Tabitha Stanmore on Practical Magic in Shakespeare’s England

BARBARA BOGAEV: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Barbara Bogaev.

[Music plays]

[Clip from Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1]
FIRST WITCH:
When shall we three meet again?
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

BOGAEV: The weird sisters. Love them. Even if you don’t know much Shakespeare, you know Macbeth’s witches. They are probably who you think of first when anyone mentions magic in his plays. But according to Tabitha Stanmore, our modern minds are way too focused on witchcraft when we think about Shakespeare’s time.

Stanmore is a scholar at Essex University and in her new book, Cunning Folk, she argues that most people in early modern England believed in practical magic—spells that could help you find lost possessions, or make someone fall in love with you. And if you needed some of this day-to-day magic done, you wouldn’t go to a witch… you’d see your local cunning man or cunning woman.

Stanmore defines cunning people as “service practitioners,” kind of like a car mechanic or a dentist. They were a normal, accepted part of society, and their magic services weren’t illegal. Stanmore found traces of these practices mentioned in church court records and other archival sources from the 15th through the 17th century.

And she is on the line with us from Bristol in the UK.

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TABITHA STANMORE: Hi, Barbara.                                                             

BOGAEV: Hello, it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I really am enjoying the book.

STANMORE: Oh, thank you. I’m so glad.

BOGAEV: Magic. I’m so excited to talk about magic. I did think, though, maybe we were going to talk about witches. But you make the point at the start of your book that it’s not about witches. So, what were cunning men and women. And what’s the distinction?

STANMORE: Yeah, lots of people have the same reaction when I say, “I’m looking at magic in the 16th century.” They go, “Oh, cool, witchcraft.” And I go, “No, no.” Which is why my handle on most social media is now “Magic, not witches.”

But yeah, so the difference, it’s a difference that I was surprised existed. I didn’t realize that there was such a thing as cunning people before I started researching them. But they’re basically the people who were selling magic in the late medieval, early modern, or kind of Renaissance period, who sold useful magic. So kind of practical things like healing spells, love spells—that kind of thing.

Most people who were living in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries would see them as very different to what they would call witches, who were the people who were quite scary. They were seen as cursing and sort of being in league with the devil. Whereas cunning folk tended to be more in league with maybe gods, maybe angels, maybe demons, but mostly friendly demons, maybe fairies. So yeah, they were seen as very different people in their own time.

BOGAEV: It’s so interesting to see these tiers because we… you know, tend to focus on the witch trials in this period so maybe that’s distorted our view of the period.

STANMORE: Yeah, definitely. And I completely understand why. I mean, Hollywood loves witches and they love the witch trials because they’re very dramatic—you know, they’re sensational moments and really dark moments in our history. And of course, you know, we tend to focus on things which are exciting and kind of have lessons that we can draw from the past when we look at history but in doing so, we are missing a lot of other history that was going on in this period and a lot of other magical activity that was going on.

I think one of the reasons that we don’t look at cunning magic as often is because it is really basic a lot of the time. It is solving everyday problems that everybody had, you know? It is literally the person who, if you have a sick cow, you would go and consult them and they would give you a spell to sort out your sick cow which doesn’t sound very exciting on the surface. But when you think about how that meant that everybody was living in this amazing magical universe that was filled with spells and fairies, all of a sudden it does get quite a lot more exciting.

BOGAEV: Yeah, the methods are varied and many. So, what methods did these cunning folks use?

STANMORE: Yeah, the methods were really, really varied. These were often people who are quite well integrated into their communities. Cunning folk or magical practitioners could sometimes even be local priests. So they were really part of their village life and, kind of, often knew the general goings on.

Something that cunning folk often offered was spells to help you find lost or stolen items. So, you know, if somebody’s stolen your spoons or your prize cow, then you would go to a cunning person. The cunning person might say, “Don’t you worry, I’m going to investigate this. And within three days, your items will come back.” If this cunning person is well known and they’re very well respected in their community, very likely the thief is going to know that a cunning person’s on the case and then return your item to you. So, often this kind of this—these magical activities they get up to probably would have worked just because of the reputation of the cunning person doing it.

