THE CORNISH WITCH-FINDER

William Henry Paynter (1901-1976) was a Cornish antiquary and folklorist who specialised in collecting witch-stories and folklore during the 1920s and 1930s: crucial years when beliefs in witches and ill-wishing were in decline in Cornwall. Paynter was an astute observer and a tireless collector of folklore, and his folklore collecting preserved many stories of Cornish witchcraft and cunning-folk that would otherwise have been lost.

Paynter was born in Callington and later lived at Liskeard. He travelled all over Cornwall on what he called his 'Witch Hunt' and was popularly called 'The Cornish Witch-finder' for the novelty of his research. Paynter visited every parish in Cornwall and heard tell stories of witchcraft; he was also witness to many cases of witchery and collected objects associated with witch-beliefs. He was made a bard of the Cornish Gorseth in 1930 in recognition of his work, and took the bardic name 'Whyler Pystry', or 'Searcher Out of Witchcraft.'

Paynter was a prolific writer and published a large number of articles on his findings, which are a vital record of the survival of witch beliefs and practices into the early decades of the twentieth century. He also wrote a book on witchcraft in Cornwall, which was never published. As Paynter wrote before the Second World War, after which so many of the old beliefs in the supernatural collapsed, Paynter's writings may be said to comprise the last significant collection of Cornish folklore; they are a snapshot of what Cornish people actually believed before the modern world intruded upon and largely banished traditional witchcraft beliefs; they also pre-date the rise of modern pagan witchcraft, in the post-war years. Indeed, as an old man in 1969, Paynter wrote a retrospective on the fieldwork he conducted in his youth and could note that "Witchcraft in its traditional form appears to have gone forever."

Due to his work Paynter was regarded as "the eminent Cornish folklorist" and was a familiar figure on Westcountry television and radio. Paynter was also a founder member of the Callington Old Cornwall Society, in 1928, and did much to stimulate interest in Cornwall's past in that part of the Duchy.

In 1959 Paynter set up the Cornish Museum at East Looe, where he exhibited the collection of Cornish artefacts he spent his life collecting. He included in his displays the charms and witchcraft artefacts he collected on his 'witch hunt', early lighting devices, a section on early transport, another on John Wesley, relics of Cornish mining, a china clay exhibit, a section of an old Cornish kitchen, and many others illustrating how people lived in past generations.