Contemplative Inquiry

Bob Stewart’s Where is Saint George? has a wider context than England’s patron saint. Although he is discussed, the subtitle Pagan Imagery in English Folksong better describes the book as a whole. I will write a post about St. George on 23 April, his date. Here I talk about the overall theme of the book, which is to explore the the author’s thesis that there is an after echo of pre-Christian beliefs and practices in traditional English folk songs. I’ve chosen one song – Bruton Town – followed by a presentation of Bob Stewart’s commentary. I notice that when reading the song, my first impression was a strong sense of a disciplinary message about class and gender norms – also an old tradition.

“In Bruton town there lived a farmer

he had three sons and a daughter dear,

by day and night they were contriving

to fill their parents’ hearts with fear.

One told his secret to none other

but to his brother this he said,

I think our servant courts our sister,

I think that they have a mind to wed.

If he our servant courts our sister

that maid from such a shame I’ll save

I’ll put an end to all his courtship

and send him silent to his grave.

A day of hunting was prepared

In thorny brakes where the briars grew,

and there’s they did this young man murder

and into the brake his fair body threw.

Oh welcome home my darling brothers

our servant dear is he behind?

We’ve left him where we’ve been out hunting,

we’ve left him where no man can find.

She went to bed crying and lamenting,

lamenting for her own true love,

She slept and dreamed that she saw him by her

all covered o’er in a gore of blood.

Do you wake up early tomorrow morning

and under the garden brake d’you go

and there you’ll find my body lying

t’was your own three bothers that laid me low.

She woke up early the very next morning

and to the garden brake she did go.

‘Twas there she found her own dear jewel

In the same place where the briars do grow.

Now since my brothers have been so cruel

as to take your tender sweet life away,

one grave shall hold us both together

and along with you in death I’ll stay.”

Stewart comments: “This song – collected in Somerset by Cecil Sharpe – is one of the rare examples of folklore and literary tradition exchanging material, and finally returning to an oral currency.  … the variants collected in the United States as well as the English West Country are preserved through the medium of  the broadsheet.”

He also references a well established literary tradition drawing on this theme, including John Keats’ Isabella Or, The Pot of Basil and its model, Boccaccio’s Decameron. It is here the he makes a link to traditions of ritual murder. “A group of young men collectively murder a victim for the sake of a woman. She then digs up his body, and severs the head. This is kept and planted with the herb basil, the discovery of the murder having been initiated by the ghost of the dead victim in a dream. The images here seem to be sacrificial, with a group of men bearing collective responsibility for the murder, a concept well known from classical sources and from surviving European folk plays and dance-dramas”.

(1) Bob Stewart  Pagan Imagery in English Folksong London: Blandford Press,1988

NB In his other works, the author is named as R. J. Stewart 

A number of birches have been planted on our estate. Today, for the first time this year, I noticed one in full leaf. I’m writing at 2 pm, four days before the introduction of summer time.

The day so far has been mostly bright, though cool and windy. Threats of rain have not so far materialised. The bright birch leaves are a gift from a moment in this year that points to a greener, leafier season to come.

This is an important annual marker for me, and this year it coincides with Lady Day. In the Christian Year, Lady Day commemorates the Annunciation, when Archangel Gabriel told Mary she would conceive Jesus Christ.

In England an Wales, from 1155-1752, it also marked the start of the legal and fiscal new year. It is now referred to as Old New Year’s Day. It was one of the four quarter days – together with Midsummer, Michaelmas and Christmas, when rents were due, debts were paid and employment contracts signed at the hiring fairs that took place at or near to these dates.

More organically, the coming into leaf of the birch marked the beginning of the agricultural year – farmers watched for the leafing of the birch as a gauge for when to sow their wheat.

In the tree lore developed around the Irish ogham alphabet (1) birch – beith – is connected with the driving out of evil or toxic influences, and with favourable new beginnings.

In the Scandinavian runic tradition, birch – beorc, berkana) also indicates new beginnings and laying aside old, toxic or redundant patterns. It adds a specific reference to the young Goddess, sexuality and birth, and a willingness to welcome new, more energising and nourishing ways of being.

But beyond any of these traditional links and associations, I felt blessed and heartened by today’s encounter with a birch tree close to home. My immediate response was spontaneous, yet I feel a kind of confirmation in the bringing together of the day with the tree.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2021/02/01/

apple blossom is bursting

In red and pink and white

on this Sunday afternoon

In my early teens I read George Orwell’s novel 1984 (1) for the first time. Written in 1948, it depicted a totalitarian regime based on the Fascist and Stalinist models of the day. It ruled through mass surveillance, lethal repression and unending war. In the hope of crushing dissent completely, the state was developing a new language – newspeak – to be rolled out to the population over time. It would be simplified in such a way that, in the end, people would no longer be able even to think independent thoughts or dream non-approved dreams. The words, once merely forbidden, would eventually be forgotten.

We live now in a hyper-capitalist world which, in a different way, is adopting some of the same characteristics and could well go further down this road. Runaway wealth is no longer adequately restrained either by market competition or by public regulation. We have revived the ancient Greek term ‘oligarchy’ to describe what is happening. People who used to be called tech bros have morphed into tech lords. Over time, they have developed an ‘attention economy’ in which our attention creates their wealth.

Our thoughts and feelings have become commodities, just as the earth, its life and its resources have been commodified over the centuries. Much of our communication has been transformed into a new form of raw material. As such, it has to be trained, manipulated and modified.