BOGAEV: You lay this out. It’s so interesting—I don’t want to say sophisticated, but really some smart psychology is at work there—because the cunning person, as you say, might be the priest who’s in people’s homes a lot or listens to confession so they know—they have an idea who the thief might be and then—I think you wrote—the smarter ones would come up with a way for a thief to return something without getting caught, without being held accountable for it so that everyone kind of gets… it’s all a win-win, you know? They don’t lose face and the people get their thing back. How did that work?

STANMORE: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think the case I refer to is someone from the 16th century, and it’s an absolutely brilliant one. It’s a local priest who hears that one of his parishioners has had their linen stolen from off the washing line. Linen is an incredibly valuable thing at this time. It’s labor intensive to make. The materials obviously have to be grown and then harvested and dried and all sorts of other things. So losing linen, it’s a problem for that to happen.

So this parishioner goes to the local priest and says, “You know, help me out. I don’t know where it’s gone.” And so the priest says, “Don’t worry, I’m going to fix this for you.” So he starts off by saying on Sunday, in front of all of his congregation, he gives a sermon about how stealing is wrong and that, you know, if anybody has stolen anything recently, then they should repent and that will sort of sort them out. The linen doesn’t reappear.

So the next Sunday he says, “Okay, if nobody returns this missing linen, then I am going to summon a demon to make you return the linen.” And then he says to the people who have lost their linen, “Now go home and leave your window open. And between, sort of, I think it’s like sort of noon and the evening, the linen will magically reappear through your window.” And lo and behold it does.

Priest gets in trouble for this because he has threatened to summon a demon and the church is generally against that kind of thing. But when he explains that he’s actually doing a very good social service by getting the sin in return, the church actually lets him off. So it’s really, really interesting.

BOGAEV: It is because it raises this issue of what does the church tolerate when it comes to magic? And what’s the line between magic and, as you say, something subversive, like summoning a demon or something that wanders into witchcraft?

STANMORE: Yeah, it’s surprising actually how pragmatic the church is about this kind of thing. Again, if we think of any Hollywood film or TV series or anything like that ever that deals with witches or magic in this period, you’re probably thinking that the church is rabidly angry at anybody who seems to be going anywhere near demons. And, you know, there is an element of that. But on a practical level, it’s really not their main concern for most of the church’s history. The records that we have surviving from England in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries shows that the church was much more interested in people blaspheming, people not attending church at all, or committing adultery and that kind of thing.

When they do get worried about magic, it’s normally because they see it as a form of superstition, like where people are practicing religion wrong. And if they’re practicing religion badly, then what the church mostly wants to do is make sure that people start practicing religion right. So they would, you know, encourage people to do penance and then explain to them why magic is bad and not something that you should be doing.

The other time that the church gets really worried about magic is when it’s causing some kind of social evil, whether that’s dragging too many people away from the truth of the Bible or because they’re causing people to—I don’t know—sort of like have some kind of strife with their neighbors.

So if, for example, a cunning person named a thief and it turns out to be the wrong person. And the thief is then sort of ostracized, or the supposed thief is ostracized, that’s when the church starts getting worried, because the cunning person’s committing libel, basically.

So it has a much more practical approach than you might expect towards magic. Because, “I’ve got so many other problems to deal with and magic’s just not very high on the priority list.”

BOGAEV: So much of this is counterintuitive. Although the methods, I really got lost in your account of all the different methods Imight just spend the rest of the interview talking about that. Tell us some more about some of these spells or these techniques. For instance, the “turned a loaf with knives” technique.

STANMORE: Yeah, I love the turned loaf with knives. It was a practice that came into being in 15th century and it seems to have died out in the 15th century as well. Because it’s one of the most unwieldy and impractical methods of fortune telling I’ve ever seen. I have tried it to work out whether it is exactly as bad as it seems, and it is. It’s terrible.

BOGAEV: Oh, that’s so great that you try these. Okay, go ahead.

