The Pickingill Connection
In his discussion of the Lammas ritual in 1940, Philip Heselton suggested that the Mason family, who he believed were hereditary witches and members of the New Forest Coven, had ancestors who performed a similar magical ceremony at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. In his writings about the coven and its practices, Gerald Gardner always emphasized the antiquity of the modern witch cult and made references attempting to link it with older beliefs. For instance, he said that “in the old days sometimes when the High Priest was not present, a skull and crossbones was used to represent the god, death, and resurrection [or reincarnation]” (1954: 28–29). The witches also told Gardner that “in the old days, the ‘prettiest girl’ was selected and given the title of the Maiden.” He says she was made the acting High Priestess and was the hostess when distinguished visitors such as the Devil (Man in Black) turned up. Often the young woman who took this role was the daughter of the High Priestess of the coven and in time would inherit her title (Ibid., 136).
Gardner even suggested that the witch cult dated back to “a Stone Age cult of the matriarchal times” (Ibid., 48). He also devoted a whole chapter of his second book The Meaning of Witchcraft to this theory (1959: 40–50), and it is an idea that is still promoted by some present-day Wiccans. When Eleanor Bone met Dafo, she was told that the New Forest Coven could trace its history back to King William Rufus in the eleventh century. Gardner said that members of the coven had told him “They knew that their fathers and grandfathers belonged [to the Craft] and had spoken to them about meetings about the time of [the Battle of ] Waterloo [1815], when it was then an old cult, thought to exist from all time” (Ibid., 51).
During the 1970s, information surfaced into public view that appeared to support the claims by Gardner and Dafo that the New Forest Coven had an ancient history, or at least was connected with a Craft tradition that did. In 1971 the late John Score, founder of the Pagan Front and editor of The Wiccan newsletter (now the Pagan Federation and Pagan Dawn magazine) received a letter from correspondent E. W. “Bill” Liddell, living in Auckland, New Zealand. He said he had been born in Essex, England, and had emigrated in 1959 or 1960. Liddell added that as a young man he had been inducted into his family’s traditional form of witchcraft on May Eve, 1950. This Craft tradition had allegedly been founded by “Old George” Pickingill (1816–1909), who lived his last years in the remote Essex village of Canewdon.
From 1974 to 1977, The Wiccan published a series of articles based on the letters Liddell sent to John Score, using at first the by-line “a well-wisher,” and then the pen name of “Lugh,” the Irish god of light. These articles were later published in book form in the 1990s. They contained sensational and controversial claims about George Pickingill and his alleged influence on nineteenth-century occultism and the twentieth-century witchcraft revival. It was also claimed that Aleister Crowley, as a young man, had been inducted into a coven in Norfolk founded by Pickingill. The articles also said that the Rosicrucian writer and researcher Hargrave Jennings had compiled ritual material with the witch master that later formed the basis of the teaching papers of the Victorian magical group, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. A link was also established between the New Forest Coven that Gardner had been initiated into in 1939, and the Pickingill Craft (Liddell 1994: 1).
Bill Liddell claimed that his Craft Elders and other interested parties had told him to write the letters and send them to the editor of The Wiccan for publication. They were reacting to the negative publicity generated, first by Gerald Gardner, and then by the self-styled King of the Witches, Alex Sanders, as they believed it had brought the Craft into disrepute. Their primary aim was to disseminate information using a public platform to counter the false claims made by Gardner and Sanders, and show that modern Wicca had nothing to do with the older, more traditional forms of witchcraft. The secondary consideration was to “stress the baleful influence” of both Crowley and George Pickingill on the history of the modern Craft revival (Ibid., 16).
