Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

Then Whitby’s nuns exulting told,
How to their house three Barons bold
Must menial service do;
While horns blow out a note of shame, 235
And monks cry ‘Fye upon your name!
In wrath, for loss of silvan game,
Saint Hilda’s priest ye slew.’-
‘This, on Ascension-day, each year,
While labouring on our harbour-pier, 240
Must Herbert, Bruce, and Percy hear.’-
They told how in their convent-cell
A Saxon princess once did dwell,
The lovely Edelfled;
And how, of thousand snakes, each one 245
Was changed into a coil of stone,
When holy Hilda pray’d;
Themselves, within their holy bound,
Their stony folds had often found.
They told, how sea-fowls’ pinions fail, 250
As over Whitby’s towers they sail,
And, sinking down, with flutterings faint,
They do their homage to the saint.

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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

I haven’t yet investigated the origins of the legends used by Scott, e.g. via https://www.jstor.org/stable/1253948

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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.

• Ammonites (2), extinct spiral-shelled marine molluscs dating from the Devonian to roughly the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, name derived from the coiled ram's horns worn by the Egyptian god Ammon W/G ·
• Battle of Flodden (3) W/G ·
• Ellerburn (1) W/G ·
• English folklore (17) W/G ·
• Feast of the Ascension (3) W/G ·
• Gull (2) W/G ·
• Henry VIII (1491-1547) (16), ruled 1509 until his death, initiator of the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority and introducing the theory of the divine right of kings, dissolved convents and monasteries, invested heavily in the navy W/G ·
• Hilda of Whitby (1) W/G ·
• Hildoceras (1) W/G ·
• Marmion (poem) (1) W/G ·
• Narrative poetry (9) W/G ·
• Nun (1) W/G ·
• Poetry (75) W/G ·
• Ryedale (7) W/G ·
• Scott, Walter (4) W/G ·
• Whitby Abbey (3) W/G ·
• 📌Whitby (22), town, port and parish on the east coast of North Yorkshire/the North Riding at the mouth of the River Esk 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.

Comment

Comment

I haven’t yet investigated the origins of the legends used by Scott, e.g. via https://www.jstor.org/stable/1253948

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

25 May 1870: An Ascension Eve performance for tourists of the Whitby Penny Hedge ritual

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

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

26 May 1941: Headingley’s Shire Oak falls, legendary site of Anglo-Saxon local government between Aire and Wharfe

12 September 1680: Francis and Mary Huntrodes are buried together at St. Mary’s, Whitby with a poetic epitaph

22 October 1906: The Yorkshire Herald reports that the king of the Wensleydale dry-stone wallers has discovered a devil among the stones

11 August 1875: The Whitby town crier’s unique act for the municipal dog show

15 December 1888: Leeds’s most popular wassailing song, according to Frank Kidson

19 February 1557: At a tithe hearing, Ralph Dicconson (60) of Malton recalls his visits 40 years ago as a pedlar to Kirkham Priory before its dissolution in 1539

10 April 1877: Echoing Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe”, John Collier tells a meeting at Walkley (Sheffield) that local Normans and Anglo-Saxons initially lived apart

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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

David Clarke:

[T]he idea of Anglo-Saxon identity exerted a strong influence upon writers who collected folklore in Hallamshire, the geographical region that became the city of Sheffield in the modern county of South Yorkshire… [T]hat identity coalesced around two folk heroes, Earl Waltheof and Robin Hood (Robin of Loxley), who are portrayed in literature and folklore as ethnic Saxon rebels who fought against Norman occupation of the region. Both also came to symbolise the region’s independence of spirit and its rebelliousness. Today they are regarded as distinctly English national folk heroes, but their complex links with the folklore of southwest Yorkshire is less well known. During the nineteenth century, their legends became part of an imagined heritage based upon ideas of Anglo-Saxon indigeneity to Britain. As a result, folklore interacted with history to create a hybrid of fact, story and interpretation that persists to the present day… The rebel traditions of [southwest Yorkshire are] reflected in Victorian literature. Barczewski (2000, 132) notes that, ‘virtually every major fictional text written after 1820 features the conflict between Saxon and Norman as a prominent motif,’ and this division is projected backwards in accounts of the history and folklore of southwest Yorkshire. The most influential example is Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820). His novel is set in the twelfth century, a generation after the Norman Conquest, and the narrative is located geographically in the valley of the River Don… Scott (1820; 2000, 15) says, ‘here flourished in ancient times those bands of gallant outlaws, whose deeds have been rendered so popular in English song.’ The plot of Ivanhoe is centred upon an imagined, ongoing struggle between dispossessed Saxons and their Norman lords that post-dated the Norman Conquest. Significantly, the outlaw Robin Hood – ‘Locksley’ – is both a central character and a figurehead for the freedom fighters.

(Clarke 2022)

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