Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

February 4th. – Cyril Arthington, of Arthington, esq., is dead of excessive drinking, because he had an heir born.

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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

Taylor, Ecclesiæ Leodienses, says 1729, but I’m assuming that is a Lady Day calendar confusion:

Cyril de Arthington lived about the year 1100, and from this time, up to the year 1681, the estate descended regularly from father to son, upwards of 500 years. In this year Henry Arthington died without issue, and the estate passed to Cyril Arthington, a descendant of a younger branch of the family. He erected Arthington Hall, (for engravings of the south front, and north side of which see Jones’s Harewood, pp. 218 and 231), and furnished it with water, as Thoresby says, “conveyed in pipes of lead from an engine he has contrived at his mill upon the River Wharfe, being an ingenious gentleman, and well seen in hydrostatics,” &c. Cyril Arthington died in 1720, leaving a son Cyril, who died in 1729, leaving a son Cyril, who died a minor, at Oxford, in 1750. The estate then passed into the family of the Rev. Thos. Hardcastle, Canon of Christ Church, Dublin, whose son, Sandford, assumed the name of Arthington. It subsequently became the property of W. F. Carruthers, Esq., whose mother was the daughter of the last Mr. Arthington. This gentleman sold the estate, about the year 1850, to Wm. Sheepshanks, Esq., who erected a fine residence on Rawdon Hill, the extremity of the township. The late occupier of Arthington Hall was Thos. Farrer, Esq. (Taylor 1875).

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Tags

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• Alcohol (drug) (62) W/G ·
• Alcohol intoxication (28) W/G ·
• Arthington Hall (1) W/G ·
• 📌Arthington (1) W/G ·
• Hobson, John (32), enthusiastically morbid diarist of Dodworth Green (Barnsley), the date of whose own death is unknown W/G ·
• Thoresby, Ralph (1658-1725) (11), 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 ·
• York virtuosi (1) 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

Taylor, Ecclesiæ Leodienses, says 1729, but I’m assuming that is a Lady Day calendar confusion:

Cyril de Arthington lived about the year 1100, and from this time, up to the year 1681, the estate descended regularly from father to son, upwards of 500 years. In this year Henry Arthington died without issue, and the estate passed to Cyril Arthington, a descendant of a younger branch of the family. He erected Arthington Hall, (for engravings of the south front, and north side of which see Jones’s Harewood, pp. 218 and 231), and furnished it with water, as Thoresby says, “conveyed in pipes of lead from an engine he has contrived at his mill upon the River Wharfe, being an ingenious gentleman, and well seen in hydrostatics,” &c. Cyril Arthington died in 1720, leaving a son Cyril, who died in 1729, leaving a son Cyril, who died a minor, at Oxford, in 1750. The estate then passed into the family of the Rev. Thos. Hardcastle, Canon of Christ Church, Dublin, whose son, Sandford, assumed the name of Arthington. It subsequently became the property of W. F. Carruthers, Esq., whose mother was the daughter of the last Mr. Arthington. This gentleman sold the estate, about the year 1850, to Wm. Sheepshanks, Esq., who erected a fine residence on Rawdon Hill, the extremity of the township. The late occupier of Arthington Hall was Thos. Farrer, Esq. (Taylor 1875).

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Similar

15 April 1729: John Hobson of Dodworth Green (Barnsley), pessimist, believes he is about to die

31 October 1674: Riding home to Pontefract from Wakefield fair, a sozzled Silvanus Rich enters the River Calder in flood at Wakefield bridge

9 October 1726: Two horsemen attack the house of Mr Goodwin, rector of Tankersley (Barnsley)

13 March 1728: Wild daffodils in the hedges at Wickersley (Rotherham)

27 May 1730: John Hobson writes off two thirds of a £48 debt because the debtor has fled to Crayke (Easingwold) in the Liberty of Durham

25 July 1730: John Hobson encounters two outlandish, free-living men at Thirsk

10 October 1730: John Hobson observes a fiery red star to the north over Barnsley

29 May 1732: Old William Lindley of Dodworth tells various marvellous stories from his youth

1 January 1735: Silkstone parish sends the presumably destitute James Lindly (7) as a servant to John Hobson in Dodworth

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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