Liddell’s brethren were encouraged to draft articles that could not be traced back to them, and he was used as a suitable middleman to deliver these for publication. Several different Craft traditions contributed information for the articles, putting forward their individual points of view. Liddell’s Elders were alarmed by inner plane or spirit advice they had received telling them that Gardner had been the instrument to restore the Old Religion in modern times. Other hereditary witches from East Anglia wanted to counter the Wiccan heresy, and the Pickingill Crafters wanted to promote their radical concepts of Goddess worship and female leadership. Unlike the others, they were not anti-Wiccan and were convinced by their spirit contacts that Gardner’s version of neopagan witchcraft was the channel for the goddess worship that would be the predominant religion of the Aquarian Age.
Each of the writers who contributed material to the articles therefore had their own individual agendas and this led to some confusion in their content. None of the informants was willing to reveal their identities publicly, so they chose Bill Liddell as the front man. They forwarded the material to him that they wanted published, and he then drafted articles in his own handwriting from this information. Once compiled, the articles were then returned by Liddell to their respective authors in England for checking before being submitted for publication. From 1974 to 1977 these articles were published in The Wiccan (TW) and then from 1977 to 1988 in my own magazine The Cauldron (TC), until Liddell’s brethren apparently decided that the work had been completed. In 1988, Liddell also felt that his obligation to his Elders was over and since then he has continued contributing articles to TC under his own name and authorship.
When Bill Liddell began to write to me in 1977, he said his Elders had instructed him to offer future articles to The Cauldron because, despite the fact I had a Gardnerian initiation, the magazine was considered less pro-Gardnerian then The Wiccan. It was also regarded as more sympathetic to the traditional and hereditary Old Craft. The new articles submitted covered considerably more ground than the ones previously published. They described the differences between the old-style covens and modern Wicca, the supposed connections between Celtic druidism, medieval French witchcraft, and Freemasonry, and the alleged influence on the witch cult of the Cathar heresy, and Saracen beliefs and practices from North Africa and the Middle East.
These new articles offered a radical and alternative view of modern witchcraft that was very different from Wicca. It was therefore predictable that they would cause controversy and skepticism. The previous contributions by Liddell to TW had already been dismissed by critics because of their grandiose claims about George Pickingill’s alleged influence on the Golden Dawn. Unfortunately, at the time, these critics were unaware that Liddell was merely passing on information provided by other sources. He also failed to inform his readers that some of the more controversial elements and claims in the articles were in the nature of Craft legends passed down by his Elders and others. These may or may not have been based on historical facts.
During our lengthy correspondence, which has lasted off and on for over thirty years, Bill Liddell has always claimed that the information in the early articles in TW and TC came directly from his Elders and other Craft brethren, and that he has also had some doubts about its veracity. He has also been very open about his later contacts with and initiations into Gardnerian and Alexandrian Wicca, even though this has also caused further controversy. He has said that his common-law wife, whom he met in New Zealand after she emigrated from England in the 1960s, was present when Alex Sanders received his first-degree intiation into Gardnerian Wicca. As we shall see in a later chapter, this has been confirmed by an independent source who was also present.
The earliest published references to Old George Pickingill or Pickingale (there are several local variations on the surname) that I am aware of are the articles written by the amateur folklorist Eric Maple for the Folklore journal. The first was published in December 1960 and was called “The Witches of Canewdon.” It was followed up in autumn 1962 by “The Witches of Dengle,” in autumn 1965 by “Witchcraft and Magic in the Rochford Hundred,” and a chapter in Maple’s book The Dark World of the Witches, published in 1962. A more sensational account of Pickingill’s life was written by Charles Lefebure in his book Witness to Witchcraft, published in the United States in 1970, but probably written about 1967.
