You Could Hire a Magician to Find Your Lost Stuff 400 Years Ago. The Real Danger Was If They Failed.

4 min readChristabel Robyns was only trying to find some spoons and a pewter jug. In 1629, there were no smartphones or microchips to track lost items and no hidden cameras to play back video of how they vanished. Instead, Robyns, a widow, is thought to have turned to a more unusual way of getting her belongings back: magic. Word apparently got around, because she soon found herself accused of witchcraft and facing possible death by hanging.Hers was hardly the only case of someone, especially a woman, being suspected of dabbling in the dark arts. In an age without modern technology, people with problems often turned to “cunning folk,” also known as service magicians, who used their own forms of magic to help. Some were healers or diviners. Others had a knack for finding lost or stolen objects. Whether Robyns was one of these cunning folk is unclear, but she must have either hired one or used magic herself, because she ended up before Ignatius Jurdain, a magistrate known for his rigid religious views. By then, courts across most of England had become skeptical of witchcraft accusations and were lenient toward the accused. Exeter retained its anti-witchcraft fanaticism.That is where historian Mark Stoyle of the University of Southampton comes in. Stoyle was born and raised in Exeter and has long been fascinated by centuries-old accusations of the occult. His research shows that Robyns was saved when the chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench stepped in and sent her case to a higher court outside Exeter. She escaped with her life, but many others prosecuted on little more than hearsay weren’t as lucky. In Exeter, even service magicians, who were usually seen as harmless, were at risk, especially when their magic failed. That’s what happened to John Blachett in 1666, when a client hired him to find a lost hood. Blachett insisted the hood was in a neighbor’s house, but a search turned up nothing, and the client reported him. He was tried for “certain devilish and hateful arts” but, fortunately for him, wasn’t convicted.“The city of Exeter possesses the grim distinction of being the last place in England in which people are known to have been executed for the crime of witchcraft,” Stoyle wrote in a study published in History: The Journal of the Historical Association. He also recently published the second edition of his book Witchcraft in Exeter, 1558–1666.Executions for witchcraft in Exeter are traditionally said to have ended in 1685 with the hanging of Alice Molland. However, no record of her execution has been found, and Stoyle has argued that a court clerk may have misspelled her name, writing “Alicia” instead of “Avicia,” or Avis. Local archives record an Avis Molland who died in 1693, eight years after “Alice” was supposedly hanged. If Stoyle is right, England’s last executions for witchcraft took place three years earlier, in 1682. That year, Temperance Lloyd, Susanna Edwards and Mary Trembles, known as the “Bideford Witches,” were hanged at Heavitree, then a parish on the outskirts of Exeter. Sometimes simply being near a person considered suspicious was enough to seal someone’s fate. Long before germ theory, people who fell ill and died soon after meeting such a person were often thought to have been bewitched.Society’s outcasts were frequent targets, too. Edwards, Lloyd, and Trembles were poor, living on parish relief and whatever scraps they could find. Each was also unmarried, widowed or abandoned, and a woman living alone was already viewed with suspicion. If someone fell ill with smallpox after meeting or even passing such a woman, she could end up in a prison cell awaiting a trial that might end in a death sentence. Female cunning folk faced particular danger in Exeter, because their work was easily mistaken for witchcraft. In 1642, a client hired Anne King, a weaver’s wife, to find out who had stolen a purse. King balanced a sieve on a pair of shears and recited suspects’ names, and the sieve turned when she said the name Marie Matthews. King herself was then reported and arrested for witchcraft, but she was released on bail and survived.In most of England, cunning folk went about their business while the authorities looked the other way. Stoyle’s research in the archives, however, shows that they often met a hostile reception in Exeter, where the outcomes for accused witches were sometimes recorded in court documents. A conviction was marked “culpabilis,” meaning “guilty,” followed by “susp.,” short for the Latin “suspensus,” meaning “hanged.” Burial records sometimes confirm these executions. One such case was Thomasin Short, whose name appears with several different spellings. She had been arrested again and again as a “scold,” an unruly woman who constantly criticized others and picked fights. Short is said to have shouted a dark threat at a family that then suffered several deaths. She was found guilty of witchcraft, and her court record is marked “susp.”“The particular sets of circumstances which resulted in Shorte…being hanged when a number of other supposed Exeter witches managed to escape that fate can only be guessed at,” said Stoyle. He suspects that an outburst of “popular rage,” combined with what seemed to be unimpeachable evidence, “...eventually persuaded the judges to hand down a death sentence.”Today, finding a lost spoon takes nothing more than a look under the couch cushions, but in 17th-century Exeter, searching the wrong way could cost a woman her life.Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.