In nineteenth-century Lincolnshire, the schoolmaster known as 'Fiddler' Fynes operated from Kirkstead — a hamlet by the ruins of a Cistercian abbey near Woodhall Spa — as one of the county's most prominent wise men or cunning folk. Unlike many practitioners who worked in secret, Fynes was openly Christian, attending church services regularly while simultaneously maintaining his reputation for solving supernatural problems and crimes by magical means. The Lincolnshire Folk Tales project, drawing on the 1934 fieldwork of folklorist Ethel Rudkin, has documented his practice as the most fully recorded cunning-man tradition in the county.
The story
His most celebrated technique involved the mirror oracle. When a farmer came to him to identify a thief, Fynes would have the farmer look into a mirror, where the thief's face would appear. The farmer would recognise someone — usually a labourer or neighbour — and Fynes would then instruct him to crack the mirror over the image. According to the tradition, the thief would develop a wound on his face corresponding to where the glass was struck, serving simultaneously as punishment, identification, and proof of Fynes's power. The technique had parallels in broader cunning-folk practice across England but was particularly strongly associated with Fynes locally.
Fynes sits within a rich Lincolnshire tradition of cunning folk who exploited the county's flat, marsh-edged landscape and its folklore of boggarts, fen lights, and witch-hares. He is distinct from the named witches already in the dataset (Dorrington Witch, Tetford Witch, Crazy Kate of Swineshead) by virtue of being a male practitioner explicitly identified as a wise man rather than a condemned witch, making him a counterpoint to the predominantly female Lincolnshire witch tradition.