Eric Maple had first visited the Essex witch village of Canewdon in 1959 while staying in the area to recover from an illness. Having an interest in the local folklore he heard tales from the older villagers about the witches who lived there fifty or sixty years before. The earliest historical reference to witchcraft in Canewdon was in 1580 when the Grand Jury from the Lent Assizes in nearby Colchester charged Rose Pye, a spinster from the village who was described in court as “notoriously living as a witch.” She was accused of bewitching to death the twelve-month-old child of Johanne Snowe of Scaldhurst Farm, Canewdon. Pye pleaded not guilty and was formally acquitted of the charge. However, for some unknown reason, she was not released from prison and died there a few months later. In 1585, another Canewdon woman, Cicely Makin, was unable to find the necessary five people to testify on her behalf that she was innocent of a charge of practicing witchcraft. She was found guilty and sentenced to undergo a public penance in church, confess her sins, and promise to live a religious life. Unfortunately she refused to mend her wicked ways and five years later was excommunicated (Webster 2005: 169–170).
When Eric Maple investigated the folk traditions of Canewdon in the winter of 1959–1960 he found stories about the witches living in and around the village in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had survived among the local farming community. One tradition that had survived into the 1950s was that if ever the tower of the village church, St. Nicholas, fell down, then the last witch would die. As long as the tower stood there would always be at least six witches living in the village. One would be the minister’s wife, another the baker’s wife, and a third would be the butcher’s wife. Every time a stone fell from the church tower, a witch died and another took her place. The village children used to dance around the churchyard as a charm against being bewitched. It was also said that if you walked around the church seven times you would see one of the Canewdon witches. An alternate version said that if you did the same around a large tombstone in the graveyard, the Devil would appear.
Another popular local tradition was that there were “as many witches in silk as in cotton” living in the village. In 1959, a reporter from The Times newspaper interviewed Arthur Dawes, one of the oldest inhabitants of the village, about the witchcraft stories. He said that as a child his parents told him that the most prominent of the witches was the minister’s wife, as in the legend, and an aristocrat named Lady Lodwick. In fact, the two women were sisters whose family name was Kesterman, and one, Mary Ann, had married the local minister, the Reverend Atkinson. A story was told that the famous Essex cunning man or male witch, James Murrell, had asked the minister’s permission to put a spell on the Canewdon witches so they would be forced to go to the churchyard and be exposed in public. The Reverend Atkinson refused the offer because he knew his wife was a member of the local coven (Ibid., 172–173).
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the witches and their powers were regarded as a menace and a threat to the village. It was said there were between six and nine witches, and they had the power to “shimmer,” or shapeshift, into the form of mice and white rabbits. For that reason, many superstitious people avoided these animals. In Canewdon, rabbits were never kept as a food source, and one foolish man who tried to catch one was taken ill afterwards, because it was believed to be a witch in disguise. The witches were also feared because they could inflict plagues of lice on their enemies, bewitch the wheels off farm wagons and pony traps so they could not move, and paralyze people with the malefic glance of the Evil Eye.
Although the witches were solitary practitioners, they were believed to be subject to the power of a mysterious individual known as the “Master of Witches,” or witch master in the late nineteenth century. In Canewdon, this position was held by Old George Pickingill, whom Eric Maple described as “the last and perhaps greatest of the [Essex] wizards.” He was born in Hockley, Essex, in 1816, and in the latter years of his life lived and worked as a farm laborer in Canewdon. Pickingill was a widower with two sons. He lived in a cottage in the High Street and later in the lane near the Anchor Inn leading up to the church. Maple described him as a tall and unkempt man, with long fingernails and intense eyes. He was solitary and uncommunicative, and practiced openly as a wizard or cunning man. He could find lost or stolen property, cure warts and other ailments by “muttering charms and making mysterious passes,” and could talk to and control animals. The cunning man cured one woman of her rheumatism by transferring it to her father.
As with most of the witches and cunning folk of the past, there was a dark side to Pickingill’s magical arts. The villagers were fearful of his powers and if he wanted to draw water from the village pump the local boys would run to do it for him. People believed he could make someone ill merely by staring hard at them, and they would not recover until he decided to lift the spell. He also carried a blackthorn walking stick and used this as a “blasting rod.” If he touched a person with it they would be paralyzed and unable to move. They would only regain their senses and the movement of their limbs when the old wizard touched them again with his stick.
