Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

To John Harrison, as a further reward and encouragement, over and above the sums already received by him, for his invention of a time-keeper, for ascertaining the longitude at sea, and his discovery of the principles upon which the same was constructed: £8,750.

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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.

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Comment

Harrison seems to have spent most of his life in Lincolnshire and London, so maybe this should be banished.

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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.

• Barrow upon Humber (1) W/G ·
• Board of Longitude (1) W/G ·
• Celestial navigation (2) W/G ·
• Clock (2) W/G ·
• Foulby (1) W/G ·
• George III (1738-1820) (17), ruled 1760-1820 W/G ·
• Harrison, John (1693-1776) (1), West Riding-born autodidact carpenter and clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer, a long-sought-after device enabling the calculation of longitude at sea W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
• Lincolnshire (15) W/G ·
• London (84) W/G ·
• Longitude Act (1) W/G ·
• Longitude (2) W/G ·
• Marine chronometer (2) W/G ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (150) W/G ·

All tags.

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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

Harrison seems to have spent most of his life in Lincolnshire and London, so maybe this should be banished.

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Similar

19 October 1816: Serenaded by the military, decorated barges leave Leeds for Liverpool to celebrate the completion, after almost 50 years, of the canal uniting east and west

24 July 1771: Actor-manager Tate Wilkinson opens Puritan Leeds’ first proper theatre with comic impressions of leading Methodists

1 July 1840: The opening of the Hull and Selby Railway terminates the threat to Hull’s port from Goole, Scarborough and Bridlington

1 December 1773: 2½ days after leaving London, legal clerk Foster Powell walks into York, rests briefly, and starts back

11 June 1681: A recent grainstorm near Leeds

4 May 1807: Lord Milton welcomes 10,000 to his 21st birthday barbecue at Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, during his campaign to be elected MP for the Whigs

22 December 1857: With only a small clock planned for Cuthbert Brodrick’s over-budget town hall, Leeds Council absents itself from a talk by Edmund Beckett, designer of the mechanism for Big Ben

3 October 1815: In the Hull Packet, a London reader defends a preference for the exact sciences over the humanities in the exam for mastership of the Trinity House mariners’ school

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

20 January 1536: Thomas Cromwell’s dissolvers of monasteries, Richard Layton and Thomas Legh, report allegations of whoring and theft by William Thirsk, Abbot of Fountains

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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

The letter then details the replacement its authors have in mind, who is willing to pay a substantial bribe for the privilege:

There is a monk of the house called Marmaduke [Bradley], to whom Mr Timmes lent a prebend in Ripon church, now abiding upon the same prebend, the wisest monk within England of that cote and well learned, 20 years officer and ruler of all that house, a wealthy fellow, which will give you six hundred marks to make him abbot there, and pay you immediately after the election, without delay or respite, at one payment, and as I suppose without much borrowing. The first fruits to the king is a thousand pounds, which he with his policy will pay within three years, and owe no man therefore one groat, as he saith, and his reason therein is very apparent.

William Thirsk was implicated in Bigod’s rebellion in early 1537, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn and his head displayed on the London walls on Whit Friday (25 May) of that year (Wriothesley 1875). Bradley surrendered the monastery in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

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