A real-life lawsuit over failed magic

Photo by Richard Wallace

In the late 1400s, an impoverished widow from just outside the walls of London tried to seek a better future for her family by hiring a practitioner of “service magic” to ensure that she would meet and marry a rich husband. Unfortunately, no potential spouse appeared. The way that we know about this story, recounted in the excerpt below, is that she then sued the magic practitioner, demanding that her payment be returned. As historian Tabitha Stanmore explains in her book Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, in medieval and early modern Europe and England, men and women across ages and social rank often tried to solve ordinary problems—finding a new spouse, locating a lost object or a missing person, or dealing with an illness—through the use of people considered skilled in using practical magic, often known as “cunning folk.”

By exploring how and when such practitioners might be hired, Cunning Folk reveals an aspect of early modern everyday life that overturns our assumptions about the history of magic. As for the use of magic to achieve a marriage, that was the subject of gossip about some well-known figures, as Stanmore writes: “it was widely rumoured that the late queen consort, Elizabeth Woodville, had married Edward IV through similar means.” Queen Elizabeth (1437–1492), who married Edward IV in 1464, is depicted in Shakespeare’s play Richard III.

In 1492 Margaret Geffrey seems to have been at the end of her tether. She was a widow living in the parish of St Bartholomew the Less, just outside the walls of London and right on the edge of Smith Field. From these details alone we can guess that she was vulnerable. Despite—or perhaps because of—the thriving weekly livestock market there, Smith Field was an unruly place. There was drinking, fighting and gambling, and it had one of the few streets where sex workers were permitted to go about their business (the street in question was affectionately called Cock Lane). To top it all, it also served as a site of public punishment, where Londoners would come to witness the brutal executions of condemned thieves, heretics and traitors. Perhaps Margaret lived here because her late husband worked at the market, or maybe she and her family moved to the area after his death because the rent was cheap.

Being a widow could be a blessing for some, as English law dictated that a woman’s dowry should be returned on her husband’s death, and in some cases she might also have the right to dispose of his property. This gave widows a level of financial freedom to which ‘maids’ and wives were not entitled. But widowhood could also ruin a family: outstanding debts had to be paid on the husband’s death, which could leave the widow with nothing. Add to this the need to support children, and many bereaved women found themselves in dire straits. The best option was to remarry, but potential husbands could be difficult to come by, with children in tow: in addition to being more mouths to feed, the late husband’s property would normally be reserved for his children and would not be at the disposal of a new partner.

Margaret appears to have been the less fortunate type of widow. Alone and responsible for both her mother and her children, she needed to find a new husband fast. One day a neighbour named Richard Laukiston approached Margaret. ‘Thou arte a poore widow,’ he told her, ‘and it wer[e] almes to helpe the[e] to a mariage.’ The use of the familiar ‘thou’ rather than the formal ‘you’ suggests that Laukiston and Margaret were on good terms, which might be why she was willing to trust him. He told her of a cunning man who ‘can cause a woman to have any man that she hath favour to’, and he was certain that, if Margaret wanted, this cunning man could find her a husband worth a thousand pounds. For context, the average skilled tradesman in the 1490s might expect to earn about tenpence a day, so this was a fantastic amount of money. Of course such services came at a price. Richard offered to be the go-between for Margaret with this unnamed magician, and asked how much she would be able to pay. All Margaret had were two mazers, or drinking bowls, worth a little over £3 16s. She handed them over with trepidation as, in her own words, ‘if thei wer sold and I faile of my purpose, I, my moder, and my children wer undoon’.

Queen Elizabeth (played by Mary Rorke), detail from Henry Railton, “Richard III, the oratory and three small insets,” 1899. Folger Shakespeare Library.

While these drinking bowls were her only valuable belongings, Margaret had reason to hope that the gamble would pay off. She trusted her neighbours, and she might even have heard of others who had found new husbands this way. Court records reveal that this sort of magic was being employed across the country. In 1446, for example, Marion de Belton and Isabella Brome were brought before the ecclesiastical courts in Durham for claiming to be able to procure desirable husbands for local women through magic. More than this, it was widely rumoured that the late queen consort, Elizabeth Woodville, had married Edward IV through similar means.

Elizabeth, like Margaret Geffrey, was a widow when she married the king in 1464. She had two surviving sons from her first marriage and, though of noble stock, she had few connections that made her a desirable match, from a political perspective. Moreover, she was about twenty-seven years old: aristocratic couples tended to marry younger than the wider population, and there were concerns that Elizabeth had only a few years left to safely bear children. Why then did the newly crowned monarch, whose hold on the throne was precarious at best, choose Elizabeth as his bride? Sorcery seemed like a plausible explanation to many, both at the royal court and across the country.

Perhaps Margaret, our widow in 1490s London, was heartened by these rumours about the royal couple and convinced herself that such spells could be relied upon. In her case, unfortunately, they could not: the reason we know about her is that nothing came of her agreement with Laukiston. No rich husband appeared after handing over her mazers and, as she feared, she was close to being ‘undone’ as a result. Ever resourceful, though, she took Laukiston to court for fraud. Surprisingly, given that she was a woman representing herself, Margaret won: Laukiston was made to return the drinking bowls or their equivalent value in cash. Her success had a downside, however: she had to perform public penance for trying to employ a cunning man. This was a humiliating ritual that was likely to have entailed walking barefoot to her parish church bearing a lit taper-candle and announcing before the congregation what she had done, begging forgiveness. No doubt Margaret felt this humiliation was worth it in order to get her money back and to warn others of Richard’s deceitful nature. We can only hope that she found a husband or some other means of supporting herself and her family, for after this episode Margaret drops from the record, fading back into the mists of time.