Cunning men of Sussex

Chambers wrote that a hundred years before, the trade of conjurer or cunning man was common and not thought disgraceful. One Hassell had been in full practice as a cunning man near Tunbridge Wells quite recently, and Sanders of Heathfield, who died about 1807, was one of the best known in Sussex; a respectable man once comfortably off, he neglected everything for astrology and was said to have died in the workhouse. In London about 1789 the failed linen-draper Isaac Tarrat, in a fur cap and white beard, told fortunes in an upper room near the Middlesex Hospital for a shilling a day, while an old woman took the money in the shop below.