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.

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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

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 (4) W/G ·
• 📌York (165) W/G ·

All tags.

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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

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

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

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

18 July 1784: Wesley finds children “restrained from open sin” at one of the first Sunday schools, at Bingley

7 January 1397: On the longest of the 42 days of his carnivalesque reign, boy-bishop John de Cave of York goes on a 200-mile begging spree

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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

Rimbault quotes one John Gregory, who in the Sarum Processionale found the following:

The Episcopus Choristarum was a chorister-bishop chosen by his fellow children upon St. Nicholas’ day… From this day till Innocents’ day at night (it lasted longer at the first), the Episcopus Puerorum [Boy-Bishop] was to bear the name and hold up the state of a bishop, answerably habited, with a crosier or pastoral staff in his hand, and a miter upon his head; and such an one too som had, as was multis episcoporum mitris sumtuosior, saith one – very much richer than those of bishops indeed. The rest of his fellows from the same time being were to take upon them the style and counterfeit of prebends, yielding to their bishops (or else as if it were) no less then canonical obedience. And look what service the very bishop himself with his dean and prebends (had they been to officiate) was to have performed, the mass excepted, the verie same was done by the chorister-bishop and his canons upon this Eve and the Holy Day.

This may be the origin of the York ritual, which nevertheless, and for reasons unknown to me, starts and ends later. The “account of Nicholas of Newark, guardian of the property of John de Cave, boy bishop in the year of our Lord 96” accounts for receipts (offerings in the cathedral, from canons, and from the nobility and monasteries visited) and expenditure (clothing, beer, food, music, etc.). The world-turned-upside-down visitations of the episcopus puerorum/Innocencium and his band remind me somewhat like those practised by the Raad van Elf of carnival associations in the Catholic Netherlands. Was there a similar serious business + drunken fun combination? For example, “the medieval breviary in the Sarum (but not in the Roman) use prescribed ‘O Virgo Virginum’ as antiphon upon the Magnificat for December 23, but was it sung for the boy-bishop on 23 December in humorous reference to his postulated sexual inexperience?

O Virgin of Virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? That which ye behold is a divine mystery (Bls 2007/12/23).

Yann Dahhaoui has compiled a map showing the locations visited by John de Cave numbered in chronological order:

(Dahhaoui 2006)

There is a 13th century sculpture of what some say is a boy bishop at the marvellous St Oswald’s Church, Filey – the church guide suggests that it might instead by

one of the canons regular of St Augustine, a member of Bridlington Priory who served the church at Filey. It was not uncommon in the 13th and 14th centuries for such a person to keep up his connection with the church by having his heart buried there with an appropriate miniature representation of himself in stone.

The account documents 42 days starting on 23 December, but I don’t know how long John de Cave’s rule actually lasted. Liz Truss managed 49 days.

Irrelevant, but St. William is presumably William of Donjeon/Bourges, whose feast day is 10 January, to which 7 January was the closest Sunday.

https://archive.org/details/stationsofsunhis0000hutt/page/100/mode/1up

Something to say? Get in touch