Yorkshire Almanac A list of shares in ship-owning partnerships held by Samuel Pinder of Whitby on this date

7 June 1703: A list of shares in ship-owning partnerships held by Samuel Pinder of Whitby on this date

Dirk Eversen Lons’s 1642 print of a fisher’s pink, from his series of ten types of Dutch inland ships. The verse, “Om kleyne winst en sobre vangst / De zeeman dickwils is in angst,” could be translated as “For modest catch and meagre gain / The seaman oftentimes fears pain” (Lons 1642).

George Young. 1817. A History of Whitby, and Streoneshalh Abbey, Vol. 2. Whitby: Clark and Medd. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

In an inventory of the goods of Samuel Pinder … taken June 7th, 1703, are these items: “In shipping. In his own vessel, six 16ths, ⅓, one 64th part – £160. In one 32th of William Johnson vessel – £30. In one 32th of Stephen Russell pinque – £13. In one 32th Richard Chapman pinque – £7 10s. In one 32th Ebo. Marshall ship – £20. In one 32th Henry Pearson ship – £20. In one 32th William Fotherley ship – £20. In one 32th Geo. Jackson vessel – £6. In one 32th Fra. Barker pinque £12 10s.”

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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

Young writes that vessels owned and exploited in this fashion were called club ships – OED take note! – and that “almost all our all our present Greenland ships are also held in shares, but not in such small shares as 32ds and 64ths.” For a full account, see Ralph Davis’ chapter on “The shipowners” (Davis 2017).

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Comment

REED’s endnote quotes the OED on riding the stang:

In some places in Scotland and the north of England, one who has in certain ways incurred the indignation of his or her fellow-villagers is compelled to ‘ride the stang’ (either personally, in effigy, or by proxy), accompanied by a jeering crowd and sometimes ‘rough music’. There is also a New Year’s day custom by which every one met by the mob has either to ‘ride the stang’ or pay a forfeit.

How had he annoyed them? “Mab” is presumably the OED’s “A slattern; a promiscuous woman,” so perhaps he had whoring, or was believed to be homosexual.

The letterpress accompanying Walker’s image apparently reads as follows:

This ancient provincial custom is still occasionally observed in some parts of Yorkshire, though by no means so frequently as it was formerly. It is no doubt intended to expose and ridicule any violent quarrel between man and wife, and more particularly in instances where the pusillanimous husband has suffered himself to be beaten by his virago of a partner. A case of this description is here represented, and a party of boys, assuming the office of public censors, are riding the stang. This is a pole, supported on the shoulders of two or more of the lads, across which one of them is mounted, beating an old kettle or pan with a stick. He at the same time repeats a speech, or what they term a nominy, which, for the sake of detailing the whole ceremony, is here subjoined:

With a ran, tan, tan,
On my old tin can,
Mrs. ____ and her good man.
She bang’d him, she bang’d him,
For spending a penny when he stood in need.
She up with a three-footed stool;
She struck him so hard, and she cut so deep,
Till the blood run down like a new stuck sheep!

(Brand 1849)

The tradition was popular in the 18th- and 19th-century United States, and the Coen brothers even run Homer Stokes out of town on a rail in O Brother, Where Art Thou?: