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Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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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. Romany Gypsies have been variously portrayed as exotic strangers or as crude, violent delinquents; Jeremy Harte vividly portrays the hardships of the travelling life, the skills of woodland crafts, the colourful artistic traditions, the mysteries of a lost language, and the flamboyant displays of weddings and funerals, which are all still present in this secretive culture. And that is the point of the book - to demonstrate just how fluid folklore can be and how it gets shaped by culture and society, appropriates the past and literary influences (much as country dance is often 'debased' aristocratic dance) and continues to evolve. 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. 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.

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)Scared yet? Get a dog: there was a long-standing tradition that a spayed bitch kept in the house would ward off ghosts and other presences of the night. Because she was a female and yet could not bear pups, she was a living contradiction, a little uncanny, however loyal she might be--and so a natural guardian for boundaries between one world and another. 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. 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. The local devil becomes the Devil and this Devil can become truly dangerous but can also used as a method of social control in the telling of tales, especially control of women and social outliers. Harte has a whole chapter on the ambiguity of devil tales involving women.

But the name of the place resulted in the stories I told before and after. Many of the kids then, still recall them these days. 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. There's a spectrum to the stories, though. While most have a relatively happy ending, some are chilling, even as we know better. 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. Folklore is intimately connected to trade and travel. The Netflix of the early modern period was the chapbook. These could spread memes widely and feed off each other. Heroes of Devil tales were often from the partially itinerant class that could spread stories in a community, men such as cobblers.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. 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.

What’s more, far from romantic visions of the Devil as a horned pagan figure, for all that he was the embodiment of the bestial and the antinomian wilderness of the outlaw and the uncivilised, he was no rustic. Indeed, it must be remembered that for the lion’s-share of the time these stories were developing, the majority of people were rustics.

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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. These stories then are about the processes of a worldview meeting with the landscape. They are about the strangeness in the world, not necessarily as explanatory narratives, but the evocation of the pull which the so-called supernatural has. His book 'Travellers through Tim'e tells the dramatic story of life on the margin of society from Tudor times to today, offering vivid insights into the hidden world of England’s large Gypsy population. It will appeal to those who are curious about other cultures, as well as those who want to understand the reality behind the prejudice. 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.

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