Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

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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 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 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. 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: Suspicions that a parson might be a master conjuror continued to shape perceptions of the clergy in southwest Britain until well into the nineteenth century. This could be because the peninsula was culturally remote, like other mountainous western districts; perhaps incumbents thought it better to use their own Latin and Hebrew in high occult style than let their parishioners trust in the village wizard; maybe the poor communications of the region forged many lonely parishes where, in the absence of social equals to talk to, a university-trained scholar could go quietly mad. Whatever the cause, Devon and Cornwall are the heartland of the conjuror-parsons. (p. 104)

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. 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.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. 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. 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. 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.). 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.

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. Before beginning this I had considered any Devil-related features on the landscapes that I know well. By chance, it’s actually the first landscape Harte refers to in this book, along with a third Devil's Bridge in the Dales.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'). 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.

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. The Devil’s craftsmanship, so horribly casual in its immensity, of such enormity that it breaks open the mundane, is also bested, diverted, and limited in mirthful ways – and for all that his power is immense, he can be undermined by ordinary, salt-of-the-earth folks. 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.

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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. 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.