Francis Young

I have signed a contract with Polity Books for a new book entitled Fairies: A History, which will be a complete history of godlings of nature and home in Europe and beyond, from prehistory to the present day.

When fairies are mentioned, many people think of a cultural stereotype of a tiny, winged (usually female) being, a byword for childish credulity. But ‘fairies’ (perhaps better called ‘godlings’) are in reality the traditional supernatural beings of European folk belief: situated somewhere between human beings and gods, forming an alternative community of almost-human beings imbued with powers of magic and enchantment, intimately connected with nature and with the earth. From the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans, the rusalki of Ukraine and Russia and the fadas of Iberia, communities of living supernatural beings can be found in folklore from all over Europe, and indeed across the world in other nations that came under the influence of European culture and colonisation. Building on the success of my earlier book Twilight of the Godlings (which dealt with the origins of fairy belief in Britain), Fairies: A History will adopt a global approach to the origins of fairy belief, arguing that fairies are best understood as complex cultural constructions that are created and re-created across time, but are ultimately rooted in popular Christianity.

I have just signed a contract with Cambridge University Press for my third book with CUP, entitled Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples, which will be a history of the last unchristianised peoples of Europe between 1387 (when the last pagan polity, Lithuania, was formally converted) and around 1900. Europe’s religious history from the late Middle Ages onwards is usually seen as the story of Christianity (in its several varieties), Ottoman Islam, and Judaism; but there was a forgotten fourth factor: the persistent refusal of some peoples in the far north and east of the continent to convert to any religion at all. Although the political threat of paganism was ostensibly neutralised at last with the formal conversion of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1387, the reality was that Christianity made painfully slow progress in capturing the hearts and minds of peoples at Europe’s ‘unchristianised edge’, and the effective Christianisation of the continent stalled for centuries in these regions.

The unchristianised peoples of late medieval and early modern Europe included the reindeer-herding Sámi in the far north of Scandinavia, the stubbornly pagan Estonians, the Baltic Prussians, Latvians and Lithuanians, and further to the east the Finno-Ugric peoples of European Russia such as the Maris, Udmurts and Mordvins. The religious history of these peoples, most of whom accepted Christianity in large numbers only in the 18th century or later, has never been told as one narrative, or in the English language. But it forms a crucial piece of the puzzle of Europe’s religious history that has hitherto been missing – a part of the heritage of the modern nations descending from these peoples, but unknown to Europe at large. Silence of the Gods will address this omission, restoring Europe’s last unchristianised peoples to the patchwork of the continent’s religious history, and revealing a history of belief more complex and diverse than traditional accounts have led us to expect.

My review of Anthony Grafton’s new book Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa has just appeared in the latest edition of History Today, under the title ‘Stranger Things’. Magus is a fascinating exploration of the figure of the Renaissance at its height, in the early years of the 16th century when anything seemed possible and magic appeared to be a key to all arts and sciences.

My chapter ‘A Provocative Presence: The Franciscan Friars of Babwell and Conflict with the Benedictine Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1265-1538’ has been published in Instances of Franciscanism in England (XIIIth-XVIth Centuries, a special issue of the journal Studi Francescani edited by Andreea Chiricheș. Publication of the volume coincides with the celebration of the 800th anniversary of the Franciscan friars in England in 2024.

While the conflicts between the Franciscans and the monks of St Edmunds Abbey before 1265 are well known, this chapter deals with the less explored subject of the relationship between the Abbey and the friary of Babwell, just outside the town boundaries, during the later period when friars and monks uneasily co-existed up to the dissolution. The Franciscan friars in Bury St Edmunds were the subject of my recent book The Franciscans in Medieval Bury St Edmunds.

I have signed a contract with Arc Humanities Press to write a new book for the ‘Past Imperfect’ series, Pre-Christian Baltic Religion and Belief, which will be the first book written in English dedicated to providing an overview of Baltic religion and mythology.

The Baltic region (Prussia, Lithuania and Latvia) was one of the last areas of Europe to be Christianised, and the survival of its pre-Christian religions into the early modern period meant that they became a subject of interest to early ethnographers, as well as church authorities concerned about idolatry and witchcraft. However, the religions of the Baltic have often been interpreted through the lens of modern reconstructions of mythology based on folklore collected in the nineteenth century. Pre-Christian Baltic Religion and Belief will concentrate instead on what we can know about Baltic religion from sources contemporaneous (or nearly contemporaneous) with the ongoing practice of pre-Christian cults, as well as drawing on the insights of archaeology to understand the world of some of the last people in Europe to relinquish their pre-Christian beliefs.

