AMONG THE BENEFICIARIES of the Earl and Countess of Rutland’s famed generosity were Joan Flower and her two daughters, Margaret and Phillipa, who hailed from nearby Bottesford. A contemporary source notes that the three women ‘dayly found reliefe’ from the castle, presumably in the form of money or provisions.1 But the noble couple evidently felt that such temporary help was not enough, for they offered all three positions as charwomen, or daily house servants. The date of their employment is not known. Possibly they were brought in to assist with preparations for the royal visit of August 1612 – it was common for great houses such as Belvoir to swell the ranks of their servants in order to cope with such occasions. The Flower women must have impressed their masters, for their employment continued well beyond the king’s visit. Joan’s younger daughter, Margaret, was particularly favoured, because she was given the dual responsibility of working in the wash house and looking after the poultry. Better still, she was invited to live in the servants’ quarters at the castle.
Another contemporary source numbers Joan among the ‘auncient people’ who lived near to the Belvoir estate.2 Her two daughters are afforded much less attention in the contemporary sources: they are very much supporting actresses in the drama surrounding their mother. The ballad that was later written about the family claims that they had ‘lived long’ in Bottesford.3 An attractive cottage close to St Mary’s church is still known as the Witch’s House today, but although it dates from the right period, its connection to the Flower women is unauthenticated. Given that most of the residents of Bottesford were tenants or servants of the Earl of Rutland, though, it is likely that Joan and her daughters lived in the village itself, rather than in the poorer dwellings scattered around the countryside nearby.
The Flower family had been connected to the earls of Rutland since at least the middle of the sixteenth century. In their heyday, the women of the Flower family had enjoyed the privileged position of lady-in-waiting to the countesses of Rutland, and had retained servants of their own. The archives at Belvoir Castle contain a handful of tantalisingly brief references to the favour that they enjoyed there. Among the earliest is a receipt dated 24 December 1557 for 13s.3d paid to ‘Maistres Flower’, one of the gentlewomen of the lady of the house, for her wages. The Flower family evidently enjoyed the same status throughout Elizabeth I’s reign, for in around 1603 the then countess, wife of the 5th earl, made a payment of five shillings to a servant of Mrs Flower ‘for presenting her Ladyship with a cake’.4
This Mrs Flower was almost certainly Joan. By the time the sources record anything more than the most cursory details of her life, she had fallen upon hard times and was looking after her daughters alone. Although there is no clear reference to her having been married, the contemporary records suggest that she was a widow rather than an unmarried mother. The records at Belvoir contain a few references to there being a male member of the Flower family. In 1604, Thomas Flower was a prominent enough parishioner to be among only eight men to pay the national grant of tax, the lay subsidy, to the Crown. But we know for certain that he was not Joan’s husband, because he was married to Elizabeth Fairbairn, who hailed from another long-standing Bottesford family. It is more likely that Joan had been married to the John Flower who is mentioned as a servant of Sir Charles Manners, a relative of the 5th earl, in June 1608. A little under three years later, in January 1611, a ‘Mr Flowar’s man of Hucknall’ is recorded as having delivered a dozen pigeons to the castle. The fact that he had a servant might suggest that he was very affluent, but this was an age when most households – except the very poorest – retained at least one servant.5
Compared to the destitution that they would later endure, Joan was in a stable position until at least 1611. Soon after the mention of John Flower’s gift to the Earl of Rutland, though, she suffered a sudden and dramatic loss of status. The archives at Belvoir contain a note of a payment made to ‘goodwyfe Flower’.6 The change from ‘mistress’ to ‘goodwife’ is significant. The latter was a term of address for a woman of low social status, whereas ‘mistress’ often meant ‘lady of the house’ or head of a household. Joan’s demotion was probably caused by the death of her husband. Married women had no independent wealth or property, and their fortunes were inextricably bound up with those of their husband. The luckier ones found that widowhood gave them not only welcome independence after years of subservience to their husband, but considerable wealth and property. The law dictated that widows were entitled to a third of their late husband’s property. It also allowed them to continue their husband’s business, provided they did not have a grown son who could do so.
