It seems to me that if the rural historian will only concede that what he is faced with in the countryside today is the valuable remnant of the old primitive society (the evidence is inescapable); if he casts aside his inborn ‘Fifty-year Rule’2 inhibitions to study the old society that is precariously about him now, he will be doing much more to promote the subject of history as a corporate discipline than he is doing at the moment which is too often a repetitive harrowing of old ground without gaining any harvest worthy of the name. He will, moreover, be likely to get direct information and enlightenment about, say, the open field and the manorial system, and an insight into the beliefs and the preoccupations of the men who actually worked these medieval fields. It is suggested that the folk-life approach, which is basically that of social anthropology, will yield a tremendous amount of valuable historical information in the rural areas at this period. For the temper and atmosphere of the old rural society that lasted for so long is still recoverable to a certain extent from its survivors. Yet the historian will get little unless he supplements his orthodox techniques with those of the anthropologist and the sociologist – the technique, chiefly, of observation, patient questioning, empathy, and a systematic recording of the living survivors. And if he objects that this is not, after all, history and therefore none of his concern, it can be pointed out that the sociology of today is the history of tomorrow and the anthropology of his own field of study is at this particular and special time a true historic present. The historian, moreover, is admirably equipped to record the material he will find in the countryside at this time; he will be able to place it in a reasoned and a balanced context and to relate it to the material he has found in another period or in another setting. The historian, too, with his training will also be able to avoid the mistakes which have given the study of some of the matter written down in this book such a bad name – the holding up of a strange fact, belief or custom for general wonderment; and instead of the asking of considered questions of the material the making of mere exclamations over it: ‘How curious!’ ‘How odd!’ or ‘How wonderful!’ or, worse still, the making of a superior judgment: ‘What fools people were (or are) to believe in such nonsense as this!’
The second reason why the folk-life approach is so relevant to the present is this. In Britain the anthropologists themselves do not appear to be aware that they have the remains of a primitive society on their own doorstep. They have been so captivated by the exotic and have so taken for granted the composition of their own society that they have always gone abroad, in spite of the fact that – as Margaret Murray so aptly pointed out – there is just as rich a harvest to be gathered in the so-called civilized countries of the west as in parts of Asia, Africa or the South Seas which are still the anthropologist’s natural habitat. This is truer today when some of the under-developed countries are being changed so quickly that their old cultures are in danger of being swept away in a bare generation.3 But in a slow, gradual change such as Britain has experienced during the last three centuries since the growth of the modern scientific method4 much of the old culture and its archaic way of thought has been preserved, sinking – as it were – into society’s unconscious in the old rural community. And, as we have seen, the material environment was sympathetic to its survival until the early years of this century. The same apparent contradiction is to be seen in the material relics of the old culture. Ffransis Payne has observed that often there is a greater wealth of the tools and furniture of the old rural community in Wales to be discovered near the industrial conurbations of the south than in the remoter areas where change, albeit late, was swifter and more uncompromising. Experience in East Anglia bears this out: I have noticed that more of the old farm tools and the domestic equipment associated with the former culture have been kept and adapted to secondary uses in those areas bordering the towns than in the isolated districts where change was delayed even to as late as the Second World War, but having arrived was quicker and more complete.
In the anthropologist’s default the rural historian is therefore called upon to bridge the gap between his own subject and anthropology, making a direct study of the living remnant of an old society in order to supplement his study of it through documents, books and archaeological evidence. He has rightly been urged in recent years to get out of the library and the records office and to walk round his parish, or whatever is his area of study; to examine the fields, the shape of the land, to look for evidence of change in the ancient boundaries and the ancient buildings he sees and to collate this change with the material he has uncovered in the documents. No doubt the rural historian is tired of being urged, and impatient of busy-bodies pointing out which path he ought to take for his best profit. But at the risk of further provoking him to exasperated comment, it should be brought to his notice that the old farmer or farm worker he meets on his perambulations is worth more than a nod or a polite giving of ‘the sele of the day’. He is likely to be worth talking to for his own sake, and he may well give the historian valuable information about the land he is walking over.
