Yorkshire Almanac 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

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

Madeline considers escape from the tomb, in a poster for Roger Corman’s 1960 House of Usher (Anon 1960).

Trevor ApSimon. 2023. The Creation of the Myth of John Bartendale, Prematurely Buried York Piper. Unpublished. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

1638 Richard Brathwait, then of London, has his Drunken Barnaby claim vaguely that he saw the resurrected piper at York during his tour of the provinces:

A piper being here committed,
Guilty found, condemned and titted:
As he was to Knavesmire going,
This day, quoth boys, will spoil thy blowing;
From thy pipe th’art now departing;
Wags, quoth the piper, you’re not certain.

All which happened to our wonder,
For the halter cut asunder,
As one of all life deprived,
Being buried, he revived:
And there lives, and plays his measure,
Holding hanging but a pleasure.

Brathwait is channelling the myth that the philosopher Duns Scotus (hence the bagpipes) was buried alive (see for example the coeval translation by William Rawley of Francis Bacon’s Historia Vitae et Mortis), not to his theology or metaphysics.

1730 York printer and author Thomas Gent imports Brathwait’s poetic tour de farce from London and turns it into a verosimilar anecdote for his History of York, adding a year (1634), creating a rescue scene, and giving names to the principals – John Bartendale, the piper, and Mr Vavasour of Hesselwood, the saviour.

1867 William Knipe in his Criminal Chronology of York Castle invents the day now used – 27 March 1634.

1874 Sabine Baring-Gould elevates Knipe’s tale from penny dreadful to tongue-in-cheek salon literature.

1957 Source-shy Jesuit Philip Caraman says the Catholic priest John Robinson told “as an old man of his days as novice-master in gaol and the story of John Bartendale, the felon whom he had confessed on the eve of his execution on 27 March 1634…”

2003 Sponsored by the The Last Drop Inn, and “using information from secret sources,” ghost/pub walk entrepreneur Mark Graham “discovers” that John Bartendale became a publican and is still toasted in York pubs.

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

Sources. Here’s Richard Brathwait’s original Latin and English translation:

Ibi Tibicen apprehensus,
Judicatus et suspensus,
Plaustro cöaptato furi,
Ubi Tibia, clamant pueri?
Nunquam ludes amplius Billie;
At nescitis, inquit ille.
Quod contigerit memet teste,
Nam abscissa jugulo reste,
Ut in fossam Furcifer vexit,
Semi-mortuus resurrexit:
Arce reducem occludit,
Ubi valet, vivit, ludit.

A piper being here committed,
Guilty found, condemned and titted:
As he was to Knavesmire going,
This day, quoth boys, will spoil thy blowing;
From thy pipe th’art now departing;
Wags, quoth the piper, you’re not certain.
All which happened to our wonder,
For the halter cut asunder,
As one of all life deprived,
Being buried, he revived:
And there lives, and plays his measure,
Holding hanging but a pleasure.
(Brathwait 1638)

Bacon:

There have been many examples of men in show dead, either laid out upon the cold floor, or carried forth to burial; nay, of some buried in the earth; which notwithstanding have lived again; which hath been found in those that were buried (the earth being afterwards opened) by the bruising, and wounding of their head, through the struggling of the body within the coffin; whereof the most recent and memorable example was that of Joannes Scotus, called the subtile, and a schoolman, who being digged up again by his servant (unfortunately absent at his burial, and who knew his master’s manner in such fits) was found in that state. And the like happened in our days in the person of a player, buried at Cambridge (Bacon 1638).

Brathwait would probably not have cared about the detailed confutation of Bacon by the Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding in 1636 (Murray 1998).

