Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

And a copy of the record of the letters patent granted by king Henry VI. the 11th day of February in the twenty seventh year of his reign to the mayor and citizens of the city of York was produced and read; reciting that the said city, the suburbs or precincts thereof, was then a county by itself, divided and separated from the county of York, and called the county of the city of York; and that the mayor and citizens of the said city were bayliffs of and in the hundred or wapontake of Aynsty; and granting to them and their successors, that the said hundred or wapontake with the appurtenances, should be annexed and united to the county of the said city, and be parcel thereof; and that the said city, suburbs and precinct, hundred or wapontake, and each of them, with their appurtenances, and every thing in them and each of them contained, except the castle of York, the towers, fosses, and ditches to the said castle belonging, be the county of the said city, separated and divided from the county of York; saving always to the church and the archbishop, dean and chapter thereof, and every other community temporal and spiritual, and all and singular other persons, all kinds of franchises, privileges, rights, commodities and customs to them or any of them of right belonging.

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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.

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Comment

Too sleepy to look this up, but I haven’t heard of it before. Is 1448 the 27th year of his reign? Bedtime.

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• Ainsty (1) W/G ·
• Henry VI (1421-71) (3) W/G ·
• History of York (1) W/G ·
• Hundred (county division) (2) W/G ·
• 📌York Castle (37) W/G ·
• 📌York Minster (28) W/G ·
• 📌York (165) W/G ·
• Yorkshire (8) W/G ·

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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

Comment

Too sleepy to look this up, but I haven’t heard of it before. Is 1448 the 27th year of his reign? Bedtime.

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Similar

17 March 1190: Jewish survivors of preceding massacres and overnight suicides plead from York castle walls to be allowed to convert to Christianity

2 September 1686: John Reresby describes his organisation of the York garrison

21 February 1688: On Shrove-Tuesday, cock-throwing York apprentices break a Catholic window, and the militia intervenes, torturing citizens and violating their civic rights

27 March 1634: In commercial Gothic urban legend, John Bartendale, a piper, is hung and buried at York, but awakes, is rescued and pardoned, and returns to the music business

12 April 0627: In a triumph for his Kentish wife, Edwin of Northumbria is baptised on Easter Sunday by Paulinus, in the latter’s wooden oratory on the site of York Minster

30 May 1836: Albinia Chaloner becomes the last person to be interred in York Minster

18 March 1650: Dorothy Rodes of Bowling (Bradford) blames witchcraft by Mary Sykes for the postpartum illness of her daughter

3 July 1761: John Wesley visits an unjustly bankrupted Yarm liquor smuggler in York Castle

2 August 1680: William Dolben, perhaps reluctantly, condemns Thomas Thwing to death at York for his part, without co-conspirators, in a fictitious conspiracy – the Popish Plot

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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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.

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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)

See also the official record of the trial (Howell 1823).

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