However, this evidently was not the case for Joan. Any property or business that she did inherit was not enough to support herself and her daughters, and they were soon forced to seek menial employment in order to survive. It may have been their sudden loss of status that prompted the increasing ostracisation that the Flower family suffered in the local community. The sources imply that they had never been popular with their neighbours, but their connection to the Manners family had ensured that they were at least tolerated. Now, they found themselves the subject of increasingly malicious gossip and rumour.
One of the many factors that set Joan Flower and her daughters apart from the rest of the Bottesford community was that they apparently failed to attend church. Joan was described as ‘a monstrous malicious woman, full of imprecations irreligious, and for any thing they saw by her, a plaine Atheist’.7 In this most God-fearing of ages, the fact that the women were not churchgoers was enough to spark deep-seated suspicion, hatred and fear among their neighbours. The religious fervour of the Reformation was still strong in the early seventeenth century. Anyone who chose not to worship was not just ostracised by their neighbours; they risked persecution by the state. It was also interpreted as a sign of confederacy with the Devil. Many suspected that witches were religious Nonconformists. The records of ecclesiastical courts for the period show that a number of convicted witches had previously been named for such crimes as non-attendance at church, Sabbath-breaking and cursing or blaspheming. Others had been convicted of fornication, prostitution and adultery.
The Flower women’s morals were also called into question. It was whispered that their home was little better than a ‘bawdy house’.8 Margaret and Phillipa were both described as ‘abandoned and profligate women; who scrupled not at the means, by which to satisfy their inordinate desires.’9 Phillipa, who according to the contemporary ballad was the elder of the two daughters, ‘was well knowne a Strumpet lewd’.10 The fact that Joan chose not to remarry intensified the rumours. Without a man to govern her morals and those of her daughters, their natural licentiousness would continue unchecked.
As women who had tasted the pleasures of the flesh, widows were thought likely to seek other sexual partners either within or outside marriage. Most men found this notion both disturbing and repugnant. As the great Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino rather bluntly put it: ‘Women should be used like chamber pots: hidden away once a man has pissed in them.’11 Such women were also assumed to be more susceptible than their married counterparts to being seduced by the Devil. In the minds of most contemporaries, there was thus a dangerously thin dividing line between widowhood and witchcraft.12
Joan’s frequent ‘irreligious’ outbursts, and her hostile, combative nature, meant that she could hardly have been further from the contemporary image of an ideal widow. The latter was expected to be meek, obedient and submissive. Shakespeare’s King Lear was made to remark: ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low, an excellent thing in a woman.’13 Convention dictated that widows should devote the rest of their lives to the memory of their late husbands, living in quiet and devout solitude. Failure to do so could result in social ruin. The seventeenth-century moralist Richard Braithwaite warned: ‘Great difference then is there betwixt those widows who live alone, and retire themselves from public concourse, and those which frequent the company of men. For a widow to love society . . . gives speedy wings to spreading infamy . . . for in such meetings she exposeth her honour to danger, which above all others she ought incomparably to tender.’14
Far from being pitied, widows attracted widespread suspicion, tending to find themselves on the periphery of society soon after their husband’s death. The natural order of society dictated that women should be subject to the authority of men – be they fathers, husbands or sons. It was inconceivable that a woman might wish to make her own way in the world, unfettered by paternal or marital ties. The few who did, either by choice or circumstance, were viewed with suspicion, even fear, by the other members of their community. Single women were derided as freaks of nature, and a contemporary ballad claimed that women who died as virgins ‘lead apes in hell’.
Interestingly, although most of the sources suggest that the Flower family were poor, a contemporary document refers to their ‘extraordinary ryot and expences’.15 This might indicate that Joan had not adjusted to the decline in her status and therefore consistently lived beyond her means. More likely is that the claim was intended to emphasise the general ill repute of their household. The rumours rapidly gathered pace and became ever more shocking. Joan was described as being an unkempt woman with a ‘strange’ countenance – ‘a woman full of wrath’. A contemporary claimed that her eyes were ‘fiery and hollow’ and her demeanour ‘strange and exoticke’.16 She was, in short, becoming every day more like a witch.