The book will deal with the gods, goddesses and spirits of Baltic belief, sacred sites in Baltic religion, rites of sacrifice, birth, marriage and burial, and the probable place of magic and divination in pre-Christian Baltic belief.

Katy Soar (ed.), Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites (London: British Library Publishing, 2023), 238pp.

“Something clings to it, some curse, some abomination …”

“They held a subtle sense of majestic power, of latent evil; a sense of darkness and decay; a sense of age and forgotten secrets …”

Why are ancient standing stones so disquieting? Is it their extreme age that disturbs us, a reminder not only of the mortality of the individual but the mortality of whole civilisations and cultures? Or is it their mystery – the frustration of never having any certainty about what they were for, or what their builders intended? Do we dislike sharing a landscape we consider ‘ours’ with an indelible yet ultimately incomprehensible past? Or is it their isolation in the landscape – the unheimlichkeit of encountering human-made structures far from anywhere, with no obvious purpose – the disquiet of the detritus of ritual long forgotten? Or is it the stories that cling to these stones that disturb us, the folklore and the interpretations of generations of antiquaries (convinced these stones were saturated with the blood of sacrifices)? Or is it even the very appearance of the stones themselves that suggests the macabre – the Rollrights pockmarked by deep time, the vaguely anthropomorphic Whispering Knights, the portal-like Stonehenge, the sinister bulk of the vast stones of Avebury that famously featured in the title sequence of the unsettling TV series ‘Children of the Stones’?

All these factors, no doubt, feed into the impression of the eldritch that often attends prehistoric monuments in the British landscape. There can be no doubt that, in the modern world, these are liminal places – eagerly visited every year by many people with different motivations, but belonging resolutely to another world that lies always just beyond the horizon of our understanding. The 15 tales in this volume, dating from between 1893 and 2018, all approach the idea that megalithic monuments are somehow sinister or eldritch in their own distinctive ways – as well as finding different ways to somehow bridge the great gap in time between the megaliths and us. Katy Soar was the co-editor, with Amara Thornton, of an earlier collection, Strange Relics (Handheld Press, 2022), which I reviewed here. Whereas the focus of Strange Relics was classic stories of the archaeological supernatural, the focus of Circles of Stone is solely on tales featuring prehistoric standing stones and megaliths of some kind.

Human sacrifice, and its dark power resonating down the centuries, is a common theme of several of the stories. In both E. F. Benson’s ‘The Temple’ (1924) and Rosalie Muspratt’s ‘The Spirit of Stonehenge’ (1930), something about the stones themselves compels people to sacrifice by the shedding of blood – leading in both cases to a tragic suicide. In Muspratt’s story (writing as Jasper John), it is ‘elementals’ who are drawn to the evil perpetrated at Stonehenge in the form of human sacrifice and haunt the place, seeking to possess or influence people who come into contact with it (an ‘elemental’ also seems to be at the root of the poltergeist-like activity in Nigel Kneale’s ‘Minuke’ (1949), and perhaps also involved in ‘The Dark Land’ (1975) by Mary Williams). In Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Tarn of Sacrifice’ (1921), however, it is not gods, demons or ghosts who bridge the gap between modernity and megaliths, but rather reincarnation – in a story heavily imbued with the aftermath of the First World War, which has turned the idyllic paganism of the Edwardian era to dark thoughts of blood sacrifice. Similarly, while the stories are set in various locations it is the West Country and Cornwall in particular that predominate – the British landscape dominated more than any other, perhaps, by the unsettling presence of the megalithic past.

In A. L. Rowse’s 1945 Cornish-set story ‘The Stone That Liked Company’, which to my mind is one of the most interesting of the collection, it is the megalith itself which is somehow the protagonist – the source of its own power, somehow, rather than a vehicle of supernatural beings:

There was something horrible in the threatening headlessness of the stone, the shapelessness that was yet suggestive of power, of a ruthless natural force imprisoned in it incapable of expressing itself, or of any release.

The longstone of the tale, which seems to move about by night, is filled with latent power, ‘the embodiment of grey despair, deserted for centuries by its votaries, living its own terrible secret life, the embodiment of imprisoned force.’ The idea of sentient or moving stones also recurs in ‘Where The Stones Grow’ (1980) by Lisa Tuttle, while in Elsa Wallace’s ‘The Suppell Stone’ (2018) the stone actually consumes people.

