Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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Scratch can be bested, yes, but slip up, and you and yours are deeply in trouble. Harte makes the point early on that this story-Devil is a latecomer to these interactions with landscape – and even those things like bridges, which humans make. 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. ' Popular tales, Harte suggests, might imply something off about the conjurer-parson, but certainly there are tales of these same individuals advising and aiding Cornish wrestlers in their very physical confrontations with the Devil – providing prayers, papers and materials to enable victory over him. 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. In the interview I begin by talking with Jeremy about what inspired the idea for the book and then look at the history of the Devil's appearances in English folklore, and some of the themes and motifs that are most common there. We also talk about the relationship between this kind of folklore and peoples personal experience of the supernatural, and how the latter has become much more prevalent in modern times, to the extent that presence of the 'landscape devil' in recent storytelling is hard to discern.

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

Before beginning this I had considered any Devil-related features on the landscapes that I know well.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. 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 name of the place resulted in the stories I told before and after. Many of the kids then, still recall them these days.

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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. To be fair, many of the tale-tellers would have been illiterate, and thus the Book as motif symbolised arcane learning in some senses, but knowledge disseminated orally is by no means unable to convey and reinforce a worldview. In fact, one may argue that these stories are doing precisely that in some fashion. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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

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. 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. Many Devil place names are of surprisingly recent origin, the creation of entrepreneurial indigenes exploiting the narrative desires of midle class tourists and re-arranging existing non-devilish local stories to appeal to their audience's sense of the horrible or simply to entertain for a penny. Harte gives us the tales of toadsmen, horse-whisperers, and porch-watchers possibly already known to the kind of person reading this review. He also discusses the cunning men and women of England, though his suggestion that those practitioners did not understand the books they had due to illiteracy seems contentious, particularly given some recent scholarship by scholars like Owen Davies et al.

The Devil and the English Landscape

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. 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.). 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. 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.