At harvest time, Pickingill wandered around the fields threatening to bewitch the farm machinery or the horses that drew the hay wagons. For this reason the local farmers bribed him with beer and food, and his landlord allowed him to live rent-free in his cottage. However, when he was in a good mood, the wizard could cut a whole field of corn in half an hour. He achieved this feat by using his imps or familiar spirits to do the job, while he sat in the hedgerow smoking his clay pipe. One of his alleged powers was that as the witch master he could summon and control all the local witches by blowing on a wooden whistle. This forced them to reveal themselves and Pickingill would then make them dance in the churchyard. This suggests he was regarded as the leader of the local coven.
Eric Maple says that, in his old age, visitors “came from great distances” to seek the advice of “the wise man of Canewdon,” as he was known. Brave souls who ventured out after dark and dared to peep through the grimy cobwebbed windows of his cottage saw the wizard dancing with his imps. It was like a scene from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia with the clock, ornaments, crockery, and furniture joining in the merry dance.
A woman who visited Pickingill shortly before his death saw him lying in on the bed “like a skeleton,” with his familiars in the shape of mice scurrying over the covers. When he died in April 1909, the old cunning man was buried in unconsecrated ground in the churchyard. As a last act of defiance, he told the villagers that he would even demonstrate his magical powers at his own funeral. Allegedly, when the horse-drawn hearse drew up to the church gate, the animals stepped out of their harnesses and trotted away down the lane.
The account given by Charles Lefebure in his 1970 book promotes a more sensational and satanic image of Pickingill. However, it is interesting, as it confirms the version of him as the Master of Witches in Bill Liddell’s articles. Lefebure said, perhaps significantly, that Pickingill still had the same status as Crowley and Gerald Gardner in occult circles. He described him as “the Devil incarnate,” who had discovered the famed Elixir of Life and eternal youth. Apparently the whole Pickingill family had been feared all over eastern England for generations as “a race apart” of witches, wizards, and warlocks, with a pedigree dating back to the days of Merlin.
According to Lefebure, the cunning man was popularly believed to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his remarkable magical powers, and he held nocturnal rites in the churchyard with his Romany kin. Pickingill terrified the locals with his supernatural powers and anyone who dared cross him fell ill immediately. His reputation spread far and wide and he became so infamous as a wizard that black magicians [sic] from all over Europe traveled to the remote Essex village to consult him and receive instruction in the Black Art.
Charles Lefebure was right to think that the Pickingills were well known all over eastern England. Sybil Webster, who lived in Canewdon in the 1960s and studied the local history, found numerous references to them in church registers and census records. The family was variously known as Pickingale, Pippingale, Pettingale, and Pitengale, as well as Pickingill, and this has led to some confusion. George Pickingill was baptized in Hockley on May 25, 1816, and in 1908 an article in the local Southend Standard and Essex Advertiser newspaper described him as the oldest man in the country, but this was incorrect. The reporter took Pickingill for a ride in the first car seen in the village, and a photograph of the event was published in the newspaper (Webster 2005: 178). Pickingill said he had never been to London on the train, but Sybil Webster told me that he was supposed to have traveled to Norfolk regularly in a pony and trap. This was probably to see his relatives in Castle Rising, a village that, like Canewdon, has a reputation for witchcraft (letter dated January 16, 2008).
The version of George Pickingill’s life and activities described in Bill Liddell’s articles contrasts with the folk traditions collected by Eric Maple. Liddell said that he was not an illiterate drunken old man, but came from an established line of hereditary witches who had been priests of the Horned God since Saxon times. The Craft that Pickingill allegedly practiced a unique amalgam of Danish paganism, Arabic mysticism, Christian heresy, and French Witchcraft. Danish Viking invaders had settled in East Anglia, and in fact Canewdon was founded by the Danish king Cnut, who also became the king of England. A later influx of French and Flemish weavers into this area in the Middle Ages allegedly introduced elements of French witchcraft and the heretical beliefs of the Cathars (Liddell 1994: 24).
