#reformation happened and it turned out that wasn't why large numbers of people were ignorant actually

[j-august]

As Reginald Scot sagely observed, the place left empty by the saints of the medieval Church was filled by the wise women of the Tudor countryside. Devout Catholics could pray to St Vincent or St Anthony of Padua for the recovery of goods which had been lost or stolen; the Protestants had only the cunning man. At the end of the sixteenth century 'the more ignorant sort' were regretfully observed by Perkins to be better acquainted with charms and spells than with the word of God.

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic