Cunning Folk and Witches

The common people of early modern Britain possessed a wide repertoire

of spells and rituals with which they could practise magical self-help, but
in those instances where more sophisticated magical knowledge was
needed, they turned to a magical practitioner. In contemporary sources
these practitioners were referred to under a wonderful variety of generic
names: wise man or woman, cunning man or woman, witch (white or
black) , wizard, sorcerer, conjurer, charmer, magician, wight, nigromancer,
necromancer, seer, blesser, dreamer, cantel, soothsayer,
fortune-teller, girdle-measurer, enchanter, incantantrix and so on. These
generic names, like those used to define categories of spirit, overlapped
considerably and were often interchangeable. At any given time, the term
used to define a magical practitioner would have depended upon the type
of magic they practised, where they lived, whether they were liked or
disliked and whether the person defining them was illiterate or literate,
rural or urban, Puritan or Catholic and so on. The same practitioner, for
example, could be referred to as a 'wise man' by one person, a 'witch' by
another and a 'conjurer' by yet another. These complexities make it difficult
for a historian to settle on a working terminology. Many of these
generic names have survived until the present day. ' Sorcerer' , 'wizard',
'magician' and 'witch' , for example, are energetic and numinous terms,
but they have been so distorted and embellished by the twentieth-century
imagination that, with the exception of the latter, they are now seldom
employed by academic historians. Given such difficulties, we shall follow
contemporary scholars in the field and employ the following terms. Any
individual who practised magic in a professional capacity, whether for
good or ill, will come under the umbrella term of 'magical practitioner' .
Those magical practitioners primarily associated with the practice of
maleficent magic will, in the absence of any viable alternative, be termed
'witches' . Those primarily associated with the use of beneficent magic will
be termed 'cunning folk' - a title which, although popular in the early
modern period, has not survived into the present day and therefore is not
overlaid with modern connotations. All these terms possess the benefit of
being non-gender specific, however when they are employed here in the
general singular, they will be used in the feminine. This choice does not
reflect any perceived gender bias in the terms per se, but mirrors the fact
that in the source material used, the majority of magical practitioners,
cunning folk and witches referred to are women.1
The term 'cunning folk' will be used here to denote popular as
opposed to learned magical practitioners, that is, the kind of individuals
that ordinary people would have turned to when they needed help. Such
a usage necessitates drawing a hypothetical line through early modern
culture, separating it into 'elite' (educated and moneyed) and 'popular'
(uneducated and poor) segments. In reality, such a division did not exist.
Society in this period was highly stratified, with many individuals inhabiting
the middle ground between the elite and popular demographic
poles, and these many levels of society were in constant interaction. As
As a
result of this, a significant minority of cunning folk - who were to all
intents and purposes 'popular' magical practitioners - would have possessed
some degree of literacy and, as historian Owen Davies has
recently shown, have prized magical manuals and written charms as
magical aids and status symbols.2 Consequently, while our discussion
focuses on popular magical practitioners, most of whom were by definition
illiterate, it will inevitably embrace a proportion of literate or
semi-literate cunning folk who enhanced their magical practice by drawing
from learned magical traditions.

The Cun ning Folk
The cunning man or woman, in the guise of sorcerer, wizard or magician,
is a prominent and numinous figure in the twenty-first-century imaginal
landscape - being frequently represented in film, television, visual art and
literature. Until relatively recently, however, the historical reality of these
magical practitioners and the popular magical traditions they worked
within, have been largely overlooked by modern historians. The cunning
folk of early modern England were first brought to the general attention
of scholars over thirty years ago with the publication of Alan Macfarlane's
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England and Keith Thomas's Religion and
the Decline of Magic in 1 970 and 1 971 respectively.