In H. R. Wakefield’s folk horror ‘The First Sheaf’ (1940), set in late Victorian Essex, the sacrificial megalith is a ‘pillar’ bearing an illegible inscription, and with some sort of dish in its top, that stands in a field left uncultivated by local people; and, although Wakefield does not say as much, the ‘pillar’ is implicitly a Roman altar – given the absence of megalithic sites in the east of England and the presence of writing and a patera (the integrated dish for sacrificial offerings at the top of a Roman altar). This makes for an interesting comparison with John Buchan’s novel Witch Wood (1927), where the altar at the centre of the folk horror action is similarly a much worn Roman one. The gods of Wakefield’s story are apparently real enough, however, since the invocation of the pagan ‘priest’ brings sudden thunder and lightning.

Stuart Strauss’s ‘The Shadow on the Moor’ (1928) is obviously an American story about the British countryside, as the author’s unfamiliarity with British archaeology and the use of certain terms (‘fall’ for autumn, and the assumption that a small community would have a mayor) suggests he may never have visited Britain. It is, nonetheless, an atmospheric story where it is the stones themselves who are somehow the protagonists: ‘As he now glanced at it he thought it seemed to have a personality – a soul old and evil – longing to crush to atoms the lives of those who entered its once sacred portals’. By contrast, in ‘Lisheen’ (1948) by Frederick Cowles the stone circle is almost incidental to the story, the site of the pagan worship of 17th-century Cornish villagers that is clearly inspired by Margaret Murray’s theory of the ‘witch-cult’. For once, however, Cowles’s story is not about human sacrifice, but rather about pagan rites and, ultimately, departure to an otherworld.

20th-century authors responding to Britain’s megalithic sites seem to have struggled with the paradox of the stones’ antiquity. At a time when the myth of human progress was at its zenith, it went without saying that the people of the past must have been ‘primitive’ – quasi-simian, even, given the prevailing racial ideas of the pre-War era. And yet the vast size and sophistication of the stones, together with their extraordinary longevity, makes them ipso facto evidence of a culture capable of extraordinary technological achievements. The idea that sophisticated people existed in the past, just as much as the thought that the seemingly ‘primitive’ cultures of colonised lands were nothing of the kind, was a discomforting one – and it was perhaps the contradiction inherent in primitive peoples achieving astounding architectural feats that suggested the idea of magic.

The centrality of the horror of human sacrifice to so many stories about Britain’s megalithic past reflects the archaeology of the time, where some element of human sacrifice was often assumed in the distant past – by analogy with what Roman authors tell us of the human sacrifices of the druids. In this sense, the association between megalithic sites and human sacrifice was a lingering relic of William Stukeley’s powerful and influential identification of megalithic sites as druidic temples. Interestingly, this theme seems to have become more common in the mid-20th century, and the two earliest stories in the collection, J. H. Pearce’s ‘The Man Who Could Talk With The Birds’ (1893) and Arthur Machen’s ‘The Ceremony’ (1897) are not concerned with human sacrifice. Perhaps this was because Frazerian ideas about folk customs as the remnants of rites of sacrifice went mainstream only in the 20th century.

We now know that stone circles and other megalithic monuments were not, in all probability, sites of human sacrifice; indeed, the evidence that human sacrifice existed in Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain is slight, and the practice of human sacrifice seems to have been an innovation of the Iron Age. There were, in all probability, no ‘altar stones’ associated with these sites, because if there were we would expect to find archaeological evidence of sacrificial activity. However, even if it was not associated with sacrifice, we do now know the extent to which a site like Stonehenge was associated with death; the entire surrounding landscape was peppered with burials. The association of megaliths with sacrifice is very much of its time, as is the evocation of ‘elementals’ – harking back as it does to the popular Spiritualism of the 20th century. We now know that the people who built the megaliths were not ‘primitive’, and have rightly jettisoned such a pejorative cultural concept. The long shadow cast by the druids is finally being dispelled.

