Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

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

To you my dear companions,
Accept these lines I pray;
A most impartial trial
Has occupied this day.
‘Tis from your dying Broughton
To show his wretched fate,
I hope you’ll make reformation
Before it is too late.

The loss of your companion
Does grieve my heart full sore,
And I know that my fair Ellen
Will my wretched fate deplore.
I think on those happy hours
That now are past and gone,
Now poor unhappy Broughton
Does wish he had ne’er been born.

One day in Saint James’s
With large and swelling pride,
Each man had a flash woman
Walking by his side;
At night we did retire
Unto some ball or play,
In these unhappy pleasures
How time did pass away.

Brought up in wicked habit,
Which brings me now in fear,
How little did I think
My time would be so near;
For now I’m overtaken,
Condemned and cast to die,
Exposed a sad example
To all that does pass by.

O that I had but gone
To some far-distant clime,
A gibbet post, poor Broughton,
Would never have been mine;
But alas, for all such wishes,
Such wishes are in vain,
Alas! it is but folly
And madness to complain.

One night I tried to slumber
And close my weeping eyes,
I heard a foot approach
Which struck me with surprise;
I listened for a moment,
A voice made this reply,
“Prepare thyself, Spence Broughton,
To-morrow you must die.”

O awful was the messenger
And dismal was the sound,
Like a man that was distracted
I rolled upon the ground;
My tears they fell in torrents,
With anguish I was torn;
I am poor unhappy Broughton,
I wish I had ne’er been born.

Farewell, my wife and children,
To you I do bid adieu,
I never should have come to this
Had I staid at home with you.
I hope thro’ my Redeemer
To gain the happy shore,
Farewell! farewell! farewell for ever,
Spence Broughton soon will be no more.

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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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• Attercliffe (4) W/G ·
• Capital punishment (7) W/G ·
• Gibbet (1) W/G ·
• Hanging (24) W/G ·
• Highwayman (4) W/G ·
• 📌Knavesmire (15) W/G ·
• Mental disorder (13) W/G ·
• Poetry (75) W/G ·
• Rotherham (21) W/G ·
• 📌Sheffield (80) W/G ·
• Spence Broughton (1) W/G ·
• 📌York (164) 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.

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Similar

6 March 1684: The highwayman and racketeer John Nevison is captured at an alehouse near Sandal Castle, Wakefield

10 December 1769: Part of the northern ballad about Bill Brown, a Brightside (Sheffield) steelworker and hare-poacher killed by gamekeepers today near Rotherham

8 February 1745: Pioneering but pennyless philologist Eugene Aram murders a wealthy Knaresborough wastrel

27 March 1634: In commercial Gothic urban legend, John Bartendale, a piper, is hung and buried at York, but awakes, is rescued and pardoned, and returns to the music business

27 July 1612: Jennet Preston, the only Yorkshirewoman among the Pendle witches, is found guilty at York of the murder of Thomas Lister of Westby Hall, Gisburn (Ribble Valley)

19 October 1808: William Perigo of Bramley finds that Mary Bateman defrauded him in promising to cure his wife Rebecca’s palpitations, and suspects she died of poisoning

13 May 1851: The Flying Dutchman runs the Great Match against Voltigeur at the York races

22 August 1572: The head of Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland and leader of the Catholic Rising of the North, is impaled on Micklegate Bar, York, where it stays for two years

5 August 1605: Debauched and ruined, Walter Calverley is crushed to death today at York for the murder of two sons at Calverley Hall (Bradford), but is revived by 1830s schoolboy ghost-raisers as the Rev. Samuel Redhead (age ca. 55)

25 May 1728: King Jessop, the fighting rector of Treeton (Rotherham), is buried at Sheffield, and remembered for his punch and his parody

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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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Necrology op cit. John Hobson says he was called King Jessop (Hobson 1877). Henry Parke, curate at Wentworth: “Great Jessop is a sound divine, / His sense is strong and masculine” (Parke 1819).

I haven’t found Jessop’s parody, but here is a translation of the original, borrowed from Edward Miller’s Doncaster (Miller 1804):

At the seat called The Wood, near Edlington, in the vicinity of Doncaster, Robert Molesworth, Esq. two years before he was created Viscount, had the remains of a favourite greyhound sent down from London, and buried there; over which animal he placed a small square altar monument with a Latin inscription, thus translated:

Stay, traveller,
Nor wonder that a lamented Dog
Is thus interred with funeral honour.
But ah, what a dog !
His beautiful form and snow-white colour,
Pleasing manners and sportful playfulness,
Affection, obedience, and fidelity,
Made him the delight of his master,
To whose side he closely adhered.
With his eager companions of the chase,
He delighted in attending him.
Whenever the mind of his lord depressed,
He would assume fresh spirit and animation.
A master, not ungrateful for his merits,
Has here in tears deposited his remains
In this marble urn.
M.F.C.

Tradition says, the above dog saved his master’s life in the following manner: when going to the privy, he pulled him by the flap of his coat, and would not let him proceed. On a second attempt, the dog behaved in the same manner. Surprised at this interruption, he ordered one of his servants to go to the place, who, on opening the door, was immediately shot dead by a villain there concealed, whose intention was most probably to rob the house when the family had retired to rest (Miller 1820).

Here is a fairly useless photo of the dog monument ca. 1930. Has anyone got something better?

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