Jeremy Harte's "Cloven Country"

Jeremy Harte is curator of the Bourne Hall Museum at Epsom and Ewell. He is secretary of the Romany & Traveller Family History Society and created the Surrey Gypsy Archive.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape, and reported the following:

The Devil is a deceiver, and his most generous offers usually turn out to have a catch. Confident that Cloven Country will pass the Ford Madox Ford test, I turn to page 99 – only to find that two-thirds of the page is not text at all, but an old photograph of Tarr Steps, the rough clapper bridge that takes you across a stream in the Quantock countryside of Somerset. This well-loved landmark was built by the Devil, so legend tells. One day there was nothing there and on the next the river crossing was complete, for the black architect can work swiftly when he is covered by darkness. It doesn’t look very Satanic on the page, drowsing in the endless summer of an Edwardian sepia postcard. But this combination of peaceful scenery and dreadful imagined deeds is typical of my book, which journeys around England from Dartmoor to Hadrian’s Wall, finding and passing on stories of the Devil’s intervention as he threw up stones or fortifications and tinkered with church architecture. Other countries may have sweeter fairytales, earthier proverbs or more haunting songs, but if there’s one thing the English are good at, it’s local legends. We’ve been telling and retelling them since the sixteenth century.

Below the picture you’ll find yourself halfway through one of these stories, with three protagonists: a blacksmith, a vicar, and an imperious gentleman, smartly dressed in black and under strong suspicion of being you-know-who. That’s a fair sample of the character list in traditional narrative. The hero will be a working man – a cobbler, a tailor, a shepherd, maybe a pair of miners looking for work or a crew of local fishermen. Often they are smart enough themselves to get one over on the Enemy of Man, but sometimes they need assistance from the village priest, who’s under suspicion of being a bit of a magician himself. But this deference has to be earned. The Devil, by contrast, is the landlord class gone bad. He swaggers, demands fulfilment of merciless contracts. and lures village girls to a fate which is – really, this time – worse than death. Spoiler alert: these stories always end in the Devil’s discomfiture and no-one gets hurt in the end. Well, a couple of people get carried off to Hell in the last two chapters, but they were Villains, and Unbelievers, so their departure makes a happy ending for everyone else.

Learn more about Cloven Country at the Reaktion Books website.

--Marshal Zeringue