Cunning Folk

Before microscopes and stethoscopes, before hospitals and modern medicine, there were the cunning-folk, who practiced a kind of magic woven into the fabric of daily life: practical, personal, and deeply rooted in community belief. A missing object, a run of bad luck, or an unrequited love were their concerns. This episode brings you the story of the wise men and women who worked in whispers and who bridged belief and need: the cunning-folk of Britain.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:07 Intro
• 2:27 Fantastical and Devilish Persons
• 8:57 All Alike Guilty
• 13:59 Fortune-Tellers of This City
• 21:31 Conclusion
• 25:32 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
Before microscopes and stethoscopes, before hospitals and modern medicine claimed authority over body and mind, there were the cunning-folk. They were not the villains of grim folklore or the grand mages of royal courts, but everyday healers, charmers, and seekers of lost things. To those who turned to them, they were as vital as the blacksmith or the midwife: keepers of old knowledge who could ease both physical pain and spiritual distress when no clear explanation or remedy could be found. Their craft existed in the fragile space between faith and fear, between what was accepted and what was forbidden.

The cunning-folk practiced a kind of magic woven into the fabric of daily life: practical, personal, and deeply rooted in community belief. A missing object, a run of bad luck, or an unrequited love were their concerns. More common than the astrologer with his charts or the alchemist chasing transmutation, they offered comfort through whispered remedies, passed hand to hand, often accompanied by herbs, charms, and quiet ritual. Though the line between help and heresy was thin, authorities often turned a blind eye. Church and crown, while eager to hunt witches and stamp out evil, tended to tolerate these village wise people, considering them familiar fixtures of rural life rather than enemies.

In a world without modern certainties, the cunning-folk filled the gap. They offered hope where reason faltered, and meaning where none was apparent. Long overlooked by history, they were not rare curiosities, but the steady presence at the heart of a culture where magic and the everyday walked hand in hand.

In this episode, I bring you the story of these quiet practitioners, the wise men and women who worked in whispers, who bridged belief and need: the cunning-folk of Britain.

Fantastical and Devilish Persons
In medieval and early modern Britain, religious and legal authorities viewed the practices of cunning men and women with suspicion, often seeing them as misguided at best, and dangerous or diabolical at worst. This concern appears clearly in both law codes and religious treatises of the period. Some fourteenth-century legal inquests reveal anxieties about divination, especially when it led to accusations of actual crimes. In 1382, Robert Berewold appeared in court after using a popular method known as “turning the loaf” to identify a thief who had stolen a drinking bowl. This ritual involved inserting a wooden peg into the top of a loaf of bread and placing four knives in its sides. As Berewold recited the names of suspects, the loaf would supposedly turn when the guilty party was named. The loaf pointed to a woman named Johanna Wolsy, who in turn accused Berewold of slander. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to stand in the pillory with the loaf hung around his neck. That same year, in another case involving magical accusation, the diviner Henry Pot admitted “he had many time before practised divers like sorceries, both within the city and without, through which various persons had undeservedly suffered injury in their character.”

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, church courts were prosecuting both men and women who offered supernatural services. Love magic was a particular concern, and cases frequently involved claims of using magic to find love and arrange marriage. In 1446, Mariot de Beiton and Isabella Brome were accused of advertising their magical ability to find husbands for desperate women. Similarly, in 1492, Richard Laukiston was brought to trial in London for seeking a wealthy match for a widow through “a cunning man that by his cunning can cause a woman to have any man that she hath favour to.”

With the rise of the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, royal policy took a more aggressive stance against these practices, increasingly associating them with witchcraft. The first English Witchcraft Act, passed under Henry VIII in 1542, criminalized a range of magical acts, particularly those involving treasure hunting, theft detection, and image magic. The statute condemned:

…divers and sundry persons [who] unlawfully have devised and practised invocations and conjurations of spirits, pretending by such means to understand and get knowledge for their own gain in what place treasure of gold and silver should or might be found or had in the earth or other secret places, and also have used and employed witchcrafts, enchantments, and sorceries to the destruction of their neighbours’ persons and goods, and for execution of their said false devices and practices have made or caused to be made divers images and pictures of men, women, children, angels or devils, beasts or fowls, and also have made crowns, sceptres, swords, rings, glasses, and other things, and giving faith and credit to such fantastical practices have dug up and pulled down an infinite number of crosses within this Realm, and taken upon them to declare and tell where things lost or stolen should have become; which things cannot be used and exercised but to the great offence of God’s law, hurt and damage of the King’s subjects, and loss of the souls of such offenders, to the great dishonour of God, infamy, and disquiet of the Realm…

The 1542 statute, sweeping in scope and severe in tone, marked the first time witchcraft was treated as a secular felony in England. Any magical act, whether meant to help, harm, or profit, became a capital offense. The law made no distinction between harmful sorcery and harmless charms. Simply making a magical image or claiming to find treasure by supernatural means could result in execution. Under this law, magic was not just superstition but a threat to both divine and royal order.

