The other week the BBC transmitted an episode of "Lark Rise to Candleford" which rang a few warning bells for me. I have not yet read the book, to my shame, so I don't know if they have started to extend beyond Flora Thompson's own writing yet. If what was done was in the book, then I am in error, and the time of my grandparents was not as I supposed it. OK, they were in Sussex, not Oxfordshire, however...

Candleford expected the bishop, coming to bless a new font, carved by Robert Timmins. He was having difficulty, as he felt the stone wanted something he hadn't planned. It turned out that the spot which was a problem had a fossil in it, which he worked into the design.

This offended the religious postman, who knew enough about Darwin to have quite modern views (and I mean modern) about the matter. But it was not this that bothered me.

The postman has previously, and in the early, definitely Thompson stuff, appeared to be very religious in a very chapelish sort of way. Probably Methodist, of some type, but could also easily be Congregational or Baptist. He has, I think, preached. For such a man to be eagerly awaiting a bishop, from Oxford, with its leanings towards Catholicism, and regarding him as someone to be looked up to, and meeting him to be an honour, seems unlikely. (In Sussex, people like the postman would have felt very differently. In Cornwall, as recently as the 1920's, men from a chapel could have marched to smash a new papistical font.) This seemed historically wrong, but it wasn't what really bothered me.

There was a tree which started bleeding, and was reputed to hold the spirit of a woman who had died a witch. The postman felt this was an afront to the bishop, and went to chop it down. (I do hope they managed not to really damage a tree - he chopped twice.) Meanwhile, Queenie, the matriarch of Lark Rise, wanted to release the spirit, and this is where my historical sense signalled error to me. I know there are such places in folklore. I know there have been, and until quite recently, folk practices designed to quiet things in some way or another. A few years after the dramatised events, some medium would have been holding a seance. But Queenie turns up and says she has discovered a ritual to solve things, and calls on the compass directions to do so. This offends the postman, but the postmistress explains that paganism simply means things done in the country and should not worry him.

If Queenie had said she remembered something she had been taught, I would have been less bothered, but she sounded as though she had been researching books. If she had called it something that needed to be done, rather than a ritual, it would have sounded better. The word seems wrong. As it was, it seemed more like something derived from the 20th century. I have not seen any record of her sort of behaviour at the time, when people were already recording folk practices. My Dictionary of Sussex dialect, which makes derogatory comments about the ignorance and ways of the locals, mentions no such thing as paganism there. I've not ever heard anyone in the family who would have been alive at the time, or anyone who would have talked to such people, mention any such thing.

Queenie, as a character, knows many remedies, and recites charms, and until this episode had seemed a realistic sort of person, who is apparently based on a real woman, whose descendants still live.

Is it likely that a Victorian would have actually been a pagan in the modern sense? And not regarded in a derogatory fashion by the educated and the churchgoers?

The whole set of views of religion in the episode just seemed wrong.

Penny