Pickingill, it was said in the articles, was a radical reformer and modernizer within the Old Craft, and he introduced goddess worship, female-led covens, and working skyclad, or naked, in the circle. This horrified his peers as traditionally the “robed covens” of the traditional and hereditary Craft were led by a Magister or witch master who initiated both men and women. Liddell said that in his later years Pickingill, who was of Romany descent, was a horse dealer and in that profession he traveled around southern England. While doing this, he recruited women he believed had the witch blood. Under his guidance they formed nine autonomous covens in Hampshire, Sussex, Hertfordshire, Essex, and Norfolk.
In his articles, Liddell claimed that the Hampshire coven of the nine covens, founded by George Pickingill, was the same one as the group in the New Forest into which Gerald Gardner was initiated in 1939. It stopped convening during World War I, but several of its elderly members attempted to revive it in the 1920s. This revival met with limited success until several hereditary witches and solitary practitioners joined. During the 1930s there was an influx of middle-class intellectuals drawn from the ranks of the Crotona Fellowship.
The Hampshire coven had retained some of Pickingill’s reforms, including the ranks of High Priestess and her female deputy known as the Maiden taking precedence over the male leader, skyclad rituals, and more reverence given to the Goddess than the God. They had also been influenced by the theories put forward by Dr. Margaret Murray in her book The Witch Cult in Western Europe and kept some of the traditional aspects of the historical Craft. This included the use of the French name Janicot for the witch-god, a Black Book of the Devil’s Art, the use of material from medieval grimoires such as the Key of Solomon, sexual congress as part of the induction rite, the diablo stigmata or Devil’s mark, the taking of a new witch name by initiates, a dance and drop technique to raise power in the circle, and the use of a flying ointment (1994: 150–151 and May 2000).
Liddell further claimed that his initiation into the New Forest Coven was not the only contact that Gerald Gardner had with what he calls “the true persuasion.” He said his Elders told him that Gardner did not advance very far with his parent coven. However he did contact a hereditary group of witches in Hertfordshire in 1945 and they were also a surviving remnant of one of Pickingill’s Nine Covens. Gardner contacted this coven after being sponsored into a Co-Masonic lodge by Madeline Montalban, where he met one of its members. Liddell described this lodge as being similar to the Rosicrucian Theatre because it was being used as a recruiting ground for various occult groups. Gardner also advanced to the third grade of the Hereditary Craft in another surviving coven of the Nine in Norfolk and is supposed to have held the rank of Magister in the Pickingill Craft through induction into a coven in Essex (1994: 83, 103, 153, and 158).
Before he founded his coven at Brickett Wood in Hertfordshire in the late 1940s, several writers have claimed that Gardner was already associated with witchcraft activities in the area. Francis King referred to the existence of a pre-Gardnerian coven in St. Albans, near Brickett Wood, but stated he did not believe its origins went back before 1900. He speculated that it might have been founded after the publication of Dr. Margaret Murray’s book in 1921 (1971: 11–12). Robert Graves also associated Gardner with an earlier Hertfordshire coven in an essay on modern witchcraft published in an anthology in 1969.
Tony Steele has also claimed he made contact with the owners of narrow boats or barges that used to carry cargo on Britain’s canals and were so-called water witches practicing a form of traditional witchcraft. One of the most influential of these witch families, Steele claims, was founded in Hertfordshire in the 1880s by Edward “Grandad” King, nicknamed the “King of the Witches” by the canal people. He had inherited a form of witchcraft from his ancestors, who came from Lincolnshire and were of Dutch extraction.
Steele was told by his contacts that in 1945 Gerald Gardner was inducted into his family coven. Prior to this, no outsider ever joined, but after King’s death the family were free to act as they wanted and relaxed the rules. Allegedly, Gardner’s interest in folklore had led him to make contact with the narrow-boat people. The water witches were flattered by the attentions of an upper-middle-class and wealthy man like Gardner, and welcomed him into their ranks with open arms (1998: 10–12).