Although the 1542 Act was repealed in 1547 under Edward VI, a new statute emerged two decades later under Elizabeth I. Unlike Henry’s blanket criminalization, the Witchcraft Act of 1562 introduced a more nuanced approach. It explained that “since the repeal… many fantastical and devilish persons have devised and practised invocations and conjurations of evil and wicked spirits, and have used and practised witchcrafts, enchantments, charms, and sorceries, to the destruction of the persons and goods of their neighbours and other subjects of this Realm, and for other lewd intents and purposes contrary to the laws of Almighty God, to the peril of their own souls, and to the great infamy and disquiet of this Realm.” While the new act still criminalized witchcraft, it reserved the death penalty only for cases in which someone had died as a result of magical practices. Lesser offenses, such as casting spells for luck or protection, were punishable by imprisonment rather than execution.

This shift reflected a broader change in official thinking. The emphasis moved from theological danger to social harm. Heresy and demonic influence gave way to concerns about fraud, injury, and public order. In place of absolute condemnation, the Elizabethan law sought to regulate behavior based on its consequences. In doing so, it signaled a growing desire to separate harmful superstition from tolerable belief, a distinction that would continue to shape the legal treatment of cunning-folk for centuries to come.

All Alike Guilty
According to historian Owen Davies, shifting legal attitudes in the late sixteenth century brought a brief period of relative leniency for cunning-folk. Courts increasingly focused on the dangers posed by harmful or malicious witchcraft, often turning a blind eye to the more benign services offered by local charmers and healers. However, this judicial tolerance was not shared by all authorities. Some voices, including that of Elizabeth’s successor, King James I, called for harsher measures. In his 1597 treatise Daemonologie, James presents a dialogue in which two characters debate the role of cunning-folk in the broader context of witchcraft. One asks, “what form of punishment think ye merits these magicians and Witches? For I see that ye account them to be all alike guilty?...” The reply is unequivocal: “They ought to be put to death according to the Law of God, the civil and imperial Law, and municipal law of all Christian nations.” This reflects James’s view that both witches and cunning-folk, regardless of intent, were guilty of the same spiritual crime.

James I’s views became law with the passage of the 1604 Witchcraft Act, which significantly expanded the scope and severity of earlier legislation. Where Elizabeth I’s 1562 statute had distinguished between harmful and harmless magic, reserving execution only for cases in which witchcraft resulted in death, James’s act collapsed that distinction. It criminalized a wider range of offenses, including merely consulting with spirits or entering into a pact with the Devil. This marked a critical shift: from punishing acts that caused demonstrable harm to punishing spiritual intent, from crimes against neighbors to treason against God.

Under this new legal framework, witchcraft became a theological offense. Making a pact with the Devil, even in secret, was now treated as a capital crime. The law no longer required proof of physical damage or victim testimony. Instead, spiritual allegiance alone became the grounds for prosecution. This blurred the line between belief and evidence, and gave legal authority the power to act on fear, rumor, and suspicion. Where Elizabeth’s law had sought tangible proof, James’s statute enabled prosecution based on invisible threats and unseen sins.

This ideological turn laid the foundation for a new kind of moral crusade. Witch-hunters such as Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General, found in the 1604 Act both legal sanction and religious justification. The state, once protector of public order, now positioned itself as guardian of the soul, watching for signs of spiritual betrayal in even the most ordinary villages. Witchcraft was no longer a peripheral concern. It was recast as a national crisis, a war not of armies but of conscience.