STANMORE: You got to know! So the idea is that you take a loaf of bread—probably quite a stale loaf of bread—and you take four very sharp knives and you put the knives into each corner of the loaf, so that it makes a cross shape. You then drive a peg into the center of the loaf. Then you hold that whole sort of contraption up, and then you ask a yes or no question.

It was used to help identify thieves, because you can say, “Did Josh steal my cow?” and then if the loaf turns one way, then it means yes, and if it turns the other way, it means no. It was also used for different fortune telling things like, “Am I going to get married this year?” Because it’s very simple, kind of, yes or no answers for everything.

BOGAEV: Yeah, that’s some leaden loaf you need. I mean, you’re not doing this with brioche.

STANMORE: Yeah, exactly. It’s heavy, it’s unwieldy. As I say, I have tried it, but every single time the loaf just fell apart. I don’t know, it’s…

BOGAEV: Yeah, our modern bread not made for magic.

STANMORE:  Yeah, no, absolutely not. And the reason that we know about this is because we—each example that we have of somebody using this method, it doesn’t work. The cunning person just consistently names the wrong person as the thief, for example.

The cross aspect is interesting though, because I think the reason the knives are put into a cross shape is because it’s trying to summon the power of Jesus, potentially, to intervene. So there is a logic there, it’s just not a great one.

BOGAEV: A lot of the methods involve suspects or people eating something, right? Like that would prove guilt or innocence what did they eat and what was… how did that work?

STANMORE: So, there are two lovely examples of edible spells. The first one is a healing spell where—and again, I don’t know how you do this because you need very, very, very good eyesight—but if you were sick with some kind of incurable disease, there was a spell where you would write a little a psalm or the Lord’s Prayer on to almonds.

BOGAEV: On to almonds, the nuts? The tiny nuts?

STANMORE: Yeah, the nut, and then you’d eat those and then something about kind of the power of, I guess, the holy words that would heal you.

Another lovely example if you want to identify a thief is to take some cheese—probably very, very dry cheese—and either carve a symbol of a cross or again the beginning of, I think it’s Psalm 29, onto a lump of cheese and then feed it to whoever you suspected of stealing your stuff. Once you’d done that, the idea was that the thief, if they, you know, were guilty, they would be incredibly nervous about sort of undergoing this test, and probably their throat would just dry out a lot, and then trying to swallow some hard cheese, probably not going to be able to do it. When they start choking, then you’ve identified your thief. So it’s kind of magic, kind of psychology, always involves cheese.

BOGAEV: Always involves cheese. Well, you got to work with what you have at hand, I guess: bread, cheese. Where did these methods come from? The Bible, or legends, or they’re just smart, cunning folk?

STANMORE: A combination of all three, I think. There’s definitely… all of these spells, they have a long tradition behind them from legends, the Bible. There’s a lot of saint stories that are sort of circulating Europe at this time. A lot of those have kind of semi-magical elements to them, where the saint is able to intervene in, you know, a kind of crisis that’s happening through kind of divine methods and people try to copy those methods sometimes.

So for example, if you’re looking for buried treasure, then you might copy the mother of the emperor Constantine, who apparently found pieces of the Holy Cross or the actual—the whole Holy Cross, depending on the story you listen to—by going to the Holy Land and just lying on the floor and praying and sort of making the sign of the cross and kind of attracting the cross to her.

So in the same way, if you have something that you think is very, very valuable, and it’s hidden in the earth, then you might use that method and sort of, just, kind of, repurpose those divine powers to your own ends.

That’s kind of where the line starts to be drawn between religion and magic. Because the church would say that what Constantine’s mother was doing was completely acceptable and legitimate because she was calling directly on God and God was granting her her prayer whereas using that same power to just do something quite flippant or easy and kind of not prayer, that’s where the action starts becoming magic.

BOGAEV: So it can get very dicey, it’s very fluid, this distinction.

STANMORE: Yes, very fluid.

BOGAEV: Of course, then there’s love potions and seduction spells, right? And they also seem to involve a lot of food, fish and bread.

STANMORE: Yeah, so love spells are incredibly common, again, for reasons that we can probably relate to, right? Like, we’ve all had some kind of drama in our love lives at some point. That will always be the case because people are tricky and we always fall in love with the wrong people.