In 1941, Gardner had also been sponsored by a colleague in the New Forest Coven to join a so-called “cunning lodge.” This was a quasi-Masonic group that combined the practice of Freemasonry, ceremonial magic, paganism, and traditional witchcraft. The lodge emphasized the worship of the Horned God, was led by a male Magus (magician), and cast the circle using passages from the Key of Solomon (Ibid., 158–159). This type of cunning lodge had a membership made up of witch masters who were either wealthy farmers or landowners. Socially, they inhabited both the world of the landed gentry and the peasantry, who included rural cunning folk. Many of the lodge members were Freemasons or, like George Pickingill, belonged to quasi-Masonic groups such as the Order of Ancient Woodsman or the Society of the Horseman’s Word. They mixed freely with occultists and Rosicrucians, and also had links to neopagan magical groups attempting to revive the classical Mysteries of Eleusis and Hellfire Club-type organizations practicing devil worship and sexual rites (Ibid., 170).
Bill Liddell said that his Craft Elders told him that George Pickingill disbanded the Canewdon Coven several years prior to his death, probably about 1899, which is a significant date, as we shall see later. The coven was composed of seven female witches, with Pickingill as the male leader, or Devil. Liddell has claimed that it was the use of this archaic title for a witch master that led to the accusations by more conservative members of the Craft that the cunning man was a Satanist, and had sold his soul to the Devil (1994: 89).
The tradition passed down in the Pickingill Craft was that the coven had been formed in the fifteenth century by a local landowner after he returned from fighting in a war between France and England. He had been inducted into witchcraft while he was abroad. The church tower in Canewdon featured in the witch legends of the village because it dates from the fifteenth century and was built by the landowner to celebrate the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt. On the outside of the tower are carved the heraldic arms of France and England (Ibid.: 8 and 88).
Bill Liddell’s articles in The Wiccan and The Cauldron were initially greeted with a delight by Gardnerian Wiccans. They seemed to provide evidence of an authenticity and legitimacy for modern Wicca, linking it with a surviving tradition of historical witchcraft that did not previously exist. In letters to his correspondents, John Score quoted from the “Lugh” material as evidence that Gardnerian Wicca was descended from George Pickingill, and the New Forest group was one of his Nine Covens. In her book Witchcraft for Tomorrow, Doreen Valiente referred to “some new and curious information” originating from a correspondent to The Wiccan whom she describes as “my East Anglian source, [and] my informant,” although she never knew Bill Liddell. At the time, she was happy to accept the Lugh material at face value and asserted that George Pickingill had played an important part in the present-day revival of witchcraft (1978: 20).
However, by the time she had written The Rebirth of Witchcraft ten years later, Valiente had changed her mind about Pickingill’s significance and the authenticity of the material. She spent eight pages analyzing and criticizing the articles by Bill Liddell before concluding he was either a genuine holder of secrets or a dreamer providing his readers with disinformation. Likewise the Alexandrian initiate, Vivianne Crowley, mentions the articles in the first edition of her influential book Wicca: The Old Religion In a New Age, but this section is strangely missing from later editions.
Not all modern witches had a high opinion of George Pickingill. In a letter written to one of his Australian students, Simon Goodman, Alex Sanders said in reference to the wise man of Canewdon that he might well have moved farm machinery by his magical power. However, “[so what] to me that is not Wicca … the Wicca is the worship of the Great Mother and the Mighty One who grants her the power.” Sanders ends the letter by using a four-letter word referring to the female genitals to describe Goodman for believing in Pickingill (letter dated September 5, 1983, in the MOW archive).
In his book Crafting the Art of Magic (1991), Aidan Kelly claimed that Bill Liddell (or Lugh, as he calls him) was “purposely creating a phony history in order to throw researchers off the trail.” In fact, according to Kelly, his articles represented “a purposeful policy of disinformation instigated by Gardner and carried out by some of his successors in the leadership of the Craft movement.” He added that Liddell “was pursuing a course built on foundations laid by Gerald [Gardner].”