Gent’s History of York:

1634 … This year one John Bartendale was executed at York gallows for felony. When he had hung three quarters of an hour, he was cut down and buried near the place of execution. A little after, a gentleman of the ancient family of the Vavasours of Hesselwood riding by, thought he saw the earth move: Upon which ordering his man to alight, and alighting himself, both of them charitably assisted to throw by the mould, and to help the buried convict from his grave; who, being conveyed again to York Castle, was by the said gentleman’s intercession reprieved ’till the next assizes, and then pardoned by the judge, who seemed amazed at so signal a providence. And this puts me in Mind, that the said Bartendale was a piper, taken notice of by Barnaby, in his book of travels into the northern parts:

[Latin as above]

Thus paraphrased:

Here a Piper apprehended,
Was found guilty and suspended.
Being led to fatal gallows,
Boys did cry, Where is thy Bellows?
Ever must thou cease thy Tuning!
Answered he, For all your cunning
You may fail in your prediction.
Which did happen, without fiction.
For cut down, and quick interred,
Earth rejected what was bur’ed:
Half alive or dead he rises,
Gets a pardon next assizes,
And in York continued blowing,
Yet a sense of goodness showing.

I have been told the poor fellow turned ostler, and lived very honestly afterwards. Having been demanded, what he could tell in relation to hanging, as having experienced it, he replied, that when he was turned off, flashes of fire seemed to dart in his eyes, from which he fell into a state of darkness and insensibility. (Gent 1730)

William Knipe’s Criminal Chronology of York Castle (which was shamelessly plagiarised by A.W. Twyford, governor of York Castle, who should have known better (Twyford 1880)):

In the reign of King Charles I., and on the 27th day of March, 1634, John Bartendale was executed on the York gallows, without Micklegate Bar, for felony etc. etc. (Knipe 1867)

Sabine Baring-Gould:

… Earth has a peculiarly invigorating and restorative effect, as has been recently discovered; and patients suffering from debility are by some medical men now-a-days placed in earth baths with the most salutary effects. In the case of gangrened wounds a little earth has been found efficacious in promoting healthy action of the skin. John Bartendale was now to experience the advantages of an earth-bath … (Baring-Gould 1874).

Philip Caraman:

It was probably at [the March 1630 assizes] in York that Fr. Robinson was condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered outside Micklegate. The sentence was not carried out, but he lay in York Castle for another eleven years, providing for the relief of Catholic prisoners. No longer in need of disguise, he ministered openly to the condemned malefactors. As an old man he told of his days as novice-master in gaol and the story of John Bartendale, the felon whom he had confessed on the eve of his execution on 27 March 1634. Bartendale had been a strolling piper. After he had hung on the gallows three-quarters of an hour he was cut down for dead and buried near the place of execution. The hangman had not reckoned on the strength of Bartendale’s throat muscles. Shortly afterwards, Sir Thomas Vavasour of Haslewood, passing on his way to the city, saw the freshly-turned soil heave close to his path. At once he dismounted, and with his servant’s help, ‘dug up the convict all alive’. At the next Assizes the Judge mercifully ruled that Bartendale was legally dead. He was released through the intercession of his deliverer, who took him into service at Haslewood: but in intervals of work he went into town,

And in York continued blowing
Yet a sense of goodness showing.

(Caraman 1957)

One two non-sources for the Caraman anecdote.

Mark Graham ventriloquising in The York Press:

For many years there has been a curious custom in York of making a toast to Honest John for good luck. Now Mark Graham, of the Original Ghost Walk of York, which leaves from the King’s Arms nightly, has uncovered the tale behind the toast. According to Mark, Honest John was John Bartendale, a young piper, who was hanged for theft on March 27, 1634 despite a clear lack of evidence. The judge behind the sentence was a notorious hanger who ignored John’s pleas that he was an honest man. John was hanged near Micklegate Bar, cut down and buried. But several hours later, travellers spotted John’s burial mound moving and watched in amazement as the piper emerged naked from the pile of soil. No sooner had John escaped his grave when he was arrested and brought before the judge who condemned him. But this time the entire city petitioned his release and an eminent gentleman argued on John’s behalf that God had passed his judgement when he allowed him to survive. The story says that Honest John was freed by the judge to rapturous cheers from the crowd. Mark said: “Honest John, as he became known, led a long and happy life as a publican in the city. People travelled from far and wide to hear his story and drink to his health, hoping to share a drop of his good fortune.” He compiled the story, using information from secret sources, for the York Brewery pub, The Last Drop Inn. The pub intends to display the tale and encourage customers to drink a toast to Honest John (York Press 2003/04/21).