Writing at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, Samuel Harsnett, an English bishop, referred to a witch as ‘One that hath forgotten her pater noster, and hath yet a shrewd tongue in her head, to call a drab, a drab.’17 Older women in particular, no longer beholden to fathers or husbands, often felt freer to speak their minds, and rapidly gained reputations as scolds or blasphemers as a result. This was the case with Joan Flower, who was the head of her own household (such as it was) and had no man to answer to. Scolding was considered a serious offence and was punished by the ‘scold’s bridle’, which locked the victim’s head inside an iron cage that drove spikes through her tongue, as well as by the ducking stool, by which the accused was plunged underwater in a stagnant pond or cesspool. Persistent offenders risked having their tongue cut out as a punishment.
The systematic character assassination suffered by Joan Flower and her daughters was not something from which they could easily recover. In a male-dominated world, a woman’s reputation was her power base. If this was called into question by members of her community, it all too often set her on the path to ruin. And it needed little foundation to become whispered about as established fact.
Even without the ostracisation that Joan and her daughters suffered, they faced an inordinate struggle to find their way in the world. The early seventeenth century was a time of economic hardship and chronic underemployment, with between a third and a half of the population living a hand-to-mouth existence. Moreover, the career options open to women in this period were on the whole of low status, badly paid and unreliable: in short, a good deal less advantageous than those available to men. Almost all rural women kept gardens, cared for domestic animals, preserved and cooked food, chopped wood, transported water, cared for and educated children, nursed the sick and prepared the dead for burial. But all of these were merely part of their expected domestic duties, and unless they were able to sell some of their produce at local markets, they gained no income from them.
Women could secure paid employment as seamstresses, lacemakers, milliners, weavers, spinners, tavern keepers, cooks, midwives, wet nurses and farm labourers at harvest time. The other career open to unmarried women was prostitution, and the fact that the Flower women’s morals were frequently called into question suggests that they may also have resorted to that. Isott Wall, a widow from Somerset, was hauled before the courts on suspicion of prostitution, and shamelessly boasted that ‘she would open her door at any time of the night either to a married man or a young man’.18 Other widows were known to pay in kind for the manual labour that would formerly have been carried out by their husbands.
But it may have been the work that Joan chose to pursue first and foremost that paved the way to her downfall. It certainly intensified the suspicions of her neighbours. Joan had an impressive knowledge of plants and herbs, and gradually built up a reputation as a cunning woman. Wise or cunning folk had been an integral part of the village community for many hundreds of years.19 They often had a thorough knowledge of herbs and other natural medicaments, and as such they made up for the shortcomings of the official medical practitioners of the day.
Seventeenth-century medical science offered little relief for those suffering from sickness or disease. Its practitioners were still guided by the principles set down by the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates, Aristotle and Galen. These taught that the human body was made up of four ‘humours’ (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile), and that any ailment sprang from an imbalance between them. The principal task of a physician was therefore to establish which of these four humours was out of line, and to rid the body of its excess by either bloodletting (often by applying leeches) or the use of purges and emetics. If the patient improved as a result, it was more by luck than judgement. ‘Many diseases they cannot cure at all, as apoplexy, epilepsy, stone, strangury, gout . . . quartan agues; a common ague sometimes stumbles them all,’ sneered the early-seventeenth-century scholar Robert Burton.20 James I was equally scornful, and made little secret of the fact that he regarded academic medicine as useless.
