A 54-card deck exploring the world of England's village healers, seers and magical practitioners
Not so long ago… England had its own popular magicians
The Cunning Folk
A 54-card deck exploring the world of England’s village healers, seers and magical practitioners
They could change a heart, heal the ill, find the lost, or unwitch a curse… but usually for a fee.
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Read their stories
There were hundreds of cunning folk, and many villages and towns had someone you could ask. Our twelve, presented as the court cards, are among the most famous. Their stories are not legends, they are in the record, and worth retelling.
Who were the cunning folk?
Most people, when they think of magic in old England, think of witches. Pointed hats. Broomsticks. Cauldrons. But there was another group of magical practitioners, nearly forgotten now, who were for three centuries as familiar a presence in English life as the doctor or the priest. The cunning folk.
In the records they go by a wonderful variety of names: wise man, wise woman, wizard, conjuror, charmer, blesser, magician. In Cornwall, pellar. Cunning once meant wise, not sly. The word comes from the Old English cunnan, to know, and the cunning folk were the knowing ones. Magic was their trade. They named their services, and they charged for them.
A Presence in Every Parish
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, in many parts of England, there were cunning folk nearby. They healed, they found, they named. And the stories told about them travelled.
Stories Told About Them
It was said of James Murrell of Essex that he called himself the Devil’s Master, that he wore iron goggles to see what others could not, and that he named the exact hour of his death in advance and died on it.
Moses Pitt recorded in 1696 that Anne Jefferies of Cornwall fell senseless in a garden, woke claiming six small people clothed in green had carried her somewhere she could not describe, and spent the following months healing the sick without eating and refusing every penny offered.
Richard Blakeborough set down in 1898 what the people of the North Riding still remembered of John Wrightson: that he knew what you were going to say before you said it, that he travelled the moors in a black cloak hung with bottles and jars, and that he was more accurate than anyone who laughed at him.
Known By Their Communities
These were not isolated figures. The surviving records document hundreds of them, and those are only the ones that left a record. Each one was known by their community, each one sought out across parish boundaries by people who had heard the stories and needed the help. They did not advertise. They did not need to.
The Line Between Cunning and Witch
The line between a cunning person and a witch was not where most people imagine it. It was not a line between good and evil, nor between the godly and the diabolical. It was a line drawn by circumstance, by accusation, by who was asking and what they needed from the answer. The same practitioner who unwitched a farmer’s cattle on Tuesday could find themselves named as the one who witched them on Wednesday. Most considered themselves Christians, doing God’s work by means that God had placed within reach. What the courts called devilry, they called knowledge.
The Written Record
And they left traces. They appear in court records, pamphlets, and parish accounts, but they also kept their own: casebooks recording their clients’ troubles, almanacs annotated in their own hands, printed charm books marked up with use. These were working practitioners, operating openly, in communities that knew exactly where to find them.
This Is Their Story
They have largely disappeared from the history books, crowded out by the more dramatic story of the witch trials. That was never really their story. This is.
Where our cunning folk lived
How the deck is structured
Fifty-four cards in five parts, from where the power came from to what people hoped for.
Why a deck of cards?
The cunning folk are known from court records, pamphlets and local memory, scattered across centuries. This project gathers them into a deck of playing cards, a form almost everyone has held. Turn a card and someone from the record turns up: a person, an object, a practice. The deck is a doorway into their world, a way to glimpse their lives and hear their stories told.
Where the power came from. It might come from blood, from contact, from graft or from choice. Each Ace names one of those origins. They are not objects or people. They are the beginning of the pattern.
What they used. Every Pip is a real object, charm or practice from the record: a love potion, a witch bottle, a toad bone. Each number is a chapter, rising from mixing and minor charms to the Nines, the Dominions. The suits keep to four areas of life: Hearts for hearth and home, Diamonds for health and healing, Clubs for fortune and finding, Spades for soul and shadow.
What it was all for. Happiness, Health, Wealth, Peace. No practitioner appears on a Ten, because once the wish is granted there is no more need of one.
The people. Twelve real practitioners, a Jack, Queen and King in each suit: Jacks for the notable cunning folk, Queens for the great cunning women, Kings for the great cunning men. They run from Margery Jourdemayne, burned in 1441, to Billy Brewer, who died in 1890. Look for them among the Pips. Their names keep turning up in the stories of the objects they used.
The world they worked in. Providence, which cunning folk believed they served, and Opposition, which they were sometimes accused of serving. The Angel and the Man in Black are the faces those powers wore. They belong to no suit.
The whole deck
Each suit has a theme, an area of life. Each rank has one too, and from Two to Nine that theme is a chapter of the Book of Secrets. Every card is where a suit meets a rank: the Two of Hearts is Mixing at the hearth, the Love Potion.
Read from Ace to Ten and you follow one working from its source to its end. Turn the Ace and you are at the root. Turn the Ten and the spell is over.
The Book of Secrets
Where every card is explained.
What the Book is
Turn a card and you meet an object, a charm or a practice. The Book of Secrets is where you find out where it came from. Each plate sets out what the thing was, who used it and what the record says: court depositions, pamphlets, parish accounts, the occasional museum piece. The name comes from the printed books of secrets of the early modern period, collections of recipes, remedies and tricks. This one is a companion to the deck, built from the surviving evidence.
Five ways in
Will you turn the cards?
Each card names something from the cunning folk’s world, such as a toad bone or a knotted cord, and carries both a historical description and an interpretive meaning.
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The Card Reader:
Claim the Gifts. Work the Craft. Achieve the Wishes. Call on the Folk. Let the Powers guide.
Turn Three Cards for a
Consultation
The cards turn again next midnight.