Yorkshire Almanac Tombstone epitaph for George Wilkinson, village crier of Ecclesfield (Sheffield), who died today aged 94

2 March 1797: Tombstone epitaph for George Wilkinson, village crier of Ecclesfield (Sheffield), who died today aged 94

F.S. Hague. N.d. Ecclesfield Churchyard Transcription. Online: St Mary’s Ecclesfield. See also Hague’s full survey and a lecture. . Reproduction by kind permission of St Mary’s Ecclesfield. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

Here lies George Wilkinson
Born and cri’d,
Liv’d ninety-four years,
And then he di’d.
2nd March 1797.

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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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6 December 1828: Tombstone epitaph for Joseph Batty (32) of Mortonley, who today fell into a coal pit 75 yards deep

21 April 1826: Tombstone epitaph for Jonas Thackray of Grenoside (Sheffield) who died today aged 72

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

6 February 1906: A reporter gains exclusive access to the entombment of Horatio Bright, a Sheffield steel merchant and lapsed Jew, alongside his first wife and only son

21 November 1972: Asphalt executive Walter Gott of Dringhouses, charged with speeding, pleads poetry before Market Weighton magistrates

30 July 1825: The Bridlington bellman Dickey Fletcher cries two keys found on the resort’s North Sands

14 April 1792: The ballad of Spence Broughton, hung this day at the York Tyburn for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail

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

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

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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’.”

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