Duns Scotus trivia:

A poem, found I know not where:

Mark this man’s demise, o traveler,
For here lies John Scot, once interr’d
But twice dead; we are now wiser
And still alive, who then so err’d.
Who would be in your medieval supergroup? Malcolm Guite replies:

Albertus Magnus: Bass
Thomas Aquinas: Multiple keyboards
Duns Scotus: Bagpipes
Bonaventure: Lead Guitar
Dante: Vocals (triple tracked)

Something to say? Get in touch

Comment

Sources. Here’s Richard Brathwait’s original Latin and English translation:

Ibi Tibicen apprehensus,
Judicatus et suspensus,
Plaustro cöaptato furi,
Ubi Tibia, clamant pueri?
Nunquam ludes amplius Billie;
At nescitis, inquit ille.
Quod contigerit memet teste,
Nam abscissa jugulo reste,
Ut in fossam Furcifer vexit,
Semi-mortuus resurrexit:
Arce reducem occludit,
Ubi valet, vivit, ludit.

A piper being here committed,
Guilty found, condemned and titted:
As he was to Knavesmire going,
This day, quoth boys, will spoil thy blowing;
From thy pipe th’art now departing;
Wags, quoth the piper, you’re not certain.
All which happened to our wonder,
For the halter cut asunder,
As one of all life deprived,
Being buried, he revived:
And there lives, and plays his measure,
Holding hanging but a pleasure.
(Brathwait 1638)

Bacon:

There have been many examples of men in show dead, either laid out upon the cold floor, or carried forth to burial; nay, of some buried in the earth; which notwithstanding have lived again; which hath been found in those that were buried (the earth being afterwards opened) by the bruising, and wounding of their head, through the struggling of the body within the coffin; whereof the most recent and memorable example was that of Joannes Scotus, called the subtile, and a schoolman, who being digged up again by his servant (unfortunately absent at his burial, and who knew his master’s manner in such fits) was found in that state. And the like happened in our days in the person of a player, buried at Cambridge (Bacon 1638).

Brathwait would probably not have cared about the detailed confutation of Bacon by the Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding in 1636 (Murray 1998).

Gent’s History of York:

1634 … This year one John Bartendale was executed at York gallows for felony. When he had hung three quarters of an hour, he was cut down and buried near the place of execution. A little after, a gentleman of the ancient family of the Vavasours of Hesselwood riding by, thought he saw the earth move: Upon which ordering his man to alight, and alighting himself, both of them charitably assisted to throw by the mould, and to help the buried convict from his grave; who, being conveyed again to York Castle, was by the said gentleman’s intercession reprieved ’till the next assizes, and then pardoned by the judge, who seemed amazed at so signal a providence. And this puts me in Mind, that the said Bartendale was a piper, taken notice of by Barnaby, in his book of travels into the northern parts:

[Latin as above]

Thus paraphrased:

Here a Piper apprehended,
Was found guilty and suspended.
Being led to fatal gallows,
Boys did cry, Where is thy Bellows?
Ever must thou cease thy Tuning!
Answered he, For all your cunning
You may fail in your prediction.
Which did happen, without fiction.
For cut down, and quick interred,
Earth rejected what was bur’ed:
Half alive or dead he rises,
Gets a pardon next assizes,
And in York continued blowing,
Yet a sense of goodness showing.

I have been told the poor fellow turned ostler, and lived very honestly afterwards. Having been demanded, what he could tell in relation to hanging, as having experienced it, he replied, that when he was turned off, flashes of fire seemed to dart in his eyes, from which he fell into a state of darkness and insensibility. (Gent 1730)

William Knipe’s Criminal Chronology of York Castle (which was shamelessly plagiarised by A.W. Twyford, governor of York Castle, who should have known better (Twyford 1880)):

In the reign of King Charles I., and on the 27th day of March, 1634, John Bartendale was executed on the York gallows, without Micklegate Bar, for felony etc. etc. (Knipe 1867)

Sabine Baring-Gould:

… Earth has a peculiarly invigorating and restorative effect, as has been recently discovered; and patients suffering from debility are by some medical men now-a-days placed in earth baths with the most salutary effects. In the case of gangrened wounds a little earth has been found efficacious in promoting healthy action of the skin. John Bartendale was now to experience the advantages of an earth-bath … (Baring-Gould 1874).

