English Cunning Woman Spirit Companion · Margery

Meet Margery.

In the villages of England, people believed there was one sure way to break a witch’s power. You had to draw her blood “above the breath”, from the forehead, above the nose and mouth. So when a neighbour was suspected of witchcraft, men would sometimes wait for her in a lane, hold her down and score her forehead with a nail or a pin until it bled. It happened for hundreds of years, well into the nineteenth century.

Margery carried that mark for the rest of her life.

She was born around 1600 on the edge of the Essex marshes, near the small port town of Manningtree, where the river Stour runs out to the sea through mudflats and reeds. Her mother was a cunning woman, one of the village wise women of England who found lost things, named thieves, healed cattle and children, and took off bewitchments. Margery learned it all.

Her speciality was witch bottles. When a family believed a witch was working against them, Margery would take a stoneware jug and fill it with the family’s own urine, a few strands of their hair, bent pins and iron nails. She sealed it and told them to bury it under their hearth or their doorstep. The idea was that the witch’s curse would be caught in the bottle and turned back on her, and that she would feel the pins and nails until she stopped. Hundreds of these bottles have been dug up from under old houses in East Anglia, some still sealed, some still full.

Margery made more of them than anyone in Essex.

People used her and feared her in equal measure. When she was thirty, a neighbour’s best cow died, and the neighbour decided Margery had done it. He waited for her one evening in the lane behind the church, held her against a wall and scored her forehead from the hairline to the bridge of her nose with a horseshoe nail. It left a dark line that never faded.

She never went to the magistrate. Two years later, when the same man’s house was being troubled by something he could not explain, he came to her door, cap in hand. She made him a witch bottle. It worked. She never let him forget it.

In 1645, the bad years came to Manningtree.

England was in the middle of a civil war, and East Anglia was full of fear. A young man from Manningtree named Matthew Hopkins, with his partner John Stearne, began going from village to village hunting witches. He called himself the Witchfinder General. He had no official title at all. But he had methods. 

The accused were “watched”: kept awake for nights on end, sitting on a stool in the middle of a room, while men waited to see whether their imps, the small demons witches were said to keep, would come to feed. Hopkins even published the names of the imps he claimed to have seen: Vinegar Tom, Pyewacket, Grizzel Greedigut. The women were searched for the Devil’s mark. And they were swum: their thumbs tied to their opposite toes, and thrown into a pond. If they sank, they were innocent. If they floated, the water had rejected them, and they were witches.

They came for Margery in the spring. They watched her for four nights. She did not sleep. She did not speak. She did not confess. On the fifth morning, they tied her thumbs to her toes and threw her into the mill pond.

She floated.

She said later that the water simply would not take her. It held her up like a hand.

That summer, at the assizes in Chelmsford, nineteen women were hanged on the word of Matthew Hopkins. Margery was not one of them. She was left in the jail, waiting, while women around her died of fever and hunger in the dark.

Then the tide turned. Clergymen began preaching against Hopkins. People started to ask how so many witches could have lived in East Anglia for so long without anyone noticing. In 1647, Hopkins gave up his work and went home. That August, at the age of twenty-seven, he died of consumption.

Margery was released that autumn. She walked home to the marshes, and went straight back to work.

She made witch bottles for another thirty years. She found lost rings and stolen sheep. She took the evil eye off children and the curse off cattle. And when people asked her about Hopkins, she smiled her crooked smile and said only that she had made one bottle in that jail that she had never told anyone about.

She died in 1679, in her own bed, with the dark line still on her forehead.

Now Margery walks again.

What she can do for you

Margery is a practical, hard-working cunning woman, and she is good for:

• protecting your home and the people in it, the old English way
• catching curses, bad wishes and ill will, and sending them straight back where they came from
• taking off bewitchments, bad luck and the evil eye
• protecting your animals and pets, the way cunning women protected cattle and horses
• finding lost things, and finding out who took them
• standing up to people who abuse their power over you
• getting back up after humiliation, and refusing to be broken by it

Over the years

At first, Margery guards. You can feel your house feels harder to get into, and that the people who mean you harm start to drift away.

As the bond grows, she starts teaching the craft of the cunning folk, the everyday magic of a household. Over the years, she becomes the kind of ally you go to whenever something goes wrong, and she will always have something practical to suggest.

What she is like

Tough, sharp-tongued and darkly funny, with the crooked smile of someone who has been through the worst and come out the other side. She is not sentimental. But she is fiercely loyal to the people who treat her well, and she has a long memory for everyone who does not.

She does not like bullies, liars or anyone who says, “it’s for your own good.”

How she shows herself

The smell of marsh water, reeds and woodsmoke. A tingling on your forehead. A sudden sense that someone is talking about you behind your back, followed by a sense of it being dealt with. Dreams of mudflats at low tide, a mill pond and an old woman with a dark line on her forehead. Lost things turning up exactly where you ask her to look. And pins and nails appearing in odd places around the house.

What to do for her

Margery was a working woman. Keep it simple:

• Make a small witch bottle: a clean jar with a pinch of salt, a few pins or nails, a sprig of rosemary and a strand of your hair. Seal it and keep it by your front door or under your bed.
• When you feel someone working against you, put your hand on the jar and say her name.
• Give her a little ale, bread and cheese, or a cup of tea.
• Keep an old iron nail by her vessel.
• When she finds something for you, thank her out loud.

They kept her awake for four nights, threw her in a pond and left her in a jail to die, and she still outlived the Witchfinder General by thirty years.

How your companion speaks

Your companion can reach you through dreams, thoughts, words, feelings and images, through a pendulum, through warmth or cold, or through automatic writing. How soon that happens depends on the spirit settling into your home, on their willingness, and on your own ability to connect. Sometimes it begins before the vessel arrives.

Before you choose

Everything known about this spirit is on this page. There are no further images, details or hidden knowledge beyond what is written here, and a printed copy comes with your order. What you discover from there is yours alone.

The pendant you receive is the exact one shown. This listing is for this one item only.

By buying, you confirm that you understand what it means to keep a spirit companion. Please read Help & FAQ first. For my background and the story behind Grimrunes, see About Hazel.

— Hazel