Ash Sarkar (2) explains: “attention, as well as being a commodity that can be monetised through digital platforms, is a psychological wage. … To be recognised is to be told that you matter, that your life has worth and that you have a place in the world. There’s nothing unhealthy about that. But our media and politics leverage the psychological wages of attention in a way that is utterly corrosive and warping. Though there is no shortage of content that flatters ‘ordinary Brits’ and ‘hard-working Americans’, this isn’t to let us know that we are loved. It’s more about telling us who’s hated. The message of who is good, moral and decent is conveyed through repeated propaganda about who is deviant, dangerous and illegitimate.”

Sarkar goes on to explain how this influences discourse in the wider media landscape: “to feed the ravenous appetites of the content economy, somebody tweeting something – regardless of how many followers they have, or how representative their post of is of a broader social phenomenon – is a decent enough pretext to publish a news story claiming that there’s a ‘Twitterstorm’ afoot.

“The job of a producer isn’t to think about how you might put together a panels of speakers and a line of questioning that can elucidate various facets of a particular topic: it’s to theatrically stage an argument that’s already taking place online, which itself has been fuelled by media coverage, which has been driven by social media engagement, in a feedback loop of content and outrage.

“The result of all this is that the threshold for what constitutes news has dramatically lowered, and reaction to that ‘news’ – the arousal of angry, impassioned attention at a speed that bypasses audience awareness – plays an outsized role in shaping the news cycle instead.”

I see this process as an alternative to the planned newspeak dictionary of 1984. It creates a narrowing of human attention, and therefore of human possibility. Complexity, dissent and nuanced perspectives are ruthlessly elbowed aside. Our own thinking and feeling are coarsened by  immersion in this process.

How is this relevant to my contemplative inquiry? From some perspectives it wouldn’t matter at all. I could simply retreat from a mundane world which, from these perspectives, essentially doesn’t exist. An apparent dark turn is simply a move in the dance of the Cosmos. Acceptance is all.

But this is not my understanding or experience of the Cosmos. Eco-spirituality finds the divine within a loved material world: present in you, me and every fallen leaf. Hence an assault on the material world is an assault on the divine.

An assault on the complexity and wealth of human language is likewise an assault on the divine, as it manifests through human speech and culture. For me, drawing attention to these developments, and working to oppose them, is fundamentally a spiritual practice. William Blake, at the end of the eighteenth century, thought of it as ‘witnessing against the beast’.

(1) 1984 in George Orwell: the Complete Books Penguin Books (Kindle edition)

(2) Ash Sarkar Minority Rule: Adventures In The Culture War London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025

NB the content economy is only one thread in this highly recommended book.

aware of recent changes

and noticing leaves

I celebrate new growth

Within this changeable season, Wednesday 4 March was a notably bright day. Being present outside felt more vivid and state-altering than a similar experience on 25 February (1). Now, under a brighter, stronger sun I embody the new season more confidently. For me, the pictures above and below record a new and subtly different moment in the year.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2026/02/25/

“Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds

Of field and meadow large as garden grounds

In little parcels little minds to please

With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease …

Each little tyrant with his little sign

Shows where man claims, earth glows no more divine,

But paths to freedom and to childhood dear

A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’ …

Thus, with the poor, sacred freedom bade goodbye

And much they feel it in the smothered sigh

And birds and trees and flowers without a name

All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came.”

Poem by John Clare in Caroline Lucas Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (1)

Caroline Lucas comments: “in bearing witness to the impact of these changes, writers like Clare (2) formed the conscience of their time. One of the reasons that the enclosure movement was so powerful was that, seen purely  in terms of short-term economics, it made sense. Having a whole field owned and farmed by one person was more ‘efficient’. And it was easier to control grazing if animals were confined to relatively small fields, rather than roaming about on large commons. Further, boosting the nations agricultural production could be seen as a ‘patriotic act’, good for England as well as for the landowner, and this helped those promoting enclosures to force them through in the face of popular resistance”.

Lucas goes on to cite the economic historian E. P. Thompson, who described Clare as a poet of ecological  protest, whose radicalism lay in the fact that he ‘was not writing about man here and nature there, but lamenting a threatened equilibrium in which both were involved’.

The enclosure movement created landless labourers who had no choice but to take whatever work was offered by the new landowners, however low the wage. It was not planned or controlled for the good of the country, but in the interest of individual land holders and speculators. No provision was made for those who were displaced, even if they lost homes and livelihoods. Instead, enclosure was backed by the full power of the state, with anyone who objected liable to be tried, convicted and imprisoned or transported to the colonies – in this period (early C19th.) mostly Australia.

(1) Caroline Lucas Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story Penguin Books, 2025 (First published by Hutchinson Heinemann 2024)

Caroline Lucas is a writer and campaigner. She was elected to Parliament for Brighton Pavilion in 2010, becoming the UK’s first Green Party MP. She also served as leader of the Green Party MP of England and Wales from 2008 to 2012 and as co-leader from 2016 to 2018 and, before that, was a Member of the European Parliament for ten years. She holds a PhD in English literature.

(2) John Clare (1793 – 1864) is described by his biographer Jonathan Bate as “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced.” In the poem above he describes the natural, economic, cultural and personal trauma of the last and most intensive phase of the English enclosure process: a time in which most of the remaining traditional commons were forcibly replaced by private ownership.

turbulent sky over quiet earth

dark clouds in motion

uncertainty in the now