From the Hedgwitch's Journal: When the Old Gods meet the New Religion and the Hedgewitch

 

When the Old Gods Met the New: Healers, Cunning Women, and the Changing Faith of Medieval England

Long before the word “witch” carried the dark meaning it would acquire in later centuries, women who knew the properties of plants, understood childbirth, treated wounds, and tended the sick occupied an important place in their communities. They might be called healers, wise women, cunning women, or simply læce—a word associated with healing. Their knowledge was practical, inherited, local, and often deeply intertwined with the spiritual world.

But the faith of the people who practiced these traditions was changing. As Christianity spread through Anglo-Saxon England, older Germanic beliefs did not simply vanish. Instead, Christian prayers, biblical figures, pagan ideas, plant lore, charms, ritual actions, and older concepts of supernatural illness could exist side by side. The surviving medical manuscripts offer a remarkable glimpse into this complicated religious landscape.

One of the most important sources is Bald's Leechbook, a tenth-century collection of medical remedies preserved in Old English. It contains recipes for everything from wounds and infections to digestive problems, fevers, eye ailments, and women's illnesses. Some remedies are recognizably herbal and practical, while others include spoken charms, ritual actions, amulets, or religious invocations. The manuscript belongs to a Christian literary culture, yet it preserves material that reaches back into much older traditions. Scholars have also identified evidence of cultural exchange with Irish and Latin medical traditions within the Anglo-Saxon healing corpus.

The Lacnunga, meaning “remedies,” takes this mixture even further. Compiled around the late tenth or early eleventh century, it contains medical recipes, prayers, charms, herbal knowledge, and ritual instructions. It is particularly famous for the Nine Herbs Charm, one of the most intriguing surviving examples of Anglo-Saxon healing. The charm names nine plants and gives them powers against illness and poison, while also invoking Woden. Yet Christian elements appear within the same healing tradition. The result is neither simply pagan nor simply Christian. It is a record of people attempting to understand and combat illness using every source of power available to them.

The Nine Herbs Charm is especially revealing because Woden and Christ appear within the same broader healing tradition. Woden is associated with the defeat of a serpent, while Christ is invoked elsewhere in the charm. The text was preserved in a Christian manuscript, and scholars continue to debate exactly how its pagan material should be understood. Rather than imagining a clean dividing line between “pagan magic” and “Christian medicine,” the manuscript suggests something much more complicated: old ideas could be retained, transformed, or placed within a Christian understanding of the world.

The same blending appears in other remedies. A healing recipe might begin with herbs and a physical treatment and then require prayers to be spoken over the medicine. One Anglo-Saxon medical recipe, for example, instructs the healer to sing Christian prayers including the Benedictus, the Magnificat, and the Credo, along with an invocation of the four Evangelists, before applying the remedy. Here the plant, the preparation, the spoken word, and Christian prayer all become part of one act of healing.

This tells us something important about the women and men who practiced healing. Their worldview was not necessarily divided into the categories we use today. A person could believe that a particular plant possessed a special power because of its nature, inherited lore, or relationship with the supernatural world, while also believing that God ultimately possessed the power to heal. A spoken charm could be accompanied by the sign of the cross. A herbal remedy could be prepared according to generations-old custom and then blessed with Christian prayer.

Even supernatural explanations for illness could become Christianized. Some Anglo-Saxon charms speak of elves or other supernatural forces as causes of sickness, yet Christian prayers and the Mass could be employed to drive those forces away. One influential study of the charms argues that these texts should not automatically be regarded as surviving pieces of pagan religion; instead, they can reveal how older popular traditions were incorporated into a Christian worldview.

The evolution was not always peaceful or seamless. By the time of the Benedictine Reform in the tenth and eleventh centuries, learned churchmen increasingly distinguished legitimate læcedom, or learned healing, from practices described with words such as galdor and drycræft, which could carry associations with charms or sorcery. Some of the practices that had once been part of ordinary healing could therefore acquire a more suspicious reputation, particularly when associated with women.

Yet the manuscripts themselves preserve the evidence of this older world. The Old English Herbarium, Leechbook III, Bald's Leechbook, and the Lacnunga all demonstrate that medieval healing was an extraordinary mixture of inherited plant knowledge, classical medicine, folk traditions, ritual, prayer, and Christian theology. Four major medical collections from Anglo-Saxon England survive, and scholars increasingly view them not simply as collections of primitive folk remedies but as products of learned literary and ecclesiastical culture.

Perhaps this is where the idea of the medieval cunning woman becomes most interesting. She did not necessarily stand outside Christianity, nor did becoming Christian require her to forget everything her grandmother had taught her. The hedge, the herb garden, the household shrine, the spoken charm, the prayer, and the healing recipe could occupy the same spiritual landscape.

The old ways did not simply disappear. They changed names, acquired new prayers, lost old gods, gained saints, and sometimes survived quietly inside Christian practices. A healing woman might reach for mugwort, whisper an inherited charm, invoke Christ, and trust the remedy all at once.

For centuries, this blending of traditions was simply part of how people understood sickness, nature, faith, and healing. It is only from a much later perspective that we try to separate these practices into neat categories such as “pagan,” “Christian,” “medicine,” or “magic.” The manuscripts tell a more complicated story—and perhaps a more human one.

The medieval healer lived in a world where the sacred was everywhere: in the herb gathered from the roadside, the spoken word, the turning of the seasons, the chapel bell, the written prayer, and the mysterious powers believed to move through the natural world. Her faith, like her medicine, was something inherited, adapted, and continually transformed.