By the late seventeenth century, long after the height of England’s witch trials, magical practices still lingered, but the intensity of earlier persecutions had waned. Courts still occasionally prosecuted cunning-folk, but more often under secular charges such as fraud or vagrancy. In 1691, Elizabeth Powell was brought before a magistrate in Wiltshire, accused of “performing the unlawful art of fortune telling and of discovering of hidden treasure.” The charge echoed the language of the 1604 Witchcraft Act, which condemned spirit consultation and treasure-seeking as signs of a pact with the Devil. Yet Powell’s case did not result in a witchcraft trial. Instead, she was treated as a social nuisance—a poor woman with no visible means of support—and punished not with execution, but with hard labor.

By this time, accusations of magical crime no longer carried the weight of heresy but reflected shifting concerns about poverty, gender, and social order. The cunning-folk had not disappeared, but the terms of their prosecution had changed. Elizabeth Powell’s sentencing signaled a new cultural reality: belief in magic still existed, but the state was now more invested in policing disorder than in rooting out sorcery. The war on witchcraft was ending; in its place emerged a quieter, more bureaucratic form of control, one that judged not the soul, but status.

Fortune-Tellers of This City
By the time Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act of 1735, the era of the witch craze had long since ended. The last execution for witchcraft in England had occurred in 1585, and the final conviction came in 1712. Just five years later, in 1717, England saw its last formal indictment for the crime. The new law marked a decisive break with the past. It no longer concerned itself with demonic pacts, familiars, or whispered spells in darkened woods. Instead, it targeted those who claimed such powers even existed. In a quiet but radical shift, the 1735 Act did not punish witchcraft. It declared witchcraft impossible. The accused was no longer the witch, but the fraud. Those who professed to tell fortunes, summon spirits, or find hidden treasure were treated not as servants of Satan, but as con artists exploiting fear and credulity. This was the language of a new era: the Enlightenment, where justice became a tool for civic reform rather than divine punishment. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 closed a dark chapter of English history marked by fear, suspicion, and persecution. In its place emerged a legal order that ridiculed the Devil and distrusted anyone who still invoked his name.

Yet belief in supernatural influence did not disappear overnight. As a 1791 article in the Norfolk Chronicle demonstrates, the public was still eager to attribute misfortune to the workings of fortune-tellers and astrologers. Reporting on a woman accused of arson, the paper remarked:

We could not suppose in an age when miracles and witchcraft are equally exploded; at a time when we are boasting of our enlightened understandings and superior judgment compared with our fathers and grandfathers — one could scarcely suppose, I say, that the Roman augurs and soothsayers were outdone by the fortune-tellers of this city; yet it is true that the proficients in astrology, and the pupils of the learned Sibyl, abound within our walls. The happy effects of their practice may be anticipated by the conduct of Mary Adams alias Burgess, committed last week for setting fire to the barn, &c. of Mr. Burgess, of Bawburgh, whose nativity cast by one of these conjurors was found in the pocket of the unhappy wretch, promising that she should overcome her enemies if she had patience.

This case captures the ongoing tension between Enlightenment rationalism and the persistent cultural power of supernatural belief. While official discourse condemned fortune-telling as irrational or fraudulent, practices such as astrology and folk magic continued to thrive among the public. The press, even while adopting the tone of reason, often used stories like Mary Adams’s to warn against the dangers of such beliefs, turning them into moral lessons and calls for continued reform.

As Enlightenment ideals advanced, they brought with them new institutions and systems of knowledge. Cunning-folk, once central figures in health and guidance, were increasingly displaced by professional physicians. This shift reflected a broader cultural movement: Enlightenment thinkers emphasized observation, experimentation, and the scientific method over inherited knowledge and mystical tradition. Universities and medical schools standardized training, helping to elevate physicians and discredit traditional healers. Science, not spirituality, became the basis for public health and policy.

Still, not all physicians rejected folk knowledge outright. In his book, An Account of the Foxglove, and Some of Its Medical Uses, physician William Withering recalls, “In the year 1775, my opinion was asked concerning a family receipt for the cure of the dropsy. I was told that it had long been kept a secret by an old woman in Shropshire, who had sometimes made cures after the more regular practitioners had failed.” Rather than dismiss the folk remedy, Withering investigated it and identified digitalis—derived from the foxglove plant—as its active ingredient. His work illustrates how some Enlightenment-era doctors blended empirical research with folk practice, transforming traditional cures into recognized medicine. This fusion marked an important moment: a rare bridge between inherited wisdom and scientific validation.

