Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

This indenture made the four and twentieth day of May … between William Shaw, of the city of York, mercer, on the one part, and Abraham Sharp, son of John Sharp, of Little Horton in the county of York, clothier, on the other part:

Witnesseth that the said Abraham Sharp hath put and bound himself apprentice unto the said William Shaw and after the manner of an apprentice with him to dwell from the making hereof unto the full end and term of eight years from thence next ensuing fully to be complete and ended, during all which said time the said Abraham Sharp the apprentice him the said William Shaw as his master well and truly shall serve, his secrets shall keep, his commandments lawful and honest everywhere shall do, fornication in the house of his said master nor without he shall not commit, hurt unto his said master he shall not do, nor consent to be done, but to his power shall it not, and forthwith give his said master warning thereof; taverns of custom he shall not haunt, unless it be about his said master’s business there to be doing; at cards, dice, or any other unlawful games he shall not play, the goods of his said master inordinately he shall not waste, nor them to any other person send without his said master’s licence, nor shall trade for himself or any other person except for his said master in any kind of merchandise neither beyond the seas nor at home during the said term without his said master’s licence; matrimony with any woman he shall not contract, nor any marry or take to wife within the said term without his said master’s licence; from his said master’s service he shall not absent himself either by day or night, but shall behave himself as a true and faithful servant ought to do as well in words as in deeds, yielding to his said master a just and true account so often as he shall be required during the said terme, and in which said terme the said William Shaw, the master, him the said Abraham Sharp, his apprentice, in the trade or mystery of a mercer which he now useth, and shall teach and inform or cause to be taught and informed, and in due manner shall chastise him, finding to his said apprentice meat, drink, and cloth linen and all other things necessary for such apprentice after the custom of the Citie of York; and shall give yearly to his said apprentice during the said term six pence in the name of his stipend or salary.

In witness whereof the parties named in these present indentures interchangeably have set their hands and seals the day and yeare first above written, Anno Domini, 1669.

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

£20 was paid for the pleasure, but Sharp didn’t complete his term.

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.

• Apprenticeship (4) W/G ·
• Astronomy (7) W/G ·
• 📌Bradford (73) W/G ·
• 📌Little Horton (9) W/G ·
• Mathematics (3) W/G ·
• Mercery (6) W/G ·
• Sharp, Abraham (1653-1742) (6), mathematician and astronomer, assistant of John Flamsteed W/G ·
• Textile manufacturing (60) 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

£20 was paid for the pleasure, but Sharp didn’t complete his term.

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

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

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).

Something to say? Get in touch