Now! Then! 2025! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

About one I preached at Daw Green. I judged the congregation, closely wedged together, to extend forty yards one way, and about a hundred the other. Now, suppose five to stand in a yard square, they would amount to twenty thousand people. I began preaching at Leeds between five and six, to just such another congregation. This was the hardest day’s work I have had since I left London; being obliged to speak at each place from the beginning to the end, to the utmost: extent of my voice: but my strength was as my day.

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.

Abbreviations

Comment

Comment

He had preached there several days before:

I preached at one in Great Gummersal; in the evening at Dewsbury. The congregation was as large as at Bradford, and as attentive. Although a few years since the people of Daw Green were as eminently savage and irreligious, as even the colliers of Kingswood.

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

About one I preached at Daw-Green. I judged the congregation, closely wedged together, to extend forty yards one way, and about a hundred the other. Now, suppose five to stand in a yard square, they would amount to twenty thousand people. I began preaching at Leeds between five and six, to just such another congregation. This was the hardest day’s work I have had since I left London; being obliged to speak at each place from the beginning to the end, to the utmost: extent of my voice: but my strength was as my day.

98 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.

• Crowd counting (1) ·
• 📌Daw Green (1) ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) ·
• Gomersal (3) ·
• Kingswood, South Gloucestershire (1) ·
• 📌Leeds (238) ·
• Wesley, John (1703-91) (21), cleric and leader of a evangelical revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism ·

All tags.

Similar

22 May 1711: Leeds’s first white-cloth hall is opened on Kirkgate, replacing the outdoor market on Briggate, and competing with Wakefield’s 1710 building

16 August 1842: Lancastrian plug-drawing rioters invade Skipton in an attempt to halt the mills

29 April 1969: Jimmy Savile sexually assaults a 15-year-old girl at Staincliffe Hospital (later Dewsbury and District Hospital), to the amusement of bystanders

22 June 1761: John Wesley is troubled by fish at Guisborough

24 June 1761: A cat joins John Wesley’s street congregation at Robin Hood’s Bay

3 July 1761: John Wesley visits an unjustly bankrupted Yarm liquor smuggler in York Castle

19 July 1761: John Wesley speaks at the first love-feast at Birstall

19 October 1909: Opening a nurses’ home in Dewsbury, Clifford Allbutt describes their predecessors in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

22 September 1896: Clifford Allbutt on the threat to industry from anti-scientific manufacturers and workers, and colonialism

6 June 1817: A government agent provocateur on his way to a meeting of pro-democracy radicals at Thornhill encounters Thomas Murray, weaver and reform activist