Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

GENTLEMENS’ CHILDREN are instructed in the first principles of English, so as to be enabled to read and write their native Language with elegance and propriety; the English Grammar agreeable to the strictest rules of Syntax, resolving a sentence into its different parts of speech. The free and natural method of Writing, and striking by command of hand; Arithmetic, Merchants’ Accounts, or the Italian Method of Book-Keeping; Mensuration; Gauging; Surveying of Land; Plain and Spherical Trigonometry; Euclids Elements; Navigation; Algebra, and the Use of the Globes.

YOUNG GENTLEMEN are Boarded and taught Geography, by familiar lectures, founded on rational principles and demonstration, and such as are of age and capacity taught to read Milton and Young, with proper emphasis and cadence.

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

Browne speculates that W.M. is Writing Master.

When in 1788 the 18-year-old William Butterworth of Leeds arrived in London from the West Indies, he was offered such an education:

I had not been ship-keeper more than two or three days, when two gentlemen came on board and looked over the ship. Addressing themselves to me, they inquired if I had considered to remain on board? “I have determined, Gentlemen,” I answered, “to have nothing more to do with the sea.” ” Indeed! young man,” said one of them, “perhaps your reason against a seafaring life may be overcome by sound arguments, if we knew it.” “ To me, Sir,” said I, “it is as irksome as precarious, and, hitherto, has proved as unprofitable as unpleasant !” “That we can and will remedy,” replied the other, “if you can reconcile yourself to the life, under more auspicious circumstances, than you have as yet been placed. You are highly recommended by Captain Smith; we have a vessel intended to sail up the Mediterranean, and have waited on you to engage you, if possible, to hold a situation in that vessel, well worth your attention.”. When I pointed out the impossibility of ever soaring higher than a man before the mast, from being ignorant of the important science of navigation, I was asked if I knew the four great rules of arithmetic – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division?” “As schoolboys generally do,” said I, “ but I have not had much practice since I left the desk.” “If you will engage with us, we will be at the expense of educating you in navigation, during the arrangement for the ship leaving England.” “I can only thank you, gentlemen,” returned I, “for your attention to my welfare; but I have resolved to return home, where I have a prospect of advancement superior to any that you can offer, at the same time that it is more congenial to my own inclination and the wishes of my friends.” Finding me inflexible, we parted; they to return ashore, whither my good wishes followed them, in return for their intended kindness to me (Butterworth 1823).

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.

• Academy (1) W/G ·
• Accounting (1) W/G ·
• Algebra (3) W/G ·
• Arithmetic (4) W/G ·
• Boarding school (2) W/G ·
• Butterworth, William (1769-1834) (5), Leeds engraver and sailor, unrelated to Henry Schroeder, good secondaries are ODNB and Thoresby Society W/G ·
• Commerce (1) W/G ·
• Double-entry bookkeeping (1) W/G ·
• East Riding of Yorkshire (67) W/G ·
• Education (8) W/G ·
• Edward Young (1) W/G ·
• English grammar (2) W/G ·
• English language (7) W/G ·
• Euclid (1) W/G ·
• Euclidean geometry (2) W/G ·
• Financial accounting (1) W/G ·
• Geography (2) W/G ·
• Globe (1) W/G ·
• International trade (17) W/G ·
• 📌Kingston upon Hull (74) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• Mathematics education (1) W/G ·
• Mathematics (3) W/G ·
• Measurement (1) W/G ·
• Milton, John (3) W/G ·
• Navigation (2) W/G ·
• North Sea (20) W/G ·
• Poetry (75) W/G ·
• 📌Port of Hull (19) W/G ·
• Rationalism (1) W/G ·
• Surveying (1) W/G ·
• Trade (4) W/G ·
• Trigonometry (2) W/G ·
• Writing (1) 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

Browne speculates that W.M. is Writing Master.

