George Pickingill

Who was George Pickingill?

George Pickingill was an English cunning man and farm labourer who lived and worked in the Essex village of Canewdon. His surname also appears in a number of variants, "Pickengale" and "Pitengale" among others. Pickingill was brought to wider public attention through the folklorist Eric Maple in the 1960s, as part of his research into beliefs in folk magic and witchcraft in Essex.

In 1974, the occultist E.W. Liddell began sending articles to British occult magazine The Wiccan on the subject of Pickingill. Switching to rival magazine The Cauldron in 1977, Liddell claimed to have been born into a witch family and to have been initiated into three traditions of English witchcraft. He asserted that the Elders of two of these traditions knew much more about Pickingill, and that they were using him as a vehicle through which to publish their claims. He claimed that Pickingill had not only been a cunning man, but had also been a practicing Luciferian or pagan member of the Witch-Cult who had founded nine covens across England. Liddell's claims have since been scrutinised and rejected by academic historians.