Philip Caraman:

It was probably at [the March 1630 assizes] in York that Fr. Robinson was condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered outside Micklegate. The sentence was not carried out, but he lay in York Castle for another eleven years, providing for the relief of Catholic prisoners. No longer in need of disguise, he ministered openly to the condemned malefactors. As an old man he told of his days as novice-master in gaol and the story of John Bartendale, the felon whom he had confessed on the eve of his execution on 27 March 1634. Bartendale had been a strolling piper. After he had hung on the gallows three-quarters of an hour he was cut down for dead and buried near the place of execution. The hangman had not reckoned on the strength of Bartendale’s throat muscles. Shortly afterwards, Sir Thomas Vavasour of Haslewood, passing on his way to the city, saw the freshly-turned soil heave close to his path. At once he dismounted, and with his servant’s help, ‘dug up the convict all alive’. At the next Assizes the Judge mercifully ruled that Bartendale was legally dead. He was released through the intercession of his deliverer, who took him into service at Haslewood: but in intervals of work he went into town,

And in York continued blowing
Yet a sense of goodness showing.

(Caraman 1957)

One two non-sources for the Caraman anecdote.

Mark Graham ventriloquising in The York Press:

For many years there has been a curious custom in York of making a toast to Honest John for good luck. Now Mark Graham, of the Original Ghost Walk of York, which leaves from the King’s Arms nightly, has uncovered the tale behind the toast. According to Mark, Honest John was John Bartendale, a young piper, who was hanged for theft on March 27, 1634 despite a clear lack of evidence. The judge behind the sentence was a notorious hanger who ignored John’s pleas that he was an honest man. John was hanged near Micklegate Bar, cut down and buried. But several hours later, travellers spotted John’s burial mound moving and watched in amazement as the piper emerged naked from the pile of soil. No sooner had John escaped his grave when he was arrested and brought before the judge who condemned him. But this time the entire city petitioned his release and an eminent gentleman argued on John’s behalf that God had passed his judgement when he allowed him to survive. The story says that Honest John was freed by the judge to rapturous cheers from the crowd. Mark said: “Honest John, as he became known, led a long and happy life as a publican in the city. People travelled from far and wide to hear his story and drink to his health, hoping to share a drop of his good fortune.” He compiled the story, using information from secret sources, for the York Brewery pub, The Last Drop Inn. The pub intends to display the tale and encourage customers to drink a toast to Honest John (York Press 2003/04/21).

Duns Scotus trivia:

A poem, found I know not where:

Mark this man’s demise, o traveler,
For here lies John Scot, once interr’d
But twice dead; we are now wiser
And still alive, who then so err’d.
Who would be in your medieval supergroup? Malcolm Guite replies:

Albertus Magnus: Bass
Thomas Aquinas: Multiple keyboards
Duns Scotus: Bagpipes
Bonaventure: Lead Guitar
Dante: Vocals (triple tracked)

Something to say? Get in touch

27 July 1612: Jennet Preston, the only Yorkshirewoman among the Pendle witches, is found guilty at York of the murder of Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, Gisburn (Ribble Valley)

23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

2 October 1800: Part of an obituary to Harry Rowe, Punch and Judy man, trumpeter at the Battle of Culloden and the York assizes, who died today, old and ill, in the York poorhouse

21 September 1549: Egalitarian, republican and Catholic, the leaders of the Seamer Rebellion against the Edwardian Reformation are hanged at York

30 January 1650: Alderman Hoyle of York hangs himself at Westminster on the first anniversary of Charles I’s execution, inspiring John Cleveland to verse

19 October 1808: William Perigo of Bramley finds that Mary Bateman defrauded him in promising to cure his wife Rebecca’s palpitations, and suspects she died of poisoning

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)

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

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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)

Something to say? Get in touch