WITCHCRAFT IN CORNWALL

Since the mid-nineteenth century, when the railway first made mass tourism possible, Cornwall has enjoyed a reputation as a 'land apart' - a legendary kingdom inhabited by piskies, giants, fairies, and witches. Cornwall continues to be regarded as a particularly 'witchy' place, yet far from being the preserve and fancy of folklore, a considerable body of evidence suggests that belief in witchcraft formed a serious part of the way Cornish people over the past 500 years viewed their world, offering a means to understand misfortune and illness and a way to measure moral conduct.

By the middle ages, ancient beliefs in the efficacy of sorcery and enchantment had become mixed with Christian notions of the Devil and of Evil, leading to the idea of the power of witchcraft to inflict harm and spread disease by Satan's aid. It was believed possible to be 'overlooked' or begrudged by an ill-wish from a witch, resulting in misfortune or illness. Fears surrounding the prevalence and incidence of witchcraft centred on the home and work. Relations between friends and neighbours could be affected in close-knit village societies if witchcraft was suspected, also in cottage industries or farming; cattle dying mysteriously, milk failing to churn properly, crops blighted: there were many varied opportunities for a witch to inflict misery and hardship upon village economies that depended upon the land.

Until recently historians have tended to assume that witchcraft beliefs largely died out during the early eighteenth century, as the last of the witch trials in England took place in 1712 and the laws against the crime of witchcraft were repealed in 1735/6. In many respects they followed the opinions of the social reformers, clergy, and intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who viewed such beliefs as credulous and superstitious, and believed that with better education and further preaching of Protestant Christianity, witchcraft would be vanquished from the minds of the masses. It came as something of a surprise then, at the end of the eighteenth century, to find that witchcraft beliefs were still vibrant.

Far from dying out in the eighteenth century, the evidence shows that traditional witch beliefs continued through the nineteenth century - the great age of Cornwall's industrialisation, before finally faltering and such beliefs largely petered out around the 1940s and '50s. This was mostly due to the mechanisation of farming, personal insurance, universal health care and the decline of village economies. Despite the twentieth-century collapse of witchcraft beliefs in Cornwall, ill-wishing is still to be met with occasionally in this twenty-first century.

While the history of organised religion in Cornwall, especially that of the Methodist movement, has been intensively researched over the years, it is noticeable that popular belief in witchcraft and the wider supernatural world has received scant attention by historians of Cornish culture. This site is intended to serve as a reference for on-going post graduate research into the topic by me, Jason Semmens. I am interested in traditional witchcraft beliefs and practices, properly described in various historical sources, and their place in the social history of Cornwall. Together with the forthcoming book on the Cornish Folklorist William Paynter and his collection of early twentieth century Cornish folklore, to be published in summer 2008, I am currently writing a full-length history of witchcraft in Cornwall, based on more than a decade's worth of research, to be published in early 2009.

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