Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

Mr. Sharp, from Jer. xxx. 7, showed what reason we have to expect and therefore provide for such a day as the Prophet speaks of: how many present themselves as a new year’s gift to Satan by their vain mirth and jollity upon this day, which custom was derived from the Heathens, who then sacrificed to their idol Janus: but we should labour to present ourselves as a spotless sacrifice to God.

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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

Comment

Jeremiah 30:7 in the KJV: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.” I now need a description and an illustration of what people actually got up to in Leeds-Babylon on that day. Thomas Sharp was minister to the dissenting congregation on Mill Hill from 1677 until his death in 1693, which deeply affected Thoresby, as had the death of his own father two months previously.

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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.

• Alcohol (drug) (62) W/G ·
• Book of Jeremiah (3) W/G ·
• Dance (5) W/G ·
• English Dissenters (4) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
• New Year’s Day (4) W/G ·
• Nonconformism (47) W/G ·
• Old Testament (8) W/G ·
• Protestantism (25) W/G ·
• Puritans (15) W/G ·
• Thoresby, Ralph (1658-1725) (12), Leeds-born antiquarian and its first historian, non-conformist, merchant, fellow of the Royal Society, diarist, author, common-councilman in the Corporation of Leeds, museum keeper W/G ·

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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

Comment

Jeremiah 30:7 in the KJV: “Alas! for that day is great, so that none is like it: it is even the time of Jacob’s trouble, but he shall be saved out of it.” I now need a description and an illustration of what people actually got up to in Leeds-Babylon on that day. Thomas Sharp was minister to the dissenting congregation on Mill Hill from 1677 until his death in 1693, which deeply affected Thoresby, as had the death of his own father two months previously.

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Similar

26 August 1693: Thomas Sharp, a Leeds nonconformist minister, finds some dying words for his wife

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

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

24 July 1771: Actor-manager Tate Wilkinson opens Puritan Leeds’ first proper theatre with comic impressions of leading Methodists

27 September 1680: The Rev Oliver Heywood manifests disregard for Calvinist views on fasting, for his horses, and for his wife

11 June 1681: A recent grainstorm near Leeds

25 November 1978: A rambunctious Leeds wedding

15 August 1677: John Thoresby writes from Leeds to his son Ralph in London recommending he keep a diary

4 April 1825: A Leeds jury shows limited sympathy for Job Robinson, a London fashion designer sacked by Hardwick’s of Briggate

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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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

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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