Hookland County Chronicle
Issue 14
To be English is to be haunted. – C.L. Nolan
Hello. Welcome to Issue 14 of the Hookland County Chronicle – read by some 2250 souls in 47 countries and 48 US states – not including West Virginia , a fact I take personally. In the numerology of Hookland, 14 symbolises a refreshing of energy, an illogical commitment to hopes gifted by vague dreams and positive change. Unfortunately, I can make no claim for this issue’s ability to deliver any of these things. Due to extreme Musk pisspuffinry, you can now not only find Hookland on Substack Notes and Facebook, but also on Bluesky as @hookland.bsky.social. If you need an invite to the cloudless place, drop me a line. – David
Every territory of witchery delivers lessons. Every mile that puts muds on the witch’s boots and tires her legs is an opportunity to be taught by the land itself. The hedge teaches entanglement, complexity of both biological and spirit eco-systems. The wood teaches the power of ferity and underground networks, a need to understand non-verbal languages if you hope for green communion. To walk the brook gives insight into strategies for overcoming, the currents within magic. Travel the hills and you comprehend the might of wind workings, the glamorous dangers of doorways to Faery. The witch taking to the tidal marshes knows not only the courage needed for navigation of salt-dominions, but the fallacy of demanding certainty in all operations. – Extract from Wild Witchery, the correspondence course in witchcraft first run by Emily Banting in 1982
You Beast You! Hairy Pike AKA Spite of the Slough
The compilers of mediaeval bestiaries are often regarded as poor naturalists by their modern counterparts. They have been labelled fabulists, unreliable storytellers, extravagant embroiders. Yet when we unpick this commonly mouthed assertion, it is often revealed as boneless.
Take for instance Gervase of Dedwick’s observations on the northern pike (Esox lucius) in the 12th century where he states: ‘For the pike is the great terror of the lake. It is the eater of fish till there is famine. It is the taker of many fingers. Oar made cudgel will not deter its vengeance. Fools say the pike has no fear except its own kind for it is a fish who will dart and take the tasty flesh of its fellow in its teeth. The wise know it flees fastest from the point-nosed shadow of the Hairy Pike.’
Many contemporary anglers would say the only contentious statement in the above is the allusion to the Hairy Pike – a species of fish referenced in many bestiaries written during the High Middle Ages and the Late Middle Ages. As early as Hamilcar’s Historia Animalium, the
Hairy Luci or the Furred Slough Snake as it was labelled, was thought of as related, but distinct from the standard northern pike. Measuring at least three to four cubits in length, it was to said to have beryl green scales. reddish fins marked with dark spots and of course, a significant covering of hair.
The defining feature of the Hairy Pike was claimed to be silver in colour and to measure between one and two inches long. The hair was most prominent on its lower jaw, neck and just behind its head. According to the Bestiaire of Gilbert de Thaon, the hairs were wild, coarse and poisonous to the touch. Four centuries later, the diarist Dr. Bron recorded both their toxicity and the uses to which witches and cunning folk made of them in assorted charms. Much like the Loðsilungur or Shaggy Trout native to Iceland, the Hairy Pike’s fur allowed it to swim in the coldest of seas and rivers. Also in commonality with the Loðsilungur, the flesh of the Hairy Pike was said to be inedible to males – though it did not cause a man eating it to become pregnant and have his scrotum cut open to deliver the baby as the Loðsilungur did.
Noted zoologist Dr. George Sandison appeared on Miranda May’s Marvellous Monsters suggesting historical reports of Hairy Pike may have been inspired by the water mould Saprolegnia (also known as cotton mould). Fish infected with the mould will spout tufts of fur-like growth on their bodies and a heavy infection will result in death. Sandison pointed out that as the fungus can continues to grow afterwards, dead fish largely covered in an apparent white fur can be founded washed ashore. When pressed by May, he did also concede: “There is a small, ridiculously small possibility that there was once a now extinct fish similar to the striated frogfish covered in dermal spinules that resembled hairs.”
