Around the year 1000 CE, a field blessing ritual went like this: The first four sods were taken at night and soaked in oil, honey, yeast, holy water and the milk of every animal to be kept in the field. A field fertility invocation half in Latin and half in Angle Saxon was then said after which the sods were kept in a church until after four masses have been said. The sods were then returned to the field and a prayer said to the East, the Christian direction.

The next prescribed step in this ritual spell was for the farmer to obtain unknown seeds from beggers and pay them generously. He put on his plough incense, fennel, sacred soap and salt, and finally these seeds. Over this, he then said an old blessing including the words:

"Erce, Erce, Erce, earth's mother,

May the all-ruler grant you, the eternal lord,

fields growing and flourishing,

propagating and strengthening,

tall shafts, bright crops,

and broad barley crops

and white wheat crops

and all the earth's crops ...

Be well earth, mother of men!

May you be growing in God's embrace,

with food-filled for the needs of men

After the 12th Century, the concept of magic changed. According to Dr. Karen Jolly, an authority on Angle-Saxon religious or magical practices, among country folk it continued to be based on an underlying pagan animistic sense that all of nature was alive and filled with spirits. However, the country use of armlets, medicinal charms, and so forth, as a focus of these natural powers became increasingly known as "low magic" while the intellectual elite developed a "high magic" for which literacy was required for it utilised astrology, Alchemic, classical and hermetic texts. Books of ritual high magic were composed known as grimoires. The church tolerated mostly this high magic. The "low magic" remained the world of the countryside and its healers, witches, and cunning folk.