The ineffectiveness of physicians was of little concern to the majority of the population, however, because only the rich could afford them. Most other people had to rely on the services of their local cunning man or woman – who were, arguably, more successful anyway. Thomas Hobbes claimed that he would ‘rather have the advice or take physic from an experienced old woman that had been at many sick people’s bedsides, than from the learnedst but unexperienced physician’.21 He was not alone. ‘Charming is in as great request as physic, and charmers more sought unto than physicians in time of need,’ observed the polemicist William Perkins in 1608.22 In vain did George Gifford urge his readers: ‘He which seeketh helpe in sicknes at the hands of a Phisicion, doth that which is lawfull being ordeyned of God. For he hath given the nature & properties unto things, which shall serve for medicine. Shall a man therefore hold it lawfull to seeke helpe at the devil.’23
As well as enjoying higher rates of success than traditional physicians, cunning folk were also considerably cheaper. Most did not charge a fee per se (perhaps fearing accusations of fraud if their remedies did not work), but made it clear that a ‘donation’ was expected. Even so, it was hardly a lucrative profession – donations varied enormously, and sometimes payment was conditional upon success. Most cunning folk therefore practised their arts alongside other occupations. Only those who succeeded in gaining an excellent reputation and a wide client base, or who were fortunate enough to win the patronage of a member of the aristocracy, could hope to secure a substantial income from the profession. The real lure of the trade was the prestige. One early-seventeenth-century commentator scathingly noted that such people were ‘fantastically proud’ and boasted of ‘their gift and power’.24
Far from being a threat to their neighbours, cunning folk were an indispensable part of the community: there were precious few doctors in rural areas during this period, so the help and advice of cunning folk was actively sought. As well as healing with potions or spells, they delivered babies, performed abortions, cured male impotence and female infertility, foretold the future, located thieves or lost property, made or removed curses, advised the lovelorn and made peace between neighbours. Their popularity was due to the fact that they tended to the soul as well as the body, and could provide objective, impartial and (mostly) confidential advice. ‘Out of question they be innumerable which receive helpe by going to the cunning men,’ observed an influential writer on witchcraft.25 One particularly renowned cunning woman was said to have forty clients a week. Often people would travel considerable distances – even beyond their county boundary – in search of a cure from such practitioners.
Even churchmen were known to consult cunning folk, although in theory they sat on different sides of the spiritual divide. ‘She doeth more good in one yeare than all these scripture men will doe so long as they live,’ observed one contemporary of his local wise woman.26 Despite being viewed as rivals, there was a great deal of overlap between cunning people and churchmen, at least during the pre-Reformation period. The former often prescribed the use of liturgical chants to rid a patient of their ailments. In 1528, a healer named Margaret Hunt was questioned by the authorities and required to describe the methods she used in detail. She told them that her first recourse would be to kneel and pray to the Blessed Trinity to heal her patients. She would then advise them to recite for nine consecutive nights a series of Paternosters, Aves and Creeds.27 Even after the Reformation, the chanting of Catholic prayers in Latin remained a key ingredient in the treatment of illness by magical means. The seventeenth-century astrologer William Lilly recorded a popular formula for curing dental problems. The patient had to write the following verse three times on a piece of paper: ‘Jesus Christ for mercy sake/Take away this toothache.’ They were then advised to repeat the verse aloud and burn the paper.28 As the witch hunts gathered ground in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, some of those accused claimed that they had healed not by magic, but by seeking God’s intervention through prayer.
Cunning men and women also advised their clients to hang passages from the Bible around their necks (the first chapter of St John’s Gospel was particularly popular), or to carry certain holy objects, such as communion wafers, holy water or a crucifix, in order to protect against evil and bewitchment. In 1590, James Sykes, a healer from Yorkshire, confessed to curing horses by writing prayers on fragments of paper and hanging them in their manes.29 Religious charms and incantations were employed for every conceivable ache and pain: ‘the stinging of serpents, bleeding at the nose, blastings, inflammations, burnings with fire, scalding with water, agues, toothache, cramps, stitches, prickings, ragings, achings, swellings, heart burnings, flowings of the head, &c.’30 The notion that such ailments were a foreign or evil presence in the body that needed to be exorcised or conjured out was an ancient one, and many of the practices of local healers had been handed down through generations since the Dark Ages.