I have suggested that the old rural society was society’s unconscious, possessing two more-or-less distinct levels like the unconscious of the individual: the preconscious into which sink out-dated customs, half-forgotten science, outmoded fashions, and words and phrases once the coin of polite conversation but gradually demoted into the rural dialect; and beneath this at a level more rarely exposed the true phylogenetic unconscious where the most archaic beliefs and modes of thinking have lasted until recent years. This level is a rich repository of much of the rural history of these islands. Yet historians whose stance appears to have anchylosed in the correct atmosphere emanating from nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ history have rarely attempted to bring this evidence of irrationality within their purview. Instead, the average historian calls it folklore, thereby hoping that in giving it an opprobrious name he will thus excuse himself from having anything to do with it. And even if he has misgivings about this treatment of material which at first glance has certain relevance to his study, he shies away from it either through fear of losing face among his colleagues or through the prevailing rigidity of mind that sees our civilization as so superior to the primitive, so rational and self-sufficient that he can afford to ignore primitive evidence as having nothing to teach him about the task he himself has in hand: ‘We are the people. Wisdom was born with us. Chaos was before us; but wisdom will come after us.’
Yet events do not wait on the historian’s conception of what his study should embrace nor on his estimate of his own achievements. Even Sir James Frazer who had a greater knowledge than most of the play of the irrational in human society could make the unspoken comment on his researches: ‘We should be thankful that we have put all this stuff behind us.’ If he had survived the Second World War he could hardly have continued in this conviction. For the last thirty years has seen the biggest outbreak of irrationality the world has experienced – the Nazi phenomenon in Germany. And only one historian seems to have sensed what was coming, Jacob Burckhardt5 who in his day was hardly considered an historian at all but just an art-historian. It was left to others – to D. H. Lawrence in his well-known ‘Dark Gods’ essay and C. G. Jung in his essay ‘Wotan’6 on the spiritual state of Germany during the early ’thirties – to give the warning. But it will be objected that it is not the historian’s duty to warn. That may or may not be true, but at least he should know what is going on, for no one – least of all a historian – should be ignorant of his own times. The attitude of historians and thinkers in Britain to the rise of the Nazis is typified by H. G. Wells’s observations7 while it was happening: he thought that there was nothing in Hitler’s doctrine of race (founded on a tentative and quite ‘unscientific’ remark of Tacitus8 and built upon during the nineteenth century9) that a well-informed sixth former could not easily refute. The irrational, that is, should not be taken seriously. But the greatest illusion of all was to believe that by explaining the irrational we
are by this very act explaining it away. The Nazi theory of race, although noisome nonsense, was actual; that is, it could be acted upon. And this is what the Nazis did, and the consequences were more real and disastrous than the worst pessimist could have imagined.
It is not suggested, however, that the outbreak of irrationality in Germany is of the same order as the material to be found in the countryside. The German outbreak was a mass-psychosis of a very complex nature, and we are probably still too near it to assess it in all its aspects. But there are similarities between this and the rural magico-religious tradition, which we have touched on continually in this book, in that both were using elements that have common roots in the pre-Christian and prehistoric times. Much of it is associated with witchcraft which has become an umbrella title for all the elements of the archaic tradition; and it is necessary to clarify the different meanings of the word. First, it is loosely identified with the kind of mass-psychosis just mentioned. But an analysis of the mechanics of this, even if it were possible, has fallen outside the terms of reference of the present study, and nothing further needs to be said about it here except to add that both in mass-psychosis and what is commonly known as witchcraft archaic and therefore unconscious material is activated and appears to arrogate to itself a dynamism of its own; a phenomenon, it is emphasized again, that should fall well within the historian’s purview.
