Charlotte Sophia Burne

Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings

By 1875, Burne had become friendly with writer and schoolteacher Georgina Frederica Jackson, having been introduced by the secretary of the Severn Valley Naturalists Field Club.^[7] Jackson was collecting material for her Shropshire Word Book (1879) and its companion work with the provisional title of "Folk-lore Gleanings" on "dialecting tours".^[6] A severe illness in 1877 meant that Jackson was forced to give up fieldwork, so Burne to took over her material.^[4] She added her own collection of tales to produce Shropshire Folk-Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings (1883), her first major work of over 600 pages.^[6]

The gleanings in Shropshire Folk-Lore included folk legends of giants and goblins; historic superstitions of bogies, fairies, ghosts, will-o'-the-wisp and witches; traces of well worship; notes on church bells; ballads and music; and the customary fairs, feasts, games, morris dancing and wakes of Shropshire.^[8] She included a description of the "Clipping the Church", a local Shrovetide custom where children join hands circle the outside of a church, which has similarities to a custom in Somerset.^[9]

The exhaustive collection was well received and continues to be favourably viewed, her obituary gave the remark "the first time the folklore of a county was published—at any rate in a form so complete and so scientific"^[7] and later folklorist and writer Katharine Briggs described it as "perhaps the best county folklore book we possess as well as the most monumental".^{[citation needed]}

The Folklore Society

Burne joined The Folklore Society (FLS) in 1883.^[7] She became the first woman to become editor of the FLS journal Folklore, serving from 1900 to 1908.^[10] She was also the first woman to become president of the FLS, serving from 1909 to 1910,^[2][10] making her also the first female president of any learned society in the country. Her appointment to positions in the Society was unusual, having been previously held by the organisations London members.^[10] Burne's presidential address in 1910 was titled "The Value of European Folklore in the History of Culture."^[11]

Burne's written works include the large collection, Shropshire Folk-Lore (1886),^[12] and preparation of the second edition of the Folklore Society's official Handbook of Folklore (1914).^[10] She also contributed over seventy articles and reviews to its journals. A small amount of other material was published in newspapers and magazines.^[10] She provided information on the dialect of Newport in Shropshire to Alexander Ellis for his work Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1890).^[6]

Despite the firsts, penetrating gender and regional barriers, and serving the FLS for forty years, during a well-documented period of its history, details of her life and works are inadequately noted. Some correspondence of Burne with leading FLS members Alice Bertha and G. Laurence Gomme is contained in the Society's archives, but her personal papers seem to have been destroyed. A vague and inaccurate portrait of her life and works was given in references to her in Richard Dorson's History of the British folklorists (1968); J. C. Burne, hrt great nephew, drew on letters and recollections of her family to write a "tactful biography" whcih was published in 1975.^[3]

Burne's interest in history and antiquities,^[13] and subsequently folk-lore, was probably fostered by her mother. She was prompted by those connected to the family to compile a genealogical history of the Mildmay family, her first manuscript for this still exists, and the editing of the poet Richard Barnfield works. Her talents as an editor were initially recognised in Robert William Eyton's acknowledgements in his Doomsday Studies and the subsequent accolades in a local newspaper.^[10]

In the early 1890s Burne resided at Pyebirch, Eccleshall, in north Staffordshire. There she collaborated the local folklorist and folk-song collector Alice Annie Keary, of Stoke-on-Trent. Together they spent three years between 1890 and 1893 collecting materials locally in north Staffordshire. While a number of joint papers were published, Burne moved to Cheltenham around 1894, and the project failed to be realised in book form.

Burne's approach to the systematic collection of folklore gave emphasis to classification of material, and the means by which it was obtained. She wrote two essays on collection, and contributed to an ongoing discourse on fieldwork, proposing that the way she interviewed produced material uncorrupted by cautious retelling or embellishment. She also promoted the importance of documenting the historical and regional context of the tales, and accounting for the substitution and changes in the characters and incidents of these; their influence by economic, local, and personal factors is indicated in her earliest works and developed in her later articles and essays.^{[citation needed]}