7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle
Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes and George Henry Walker. 1898. Ben o’ Bill’s, the Luddite. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, and Co. Get it:
.Unedited excerpt
If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.
But one day intervened between the trial of Mellor, Thorpe and Smith and their execution. Mr. Webster was allowed to see the three condemned men the night before the Friday on which they were to make their piteous end. He shrank from that last interview in the cells with the sensitiveness of a woman; but he had a great soul in a little body and nerved himself to the painful ordeal. He told us something of what passed. Thorpe was stolid as ever, and simply asked to be let alone, and not pestered with questions. George declared that he would rather be in the situation he was then placed, dreadful as it was, than have, to answer for the crime of his accuser; and that he would not change situations with him, even for his liberty and two thousand pounds.
“Well said,” cried my father, when Mr. Webster, with many a sigh, brought his tale to an end: “well said, there spoke our George. There spoke the lad we used to be proud on, and he’s in the right on it, and so folk will say for all time to come.”
“I urged him to forgive his enemies and to leave this sinful world in charity with all mankind.”
“An’ what said he to that?”
“He said he’d nought to forgive to anybody but Ben Walker.”
“Well, and him?”
“I urged him to forgive even Walker. ‘Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.’”
“Well, did he?”
“Nay, I found him obdurate on this point, though I pressed him hard. He reiterated that before he forgave Walker he’d like to give him something to forgive too. I could not but tell him he was entering the presence of his Maker in a most unchristian frame of mind.”
“Are yo’ clear, Mr. Webster,” asked my father, “that religion calls on George to forgive Ben Walker?”
“There can be no question of it,” was the answer. “Do we not pray ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us?’”
My father shook his head pensively. “It may be Scripture, parson, but it isn’t Yorkshire. Hast ta never heard that a Yorkshireman can carry a stone in his pocket for seven years, then turn it and after another seven years let throw and hit his mark?”
“It is an evil, an unforgiving, an unchristian frame of mind,” quoth the parson.
“That’s as may be,” replied my father, doggedly. “But what’s born in the bone will out in the flesh. For my part I’st uphowd George, an’ if he’d said he forgave that spawn o’ the devil I should ha’ thowt he met be a saint, but he wer’ a liar an’ a hypocrite for all that. It’s agen natur, Mr. Webster, it’s agen natur.”
Comment
Comment
Some background to the novel:
D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.
Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)
See also the official record of the trial (Howell 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.
- Hanging (25) W/G ·
- Horsfall, William (1770-1812) (4), pro-technology wool textile manufacturer at Marsden, ambushed and murdered by Luddites W/G ·
- 📌Huddersfield (30) W/G ·
- Luddism (1811-17) (12), in Yorkshire's West Riding, a movement of croppers opposed to the use of shearing frames and gig mills to raise productivity in the finishing woollen cloth, involving machine-breaking, political radicalism, arms raids, and the administration of illegal oaths - brutally suppressed W/G ·
- Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) (23), a series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon (1804-15) and a fluctuating array of European coalitions, which originated in political forces arising from the French Revolution (1789-99) and from the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and produced a period of French domination over Continental Europe W/G ·
- 📌Pole (Powle) Moor (1), high moorland hamlet between Outlane and Scammonden in Kirklees, between Slaithwaite and Wholestone Moors W/G ·
- Scammonden (1) W/G ·
- Textile manufacturing (60) W/G ·
- 📌York Castle (37) W/G ·
- 📌York (165) W/G ·
- Yorkshire dialect (21) W/G ·
Comment
Comment
Some background to the novel:
D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.
Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)
See also the official record of the trial (Howell 1823).
Something to say? Get in touch
Similar
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)
Comment
Comment
Which “new burying ground to the west of the town” are some of the rioters working on? Doesn’t appear to be any listed in a later piece on Sheffield’s churchyards (Sheffield Independent 1850/03/30).
Something to say? Get in touch
Search
Subscribe/buy
Donate
Music & books
Place-People-Play: Childcare (and the Kazookestra) on the Headingley/Weetwood borders next to Meanwood Park.
Music from and about Yorkshire by Leeds's Singing Organ-Grinder.
RSS feed
Bluesky
Extwitter