The effectiveness of these cunning folk varied widely. Those who had a detailed knowledge of the healing properties of certain plants and minerals no doubt provided a much more reliable alternative to conventional medicines than those who veered towards ‘magical’ cures such as spells and incantations. Paracelsus, considered the ‘father of modern medicine’, burned his text on pharmaceuticals in 1527, declaring that he ‘had learned from the Sorceress all he knew’. A century later, William Perkins, the leading English Protestant thinker of his day, claimed that on visiting cunning folk, ‘the meanes are received, applied, and used, the sicke partie accordingly recovereth, and the conclusion of all is, the usual acclamation; Oh happie is the day, that ever I met with such a man or woman to helpe me!’31 Reflecting on his life in the 1630s, Adam Martindale described how a local wise woman had proved far more effective than members of the medical profession at curing an unpleasant skin condition:
A vehement fermentation in my body . . . ugly dry scurfe, eating deep and spreading broad. Some skilfull men, or so esteemed, being consulted and differing much in their opinions, we were left to these three bad choices . . . in this greate straite God sent us in much mercie a poore woman, who by a salve made of nothing but Celandine and a little of the Mosse of an ashe root, shred and boyled in May-butter, tooke it cleare away in a short time, and though after a space there was some new breakings out, yet these being anointed with the same salve . . . were absolutely cleared away, and I remain to this day ever since perfectly cured.32
Some of the herbal remedies used by the healers can still be found in modern pharmacology. They include ergot to relieve labour pain and belladonna to prevent miscarriage. Others, such as boiling hair and eggs in urine, have – thankfully – disappeared. Perhaps because of their seemingly miraculous nature, conception and childbirth tended to attract the greatest range of magical treatments. Wearing amulets containing powders could either enhance or prevent conception; herbs wrapped in linen and worn around the neck were used as contraceptives, as was a bizarre concoction of the ashes of a female mule’s hoof mixed with wine. Meanwhile, women who wished to conceive without having sex were given horse’s semen to drink, and a prolonged labour could be brought to a swift conclusion by opening doors or chests within the patient’s house. George Gifford was deeply suspicious of the cunning folk’s potions and practices, claiming that ‘Satan . . . teacheth them to make poisons: whereupon this is cleere that the greeke woord Pharmakeia is used as a generall name for witchcraft & sorcery.’33
Psychology was a major factor. A local healer knew her neighbours intimately and could therefore act as an effective therapist and comforting adviser. As such, she was a precursor to the modern-day psychiatrist in making the connection between physical and mental well-being. The attention that she gave each patient, often enlisting the support of other family members, eased their minds and might in itself have led to healing. Faith was another important factor. One cunning man was said to have urged his clients: ‘you must beleeve it will helpe, or els it will doe you no good at all’.34 The pamphleteer Richard Bernard concurred: ‘These witches profess that they cannot heal such as do not believe in them.’35
Most people were all too willing to place unquestioning trust in their healer. After all, they presented a much more appealing option than contemporary doctors, with their purges, leeches and – worst of all – barbaric surgical procedures. In any case, failure by a cunning man or woman could be easily explained away by saying that the client had left it too late to seek help, had performed the prescribed rituals ineffectively, or had lacked faith in their efficacy. The fact that even as late as the nineteenth century common people across Europe clung to these cunning folk in preference to other medical practitioners is a testament to how highly valued they were.
