Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History

Folklore, August, 2006 by Juliette Wood

Cunning Folk: Popular Magic in English History. By Owen Davies. London: Hambledon and London, 2002. 256 pp. Illus. 19.99 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 1-85285-297-6

This excellent study examines the liminal world of cunning folk in England. It follows a welcome trend begun by a number of studies in the 1970s, which examined the composite nature of the "witch" concept by moderating the notion of a witch rooted in demonological theology and its focus on demonic pact with elements drawn from a wider range of folk beliefs about weather magic, love charms, cures, and night-flying. As a result, the role of the magician in the community became clearer and certainly more complex, and the term "cunning folk" has become quite widely used in both popular and academic contexts as an accepted and all-embracing term for practitioners of popular magic in the pre-modern era. The focus has also shifted from the idea of a witch as a category to studies that are more likely to focus on specific individuals and the social network in which they operated.

In his study Davies uses both the term "cunning folk" and the concept of popular magic and in a quite specific way. "Cunning folk" are practitioners who could be described as magicians in the widest sense. Their activities included healing (both spiritual and medicinal), cursing, casting spells, and horoscopes. These activities involved some degree of literacy, and practitioners who specialised in, say, fortune telling, are not central to his concerns. Chapters four and five cover the subjects of written charms and printed sources in depth, and these too highlight figures with a degree of literacy. In line with this approach, the first two chapters consider the legal position of cunning folk and the attitudes towards them. The legal position of these people is made the more interesting since, although there were prosecutions, they continued to practise throughout periods of active persecution. The bulk of the study concerns the activities of specific individuals working at a local level, and the ways in which their magical activities affected their social groups is varied. Most of the examples demonstrate a body of active belief from the second half of the fourteenth century (the earliest period for which information on "cunning folk" is abundant) to the intellectual change in the perception of the reality of magic. There are many instances in which "cunning folk" were called on to neutralise the power of a witch, rituals that range from "scratching a witch," face-to fact confrontation and elaborate recipes for "witch-bottles." However, the encounter of John Collier with the Lancashire cunning man George Clegg in 1752 illustrates the somewhat patronising attitude typical of educated eighteenth-century middle class who regarded cunning folk as fraudsters and their clients as benighted. Collier played a potentially dangerous joke on Clegg, ridiculed him in print and refused to pay him for the "horoscope" he had commissioned.

This is essentially a historical study of cunning folk, but it throws into relief a number of folklore concerns. Davies points out (pp. 53-4) how the collection of popular beliefs and customs became a middle-class pastime during the nineteenth century and how this, and the rise of the popular press with its fondness for human interest stories and the "odd," provides evidence for the continuing function of the services that cunning folk provided, as well as evidence of changing attitudes to them. The final chapter deals briefly with cunning folk in the twentieth century. Indeed, one suspects that one could follow changing attitudes and continued reinterpretation of this kind of magic through to the contemporary academic concern with the social and cultural function of magical beliefs that provides the audiences for such works as Owen's own excellent study.

Juliette Wood, Cardiff University, Wales