In Hookland where Esox lucius has a legion of names including Nasty-nosed Jack; Long-faced Harry; Ditch-bastard; Finger-thief and Water Wolf, there should be no surprise Esox Esau also has a raft of titles. Among those still used as late as the end of the 19th century were: Shaggy Slough; Teeth-of-the-Mere; Silver Slough Slinker; Glass-toothed Pike; Mere Menace; Swan-slayer; Blood Pike; Spite of the Slough and Furry Lucy. Unlike many other creatures recorded in mediaeval bestiaries, the Hairy Pike was regularly reported – if much less regularly caught – up until the first decade of the 20th century.
Believed to favour sluggish streams, weed-ravelled ponds and meres, it is unsurprising the last sighting of Hairy Pike in England was in the Blood Wide of the Restal Wastes in 1934. Unfortunately, the photograph taken of its catch is exceptionally blurred. It has been suggested that the picture shows nothing more than a large northern pike, dressed in a white wig, desperately struggling to leave the arms of its alleged captor. The Alderings’ Court pub in the Waste claims to have a stuffed Hairy Pike caught in 1878 in a display case high up behind the bar, partly obscured by the optics and dusty bottles of apple brandy and sloe gin. However, several successive publicans have kept to a policy of not allowing close inspection of the taxidermied fish – especially by anyone who could be considered a man or woman of science.
Given the claims made about the Esox Esau in parental scarelore – don’t put your hands in the pool in case you lose a finger or brush against it is poisonous fur and suffer a permanently withered arm – it is possibly a good thing that modern sightings of it have died out. Ultimately, we all know some children are notoriously immune to following good advice.
For some Saxons, everywhere had elves. There were mound elves, woods elves, elves of the downs and elves of the sea. There were elves of the water that spread diseases and field elves who would curse a crop given the excuse of anything resembling disrespect. There were fire elves and elves of the stones that sat atop hills like a crowns of broken teeth. This was an elf-crowded island. Any peace between man and elf since the formal ending of the Iron Wars was precarious at best. Invisible borders were easily crossed. Casual encounters between the two parties could easily lead to conflict that soured the surrounding soil for generations. Untangling where Elfland stops and England begins has always been a task no sane cartographer of psychic fault lines wished to undertake.– Dr. Michael Benn, Woden College, Weychester University
Notes From the Wyrd Lab
Remembered Halloweens and the 365-day gothic mode of Hookland
Halloween is coming. I can tell from conker carpet underfoot, the apple-rot smell in the alley. I can tell from the bonefire incense sending smoke-wraith prayers to boundary gods, the parade of heavy coats along the street. I can tell from the early coming dark, the trees wearing gold gifted by the dying year and the withering of berries in all the feral, thorn-deep patches of ground.
If I couldn’t tell from hawthorn leaf fall, the land’s slow striptease or second brood rooks being fledged, I’d know where we are in the calender from the number of social media accounts doing Halloween countdowns. That and the inevitable messages asking: ‘What is Hookland doing for Halloween?’ While I love to see how others celebrate All Hallow’s Eve online, people often seem perplexed when I tel them: ‘Nowt. Hookland isn’t doing anything for Halloween.’
This position is not out of any curmudgeonly dismissal of the festival. I recognise its emotional import for those who feel liberated by it masks and misrule desires, I see its valuable specific spiritual modality for neo-Pagans and Christians alike. Given my passions, I am happy to see any widespread celebration of a living current of folklore. There will no sneering in the county at those for those who use it as their one safe night to indulge in the deliciousness of horror. No sneering at those who use its rituals to face death’s constant shadow through a safety barrier of chocolate skulls, store-bought costumes and glitter.
Part of my business as usual for Halloween in Hookland comes from being a child of England in the 1970s. During that point in our culture, it was hardly the biggest day or night in the folkloric calendar. Among the jumble of cardboard Guy Fawkes masks for sale in the newsagent, there would be a single design witch mask. If anyone purchased it, they usually only used it for a few days of witch-begging outside local shops before their effigy underwent change of sex and face to become the Guy who earned you pennies to spend on fireworks. For children of my locations and era, a folk night of gunpowder delight, cinder toffee and potatoes cooked in bonfires was much more of an exciting prospect than Halloween.
