Yorkshire Almanac A Danish soldier is beheaded at Beverley for killing a comrade in a duel, inspiring some doggerel

23 December 1689: A Danish soldier is beheaded at Beverley for killing a comrade in a duel, inspiring some doggerel

The memorial plaque to the Danish soldiers is currently outside St Mary’s, Beverley (Craven 2023).

Thomas Allen. 1828. A New and Complete History of the County of York, Vol. 3. London: I.T. Hinton. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

In the churchyard [of St. Mary’s], against the south side of the nave, is an oval tablet with the following doggerel rhyme:

Here two young Danish soldiers lie,
The one in quarrel chanced to die;
The other’s head, by their own law,
With sword was severed at one blow.

In the register of the parish are the following entries:

1689. Dec. 16, Daniel Straker, a Danish trooper, buried.
Dec. 23, Johannes Frederick Bellow (beheaded for killing the other,) buried.

The above event occurred upon the occasion of some Danish soldiers having been landed at Hull, for the service of William III; they were marched to Beverley, and the sick, as well as the ammunition and ordnance, were forwarded at the expense of the corporation. During their short stay, two young men belonging to one of the regiments, having had a quarrel on the passage, which could not be decided on board the vessel, sought the first opportunity of a private meeting to settle their differences by the sword; and their fate is recorded in the above epitaph.

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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

Probably apocryphal:

A writer in a Hull paper a few years ago, Mr. Empson, Hessle road, Hull, an old freeman of Beverley, still living, spoke of the story of the actual execution as related to himself, by only the third transmission, from an original eye-witness. This was a girl named Mary Hopwood, who was taken by her mother to see the execution. This Mary Hopwood lived to be 104 years of age, and passed the story to her daughter, who lived to 80, passing it to her daughter, Mrs. Southeran, Westwood Road, who, at the age of 86 (in 1830), told the brief tale to Mr. Empson. A scaffold was erected on the Cornhill (the middle of the large open space where the gas standard now is). Two cartloads of gravel were strewn below the scaffold to absorb the blood which fell. Lines of cavalry were drawn up all round the scaffold, and a great crowd filled the market place, strangers as well as townsmen. The bells of the churches tolled, but with that exception all was silent, till a dull sounding stroke severed the head from the culprit’s body, when a fierce and simultaneous shriek from the females present broke the air.
(Bulmer 1892)

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Comment

Probably apocryphal:

A writer in a Hull paper a few years ago, Mr. Empson, Hessle road, Hull, an old freeman of Beverley, still living, spoke of the story of the actual execution as related to himself, by only the third transmission, from an original eye-witness. This was a girl named Mary Hopwood, who was taken by her mother to see the execution. This Mary Hopwood lived to be 104 years of age, and passed the story to her daughter, who lived to 80, passing it to her daughter, Mrs. Southeran, Westwood Road, who, at the age of 86 (in 1830), told the brief tale to Mr. Empson. A scaffold was erected on the Cornhill (the middle of the large open space where the gas standard now is). Two cartloads of gravel were strewn below the scaffold to absorb the blood which fell. Lines of cavalry were drawn up all round the scaffold, and a great crowd filled the market place, strangers as well as townsmen. The bells of the churches tolled, but with that exception all was silent, till a dull sounding stroke severed the head from the culprit’s body, when a fierce and simultaneous shriek from the females present broke the air.
(Bulmer 1892)

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Similar

5 March 1829: Henry Burton of Hotham tells a rowdy public meeting at Beverley to petition parliament against Catholic emancipation and preserve “the Protestant constitution”

19 October 1775: Mayor Joseph Outram lays the first stone of Hull’s first dock and customs quay, dooming the town’s walls and commencing its great expansion

27 March 1690: At the première of an ode celebrating the “chief agents” of the Glorious Revolution – “the city and county of York” – London-based Yorkshiremen hear of domestic decline since the days of the Roman emperor Constantine

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

17 August 1561: William Strickland arrives at Flamborough and interviews witnesses of the northerly passage along the coast of Mary, Queen of Scots

7 January 1397: On the longest of the 42 days of his carnivalesque reign, boy-bishop John de Cave of York goes on a 200-mile begging spree

24 April 1688: At Pontefract, the new Catholic and Dissenting members of the judiciary send James II, a Catholic, thanks for allowing freedom of religion, leading him to believe he has popular support

17 December 1688: Mass mobilisation in Leeds on rumours of an imminent Celtic counteroffensive against the Glorious Revolution

5 July 1858: The view from the tower of Beverley Minster

2 August 1680: William Dolben, perhaps reluctantly, condemns Thomas Thwing to death at York for his part, without co-conspirators, in a fictitious conspiracy – the Popish Plot

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Comment

This is a Jesuit hagiography, and I don’t know to what extent the source reflects the substance of Dolben’s remarks. Wikipedia takes a more benevolent view of him:

In the aftermath of the Popish Plot, Dolben tried many of the accused, including Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 2nd Baronet and Sir Miles Stapleton; due to his impartial trait of pointing out inconsistencies in the prosecution’s evidence, both were acquitted.[4] At the trial of Mary Pressicks, who was accused of saying that “We shall never be at peace until we are all of the Roman Catholic religion”, Dolben saved her life by ruling that the words, even if she did speak them, could not amount to treason.[5] As a result of this and his opposition to Charles II’s removal of the City Corporation’s writs, he was “according to the vicious practise of the time” dismissed on 18 April 1683. Again working as a barrister, Dolben prosecuted Algernon Sidney in November 1683 before being reinstated as a Justice of the King’s Bench on 18 March 1689. Records from 29 April show him “inveighing mightily against the corruption of juries [during the Glorious Revolution]”,[1] and he continued sitting as a Justice until his death from an apoplectic fit on 25 January 1694,[6] and was buried in Temple Church.

Vulgar almanacs glory in death sentences and executions, but I suppose one (1) is called for.

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