So people were constantly, like, looking for a way out of a relationship or a way into a good relationship and so they would go to cunning folk to help them with this. And, yeah, there’s a lot of seduction spells.

As you mentioned, some of them involved fish. This was one that the church did get concerned about because they frankly found it a bit icky. But the idea is a kind of form of sympathy magic. The way it’s described is that a woman might take a fish and insert it into her vagina and let it die there, take it out, and then cook it and feed it to her intended lover. The idea is that the intended would be so inflamed by desire that they would just not be able to keep their hands off of this woman afterwards.

BOGAEV: Oh, ew.

BOGAEV: But wait, you say there’s another element in this and it’s something to do with cockles bread?

STANMORE: Yeah, so cockle bread is the slightly less grim version—it was sometimes called “buttocks bread” as well. It would be bread that was shaped to look like a pair of buttocks, basically, and again, the idea is that if you fed it to your intended, then they’d be inflamed by desire for you and not be able to stop thinking about you. If you wanted to make it extra potent, then you could actually knead the bread with your buttocks and then that would transfer some of that essence of yourself and your desire into the bread, so that when the other person consumed it, you know, they’d catch the bug, too.

BOGAEV: Some of these love potions do show up in Shakespeare though, right? Wild pansy in Midsummer, I think. Are there others?

STANMORE: Yep. Yeah, actually, it does seem to turn up all over the place. There are often kind of magical references in Shakespeare. As you say, there’s a love potion in Midsummer Night’s Dream that, you know, sort of put into the Fairy Queen’s eyes. If you start looking at Shakespeare’s plays more closely, that cunning folk do start appearing in all sorts of places you wouldn’t necessarily expect.

So for example, in A Comedy of Errors, Antipholus’ wife thinks that he’s gone mad or has got some kind of sickness because, you know, he’s sort of wandering around not knowing who anybody is and it’s all very strange. So she employs a cunning man—I think he’s called a conjurer in this context—to help identify or kind of diagnose what’s wrong with Antipholus.

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff dresses up as, I think it’s called, “The witch of Brentford” but he’s dressing up actually as a cunning woman when he’s been turned out of the house and he’s sort of wandering back down the street, sort of dressed as this, kind of, old woman. He is then followed by people asking him for magical help. So he’s asked to identify who has stolen a golden chain, for example. So yeah, the more you kind of read Shakespeare, the more—when you’re aware that cunning folk exist—you start seeing them kind of turn up in all sorts of different plays.

BOGAEV: And they’re presented in these kind of ambivalent ways—I mean, really the way Shakespeare presents everything—“This is just a fact of life, these cunning people.”

STANMORE: It’s really interesting because a lot of other playwrights working around the same time as Shakespeare adopt a similar outlook because they normally debate whether or not cunning folk are good or bad because there is this tension between whether somebody is a cunning person or a witch sometimes, especially kind of as we get further and further into the Reformation and there’s more tension between Catholics and Protestants. So, plays kind of pick up on this and they start kind of questioning like, “Is somebody a cunning person or a witch?” and so you’ve got normally one character who says, “Oh, this person is a hag,” you know? Throw them out.”

You know, for example, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the husband throws Falstaff / the witch of Brentford out because he says that, “She’s a witch, a queen, an old cousin and queen.” But then his wife says, “Well firstly she’s my aunt, and secondly she’s only ever done good. She’s never done anybody harm. She’s not a witch, she’s a cunning woman.” So you’ve normally got two characters kind of arguing the toss in most plays at this time.

BOGAEV: It’s interesting because you have then Shakespeare writing Macbeth and the fascinating witches in Macbeth. And then you have Marlow’s Dr. Faustus. I’m thinking that we think of people as being more superstitious in the past and maybe more gullible because science hasn’t become established yet. But maybe that’s a misconception and maybe the audiences for these plays at that time were really thinking about common day magic in a more nuanced or mixed way.

