Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

This day upon intelligence given to the said Commissioners that it is meant and purposed that in the town of Wakefield shall be played this year in Whitsun week next or thereabouts a play commonly called Corpus Christi play which hath been heretofore used there, wherein they are done to understand that there be many things used which tend to the derogation of the majesty and glory of god, the profanation of the sacraments, and the maintenance of superstition and idolatry. The said Commissioners decreed a letter to be written and sent to the Bailiff, Burgesses and other the inhabitants of the said town of Wakefield that in the said play no pageant be used or set forth wherein the majesty of God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost, or the administration of either the sacraments of baptism or of the lord’s supper be counterfeited or represented, or anything played which tend to the maintenance of superstition and idolatry or which be contrary to the laws of God or of the Realm.

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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

Garrett Epp in the excellent intro to his edition of the Towneley Plays chronicles the troubled modern history of the plays (Epp 2018), in which between-wars fabrications of evidence by Matthew H. Peacock, headmaster of Wakefield Grammar School, and J.W. Walker, a Wakefield historian (Walker 1934), led to a general belief that they were linked to Wakefield. However, in 1988 it was revealed that Walker had invented or borrowed from elsewhere all but three of the records cited, while others were mis-transcribed and misdated. The earliest of the three survivors is from 1556, during the brief attempt by Elizabeth I’s predecessor, Mary I, to re-establish Catholicism. Fun – which may or may not have had anything to do with the Towneley Plays – was brought forward by two months and made mandatory:

Item a pain is set that every craft and occupation do bring forth their pageants of Corpus Christi day, as hath been heretofore used, and to give forth the speeches of the same, in Easter holy-days in pain of every one not so doing to forfeit 40 shillings [ca. £900 in 2021] (Cawley 1988).

What I know of the Ecclesiastical Commission at York comes from the Tyler article (Tyler 1967), which unfortunately didn’t seem to contain anything directly pillageable!

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Bible (15) W/G ·
• Ecclesiastical Commission at York (1561-1641) (1), a conciliar court begun amid unsettled conditions in the north and focused on religious affairs, which were neglected by its elder and more powerful sibling, the Council of the North W/G ·
• Elizabeth I (1533-1603) (15), ruled 1558-1603, established an English Protestant church W/G ·
• Elizabethan Religious Settlement (1) W/G ·
• Feast of Corpus Christi (3) W/G ·
• Mary I (1516-1558) (3), reigned 1553-1558, best known for her vigorous attempt to reverse the English Reformation W/G ·
• Mystery play (3) W/G ·
• Theatre (24) W/G ·
• Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays (2), a collection of thirty-two Biblical mystery plays including some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, probably performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi, but probably not in Wakefield W/G ·
• 📌Wakefield (37), cathedral city on the River Calder in the West Riding/West Yorkshire W/G ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (150) W/G ·
• Whitsun (4) W/G ·
• Whitsuntide (4), the week following Whitsunday, traditionally one of three holiday weeks for medieval serfs W/G ·
• York Mystery Plays (3) W/G ·
• 📌York (165) W/G ·

All tags.

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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

Garrett Epp in the excellent intro to his edition of the Towneley Plays chronicles the troubled modern history of the plays (Epp 2018), in which between-wars fabrications of evidence by Matthew H. Peacock, headmaster of Wakefield Grammar School, and J.W. Walker, a Wakefield historian (Walker 1934), led to a general belief that they were linked to Wakefield. However, in 1988 it was revealed that Walker had invented or borrowed from elsewhere all but three of the records cited, while others were mis-transcribed and misdated. The earliest of the three survivors is from 1556, during the brief attempt by Elizabeth I’s predecessor, Mary I, to re-establish Catholicism. Fun – which may or may not have had anything to do with the Towneley Plays – was brought forward by two months and made mandatory:

Item a pain is set that every craft and occupation do bring forth their pageants of Corpus Christi day, as hath been heretofore used, and to give forth the speeches of the same, in Easter holy-days in pain of every one not so doing to forfeit 40 shillings [ca. £900 in 2021] (Cawley 1988).

What I know of the Ecclesiastical Commission at York comes from the Tyler article (Tyler 1967), which unfortunately didn’t seem to contain anything directly pillageable!

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

8 June 1561: A York official explains why textile manufacturing has left his city for the West Riding

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

29 August 1570: On arriving in Yorkshire, Archbishop Grindal declares war on bloody-minded folk-Catholicism

13 August 1821: The laments of the adulterous poisoner Ann Barber on the scaffold at York

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

13 June 1864: With the assizes leaving York for the West Riding, manufacturers suffer a surprise defeat by landowners in the Lords in the choice of the new county town

26 December 1570: Edmund Grindal, Puritan archbishop of York, orders the removal of rood-lofts (and their superstitious images), and the erection of pulpits

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

16 August 1845: The York Herald is conned into posting the American actor Ira Aldridge’s sensational account of his own death

4 September 1947: Conflicting hopes for the future of the nationalised coal industry, as a wildcat strike against increased hours at Grimethorpe spreads through the South Yorkshire coalfield

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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

Re this wave of unofficial strikes:

Major-General Sir Noel Holmes, chairman of the north-eastern division of the National Coal Board, in a statement yesterday on the strike at Grimethorpe Colliery, said that 140 coal-face workers, out of 2,682 employed at the pit, were not doing a fair day’s work. A committee representing management and workmen had decided that the stint for the 140 workers should be increased by 2ft., but they refused to accept its findings and came out on strike. The other coal-face workers came out in sympathy. “As much as I dislike mentioning this fact,” said Sir Noel Holmes, “it is only right to recall that at Grimethorpe since January 1, 1947, and before the present strike, there have been 26 sectional unofficial stoppages, which have lost 33,000 tons of coal to the nation. The present stoppage up to date represents a further loss of more than 40,000 tons.” (Times 1947/08/27)

Holmes’s Wikipedia article curiously doesn’t mention this phase of his career.

I’m guessing that the Welsh ex-Puritan authoritarian Communist Arthur Horner is the voice of the NUM in the above – see e.g. the Times for 9 September.

Interesting comments on the wartime coal boards by T.S. Charlton, colliery manager at Cortonwood:

The management of the collieries is in the hands of men trained primarily in management of mines and miners. They have a working knowledge of all the machinery available and how best it can be used, but the details of this side are left to the mechanical and electrical engineer. Labour costs are two-thirds of production costs, and therefore the handling and the best use of men are of the greatest importance to managers. Why it should have been decided that labour leaders should be good labour directors is, apart from the political issue, difficult to understand, unless it is on the old adage of “poacher turned gamekeeper.” Unless and until the production director has control of his labour side, I can see little hope of his schemes proving effective.

The miners have put forward suggestions to improve output, but they appear to do no more than improve the position of the miner. Can it be said that any suggestion already put forward by the men has put up the output figure? Why should it be assumed the men’s side of the pit production committees should be able to improve output in any way? Their training, inclinations, and very job depend upon their obtaining the best for their electors rather than for production.
(Charlton 1943/12/01)

Charlton was clearly a clever and capable man – it would be good to know more about him.

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