How, then, does contemporary literature respond to Britain’s megalithic past, if archaeology is to inform imaginative responses to these monuments? This anthology offers a few hints. Perhaps the traditional tales told about these sites will become more important than their supposed ‘original purpose’, which often feels unrecoverable. Above all, however, the trajectory suggested by this anthology seems to be towards a focus on the stones themselves as quasi-sentient objects, pregnant with presence and meaning. The secret of their original purpose and meaning, held with such resolute determination, imbues them with a kind of cultural charge – batteries of the strange, simultaneously eternally familiar and implacably alien. This collection is one of the very best British Library Publishing has yet brought out in the Tales of the Weird Series.

Rosemary Pardoe (ed.), The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Follies and Grottoes (Sarob Press, 2022), 177pp.

Rosemary Pardoe, the doyenne of the Jamesian ghost story, has edited several compilations of supernatural tales for Sarob Press – all in the vein of the stories published in the magazine Ghosts & Scholars that she edited for so many years – if not actually consisting of stories culled, in a thematic fashion, from its pages. Of the thirteen stories featured in the Book of Follies and Grottoes, eight have previously appeared in Ghosts & Scholars (a magazine where one of my own ghost stories has previously been published, in fact). Each one of the stories in this volume is built around a folly or grotto that in some way evokes, provokes or restrains the preternatural.

Reading the collection caused me to reflect on what it is that makes follies of various kinds so creepy – for creepy they certainly are. One of the best-known ghost stories to feature a folly – or, rather, a garden feature – is M. R. James’s ‘Mr Humphreys and His Inheritance’, and the folly story can perhaps be classified as a subset of stories about garden hauntings. For if the decaying haunted house is a terrifying prospect, the overgrown haunted garden is arguably more fearful still – combining as it does the exuberant life of encroaching, choking, heedless nature with the prospect of an encounter with the dead. Yet within the haunted garden the folly occupies a special place, for follies are inherently unnatural: buildings without any normal, useful purpose that embody the unchecked will of their capricious designers and builders.

The first reason follies are creepy, therefore, is their lack of a normal domestic purpose. Unlike other ancillary buildings found on an estate, a folly exists only to be viewed as part of a picturesque vista, and perhaps visited as some sort of summerhouse (or, like several of the follies in these stories, as a viewing platform). Furthermore, some follies were created to be ruined; and thus decay was integrated into their design from the very beginning. A folly’s state of general decay is a feature, not a bug; and a folly is thus a kind of undead building – a structure brought into being only to exist in a kind of half-life of intentional decay.

Another reason why follies are creepy is their association with pagan religion. Many roofed garden structures in the gardens of England’s great houses are known as ‘temples’, and based loosely on ancient buildings such as the Tower of the Winds in Athens, although in most cases the name ‘temple’ simply describes their Neoclassical architectural style rather than any sacred use for which these glorified summerhouses were intended. But there were notable exceptions, such as Sir Francis Dashwood’s antics at West Wycombe when he dedicated a temple to Bacchus; and the existence of societies such as the Hellfire Club fuelled a lingering suspicion that some of the bien pensant Enlightenment connoisseurs of England were so immersed in the Classical world they loved that they had not only abandoned Christianity, but had also begun to quietly embrace paganism. In light of this fear of creeping apostasy, which was occasionally articulated by the more thoroughgoing churchmen of the time, the ‘temples’ of England’s estates take on a certain dark glamour, as potential sites of abominable rites in honour of long dead deities, breathing life back into dark powers dormant since antiquity. And the idea that a philopagan squire brought something more than sculptures back from the Grand Tour lies at the heart of several of the stories in Rosemary Pardoe’s collection. In this respect, folly stories can be located in that subgenre of supernatural tale (with longstanding antecedents in English folklore) about the evil squire.

But temples were not the only buildings on which follies and other garden structures were modelled. Some were inspired by mausolea, and it is this link between follies and mausolea that gives them another creepy association: with death and burial. I am not aware of any actual follies that really were mausolea – they would not, after all, have been built on consecrated ground – but many English country estates have a church and therefore a churchyard close to or right next to the main house, meaning that the sometimes grandiose mausolea of the dead are sometimes adjacent to (if not part of) the garden. Furthermore, as the demands of eighteenth-century landscaping led to the clearance and relocation of village communities too close to a great house, the ancient churches of country estates were often left marooned in the garden – little more than follies themselves, one might say, especially if they came to be rebuilt in a fashionable style. Follies in ghost stories sometimes turn out to be unholy mausolea – dwelling-places of the unsanctified dead, like a replacement for the estate churches whose crypts really did house the genteel dead. The world of the folly is thus the world of the necropolis, the house of the dead that stands as a counterpart to the house of the living at the heart of the estate.

