Review: Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore

An illuminating account of the role magic played in everyday life in pre-modern England

Sometime in 1492 in Whitstable on the Kent coast a woman named Alice Breede went to visit a local soothsayer. She wanted assurance about the kind of life that her young child might expect, the kind of comfort any parent might seek, even today, never mind in an age of high infant mortality. What she learned, however, was no comfort at all. It could hardly have been worse, in fact. The soothsayer told Alice that her child would be hanged.

It's not hard to image Alice’s state of mind as she returned home. Still, what she did next is shocking. She decided to hang her child herself. She could ensure that the prophecy was fulfilled, she thought; and she could also ensure that the hanging wasn’t fatal. Alice’s neighbours, perhaps unsurprisingly, found her decision just as shocking as we do, and she was reported to the church courts which, until the Henrician Reformation, adjudicated on most issues relating to the supernatural. Alice’s punishment was to do public penance in the streets of Canterbury confessing what she had done. A small price to pay for saving a child’s life, she must have thought.

Cases like this run through the pages of Tabitha Stanmore’s new book Cunning Folk, which is perhaps best approached as a primer for the world of what the author calls service magic. It is structured as a series of ‘How to…’ chapters, each of which has a practical end: how to get rich, how to save lives, and so on. Within that framework Stanmore ranges freely across some four hundred years of English history, with occasional forays elsewhere, most notably into Russia. The same themes re-occur throughout, however: love, wealth, health, death. And you could reduce that further: people across the social spectrum were driven to magical solutions by the most primal of hopes and fears.

Some of these stories involve the high and mighty. Stanmore examines the painful and protracted death in 1595 of 35-year-old Ferdinando Stanley, earl of Derby and hypothetical claimant to the throne, for example, which was thought to be the result of sorcery, and the accusations of witchcraft made again Alice Perrers, the young mistress of Edward III, who amassed great wealth and power through her relationship with the elderly king. But most involve the lives of otherwise unknown people, who surface briefly on the legal record and then disappear into oblivion. In 1515, a Lancashire widow named Elizabeth Robynson undertook a ‘black fast’ – which involved starving oneself to inflict the suffering of starvation on another – as revenge against one Edmund Parker. In the 1590s, William Divers, a Canterbury man, wanted to marry Elizabeth, daughter of Agnes Williams. The negotiations were handled by two intermediaries. When Elizabeth proved reluctant, one of those intermediaries, William Walsall, a church clerk, took to threats: “I will… so deale with you that your mynd will never be quiet in the day tyme and in the night you shal be trubled and vexed with straunge sights and noises”. He would conjure up a demon, in other words. Often, we don’t even know how these court cases were eventually resolved.

What strikes you most how homespun much of this is. Everyday items could made numinous through rite and incantation: practices such as ‘turning the loaf’, in which bread, with knives inserted in the shape of cross, could be placed on a peg, spun like a spinning top and made to answer ‘yes or no’ questions; or the ‘sieve and shears’, which worked on a similar basis. Women tried to inspire love in their husbands by feeding them menstrual blood or a fish that had died in their vagina; a husband could be made kind by washing his shirts in holy water. Healing bread could be written on communion wafers; a sprig of mistletoe could you protect you from losing in court.

This is all in keeping with Stanmore’s principal aim, which is to normalise the practice of magic, to make us understand why recourse to it seemed both natural and unremarkable in the medieval and early-modern world. To that end, Stanmore writes perceptively about the overlap between magical practice and conventional Christianity – particularly prior to the Reformation. Many spells involved the repetition of prayers or quotations from scripture; cunning folk often called on Christ or the saints to effect their work in ways that were analogous with the intercessionary prayers of the church. At shrines pilgrims often hung up wax body parts indicating the nature of their ailments in hope of healing; sacred girdles – such as that of the Virgin Mary at Westminster Abbey – were routinely offered to help women face the terrors and perils of childbirth.

The downside to Stanmore’s emphasis on the practical uses of magic, and the resultant blurring of chronologies and cultures, is that we learn less about the belief systems and intellectual theories underpinning the various strands of magical thought than we might. To the end user, perhaps, it made little difference whether you employed an alchemist to turn base metal into gold or cunning man to persuade the fairies and ghosts protecting grave barrows to give up their treasure. The point was to get rich quick. But those processes are worlds apart in both theory and practice.

Likewise, Stanmore’s desire to normalise magic use, and her commendable empathy for those who employed it, leads her to find sympathy for those who were almost certainly charlatans. In 1380, Roger Clerk, a Wandsworth cunning man, conned an ironmonger named Roger atte Hache out of two days wages for a charm to heal his sick wife Johanna. Taken to court, Clerk actually admitted that his cure was fake. Stanmore nevertheless wonders if he was simply intimidated into the confession; but part of Clerk’s charm was a scroll of parchment which, he said, had a prayer to Christ written on it; when it was unrolled in court, the parchment was blank. Surely if we are to appreciate the world of cunning folk on its own terms, we surely have to sift out the faithful from the frauds.

Caveats notwithstanding, however, this is a fascinating book, commendably clear in its exposition and illuminating about the quotidian importance of cunning folk in the period. Stanmore is strongest where she explores the psychological needs for security the magic arts assuaged in a period in which lives were immeasurably more vulnerable and precarious than our own.

This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in the August 2024 issue of Literary Review.