Yorkshire Almanac John Cockin, Holmfirth minister, describes the remains of Richard Frankland’s late 17th century dissenting academy at Rathmell, Craven

21 April 1821: John Cockin, Holmfirth minister, describes the remains of Richard Frankland’s late 17th century dissenting academy at Rathmell, Craven

Hide-and-seek at Herculaneum (Raddato 2015/01/09).

Bryan Dale. 1909(?). Yorkshire Puritanism and Early Nonconformity. Ed. Thomas George Crippen. Bradford: Dale’s literary executors. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

The old college building at Rathmell still exists, but has been greatly altered; in part demolished, and in part turned into cottages which occupy an enclosure known as College Fold. The following is an account given by John Cockin, minister at Holmfirth, in a letter written by him April 21st, 1821, of a visit paid by him to the place:

“Some years ago, when I was itinerating in Craven, I passed through a village, and saw ‘Rathmell’ painted on a board. The name struck me, and … I recollected it was the residence of Mr. Frankland, the tutor of the first dissenting tendency in England. I asked the first man I met if there were any remains of an old chapel in the place; ‘No,’ said he, ‘but there was once a college here.’ I then enquired what person in the village was most likely to give me information about it…. At last I went to one family whose ancestors had resided within a stone’s cast of Mr. Frankland’s house for several centuries. They received me courteously, entertained me to dinner, shewed me the premises, and told me all the traditions of the place respecting ‘the old college.’ It was an extensive establishment, bounded by a high wall, which enclosed an acre of ground. Over the gate of the yard was a large bell, which rang at stated times to call the students up, and to summon them to family prayers, meals, &c. Some of the buildings have been taken down, and those which are still standing are converted into cottage houses. There was a long row of windows to the different studies, most of which are now walled up…. The kitchen was described to me as having been very large; and my guide told me that when she was a girl she had often hid herself in the oven in a game of ‘hide and seek.’ The garden and orchard were extensive, but are now converted into grass land. I could learn no anecdotes of the personal character of Mr. Frankland, or any of the students; and all the traditions I heard related to the mischievous tricks which the young men played to the country people.”

A view of the buildings, as they now appear, is given in the Transactions of the Congregational Historical Society for September, 1906. A complete list of Frankland’s students may be found in J. H. Turner’s edition of “Oliver Heywood’s Diaries, &c,” vol. 3, 1885.

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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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27 September 1680: The Rev Oliver Heywood manifests disregard for Calvinist views on fasting, for his horses, and for his wife

23 October 1679: Presbyterian emotion at Gisburn, Ribble Valley (West Riding)

23 June 1674: Oliver Heywood attends the funeral of Martha Stansfield and her baby

2 January 1673: Despite Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, Presbyterians Oliver Heywood and Christopher Richardson are detained while preaching at Lascelles Hall (Kirkburton)

5 February 1691: Approaching 60, Oliver Heywood contemplates his place in the cosmos

29 November 1673: A verse warns Charles II against his brother James, six days after the latter’s marriage to an Italian Catholic

19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë

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Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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