Folly stories seem to be dominated disproportionately by the presence of one historical period: the eighteenth century, as the era most strongly associated with the construction of pointless buildings in artificial landscapes. It was an era of vast injustice and obscene disparities of wealth, now seemingly neatly packaged for the genteel visitor to country houses and estates. The folly story is perhaps an epiphenomenon of a deep-seated unease with the period – an era of great beauty and astounding aesthetic accomplishment that was underpinned, in many cases, by profound evil and exploitation. Here as elsewhere the ghost story provides a kind of cultural escape valve for our unease, in the stereotype of the evil Georgian connoisseur whose apostasy and spiritual abominations unleashes dark forces: a revelation, on one interpretation, of the true ugliness of the eighteenth century. But perhaps this is an interpretation too far; however interpreted, the subgenre of ghost story that concerns itself with follies, grottoes and other useless buildings is handsomely represented in Rosemary Pardoe’s collection, which will be enjoyed by lovers of antiquarian ghost stories for years to come.

This evening I launched my new book The Franciscans in Medieval Bury St Edmunds with a talk at Moyse’s Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds. Published by Boydell & Brewer on behalf of the Suffolk Record Society, the book is volume 22 in the SRS’s Charters Series, edited by Dr Nicholas Karn. The book is an edition and translation of documents relating to the conflict between the Franciscan friars and the Benedictine monks of Bury St Edmunds between 1233 and 1263, and thereafter documents relating to the Franciscan friary at Babwell (just outside Bury) between 1265 and its dissolution in 1538. The site of Babwell Friary is now the Best Western Priory Hotel in the northern part of the town.

I first proposed a volume dealing with the Bury Franciscans to the Suffolk Record Society in 2019, and planned to undertake most of the work on the volume in 2020. The pandemic supervened, however, and it became impossible for me to access the archives in which most of the material for the book could be found. Accordingly, I was forced to postpone work on the book for a year or more, but I am very grateful to Dr Nicholas Karn for seeing the book through to completion and publication. I am hopeful that it will shine a light on Bury’s largely forgotten Franciscan friaries, and an often overlooked aspect of the town’s religious history.

My short article ‘Folklore in Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy‘ has just been published in issue 101 of FLS News, the newsletter of the Folklore Society. The text of the article is below:

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The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy by Penelope Lively, published in 1971, is a classic of what would later become known as folk horror – and, indeed, what would later become known as young adult literature, long before either term had been coined. As Ronald Hutton has observed, The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy holds a special place in the modern history of the cultural motif of the Wild Hunt, because it was the first time the Wild Hunt appeared in twentieth-century British fiction. The novel was aimed at 11 to 14 year-olds, and tells the story of a 12 year-old girl named Lucy who is sent to spend the summer with her aunt Mabel in the remote West Somerset village of Hagworthy. Hagworthy is quite precisely located: two stops after Dunster on a fictional railway line that turns inland running southwest from the coast, and therefore somewhere in the Brendon Hills on the edge of Exmoor.

Lively revealed some of the folkloric inspiration for the book in two quotations that appear on the opening page: one is taken from the Peterborough recension of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describing the first recorded appearance of the ‘Wild Hunt’ in England, at Peterborough in 1127; and the other is a quotation from Ruth Tongue’s Somerset Folklore (1965). The second quotation offers several clues to the folkloric inspirations for The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy, since it locates a tradition of the Wild Hunt (or more specifically, the Yeff Hounds) in the same region where Lively’s story situates the fictional village of Hagworthy. The quotation is taken from Appendix III(b) of Tongue’s book, on p. 228, and was attributed by Tongue to a member of the Stogumber W.I. who told her the story in 1960:

The Yeff Hounds, or Ghost Pack, were heard pattering through Stogumber after midnight this year, but no-one looked out to see them, even nowadays. They are known to run through the village and down towards Roebuck, then on up towards Wills Neck.

‘Roebuck’ is a reference to Roebuck Farm, Roebuck Gate Farm and Roebuck Crossing, which are all located about a mile southeast of Stogumber on the east side of the railway line which runs along the bottom of the combe parallel to Doniford Stream, and just inside the parish boundary of the neighbouring village of Crowcombe. ‘Wills Neck’ is the highest summit of the Quantock Hills, located due east of Roebuck Farm, past the village of Triscombe. The place-name ‘Roebuck’ is a reminder of the significance of deer in the Quantock and Brendon Hills and the tradition of hunting them there – and perhaps represents the source of the significance of deer and antlers in Lively’s book.

