page_title: Cunning folk
section_title: Britain
hierarchical_section_title: Cunning folk / Britain
caption_attribution_description: English: A photograph of the cunning woman in her house, at the Museum of Witchcraft.
context_page_description: Cunning folk, also known as folk healers, are practitioners of folk medicine, folk magic, and divination within the context of various traditions of folklore in Christian Europe.
  Names given to folk healers or magicians in parts of Europe include:
  the French devins-guérisseurs and leveurs de sorts
  the Italian benandanti
  the Dutch toverdokters or duivelbanners
  the German Hexenmeister or Kräuterhexen
  the Irish bean feasa, banfháidh or fáidhbhean
  the Spanish curanderos
  the Portuguese curandeiros/as, benzedeiros/as or mulheres de virtude
  the Danish kloge folk
  the Swedish klok gumma or klok gubbe
  the Slavic vedmaki
  Some historians and folklorists have opted to apply the term "cunning folk" as an umbrella term for the entire range of the phenomenon.
context_section_description: The term "cunning man" or "cunning woman" was most widely used in southern England and the Midlands, as well as in Wales. Such people were also frequently known across England as "wizards", "wise men" or "wise women", or in southern England and Wales as "conjurers" or as "dyn(es) hysbys" (knowing man or woman) in the Welsh language. In Cornwall they were sometimes referred to as "pellars", which some etymologists suggest originated from the term "expellers", referring to the practice of expelling evil spirits. Folklorists often used the term "white witch", though this was infrequently used amongst the ordinary folk as the term "witch" had general connotations of evil.
  Certain Christian theologians and Church authorities believed that the cunning folk, being practitioners of magic, were in league with the Devil and as such were akin to the more overtly Satanic and malevolent witches. Partly because of this, laws were enacted across England, Scotland and Wales that often condemned cunning folk and their magical practices, but there was no widespread persecution of them akin to the Witch Hunt, largely because most common people firmly distinguished between the two: witches were seen as being harmful and cunning folk as useful.
  In England during the Early Mediaeval period, various forms of folk magic could be found amongst the Anglo-Saxons, who referred to such practitioners as wicca (male) or wicce (female), or at times also as dry, practitioners of drycraeft, the latter of which have been speculated as being anglicised terms for the Irish drai, a term referring to druids, who appeared as anti-Christian sorcerers in much Irish literature of the period.
  Some of the spells and charms that had been used in the Anglo-Saxon polytheist era continued to be used following Christianization. However, as historian Owen Davies noted, "although some such pre-Christian magic continued, to label it pagan is to misrepresent the people who used it and the context in which it was used."
  In England and Wales, cunning folk had operated throughout the latter part of the Mediaeval and into the Early Modern period. In the 15th and 16th centuries, there had been no attempt to illegalise the cunning craft, although private lawsuits had been brought against some of them by those clients who felt that they had been cheated out of their money. This changed with the first of the Witchcraft Acts, the Witchcraft Act of 1542, enacted under the reign of Henry VIII, which targeted both witches and cunning folk, and which prescribed the death penalty for such crimes as using invocations and conjurations to locate treasure or to cast a love spell. This law was repealed no later than 1547, under the reign of Henry's son Edward VI, something that the historian Owen Davies believed was due to those in power changing their opinion on the law: they believed that either the death penalty was too harsh for such crimes or that the practice of the cunning craft was a moral issue that was better for the Church to deal with in ecclesiastic courts rather than a problem that had to be sorted out by the state.
  For the following few decades, the magical practices of the cunning folk remained legal, despite opposition from certain religious authorities. It was a time of great religious upheaval in the country as Edward's successor, his sister Mary I, reimposed Roman Catholicism, before Anglicanism was once again restored under Elizabeth I. In 1563, after the return of power to the Anglican Church of England, a bill was passed by parliament designed to illegalise "Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts", again being aimed at both the alleged witches and the cunning folk. However, this law was not as harsh as its earlier predecessor, with the death penalty being reserved for those who were believed to have conjured an evil spirit or murdered someone through magical means, whilst those for whom the use of magic was a first offence faced a year's imprisonment and four stints in the pillory. Nonetheless, this law would have little effect on the cunning folk, as "the attention
caption: A model of a 19th-century cunning woman in her house, at the Museum of Witchcraft, Boscastle in England
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