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. But the Devil is a frequent, if not constant, presence. 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. He says things like Have another drink and Nobody's watching and Do it! Do it! Do it! That's the Devil as stinker, but the Devil rides a spectrum. The Rolling Stones knew he popped up at big events, always getting Man to do his dirty work. After all, it was you and me. Even now, you can't see him sitting behind Putin, but he's there. There's also the Faustian Devil, when Man signs away his soul. That's as dark as life gets. 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.

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) 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

The University of Chicago Press

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.

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. 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. 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. 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.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.

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. By chance, it’s actually the first landscape Harte refers to in this book, along with a third Devil's Bridge in the Dales. 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. 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.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'). 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: If a man could make other men do his bidding, if he had the power to make them sit, or stand, or go as he wished, and could tell who was going to live, and who was going to die, then that man was in a fair way to being the little devil of his neighbourhood. The Devil knew all about power – that was why he was always dressing as a gentleman – but he did not give it away readily, not without a fight. (p. 123-4) 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. 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.