STANMORE: Yeah, definitely. I think they were definitely looking at it in a much more nuanced way than we normally give them credit for. I do struggle with the idea that people in the past were, I don’t know, more hysterical, more gullible than we are because, well, they weren’t. They definitely had a different world view and a different understanding of how the world worked and magic definitely fitted into that in a way that it doesn’t necessarily with the way that we look at things now.

But yeah, I think that there is an internal logic to most of the things that they believed. There were people, some people who were gullible and they were mocked on stage and off for being incredibly gullible. That’s true today as well. You know, we’re constantly mocking each other for getting things wrong and not knowing enough. So, it’s definitely—it’s not naivete and it’s not a lack of knowledge that caused people to believe this stuff—it was that, you know, actually there was a logic there and they were pursuing that to its logical conclusion. So yeah, I don’t think we should judge them too harshly.

BOGAEV: Of course, a big part of this is astrology and soothsaying and fortune telling and palm reading. It sounds like it could get really pricey. What was involved in hiring a cunning person to, say, get the stars and the planets to work for you?

STANMORE: Yeah, it could be really expensive. Because astrology, I don’t know if anybody’s ever tried to be or tried to kind of cast their own kind of birth horoscope or anything like that, but it’s incredibly complicated. I cannot get my head around it—I can identify the plow in the sky and that’s about as far as I can get.

So somebody who is a competent astrologer, who can predict what’s going to happen to you in the future or can even kind of get the stars to influence what’s going to happen in the future, they are very, very smart, very, kind of, mathematically minded a lot of the time, and also normally have a very good education. So we’re mostly talking about people who have been to university at least for like a year or so, possibly more. Therefore you’re probably talking about men.

So, if you did want to employ an astrologer to predict your future or get you a good marriage or something like that, by kind of working out the right time for you to make a marriage proposal, you’re probably talking about employing a highly educated man to help you with it—and yes, they would charge a lot which is why you normally see astrologers often being used, especially sort of about 1600 you know, being employed by the nobility or even the royal family because these are the kinds of people who can afford to use astrologists.

BOGAEV: Like Nancy Reagan.

STANMORE: Yes, exactly like Nancy Reagan.

BOGAEV: You write that the 1560s, though, were something of a tidal change as far as all of this is concerned that before you could get away with doing magic even to harm someone, like revenge magic, which you talk about. But afterwards was a different story. So what changed?

STANMORE: Basically the law changed. So, in the mid-16th century across Europe, there is an increasing concern about witchcraft—malevolent witchcraft, people using demons to harm people—this reaches England in the 1520s, 1530s, the idea of it but then in the 1540s, Henry VIII suddenly decides that, no, witchcraft is really going to be an issue. So he legislates against it. That law is basically never used.

As you say, in the 1560s, Elizabeth I is on the throne and she introduced the new witchcraft act which really does spark the witch hunts in many ways in England. It’s actually the act against witchcraft and conjurations. The witchcraft element is kind of what you’d expect. It is punishing by death people who use demons to harm and kill other people. The rest of the act gives a year imprisonment to anybody who uses magic to find buried treasure, to find lost or stolen goods, and also to provoke somebody to unlawful love, which I don’t really know what that means. I’m very curious to find out.

But yeah, this is the point where it becomes an actual state crime to cause harm by magic and also to do other kind of activities of magic. The witchcraft element is the part that really gets picked up on. The cunning magic aspect, the kind of finding lost and stolen goods, that kind of thing, that doesn’t get used even nearly as often. Basically because in order to be prosecuted for a crime, you have to be reported for it and most people aren’t interested in prosecuting their neighbors for something which is really, really useful.

BOGAEV: So, it seems like the waters are muddied, though, between cunning people and witches, and I guess if you’re unpopular cunning person, you could be accused of being a witch, right?

STANMORE: It could potentially happen. It doesn’t happen as often as you might expect. So I’ve, kind of, collected in my research a database of about 550 cases of, you know, practical magic use. I think only five of those people were ever accused of witchcraft so it is actually quite small numbers because people did see them as different.