An important aspect of the cunning person’s art was to cultivate a sense of mystery, keeping their patients in ignorance of the precise formula of the herbs or incantations they were using. Although contemporary charm books survive, they were never printed and published, except by those wishing to expose them as fraudulent. During the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, a woman named Alice Prabury was investigated by the church authorities, who found that she ‘taketh upon her to help by the way of charming, and in such ways that she will have nobody privy of her sayings’.36 In this respect, there was little distinction between cunning folk and conventional medical practitioners. ‘We go to the physician for counsel, we take his recipe, but we know not what it meaneth; yet we use it, and find benefit,’ observed William Perkins. ‘If this be lawful, why may we not as well take benefit by the wise man, whose courses we be ignorant of?’37
Many cunning folk enhanced their mystique by wearing strange costumes, or filling their consulting rooms with weird and wonderful objects. Mirrors and crystal balls were favoured devices for discovering the identity of a thief or other culprit. Elizabeth I’s favourite astrologer, John Dee, was said to have a crystal ‘as big as an egg: most bright, clear and glorious’.38 One victim of theft consulted the local cunning man, who ‘browghte with him a looking glass (about vii or viii inches square), and did hange the said glasse up over the benche in his said hawle, upon a nayle, and bad the said examinate look in yt, and said as farre as he could gesse, he shulde see the face of him that had the said lynnen’.39
A host of other props, costumes, potions and paraphernalia were employed by these ‘white witches’. Johann Weyer, physician to the Duke of Cleves, scathingly described
the entire category of tricks and illusions by means of which these malefic or evildoers . . . produce phantasms and apparitions while fraudulently vaunting their many ‘miracles’. They usually employ sorcerers’ enchantments, absurd conjurings, illicit pagan sacrifices, imprecations, a naming of divine names, the recitation of sacred or barbarous words, and mutterings of all sorts. On occasion they irrelevantly introduce plants, animals, and parts of animals – whether for superstitious reasons or by way of deceit. Sometimes too they employ special perfumes, lights, eye-salves, and periapts or objects affixed to the person by binding or suspension; they also employ metals, artificial bodies, statues, little images, rings, and seals; they make various objects; they likewise employ mirrors and similar monstrosities and tools of the magic art.’40
As well as healing the sick, cunning folk enjoyed impressive rates of success in the detection of theft and other crimes. When their methods are scrutinised, it becomes clear that they cleverly combined mystical objects and devices with real detective work. Any investigation would begin with the cunning man or woman asking their client to produce a list of suspects. The client proved all too willing to cooperate, given that they often bore a grudge against someone in the community and saw this as an ideal means of gaining the upper hand. Armed with this information, the healer would employ various rituals to determine who the guilty party was. A popular method was to hang a sieve by the point of some shears and read out the names of the suspects. When the guilty person was named, the sieve would spin around. Given that the client had already revealed who they thought the prime suspect was, it was easy for the healer to make the sieve spin at the right moment. ‘Many other pretie knackes hee glorieth in,’ sneered one cynic, ‘as if he had attained great wisedome.’41
In such cases, the role of the cunning folk was less to identify the thief than to strengthen their client’s resolve to prosecute him. Not everyone was taken in by their powers. The author of the Belvoir witch pamphlet criticised ‘the conceit of wise-men or wise woemen, that they are all meerely coseners and deceivers; so that if they make you beleeve that by their meanes you shall heare of things lost or stolne, it is either done by Confederacy, or put off by protraction to deceive you of your money’.42 He warned that their artifice was born of malicious intent: ‘However the professors aforesaid practise murther and mischiefe, yet many times they Pretend cures and preservation; with many others, carrying the shew of great learning and admired knowledge; yet have they all but one familier tearme with us in English called Witches.’43
Cunning folk also played an important role in bringing the guilty party to light through intimidation. As well as detecting the thief, murderer or other criminal, they were known to have magical recipes which could inflict pain or injury upon the culprit, or paralyse him so that he could not escape. In small, insular communities such as Bottesford, where everyone knew everyone, the fact that the local cunning person had been enlisted to solve a crime would be widely known and talked about. The criminal, too, would hear about it. Many either returned the stolen goods, confessed their guilt or fled in panic – such was the strength of belief in the power of cunning folk. George Gifford described a typical scenario: ‘A man hath a silver cup missing, all corners are sought but yet it cannot be found . . . He enquireth secretly where there is a cunning man of great fame. Thether he hasteth. Home he returneth and in very deede findeth the cup.’44 Even when the wrong person was identified, that person would have a strong interest in proving their innocence by finding the real culprit, so the role of the cunning man or woman still proved ultimately effective.