But the kind of witchcraft we meet in the countryside has two distinct trends. The first is what can be called real witchcraft, the authentic remnant of the old fertility religion associated with the ‘Horseman’s Word’ in Scotland and some of the old horsemen’s practices in East Anglia and elsewhere. This, in my view, is the true witchcraft which was embedded in a definite cultural setting. It was, in fact, functional or operative in the old rural community in Britain; and if the old culture were still at this moment more-or-less intact as it was in most parts of Britain up to 1914 – still dependent largely on animal power for tilling the land and with farming still essentially the same as it had been for an era – this tradition would still be uncovered, still secret and deeply imbedded underground in the old rural community as it had remained for centuries. This tradition or witchcraft had use and was therefore tied to the soil and reality as part of the whole cultural complex. It was, in a word, practical, concerned with the fertility of the soil and the increase and control of animals; and it was not isolated but used alongside a large corpus of practical lore. The magic side of this witchcraft, as already suggested, was directed at those parts of the process that could not be reached by the ordinary physical measures the operator took to gain his ends; and one of these parts, as the primitive instinctively recognized, was that area of his own psyche that was ordinarily inaccessible but which could be aligned by the help of magic to promote his best endeavours in the project he had in hand. Thus the magic was primarily addressed to his hope, his desire, or his conviction that his ends could ultimately be attained.
The other aspect of witchcraft is best described as speculative, although this terminology is bound to invite invidious comparisons. But speculative is a good description of it because it cut loose from any direct or operative connection with the original purpose of the magic-religious cult – the fertility of the soil and the increase of men and animals – and like Freemasonry sought to make the old cult a vehicle for other aspirations. This aspect of witchcraft became a shell of the ancient cult which had been removed from its context in the old rural society, and in the hands of speculators became inflated into pure magic or illusion, a vehicle for all their unattached desires and imaginings. These, it seems, were largely the need to experiment with new sensations, to make new explorations, and to console themselves with the superior comfort of being part of an imperium in imperio, an ‘in-group’ that was all the more exciting in that it worked in secret wearing the trappings and under the specious standard of an ancient tradition. The eighteenth-century ‘Hell-Fire Club’ and the modern outbreaks of Satanism seem to have everything in common except their scale; and they should be sharply distinguished from the true thread of operative magic which has been an identifiable part of the rural tradition from earliest times right up to the recent past.
It has been assumed throughout the present book that there has been a real break in the countryside: the old social order has changed, the temper of mind has altered and most of the old irrational beliefs have been jettisoned. This I believe to be a true account of the position, though many of the beliefs will undoubtedly be transmitted and will continue in a thinner, more abstract form for many years to come. But what we must beware of assuming is that, having got rid of these irrational beliefs, we have therefore basically altered our own cast of mind. Hope and desire are still stronger than reason, and although we have successfully thrown off many of the old ‘superstitions’ there is a real danger of acquiring others that are infinitely more disastrous. The irrational belief about race has already been mentioned; and there are many more which, like the old beliefs we have been concerned with, are the direct resultants of existence in a certain type of culture: for instance, the uncritical belief that anything in print is canonical, that the ‘magic’ of science has no limitations, or that what is advertised and what everybody wants is necessarily indispensable. But these are much more difficult for us to detect as they are part of our own cultural situation. If, therefore, we are tempted to feel superior to the old countryman who still looks for light where we should expect to find none, we would do well to remember that he could be equally and as reasonably critical of many of what we value as our newest and most enlightened assumptions.
1 The Historian’s Craft, p. 58.
2 But even this is likely to be relaxed: The Times, 11th July, 1964.
3 Dilim Okafor-Omali, op. cit., p. 159.
4 Christopher Hill, op. cit., passim.
5 Jacob Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians (with an introduction by H. Trevor-Roper), London, 1959, p. 15.
6 Essays on Contemporary Events, 1947.
7 Experiment in Autobiography, London, 1934, pp. 100–2.
8 Germania, II: Ipsos Germanos indigenas crediderim minimeque aliarum gentium adventu et hospitiis mistos.
9 Henry Hatfield, The Myth of Nazism. Myth and Mythmaking, New York, 1960.
SELECTED PRINTED SOURCES
Selected Printed Sources
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Elsworthy, F. T., The Evil Eye, London, 1895; New York, 1958.
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