Ruth Tongue’s interest in supernatural hounds went back at least as far as 1956, when she published a brief notice on the subject, ‘Traces of Fairy Hounds in Somerset’, in Folklore 67:4 (December 1956), pp. 233–4. Penelope Lively’s story brings together the idea of the Wild Hunt (in the form of the Yeff Hounds, although they are never mentioned in the narrative itself) and a fictional horn-dance, loosely based on that of Abbots Bromley, which the villagers of Hagworthy decide to revive.

While many 20th-century writers of ‘folk horror’ were preoccupied with the idea of survivals (Eleanor Scott, John Buchan, David Pinner, Norah Lofts and John Bowen, to name a few), in common with the trends in folklore studies at the time, Penelope Lively’s Wild Hunt of Hagworthy adopts a different approach. The novel is notable in placing the emphasis on revival (reinvention, even) rather than survival. While the hapless vicar of Hagworthy, who is the moving spirit behind the revival of the local horn dance, believes the dance to be ‘no doubt a very ancient survival’, we are told that the church accounts mentioning the Horn Dancers reach back into the eighteenth century (but apparently no earlier), and stop in around 1803. In contrast to much ‘folk horror’ of the era, Lively does not attempt to set up a conflict between Christianity and a supposed ‘old religion’ underlying the ancient surviving ritual, but rather makes the vicar the unwitting initiator of the novel’s supernatural events – a kindred figure, perhaps, to the complacent antiquaries who inadvertently awaken eldritch horrors in the ghost stories of M. R. James. Lively’s nuanced (and even tongue-in-cheek) treatment of the question of folkloric survivals means that The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy stands the test of time; it seems more in tune with present-day preoccupations with the revival and reinvention of customs than with the ‘survivalist’ approaches to folklore that still largely held sway in 1971.

Nevertheless, in spite of the absence of any certainty that the Horn Dance of Hagworthy is really ancient, in the novel the revival of the dance triggers two supernatural events. The first is a kind of collective ‘possession’ which comes upon the young male dancers, causing them to compulsively pursue Kester Lang, the misfit of the village. The second is the arrival of the Yeff Hounds or Wild Hunt itself – heard by the protagonist, Lucy, several times during the night and then finally encountered on Exmoor by Kester and Lucy at the climax of the novel. Exactly what the connection is between the Horn Dance and the Wild Hunt is never explained – arguably, a strength of the novel. However, at one point the old blacksmith, Kester’s uncle, does explain to Lucy why people do not look out at the Wild Hunt when they hear it:

‘Because once you seen them you’re a part them, aren’t you, girl? You’re with them under the same sky and treading the same ground. And they’re a Hunt, aren’t they? They have to hunt something, or someone, don’t they?’

The idea that observation of something otherworldly somehow constitutes a form of participation in it is found elsewhere in English folklore; the Cambridgeshire folklorist Enid Porter, for example, noted the belief that if anyone watched for the fetches of those destined to die in the coming year on St Mark’s Eve, he or she would be fated to watch every year thereafter. It is wiser not to look, therefore, and a similar idea may have underpinned the people of Stogumber’s reluctance to look at the Yeff Hounds. However, the Stogumber narrative seems to have been doubly suggestive to Penelope Lively, stimulating the novelist to imagine both the nature of the apparent taboo against looking at the Wild Hunt, and to wonder why people ‘even nowadays’ might entertain such reluctance. The result is a novel in which Kester Lang’s decision to look at the Wild Hunt makes him both the quarry of both the supernatural hunt and the ritual hunt that the Hagworthy Horn Dance inevitably becomes.

This afternoon, at Evensong for the eve of St Edmund’s Day, I was collated and installed as an Honorary Lay Canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral. This is a personal appointment of the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich and makes me a member of the cathedral’s College of Canons. It is a rather humbling honour to receive from the Cathedral of my home town, and it feels especially fitting that I have been assigned the stall named ‘Historiographers’. The appointment will last for three years, although it may be renewed for a total of six.