When in 1788 the 18-year-old William Butterworth of Leeds arrived in London from the West Indies, he was offered such an education:

I had not been ship-keeper more than two or three days, when two gentlemen came on board and looked over the ship. Addressing themselves to me, they inquired if I had considered to remain on board? “I have determined, Gentlemen,” I answered, “to have nothing more to do with the sea.” ” Indeed! young man,” said one of them, “perhaps your reason against a seafaring life may be overcome by sound arguments, if we knew it.” “ To me, Sir,” said I, “it is as irksome as precarious, and, hitherto, has proved as unprofitable as unpleasant !” “That we can and will remedy,” replied the other, “if you can reconcile yourself to the life, under more auspicious circumstances, than you have as yet been placed. You are highly recommended by Captain Smith; we have a vessel intended to sail up the Mediterranean, and have waited on you to engage you, if possible, to hold a situation in that vessel, well worth your attention.”. When I pointed out the impossibility of ever soaring higher than a man before the mast, from being ignorant of the important science of navigation, I was asked if I knew the four great rules of arithmetic – addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division?” “As schoolboys generally do,” said I, “ but I have not had much practice since I left the desk.” “If you will engage with us, we will be at the expense of educating you in navigation, during the arrangement for the ship leaving England.” “I can only thank you, gentlemen,” returned I, “for your attention to my welfare; but I have resolved to return home, where I have a prospect of advancement superior to any that you can offer, at the same time that it is more congenial to my own inclination and the wishes of my friends.” Finding me inflexible, we parted; they to return ashore, whither my good wishes followed them, in return for their intended kindness to me (Butterworth 1823).

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

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

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

19 October 1775: Mayor Joseph Outram lays the first stone of Hull’s first dock and customs quay, dooming the town’s walls and commencing its great expansion

3 July 1837: The Swan, a Hull whaler, returns from the dead (the ice of the Davis Strait) bearing three whales

30 July 1798: The homeward-bound Greenland whaler Blenheim fights off a Royal Navy press gang in Hull harbour, killing two boarders

17 May 1823: “Doncaster fertiliser manufacturers imported more than a million bushels of skeletons from Waterloo and other Napoleonic battlefields in 1822”

26 November 1851: Exports in sterling to foreign ports for the year to date by one of Hull’s largest shippers, Brownlow, Pearson and Co.

1 September 1651: Robinson Kreutznaer sails from Hull, and soon wishes he hadn’t

17 August 1778: Civil engineers John Smeaton and John Wooler explain how to use the River Hull to flush the dock which has replaced the northwest section of the city walls

23 January 1640: Andrew Marvell’s father drowns in the Humber at Hull

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

Andrew Junior left to look after himself.

The manner of his father’s death, and the fact that the poet himself was born in reclaimed Holderness, should give pause to those who take offence at his lines on Holland:

How did they rivet with gigantic piles,
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground,
Building their watery Babel far more high,
To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky!
Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid,
And oft at leap-frog o’er their steeples played,
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what’s their mare liberum.
A daily deluge over them does boil;
The earth and water play at level coil.
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest (Marvell 1665).

I must find out more about Mrs. Skinner of Thornton, North Lincolnshire, who adopted him.

Marvell was not the only person with reason to dislike the crossing:

There are some good towns on the sea-coast; but I include not Barton, which stands on the Humber, as one of them, being a straggling mean town, noted for nothing but an ill-favoured dangerous passage, or ferry, over the Humber to Hull; where, in an open boat, in which we had about 15 horses, and 10 or 12 cows, mingled with about 17 or 18 passengers, we were about 4 hours tossed about on the Humber, before we could get into the harbour at Hull. Well may the Humber take its name from the noise it makes; for in an high wind it is incredibly great and terrible, like the crash and dashing together of ships (Defoe 1748).

In “To a Coy Mistress” Marvell laments his lover’s absence in the lines “I by the tide/ Of Humber would complain” (Marvell 1898), which inspired Angela Leighton to a rather excellent poem, “By the Tide of Humber” (Leighton 2023) which I hope I’ll be allowed to use.

I haven’t managed to access Nicholas von Maltzahn’s “Death by Drowning: Marvell’s ‘Lycidas’.”

Something to say? Get in touch