Yorkshire Almanac Walking from London to Edinburgh, Ben Jonson drives a parson and an innkeeper into an alcoholic frenzy at Tollerton (York),

17 August 1618: Walking from London to Edinburgh, Ben Jonson drives a parson and an innkeeper into an alcoholic frenzy at Tollerton (York),

Ben Jonson. 1618. Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland. Online: Records of Early English Drama. The purchase link is to the published edition, which I hope to be able to afford one day. Here is the editors’ blog. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

…But as we travayled hearing it was out of our way and desiring to take advantage of the fairnesse of the weather we resolv’d to go one and so bayted at Tollerton, where Parson Rogers hearing of our passing by rydd after us and recoverd vs at Tollerton where at myne host Thorntons, where my gossip dischargd two borrachoe bottles vpon the myne host and the parson, to the down fall of the one, and soe elevating the other that Master Parson would needs bring vs one the way, where to shew his love to my gossip he fell of his horse and after ran leaping and dancing before vs half way to Topliffe, where we went to Mistres warcups the famous good Hostesse, where we stayed till wensday being shut vp with rayne.

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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

As I’m sure you know, borracho is Spanish for “drunk,” and here it means “a great Dutch leathern bottle.”

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Comment

As I’m sure you know, borracho is Spanish for “drunk,” and here it means “a great Dutch leathern bottle.”

Something to say? Get in touch

5 August 1605: Debauched and ruined, Walter Calverley is crushed to death today at York for the murder of two sons at Calverley Hall (Bradford), but is revived by 1830s schoolboy ghost-raisers as the Rev. Samuel Redhead (age ca. 55)

12 April 1706: The first four-day stagecoaches from York to London and vice versa depart from the Black Swan in each city

16 November 1827: John Nicholson, “the Yorkshire Poet,” an “uncouth clownish-looking man,” appears at Bow Street charged with creating a disturbance at Drury Lane

25 January 1859: John Lumsden, Hull-based Scottish steam entrepreneur and future mayor, addresses the local Robert Burns centenary dinner

14 May 1604: One of the compensatory “northern poems” registered today by Dr John Favour, Vicar of Halifax, to celebrate the union under James of Scotland and England a year ago

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

3 January 1638: On the eve of the civil war, Henry Slingsby witnesses Royalist cavalry exercising near Wetherby on Bramham Moor, scene of the defeat of the Percy Rebellion in 1408

3 November 1694: Leeds’s borough treasurer is mandated to pay goldsmith Arthur Monjoy £61 for making the ceremonial mace

19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë

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Comment

Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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