Cunning folk often pedalled charms and sigils to perform all manner of other beneficial functions: from securing victory in battle to winning at cards or excelling at the lute. Such charms were believed to contain familiar spirits that would work their magic at the propitious moment. They were favoured by rich and poor alike; even kings and queens were not averse to using them. Elizabeth I sent a protective amulet to her favourite, the Earl of Essex, when he embarked upon his expedition to the Azores in 1597. Meanwhile, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell were both said to have used magic rings in order to win Henry VIII’s favour.
Many of those who bought charms from cunning folk did so to remove some impediment in their love lives, whether it was unrequited passion, impotence or unsatisfactory intercourse. Goodwife Swan of Margate in Kent boasted in 1582 that she could make a drink ‘which, she saith, if she give it to any young man that she liketh well of, he shall be in love with her’.45 During the investigation into the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613, it emerged that Frances, Countess of Essex, and her confidante, Anne Turner, had consulted an astrologer and magician to secure the love of the Earl of Somerset and Sir Christopher Mainwaring. In other cases, the use of magic was blamed for things going wrong in a relationship. Thus, when the 5th Earl of Sussex abandoned his wife for his mistress during James I’s reign, the countess’s friends attempted to prove that she had lost her husband because of maleficent magic. But the countess was hardly blameless: as well as ‘enterteininge the unlawfull affections of other persons’, she was said to have ‘secretly professed and practized the unlawfull and damnable artes of witchcrafte’ in order to bring about her husband’s death.46 Meanwhile, in 1619 a gentlewoman tried to disguise the shame of her daughter’s elopement with a local ploughboy by attributing it to ‘diabolical sorcery’.47
The other most popular service performed by cunning folk was to predict the future. They employed a variety of means to do so, from gazing into a crystal ball to listening to the croaking of frogs, or simply claiming that they had the natural gift of foresight and regularly witnessed ‘visions’ of what was to come. Others used a combination of fraud and psychology, secretly listening in on conversations and then startling their clients with how much they knew about their personal circumstances, or asking leading questions during the consultation. Often people sought out a fortune-teller at times of crisis in their lives. In such cases, the cunning folk could help them to reach a decision, or strengthen their resolve if they already half knew the course of action they wanted to take. When he fell from James I’s favour, the Earl of Somerset was rumoured to have consulted a wizard about how to regain his former position. At around the same time, Mrs Suckling, a doctor’s wife from Norfolk, sought the help of a renowned Norwich palmist to find out when her husband would die. The answer evidently did not prove satisfactory, for Mrs Suckling went on to offer the wise woman money to poison him.48
Despite the inevitable patchiness of the cunning folk’s success, the fact that they offered a ‘one-stop shop’ for a whole range of ills afflicting society made them an indispensable part of any community. By the late sixteenth century, one leading authority on magic and witchcraft wrote that there was a ‘miracle worker’ in every parish, and that some places had as many as 18. At the same time, Henry Holland, a Cambridgeshire preacher, scornfully remarked upon ‘the continual traffic and market which the rude people have with witches’. Johann Weyer was aghast that ‘the frenzy of this satanic profession has so pervaded the minds of these men that they believe that their every desire is accomplished by such demonic impostures, that new powers are conferred upon the nature of things, or former powers taken away, weakened, or enlivened, or that the course of nature is changed, lightning bolts stirred, thunderclaps, winds, and rains unexpectedly roused or quelled, serpents stripped of their savagery and violence, untamed beasts brought under control, iron broken, diseases inflicted and cured, shades and spirits of the dead called up’.49 George Gifford was similarly confounded by their popularity: ‘Is Satan become a weldoer? Is hee so charitable and so pitifull that hee will releeve mens miseries? . . . Some man will replye that this is a common thing and well tried by experience, that many in great distresse have bin releaved and recovered by sending unto such wise men or wise women, when they could not tel what should els become of them, and of all that they had.’ But Gifford warned that there was a high price to pay for such healing: ‘For Satan . . . healeth the bodie, to the end he may the more fully possesse and destroy the soule . . . O wretched men so relieved: they do imagine that the devill is driven out of them, and he hath entred in deeper.’50
