H.E. Bulstrode's Blog, page 6

Indie Authors Weekend Book Giveaway!

Do take the opportunity to visit the following site where you can snap up some bargains - free ebooks, or ebooks with a significant price reduction - over the weekend, starting Friday 31st March, and running until the evening of Sunday 2nd April.

There are authors writing in a wide range of genres, including the paranormal, occult and the uncanny. You'll find three of my own there, including, for the first time, 'The Rude Woman of Cerne,' as well as 'Gwydion's Dawn' and '3:05 am.' The cover artwork for Gwydion is as displayed in the banner on my author page here, rather than the old cover on the site below. Make the most of it whilst it lasts!

http://events.supportindieauthors.com/

'Support Indie Authors' - Forthcoming Event

The 'Support Indie Authors' group will shortly be running a weekend giveaway event from Friday 31 March to Sunday 2 April inclusive. During this time, you will be able to download over a hundred books for free, or at a greatly reduced price, from a wide range of authors and genres. A couple of mine will be included. To find out more, you can either subscribe to the event via the Twitter hashtag #SIAFBB (don't ask me how Twitter works, as I've not got to grips with it yet), or visit their website at http://events.supportindieauthors.com/

Spectral Imagery

For a while, I have felt that I needed some cover artwork more suitably spectral for my ghost story 'Old Crotchet,' so have come up with something new. Strangely though, Goodreads does not allow authors to update their cover imagery on this site, so if you'd like to see it, you'll need to visit Amazon at one of the many links below.

A brief description.
Old Crotchet - her manor, her rules. Cross her at your peril. There's little that will rile a woman more than 300 years of age than the arrival of some flighty young upstart intent upon displacing her. It is Twelfth Night by the old reckoning, and festivities are about to commence as something sinister stirs from its protracted dormancy, awakened, it seems, by the arrival of two young guests. The old ways, they find, should not be treated lightly.

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
The Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
India: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/
Mexico: https://www.amazon.com.mx/dp/B01HSDYE2Q/

An Interview

The following link takes you to an interview I recently gave to author and blogger Wayne Turmel about superstition, credulity and deception in a seventeenth-century Devon village: http://wayneturmel.com/2017/02/the-en...

Review: 'Pagan Britain'

Professor Hutton is, perhaps, one of the most affable and publicly recognisable academics in Britain today and, arguably, its greatest authority on this country’s pagan history and heritage. In this volume, he sets himself the task of surveying the rise and fall of paganism in our island story, from the distant Palaeolithic to the early modern period. However, whereas the matter of the pagan revivalism of the past century is touched upon, it is not treated in any depth in itself, although it is considered in connection with the retro-projection of its beliefs, and practices, into the distant past. He has previously dealt with the subject matter of the history of Wicca in his book, ‘The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft,’ a work that, apparently, caused umbrage amongst certain elements of the contemporary pagan community.

The primary message that came through in this thorough and engaging treatment of the subject was this: there is much that remains in terms of the material legacy of the pagan past, yet next to nothing with respect to our knowledge of the concrete beliefs and rituals conducted by pagans at various points in the pre-Christian era of our island. Much of what is commonly supposed about the pagan beliefs of the inhabitants of Britain is little more than that: supposition, based upon the most tenuous of textual evidence, and erroneous conjecture arising from the once widespread belief that the uneducated mediaeval populace adhered to a basically pagan set of beliefs beneath a superficial veneer of Christian piety. None the less, it is this very absence of certainty with respect to the beliefs and practices of our pagan past, in which much of this subject’s charm and appeal inheres; it is cloaked in an aura of mysticism.

Hutton marshals and interprets an impressive array of evidence to provide an outline of developments in ritual practice. From prehistory we by definition have access only to archaeological remains, but this period has bequeathed to us such a rich legacy of different types of ceremonial monument – henges, stone avenues, barrows cursuses, dolmens, etc. – that it is evident, thanks to the development of carbon dating, that beliefs were far from static. From the Mesolithic onwards, there were significant shifts in monumental form, with many sites – the most famous of all being Stonehenge – being refashioned over the centuries and millennia, presumably to keep pace with changing ritual practice and belief. As to the detail of the actual substance of these beliefs – the names of any gods, goddesses and spirits called upon and propitiated, and the mythologies attendant upon them – they will forever remain beyond our grasp. Only with the entry of the island of Britain into the orbit of the ancient literary cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, do we find any indications as to what these beliefs and deities were, and even then, what we are left with is fragmentary and, perhaps, rather tendentious in nature; it does not present us with an objective ethnographic commentary on the beliefs and practices of the ancient Britons. We remain in the historical twilight.

Rather more is known about the religious beliefs and practices of the Roman conquerors, and cult precincts and associated dedicatory inscriptions reveal that many of their gods and goddesses were revered here, often, as elsewhere in the Empire, in syncretistic form with native deities, with the most famous case being that of Sulis-Minerva at Bath. To what extent the coming of these new deities supplanted those already resident in the imaginations and devotional practices of the island’s inhabitants is unknown, but it could be argued that an eclectic form of fusion and co-existence took place, before Christianity asserted its grip.

