[Please forgive me a rambeling start to this, the first of my new set of original posts. I will get to the point (the colour red in western folklore) eventually...
I was watching the Morris in the village last night, my mind a little softened by the ringing of bells and the
Reel Ale in my gut (best pint in Chagford usually) and musing on what to put in this blog post.
I enjoy Morris dancing and I cannot properly explain why. I think the beer helps, but also there is an element of community in the weaving dance and mirrored actions, liberally strewn with the varying personalities and abilities of the dancers. There is a sense of deep kindness in the way people work together for a common performance, becoming efficient. Things happening before the observer expects them, the dancers turning and swinging, knowing their fellow dancers stick will be there to great them. Yet it is not the working of a machine, as some dance can become. These are real people, in every stumble, in every smiling helping hand there is humanity. It echoes for me the best times in life, where there is a human size common aim. There is the freedom to dance in the middle of the road, yet the security of knowing all around you are on your side, even when they come at you growling with a massive stick in their hands... In some ways Morris dancing puts me in mind of the insatiable kindness of a Dr. Who episode!
But I cannot write of Morris Dancing in the Westcountry - that is a massive topic - I will leave that to people who know far more than I. Before I talk the talk of this living evolving tradition I feel I would need to walk the walk...
Then there was the Bells.
Bells might make a good post... The bells of the church mingled loudly with the sound of the Morris bells, ringing out their very different sorts of joy... But after some drunken consideration I felt this subject would be too lengthy and in the case of Church bells it would be quite difficult to draw the line between local lore and international Christianity.
Then I spotted the 'uniform', the colours...
One side, the
Raddon Hill Morris dancers where waring the colours of the suffrage movement - White for purity, Green for hope and Purple for diginty. This stuck me quite strongly as a very well loved old friend of my family who died not to long ago had asked for these to be the colours of her funeral. For her as well as the suffrage movement they also symbolized White for Peace, Green for the natural world and Purple (I think) because of the poem
"Warning" about liberation in old age by Jenny Joseph.
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| Raddon Hill Morris in Chagford - thanks to artist and writer (and my wife) Lunar Hine for the image |
The other side (Wickliegh Morris) wore red and black.
Now, over the past year or so, and with the help of google, the various student / anti-cuts protests have educated me to the fact that these are the colours of
Social Anarchism or Anarch-Syndicalism, and this is what sprung into my amused and drunken mind (secret anarcho-Morris dancers - historically a very Morris thing to be!). This was followed by my older semiotic association with the (often anarchic) exploits of
Dennis the Menace and
Minnie the Minx!
Maybe the red chosen by Winkleigh Morris was that of socialism (think the Red Army), but I doubt it. Red in all its strong vibrancy, seemed like a good choice for this post - wide enough used to be interesting, not so widely used as to be meaningless. I had found a topic...
So how is the colour red used in the Westcountry? Here are my musings. I do not pretend them to be 'true' - folklore can never be either true nor false in my opinion - it is as mailable and definable as the water cycle. Here are today's truths for me.
Red is of course the colour of our blood, our life force. In this sense it can be representative of our health, our vitality. This is how it seems to have been used most in the Lore of the Westcountry. It is somewhat ironic that in the modern hegemony of the western world red is the colour of stopping, or reversing!
Perhaps a little outside the Westcountry in the New Forest we find the legends of the
Red King, King Rufus - a masculine figure - who died or was murdered while out hunting. Here red blood marked his life - his name and lineage,
his cruelty, his love of the hunt and ultimately his bloody death. The colour is a ribbon that marks out the vibrant and cruel strength of his (and our) perilous existence. Red here seems the colour of living, and living is always so very close to death. Fox-hunters still dress in red, and in Devon at one time a human pack of hounds chased a red and brown painted human 'stag' through the streets of Okehampton (see Theo Brown in
Folklore, 1952, Volume 63, pages 104-109)
Completely speculatively we could also see red being employed as a symbol of protective masculinity (blue being perhaps a more feminine colour, for instance being used to depict the Virgin Mary ). With
this Devon amulet red substances and the red planet Mars (historically masculine) are used at a time when the moon is at its darkest (the moon often being a symbol of femininity) to create a ward against enemies and the Evil Eye. Neither the Evil Eye nor 'black/grey' witches where/are exclusively female,
on Dartmoor at least (
see Ruth E. St Leger Gordon), but there does seem a tendency to this.
