In the parish records and court documents of early modern England there is a figure who appears with remarkable regularity: a person, usually living on the edge of a village or market town, who is consulted when the ordinary remedies fail. It might be that cattle are sickening without apparent cause. Or a child wastes despite every natural treatment. Maybe objects go missing and the thief cannot be identified. Or a youngster needs to know the answer to one of the eternal questions of youth, whether the person they are thinking about loves them back.
This person is the cunning man or cunning woman. Not the witch — or not necessarily. Not the herbalist, though they often know herbs. Not the priest, though they sometimes invoke religious formulae. Something older and harder to categorise than any of those
They were everywhere in England, for much longer than the history books usually acknowledge.
What they actually did
The term “cunning” in this context comes from the Old English cunnan, to know. A cunning man or woman was a person of knowledge. Specific, practical, applied knowledge that bridged the gap between the natural and the supernatural as those categories were understood at the time.
Their services, as documented in court records, pamphlets, and the records of church courts from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, fall into roughly four categories. The first and most common was counter-magic: identifying and neutralising witchcraft. If your cow had stopped giving milk or your child had fallen into a mysterious decline, the cunning folk could diagnose whether a curse or ill-wishing was responsible and, if so, take steps to reverse it. The second was finding lost or stolen property — using techniques ranging from the examination of a mirror or crystal to the construction of elaborate sieve-and-shears divination procedures. The third was healing, primarily through charms, verbal formulae, and material objects used in conjunction with herbal remedies. The fourth was love magic and related personal enquiries.
These were not just obscure superstitious practices.
This was a coherent system of specialist knowledge serving genuine community needs in a world where the distinction between natural and supernatural causation was not the philosophical absolute it later became. The cunning man’s client was not credulous or irrational. They had a problem. They wanted it solved. They went to the person most likely to solve it.
The social position
The cunning folk occupied a peculiar place in the communities they served, and the peculiarity is worth dwelling on. They were needed and they were also feared. Their knowledge was useful and it was also potentially dangerous. They were frequently consulted by the same communities that, on other occasions, accused them of witchcraft (a fact that tells us something important about the ambivalence with which this kind of expertise was regarded).
They were not typically poor, marginal, or isolated in the way that the witchcraft stereotype suggests. Keith Thomas, whose Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) remains the indispensable scholarly account of this world, found evidence for cunning folk operating as substantial members of their communities — owning property, paying taxes, sometimes holding minor civic offices. Their practice was, for much of the period, illegal under the witchcraft and vagrancy statutes, but prosecution was rare and usually the result of some other conflict.
The community protected them because it believed it needed them.
Women were well represented among the cunning folk. The wise woman — the older female practitioner with knowledge of herbs and charms and the ability to diagnose supernatural afflictions — is the most familiar figure in the popular imagination. But the cunning man was likely a more common reality than than a cunning woman, maybe by a ratio of 2 to 1.
The tradition’s extraordinary survival
What is striking about the historical record is how late the cunning folk tradition survived. Cunning men and women were consulting in English villages and market towns well into the nineteenth century, and traces of the practice have been documented into the twentieth. The Witchcraft Act of 1735 shifted the legal burden from persecuting actual witchcraft to persecuting fraudulent claims of supernatural power, which paradoxically made the legal situation of cunning folk more complicated without ending the practice. The Witchcraft Act was not repealed until 1951.
Emma Wilby, in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005), has argued that the tradition of the cunning practitioner was continuous with the shamanic or specialist magical traditions of much earlier periods, and that the familiar spirits attributed to cunning folk — the animals or entities that assisted in magical work — reflect a genuinely ancient stratum of practice rather than later literary invention. This view is contested, but the evidence for the long survival of operative folk magic in England is not.
The nineteenth century brought increasing pressure from a combination of scientific rationalism, evangelical religion, and urbanisation, and the cunning folk tradition gradually retreated. But it did not vanish entirely. It went underground, lost its social legitimacy, and eventually dispersed into the streams that became the twentieth century’s revival of interest in Wicca, folk magic, and what its practitioners call the Western esoteric tradition.
What this leaves in the culture
The cunning folk tradition left England with a particular kind of imaginative resource: the idea of a magical practitioner who is not primarily a figure of evil, not a literary witch or a pantomime wizard, but a community servant with specific skills and a professional relationship with the uncanny.
This is the figure who appears, variously transformed, in the “wise woman” of English fairy tale, in the hedge-witch of contemporary fiction or in the characters created by Alan Garner and Susan Cooper.
The figure is interesting because she is not the radiant priestess of Romantic Wicca, presiding over moonlit rituals. She is also not the crone of fairy tale, consumed by malice. She is a specialist. She has knowledge. She exists in a community that needs her and does not entirely trust her and would rather not think too carefully about what her knowledge implies about the nature of the world. She operated in a world with a different set of working assumptions about what caused things to happen.
England maintained that world, in practice, for a remarkably long time. Some of its assumptions have not entirely left.