One question that will also forever go unanswered will be the extent to which late-Roman Britain was Christianised. Evidence exists – such as from the Romano-British pagan temple at Brean Down – that non-Christian beliefs were still adhered to in the second part of the fourth century, which would be consonant with Julian the Apostate’s (361-363) attempt to revive Hellenistic paganism. However, by the time that Theodosius – the last Emperor to rule over both the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire – began to vigorously enforce Christianity as the sole state religion from the 380s onwards, Roman Britannia was already in a position of significant material decline and marginalisation, and would be lost to the Empire in 409 or 410.

The pagans of post-Roman Britain left us no written record of their beliefs and practices, and all we have to go on are a handful of hostile references produced by Christian scholars such as Gildas and Bede. As Hutton emphasises here, we possess only the most tenuous of knowledge relating to the newly arrived deities beyond their names: Woden, Thunor, Tiw and Frigg. Indeed, he calls into question the commonly believed assumption that there was an Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre. This appears to possess but the flimsiest of foundations, with Bede’s supposition that Eosturmonuth was named after such a goddess likely to have been a misunderstanding, with the name of the month (equivalent to April), simply meaning ‘the opening month,’ which Hutton suggests could well refer to the unfurling of leaves.

The material evidence for pagan belief during the fifth to seventh centuries is even more scant than that of earlier eras, for no single pagan temple from this period has been conclusively identified in Britain. What we are presented with, however, are changes in burial practice, that are clearly not Christian, and often include the interment of grave goods alongside the Saxon dead. It seems, however, that once the Anglo-Saxon, British and Pictish elites had adopted Christianity, the new religion readily established itself amongst the mass of the population. What greatly eased this transition, argues Hutton, was Christianity’s ability to present its new followers with an array of saints who functioned in a manner analogous to that of the old gods and goddesses who looked after a particular sphere of life, or a particular place.

There is much more that Hutton discusses in this book with respect to possible pagan survivals, including mediaeval Welsh and Irish textual sources, as well as folk traditions relating to a parallel supernatural realm populated by fairies, hobgoblins and so on. However, once the pagan Danish settlers had converted to Christianity, it is Hutton’s opinion that paganism ceased to operate as a coherent system of operational belief within the island of Britain. He also dismantles the widely cherished belief in a prehistoric ‘Great Goddess,’ tracing the emergence and development of this concept in modern times, and uses the concept of human sacrifice to show how remains – particularly decapitated ones – can be used both in favour of this theory, and against it. His treatment of these issues, and the subject as a whole, is even-handed, pluralistic and non-prescriptive. He encourages the reader to reflect, and to draw his or her own conclusions with respect to the evidence presented. For anyone interested in this area of our history, this book makes for a rewarding, and essential, read.

Seventeenth-Century Occult Novella: The Cleft Owl

A cunning man, a sick man and a dead man, united by charm and rite. Seventeenth-century Devon was never stranger.

‘The Cleft Owl’ – a tender discomfort and a gory crown.

We find ourselves in Widecombe, Dartmoor, in the late autumn of 1683. Dr Robert Tooley – wise man, conjuror and confidence trickster – takes in hand the fortunes of a vulnerable family, as the harshest winter of the century is about to take the parish in its grip. Through his bizarre rites, paid for with their money, he has promised to deliver them from the reach of their tormenter, but the man in question happens to be dead. The gullible villagers, however, entrust their faith to his occult practices, at least for a time.

Based upon a little-known and strange case, a number of the characters here portrayed – Tooley, the Reverend Tickle and the Worshipful Sir William Bastard – all lived and played a role in the life of this late seventeenth-century community, although it should be noted that the words written here are a loose work of fiction. Inspired by an incident related by Keith Thomas in ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic.’

Review: ‘The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England,’ Keith Thomas, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Over his long career, Keith Thomas has written a trio of books that are essential reading for anyone interested in the social history of early modern England, with this being his most recent. The theme that it tackles is a perennial one: how to live a good, as in a fulfilled, life. Whereas the reader will encounter goals and attitudes that are not so distant from our own today, there are many beliefs and practices – unsurprisingly found more towards the beginning of the period in question (the book spans the three hundred years from 1500 to 1800) – that are quite unlike those to which all but a fringe few now subscribe. These changes in outlook run in tandem with shifts in the accompanying social and economic order, with the most pronounced transitions during the period in question being associated with a growing commercialism, individualism and secularisation.

Thus, whereas the mediaeval conception of military glory as virtuous and noble carried over into this period, with martial skills and prowess being seen as an integral part of masculine identity, it gradually ceded its status to the pursuit of wealth, with the military becoming increasingly specialised and professional as feudalism became eclipsed by mercantile, and then industrial, capitalism. The old belligerent ethos was unsuited to the majority in the new commercial age, many of whom now looked down upon the murderous trade plied by those who clung to the ideals of chivalric nobility, or served in the common soldiery.

