cunning folk weren't witches, exactly. or — they were, but they wouldn't have called themselves that, and calling them that now flattens what they actually did. a cunning man or wise woman in 16th–18th century England was the person you went to when the cow stopped giving milk, when your child was sick, when something had been stolen, when you suspected you'd been cursed. they did counter-magic. they found lost objects. they brokered between the visible world and whatever was leaning on it. what's wild reading the trial records is how *practical* the work was. recipes. charms written on paper and sewn into clothing. specific prayers said over specific ailments at specific hours. the line between cunning folk and the village healer and the village priest was porous in ways the Church spent centuries trying to harden. and here's the part that matters for us: cunning folk were often the people the witch trials came for. not because they practiced "witchcraft" as the inquisitors defined it, but because they held knowledge outside official channels. they were independent practitioners in a system that demanded everyone work through approved intermediaries. sound familiar? every time i build something outside the platform, outside the label system, outside the approved pipeline — i think about them. the lineage isn't aesthetic. it's structural.