As you say though, it does definitely change the way that people felt about magic. There is a lot more concern about whether or not a cunning person is a witch. As I say, that’s when it starts coming through in plays, where people start debating this question. Interestingly, a lot of the time in the plays, ultimately people agree that probably the cunning person isn’t a witch, and they probably are doing something good or they’re seen as frauds but they’re often not actually decided to be a witch.

BOGAEV: Yeah, well you’ve approached this in a more anthropological way. You asked your friends and family whether they believed in magic. What kind of answers did you get?

STANMORE: Really varied. There were quite a few people who said, “No, absolutely not. I don’t believe in that at all.” Quite a few said who said, “Absolutely do. Yes, magic has saved my life several times,” or, you know, kind of, “I wouldn’t make a big decision without consulting a psychic.” But then most people were kind of in the middle and they just said, “Sort of. Like… well, what do you mean by magic? It depends.”

It often depends. I found that really kind of beautiful, partly because people are prepared to, kind of, put themselves out there, and, kind of, be very vulnerable about it and say they don’t know what they believe or, you know, whether they’ve ever used magic. But also because, you know, they did say that at least once in their life they have, you know, they’ve tried a spell. They’ve tried some kind of superstition or something that has made their life better or they’ve thought would help in that moment. It’s really interesting because lots of people, I think, do use magic alongside other methods for kind of getting through life, you know.

BOGAEV: Yeah, I think we all have our lucky socks or things like that. Kinda superstitions. But you write about something really interesting at the end of your book about a kind of modern magic creep, for instance, in Iceland, the government made a compromise with a community of elves, and astrology got very popular during the COVID epidemic. Is magic having a resurgence?

STANMORE: Yeah, I think it is. There is definitely a resurgence happening.

I’m not surprised by that really at all. Fortune tellers of various different stripes became very, very popular during the pandemic. We saw the same thing happen in the 2008 financial crash, for example, because people, I think, turn to magic when nothing else is working. They’ll sometimes, as I say, kind of, just, like, incorporate light magic into their daily lives anyway.

But there is a lot more interest in it, I think, when things feel out of control and really scary. Right now, obviously, we’ve got a lot of things in the world that seem quite scary, and, you know, magic is an excellent coping mechanism apart from anything else.

BOGAEV: Well, it gives you hope and a sense of control. Just to pick up on something you were talking about a little earlier. In the end, looking through this lens of cunning folk and everyday magic as opposed to witchery, has it changed how you think about, kind of, what we assume is pervasive misogyny of the early modern period?

STANMORE: That’s a great question. I think, yes, it has because, as you say, it’s kind of… it’s given the period a lot more nuance for me.

I first got interested in this subject because I was interested in witchcraft, why so many witches were women, that kind of thing. Having discovered that cunning folk existed, and they were kind of 50-50 gender split between men and women, and the fact that they weren’t prosecuted as witches, it really opened up the world for me and made me realize that, you know, we’ve been seeing the early modern period in a very kind of 2D way. It wasn’t just sort of flat-out misogyny at all times. It wasn’t just that if you’re an empowered woman, then you were going to be automatically accused and executed as a witch. Because frankly, there was enough misogyny. There was enough sort of legislated misogyny that if you wanted to get rid of a woman, there were way more straightforward ways of doing it than accusing them of witchcraft. I think that realizing that actually there were a lot of magic users and magic wielders, a lot of whom were women who were using this to kind of gain an income, get a decent living, and also have some kind of power in that and standing in their community. It means that society was a lot more complex and actually a lot more compassionate than maybe most people think.

BOGAEV: Well, thank you so much for this book. I mean, it gets really deep and also it’s really fun. That is an amazing combo. Thank you for that.

STANMORE: Thank you. I’m really, really glad. I mean, yeah, there are some wacky, wacky things in there. I just love… I feel like it’s basically gossip. It’s like 17^th-century gossip, and I just adore that.

BOGAEV: Me too. And it was really fun talking with you.

STANMORE: Oh, you too. Thank you so much.

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BOGAEV: Tabitha Stanmore. Her new book is Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic, and it’s out now from Bloomsbury Publishing.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical assistance from Lyndon Jones in Bristol, UK, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. We had web production help from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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