James Murrell ( – 16 December 1860), also known as Cunning Murrell, was an English cunning man, or professional folk magician, who spent most of his life in the town of Hadleigh in the eastern English county of Essex. In this capacity, he reportedly employed magical means to aid in healing both humans and animals, exorcising malevolent spirits, countering witches, and restoring lost or stolen property to its owner.
Born in Rochford, Essex, Murrell grew up in the area before moving to Southwark in London, where he was married in 1812. He had seventeen children with his wife, and the family later moved back to Essex, settling in Hadleigh, where Murrell gained work as a shoemaker. At some point he also began working as a cunning man, gaining fame for his work in this field on both sides of the Thames Estuary. Describing himself as "the Devil's Master", he cultivated an air of mystery about himself, also experimenting with the creation of iron witch bottles. On a number of occasions his magical activities gained the attention of the local press. Although many residents valued his services and viewed him as a good and benevolent individual, his activities proved controversial and divisive. Many educated figures criticised what they saw as his role in encouraging superstition among the local population; his death certificate recorded his profession as that of a "quack doctor".
Murrell's fame greatly increased after his death when he was made the subject, albeit in a highly fictionalised form, of a 1900 novel by Arthur Morrison. Morrison also produced a more objective study of the cunning man, published in The Strand magazine. During the 1950s, the folklorist Eric Maple conducted further research on Murrell, finding much local folklore still surrounding him in the Hadleigh area, including the allegation that he had the ability to fly and to instantaneously transport himself vast distances. Murrell has continued to attract the attention of historians and folklorists studying English folk magic, and is referenced in works by scholars like Ronald Hutton, Owen Davies, and Ralph Merrifield.
Life and family James Murrell was likely born in Rochford, Essex in 1785, and then baptised on 9 October 1785 in the St. Mary the Virgin Church in Hawkwell, Essex. His parents were named Edward Murrell and Hannah Murrell, née Dockrell. According to the investigations of the journalist Arthur Morrison, Murrell was the seventh son of a seventh son. After completing school, Murrell entered into an apprenticeship with the surveyor G. Emans, who operated from Burnham, a town to which Murrell's brother Edward had moved. There is evidence that Murrell subsequently moved to London, where he worked as a stillman at a chemist's shop in the 1800s or early 1810s.
On 12 August 1812, Murrell married Elizabeth Francis Button at St. Olave's Church, Bermondsey in Southwark. Button was also from Essex, having been baptised in Hadleigh on 5 December 1790. Between 1814 and 1834, there are baptismal and burial records of the couple having seventeen children, many of whom did not survive infancy.
On 26 December 1820, Murrell returned to Essex to attend the wedding of his sister Hannah at Hawkwell's St. Mary the Virgin Church. She and her new husband Daniel Whitwell then proceeded to move to nearby Canewdon, with Murrell visiting them there on a regular basis thereafter. By the early 1840s, one of Murrell's daughters, Louisa, had moved in with the childless Daniel and Hannah.
Elizabeth Murrell died in Hadleigh on 16 April 1839, aged forty-nine. The cause of death was cited as "inflammation of the chest", and her body was buried on 21 April in Hadleigh's St. James the Less Church. In the 1841 national census, Murrell was documented as a shoemaker living in Hadleigh with four of his children (Eliza, Matilda, Edward, and Eleanor). However, in the June 1844 wedding documentation of Eliza, Murrell was listed as a labourer, and on the October 1844 marriage documentation of Matilda, he was listed as a herb doctor. By the 1851 national census, he again specified his profession as that of a shoemaker, and recorded that he was living in Hadleigh with his children Edward, Eleanor, and Louisa, as well as with his grandson William Spendle.
No images of Murrell survive. Accounts describe him as a short man who walked with his hands behind his back and hummed as he went. He was also noted for wearing a hard hat, bobbed tail coat, and iron goggles, while carrying a whalebone umbrella and a basket into which he placed the herbs that he collected. His appearance reportedly scared local children, of whom he was nevertheless fond.
Cunning career
In south-east Essex, Murrell was known as "The Devil's Master", a title that he himself used as a self-description. He cultivated an air of mystery about himself by keeping himself largely apart from wider community life, speaking seldom, and traveling largely at night. His house was locally known as a "place to avoid" and those visiting him reportedly often waited for some time outside, plucking up the courage to enter. Within the cottage, Murrell had drying herbs hanging from his ceiling, and his devices were reported to include a crystal, a mirror, and a bowl of water. Other items that Murrell used in his magical practices were a copper charm with which he would allegedly distinguish whether an individual was lying or not, and a "trick" telescope that supposedly enabled him "to see through brick walls". The latter device was examined by an acquaintance of Murrell's, who deemed it to be "a clumsily home-made arrangement of bits of looking-glass, such as might once have been bought at a toy-shop". Murrell possessed a library of books, including works on astrology and astronomy, conjuration, and medical texts. He also wrote a number of personal notebooks containing information on such topics, the last of which survived into at least the 1950s.