Some of the lacklustre celebration of the feast was undoubtedly a regional hangover. Essex – my birth county – had a complex relationship to witchcraft, cunning folk and the spirits of the dead at the best of times. When my hometown was village, it stoned Matthew Hopkins when he arrived trying to ply his evil trade. Yet Essex as whole has the worst record for witch trails and executions of anywhere in England. Such contradictions refused to be quiet, especially on the 31st of October.
The density of supernatural tales and old, palpable tensions encoded in local folklore led to Halloween becoming a flashpoint. Centuries of implied magical malignity often exteriorized as violence. In the village of Canewdon, said to be witch-soaked and home of the most haunted church in the nation, every All Hallows’ Eve saw a pitched battle. The police pulled out batons to challenge those who flooded in trying to run anticlockwise around the church tower to summon the Devil to dance. Even in the 21st century, the police have to issue and enforce annual dispersal orders – though I doubt Old Scratch obeys them.
There were some childhood Halloween parties in Essex. Held in church hall or house, the only costumes were party frocks and ribbons, the only activities apple bobbing, hide-and-seek and ghost stories told in a circle of candlelight. All Hallows’ Eve got a little more exciting when we were fostered out to other bits of the country. Elsewhere there were the afternoons of carving manglewurzel lanterns at school, the eventual parade of twisted, tormented faces representing trapped souls through dark lanes. A snaking of lantern light that left the village for vigil at the church on the hill via boneyard prayers. Sent even further west, there were divinations, Hallowtide bonefires on hills, mutterings about the Wild Army.
Hookland is often memories made manifest. All of those elements of childhood echo in how the county celebrates the tridum of Hallowmass season. Yet it is because Hookland is not made up, just remembered differently, that Halloween remains a somewhat average day in county calendar.
When you have grown up with sitting in the church porch on St. Mark’s Eve to watch the future phantoms of those who die in the parish appear, Halloween is somewhat small beer. Being dragged out of your bed to see the torchlit St. Gile’s parade of hooded figures wearing mask and costume to represent beggars, deer, the fear of night, lepers and breasts scars you. After that, someone trying to be an avatar of witchcraft by merely donning some fishnets and a pointed hat just doesn’t cut it in the fright stakes. The hope of ghost glimpse on April 24th, the prospect of seeing spirits traipse along wraith way to their coming graves trumped Halloween for a sense of closeness to Death’s dread empire. For me as child, September 1st‘s funeral-drummed procession of people faking epileptic spasms marching alongside women wearing papier-mâché breasts and screaming of ram-skulled dancers held more terror than any October told ghost story.
The other reason Hookland doesn’t do anything special for Halloween is that the county is a 365-day gothic mode. Pick a random date in its diary and you’ll find witchery, ancient spirits haunting the now and balm of old horrors against terrors of today. Hookland does hallows on every turn of the calendar. The county is ghost soil, it is a constant navigation through an enfolding, dark Otherworld. Pretending that Hallowmass has some faux centrality and over-riding import compared to other seasons in its folkloric cycle would be pandering.
Hookland is never going to be about the confining parameters of trying to please people. I am a stubborn bastard. I am always going to be trying to persuade you to like the things I am interested in. Trying to presume what people want is a shortcut to artistic mediocrity. And yes, not treating Halloween as a 31-day long marketing opportunity almost certainly limits the reach of the county. Forgive me for not giving a stuff about that.
I do care about folklore as living current and what it offers to many at during this season. I passionately believe in the importance of carving cultural space and time to commemorate, commune and pull close to the dead. I hold to valuing the strangeness and awe of ancient feasts when our current calendar reckoning is so often starved of wonder. These things matter enough to be part of the fundamental fabric of Hookland. These things matter enough to be everyday in the county. I refuse to let them to be confined to Hallowtide.
