Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

I preached at Pateley-Bridge. Such a congregation, both for number and seriousness, I have not seen since we left Newcastle. As it rained, I desired the men to put on their hats; but in two or three minutes they pulled them off again, and seemed to mind nothing but how they might “know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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

Something to say? Get in touch

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.

• Hat (5) W/G ·
• Jesus (3) W/G ·
• Methodism (38) W/G ·
• Newcastle upon Tyne (8) W/G ·
• 📌Pateley Bridge (4) W/G ·
• Wesley, John (1703-91) (21), cleric and leader of a evangelical revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism W/G ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (151) W/G ·

All tags.

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

Order the book:

Subscribe to the free daily email:

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

That all four were Methodists is from Sydney Smith (Holland 1855): “Conceive the horror of fourteen men hung yesterday! And yet it is difficult to blame the Judges for it, though it would be some relief to be able to blame them.”

Modern accounts generally follow the colourful but substantially fabricated version by (George) Walter Thornbury, first published by Dickens (Thornbury 1867/05/11) and then under his own name (Thornbury 1870). First among them was local lad Frank Peel – frequently given as a source for Thornbury’s attribution to Horsfall of a probably fictitious “desire to ride up to the saddle girths in Luddite blood” (Peel 1888) – but see also e.g. Georgina Hutchinson’s Under the Canopy of Heaven, Geoffrey Bindman in The New Law Journal, and Wessyman. (Susanna Berger is good on Thornbury’s ground-breaking but misleading biography of J.M.W. Turner (Berger 2013).)

Kevin Binfield quotes from a letter to Huddersfield magistrate Joseph Radcliffe from Colonel Thomas Norton describing the behaviour of Luddites hanged at York Castle during the first
two weeks of 1812:

You know how the three Murderers died, and the five Men for Rawfold’s Mill died precisely the same. The Chaplain told them it was his Duty to entreat them to confess. They were silent. He then told them he should take their Silence as confessions. They were still Silent on that Subject, but spoke Generally of their Sins. Thus in Fact tacitly allowing their Guilt as to the Offence they died for, but not doing so in Words…. Nor was one Word said by their People. (Binfield 2004)

Something to say? Get in touch