Now! Then! 2025! - A Yorkshire Almanac

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.

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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

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)

24 January 1680: Miners rob, murder and burn a pit-owning nonconformist minister and his mother and maid at Beeston (Leeds)

23 June 1674: Oliver Heywood attends the funeral of Martha Stansfield and her baby

10 January 1675: George Aislabie, profiteering registrar of the York ecclesiastical court and assiduous duellist, challenges the wrong man

17 December 1674: Michael Gilburn, a Halifax lawyer, terminates a drunken weekend in style

24 February 1673: Oliver Heywood regrets impulsively baptising the child of an irresponsible Quaker father

12 February 1677: Heavy snow leaves Oliver Heywood unsure whether to cross the Pennines into Lancashire

2 April 1683: A domestic dispute at the Heywoods’ in Northowram (Halifax)

18 June 1664: Jane Thompson of Craven, “a swinish drunkard,” dies of a barely-treated compound fracture