For centuries, ordinary people feared witches — and scratched, buried and hung small things to keep them away. This is their story, with the sources: what people believed, and what they did with their own hands.
A six-petalled flower drawn with compasses near doors, windows and fireplaces. Historic England says protection from witches and evil spirits is the most widely accepted reading — though some see a sun sign or an apprentice’s geometry practice.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceTwo overlapping Vs, which English Heritage notes some read as a call on the Virgin Mary for protection. In 2024 its volunteers mapped them at Gainsborough Old Hall, beside circles, a pentangle and a “curse” with the owner’s name written upside down.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceMesh and chequerboard marks carved under the floor and around the fireplace of a room made ready for King James I after the Gunpowder Plot, thought to trap demons. Tree rings date the timber to 1605–06. The king never came.
Story onlyA bottle filled with pins, hair or nail clippings and buried under a hearth or threshold. People believed it turned a spell back on the witch. The earliest written case is in Joseph Glanvill’s book of 1681.
Story onlyA pebble with a natural hole, nailed to doors or hung over beds “to keep away witches”. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum holds one found fixed on a nail to a Dorset cottage door, collected in 1880–81.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceAn old Scots rhyme: “Rowan-tree, and red thread, / Put the witches to their speed!” A red thread kept against harm in Scotland; a red thread tying two lovers in China. Same colour, two stories.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceA shiny glass ball hung in a window. People said its light dazzled witches, or that a witch would be caught counting the strands inside. The Museum of Cambridge has one made in 1721.
Story onlyWorn shoes hidden up chimneys, in walls and under floors. Northampton Museum’s index lists nearly 3,000 of them. Nobody wrote down why; keeping harm away is only the usual guess — and we say so.
Story onlyThe earliest known use of the word: the Roman physician Serenus Sammonicus told readers to write it in lines that lose one letter each time, forming a shrinking triangle, and wear it round the neck.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceSATOR · AREPO · TENET · OPERA · ROTAS — five Latin words that read the same forwards and backwards, horizontally and vertically, scratched on a wall at Pompeii. Centuries later, people wrote it on walls and paper as a charm.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceStaves for journeys, for safety and for good fortune from Icelandic spell books: the Galdrabók of about 1600 and the Huld manuscript of 1860. Not Viking Age, whatever the shops say — about 800 years later.
Story onlyWicca took shape with Gerald Gardner’s Witchcraft Today (1954); the maiden–mother–crone moon owes much to Robert Graves’s The White Goddess (1948). Wicca and Paganism are living faiths — the 2011 census counted 56,620 Pagans and 11,766 Wiccans in England and Wales — so we describe them with respect, not as costume.
Story onlyThe five-pointed star of the court diviner Abe no Seimei (921–1005), honoured at Kyoto’s Seimei Shrine. Ama divers in Mie still mark it, with a grid of “many eyes”, on their work clothes. The same star was scratched on English houses — two ends of the world, one shape.
See the pendants · from £28 Sample priceCoin-shaped charms that were never money, cast with wishes such as “drive out evil, bring down good fortune” and kept for a family’s safety. London’s Science Museum has one made for a newborn child.
Story onlyTen people were hanged at Lancaster in 1612 after the Pendle trials, recorded by the court clerk Thomas Potts. Accusations of witchcraft still lead to violence today; in 2021 the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution against it. We tell this history, and we never sell “witch” merchandise about real victims.
From the Witchcraft Act of 1735 to today’s consumer law, Britain has long had rules about selling magic. We follow them gladly.