Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

Friday 17 August [Halifax]
My aunt had a letter from Marian [Market Weighton] this morning announcing their having sent off 2 hedgehogs which have just arrived safe (about 12) by the mail coach, packed in straw in a basket. We have put them under a hot bed frame in the back room where they are to be kept a day or two, before being turned out into the garden to clear it of snails & other vermin, with which it is at present exceedingly infested … Went down to the hedgehogs for 10 minutes, took them a plate of gooseberries & watched 1 of them drinking the milk set for them.

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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

They were duly deployed:

Saturday 18 August [Halifax] Mending my stocking tops for an hour … Just before I went out this afternoon, George took the hedgehogs from the back room & put them loose under the great yew tree.

But that is the last we hear of them. Perhaps they found the West Riding unbearable and set off to scuttle the 60 miles to their home in the East.

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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.

• East Riding of Yorkshire (67) W/G ·
• Gardening (6) W/G ·
• Gooseberry (1) W/G ·
• 📌Halifax (43) W/G ·
• Hedgehog (1) W/G ·
• Helena Whitbread (1) W/G ·
• Lister, Anne (1791-1840) (8), wealthy diarist, famous for revelations for which she has been dubbed "the first modern lesbian" W/G ·
• Market Weighton (4) W/G ·
• Milk (3) W/G ·
• Pest (organism) (2) W/G ·
• Pest control (1) W/G ·
• Shibden Hall (5) W/G ·
• Shibden (5) W/G ·
• Slug (1) W/G ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (150) 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.

Comment

Comment

They were duly deployed:

Saturday 18 August [Halifax] Mending my stocking tops for an hour … Just before I went out this afternoon, George took the hedgehogs from the back room & put them loose under the great yew tree.

But that is the last we hear of them. Perhaps they found the West Riding unbearable and set off to scuttle the 60 miles to their home in the East.

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Similar

2 May 1817: Public unrest at Leeds regarding the efficacy of the smallpox vaccine

12 May 1817: The transport of voters in the election of the registrar of deeds at Wakefield

19 August 1817: An encounter with John Oates of Halifax, autodidact optician

8 November 1817: Anne Lister’s uncle Joseph dies, and her aunt recounts a premonitory vision

15 May 1841: Patience Kershaw (17) tells the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) about her work at Joseph Stocks’ Booth Town Pit, Halifax

11 April 1812: On a moonless night, Luddites attack William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds (Cleckheaton) – subsequently inspiring Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley”

25 September 1705: Daniel Defoe is amazed by Leeds’s outdoor cloth market on Briggate, shortly before the opening of the white cloth hall

27 July 1822: An inquest at York finds that John Furnel of the Queen’s Regiment of Foot died of flogging and resulting illness

7 January 1397: On the longest of the 42 days of his carnivalesque reign, boy-bishop John de Cave of York goes on a 200-mile begging spree

1 November 1643: Sam Priestley of Soyland (22) saves a Royalist enemy from drowning in Hebden Water at the Battle of Heptonstall, and himself dies later of pneumonia

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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

Many tales are told of this battle, or skirmish, or whatever, but I haven’t seen sources even to establish something as simple as the date.

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