Review: Jeremy Harte, Cloven Country: the Devil and the English Landscape, London, UK, Reaktion Books 2022, ISBN: 9781789146509

by Craig ‘ VI’ Slee

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.

Indeed, one need not even have brains to beat the Devil: sometimes it is enough to know the rules which he breaks, by definition. Mentioning his “opposite number”, or forcing him to do so, is sometimes enough.

It is clear that this is a less-than-transcendental Old Nick-as-embodiment of Evil, as Harte writes: “The Devil likes a good view; he once took his business rival to a high place just to point out the details of the vista.” (p. 12)

This sort of tone runs throughout the book, taking itself from the attitudes of the stories themselves. An everyday, matter-of-fact tone where the battle for human souls is less an existential proposition and more a chance for a long-running feud between soul traffickers to burst forth anew. These two have been bickering over humanity since the days of Eden, and, if that seems too crude, just look at the story of Job. There, God and Satan are supposedly in dialogue over a mortal’s faith – something that might seem out of place to a modern Christian’s view, but to those raised in an earlier milieu makes sense. Even a quick look at Jewish tradition suggests that Satan is a prosecutorial or inquisitorial figure rather than a cosmic Evil.

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 what’s more supernatural than the Devil himself?

That this Devil is the “demotic brother to the sermon-Devil” (p. 9) is key, for this kinship is part of the fabric of the world in which people lived, and in some cases still do. 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.

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.

Earlier forms gave authorship rights to giants, to fairies; to any of myriad agencies which moved through the world, alongside and interwoven with the human. For a variety of reasons, not least industrialisation, the field narrows, leaving the Devil to pick up the slack.

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.).

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.

Yet in all cases it seems, landscape is always the initial prompt for the story. It is the sense of place, of atmosphere which says “something happened here, to create this”. In this context, it is the landscape which apprehends those who encounter it, forcing a pause into which wonder, strangeness, difference, and potentially the numinous, may flood. Even if the phenomenon is not a “natural” construction, but something created by humans in elder days, the key is the disruption to the usual, the everyday. This gap, or crack, in all its liminality stimulates narrativization; it induces the worlding of storytelling.

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.

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.

Here is the paradox: this Devil of local legend only took shape in the last two to three hundred years, while earlier in the Middle Ages, when people believed so many wonderful and unlikely things, their stories about devils were relatively practical… Their saints and hermits battled demons in the plural, just as their knights fought with multiple dragons and giants. At some point in the sixteenth century this multiplicity collapsed… Other heroes and villains are local. Hereward and Hickathrift and Guy and Godiva each have a region, but everywhere the Devil is at home. (pp. 88-89)

Who then remains but God Himself, and His antagonist par excellence?  Since for many Protestants, the age of miracles was limited to the era of their scriptures, and God’s intercessions were less flashy, and His presence less immanently manifest for most, it seems logical that such crafting of wonders becomes the domain of Old Nick.

But of course, one could not trust the wonders of the Man in Black, or his servants. These were horrid deceptions that might damn the soul at worst, or mere theatrical flim-flammery and prestidigitation at best.

“The Devil is a spirit of negation; he features in place-names whenever somewhere is not what it claims to be.” (p. 71) He is the master of atmosphere which alters perception – the Devil’s Pulpit is an outcropping of rock which, nonetheless, at certain times of day, or under certain conditions, may come to resemble something familiar become strange. This estrangement from the order ordained by his opposite number is, in fact, one of his defining features – the stranger who pulls us away from the righteous proper path, into an older, less stable world.

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 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.

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:

In the old world, spiritual action had tended to be collective; the founders of abbeys felt that, all things being equal, a monastic convent was better than a single hermitage, and a choir of twenty monks would be better than ten when it came to taking on the black hosts of demons. The saints themselves were a mighty army on whose help the beleaguered Christian could always call. (p. 90)

Protestantism, Harte suggests, removed that collective backing. It was now merely the Christian and a somewhat distant God against the machinations of the Prince of Darkness himself.

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.

Thus, the Devil, as Man in Black, often appeared in clothing and form more appropriate to the gentry. 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.

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.

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.

As a phallic rustic god, the transition to a devil makes a certain kind of sense. Yet how do we square this figure with the Gentleman in Black? Clearly there is a suspicion of power, or rather of the exercising of power-over in these stories, a kind of fatalistic recognition of “one rule for us, another for them”. What could, or can, an average person do against the depredations of the powerful and well connected? The 21st century has seen people break their silence over assault and abuse by the powerful in their spheres – think of Epstein, Weinstein, or the horrors Jimmy Saville perpetuated under the nose of the British government.

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.

In a world without collective backing, what is a person to do? This then is where Harte speaks of the magical practitioners, the would-be wonder-workers.

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 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.

For all these strivers with the Devil, there is another figure the book discusses, a kind of strange double of the Man in Black – the parson, or priest who was also a conjurer. A learned man, often university educated, the tradition of priest-as-magical-practitioner is particularly prevalent in the West Country, particularly Devon and Cornwall. Hart suggests that these highly educated people with their strange bookish ways, were sometimes seen as exceeding ordinary Church-approved knowledge – that their occult learning was wrested by virtue of their authority. They may not always have been gentry, but their power was derived directly from God and that gave them one up over the Devil, in order to know and do what others could not. Though it seems almost as if they perform a kind of “working with both hands” at least in the popular imagination, this doubling of the Man in Black is interesting to students of the history of Western Esotericism, since this is yet another manifestation of the ambiguous clerical interest in magic which can be spotted throughout Europe and Scandinavia, be that within the grimoire tradition or otherwise.

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)

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.

Even such names as The Devil’s Pulpit reflect a blurring of the lines between the powers – is the Devil mocking the church, or is he attempting to twist liturgical rite and form, knowing it possesses its own power?

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.

The point is well made that “magic in folk stories is always something physical and local, a lore of crossroads and thresholds, rings and staffs and bottles.” (p. 155) However, while he is correct that the grimoires are often in love with language and literacy, the reality is that this so-called high magic contained just as many rings, staffs, bottles, crossroads, and thresholds, even in England. One only has to look at John Dee’s shewstone or his alchemical obsessions and productions of minerals whilst seeking the Philosopher’s stone, or the continuance of particular virtues in certain materials as part and parcel of a whole worldview. 

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.

Regardless of this somewhat artificial (to this reviewer) division into literate and illiterate behaviour and belief, Cloven Country is a fascinating look at one of the most complicated relationships with landscape that still exists in the modern world. Its twin References and Bibliography contain a treasure trove of sources for you to hunt up – and it’s very readable to boot!