Yorkshire Almanac A native God creates, in the York Mystery Plays, the first Yorkshireman and -woman

30 May 1415: A native God creates, in the York Mystery Plays, the first Yorkshireman and -woman

Anon. 1982. Play 3A [The Cardmakers]. The York Plays. London: Edward Arnold. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

God
In heuyn and erthe duly bedene
Of v days werke, euyn onto ende,
I haue complete by curssis clene;
Methynke the space of thame well spende.
In heuyn er angels fayre and brighte,
Sternes and planetis ther curssis to ga,
THe mone seruis onto the nyght
The son to lyghte the day alswa.
In erthe is treys and gres to springe,
Bestis and foulys, bothe gret and smalle,
Fyschis in flode, all othyr thyng
Thryffe and haue my blyssyng all.
Thys werke is wroght now at my will,
But yoet can I here no best see
THat acordys be kynde and skyll,
And for my werke myght worschippe me.
For perfytt werke ne ware it nane
But ought ware made that myght it yoeme,
For loue mad I this warlde alane,
THerfor my loffe sall in it seme.
To kepe this warlde, bothe mare and lesse,
A skylfull best thane will I make
Eftyr my schape and my lyknes,
The wilke sall worschipe to me take.
Off the symplest part of erthe that is here
I sall make man, and for this skylle:
For to abate hys hauttande chere,
Bothe his gret pride and other ille;
And also for to haue in mynde
How simpyll he is at hys makyng,
For als febyll I sall hym fynde
Qwen he is dede at his endyng.
For this reson and skyll alane
I sall make man lyke onto me.
Ryse vp, thou erthe, in blode and bane,
In schape of man, I commaunde the.
A female sall thou haue to fere,
Her sall I make of thi lyft rybe,
Alane so sall thou nough be here
Withoutyn faythefull frende and sybe.
Takys now here the gast of lyffe
And ressayue bothe yooure saules of me;
THis femall take thou to thi wyffe,
Adam and Eue yoour names sall be.

Corpus Christi is on 4 June 2026.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Of all the entries in this almanac, this is the most arbitrary. Peter Meredith, via Margaret Rogerson (Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries 2009):

There are five key dates that establish our understanding of the functioning of the Play: 1377, 3 the first record of any kind; 1399, the first list of the stations* (the places in the city streets at which the Play was performed); 1415, the first clear statement of its scope and structure; 1433, the date of the Mercers’ indenture that illuminates the nature of the pageant wagon; and 1463-77, the writing of the Register that provides us with almost the complete text of the Play. Perhaps one should add to those 1569, the date of the last performance (Meredith 2000).

But I have no idea whether this text was created or reached this form before or after 1415, though my negligible knowledge of the historical linguistics suggests 15th century York dialect (hence “native God”), exhibiting features from both further south and north. However, if you are prepared to join me in self-deception, then we do know that Easter was 31 March in Julian 1415, and Corpus was thus 30 May.

“Course”/”courses” is ugly, but Canon Purvis’s translation of the first quatrain gets the job done:

In heaven and earth the course is seen
Of five days’ work even unto the end,
I have completed by courses clean;
Methinks the space of them well spent.
(Purvis 1957)

My mistranslation of “fere” is a tribute to Les Dawson:

Les Dawson might have disagreed with the great Canon Purvis' translation of "fere" in his popular version of the York Mystery Plays. ("I discovered the wife's got asthma. Thank God – I thought she was hissing at me.") pic.twitter.com/Zrac5r4Oua

— Leeds' Singing Organ-Grinder (@elorganillero) May 19, 2024

For all the lack of proper dating, I am glad this entry has ended my flirtation with Archbishop’s dating of the creation of Adam Eve to Friday 28 October 4004 B.C.:

