WW BOOK CULT: Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore

A fascinating exploration of practical magic

Back in 2018, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford held a remarkable exhibition entitled Spellbound. Within its galleries were incredible artworks and objects from over 800 years of European magic. Alongside the beautiful manuscripts, talismans and obsidian mirrors, were more humble artefacts – scraps of charms designed to protect property and love locks once fastened to bridges.

We were reminded of these very human objects when reading the brilliant new book by Tabitha Stanmore, which explores the world of cunning folk in medieval and early modern Europe. It’s a fantastic read – full of intriguing characters and surprising details. We discuss the book with Tabitha below, and you can pick up a copy in our shop. If you do, be sure to let us know what you think of Cunning Folk in the comments.     

How did you become interested in the magical side of medieval and early modern life?

In some ways I think specialising in medieval and early modern magic was inevitable. I grew up in Wiltshire in the 1990s, surrounded by incredible historic monuments like Stonehenge, Avebury, Salisbury Cathedral and Littlecote House. All of these sites have a spiritual or magical history to them (depending who you ask), which fascinated me from a young age.

As I got older, I became interested in the nature of belief, particularly why people believe what they do. I read History at university, mostly focussing on medieval and early modern Christian sects, and from there it was a short jump to exploring the social function of supernatural phenomena more broadly. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on male witches, and planned to research the same topic at postgraduate level. When I started my PhD, though, I realised that there were a whole host of other magical practitioners running around medieval and early modern England, beyond witches. I fell down a rabbit hole of practical magic research, and Cunning Folk is the result.

How would you define cunning folk for someone new to the subject?

Cunning folk were (and in some cases still are) people who had a particular skill in magic, which they shared with others. They generally offered services like healing, magically finding lost or stolen goods, casting love spells, or making protection charms. Individual cunning men and women ranged from people who had a single spell that they learned from their mother, or someone who studied Divinity at university and re-purposed the religious rituals they learned towards more practical ends. Cunning folk could be young or old, female or male, rich or poor – the thing that united them was some kind of connection to the supernatural, which they used as a tool to change things in daily life.

In the book, you distinguish between those who were viewed as witches and those seen as cunning folk, while noting the broad spectrum of magical practitioners (which even included some priests). Why are these distinctions significant, and has the magic of the period become blurred in the popular imagination?

In the modern day, ‘witch’ has become a catch-all term. It can refer to someone who heals, or has a psychic ability, or practises black magic, or is simply an empowered person (most often a woman). In the late medieval and early modern periods, these people were generally seen as distinct: someone who practised beneficent magic was seen as a cunning man or woman, someone who used magic to cause harm was a witch. When we recognise this distinction, a different view of the past snaps into focus: one in which, though they believed they lived in a magical universe, people took a pragmatic view of the supernatural. They feared and prosecuted magic when they thought it was doing harm, but otherwise accepted and embraced it as a useful tool.

We can then start to see a spectrum of magical activity, as you say. At one end there were priests working with divine powers (sometimes using their knowledge for mundane purposes), and at the other end there were malevolent witches in the service of demons. In the middle, there was the jumble of morally grey practices and beliefs of cunning folk and their clients. I think that recognising this broad range of peoples and beliefs gives us a more balanced view of the past, which is less hysterical and superstitious than we might assume if we only focus on those prosecuted as malevolent witches.

Which example of practical magic in the sources left the greatest impression on you?

Probably the case of William Wycherly, a sixteenth-century cunning man who was questioned by the Church courts in London. The ecclesiastical authorities didn’t have the jurisdiction to apply torture or even dole out severe punishments (by early modern standards), which makes it all the more surprising that William gave a four-page long testimony about all his magical activities. He related how he summoned spirits to help him discover buried treasure, used mirrors to tell the future, and was generally so good at magic that he could barely step out his front door without a client running up and asking for his help. It’s an amazing case because it shows that someone in this time could make a career out of magic, be celebrated for such skills in their community (and he must have been good, given that his business would have relied solely on word-of-mouth recommendations), and not fear prosecution.

Do the values and ideas of the medieval and early modern folk you look at in the book have lessons for us today?

I think so! I finish Cunning Folk with some reflections on the ways some people use magic today, and it serves as a reminder that we’re not all that different to our ancestors. We still worry about our love lives, our health, and our finances. We still want the best for our children and feel anxious about the future. And when life gets really difficult, we still turn to magic. During the pandemic there was something like a 300% increase in demand for psychics, because people wanted to know whether they and their loved ones were going to be ok. Knowing this about ourselves – that we’re all anxious apes who sometimes need support and reassurance from forces bigger than us – should, I hope, make us into more compassionate and tolerant people.