Murrell claimed that he could exorcise malevolent spirits, destroy witches, and restore lost or stolen property to its owner, as well as providing services as an astrologer, herbalist, and animal healer. He charged a halfpenny for curing warts, and two shillings and six pence for breaking a witch's spell. He was reputed to cure sick animals by passing his hands over their affected area, muttering a prayer, and then hanging an amulet about their neck, and was requested to use these powers at farms in Essex, Suffolk, and northern Kent. During his lifetime, Murrell was known on both sides of the Thames Estuary, although not apparently beyond that. He did however receive postal correspondence from a range of places, including from Essex girls who were working as maids in London.
Murrell used witch bottles as part of his magical practices, and, during the 1950s, the folklorist Eric Maple encountered claims that Murrell was able to summon anyone he wished using them, including individuals who had gone overseas. Murrell experimented with the use of a witch bottle constructed out of iron; he had two such devices created by a local smith, Stephen Choppen, and had the plug at the mouth soldered up before the bottle was placed in a fire as part of an anti-bewitchment spell. The idea behind this was that the bottle itself would not explode under the heat, and that thus it could be reused on other occasions. According to folklore collected by Maple, the smith's attempts, which were initially unsuccessful, succeeded only after Murrell had recited a charm.
According to Maple's research, various accounts of Murrell's astrological activities continued to be told in the community after the latter's death. One held that he was able to predict the death of a man to the "very day and hour" while another was that he also predicted the time of his own death to the very minute. It was claimed that on one occasion he was asked to provide the horoscope of a newborn child, but that he refused, stating that "Make the most of the child, you will not have it for long", after which the child soon died, while when an old lady asked him to predict the future for her, he refused to do so for more than nine years ahead, with her dying in the eighth.
Morrison found that the locals whom he spoke to – many of whom remembered Murrell from several decades before – found the cunning man to be "a white and lawful wizard, who warred against the powers of darkness with all his might"; they added that it was "no sin to employ the arts of a man like him". Conversely, Maple noted that his research indicated that attitudes toward Murrell varied within the local community. Although many individuals, particularly among the poor, viewed him as a valuable member of the community, others – particularly among the wealthier strata of society – deemed him to be "a dangerous quack and disseminator of superstitious nonsense". Maple found one woman, Mrs Petchey, who described him as "a smuggler and a bad man. He did things that wouldn't be allowed today - them witchcrafts, I mean. Nowadays, people would say he'd sold his soul to the Devil, wouldn't they? They'd put him away for his witchcrafts." Conversely, Maple noted that Mrs Murrell, who was a descendant of James, described the cunning man as "a good man and a regular churchgoer". According to the folklore obtained by Maple, Murrell would often have debates about Christian theology with a local parson, the Reverend Thomas Espin – who had been Professor of Pastoral Theology at Queen's College, Birmingham – and that Espin expressed the view that Murrell "knows his Bible better than I do... He is either a very good man or a very bad one, and I can't make up my mind which."
Documented cases
Several accounts about Murrell's activities have been preserved, either because they were reported on by the regional press or because they were passed down in oral tradition. One example focused around a rumour that had spread in nearby Canewdon which claimed that two prominent local women were malevolent witches. One of these individuals was Mary Ann Atkinson, the wife of the Reverend William Atkinson, the vicar of Canewdon. The other was Eliza Lodwick, a widow who took control of the 500 acre Lambourne Hall following the death of her husband in 1826; on two separate occasions labourers were convicted of stealing from her, while another died accidentally on her property. Locals concerned that these women were witches approached the vicar with their beliefs, but he dismissed them. They subsequently turned to Murrell, asking for his aid in exposing the women as witches. According to claims made in the 1950s by the-then 94-year-old local man Arthur Downes, the Canewdon villagers believed that Murrell could force all of the witches to assemble and dance about the churchyard against their will by whistling. However, the vicar intervened, with locals believing that he was doing so to protect his wife. The vicar himself died in March 1847.
In April 1849, the Ipswich Express and Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper reported on a case in a village near to Rayleigh in which a girl had been afflicted with fits. Her family believed that a witch was to blame, with Murrell being called in to free her of the perceived bewitchment. He commissioned the local blacksmith to create an iron witch bottle, into which he placed toe-nail clippings and locks of hair belonging to the putative victim. The bottle was then placed into the hearth and heated until it exploded, with this supposedly defeating the witch's machinations.
In February 1857 the Chelmsford Chronicle reported that £10 in silver had been stolen from Golding Spearman, keeper of the Tilbury Fort canteen. When the police were unable to identify the culprit, Spearman turned to Murrell, who asserted that he would place a spell on the thief which would result in the return of the money. Shortly after, a soldier discovered the stolen money and returned it to Spearman, who attributed its retrieval to Murrell.