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Call Your Local Wizard
An entertaining history of everyday magic in the Middle Ages.
BY LAURA MILLER
MAY 27, 20245:45 AM
A magician surrounded by a magical book, spoon, bag with a skull, hand
with leaves, and candle.
Illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo/Slate

In 1637, a Londoner named Mabel Gray lost her spoons. After looking everywhere, she set off to consult a wizard. That wizard directed her to
a second, who sent her to a third, and she wound up taking a lengthy
trek around the city, paying for ferries across the Thames and tromping through livestock yards and sketchy neighborhoods. According to Tabitha StanmorerCowho opens her charming book Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic with this accountrCothe whole process would have cost
Mabel the equivalent of a skilled tradesmanrCOs pay for a week. And as
much as MabelrCOs quest sounds like the premise of a fairy tale, Stanmore insists that there was nothing especially unusual about it.

Cunning Folk is packed with anecdotes about rCLservice magiciansrCYrCopeople who offered a range of everyday magical help for a feerCoin late medieval
and early modern Europe (roughly the 14th to late 17th centuries). StanmorerCOs sources are court records from the time, which provide fascinating windows into what people fought about, and therefore what
they cared about, during the Middle Ages, even if the piquant little
stories they tell donrCOt always come with a satisfying ending. Did Mabel
get her spoons back? WerCOll never know.

The hot-pink book jacket has a broom made of dried flowers on it.
Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic
By Tabitha Stanmore. Bloomsbury.



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Stanmore takes pains to correct many misperceptions about the period. A rCLcunningrCY woman or man was a wise person specializing in rCLsimple spells.rCY These included charms designed to find lost or stolen items, predict the future, inspire love, win disputes, heal illnesses, make
money, and inflict revenge. All but the last of these were, she
maintains, considered legitimate and useful services, particularly
during the Middle Ages. It was only toward the end of the historical
period Cunning Folk covers that civil and church authorities began to
look askance at such practices, and even then they mostly turned a blind
eye to the cunning folk. rCLPeople tended,rCY Stanmore writes, rCLto put magical practitioners into two distinct categories: those who used magic
out of spite to harm others, and those who used it as a tool to
positively affect the world around them.rCY The former were witches, specifically people in league with a demon or the devil himself. But not everyone who used magic was considered a witch.

Perhaps you hold the currently popular notion that medieval witch hunts targeted wise old women who made herbal remedies for their ungrateful
peasant neighbors? Incorrect, according to Stanmore and most historians
of the period. In the first place, witch hunts were rare during the
Middle Ages. They proliferated in the early modern period, and while
Stanmore does not explore theories about what caused this in Cunning
Folk, historians increasingly view EuroperCOs witch hunts as a symptom of social upheaval and competing faiths following the Reformation. Witch
hunts occurred within all Christian denominations and served as a kind
of advertisement for a particular churchrCOs ability to secure both
salvation and protection from evil for its members. They were dramatic demonstrations of purity in a highly competitive ideological marketplace.

Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried
treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits.
Stanmore, however, isnrCOt interested in witch hunts, since they rarely affected the cunning folk she studied. rCLIn England,rCY she writes, rCLonly a handful of wise women and men were tried as witches: for every one that
was, there would have been hundreds who continued their practices unhindered.rCY As peculiar as some of the spells described in Cunning Folk seem, as Stanmore observes, the motivations behind them are not just relatable, but expressive of eternal human concerns. A spendthrift young
man hired a wizard to make him a ring that bound an angelic spirit to
help him win at cards. A woman threw a closed lock into one well and its
key into another well, intending to cause the man who jilted her to
become impotent with his new wife. Bizarre practices like feeding a man
with a fish that had been inserted in the cookrCOs vagina before she
prepared it, or with bread that the baker had kneaded with her buttocks,
were meant to make him fall in love with the woman who did so. rCLMagic in
all its forms,rCY Stanmore writes, rCLis ultimately the expression of a
desire to have power in a situation that may feel outside onerCOs
control.rCY And what predicament feels more uncontrolled than love?

