New Forest coven

The New Forest coven were an alleged group of Neopagan witches or Wiccans who met around the area of the New Forest in southern England during the 1930s and 1940s. According to his own claims, in September 1939, a British occultist named Gerald Gardner was initiated into the coven, and subsequently used its beliefs and practices as a basis from which he formed the tradition of Gardnerian Wicca. Gardner described some of his experiences with the coven in his published books Witchcraft Today (1954) and The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959), although on the whole revealed little about it, saying he was respecting the privacy of its members. Meanwhile, another occultist, Louis Wilkinson, corroborated Gardner's claims by revealing in an interview with the writer Francis X. King that he too had encountered the coven, and expanded on some of the information that Gardner had provided about them.

As the Neopagan religion of Wicca developed in the latter decades of the twentieth century, some of the figures who were researching its origins, such as Aidan Kelly and later Leo Ruickbie, came to the conclusion that the New Forest coven had never existed, and that it was simply a fictional invention of Gardner's to provide a historical basis for his new faith. The historian Ronald Hutton accepted this as a possibility, although recognised that it was not "implausible" that the coven had indeed existed. Later research by Philip Heselton, which was published in the early twenty-first century, came to a different conclusion, indicating that there was much evidence for a coven of practitioners, whose members he identified as being Dorothy Clutterbuck, Edith Woodford-Grimes, Ernest Mason, Susie Mason, Rosamund Sabine and Katherine Oldmeadow. Another researcher, Steve Wilson, also concurred that the New Forest coven was real, but believed that it had originated from a Neopagan offshoot of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.

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