They talk of gods that manifest in TV static. Gods that refuse linearity, whose every utterance is a prophecy dreaming itself into existence. According to the cult, these cathode ray deities can wear the faces of The Six-million Dollar Man or Kenneth Kendall – though quite why they choose such avatars is unclear even to the devotees. – Dr. Kate Lowe, Woden College, Weychester University
Is It Worth It? Corvidae
Most writers cannot help themselves. We play adaption in our heads the way most people play the lottery win game. We shuffle apposite actors, favourite composers and cinematographers. We have essential editors, directors we believe would get our work and do something amazing with it. When I engage in TV Hookland Dreaming, one of those directors is Tom De Ville.
Now that I’ve revealed my personal bias, I can move onto to reviewing De Ville’s short-film from 2018 Corvidae. It is a joyfully hard-to-kill with labels tale of a girl Jay (Maisie Williams), bullies and a murder of crows. You could call it infused with folk horror, English gothic or a 1970s’ approach to child menacing without being inaccurate, yet it neatly dodges easy taxonomy. Set largely in the brown, slushy fields and wind-bullied woods of an England made thin from winter light-starvation, it’s a treat of visual storytelling. Its absence of dialogue only creating room for the mythic to manifest.
There is an economic grace to the storytelling in Corvidae which is exhilarating. No shot is wasted. No moment steals from the power of the next. Everything is necessary and everything is elegant. All aspects of the film – especially the cinematography, editing and music – not only work in harmony to create atmosphere, but let the story unfold at a perfect pace. However, the combination of De Ville’s direction and Jenny Ray’s art direction is especially formidable. The mise-en-scène is a potent part of the storytelling. No detail is allowed to be unimportant – whether it is totemic action figures or the implied security provided by a wall of a dead parent’s books.
Short films are among the hardest to make. Something usually suffers in the compression of time. Most often we feel short-changed in terms of plot, characterisation or the subtlety which allows the audience to think for itself. These issues are skilfully avoided by De Ville. The economy of Corvidae means that ideas such as the importance of instinctive ritual within childhood’s reckoning of the world or the long-grasp of loss are told without any significant clunk of exposition. We are trusted to be smart enough to stitch it together, trusted to value wonder as the heart of good tale.
In 11-minutes, De Ville not only carves out space to explore how our unfiltered childhood connections to nature often feel faerytale, but gifts an exploration of navigation through grief that is both beautifully nuanced and a three-inch power punch to the heart. Corvidae is a confident enough work to amplify threat not through tawdry jump-scares, but the simplicity of mask and gesture. It feature possibly the most menacing use of a crows since Damien: Omen II because it is wise enough to provide a shortcut to the folkloric role of the bird lurking within our collective DNA museum. Corvidae also cleverly uses that folkloric sense of crow as a gateway to the grim eeriness embedded in feral England that all us children of the woods understand.
If you ask me why in my fantasies I’d love to see Tom De Ville direct Hookland, it can all be explained by watching Corvidae. That sense of enchantment which moves from beatific to deep dark depending on perspective which I work so hard to put into the county is powerfully, palpably there on screen. My holding to engagement with the transcendent through small moments, the telling that horror is often human in origin point, but mythic in destination are shared by this story. Most of all Corvidae is drenched in a glorious sense of wonder and odd beauty.
Any film that enfolds you in the cold teeth of an English winter with its ubiquity of mud and yet simultaneously gives you glamour glimpse of a world beyond is worth watching. Any film that can do that in just 11-minutes is worth treasuring.
8.5/10 Absolutely worth it. Available to watch on YouTube, it offers a beautiful return on the small investment in the amount of time it takes to watch.
