Throughout human history, and as far as we can tell before written history, the people

have had priests, magicians and shamans who would have worked magic and communed
with the Gods and Goddesses, the spirits of the land and water as well as the weather to
try and ensure the wellbeing of their family and village.

In many ways the coming of Christianity didn’t remove the need for high priests and
shamans to work the magic that people knew was necessary to protect them and ensure
their wellbeing, the roles simply transferred to the priests and bishops. Around 1426 for
example the bishop of Durham’s accounts contain a payment for signing sixteen cattle
with St Wilfrid’s signet to ward off the murrain [1][2]

Unfortunately however, not everybody had the money or power to be able to obtain such
magical services from the new hierarchy. The majority of the people had to either rely on
the services of the local cunning man or wise woman or work what magic was available
to them. We have seen one form of magic that was available to the general population,
that of Charms.

But Charms, as accessible as they are, were not the only forms of magic available to the
populous. Indeed there was a whole range of ‘simple’ magics that they could call on and
it is this ‘folk magic’ that I want to look at in this essay.

Practical Magic

Most, if not all of the folk magic practiced by people throughout the ages has been of a
very practical nature. Such magic was designed to help in the day to day lives of the
common people. One such example is in finding lost goods. People’s personal belongings
and goods were very important in an age where the law was for the rich and there was no
police to track down the local thief.

In 1554 William Hasylwoode confessed to the commissary’s court of London that

“having lost a purse with fourteen groats … took a sieve and a pair of shears and hanged
the sieve by the point of the shares and said ‘By Peter and Paul, he hath it’”[3]

Naming in all belief the person who he believed had stole it. If his suspicions were true,
he expected the guilty party to turn around and thus be proven guilty.

This idea of divining the guilty by a reaction to the guilty party’s name works on the
magical belief that the name of a thing had power over that thing, an old belief with only
the involvement of the Christian saints and deity taking the activity out of the realm of
diabolical magic. That’s not to say that such activities were favoured however. In 1641 a
labourer’s wife appeared before Lancashire Quarter Sessions for using the sieve and
shears to find out who had stolen a sheep and hen [4]

The finding of lost or hidden items has quite a large body of magical practice around it.
Today we still know and use the ancient practice of divining for water, treasure or even
the truth! The original use seems to have been for divination purposes - to divine the will
of the gods, to foretell the future and divine guilt in trials. During the Middle Ages
dowsing was associated with the Devil. In 1659 dowsing was declared Satanic by the
Jesuit Gaspar Schott. In 1701 the Inquisition stopped using the dowsing rod in trials.
Dowsing as practiced today probably originated in Germany during the 15th century,
when it was used to find metals.

An epigram by Samuel Sheppard, from Epigrams theological, philosophical, and

romantick (1651) runs thus:

Virgula divina.
"Some Sorcerers do boast they have a Rod,
Gather'd with Vowes and Sacrifice,
And (borne about) will strangely nod
To hidden Treasure where it lies;
Mankind is (sure) that Rod divine,
For to the Wealthiest (ever) they incline."

Seeing things to come

Living in such an unpredictable world it is not surprising that a great deal of the folk
magic was dedicated to trying to find out what the future held. It is also unsurprising that
as that the majority of the people of the country, until the last couple of hundred years at
least, were totally and inextricably tied up with farming and the land a lot of that folk lore
was dedicated to farming, weather and the harvest.

In order to ensure a good harvest, many blessings and rituals were performed. Some
distinctly Christian in nature, such as blessings of the fields performed by the local priest
at Rogationtide, though it could be argued that he was simply performing a duty that the
local pagan priest would have undertaken before him. We also see the remnants of pre-
Christian fertility rituals with the May Day celebrations and maypole dancing. All
designed to ensure a good harvest for the village.

