Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

A poor man at a little house by Mark Whittaker’s near Ossett in Wakefield Road hanged his own child to death for taking a piece of bread to eat it. Another child said, “Father, you’ll not hang me, I took no bread.” The man is gone to the jail.

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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.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

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Original

A poor man at a little house by Mark Whittaker’s near Ossit in Wakefield road hanged his own child to death for taking a piece of bread to eat it. Another child said, “Father, you’ll not hang me, I took no bread.” The man is gone to the jail.

53 words.

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.

• Filicide (3) ·
• Heywood, Oliver (1630-1702) (34), Bolton-born nonconformist minister and diarist, active in the West Riding, resident at Northowram, ejected for his beliefs ·
• Hunger (9) ·
• Murder (38) ·
• Ossett (1) ·
• Poverty (16) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 15 November 1894: Application is made to move Maria Squires (11) of Dewsbury from a girls’ shelter in Wakefield to St Chad’s Home For Girls, Far Headingley
• 27 August 1673: John Holden fatally mugs his wife at Lightcliffe (Calderdale), but witnesses are fearful, and the jury sees only manslaughter
• 10 March 1665: Blizzards and Dutch attacks prolong Restoration-induced shortages of fodder and coal at Northowram (Halifax)
• 31 October 1674: Riding home to Pontefract from Wakefield fair, a sozzled Silvanus Rich enters the River Calder in flood at Wakefield bridge
• 24 February 1673: Oliver Heywood regrets impulsively baptising the child of an irresponsible Quaker father
• 27 June 1669: The vicar of Morley fails to persuade the local JP to prevent Oliver Heywood speaking from his pulpit
• 2 March 1665: A sighting of the northern lights at Northowram (Halifax) recalls the eve of the civil war
• 25 March 1831: Esther Dyson of Ecclesfield (Sheffield), charged with decapitating her infant daughter, is judged insane because she is deaf-mute
• 24 January 1680: Miners rob, murder and burn a pit-owning nonconformist minister and his mother and maid at Beeston (Leeds)
• 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)