It is said that the easiest way to start an argument in a Hookland hostelry is to suggest whether hanging a horseshoe upwards or downwards is the best way to ensure good fortune. For to hang it so that it makes a ‘U’ is favoured by those claiming this is the only way in which the luck does not drain out of the object, while an equal contingent refutes this wisdom. Those that reverse the hanging state of the horseshoe believe their way ensures the Devil cannot make a nest within the iron or the home its wards. Having personally witnessed the heat, froth and flying fists generated by this bar debate – and those who instigate it out of a delight in mischief – I would advise against ever raising the topic in any place where drink and pig-headed men are both to be found. – C.L. Nolan, The Secret Land, Richard & Horlick, 1912
An Entry from the second edition of The Hookland Writer’s Bible
St. Aldate
In terms of historical fact, little is known of Saint Aldate. Obscure even by the standards of the Sarum and Weychester martyrologies, this does not prevent him from enjoying a cultus in the county – especially among ghost-layers and those in fear of malign magics. Believed by most to be a sixth century Briton and Bishop of Gloucester who rallied the countryside to fight against pagan West Saxon forces at the Battle of Deorham in 577, he died in what turned out to be a bloody Brythonic defeat.
However, loser status rarely impedes a saint’s popularity – especially when they have a reputation for doling out miracles. The Patron saint of the Besieged, St. Aldate became popular in Hookland after his intercessions were deemed successful in ending the ravages of the Burrwood Wyrm (thought by some later scholars to be an escaped crocodile brought back from the First Crusade) and the Siege of Weychester during The Anarchy. Often depicted holding a firebrand on a path leading up to a tower, the county also boasts carvings and doom paintings showing St. Aldate wrestling a dragon or matching its fiery-breath with his own flaming torch.
Lending his name to the infamous knightly Order of St. Aldate in the 14th century and the Church of England brotherhood of ghost-layers who revived their label more than three centuries later, his prayer is regularly recited by those who feel they are under attack by malign magic. First recorded in the 13th century Weychester Book of Hours, its text is used almost as an apotropaic spell: ‘As torch of truth, tower of strength, bastion against the demon dark, O Martyr Aldate, thou art the shiver of Hell, the fear of vile beasts, protect us who offer you praise.’ Fittingly for a saint whose name may be no more than a tired corruption of ‘old gate’, his prayer is used during the ghost-laying ritual known as ‘the Sealing of the Postern’.
Now largely neglected outside of Gloucester, Oxford and Hookand, five churches in county are dedicated to him. His feast on February 4th is marked by torchlit parades in Coreham, Weychester and Silverwell. He also gets a walk-on part in both the Weychester and Green mystery play cycles as well as a chance to brawl with an assortment of monsters in mummers’ plays at Mossgate, Burrwood, Bullstead and Hagmead.
For I was one of those damned foreign Jews that the Daily Mail was always telling its readers were flooding into the country. I was never going to tug my forelock to the aristocracy or play along with the hateful game that is the British class system. Nor was I going to respect those repugnant hierarchies within the spectral realm. I had noticed that among my fellow psychic researchers, many had the tendency to pay far more attention if a haunting occurred at stately home or involved the scions of the fag-end of feudalism. Not for me this route. In my investigations there would be no reverence for title. The alleged spirit which could boast of being a Sir, Lord or Lady was of no special interest to me. If psychic research was to have a place among the sciences it could not proceed with any ridiculous deference to bloodline and privilege. Pick and shovel phantoms of the navvies who built the canals and railways were as valid of study as the spirits of the grand staircase. Suburban poltergeists as important to inspect as ectoplasmic knights of the realm. The loyal staff of the Co-Op who turned up even after death just as important and usually much more interesting than the temporal shade of a promenading noble. – C. Josiffe, That Haunting Man – An Autobiography Among Ghosts, WWB Publishing, 1973
Hookland Roll of Kindness
Byron Ballard
Amy Brennan
Scott Campbell
Roger Clarke
April Cole
Lee Ann Day
Nathan Downs
Gordon Peake
Sarah-Jane Farrer
K J Stark
Maria Strutz
John Wilkinson
Paul Wilson
In kindness there is connectivity, an impulse for good and a better world that is not denied. Kindness is a refusal of darkness. In its graceful light friendships have been found, lives saved and hope restored. – C.L. Nolan
Ω
Told you. This reviewer does not mislead.
Thank you