5. Bewitched in East Budleigh! (1)

View of East Budleigh, looking east towards Peak Hill and the English Channel

This Conant 400 blog was inspired by the 400th anniversary of the American city of Salem in Massachusetts and by the life of  its founder, Roger Conant, born in the village of East Budleigh in 1592.

 

 

You don’t have to go too far from the village before finding yourself on Woodbury Common, also known as the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands.  It's an undulating landscape of gorse, heather and  pebbles – millions of them – stretching for miles.

Wandering over the pebblebed heathlands when I first moved to East Devon in 2009 it didn't take me long to reflect on how similar it seemed to the fictional landscape of what the author Thomas  Hardy called Egdon Heath in his novel The Return of the Native. The anthropologist Chris Tilley agreed with me. He refers to it as ‘a dark, brooding creature’ in the 474-page study of the area, published in 2017.   

Christopher Tilley with one of the many pebbles I've dug up in my garden - not all as massive as that one

Professor Tilley had been fascinated by East Devon’s pebbles for many years. Not just the pretty ‘sugared almonds’ or 'buns' on Budleigh’s celebrated beach, but all those left by the huge river which, about 250 million years ago, flowed through East Devon and southern England. 

It began somewhere in Brittany and terminated in the Midlands; it takes in my garden in Budleigh Salterton where I admire but sometimes curse the pebbles that it left in its path when I’m digging a new plant border.

Chris Tilley’s book ‘Landscape in the Longue Durée’ is based on the results of a four-year archaeological research project in the East Devon pebblebed heathlands, which was the subject of an exhibition at Budleigh Salterton's Fairlynch Museum in 2011. You can download the book free at https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/94977 

One of Chris Tilley's conclusions was that to prehistoric people these extraordinarily colourful pebbles had magical power. 

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and the 1929 edition of 'The Return of the Native' published by Macmillan

Professor Tilley had ‘a firm belief that we have much to learn about landscapes from novelists as an antidote to the sometimes impoverished accounts that archaeologists and historians provide’. In his view Hardy is the principal ‘historian’ and ‘ethnographer’ of the English lowland heathland such as we find in East Devon and Dorset.   

Hardy's cottage at Higher Bockhampton, Dorset

Image credit: Peter Trimming

Hardy was born and brought up on the edge of the Dorset heathlands. The 'Egdon Heath' of his 1878 novel The Return of the Native is set in an imagined place based on at least a dozen different heathland areas in the southeast of the author’s home county. 

It's been said that the author's choice of themes — sexual politics, thwarted desire, and the conflicting demands of nature and society — makes this a truly modern work.  It certainly raised some eyebrows in Victorian Britain when it appeared in serial form in the magazine 'Belgravia' — a publication known for its sensationalism — before being published as a book.   

Hardy’s description of Egdon Heath's wildlife, traditional heathland occupations and — as Chris Tilley puts it — ‘the deep-rooted and enduring pagan customs of its inhabitants’ all combine to create what is generally considered to be a powerful character in its own right in the novel.  

Even the bushes on the Heath contribute to the general spookiness: in Hardy's words, they ‘whistled gloomily and had a ghastly habit after dark of putting on the shapes of jumping madmen, sprawling giants, and hideous cripples’.   

A ‘poppet’ of stuffed fabric in Edwardian-style black dress with stiletto through face, South Devon, England, 1909–13.  Image credit: The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, Boscastle.  This image was widely used to publicise the Ashmolean Museum's exhibition Spellbound 2018-19. I wonder where it was actually found. 'South Devon' is often used to include East Devon!

Prof Tilley notes that Eustacia Vye, one of the central characters in the novel, is believed by some heathland people to be a witch; one of them, Susan Nonsuch, makes an effigy of her out of beeswax and pricks it with pins to protect her son. 

Hardy writes of maypoles, mummers and dancing around a fire lit on top of a Bronze Age barrow, ostensibly to mark Guy Fawkes Night.  

His description of this heathland fire festival emphasises its pre-Christian orgins: ‘it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder plot’. * 

It’s as if  The Return of the Native could have been set in Roger Conant’s homeland. ‘Replace topographical and geological details and Hardy’s Egdon Heath could be the East Devon Pebblebed heathlands,’ Chris concluded. 

*Interestingly, for Hardy fans, the late John Paterson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California, noted that Hardy’s original manuscript in the description of dancing at East Egdon, read:  ‘Christianity was eclipsed in their hearts, Paganism was revived, the pride of life was all in all, they adored themselves & their own natural instincts.’ The reference to the eclipse of Christianity, which appears in the 1878 serial edition of the 'The Return of the Native' published in the 'Belgravia' magazine was omitted in the first edition of the book. Clearly, Hardy felt that some Victorian readers would object.   

Continued at 
https://conant400.blogspot.com/2019/10/bewitched-in-east-budleigh-2.html