The Cornish Pellar: Conjurors, Charms, and the Last Custodians of Brittonic Magic

Written by David Caldwell · 14 February 2026

Introduction: The wise person of the West Country

In nineteenth-century Cornwall, when trouble came without a clear cause, people often went to the Pellar before they went to anyone else.

A child suddenly taken ill. A heifer failing for no obvious reason. A run of dead calves. Money gone from a chest. A fishing boat that could not draw a catch. In these moments, many families did not begin with doctor, priest, or magistrate. They began with the local conjuror, the wise woman, the charmer, the one who could name an enemy and prescribe a remedy.

That figure, in Cornwall, was the Pellar.

Modern readers often meet the word in passing and assume it means little more than fortune-teller. The sources suggest something bigger. The Pellar could be healer, diviner, dispute-mediator, finder of lost goods, and breaker of ill-wishing. At times, the Pellar stood in open tension with church and law. At other times, the same community that mocked “superstition” in daylight went quietly to the Pellar after dark.

The result is not quaint folklore at the edge of history. It is a social institution in its own right.

What a Pellar actually did

The surviving reports and oral tales describe a recognisable pattern of work.

1) Countering bewitchment and ill-wishing

This is the core role. When repeated misfortune hit one household and not another, people suspected intention. Someone had “overlooked” them, ill-wished them, or set harm in motion. The Pellar’s job was to diagnose who and how, then lift, turn, or block the harm.

2) Restoring stolen goods and missing money

Even sceptical writers admitted that the threat of consulting a Pellar could force return of stolen property. In villages where reputation mattered, fear of exposure could work faster than formal justice.

3) Treating specific ailments

Accounts mention Pellars who charmed warts, stopped bleeding, treated ringworm, and performed cures for burns, nettle stings, and other common injuries. The methods ranged from spoken formulas to carried objects and ritual actions.

4) Advising on risk, timing, and luck

Pellars were consulted before journeys, harvest tasks, and other uncertain decisions. Divination and fortune-telling were part of the trade, but they sat beside practical village concerns, not apart from them.

The spring season and “twelve hours’ sun”

Several accounts place renewed protection in spring, when daylight was said to have “come back” and there was “twelve hours’ sun.” Folk usage points strongly to the spring turning point around the equinox, or the period felt to mark its arrival in local reckoning.

In that seasonal frame, protection was not a one-off purchase. It was renewed. This fits older agricultural thinking, where danger and vitality rose and fell with the year.

Story: the Ladock Conjuror and the man in the shaft

One of the most famous Cornish tales concerns Johnny Hooper, the Ladock Conjuror. A man named Samuel Cornish fell into a mine shaft and was missing. Hooper was consulted and reportedly told searchers that the man was alive and sitting at the bottom, and that he would be found before a stated time. He was then recovered.

Whether one reads this as second sight, intelligence gathered from local knowledge, or narrative improvement after the event, its social meaning is clear. The conjuror was treated as someone whose word could guide urgent action when conventional methods had stalled.

Later commentary, even from critics, still struggled to dismiss Hooper outright. That tension runs through the whole tradition.

Story: an ill-wished family and six black silk bags

An 1887 report gives one of the most vivid household narratives in the entire record.

After a quarrel with a neighbour known as Old Robin, a family suffered a chain of disasters: two children scalded and dead, calves lost, a heifer failing, a pig in poor condition. They became convinced they were under an ill-wish and went to a female Pellar at Helston.

The Pellar is said to have identified the situation before hearing the full account. She named an enemy, described ties between families, and supplied six small black silk bags with instructions for use. The report then claims that the misfortune lifted from the afflicted household and struck the enemy’s horses, whose feet swelled grotesquely before they died.

Taken literally, it is a tale of curse and counter-curse. Taken historically, it reveals the Pellar’s social function. She gave the family three things formal institutions could not easily provide: diagnosis, ritual action, and moral narrative.

Story: the bewitched boat at Padstow

A twentieth-century recollection preserves a North Coast story set in 1848. Padstow boats were catching heavily, except for one vessel. Its crew believed it had been bewitched. They consulted a Pellar, who advised nailing a horseshoe to the boat’s bottom. They did so, and next night the catch returned.

To a modern eye, this is classic maritime folklore. To working fishers, it was practical. The rite restored confidence and gave a crew a way to act together under pressure. The successful catch then confirmed the cure and strengthened belief in the Pellar’s authority.

Charms and papers: what was carried, folded, and worn

One of the strongest clues to the Pellar tradition lies in material culture: parchment slips, folded packets, silk bags, protective formulas, and symbolic signs.

The SATOR square

Cornish correspondents linked local charm use to the famous word square:

SATOR

AREPO

TENET

OPERA

ROTAS

It appears in antiquarian discussions as both Roman and magical, and in Cornish reporting as a practical protective device against evil and witchcraft. Whether every user understood its origin is doubtful. What matters is that it was copied, preserved, and trusted.

