Folklore research in England is currently at an intriguing point. There has lately been no higher degree folklore program available in England, although that will change in the coming year. At the same time, however, interest in folklore is higher than ever. It is noteworthy, therefore, that many small press folklore publications do reflect serious scholarly engagement, albeit not from scholars who would necessarily regard themselves above all as folklorists. These two rather good little local studies highlight the strengths and idiosyncrasies to be found.
Francis Young is a prolific author with an academic background in Anglo-Catholic and pre-Reformation church history and an interested focus on his local region, East Anglia (the eastern counties north of London as far as The Wash). Coming to local folklore in this way inflects Young’s work with an historical and historicized character that is equally refreshing and perplexing, while his intensely local focus also reflects certain longer-standing historical problems with folklore studies in Britain. Close local studies are essential, but how best these are organized remains an open question amidst calls for renewed publication of regional collections. Young, Suffolk-born and now resident in Peterborough, does have a wider view, and does not succumb to the temptation to study solely within municipal boundaries that characterized the worst of the early publications. His fairylore book looks beyond county boundaries in its discussion of historical expectations of fairy belief in East Anglia, although in doing so it does also sometimes posit conjectural local origins. Young’s tendency to operate within other administrative boundaries (dioceses) reveals an antiquarian slant that needs mention. Considering the small city of Peterborough, for example, he takes as his boundaries the ancient church parishes of three counties now lying within Peterborough Unitary Authority, a 1998 adaptation of previous local government organization.
Probably the greatest strength of both volumes is their good historical overview of earlier material. The collation of earlier documentation in the Peterborough book is sensitive, intelligent, and wide-ranging, bringing together the familiar (the poet John Clare’s records of local customs) and the less well-known, including the archival collection of Charles Dack (1847-after 1921), sometime honorary curator of the city’s museum. This is particularly valuable, and does not just involve collectanea. Young also considers some of the thinking behind earlier appraisals of folklore, writing well on the “nostalgia and … tendency to exaggerate the decline of … traditions” (8) shown by Clare and his successors. In fact, Young notes, much of Enid Porter’s 1969 Cambridgeshire folklore collection came from contemporary informants.
Young wrestles with questions of adaptation and invention, taking a healthy attitude to the interaction of literary creation and oral tradition, although he seems to have arrived at this position independently: he is usefully not inclined to dismiss traditions arising from literary sources if they have been adopted as locally told stories, although this begs some (unanswered) questions about how to assess that adoption. It also raises questions about how to interpret revivals of older, defunct traditions. Writing only four years later that a May Day procession revived in 2013 was “already a local tradition” (6), for example, seems overly expansive, even if it does reflect Young’s healthy instinct that folklore is a constantly evolving and developing body of “stories and customs.” Thanks to this, he is able to take a generally level-headed view of current adaptations of belief in the fairy volume’s epilogue, which deals with accounts since the First World War.
Young acknowledges the Peterborough book is too slender to include all the area’s vernacular culture, so divides its chapters evenly between the thematic and the general (a local survey, largely by legend, and a calendar rundown of customs), with an appendix of records of local mummers’ plays. The thematic chapters, on religion and magic (broadly indicating his research interests), give the book an historical slant, documenting narratives around the Christianization of the area and pre-Christian paganism at length. Young is, however, at least aware of more recent work in folklore, and there is much to enjoy.
His study of Suffolk’s fairylore is similarly guided. The recent surge of interest in fairylore has been in part driven by practitioners, so Young’s sometimes old-fashioned historicism provides a sensible starting point and a valuable corrective to more speculative invention in this area, even as he engages well with contemporary interest in fairies. Addressing the historical and historiographical records requires efforts to define the subject, and Young does well with a set of working “boundaries (however artificial)” (8) that allow him wide scope. His argument that “No general theory of the origin of fairy beliefs is possible (or even desirable)” (35) is welcome, although it comes at the end of a chapter that seems expansively embracing of the far-reaching historical conjectures he is warning against. The book improves as it moves more confidently through its historical overview right up to the present day. (Useful appendices document medieval narratives and the folktales collected in the nineteenth century.)
Young is wrestling with some big questions here—his discussion of the argument that witchcraft and fairy belief are inversely relational is lucid—so he will hopefully be able in future work to overcome the absence of some germane recent scholarship here. This, it feels, is where the local focus can inhibit sensible scholarship, even in small books like these by someone with Young’s sound scholarly instincts. Sabina Magliocco’s work on neo-pagan fairy belief would have helped shape the last chapter of the fairy book greatly, for instance, while Young’s arguments around ancient fairy interpretation would be further refined and clarified by reference to scholarship from further afield. Within these limitations, however, both books will retain their value as meticulously sourced compilations. They are a compelling snapshot of what is currently being achieved in that approach to folklore studies.
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[Review length: 959 words • Review posted on November 7, 2019]