One of Thomas’s key observations is that routes to individual fulfilment were vastly more circumscribed at the beginning of this period than towards its end, and alas, many still find that their personal choices are greatly limited by their social and economic status today. Self-realisation is not quite as new a concept as we may often think, and the different ‘roads to fulfilment’ that he sketches – vocational, material, reputational, personal and posthumous – are all at play, to a greater or lesser degree, in our own lives now.

Thomas’s prose is always a joy to read, being both commendably objective and laced with wit, with contemporary voices from many different stations of life being given the opportunity to address the reader directly, in the form of the many quotations that pepper this text. For those interested in this period of English history, and particularly for those who aspire to write fiction and wish to gain an insight into the varied social milieux of this time, it is an indispensable resource.

Thomas ends the volume with a quote from a far earlier age – that of Augustan Rome – translated by John Dryden from Horace’s twenty-ninth ode, which is as salutary and joyous now, as it was to its readers in late seventeenth-century England:

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He, who can call today his own;
He, who secure within, can say
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.
Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate are mine.
Not Heav’n itself upon the past has pow’r;
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.

Ghost Story: Kindle Offer

By way of a belated Christmas gift, today and tomorrow I am offering a ghostly tale of Old Twelfth Night free to readers who have a taste for such things. It will be included in the forthcoming anthology ‘Wry out West: Tales of the Uncanny,’ which will be released this spring in both Kindle and paperback formats: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01HSDYE2Q

Star ratings and reviews on Amazon and Goodreads would be welcome.

A brief blurb:
Martin Parsons lets out a shriek as he collapses onto his haunches in Mathew Sweet’s orchard, his broad hands spread by way of protection over his forward-inclined head. It is Twelfth Night by the old reckoning, and festivities are about to commence as something sinister stirs from its protracted dormancy, awakened, it seems, by the arrival of two young guests; the old ways, they find, should not be treated lightly.

Book Review: 'Man and the Natural World,' Keith Thomas.

This work has a longer span than that of Thomas’s most famous book, ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic,’ which constrained its temporal timeframe to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although on occasion it strayed beyond these bounds both before and after, adding an additional century. The century that he adds is the century of the Enlightenment: the eighteenth, with a few ‘unofficial’ forays into the nineteenth. For this wandering beyond his self-imposed bounds, he can be readily forgiven, for what he has produced in this volume is an illuminating guide to popular and learned beliefs relating to the animal and vegetable worlds in early modern England, and how general views relating to these non-human domains shifted during the period in question.

In all of his major publications, Thomas acknowledges that he tends to generalise and lump sources together, making frequent recourse to quotation to illustrate individuals’ views on the matters that he is considering. Such views can at times perhaps run the risk of providing a somewhat skewed picture of general opinion, but Thomas tries to be judicious in choosing a diverse range of primary source materials to bolster the points that he makes. What we thereby obtain is but an imperfect window into the mental universe of the past, but by dint of our very inability to access it directly first-hand, this is, perhaps, the best that we can hope for. Besides, it could equally be argued that it is not possible for us to capture and appreciate the full and rich heterogeneity of contemporary attitudes to the natural world without devoting our lives to observing this subject. We are all, to a greater or lesser degree, imperfect observers of, as well as shapers of, the attitudinal currents that comprise our social world. Nonetheless, Thomas is able to identify and highlight broad trends and shifts in general attitudes between 1500 and 1800, which to a significant extent are expressive of the early conquest and domination of the natural world in England.

It was in England that some of the earliest attempts were made to emulate Nature with the creation of landscape gardening, and that the public acquired a taste for the picturesque and visiting the countryside. The previously perceived ‘horrid wastes’ of mountain and heath, had by the latter part of the eighteenth century become seats of natural sublimity, in which the urban middle classes in particular could seek physical and spiritual refreshment. It seems that the growth of urbanisation and increasing secularisation of knowledge contributed significantly to the emergence of new attitudes within this class in particular, with their estrangement from Nature allowing for a re-evaluation of it as constituting something of value in its own right.

The key dilemmas presented by the human domination and use of the natural world had clearly emerged by the close of the period in consideration: the exploitation of Nature versus conservation; anthropocentrism versus a vague sentiment of pantheism, and the rights of animals constituting some of the more important ones here discussed. As with ‘Religion and the Decline of Magic,’ ‘Man and the Natural World,’ is another volume which I would recommend to anyone interested in the history of early modern England.

Agnes of Grimstone Peverell

A wry-humoured ghost story for Christmas.

On a bitterly cold day in December 2009, the Smallwoods find themselves enjoying the Victorian Christmas market in the little-known Dorset town of Grimstone Peverell. Chilled to the marrow, they retire to the town’s minster where they are accosted by an enthusiastic guide, who knows a great deal about some things, yet next to nothing about that which would, to most people, seem obvious; she seems keen not to let them go, but return to London they must – Lionel has a play to review. That, at least, is his intention.

Available for 99p, 99c, or free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. For a preview, or to purchase, please click on one of the following:

For the UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01N5CVO8Z/

For the US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5CVO8Z/

For Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01N5CVO8Z/

For Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01N5CVO8Z/