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| More Winkleigh Morris - thanks to artist and writer (and my wife) Lunar Hine for the image |
We even find in
Padstow and Illfracombe women taking on the masculinity of red through the showing of red petticoats to scare away French soldiers (red being the colour of the English army uniform). At risk of over complicating a simple tale I could also bring in another aspect of blood red here - a very feminine red - menstrual blood. The petticoat was a woman's undergarment, and as such to show them off would require lifting of ones skirt. To have a red one, rather than a pure virginal white one shows a woman in the full vibrancy of her creative and sexual powers. That the french where scared off by red petticoated woman may point to them being both cowards and little more than boys - they could not take face the full grown sexuality of the Westcountry women. It must also be said that the legend of women scaring off the French with red cloaks and broomsticks happens at Budleigh Salterton, Dartmouth, Ilfracombe, Plymouth, Sidmouth and Torquay (all Devon) and on the the Cornish coasts including Fishguard (from Theo Brown in
Folklore, Volume 75, 1964, page 148).
I am, then, perhaps being misleading to mark out red as a masculine colour - instead it could be a grown-up colour, the ruddy complexion of life at full throttle. One can even find a hint of this in three aspects of
the rose rent paid at Gidleigh Castle, on Dartmoor. This rent was paid at midsummer - the adulthood of a year - and it was required to be open and deep red - all conceivably symbols of maturity.
Back in the
1920's sheep at Widecombe fair are described as 'ruddled'. I think this means they where marked with red from a pack strapped under the rams chest to show they where fertilized. It could be that the irony red was simply a cheep colour to use, but I feel it was used to mark out the carnal act - to point out the maturity and vitality of the ewes.
The slightest reddening can be used in this way - the prim pinkness in 18 year old Selina's white (virginal) cheeks,
in the Mermaids Vengance, seems to be used to indicate her growing sexual awareness. In this Victorian telling of the story the redness is almost invisible for the 'shame' associated with feminine sexuality, but is retained as a crucial indicator of her age and awareness.
Cherry of Zennor has a less subtle marker of her growing maturity. When she enters the faerie realm (unmarried adult/teenagehood?) her way is marked by the 'reddest of apples', a biblical allusion to the garden of Eden. She does not however eat them - perhaps she does not truly grow up until she is expelled from that magic place.
There is an even more marked and violent depiction of the transition from white virgin to red sexual being in
the story of Tregeagle. Goonhylda first arives in the story as a young lady on a white horse. After becoming a 'guest for the night' with Tregeagle her father searches for her and finds her bloody garments and her horse 'all torn in the dark crimson floode'. Yet Goonhylda still lives, and 'refuses' Tregeagle... It is hard to tell if this is his sexual advances or his request for marriage.
With feminine sexuality comes the inevitable baggage of the Christian churches. Full strength female sexuality cannot be seen as a wholesome thing in all cases.
Betty Stoggs, a Cornish woman whos mother was given to drink had her cottage prepared with a four-poster bed and a 'lead and liver' (grey and pink/red) dresser to lure in Jan the Mounster (for her mother couldn't see that she would ever be an 'honest woman'). This, perhaps the red of a 'scarlet woman', or prostitute, is not widespread in the folklore of the Westcountry that I have found, but it is present.
It is not exclusively 'feminine' sexuality that is marked out with red. This vibrant red association is found in a strata of red rock and the legend of
the Cornish Giant Bolster (or of
Goran) and in the costumes of the players in the
Bolster Day celebrations. The amorous (red-blooded) giant is tricked by (white clad) Saint Agnes into filling a hole with his blood to prove his manhood. Little does he know but the hole links to the sea and he is drained unto death. That the sea (moving with the moon like a woman's womb) is made red with his blood, and that their is a 'hole' in the earth that remains unquenchable points to me to sexual, or even creative/fertile pagan undertones. Around Dartmouth in Devon the red soil has been linked to the story that all the land around is a fallen giant (see Theo Brown in
Folklore 1964, Volume 75, pages 146) - blood here is life - the very fertility of the earth. Dragons elsewhere in Britain where described as being bled into the ground to fertilize it.