By the end of the eighteenth century, official concerns about cunning-folk began to resemble those of the medieval past, albeit reframed in modern terms. In 1797, a case from the Norwich Assizes tells of a woman defamed through a cunning-woman’s divination. The report reads:

A Mrs Whiffen, of Hetherset, having lost seven cheeses, caused an enquiry to be made of a cunning woman to discover the thief. This cunning woman, by the aid of magic, or some other mode of detecting culprits, unknown even in Bow-Street, found out that the offending person had a mark on her nose. Now it happened, unfortunately, for Mrs Bailey that, under this description, her nose betrayed symptoms of her guilt; the defendant [Mrs Whiffen’s husband], at least, (who is a shoe-maker, at Hetherset) entertained no doubt on this point, and roundly taxed her with the robbery. He told her that “he knew very well by the subscription that was given of her that she was the woman who had stolen the cheese,” and said, that “the guilt was lodged on her, and she could not get it off.”

This case shows that despite dramatic changes in law and thought, older patterns of suspicion and scapegoating remained active in daily life. The same cultural instincts that once fueled witch trials—rumor, fear, the search for blame—still shaped interactions in villages and small communities. Cunning-folk continued to hold influence, not as agents of evil, but as figures who offered meaning and agency in uncertain times. Though the Enlightenment redefined truth through reason and science, it could not fully erase older ways of understanding misfortune.

Instead, these systems coexisted. Britain transitioned from a culture of persecution to one of professionalization and regulation, but the cunning-folk and fortune-tellers never fully disappeared. The cunning-woman was no longer tried as a witch, but she might be prosecuted for fraud, mocked in print, or quietly consulted in secret. In this new age, the legacy of witchcraft endured not in fire and fear, but in skepticism, satire, and the stubborn persistence of belief beneath the surface of reason.

Conclusion
In his 2018 essay, “Witches and Cunning Folk in British Literature, 1800–1940,” Ronald Hutton explores how witches and cunning folk were continually reimagined through the lenses of social justice, satire, and finally, subversion. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the evil witch reigned supreme in literature: a villain aligned with Satan, often grotesque or seductive, punished with fire, exile, or damnation. These depictions drew heavily from Gothic tropes and German Romantic influences, keeping alive witches’ sabbats, demon lovers, and fiery retributions largely absent from real English trial records. Yet alongside this demonic archetype, the witch as victim emerged: innocent women crushed under the weight of ignorance and persecution. Writers like Sir Walter Scott and Elizabeth Gaskell framed these women as tragic emblems of a dark, pre-Enlightenment past.

By the late 19th century, however, the image of the witch began to shift. No longer merely wicked or wronged, she became, especially in the hands of women writers, a figure of liberation. In novels like Lolly Willowes, witchcraft symbolized a woman’s break from social constraint, a kind of spiritual mutiny against patriarchal order. The sabbat became a pastoral retreat; the Devil, a gentleman offering escape rather than damnation.

Running parallel to these representations were the cunning folk, the practical magicians who served their communities with charms, cures, and folk wisdom. While often ridiculed or condemned by reformers and the educated elite as charlatans or agents of superstition, literary portrayals were more ambivalent. Figures like John Keats’ and Sir Walter Scott’s Meg Merrilies or the village magician in Rudyard Kipling’s 1910 short story “Rewards and Fairies” reveal a tension: cunning folk could be quacks or quiet revolutionaries, fools or folk heroes. Over time, as feminism and folkloric nostalgia gained ground, even these rural conjurers began to emerge with a kind of ragged dignity, especially when cast as literate, Christian, or female. By 1940, witches and cunning folk alike were no longer echoes of early modern panic; they had become mirrors held up to changing ideas of gender, class, knowledge, and power. Their legacy, Hutton suggests, is not in spells or curses, but in the enduring enchantment of the stories they inhabit.

In John Keats’ poem “Meg Merrilies,” he sketches the biography of a cunning-woman living a solitary life on the moors. The last two stanzas celebrate her both as a help to her community and as a kind of mythic figure:

And with her fingers old and brown
       She plaited Mats o’ Rushes,
And gave them to the Cottagers
       She met among the Bushes.

Old Meg was brave as Margaret Queen
       And tall as Amazon:
An old red blanket cloak she wore;
       A chip hat had she on.
God rest her aged bones somewhere—
       She died full long agone!

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more about the history of Britain’s cunning-folk, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes, especially Owen Davies’s Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.