled tradesman’s pay for a week. And as much as Mabel’s quest sounds like the premise of a fairy tale, Stanmore insists that there was nothing especially unusual about it.
Cunning Folk is packed with anecdotes about “service magicians”—people who offered a range of everyday magical help for a fee—in late medieval and early modern Europe (roughly the 14th to late 17th centuries). Stanmore’s sources are court records from the time, which provide fascinating windows into what people fought about, and therefore what they cared about, during the Middle Ages, even if the piquant little stories they tell don’t always come with a satisfying ending. Did Mabel get her spoons back? We’ll never know.
Stanmore takes pains to correct many misperceptions about the period. A “cunning” woman or man was a wise person specializing in “simple spells.” These included charms designed to find lost or stolen items, predict the future, inspire love, win disputes, heal illnesses, make money, and inflict revenge. All but the last of these were, she maintains, considered legitimate and useful services, particularly during the Middle Ages. It was only toward the end of the historical period Cunning Folk covers that civil and church authorities began to look askance at such practices, and even then they mostly turned a blind eye to the cunning folk. “People tended,” Stanmore writes, “to put magical practitioners into two distinct categories: those who used magic out of spite to harm others, and those who used it as a tool to positively affect the world around them.” The former were witches, specifically people in league with a demon or the devil himself. But not everyone who used magic was considered a witch.
Perhaps you hold the currently popular notion that medieval witch hunts targeted wise old women who made herbal remedies for their ungrateful peasant neighbors? Incorrect, according to Stanmore and most historians of the period. In the first place, witch hunts were rare during the Middle Ages. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning Folk, historians increasingly view Europe’s witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. Witch hunts occurred within all Christian denominations and served as a kind of advertisement for a particular church’s ability to secure both salvation and protection from evil for its members. They were dramatic demonstrations of purity in a highly competitive ideological marketplace.
Stanmore, however, isn’t interested in witch hunts, since they rarely affected the cunning folk she studied. “In England,” she writes, “only a handful of wise women and men were tried as witches: for every one that was, there would have been hundreds who continued their practices unhindered.” As peculiar as some of the spells described in Cunning Folk seem, as Stanmore observes, the motivations behind them are not just relatable, but expressive of eternal human concerns. A spendthrift young man hired a wizard to make him a ring that bound an angelic spirit to help him win at cards. A woman threw a closed lock into one well and its key into another well, intending to cause the man who jilted her to become impotent with his new wife. Bizarre practices like feeding a man with a fish that had been inserted in the cook’s vagina before she prepared it, or with bread that the baker had kneaded with her buttocks, were meant to make him fall in love with the woman who did so. “Magic in all its forms,” Stanmore writes, “is ultimately the expression of a desire to have power in a situation that may feel outside one’s control.” And what predicament feels more uncontrolled than love?
Rather coyly, Stanmore refuses to weigh in on the efficacy of such spells. “It is not my place to say whether the magic practiced by cunning folk was real,” she writes: “I don’t know, I wasn’t there.” She does propose that all of their fellow citizens believed in the cunning folk’s powers. Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits, and she maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.
But, at the risk of stating the obvious, the partakers of the cunning folk’s services weren’t necessarily so rational. Stanmore describes a 1355 trial by combat over the rights to an old castle. Both sides hired champions to fight for their side. God, it was believed, would intervene on behalf of the rightful owner. In the midst of the fight, one of the champions was revealed to have “prayers and spells” sewn onto the lining of his coat, a serious violation of the laws governing such contests. No one seems to have wondered why an omnipotent god capable of determining the results of the combat could not also easily override the power of such charms.
Other magical feats offered by cunning folk suggest a shrewd grasp of psychology. Clients often contracted wise men and women to help identify a thief from among an assortment of suspects. In one spell, the magician enchanted pieces of cheese or bread, then ordered the suspects, one at a time, to eat a piece, reciting something like “Lord, if I be the thief, may this morsel choke me.” The person suspected of being the culprit would be placed last in line so that he would become more nervous and dry-mouthed as the trial progressed, and therefore more likely to find it hard to swallow. In another test, the suspects would be placed in a dark room with a sooty cooking pot, told to touch it, and assured that God would miraculously keep the hands of the innocent clean. “It seems the expectation here,” Stanmore writes, “was that all those who were confident of their own innocence would touch the pot and leave with dirty hands. The one person whose hands were clean would be the guilty party, as they had not dared to touch the pot in the first place.” Cunning indeed.
Regardless of the nature of the cunning folk’s powers, Stanmore persuasively argues that their stories provide a window on the everyday life of premodern Europeans that proves more intimate than other forms of history. Take Mabel Gray’s spoons: How strangely comforting to learn that even 800 years ago, spoons had a maddening propensity to go missing. Today, we’d just buy more, but, Stanmore explains, “in a time before mass production, even simple household utensils were time-consuming to make and worth keeping for decades. If they were made of metal—especially silver—they might have been her most valuable items, perhaps even her sole heritable property.” It turns out that the spoons of the Middle Ages are both familiar and precious.
In one of the most outlandish stories in Cunning Folk, Stanmore recounts the 1371 arrest of a man named John Crok on the streets of Southwark. Crok was found carrying a severed head which he said he’d obtained in Toledo, Spain. He planned—with the help of a book of “experiments” also found on his person—to trap a “spirit” inside the head and compel the spirit to answer questions. The court found that Crok had not “done any deceit or evil to the king’s people with the aforesaid head,” and let him go after he swore not to do it again. The head and the book were burned.
As bizarre as Crok’s scheme sounds, when Stanmore found herself standing in line at a palm reader’s stall in Covent Garden, she recognized that she and her fellow 21st-century Londoners were “walking in the footsteps of thousands, if not millions, of others who have sought answers from cunning folk.” So do contemporary aficionados of astrology and casual readers of horoscopes. Crok might have intended to ask his enchanted head about the nature of the universe, or he could simply have wanted to use it to find out the identity of his future wife. “The latter may sound spurious for such formidable magic,” Stanmore writes, “but most fortune-telling was, and is, concerned with everyday questions. The mysteries of the world were of far less interest to most people than what happened in their own lives.” However much things have changed since 1371, this, at least, has remained the same.