NALGAH and sacred names

Another described charm contained the word NALGAH, a winged figure, and powerful devotional names including Tetragrammaton, Jehovah, Elohim, Shaddai, and Adonai, followed by a plea for mercy.

This is a striking mixture: biblical language, occult framing, and folk deployment in one object worn close to the body.

Abracadabra and planetary signs

Reports also mention triangular ABRACADABRA forms, pentagrams, crosses, and planetary symbols. Some writers believed these were ancient survivals. Others argued they were garbled borrowings. Both can be true at once. Traditions often survive by reusing what works, whether fully understood or not.

Were these really ancient survivals?

Nineteenth-century writers loved grand origin theories. They connected Cornish charms to Romans, cabalists, Phoenicians, Sabian star religion, and Semitic traders in the old tin routes of Dumnonia.

Some of this is speculative, sometimes wildly so. Yet the core point is still useful:

• Cornwall had deep, long trade connections.
• Brittonic culture persisted strongly in Cornwall, Wales, and Brittany.
• Local magical practice was layered, not invented overnight.
• Christian, classical, and vernacular elements coexist in the same charm corpus.
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So the safest conclusion is not “pure Roman survival” or “pure Celtic survival.” It is continuity through mixture.

The “Pellar blood” idea and hereditary claims

Folklore repeatedly claims that true Pellars came through special birth lines, often “seventh son” or similar formulas, with knowledge passed in regulated ways. These claims may not describe strict institutions, but they did mark status. They told clients this was not an ordinary trade open to anyone.

That matters because authority in this world came from more than technique. It came from lineage, reputation, and fear.

Women in the craft: Tammy Blee and others

The Pellar tradition was never exclusively male.

Tammy Blee

Tammy Blee, associated with Helston, appears in later recollections as a feared and famous practitioner. Reports tie her to James Thomas (“Dr Thomas the Wizard”), to dramatic local stories, and to relic objects such as a decorated scent bottle. Some material is clearly embellished, but her prominence shows that female practitioners could hold major public reputations.

Female Pellars in local healing

Other reports describe women who could staunch bleeding by hand and charm, or handle specialised cures. In practice, villagers cared less about theory than results.

Respect, fear, and contradiction

Cornish newspapers preserve a constant contradiction:

• Editorials denounce conjurors as impostors.
• Clergy condemn the work as superstition or worse.
• Magistrates are urged to prosecute.
• Yet people keep going, often from all classes.

One writer mocked the conjuror’s “old decanter stopper” method for showing the face of a suspect. Another, equally sceptical, conceded that goods did return and that fear of the Pellar could be socially effective.

The contradiction is not noise. It is evidence. The Pellar stood exactly where official authority was weakest: in cases of suspicion, envy, rumour, and unexplained bad luck.

William Bottrell: chronicler, collector, custodian

Any serious account of Cornish folk belief returns to William Bottrell (1816-1881), “Old Celt,” whose work preserved oral material that might otherwise have vanished.

He collected stories from miners, fishers, labourers, and parish talk. He copied charms. He recorded speech and character with unusual sympathy. His obituary recognised how much might have been lost without him.

Was Bottrell himself a Pellar?

The evidence does not show him as a professional conjuror taking clients in the classic way. But he was close to that world, close enough to preserve operational details, not just colourful anecdotes.

The best reading is this:

Bottrell was less a Pellar in office than a custodian of Pellar culture.

He stood near enough to the networks to understand their logic, and early enough to record them before they broke apart.

Decline, survival, and afterlife

By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, several pressures reduced the old system:

• More policing and legal action against fortune-telling.
• Expansion of formal schooling.
• Religious campaigns against folk magic.
• Industrial and social change that weakened older parish structures.
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Yet decline was uneven. Reports into the twentieth century still describe active charmers and Pellars, though often with narrower specialisms. By then, the full village system was fragmenting, but techniques and beliefs remained alive in pockets.

That pattern is common in folk traditions. They do not simply vanish. They contract, adapt, and go quiet.

What the Cornish Pellar tells us

The Pellar was not only a “witch doctor” and not only a village trickster. The role combined medicine, theatre, law, religion, and social psychology in one local office.

When misfortune struck, people needed more than explanation. They needed action. The Pellar provided actionable meaning.

That is why the tradition endured for so long. It met needs that modern categories split apart: bodily cure, moral story, communal pressure, and ritual protection. In one person, households found a way to move from helplessness to response.

Seen in that light, the Cornish Pellar is not a curiosity from a backward past. The Pellar is a key to understanding how communities survive uncertainty, and how old Brittonic worlds continued to speak long after official history declared them finished.

Sources and tradition base for this article

This draft draws on material from Bottrell and from newspaper reports and correspondence in, among others, the Cornubian and Redruth Times, Cornish Telegraph, Cornishman, Royal Cornwall Gazette, West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser, Western Morning News, Newquay Express and Cornwall County Chronicle, and Cornish Guardian.