Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

At Trumfleet water mills there are commonly every May such vast numbers of young eels comes over the wheels with the waters and runs into the mill, that they are forced to give over working, and to send into the town for the swine to devour them, for they are innumerable as the sand on the sea shore. I was a fishing in the Went the other day. It is a narrow river, not over six yards over, but the crookedest and the deepest that ever I saw in my life, therefore it is rightly called Went, which signifies deep in Welsh. Every turn of the river makes a great bog on the other side, on which the water is thrown by the current; and there is delicate fish therein; but such quantities of eels that the like was never seen. Sometimes there will break out, or fall out of the hollow bank sides, when people are a fishing, such vast knots of eels, almost as big as a horse, that they break all their nets in pieces.

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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

Comment

Comment

I struggled with the geography until I found Chris Firth:

It would be difficult to recognise the present River Went from this description given by de Prime. The river has clearly undergone many drainage operations since his time, and is essentially now a straight drainage channel… In a further paragraph of his observations, de Prime describes the Went as feeding Trumfleet Water Mill. This indicates that the course has been substantially altered as Trumfleet is now a considerable distance from the river channel (Firth 1997).

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Original

May 7th. At Trumfleet water mills there are commonly every May such vast numbers of young eels comes over the wheels with the waters and runs into the mill, that they are forced to give over working, and to send into the town for the swine to devour them, for they are innumerable as the sand on the sea shore.

I was a fishing in the Went the other day. It is a narrow river, not over six yards over, but the crookedest and the deepest that ever I saw in my life, therefore it is rightly called Went, which signifies deep in Welsh. Every turn of the river makes a great bog on the other side, on which the water is thrown by the current; and there is delicate fish therein; but such quantities of eels that the like was never seen. Sometimes there will break out, or fall out of the hollow bank sides, when people are a fishing, such vast knots of eels, almost as big as a horse, that they break all their nets in pieces.

184 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.

• 📌Doncaster (34) ·
• Eel life history (1) ·
• Eel (1) ·
• Fishing (7) ·
• Kirk Sandall (1) ·
• Pig (11) ·
• Pryme, Abraham de la (1671-1704) (13), Yorkshire antiquary and curate born to Huguenots: a Dutch-speaking father from Ypres and a Parisian mother ·
• River Don, Yorkshire (10) ·
• River Went (1) ·
• Watermill (5) ·
• Wentbridge (2) ·

All tags.

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