Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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Thematically he moves us from tales of a stupid and outwitted Devil which are just recastings of much older giant or fairy lore through increasing fear and anxiety to culminate in the sinister Hounds of Hell motif which appears to be drawn from German romanticism. In most of the stories, the Devil is outwitted by mortal man or woman. And if I was advising him, I'd tell him to find a way to conceal his hoofs. They're a dead giveaway. If a man could make other men do his bidding, if he had the power to make them sit, or stand, or go as he wished, and could tell who was going to live, and who was going to die, then that man was in a fair way to being the little devil of his neighbourhood. The Devil knew all about power – that was why he was always dressing as a gentleman – but he did not give it away readily, not without a fight. (p. 123-4) There's a spectrum to the stories, though. While most have a relatively happy ending, some are chilling, even as we know better. Before beginning this I had considered any Devil-related features on the landscapes that I know well.

Lightning strikes on the highest point of a village could wreak serious damage to fabric but also to people if a service was being taken at the time. The choice between blaming God (socially dangerous) and one's own sinfulness could be evaded by actually seeing (literally) the Devil in the act. It's a wide spectrum, and thus the Devil takes many forms, not always hideous. He's useful, too, in all his guises, for us humans. He's a default explanation for the inexplicable, as well as a convenient excuse. The Devil made me do it. Stories also get transmuted constantly according to who is telling the tale and to whom. The same story told against one village may get garbled by that village to be told against the village that told it first. Garbling and multiple versions are normal. What folklore is not is some fixed popular culture marking out some timeless and ancient division from the culture of some oppressing elite nor is it some atavistic survival of ancient pagan ways although traces of older Celtic and Nordic memes may sometimes be identified. The most significant for me, is Hell Gill and Devil’s Bridge in the Dales, leading into Wensleydale - and the Devil's Bridge in Kirby Lonsdale.

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Perhaps it is no coincidence, on multiple levels, that this occurred at the same time as the exercise of Tudor authority and the codification of sovereignty. Henry VIII’s insistence that ”this realm of England is an empire” (see my review of Magic in Merlin’s Realm, by Dr. Francis Young) was an almost unprecedented step, stating that there was none higher than God who might command the monarch. Further, as the dynasty continued, the Elizabethan age was one in which universality came by recognition and exercise of that same sovereign, unequalled power – since the monarch was supposedly divinely ordained. The gentry may (or may be not) be beasts and monsters for all their finery, but their effective satirisation as easily bamboozled pompous hypocrites with little comprehension of the realities of daily life can be a potent weapon when deployed at the correct opportunity. Consider the way US television personality Bill Cosby had his sexual crimes brought to public awareness by comedian and actor Hannibal Burress talking about it during a show which subsequently went viral, or the way satirical publications have strongly fought against the tactics of silencing via lawsuit if one wishes for further modern examples. This is what popular folklore studies should be - learned and yet readable. Jeremy Harte takes all the topographical references to the devil in England (with an occasional nod to Wales) and creates a narrative that gives us profound insight into traditional English culture and history. after newsletter promotion Harte shows how local myth is a complex 'lattice', a collective work of the imagination that is constantly being reworked At one of its finest moments, and towards the end of the book he discusses how historically it was frowned upon to do pretty much anything on a Sunday, and how in various parts of the country stories of the Devil taking punitive measures against those intent of enjoying themselves, were common.

The brief comparison with Celtic stories is instructive because the Welsh tradition managed to avoid the early modern emphasis on the Devil and so retained forms of the same stories as the English with an older medieval cast of characters. But the Devil is a frequent, if not constant, presence. He's the one who tells me to hurry, that I could save time by pulling my sweatshirt off as I'm running up the stairs, and I hear him chortle as I rearrange my nose. He says things like Have another drink and Nobody's watching and Do it! Do it! Do it! That's the Devil as stinker, but the Devil rides a spectrum. The Rolling Stones knew he popped up at big events, always getting Man to do his dirty work. After all, it was you and me. Even now, you can't see him sitting behind Putin, but he's there. There's also the Faustian Devil, when Man signs away his soul. That's as dark as life gets. Cloven Country is several things at once; a travelogue of Devilish spoor, a meditation on the way landscape affects the human imagination; a historical feeling-out of folk-religiosity, word of mouth – and the way human changes in society and culture are reflected in the stories we tell ourselves. It regales us with the shifting forms of the folk-Devil and highlights the distinction between the eternal Adversary of the pulpit and the stubborn, often lazy, figure that stands as an inhuman encounter. In many cases, this Devil is, if not easy to best, nonetheless beatable. With a little bit of cunning, a smidge of nous (pronounced nowse in many British dialects) one may best the dark figure who comes upon us. By 1700, Harte argues, landscape stories were being reworked to include the Devil to “replace older heroes” as “part of a structured forgetting” (p. 52f.). As such, for Harte, these seem to be just stories, or recountings of folk-belief, rather than actual lived realities. This would have to be this reviewer's major criticism of this book: for all its invocation of a widespread belief in spirits creating landscape, and its calling upon the Australian Indigenous Dreaming, it does very little to consider the phenomenological experience and lived realities beyond the surface. This is of course unsurprising, as Harte is primarily a folklorist and museum curator.

