Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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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. From a perusal of any detailed map of England, you would think we were a people satanically obsessed. Place names include the Devil’s Highway, the Devil’s Punchbowl, the Devil’s Thumb, the Devil’s Frying Pan… The list seems endless. 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. 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.

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

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.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. 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. 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. By chance, it’s actually the first landscape Harte refers to in this book, along with a third Devil's Bridge in the Dales.

Cloven Country « enfolding.org Book Review: Cloven Country « enfolding.org

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. Cloven Country is an extensive and well-rounded exploration of the image of the Devil as reflected in the English landscape and folklore record, penned in Harte's inimitable clever and witty style. Although rigorously academic, you always feel like you have sat down for a pint with Jeremy, probably in a pub named after one of the Devil's exploits, whilst being regaled with tales. Pull a chair up to the fire, get yourself a drink and a copy of Cloven Country . . . You will not be disappointed." Folklore Podcast 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. 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.

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. 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."

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape - Goodreads

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. 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. A] fascinating study . . . In Cloven Country, Harte sets out to discover why the 'Devil' appears in so many of our place names, and so many of the accompanying tales and folklore. Along the way it becomes an invaluable guide to some of our more puzzling local oddities . . . It all makes for a highly evocative and original guide to our ever-fascinating, multilayered landscape, so full of shadowy mysteries and stories. '

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. 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').

Cloven Country’ by Jeremy Harte — Paralibrum. ‘Cloven Country’ by Jeremy Harte — Paralibrum.

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.As the government’s national archive for England, Wales and the United Kingdom, The National Archives hold over 1,000 years of the nation’s records for everyone to discover and use. 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. 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. 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. 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.