Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape

Product Information

Even a humble village schoolmaster could summon the Devil and compel him to perform a task, with the hope of escaping the dire consequences of such a pact.

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

Kinship renders the lines blurry, for the Devil is at once a Trickster-who-can-be-Tricked, but also a figure which exemplifies the tension between laughter-as-attempt-at-banishment, as relief from the pressure of existence, and that of the ineluctable fact that Bad Things Happen. 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. 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. Sometimes a scholar or clergyman intervenes to rescue a tailor or smith who has, through their own hubris, made a bad bargain with the Devil.

The stories of how the Devil made Silbury Hill, for example, he places as recently as the mid-19 th century. The choice between blaming God (socially dangerous) and one's own sinfulness could be evaded by actually seeing (literally) the Devil in the act. For a variety of reasons, not least industrialisation, the field narrows, leaving the Devil to pick up the slack.

Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape, Harte

From the demon who appears as a fearsome figure hurling stones, gouging out valleys and heaping up hills, or as a sinister black-clad huntsman with his fiery-eyed hounds howling across Bodmin Moor, to ideas about how a woman’s wit is better than a man’s when it comes to besting the lord of darkness, Harte takes his reader on a devilishly entertaining tour of England and its richly storied landscape. Whilst some of the legends concerning the activities of the devil are reworkings of earlier tales; many are of fairly recent origin, dating from the 17th century. This Gentleman Devil was still a thaumaturge – still a craftsman of wonders, a literal snake-oil salesman casually capable of performing labours in one night which would break the back of ordinary folk. 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. Harte gives us the tales of toadsmen, horse-whisperers, and porch-watchers possibly already known to the kind of person reading this review.

The same story told against one village may get garbled by that village to be told against the village that told it first. 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.