Rather coyly, Stanmore refuses to weigh in on the efficacy of such
spells. rCLIt is not my place to say whether the magic practiced by
cunning folk was real,rCY she writes: rCLI donrCOt know, I wasnrCOt there.rCY She
does propose that all of their fellow citizens believed in the cunning folkrCOs powers. Many magicians had excellent reputations in the art of finding buried treasure or directing the outcome of lawsuits, and she maintains that this could only be the result of a consistent record of success.

But, at the risk of stating the obvious, the partakers of the cunning
folkrCOs services werenrCOt necessarily so rational. Stanmore describes a
1355 trial by combat over the rights to an old castle. Both sides hired champions to fight for their side. God, it was believed, would intervene
on behalf of the rightful owner. In the midst of the fight, one of the champions was revealed to have rCLprayers and spellsrCY sewn onto the lining of his coat, a serious violation of the laws governing such contests. No
one seems to have wondered why an omnipotent god capable of determining
the results of the combat could not also easily override the power of
such charms.

Other magical feats offered by cunning folk suggest a shrewd grasp of psychology. Clients often contracted wise men and women to help identify
a thief from among an assortment of suspects. In one spell, the magician enchanted pieces of cheese or bread, then ordered the suspects, one at a
time, to eat a piece, reciting something like rCLLord, if I be the thief,
may this morsel choke me.rCY The person suspected of being the culprit
would be placed last in line so that he would become more nervous and dry-mouthed as the trial progressed, and therefore more likely to find
it hard to swallow. In another test, the suspects would be placed in a
dark room with a sooty cooking pot, told to touch it, and assured that
God would miraculously keep the hands of the innocent clean. rCLIt seems
the expectation here,rCY Stanmore writes, rCLwas that all those who were confident of their own innocence would touch the pot and leave with
dirty hands. The one person whose hands were clean would be the guilty
party, as they had not dared to touch the pot in the first place.rCY
Cunning indeed.

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Regardless of the nature of the cunning folkrCOs powers, Stanmore
persuasively argues that their stories provide a window on the everyday
life of premodern Europeans that proves more intimate than other forms
of history. Take Mabel GrayrCOs spoons: How strangely comforting to learn
that even 800 years ago, spoons had a maddening propensity to go
missing. Today, werCOd just buy more, but, Stanmore explains, rCLin a time before mass production, even simple household utensils were
time-consuming to make and worth keeping for decades. If they were made
of metalrCoespecially silverrCothey might have been her most valuable items, perhaps even her sole heritable property.rCY It turns out that the spoons
of the Middle Ages are both familiar and precious.

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In one of the most outlandish stories in Cunning Folk, Stanmore recounts
the 1371 arrest of a man named John Crok on the streets of Southwark.
Crok was found carrying a severed head which he said herCOd obtained in Toledo, Spain. He plannedrCowith the help of a book of rCLexperimentsrCY also found on his personrCoto trap a rCLspiritrCY inside the head and compel the spirit to answer questions. The court found that Crok had not rCLdone any deceit or evil to the kingrCOs people with the aforesaid head,rCY and let
him go after he swore not to do it again. The head and the book were burned.

As bizarre as CrokrCOs scheme sounds, when Stanmore found herself standing
in line at a palm readerrCOs stall in Covent Garden, she recognized that
she and her fellow 21st-century Londoners were rCLwalking in the footsteps
of thousands, if not millions, of others who have sought answers from
cunning folk.rCY So do contemporary aficionados of astrology and casual readers of horoscopes. Crok might have intended to ask his enchanted
head about the nature of the universe, or he could simply have wanted to
use it to find out the identity of his future wife. rCLThe latter may
sound spurious for such formidable magic,rCY Stanmore writes, rCLbut most fortune-telling was, and is, concerned with everyday questions. The
mysteries of the world were of far less interest to most people than
what happened in their own lives.rCY However much things have changed
since 1371, this, at least, has remained the same.

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