The Cunning Folk Cards
Exploring the world of England's village healers, seers and magical practitioners
INTRODUCTION
The Wise Men and Women of Early Modern England
In most villages and towns throughout early modern England, there would have been someone set apart in the community, someone sought out in times of need and trouble. They could heal the sick when doctors were rare and expensive. They could find things that had been lost or stolen. And if ill fortune had befallen a family — a sickness that wouldn’t lift, livestock dying without cause, a run of misery that seemed to come from somewhere — they could name the source of the malevolence and offer a cure.
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These were the cunning folk. The name comes from an Old English word meaning ‘knowledgeable’ or ‘wise’, and knowledge was precisely what they offered — knowledge of herbs and remedies, of charms and counter-charms, of the invisible forces that the people of early modern England understood to move through the world and shape their lives.
They were not witches, though they worked in the same territory. Where witches were feared and accused, cunning folk were consulted and paid. They operated openly, often with the tacit approval of the church and the community, sitting somewhere between the doctor, the priest, and the magician — usually closer to the last two than the first.
Cunning folk have largely disappeared from the history books, crowded out by the more dramatic story of the witch trials. They deserve better. Here is an attempt to bring them back into focus — to look seriously at who they were, what they did, and what their world looked like from the inside.
THE CARD READER
Draw the Cards
The Cunning Folk Cards grew out of a simple question: what did these practitioners actually work with? Not the theory, not the theology — the objects, the creatures, the materials that passed through their hands.
The result is a 54-card deck drawn from the historical record. Each card names something from the cunning folk’s world — a toad bone, a wax poppet, a knotted cord, a sealed letter — and carries both a period-accurate historical description and an interpretive meaning grounded in what that object meant to the people who used it. The images are original, drawn in the woodcut aesthetic of the chapbooks and broadsides of the period.
The cards can be used as a reading — three cards drawn in sequence, each speaking to a different moment — or simply explored one by one as a way into the history. The academic literature behind them runs from Emma Wilby to Owen Davies to Tabitha Stanmore. The experience of using them is something else entirely.