The Cunning Folk and the Wise Women

The Cunning Folk and the Wise Women

I’ve always been drawn to people who lived quietly between the ordinary and the otherworldly—healers, charm-makers, and seers who walked among their neighbors with a pocketful of prayers and a pinch of mystery. The Cunning Folk and Wise Women were part of that world: practical, local, and needed. Neither saints nor villains, they worked at the place where fear meets hope—where a whispered charm might soothe a fever, and a bowl of water might answer a question no one dared to ask.

What They Did (and Why People Knocked at Their Doors)

From the late Middle Ages into the 19th century, “cunning folk” (in England) and “wise women/wise men” (across the Isles and parts of Europe) offered everyday magic: healing salves, protective charms, lost-property divination, countermagic against suspected curses, and advice for troubled hearts.[1] Their work was often a braid of scripture, folklore, and knack—Psalms spoken over herbs, wax dripped into water for omens, and written papers pinned into clothing as wards. Communities relied on them, even when clergy or magistrates frowned.

Three Visits to the Threshold

1) Bessie Dunlop of Ayrshire (Scotland, 1576)

When neighbors sought help, Bessie Dunlop did what many wise women did: she combined remedies with second sight. At her trial, she said her knowledge came from a spirit guide named Thom Reid, a man slain in local conflict who now counseled her on cures and lost goods.[2] To some she was a help; to authorities, she had wandered too near the fairy road. Her story preserves a rare first-person account of how “advice from the other side” could look inside a working life—a reminder that folk healing and spirit traffic were not always cleanly separable.

“He bade me take milk and herbis, and say the Pater Noster thrice…” — attributed to Dunlop in her examinations.[3]

2) A “Klok Gumma” by the Lake (Sweden, 18th–19th c.)

In Scandinavia, village healers called klok gumma (wise woman) or klok gubbe (wise man) mixed Christian devotion with very old rites: reading wax or lead shapes poured into water, whispering blessings over woven threads, or “measuring” a fever with cord and prayer.[4] A common pattern: the patient’s shirt was passed through a window three times at dusk, each pass sealed with a Psalm. If the fever “stuck” to the knot, it was said the illness would break with the dawn. Officials called it superstition; villagers called it hope.

3) Old Mother Redcap of the Moor (Northern England, c. 17th–18th c. lore)

Under the nickname “Mother Redcap,” several northern English wise women left a tangle of stories: one brewed ale “that never soured,” another set witch-bottles beneath hearthstones to turn away malice, and a third fixed a cattle blight with a paper charm pinned in a cowshed beam.[5] In many versions, her “danger” was mostly reputation; what people truly feared was that her blessings worked. The line between cunning and witch often depended on whether the result pleased or offended the neighbor who told the tale.

Materials of Power: Charms, Herbs, and Speaking Names

The toolkit was humble but charged with meaning. Protective papers carried short scriptures (especially John 1, the Magnificat, or bits of the Athanasian Creed).[6] Herb lore leaned on yarrow, rue, St. John’s wort, and mugwort—plants with old reputations at the borders of sickness and sorcery.[7] For “ill-wish” cases, practitioners might use a witch-bottle: pins and hair in brine buried by the threshold to reflect the harm back—half prayer, half folk counter-magic.[8]

Charm fragment (English, 17th–18th c.):
“As Christ went over the land, / the Cross in His hand, / He blessed the corn, He blessed the mead— / so bless this house from ill and need.”[9]

Further Reading & Footnotes

  1. Owen Davies, Cunning-Folk: Popular Magic in English History (2003). ↩
  2. Bessie Dunlop trial, Ayrshire (1576), in Scottish Witchcraft Trials, ed. Pitcairn (1833). ↩
  3. Primary testimony excerpted in Christina Larner, Enemies of God (1981). ↩
  4. Eva Wigström, Folktro och Trolldom (1880s); Bengt af Klintberg, Swedish Folk Belief. ↩
  5. Jacqueline Simpson, Green Men and White Swans (2010); English folklore collections on Redcap legends. ↩
  6. Owen Davies, Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. ↩
  7. Pauline Campanelli, Wheel of the Year (1989), and traditional English herbals. ↩
  8. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584); and archaeological studies on witch-bottles, British Museum archives. ↩
  9. 17th–18th century English charm fragments, Bodleian Library MS. Rawlinson D.1313. ↩

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