Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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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. 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. That was Jeremy Harte just then speaking in italics. He's written this wonderful book, a collective of folklore about how the Devil is responsible for things we see in the English landscape. You can tell these places by their names: The Devil's Chapel, The Devil's Elbow, The Devil's Arrow, The Devil's Dyke, The Devil's Jumps, The Devil's Chair.

Cloven Country by Jeremy Harte | Waterstones Cloven Country by Jeremy Harte | Waterstones

Perhaps the most unnerving tales are not those of Hell's Hounds chasing men across Bodmin Moor (bad and selfish gentry are also targets of devil tales which, like fairy tales, can have 'moral purpose) but the use of the Devil to re-envision those lightning strikes on churches that kill the faithful. 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. 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.). Jeremy has written extensively on local history, folklore and the supernatural and is the curator of the Bourne Hall Museum at Epson and Ewell as well as secretary of the Romany and Traveller Family History Society. 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.

Occulture

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. My guest for this episode is folklorist and author Jeremy Harte, who joined me to talk about his new book Cloven Country: The Devil in the English Landscape.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Goodreads Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Goodreads

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. Folklore would appear to be a sea of interconnecting memes that construct popular culture with its own distinguishing mark being that there is no individual 'auteur' (even if some middle class folklorists briefly threatened to take that role) but only a socially created soup of linked conceptions. 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. 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.By chance, it’s actually the first landscape Harte refers to in this book, along with a third Devil's Bridge in the Dales. 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. 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. 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. But folklore does not stand still, early modern rural and socially controlling obscurantism gets vectored through literary accounts and, of course, whoever writes the story tends to own the story. Literary types are not averse to a bit of creative invention. They are, by nature, noble liars.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape by Jeremy

There are some 'big moments' - the emergence of the Protestant revolution and the crushing of Catholic ways of seeing, the itineracy of the working class and traders, the rise of a travelling middle class eager for sensation, the emergence of folkorists as a class - but these do not change the picture.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 Devil is a perfect character for a storyteller. And so they've come down to us: repeated, amended, borrowed, plausible only to the gullible; yet, entertaining always. They are like the Irishman's old hammer, which had been in the family for generations but with three new heads fitted to it and five different handles. Unlikely was he to have callouses upon his hands, though he could raise up walls and dykes with little effort. In this sense, he resembles the learned and landed classes who were supposedly the “betters” of the ordinary people. Just as now, the rich and powerful had privilege – literally “private law” – which others did not: a different set of rules by which they altered the world to their whim, and the poor labourer or widowed woman would have no choice but to be swept along. 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. As literacy advances so the Devil tale advances. Places get re-named for him to advance a story rather than to reflect local 'reality'. We have mentioned tourists creating the tales they wanted to hear simply by being present in the right place at the right time (and then reporting them as 'true').

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Even the choice of the central image on the book’s cover seems telling to this reviewer; a depiction of a popularised and degraded Priapus-as-a-devil, from the 1786 book A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus. There's a spectrum to the stories, though. While most have a relatively happy ending, some are chilling, even as we know better. 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. He makes a case that the mobility of these stories accompanies the beginning of the rise of tourism – people from further away would come to visit areas with certain landscape phenomena, and often the semi universal figure of the Devil seems to have served as a kind of flattening lingua franca. Local understanding of giant or faerie becomes smoothed out to Old Horny. This flattening also meant that various landscape phenomena might have similar story-variants applied to them – that the legends migrate one step at a time but, are borrowed or even stolen, with elements in the story that perhaps do not entirely fit their new locale.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: 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. 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.