Bill Liddell refuted this alleged pro-Gardnerian conspiracy in his book The Pickingill Papers (1994). He dismissed Kelly’s “erroneous allegations and wild speculations,” and said he had a problem distinguishing guesswork from history. This was a direct reference to the highly speculative membership list of the New Forest Coven that Kelly had published in his book. On the Pagan Network forum on the Internet, Bill Liddell has said: “My Elders believed totally in the material they gave me. I also believed it at the time of publication. There was never any question on my part, or on others, of distributing false information” (August 22, 2006).
One of the most controversial claims made in the original Lugh material published in The Wiccan was that George Pickingill had cooperated with various ceremonial magicians and occultists, and influenced the formation of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This has caused confusion and misunderstanding, and led to statements such as Pickingill “organising rituals for the Golden Dawn and also writing their Book of Shadows [sic]” (Webster 2005: 175). In fact, on his own website, Bill Liddell has said that the information about Pickingill and the GD had been supplied to him only by “three Pickingill [Craft] ladies,” and they had been told the story when they were young women.
They said that what had happened was that one of Pickingill’s students was the Rosicrucian writer and researcher Hargrave Jennings. He had allegedly copied out some of the notes made by Pickingill about the Cabbalistic Tree of Life, astrology, and geomancy. These ended up in the library of the Rosicrucian Society in England in London and were later read by Samuel MacGregor Mathers, who then incorporated them into the GD teaching papers. This is not so fanciful as it seems. Francis King mentioned a Lincolnshire cunning man called John Parkin. He was a student in London of both the astrologer Ebenezer Sibly, and of Francis Barrett, the author of the modern grimoire The Magus (1801). Parkin used his own system of geomantic divination—eighty years later this was being taught to the students of the Golden Dawn (King 1992).
Another contentious claim is that George Pickingill was visited by occultists who sought his advice and instruction in the magical arts. We have already seen that both Eric Maple and Charles Lefebure also made that claim. Pickingill’s obituary, published in a local newspaper in 1909, said “the deceased had received many visitors and was the recipient of various kind and thoughtful gifts.” In the stories about the other famous Essex cunning man James Murrell, it was said he had clients who visited him from far and wide. Essex girls often got jobs as servants in London and told their employers about Murrell. As a result, wealthy women visited the cunning man, wanting to consult him about their domestic problems and hoping he could foretell their futures.
In October 1977, a few days before Hallowe’en, I decided to visit Canewdon in the hope of finding out more about Pickingill and paying my respect at his graveside. When I arrived and made inquires in the village I was told that the wizard’s home had been demolished many years ago. Attempts to find his burial place in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, now protected by CCTV due to unruly scenes each Hallowe’en, were also fruitless. I called at the vicarage and asked the aged minister if he could help me in my quest. He had been the incumbent for many years and said he had never come across Pickingill’s grave, which if it were in unconsecrated ground would have been unmarked anyway. However, he kindly suggested that an elderly lady called Granny Garner might be able to help me, and he directed me to her cottage in the lane leading up to the church. Apparently she had been Eric Maple’s chief informant in the village and he had described her as the last white witch in Canewdon.
Lillian Garner was eighty-seven years old when I met her, but her mind was, as they say, “as bright as a button.” She invited me in for tea, and told me that she remembered George Pickingill from her childhood as a village character and eccentric old gentleman. She recollected when the first car came to the village that he had his photograph taken beside it. She also revealed that her own mother had told her that Mr. Pickingill was the leader of a local coven of witches. Apparently her mother was actually a member of the coven and said that the witch master had “many visitors” from outside the village who came seeking his occult knowledge. Before I left, Lillian gave me the original of the photograph of George Pickingill that was published in Eric Maple’s book Dark World of the Witches. A photograph of Granny Garner herself standing at the door of her cottage was reproduced with Maple’s article on the Canewdon witches published in the encyclopedic work Man, Myth and Magic in the 1970s.
