Widely considered to be a cunning man, or vocational folk magician, he reportedly employed magical means to offer cures for ailments and to locate lost property, although was also alleged to have threatened to place curses on people.

As part of his research into beliefs regarding folk magic and witchcraft in nineteenth-century Essex, Maple had interviewed a number of Canewdon residents and collected their stories about Pickingill and his reputation as a cunning man.

Although it has been suggested that local people were inventing claims to please Maple, many of which were based on older tales regarding the Essex cunning man James Murrell, subsequent research by historian Ronald Hutton has confirmed aspects of the folklorist's original accounts.

"Bill" Liddell began publicising claims that secretive hereditary witch families had informed him that Pickingill was not simply a rural cunning man but that he was a major figure in the nineteenth-century esoteric community.

Prominent Wiccans Doreen Valiente and Lois Bourne have expressed criticism of his claims, which have also been rejected as spurious by such historians and scholars of religion as Maple, Hutton, Owen Davies, and Aidan A. Kelly.

By the time of the 1901 census, he was claiming to be 95, moving his birth to c.1806; it has been suggested that he made himself appear older to ease the process of collecting parish assistance from the church.

[4] Throughout his life, Pickingill would also use a variety of different spellings of his surname on official records, including Pickengill, Pickingale, Pickengal, Pettingale, Pitengale, and Pittengale.

This attracted attention from other areas, including London, and in September 1908 a journalist visited Canewdon; he arrived by automobile, the first that Pickingill had ever seen, and allowed the old man to ride in it.

[6] This was provided by the folkorist Eric Maple, who was making a systematic study of nineteenth-century traditions regarding witchcraft and magic in south-eastern Essex,[7] and who examined the case of Canewdon in the winter of 1959–60.

[8] He had begun his enquiries by meeting with a number of elderly local residents at the home of the schoolmistress, from whom he gained a variety of tales pertaining to magical practices in the village.

In this work, he erroneously described south-eastern Essex as the last bastion of English witchcraft beliefs, and ignored scholarly conventions in relating his information, resulting in a critical reception from folklorists; the book nevertheless was popular and sold well.

[5] Maple wrote that Pickingill was known to use cursing and malevolent magic on occasion, something that the folklorist contrasted with the activities of other contemporary cunning folk that he had studied, such as James Murrell.

[5] At harvest time, Maple recorded, Pickingill was known to wander around the field threatening to bewitch farm machinery, with many farmers thus offering him beer so that he would leave them alone.

[16] Meanwhile, as Maple noted, Canewdon had developed a reputation associating it with witchcraft and magic by the end of the nineteenth century, when it was often thought of as "The Witch Country" and avoided by many wagoners who feared having their vehicles bewitched.

[22] She then added the information—which she had not given to Maple or Hutton—that her own mother had talked of Pickingill leading a local coven, and that he received "many visitors" from "a long way away" who sought his magical knowledge.

[25] Hutton responded critically to Ward's claims, highlighting his own investigations into the local folklore and his interview with Taylor to express the view that there "seems little doubt" that Pickingill was a cunning man, although "there are still questions over what sort of one he was".

[26] In his counter-response to Hutton, Ward accepting that Pickingill could have been associated with "some apparent supernatural control or knowledge of horses" as Taylor had claimed, but that this did not automatically make him a cunning man, for which there remained no contemporary historical evidence.

[27] According to Maple's account, in the last few weeks of Pickingill's life, when he had become very ill, the local people moved him to the infirmary against his will, where he declared that at his funeral there would be one more demonstration of his magical powers.

[4] He was buried at Canewdon's St Nicholas Church on 14 April; although his stated age of 103 was recorded, the vicar added a note asserting that this was erroneous, for in reality Pickingill was "born at Hockley 1816 [and] was only in his 93rd year".

Several surviving Craft families, a number of solitaries, and my own Brethren were at first amused – and then alarmed – at the Witchcraft beliefs being propounded by Gerald Gardner and Alex Sanders.

[36] He stated that these various Elders had chosen him to disseminate the information because he had been involved in both hereditary witchcraft and Gardnerian Wicca and because he was based in New Zealand, thereby making it hard for anyone to trace their identities.

[41] Despite Liddell claiming that the material he was putting forward came from various sources, the historian Ronald Hutton noted that it was all presented in a "single, dogmatic, authorial voice", with no indication of where the different pieces of information came from.

[42] According to Liddell's initial 1974 claims, since the eleventh century the Pickingill family had been priests of a pre-Christian, pagan religion devoted to the worship of the Horned God.

[48] Liddell also claimed that Pickingill despised Christianity and wanted to see it overthrown; to this end he collaborated with Satanists and included Satanic elements within his ritual practices, something which horrified other members of the East Anglian witch-cult.

[59] Liddell also asserted that Pickingill was influenced by a coven that had been founded in the early nineteenth century by a group of Cambridge University academics led by Francis Barrett and whose rituals were based largely on Classical sources.

"[48] Liddell believed that while many hereditary witches despised him, Gardner represented "the spiritual heir of Pickingill", because he had similarly reformed and propagated witchcraft for contemporary purposes.

[36] In her 1978 book Witchcraft for Tomorrow, the Wiccan Doreen Valiente – who had been Gardner's High Priestess in the Bricket Wood coven during the 1950s—stated that she had an "East Anglian source" from Essex who claimed that many of Liddell's assertions were correct.

[70] In his 2013 biography of Valiente, Jonathan Tapsell stated that the Liddell material was "generally regarded as a hoax", being "a spurious history at best, or a malicious prank at worst.

[36] Pagan studies scholar Ethan Doyle White noted that in his history of the Traditional Witchcraft movement, Children of Cain, Howard "remains cautious and refrains from accepting [Liddell's claims] outright".

[87] Kelly believed that either Liddell or his Elders had purposely created a "phony history" in order to hide the fact that Gardner had invented Wicca in its entirety in the early 1950s.