Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

On May 19th, a wife was sold in Leeds market for five guineas, to a gentleman who well knew her merits, and, strange to say, she had been previously sold at the same place before she was born, her mother, when she was in embryo, being disposed of in a similar manner.

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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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Context required. Divorce/prostitution?

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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.

• 📌Bradford (73) W/G ·
• Divorce (2) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
• Misogyny (9) W/G ·
• Newspaper (28) W/G ·
• Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser (1837-52) (3), Chartist newspaper owned and run by Feargus O'Connor W/G ·
• Slavery (22) W/G ·
• Wife selling (2), an illegal but often tolerated way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage without going to the expense of divorce, practised from the late 17th to the late 19th century - see e.g. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge 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.

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Context required. Divorce/prostitution?

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Similar

21 April 1838: The Northern Star reminds husbands that it is a criminal offence to sell one’s wife

29 September 1830: Tory Radical Richard Oastler: “free” white workers in the Bradford mills are worse off than their enslaved black counterparts in the colonies

15 October 1838: Apologies from “imprisoned” Huddersfield workers are read to the great Chartist rally on Peep Green (Hartshead Moor), accusing middle-class radicals of betrayal

23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

20 June 1681: A Leeds court hears of the enslavement by North African pirates of the son of Alderman Foxcroft

1 July 1718: The first edition of the Leeds Mercury

17 July 1844: Tory Radical Joshua Hobson tells Leeds council that Liberal mayor Hamer Stansfield was wrong to prohibit public meetings on the semi-privatised Kirkgate market

10 October 1857: Questions from the floor of the Leeds Chamber of Commerce to the explorer and missionary David Livingstone during his exposition of the wonders of Africa

26 November 1980: Following the Headingley murder of Jackie Hill, West Yorkshire Police receive a letter from Trevor Birdsall clearly identifying his friend Peter Sutcliffe of Heaton (Bradford) as the Yorkshire Ripper

5 August 1685: John Thompson, an ex-excommunicant, is abandoned in Leeds parish churchyard

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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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Where’s Hillows Bank? Hallows?

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