The Cunning Folk Cards

Dick stopped at the Llindir Inn on his way to Llanrwst and was charged fourpence for the ale and sixpence for the bread and cheese. He considered this outrageous. He paid it anyway. Before leaving he wrote a spell on a slip of paper, tucked it quietly under the leg of the table, and rode off into the dark, whistling.

That evening the serving girl began dancing around the kitchen, leaping and spinning, shouting "six and four are ten, count it o'er again." The landlord came down to stop her and immediately began dancing himself. The landlady came to stop them both and joined the dance. All three of them were spinning and stamping and shouting, "six and four are ten, count it o'er again," unable to stop, until the noise woke the neighbours.

One of them recognised the work of Dick Spot. He saddled a horse and rode after him, and found Morris some miles down the road, taking his time, still whistling. No need to hurry back, Morris said. Just burn the paper under the table. They burned it. The dancing stopped.

Morris worked as a cunning man for nearly eighty years. This is just one of the fantastical stories recorded about him.

James Murrell wore iron goggles to see what other people couldn't. He predicted the exact hour of his own death and died on it. John Wrightson built up his hearth fire and welded two mocking visitors' chairs to the floor, leaving them to roast until he felt they'd learned their lesson. Anne Jefferies was carried off by six fairies in green at nineteen, came back able to heal anyone who asked, and never took a penny for it again.

These are the cunning folk. Not witches, though the same person who lifted a curse on Tuesday could be accused of casting it on Wednesday. In the records they go by a wonderful scatter of names: wise man, wise woman, conjuror, charmer, pellar if you were in Cornwall. Cunning meant wise, not sly, from the Old English cunnan, to know. They spoke charms, broke curses, found what was lost, told you who'd wronged you, and charged for it, openly, as a trade. At their peak there were several thousand of them working at once. Then they were almost entirely written out of history, crowded out by the witch trials. That was never really their story.

The Cunning Folk Cards is a project I made as a way into that history, through the people who actually did the work. 54 cards, real cases, real names, pulled from the records where most of this got quietly filed away. Use them to explore the cunning folk's world, have your fate foretold in a three card spread, or build a spell of your own.