Belief in the powers of cunning folk remained just as strong in the early seventeenth century. Robert Burton echoed the earlier view that there was a cunning man in every village, and in 1621 the future Bishop of Lincoln lamented that it was ‘scarce credible how generally and miserably our common ignorants are besotted with the opinion of their [cunning folk’s] skill; and how pitifully they are gulled by their damnable impostures, through their own foolish credulity’.51
For all their popularity, cunning folk were not immune to suspicion and malevolence from members of their community. In theory, they harnessed the powers already at work in the universe, whereas witches drew upon evil powers within themelves. But as the witch hunts gathered momentum, the dividing line between beneficial magic such as this and the maleficium of ‘black’ witches became dangerously blurred. ‘It is indifferent to saie in the English toong; she is a witch; or she is a wise woman,’ declared Reginald Scot.52 His contemporary, George Gifford, agreed: ‘God saith . . . that such persons as seeke unto Conjurers and Witches, doe goe a whoring after devilles.’53 Because women were not permitted to study conventional medicine, it became widely accepted that the only way they could acquire the necessary skills and knowledge was from the Devil. ‘If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die,’ the church proclaimed.54
Ironically, although many cunning folk were later prosecuted as witches, they were also responsible for fanning the flames of the witch hunting fervour. ‘If they doe suppose that one is bewitched, they enquire after a wise man or a wise woman, to learne who hath done the deede,’ observed George Gifford. ‘There be none more extreme haters of witches, then such as be infected with a kinde of witchcraft themselves.’ But he warned that such folk were carrying out the Devil’s work, just as surely as the ‘witches’ whom they accused. ‘A man is sicke, his sicknesse doth linger upon him. Some doe put into his head that he is bewitched. He is counselled to send unto a cunning woman. She saith he is forspoken indeede, she prescribeth them what to use, there must be some charme and sorcerie used. The partie findeth ease, & is a glad man, he taketh it that he hath made a good market, it was a luckie hower when he sent to that woman. For doubtlesse he did thinke that if he had not found so speedie a remedie, the Witch would utterly have spoyled him.’55 In this way, cunning folk would regularly diagnose bewitchment – something that more orthodox physicians often refused to do. If a series of disasters befell a community, then either its members or the authorities would routinely consult the local cunning man or woman to find out who was responsible. Although they pretended to use mystical powers to discover the suspect, the name of anyone believed to be dabbling in the dark arts would already have been given to them by previous clients: they were, after all, the chief repositories of gossip, rumour and information in the community.
Sometimes, though, the cunning folk were responsible for initiating suspicions by planting the idea in a client’s mind that their ailment or misfortune was the result of maleficium on the part of a hostile member of the community. The mid-seventeenth-century commentator Thomas Ady claimed that cunning folk ‘will undertake to tell them [their clients] who hath bewitched them, who, and which of their Neighbours it was’.56 In 1619, it was said of William Walford, a cunning man from Cold Norton in Essex, that ‘his order is, when he comes to visit any sick neighbour, to persuade them that they are bewitched, and tells them withal [that] except they will be of that belief they can very hardly be holpen of their disease and sickness’.57 Others shied away from actually naming the suspect, but dropped such heavy hints that their client was left in no doubt. When his wife fell grievously ill in 1645, a desperate Essex man sought the advice of his local cunning woman, who told him ‘that his wife was cursed by two women who were neere neighbours to this Informant, the one dwelling a little above his house, and the other beneath his house, this Informants house standing on the side of an Hill: Whereupon he beleeved his said wife was bewitched by one Elizabeth Clarke’.58
Indispensable though they may have been, therefore, the position of the cunning man or woman in their local community was a potentially dangerous one. By meddling in local disputes, failing to satisfy their clients, or simply knowing too much about an individual’s business, they could arouse feelings of suspicion and paranoia. Joan Flower would soon know the truth of this all too well.