And upon the sixth day (October 28, which is our Friday) the living creatures of the earth took their creation, as well going, as creeping creatures. And last of all, man was made and created after the image of God, which consisted principally in the divine knowledge of the mind, and in the natural and proper sanctity of his will. And he forthwith, when all living creatures, by the divine power, were brought before him, as a lord appointed over them, gave them their names, by which they should be called. Among all which, when he found none to help him like to himself, lest he should be destitute of a fit companion, God taking a rib out of his side, while he slept, fashioned it into a woman, and gave her to him for a wife, establishing, withal, a law of marriage between them; then blessing them, he bade them wax and multiply, and gave them dominion over all living creatures, and for them all he provided a large proportion of food and sustenance to live upon. To conclude, sin being not yet entered upon the world, God beheld all that he had made, and, behold, it was exceeding good. And so was the evening, and so was the morning of the sixth day (Ussher 1658).

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Comment

Of all the entries in this almanac, this is the most arbitrary. Peter Meredith, via Margaret Rogerson (Playing a Part in History: The York Mysteries 2009):

There are five key dates that establish our understanding of the functioning of the Play: 1377, 3 the first record of any kind; 1399, the first list of the stations* (the places in the city streets at which the Play was performed); 1415, the first clear statement of its scope and structure; 1433, the date of the Mercers’ indenture that illuminates the nature of the pageant wagon; and 1463-77, the writing of the Register that provides us with almost the complete text of the Play. Perhaps one should add to those 1569, the date of the last performance (Meredith 2000).

“Course”/”courses” is ugly, but Canon Purvis’s translation of the first quatrain gets the job done:

In heaven and earth the course is seen
Of five days’ work even unto the end,
I have completed by courses clean;
Methinks the space of them well spent.
(Purvis 1957)

My mistranslation of “fere” is a tribute to Les Dawson:

Les Dawson might have disagreed with the great Canon Purvis' translation of "fere" in his popular version of the York Mystery Plays. ("I discovered the wife's got asthma. Thank God – I thought she was hissing at me.") pic.twitter.com/Zrac5r4Oua

— Leeds' Singing Organ-Grinder (@elorganillero) May 19, 2024

For all the lack of proper dating, I am glad this entry has ended my flirtation with Archbishop’s dating of the creation of Adam Eve to Friday 28 October 4004 B.C.:

And upon the sixth day (October 28, which is our Friday) the living creatures of the earth took their creation, as well going, as creeping creatures. And last of all, man was made and created after the image of God, which consisted principally in the divine knowledge of the mind, and in the natural and proper sanctity of his will. And he forthwith, when all living creatures, by the divine power, were brought before him, as a lord appointed over them, gave them their names, by which they should be called. Among all which, when he found none to help him like to himself, lest he should be destitute of a fit companion, God taking a rib out of his side, while he slept, fashioned it into a woman, and gave her to him for a wife, establishing, withal, a law of marriage between them; then blessing them, he bade them wax and multiply, and gave them dominion over all living creatures, and for them all he provided a large proportion of food and sustenance to live upon. To conclude, sin being not yet entered upon the world, God beheld all that he had made, and, behold, it was exceeding good. And so was the evening, and so was the morning of the sixth day (Ussher 1658).

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31 May 1526: Properties for the Corpus Christi performance of the (moribund) mystery play of York’s Mistry of Mercers

1 February 1829: Jonathan Martin’s attempt to burn down York Minster is frustrated by a frolicsome chorister

5 December 1859: Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew and the cousin of the then French emperor, has work for the Barnsley dialectologist Charles Rogers

22 October 1906: The Yorkshire Herald reports that the king of the Wensleydale dry-stone wallers has discovered a devil among the stones

25 September 1880: Thomas Harper reveals to the Leeds Mercury’s young readers a mnemonic song of monarchs (except Oliver) used in the village school at Weldrake (York) in the 1770s

14 April 1792: The ballad of Spence Broughton, hung this day at the York Tyburn for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail

20 June 1881: John Tutin of Hull visits Hart-leap Well, the subject of Wordsworth’s anti-hunting poem

30 July 1825: The Bridlington bellman Dickey Fletcher cries two keys found on the resort’s North Sands

7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle

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Comment

Some background to the novel:

D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.

Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)

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