Yorkshire Almanac A Leeds court hears of the enslavement by North African pirates of the son of Alderman Foxcroft

20 June 1681: A Leeds court hears of the enslavement by North African pirates of the son of Alderman Foxcroft

European slaves on sale at the market in Algiers (Luyken 1684).

John Mayhall. 1860. The Annals and History of Leeds, and Other Places in the County of York. Leeds: Joseph Johnson. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

Forasmuch as this court hath been credibly informed by Mr. Alderman Foxcroft, a member thereof, that he hath a son lately taken by the Turks, who was put apprentice to one Mr. Robert Newport, captain and owner of the good ship the Adriatique, and in that voyage was bursar to the said ship, his master having lost his life with his vessel, and the young man taken captive and carried prisoner to Algiers, and there sold for seven hundred dollars. And that the sum required for his redemption will amount to £350 sterling at the least, and his father not being in a condition to raise the same, hath craved the advice and assistance of this court; thereupon it is therefore ordered, that a general collection be made from house to house in all constabularies and places in the said borough. And that all persons, both householders, and others, will be pleased to give their charitable contributions to so pious a work, as the redemption of a Christian soul out of the hands of those barbarous infidels. Ordered that a letter be writ to Hull in the name of the corporation, to request their charitable contributions to the furtherance of this pious work.

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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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19 May 1804: A woman is sold for the second time at Leeds market

10 September 1855: Leeds celebrates the fall of Sevastopol during the Crimean War

25 September 1705: Daniel Defoe is amazed by Leeds’s outdoor cloth market on Briggate, shortly before the opening of the white cloth hall

11 July 1787: Advertisement for The Commercial and Mathematical Academy, Hull

21 May 1785: Aged 15, William Butterworth of Leeds runs away to sea and joins a slaver

24 September 1862: Having bet his shirt on blockade-running to the Confederates, Hull mayor Zachariah Pearson tells of his ruin by Lombard Street and Abraham Lincoln

5 August 1685: John Thompson, an ex-excommunicant, is abandoned in Leeds parish churchyard

23 January 1720: Mr Robertson demonstrates his ultra-compact inflatable boat on the Aire at Leeds

3 June 1917: A mob wrecks and loots Jewish shops and houses in east-central Leeds

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James Appell:

The wartime discord prompted some soul-searching within the community, which began questioning whether the economic and social bonds between Jew and non-Jew, forged in Leeds by the conditions of the tailoring trade, were really as strong as the trade unions and socialist movements might have portrayed. The Jewish Chronicle offered its own analysis just a few weeks after the Leeds riot concluded:

There has been a very large and sudden increase in the Jewish population of Leeds during the last few years, and that there has in consequence been considerable inconvenience in many directions to the indigenous inhabitants … Towns, like countries, can assimilate only a certain Jewish element in a certain time, and the Jewish addition to the population of Leeds has been too much and too fast.

The rapid entry of nearly 20,000 Jews into Leeds within the space of two generations clearly exerted pressures on the local population. In this respect Leeds may have differed from London and other provincial cities, where Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe was of a longer duration, where an Anglo-Jewish community already existed and where tensions were less marked than in Leeds. Poverty and mode of employment may have united the two groups, but ultimately religious difference divided them. In such circumstances, therefore, Leeds Jews’ identity as Yorkshiremen was only ever going to be fragile (Appell 2019).

Via Lola Fraser, who thinks the perception that Leeds’s (eastern European) Jews were evading military service would have been exacerbated by the Leeds socialist-pacifist convention on 3 June 1917 in support of revolutionary Russia’s withdrawal from World War I (Fraser N.d.).

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