When we talk about the history of folk magic, we tend to talk about women.
Understandably so. The witch trials targeted women disproportionately. The cunning woman, the wise woman, the herb wife; these are the figures who have been most thoroughly examined by historians and most thoroughly romanticised by modern witchcraft culture. The image of the solitary woman at the edge of the village, keeper of knowledge and power that the mainstream could not accommodate, has become one of the central mythologies of contemporary practice.
But she was not alone at the edge of the village. More often than not, there was a man there too.
The cunning man (sometimes called the wise man, the charmer, the conjuror, the white witch, the pellucid) is the less examined but equally well-documented other side of the British and Irish folk magic tradition. He served the same communities, performed the same services, drew on the same body of accumulated folk knowledge, and occupied the same complicated social position: feared and needed, respected and suspected, operating in the space between the ordinary world and whatever lay beyond it.
Understanding him properly does several things at once. It corrects a historical imbalance that has allowed folk magic to be coded as exclusively feminine when the evidence does not support that. It complicates, productively, the relationship between gender and magical practice in ways that are relevant to anyone building a practice today. And it introduces some of the most remarkable and well-documented individual practitioners in the entire tradition.
Who the cunning men were
The historical record for cunning men in Britain is, if anything, more extensive than for cunning women; partly because men were more likely to be literate, and literate practitioners left more written records, and partly because male cunning folk were somewhat less likely to be prosecuted under the witchcraft statutes that targeted women so disproportionately.
Owen Davies, whose work Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History remains the most comprehensive survey of the tradition, estimates that cunning folk (male and female) were active in virtually every community in England from the medieval period through to the early twentieth century. They were not rare. They were not exotic. They were as ordinary a feature of community life as the blacksmith or the midwife, offering a specific set of services that no other institution provided.
Those services were consistent across the tradition and across the centuries. Healing illness in people and animals. Identifying and countering witchcraft or ill-wishing. Locating stolen goods and identifying thieves. Providing charms for protection, luck, and love. Divination (using a variety of methods including the magic mirror, the sieve and shears, and the reading of omens) to answer questions about the future or about hidden things.
The cunning man differed from the village wiseman or the local herbalist in one crucial respect: he claimed, and was understood by his community to possess, a specific relationship with supernatural forces. Not a religious relationship, though many cunning men used Christian prayer and invocation as part of their practice, but a working relationship, the kind that gave him access to information and power beyond ordinary human means.
The tools of the trade
What distinguished the cunning man’s practice, and what makes the documentary record so interesting, is the specificity and the variety of the tools he used.
The magic mirror or black mirror (a darkened reflective surface used for scrying) appears repeatedly in accounts of male cunning folk. John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court astrologer and one of the most famous magical practitioners of the Elizabethan period, used a black obsidian mirror now held in the British Museum. He is not, strictly speaking, a cunning man in the folk tradition sense (his was a learned, ceremonial magic rather than a folk practice) but the tool connects him to the same tradition of reflective scrying that appears in village practice across centuries.
The cunning man’s bottle (distinct from Biddy Early’s blue bottle, though serving a related function) appears in archaeological finds across Britain. These are sealed glass or ceramic vessels containing hair, nail clippings, pins, and sometimes urine, buried beneath the threshold or the hearth as protective charms against witchcraft. Some cunning men made and sold these. Others used them diagnostically, examining a bewitched person’s urine in such a bottle to identify the witch responsible.
Books appear frequently in accounts of male cunning folk in a way they do not for women; again, a function of literacy. The grimoire tradition, the books of magical knowledge that circulated in manuscript form through the early modern period, fed into folk practice through cunning men who could read them and adapt their contents for local use. The Key of Solomon, various versions of the Book of Secrets, texts on astrology and planetary magic; these circulated at the edges of the learned tradition and were absorbed into folk practice by men who stood with one foot in the village and one foot in the wider world of written knowledge.
Three remarkable individuals
The folk magic tradition produced individuals of such remarkable documented practice that they deserve to be named, in the same way that Biddy Early deserves to be named.
John Harries of Cwrt-y-Cadno (1785–1839) was a Welsh cunning man whose practice in Carmarthenshire was so extensive and so well-documented that he is sometimes called the most famous cunning man in Welsh history. He and his son Henry kept detailed notebooks of their cases (astrological charts, diagnostic records, lists of charms) that survive and have been studied by historians. He diagnosed bewitchment, identified witches, cast horoscopes, and treated illnesses using a combination of herbal medicine, astrology, and ritual. His practice drew clients from across Wales and beyond.
James Murrell of Hadleigh (c.1780–1860) was an Essex cunning man known as the Master of Hadleigh, renowned across the county for his ability to identify witches and lift curses. He was said to possess a magic mirror in which he could see the face of any witch troubling his clients, and a pair of iron tongs with which he could cause a distant witch physical distress; a form of sympathetic magic that was understood to operate across any distance. The accounts of Murrell are the kind that make even the sceptical reader pause: too specific, too numerous, and coming from too many independent sources to dismiss as simple embellishment. Cunning Murrell, as he became known, represents something important in the tradition: the cunning man as a figure of genuine local power, not marginal or apologetic about what he did, but operating openly and with considerable community respect. He charged for his services. He had a reputation to maintain. He was embedded in his community in a way that the romanticised image of the solitary magical outsider does not quite capture.
George Pickingill of Canewdon (1816–1909) is perhaps the most controversial figure in this tradition. A cunning man from another Essex village whose reputation was so fearsome that even other cunning folk were said to be wary of him. He was known for his ability to stop farm machinery at will, a useful power in a community where his services as a cunning man depended partly on his reputation for causing the kind of trouble he also offered to cure. Whether the stories are literally true is, as always with this tradition, less important than what they encode: the cunning man as a figure whose power was understood to be real, local, specific, and not entirely safe.
What this adds to practice
The cunning man tradition matters to modern practitioners for the same reason the wise woman tradition matters: it grounds what we are doing in a real, documented, human history that is considerably more complex and more interesting than the simplified version most of us inherited.
Folk magic was not a women’s tradition that men occasionally intruded upon. It was a shared human tradition, practised by men and women in roughly equal numbers according to the historical record, serving communities that needed what it offered regardless of the gender of the person offering it.
The gatekeeping of magical practice by gender (in either direction) has no basis in the tradition we are drawing from. The tradition itself was pragmatic, localised, and entirely indifferent to whether the person holding the mirror or burying the bottle was a man or a woman. What mattered was whether it worked.
That seems like the right standard to carry forward.
