cunning folk very rarely suffered a similar fate. It was unusual for a cunning man or woman to actually be accused of witchcraft; in the county of Essex for instance, whereas around four hundred people had been put on trial for witchcraft, only four of those were identifiably cunning folk. However, many of the professional witch-hunters and theologians continued to proclaim the cunning craft as being the same as witchcraft, with them both being caused by the Devil. With the decline in the witch trials in the latter part of the 17th and early 18th centuries, partly due to the rise of the Enlightenment amongst the educated elite, a new law was introduced, the Witchcraft Act of 1736. Unlike earlier laws, this did not accept the existence of magic, and took the opinion that there never had been any witches, and it, therefore, came down heavier on the cunning folk, who were claiming to perform genuine magical spells. It portrayed the cunning folk as practitioners of "explicitly fraudulent practices designed to fool the credulous" in order to gain money off of them. Germany The belief in cunning folk and the use of "white magic" to be used for healing and as protection against "black magic" was once widespread in Germany; however, during the early modern period such practices gradually became less accepted by the authorities, partly because the belief in "white magic" was viewed by the church authorities to be contrary to Biblical teachings and partly due to the loss of revenues for certain groups such as barber-surgeons and physicians, as was the case in Rothenburg ob der Tauber in which periodical action was taken against users of "white magic". The usual punishment was banishment rather than execution as was common for others convicted of witchcraft and the use of "black magic" In Germany practitioners of folk-magic were almost always female; however, by contrast the Hexenmeister (also a term for a warlock) or Hexenfinder who hunted witches and "neutralised" them on behalf of society was always male. Ireland In Ireland, the cunning-folk were known as bean feasa ("woman of knowledge"); banfháidh or fáidhbhean ("female seer"); bean bhán ("white woman"), bean chaointe ("keening woman") and bean ghlúine ("joint woman"). These would provide traditional herbal cures and perform funeral tasks like preparing corpses. Gearoid Ó Crualaoich described the bean feasa as “an oracular authority for her community regarding the meaning and significance