Lightning strikes on the highest point of a village could wreak serious damage to fabric but also to people if a service was being taken at the time. The choice between blaming God (socially dangerous) and one's own sinfulness could be evaded by actually seeing (literally) the Devil in the act. Before beginning this I had considered any Devil-related features on the landscapes that I know well. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.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. 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. Folklore would appear to be a sea of interconnecting memes that construct popular culture with its own distinguishing mark being that there is no individual 'auteur' (even if some middle class folklorists briefly threatened to take that role) but only a socially created soup of linked conceptions. 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. ' 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.

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. Is it any surprise then, that the wonder which inspires such storytelling requires a wonder- worker – a thaumaturge? A maker, a crafter, an originator of the same? Harte references the Devil as a “scaled up everyman: whatever needs most doing in any particular region, he does it, and on a gigantic scale. On the Norfolk clay he digs drainage ditches, in the West Country he clears stones for a Cornish hedge” (p. 45). That this figure performs such extra-ordinary feats with supreme casualness is the point. This is the stunning, amazing (in its original sense of stupefying overwhelm in the face of wonder or surprise) fact that such phenomena exist and may be easily wrought. 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)

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.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. He rejects the traditional notion that folklore grows like a tree, branching out from a single pagan trunk. There is usually no ancient “master clue” – such as the devil originally being Odin – which can be used to explain a story’s meaning. Instead, he emphasises the idea that local myth is a complex “lattice”, a collective work of the imagination that, like a palimpsest, is constantly being reworked to introduce new motifs and heroes. 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.

Perhaps the most unnerving tales are not those of Hell's Hounds chasing men across Bodmin Moor (bad and selfish gentry are also targets of devil tales which, like fairy tales, can have 'moral purpose) but the use of the Devil to re-envision those lightning strikes on churches that kill the faithful. after newsletter promotion Harte shows how local myth is a complex 'lattice', a collective work of the imagination that is constantly being reworked 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: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. 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. 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. 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. 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.