Seventeenth century farmers would predict the price of corn by watching the behaviour
of grains placed on a hot hearth and most of us know at least one or two rhymes or saying
that are meant to enable us to predict what the weather will be over the next few days or
so. Such knowledge was common throughout history and is even referenced in the bible,

“He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, [It will be] fair weather:
for the sky is red.
And in the morning, [It will be] foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring.”
KJV Mat 16:2

But it wasn’t just the farmers that wanted to understand what was in store for them;
everybody wanted to know what the future held. Sometimes this was short term, maybe
the next year or season such as the belief that “If Christmas day was on a Sunday then the
year would be a good one”. Perhaps a somewhat more immediate and macabre example
of this desire to know what the future brings is the desire to know who will die during the
next year or so, presumably the diviner wasn’t hoping to see his or her own end though.
John Aubrey records the practice of sitting up on midsummer eve in the church porch in
order to see the ghosts of those that were due to die in the coming year[5]

Longer term predictions were also wanted on occasion, particularly at important points in
a person’s life. Perhaps the most familiar one being the rhyme Mondays child

Mondays child is fair of face,

Tuesdays child is full of grace,
Wednesdays child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturdays child works hard for his living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

Protection

In a world where there was very little certainty, and where magic, evil spirits and the
devil wandered the land just looking to people to harm, it is little wonder that much of the
folk magic was dedicated to protection. There were protection spells and charms that
would protect you, your cattle or your house.

Perhaps the most common form of house protection is that of placing concealed shoes
inside the fabric of a building. Archaeologists, as well as builders, have found these shoes
in building from many periods right up until the twentieth centaury.

These shoes are usually found concealed in chimneys, either on a ledge a little way up the
chimney or in purpose built cavities behind the hearth into which items can be deposited
from above. These have been termed 'spiritual middens'.
Other locations for hiding the shoes have included in walls, under floorboards, in window
frames and in staircases. Nearly all of the shoes discovered in this context are well worn,
half of those found belonged to children and only very rarely are pairs found.
Many explanations have been put forward as to why the chimney was such a favoured
place for these items.

One suggestion is that they were a fertility symbol. For example, Roy Palmer in his book
The Folklore of Hereford and Worcester cites a case from Broadwas-on-Teme where in
1960 a midwife refused to allow a young woman to remove her shoes until her child had
been born [6]
Another object that was thought to have magical protective properties was the Witch
Bottle, although they were nowhere near as popular as the shoes as a protective symbol.

What we know about witch-bottles is quite amazing. The effort that went into placing
them was quite substantial compared to that of shoes, which were merely thrown down a
hole or perched on an existing ledge. Many of the earliest bottles have been found upside
down buried beneath doorways and hearths. They are not exclusively inverted but this
seems to have been an important part of the practice in some areas. The most common
components of the contents of a witch-bottle are pins and urine.

Some examples have a heart shaped piece of felt material within them which has been
stuck with pins.[7] A common feature is that many of the pins have been bent before
being placed into the bottle

The aim of these bottles seems to have been, once again, to serve as a spirit trap. The
placing of the bottles at doorways and chimneys seems to support this interpretation.
Other interesting facts are that the bending of the pins ritually 'kills' them which means
they exist in the 'otherworld' where the witch travels - which is why you can't see them.
This is mirrored in the established ancient practice of breaking objects before they were
deposited in water as an offering to the God / Goddess.
The urine seems to be a way of making the bottle 'contain' the person again in a similar
way as worn shoes contain the person. Sticking pins into a heart soaked with your urine
would seem to be a way of fooling the witch into thinking that your heart is in the bottle,
so when the witch detects you, or rather the bit of you inside the bottle, they are trapped
inside the bottle impaled on the prickly pins.

That such folk magic was deeply engrained into the lives and beliefs of the people can be
seen by the number of these spells, incantations and rituals that has passed down to us
today. Often the original meaning behind them has become lost or distorted by time, as
with the maypole dancing, but many do survive. Just look at the number of coins that are
thrown into wells, pools and in fact almost any bit of available water.

The magic of Charmed and Harry Potter has recently captured the public imagination
with its books and spells and wands but for most people the real magic was that that they
could perform themselves and that gave them a measure of protection from the vagaries
of the world.

Fortunately today we no longer need to result to folk magic for protection against bad
luck or evil spirits and as long as the horse shoe on the door stays the right way up and it
doesn’t rain on St Swithins day we should all be OK.

[1] Bede, his life, times and writings, Thompson (oxford 1935)
[2] Murrain is a highly infectious disease of cattle and sheep. It literally means "disease"
and was used in medieval times to represent just that.
[3] Keith Thomas , Religion and the decline of magic, Penguin Books Ltd 1991
[4] Hale, precedents, P139;
[5] Aubrey, Gentilisme, pp26, 97
[6] Palmer, Roy, The Folklore of Hereford and Worcester, 1992, Logaston Press,
Herefordshire, p87.
[7] Merrifield, Ralph, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic, 1987, BCA, London.