Anne Jefferies finds that the faerie she loves the most, and who defends her as a lover would, is marked from the others by the red feather in his cap. Here possibly we return to red is simply a colour of adulthood, of sexual awareness, of passionate life. I could be reading more here than there is.
There are occasions where the colours of faerie clothing baffles me, though the predominance of red (e.g
the red of their caps {
and here}or
the red of a chaingelings lips) could be linked, like Father Christmas's outfit, to hallucination inducing Fly Agaric mushrooms - but I have no evidence for this.
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| Fly Agaric near my house in Chagford - If you want to use this photo please attribute this blog. |
I am not sure how long the Devil has traditionally been red, but the fear of the feminine and the sexual in the 19th century seems a logical place to look. Certainly he is more often black in tradition Westcounty stories (not necessarily the black we use to describe human coloring today - I think the link is more to the charred black of burnt flesh and long dead corpses, to absence, destruction and darkness - all fears of a pre-electric lighting, pre-welfare-state society). Cutty Dyer, a devilish monster living in Ashburton waters does have red eyes (from Theo Brown in Folklore, Volume 75, 1964, page 150), but this is all I can find so far.
"Where Dozmare lake its darke waters did roil,
A castle now reared its heade,
Wythe manye a turrete soe statelye and talle;
And many a warden dyd walke on its-walle,
All splendidly cloathed in redde.
Later the earl of Cornwall, in the guise of the devil, the Black Hunter, strikes down Tregeagle with a "
rede bolte of vengeaunce" as a punishment for is cruel actions. Whether this is the red of the devil, or simply the red of red-blooded vengeance (IE direct and angry) I cannot tell! It could even be in the case of the red clothed men simply a reference to the devilish English army.
Red, as well as being symbolic of vitality and health, can also
be a colour of disease, for example
Red Barngum or 'red ill-thing' (cited in a Devon charm described Owen Davies
Folklore 1996, Volume 107
pages 19-32) or 'red ill' (in a charm from the
Transactions of the Devonshire Association
Volume 31 1899).
A connection with disease can be found in the way that those who disturb a robins nest will die,
a red spot marking the tranagressers corpse. Robin 'redbreast' is an all round powerful and unlucky bird in Devon, protected by
strong death taboos.
Red spider-mites also cannot be destroyed, for fear of the ill luck and loss of money encountered. In a way this links more to the vibrancy of red life rather than a desseased and feverish red - it is the destruction of vital red beings that is to be feared for one is destroying life itself.
This vitality is even seen in the colour of productive animals. Perhaps the kindred of the red eared white hounds and cattle of Wales
one cornish white and red cow is remarked upon for her fine pixie fueled milk. One Ashburton lady charmed away erysipelas (a reddening skin disease) with milk from a 'red' cow (from the
Transactions of the Devonshire Association 1883, Volume 15) This could simply be sympathetic magic, rather than specifically to do with reds vitality.
The sticking of pins into a projection of red rock in Chudliegh known as the Pope's Nose is I think from an unlinked tradition of mockery of Catholicism (from Folklore 1961, Volume 72, pages 388-399), red noses being a sign of excessive drinking, and possibly of the papal uniform. If one really wanted to one could link this to the red rock of the giant Bolster, as the rock is in a cave. Perhaps there is a thread of an old blood/fertility tradition embedded here, but I think it is probably wishful thinking.
Like I said these interpretations are my own, and therefore not the work of a great folkloric scholar. Nor is my research very complete (if it ever can be). Though these stories flow though my entire life from cradle to now and beyond I have only spent a year or so thinking more deeply on them.
It seems to me that the uses of the colour red in the Westcountry are not that dissimilar their use in the rest of the country, though they do seem to originate in form from a slightly earlier age. Less of the primness of the Victorians clings to their structure, and more of the sex, blood and death.
I for one am quite grateful!]
