You might think that bumping into the Devil on the way home from the pub or from work might be a rather terrifying experience – bottomless pit, eternal fires, that sort of thing. However in this book Jeremy Harte shows us that if you keep your wits about you, you can avoid such a fate, and might even turn a bit of a profit.
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In his Introduction Jeremy Harte describes looking down into the 'Devil's Chimney', a narrow cleft in the cliff-face near Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. Trying to find the origin of this name, perhaps in some ancient piece of folklore, he discovers that the name cannot be traced any further back than 1978. This intrigued him and he then began researching some of the many landmarks and geographical features across England which claim some association with the Devil.
One of the most famous devil-related names, in the South of England at least, is the 'Devil's Dyke', this is a narrow cleft through the South Downs, from the Weald to the coast near Brighton. The legend behind this tells of the Devil's disapproval of the number of churches that had been built across the Weald, and his attempt to destroy them by cutting a channel to the coast so that the sea would flood through and drown them.
He begins his work one night, digging away thousand of tons of earth to create the channel, but his frantic activity woke up an old woman who knew just how to prevent herself and her neighbours from being swept to a watery death. Knowing that the Devil can only do his evil deeds by night, she fooled him by lighting a candle and holding it at her cottage window with the light diffused through a sieve, giving it the diffused impression of the rising sun. Seeing this, the Devil fled, leaving this attractive part of Sussex high and dry.
Stories from across England tell of similar ways in which Satan, who you might thing of as a powerful and devious individual, is easily frustrated in his plans by the native cunning of the local farmers and tradesman. Not only can he be fooled by simple tricks like starting a fire to give the illusion of daybreak, but by tricking him into giving up his plan by suggestion it is much harder task than he thought.
The Devil was at one time on his way to wipe out the town of Bewdley, which was far too God-fearing for his liking. His plan was to dam the River Severn and flood the town. Curiously rather than wait until he had arrived at the river and then find some convenient natural feature that he could use to block the river, he carried a massive load of earth with him on a shovel. Getting tired with this burden he sat down to have a conversation with a passer-by, which seemed to be quite a normal thing for the Devil to do.
Telling the man of his intent, the horrified traveller interrupted, and being a cobbler showed the Devil the sack that he was carrying, which was full of old worn-out shoes. He explained that Bewdley was so far away that he had worn out all those shoes just walking from there. In his usual credulous way the Devil believed this, and threw his great spadeful of earth away, before returning, presumably, to Hell. And to prove the truth of this story you can still see the mound of earth, now called the Devil's Spittleful (a dialect word for 'spadeful') just outside Bewdley, which clearly had a very narrow escape!
It's clear that this 'Devil' has little or nothing to do with the Biblical Satan, punishing sinners for all eternity in Hell, and has more in common with the giants, goblins, hobgoblins, boggarts and the other sprites and spirits that fill the folktales and legends of England. He is a character who is easily fooled into ridiculous deals, and then easily frustrated in his own nefarious schemes by a good old Church of England parson.
An idle and cheating tailor who was inveigled into making a suit for the Devil worked hard to complete it on time, He then met his fiendish customer to hand over the finished suit, but rather than trying it on, the Devil attempted to grab the tailor, only to shrink away in terror as the prayers of the local minister, informed of the devilish dealing by the tailor's more canny wife, were heard from his place of concealment behind a gate.
The particular story Harte quotes comes from Shropshire, but he finds similar tales from across the country. A story from Northumberland has the tailor escaping his fate by out-talking the Devil as advised by the local parson. A Gloucester cobbler gets out of his predicament simply by refusing the Devil's payment; a blacksmith in Devon escapes with his soul intact after the Devil spots the clergyman hiding behind a hedge.
These stories, and the hundreds of other recounted in this book, have spread, changed, and been renewed over the centuries, and although the location may change, details filter from one story to another, and elements are removed and replaced, they remain basically the same. Harte compares the process to the old hammer “which had been in the family for generations but with three new heads fitted to it and five different handles”.
These are not stories which have been handed down for generations from some ur-text, they are not fragments of some surviving remnant of pagan belief. The Devil in these tales is not Odin reworked for Christian consumption, although often they were told to guide the listeners into the paths of righteousness, like the lazy tailor or the drunken cobbler who saw the errors of their ways after their encounter with the Prince of Darkness. But Harte is clear to draw a distinction between the 'story-devil' and the 'sermon devil', although sometimes their paths cross. These are stories for amusement, to raise a laugh or provoke a shudder, and to show how the 'simple countryman' (and quite often the simple townsman) can outwit, out-run and out-cheat the powers of darkness.
This is a wonderfully entertaining collection of folk tales, wittily told. Jeremy Harte is a natural raconteur and this sparks in these accounts. Although some of the stories are grim, many are amusing pub-tales where the 'little man', very often with the help of the even more cunning and resourceful 'little woman' - one of the book's chapters is headed 'Woman's Wit is Better then Man's' – comes out laughing. As the author says in his introduction, “What looks like blood on Satan's claw usually turns out to be blackberry juice”.
- John Rimmer
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