One of the problems, as far as academics are concerned, is the lack of documentary evidence or independent testimony to back up the claims made by Bill Liddell and his Elders. Liddell has told me that there are still at least two Pickingill covens operating in East Anglia today. When I asked him for proof of this claim and inquired as to the possibility of being put in contact with them there was no response. There may have been good reasons for his reluctance to expose them, even though I gave assurances that I would not publicly reveal any-thing about them. In the 1970s, I met a man of Romany descent named George Wells. He also claimed to know practitioners of the Pickingill Craft. He told me they still convened on the outskirts of the New Forest and at Brandon on the border between Suffolk and Essex. I mentioned this to Liddell, but he said he knew nothing about these alleged covens.
In 2005, Ralph Harvey, the owner of a theatrical company providing replica weapons to film and television companies and the founder of the Order of Artemis in 1959, announced publicly that he had been initiated into a coven that had links with George Pickingill. Harvey says that after the old Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1951 (The Last Bastion, 2005: 31–39), he was desperate to preserve the traditional ways of the Craft that “with the upsurge of Gardnerianism” were dying. At that time he knew of only five hereditary witch families left, and a handful of solitary witches. However, as time passed he found out there were more witches in existence than he had realized, especially in Devon, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man.
Harvey says that attempts were made to try to trace the surviving remnants of Pickingill’s Nine Covens. This search was concentrated on Sussex as allegedly, “It had been the last bastion in resisting the witch-finders, [and the] last county in Britain outwardly to accept Xtianity [sic].” One day Harvey saw an advertisement in the personal column of a local newspaper that said, “Witch wanted to remove family curse.” When he answered it, he found that, by coincidence, it had been placed by an old family friend and distant relative of his, the Duke of Leinster. The duke told Harvey a local witch had responded and within weeks contact was made with this person who was living in the Sussex village of Storrington. This is not far from the Iron Age hill-fort of Chanctonbury Ring that has an ancient connection with witchcraft. It was believed to have been used for many years as a meeting place by an old coven that exists in the area.
Subsequent enquiries revealed that there were two covens allegedly descended from Pickingill’s Nine operating in Sussex with different names, but in reality they were one and the same groups working at two sites. Ralph Harvey says all the members of the Storrington Coven were elderly. When he later made contact with another group called the Willingdon Coven, he discovered they were also elderly—their High Priestess was seventy-two years old. He said that the covens had not initiated anyone since before World War II, and were in danger of literally dying out. Harvey says they decided to take him in so that the tradition would survive. After the traditional “year and a day” probationary period, Harvey was duly inducted into the Storrington Coven.
The two covens combined to help the Duke of Leinster with his family problems, although they were unable to assist with the legal matters relating to his estate. Harvey said that the High Priestess of the Storrington Coven died in her nineties in 1977, and left her magical artifacts to his Order of Artemis, a group that combined traditional witchcraft with modern Wicca. Harvey claims he was told that the coven that Gardner was initiated into in the New Forest was one of the surviving remnants of the Nine founded by George Pickingill in the nineteenth century. He also mentions Rosamund (Sabine), who died in 1948, and was either the High Priestess or Maiden of the coven. He added, “By all accounts she had a position of some authority within the coven, and was certainly an Elder” (2005: 33).
Harvey further claimed that the High Priestess and High Priest of the Storrington Coven had actually met Pickingill. He says from his own research that he is confident that the Essex cunning man “never, ever founded a single coven in his life,” but he was the mentor of at least seven covens, including the one in the New Forest. Harvey says that the High Priestess of the Willingdon Coven was in contact with a coven in the New Forest during World War II, and presumes this was the same one Gardner belonged to. She is also supposed to have known two other independent groups in the West Country that Pickingill had been associated with.