Eric Maple

{{Short description|English folklorist}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2015}}

{{Use British English|date=April 2015}}

Eric Maple (1916–1994) was an English folklorist and author known for his studies of witchcraft and folk magic in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Essex, in particular his first-hand research into the folklore surrounding the cunning men James Murrell and George Pickingill.

Born in Essex to a family of Kentish ancestry, his mother was a Spiritualist medium.{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}} Having little formal education, he has been described as a "self-made man".{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}} In the early 1950s, he discovered the scholarly field of folkloristics, and decided to use a folkloric methodology to explore the folk stories of his home county.{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}}

This resulted in the publication of four research articles in Folklore, the journal of The Folklore Society: "Cunning Murrel" (March 1960), "The Witches of Canewdon" (December 1960), "The Witches of Dengie" (Autumn 1962), and "Witchcraft and Magic in the Rochford Hundred" (Autumn 1965).{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}} The folklorist Alan A. Smith would later describe these papers as "a perhaps unique contribution to the literature of English witchcraft. Totally jargon-free, they are the raw stuff of folklore, stories told by real people about still remembered (reputed) witches and their doings."{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}} These articles and others would be reprinted in Essex Countryside{{cite web | url=http://www.hadleighhistory.org.uk/page_id__47.aspx | title=Cunning Murrell Bibliography | publisher=Hadleigh & Thundersley Community Archive | access-date=12 December 2014}}

in a series, "Legends of the Essex Witches".

He then embarked on authoring a wide range of books about folklore and the supernatural for a popular audience, which proved sufficiently financially successful that he became a full-time writer.{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}} However, these books eschewed any academic standards, with Smith noting that they lacked "the strength" of his earlier papers in Folklore.{{sfn|Smith|1995|p=87}}