Shropshire Folklore of Mary Webb

Описание: Mary was born Mary Gladys Meredith
In 1881 at Leighton Lodge in the Shropshire village of Leighton, where she was baptised at St Mary's parish church.
She was actually known as Gladys to her family.
Her Welsh father, George Edward Meredith, an Oxford graduate was a private schoolteacher.
Indeed, he had a small boarding school at Leighton Lodge.
He inspired his daughter with his own love of literature and the local countryside.
Mary explored the countryside around her childhood home, and developed a sense of detailed observation and description, of both people and places.
She was a champion of the non-conformist and the underdog,
she defended the right of the individual against societal pressures,
and expressed an intuitive awareness of the collective unconscious of humanity.
Mary’s was heavily influenced by Charlotte Burne and her jointly authored 1883 book Shropshire Folklore: A Sheaf of Gleanings.
Who when discussing the people of Shropshire’s beliefs that it would be easier to:
“… to alienate them from the Church than to weaken their faith in witchcraft.”
Indeed, the Stiperstones and particularly Snailbeach had a long tradition witchcraft which by Mary’s time had merged with non-conformity.
This tradition goes back at least to the black death, when labour shortages offered the opportunity for surfs to rebel against their masters.
And Snailbeach became a centre for these runaway surfs.
Unaffected by the laws of the manor and the established church.
Precious Bane is the story of Gideon and Prue Sarn intersects which with the local cunning-man Beguildy, with whom the Sarn family has a long-running feud.
Resonating with the English Romantics, Mary adds the dimension of folklore to the tensions in rural Shropshire.
The novel challenges the post-Enlightenment opposition between a modernity and the superstition of those whose lives are still structured around traditional ways of understanding the world.
Indeed, Precious Bane represents a countryside in transition as residual traditional culture confronts a rural modernity shaped by capitalist ideology.
A sin-eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal in order to spiritually take on the sins of a deceased person.
The food was believed to absorb the sins of a recently dead person, thus absolving the soul of the person.
Sin-eaters, as a consequence, carried the sins of all people whose sins they had eaten; they were usually feared and shunned.
They therefore pawned their own souls for a little bread and wine.
Gideon can take on the role of eater for his deceased father’s sins
because he thinks the process is nonsense.
And in doing so Gideon had made Faustian pact to get the farm, his bane is gold, which he sets of to acquire quite regardless of the harm he will do to others.
He is, of course, cursed and doomed.
Gideon becomes a monster, with no morals, and eventually is half mad.