Enchanted Britain and Ireland: A Complete History of Magic in the British Isles

A Bronze Age sword is dropped into the Thames as an offering to powers beneath the water. A Roman citizen scratches a curse onto lead and casts it into a sacred spring. A medieval monk copies a spell for summoning angels into the margins of a psalter. A seventeenth-century farmer buries a bottle of nails and urine beneath his hearth to break a witch's curse. A modern Druid raises her arms to greet the solstice sunrise at Stonehenge. Five moments separated by thousands of years.
One continuous tradition. This is the first comprehensive history of magic in the British Isles - spanning five millennia and encompassing England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Drawing on archaeological discoveries, trial records, grimoires, folklore, and the accounts of living practitioners, it reveals a magical tradition that was never confined to the margins but was embedded in the medicine, the architecture, the literature, and the daily life of these islands. No previous book has told this complete story - from Neolithic ritual to contemporary paganism, from cunning folk to ceremonial magicians, from fairy faith to digital covens. The British Isles have never been disenchanted.