I am not by any means the first lay canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, and indeed the Cathedral’s best known lay canon was the late Ronald Blythe, who was installed in 2003. Indeed, Ronald Blythe bequeathed a Reader’s blue preaching scarf ornamented with the arms of the Diocese (a privilege of a canon) to the Cathedral, and I wore it today as I am also a Reader.

The Cathedrals Measure 1999 makes provision for the appointment of laypeople as canons of Church of England cathedrals, but lay canons have in fact existed since the Middle Ages. Originally, the term ‘lay canon’ was a synonym for ‘secular canon’; that is, non-resident secular priests who had the title of canon of a cathedral or collegiate church. However, the statutes of some orders of regular canons (such as the Gilbertines) also permitted laymen to be admitted to the order as canons; and of course women could become canonesses in various religious orders. Furthermore, by the 13th century it was not unknown for a layman to obtain appointment to a canonry in order to farm its income, while appointing a vicar or proctor to perform his canonical obligations. Elsewhere in Europe, noble lay canons (who were sometimes hereditary) sometimes underlined their status by wearing armour under their surplices in choir, and by carrying a hawk on one hand on certain important feasts.

As a cathedral foundation, St Edmundsbury Cathedral dates only to 1914, although the Church of St James that became the Cathedral was founded by Abbot Anselm in the 1120s in symbolic fulfilment of a vow to go on pilgrimage to Compostella. However, St James’ Church succeeded a previous church on the site (on the north side of the Abbey Church’s west front) dedicated to St Denis, which may have been served by a college of secular canons and was probably founded in the 1080s by Abbot Baldwin. The canons of St Edmundsbury Cathedral thus continue an ancient tradition of canons in Bury St Edmunds which can be traced back to the original community of secular priests and laypeople (‘canons’ might be an anachronism) who cared for the shrine and body of St Edmund before Benedictine monks replaced them in 1020. Furthermore, this was not the last secular college in Bury; in 1480 Jankyn Smyth founded the College of the Sweet Name of Jesus, which housed and supported the chantry priests and chaplains of both St Mary’s church and St James’s (although these were not canons). This college endured until its dissolution by Edward VI in 1547.

The Council of Trent did not outlaw lay canons, but it denied them the right to speak in chapter. Lay canons survived the Reformation in England, since a canonry did not carry with it a cure of souls, and it was not until 1661 that the law required all residentiary canons to be in priest’s orders. But even then, lay canons continued to be appointed as honorary members of cathedral chapters, and laymen could be presented to prebends. Dr Johnson’s dictionary defined lay canons as men ‘who have been, as a mark of honour, admitted into some chapters’. There are sporadic references to lay canons of various English cathedral chapters throughout the nineteenth century; Carlisle, for example, had four lay canons throughout this period. Installations of lay canons continued into the 20th century; in 1936, for example, Portsmouth Cathedral put in special stalls for its lay canons. However, the Cathedrals Measure 1999 revitalised the idea of lay canons, establishing them as part of the diocese’s College of Canons (which replaced the Greater Chapter). The College of Canons is distinct from the Cathedral Chapter that actually governs a cathedral, and is not part of its foundation, but it is the College of Canons which formally elects a new bishop for the diocese.

The installation of canons is a surprisingly complicated affair that begins behind closed doors, with the Diocesan Registrar administering the required oaths to the clergy and laypeople about to be installed as canons. For a lay canon, these are the Oath of Allegiance to the King, an oath of canonical obedience to the Bishop, and an oath to maintain the statutes and customs of the cathedral church. The new canon subscribes these oaths (by signing them) and is then presented with a deed of collation, to which the Bishop’s seal has been affixed.

In the service itself the new canons are introduced by the Bishop and Dean, and later in the service comes the collation, when the Dean formally presents the new canons to the Bishop; the Bishop then asks the Registrar to confirm that the canons have made the required oaths, and the Bishop then confirms the canons’ appointment and blesses them. Then the Bishop directs the Dean to install the canons, and the Dean leads them to the nave altar. Here, with their right hands on the Gospels, the canons swear (again) to observe the cathedral’s statutes and customs. Once this is done, the installation itself takes place when the Dean leads the new canons by hand into the quire to their assigned stalls. The canons remain standing until the Dean has read the formula of installation for each canon. The canon then sits in their stall and the installation is formally complete. One reason why the rite of installation is quite so convoluted is that canonries were once treated as items of property, and thus installation carries with it traces of the procedure of livery of seisin, whereby ownership of a freehold was passed on by a series of ritual actions.