Canewdon's reputation was already old by the time the folklorist Eric Maple began collecting it in the 1950s, but Maple's fieldwork is the source almost everything now said about the village ultimately traces back to. The core belief, as he recorded it, held that six witches were always resident in the parish: three in silk, meaning women of some standing, and three in cotton, the poor. The number never fell, because as one died her power passed to another before the church bells, or in some tellings the tower itself, could ring her out. A widely repeated rider warned that if the tower of St Nicholas's ever fell, the last witch would die with it.
The belief attached itself most durably to George Pickingill (c. 1816–1909), a farm labourer of famously foul temper who lived in the village into his nineties. Villagers credited him with the power to freeze a labourer's tools mid-swing until he was paid tribute, and consulted him as readily as they feared him. Twentieth-century occult writers, chiefly the amateur historian Eric Maple and later a chain of popular writers on witchcraft, built Pickingill up into the head of a supposed hereditary tradition of English hedge-witchcraft passing down through named covens. It is a claim with no evidence earlier than the 1960s, and folklorists now generally treat it as invented lineage rather than recovered history.
What is harder to dismiss is the persistence of the belief itself among Canewdon residents well into living memory, entirely apart from what any book made of it. Reporters visiting the village in the mid-twentieth century found the six-witches tradition still current and taken half-seriously. Whether that reflects an unbroken current of genuine village belief or a story kept alive by outside attention is, at this distance, not really answerable.
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