Harte neatly brings in the suggestion that this may mirror actual class-dynamics – the fairly obvious idea that the stories which told are affected by such dynamics brings us to some interesting conclusions: Harte’s meticulous scholarship shines through Cloven Country. There are some fascinating snippets of lore – for example, how church bells, in the Middle Ages, were baptized, and considered to be under the protection of the name of the saint they bore. If there is a decisive shift in the Devil tale, it is in the early modern era when a whole range of local boggars, demons, giants and malignant fae become centralised (like the centralised state) as the Devil, reflecting the centralisation of salvation away from a multitude of Catholic saints and devils. This is why folklore is so rich and so slippery. It is a temporal phenomenon with most of it being lost as people die and forget, requiring new inventions and transcriptions that, once written down, may save the tales but denies their essence by doing so in canonical and so false form.

Harte shows how just as place names change through time so, too, does folklore, and its history can be revealed through close reading and comparison with fables from across Europe. This is no easy task, for although scholars in other countries systematically collected and recorded such things, “our stories have come down to us in a muddle of guidebooks, scribbles in the corners of maps, amateur poetry and notes for antiquarians”. Fortunately, Harte – a curator at Bourne Hall Museum in Surrey – has an encyclopedic knowledge of the diverse sources of England’s traditional tales and proves himself to be an authoritative guide. By chance, it’s actually the first landscape Harte refers to in this book, along with a third Devil's Bridge in the Dales.Is it any surprise then, that the wonder which inspires such storytelling requires a wonder- worker – a thaumaturge? A maker, a crafter, an originator of the same? Harte references the Devil as a “scaled up everyman: whatever needs most doing in any particular region, he does it, and on a gigantic scale. On the Norfolk clay he digs drainage ditches, in the West Country he clears stones for a Cornish hedge” (p. 45). That this figure performs such extra-ordinary feats with supreme casualness is the point. This is the stunning, amazing (in its original sense of stupefying overwhelm in the face of wonder or surprise) fact that such phenomena exist and may be easily wrought. The point is well made that “magic in folk stories is always something physical and local, a lore of crossroads and thresholds, rings and staffs and bottles.” (p. 155) However, while he is correct that the grimoires are often in love with language and literacy, the reality is that this so-called high magic contained just as many rings, staffs, bottles, crossroads, and thresholds, even in England. One only has to look at John Dee’s shewstone or his alchemical obsessions and productions of minerals whilst seeking the Philosopher’s stone, or the continuance of particular virtues in certain materials as part and parcel of a whole worldview. I would argue that most of our contemporary media is, in fact, folklore on these terms - a similar soup of interconnecting memes disconnected from 'scientific' reality, serving some social purpose that no part of it truly understands or can control, and creating its own 'felt' reality. Although [Harte] will retell a tale with a nimble and gleeful charm, he’ll then carefully examine them. Harte's skill as a writer makes this process seamless. It also renders what could be an academic and slightly dry exercise every bit as interesting as the narratives themselves. Come for the telling of folktales; stay for the workings of folklore. Cloven Country is testament to Harte's deep personal and learned knowledge of the folklore of England. He’s seemingly read everything and been everywhere – and given the book is illustrated from his collection, clearly also bought the postcard. His writing style is wry and frequently aphoristic. Harte is one of Britain's most eminent folklorists, whose previous works have included detailed accounts of gypsy folklore, holy wells and an award-winning book on fairy traditions. As Cloven Country is coming from a more recognised publisher, hopefully his work will now reach a wider audience. Purely on the basis of this erudite, witty and exceptionally entertaining book, it clearly deserves to. ' When speaking about the thaumaturge– the wonder-worker – we must remember that this was applied to magical practitioners and saints. Persons, latterly, so holy in many cases, that their merest presence induced miraculous events. That these saints chased up and down the country, cast out demons, blessed areas, and gave their names to holy wells is well known. But, with the Protestant Reformation, the notion of the saints as miraculous figures and thaumaturges began to dwindle.