This book is about magic and people. Magic, in one form or another, is a constant in all societies across the world and throughout time. The place it inhabits in society, and how those who practise it are treated, are the variables; the fact of its presence is rarely a novelty. Despite this, the study of magic has largely been quartered separately from other lines of historical inquiry, as a strange outlier to the mainstream of political, social, economic, or archival discourse. This is an inaccurate and unhelpful interpretation of a fundamental part of human lived experience.

Magic is a constant across the world and throughout time. The place it inhabits in society and how those who practise it are treated are the variables; its presence is never a novelty. While witchcraft is recognised as a phenomenon of the medieval and early modern periods, service magic – performed to a useful end in exchange for a fee, and more common than witchcraft – has been overlooked. This book gathers over 700 instances of magic use in England between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries to demonstrate the entrenched nature of service magic in premodern society, and explore how it was perceived and incorporated into daily life. Service magic was well established by the time of the witch trials, and was recognised as a useful tool from at least the fourteenth century. It was used to meet needs that nothing else could address, like healing the chronically sick, finding lost goods, ending poverty by locating buried treasure, and kindling love. Though its use was technically illicit, first treated as a moral crime and then a secular one from the mid-sixteenth century, for most people magic was an accepted and even welcome aspect of everyday life.

Chapter 1 focuses on the most common demands placed on magic by wider society during the late medieval and early modern periods. This chapter acts as the foundation for the rest of the book: it cements the idea of magic as a useful tool that could be employed for mundane or everyday purposes. It also establishes what these purposes generally were, using a statistical approach to gauge the popularity of certain services. As such, Chapter 1 is divided into sections covering the primary demands made on magic, including healing and unwitching; theft and goods recovery; love magic; and treasure hunting. Under each of these sections their fluctuating popularity is explored, as are the methods used to bring about the desired outcome.