Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

The absurdity of regulating the property qualification under the Municipal Reform Act by the assessed value of the house in which a man lives instead of by its actual value, is rendered so palpable now that the Barristers for regulating the wards have commenced their inquiry, as to be perfectly ridiculous. The borough of Leeds affords an apt example: in the principal township of the borough the property is assessed at 4-5ths its annual value, while in one of the out-townships the assessment is at 1-5th, and in another at 1-8th, so that a person is qualified to be a Councillor in the town of Leeds who occupies property to the amount of £36 a year, while in an adjoining township in the same borough, it requires that he should occupy to the amount of £150 a year! and in another to the amount of £240 a year! before he can, by the alternative test qualification of Sir Robert Peel, be qualified to take his seat in the town council. The effect is, that in some of the townships, containing many thousands of inhabitants, there is not a single individual who has a qualification by occupancy!

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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

Rather like modern council tax assessments:

A terraced house in Blackpool pays more council tax than a £100m penthouse in the West End. https://t.co/bAW96srOQS

— Dan Neidle (@DanNeidle) August 29, 2024

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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.

• Borough (1) W/G ·
• Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (2) W/G ·
• Charles Grey (1) W/G ·
• Class discrimination (3) W/G ·
• Leeds City Council (34) W/G ·
• Leeds Mercury (18), leading Whig newspaper founded by John Hirst in 1718, bought by Nonconformist-Liberal Edward Baines in 1801 and used to advocate some types of social and political reform, remained in the family for two more generations W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• Municipal Corporations Act 1835 (6) W/G ·
• Municipal borough (1) W/G ·
• Newspaper (28) W/G ·
• Peel, Robert (1788-1850) (7), Conservative statesman, Prime Minister 1834-35 and 1841-46, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1834-35, Home Secretary 1822-27 and 1828-30, seen as father of modern British policing owing to his founding of the Metropolitan Police, one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party W/G ·
• Rates (tax) (1) W/G ·
• Reform Act 1832 (11) W/G ·
• Whigs (1678-1859) (23), political faction and, later, party, supported parliamentarism, various forms of elite liberalism, manufacturing interests, opposed Catholic emancipation, succeeded by the Liberal Party 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

Rather like modern council tax assessments:

A terraced house in Blackpool pays more council tax than a £100m penthouse in the West End. https://t.co/bAW96srOQS

— Dan Neidle (@DanNeidle) August 29, 2024

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

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

20 September 1819: Flags and fasces at a procession from Briggate to Hunslet Moor to protest the Peterloo Massacre

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

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

30 May 1835: The (Tory-dominated) Leeds Corporation gives its assets to three cronies to prevent their being inherited by the new (Whiggish) town council created by the Municipal Corporations Act

27 June 1835: On the eve of municipal reform, the Leeds Mercury maps the self-electing clan that runs the Leeds corporation

26 September 1835: The (Whig) Leeds Mercury reports the attempt of its proprietor and editor, Edward Baines Jnr, to qualify for the electoral register on the basis of shares in accommodation for the dead

27 September 1835: Gabriel Davis, an (Ashkenazi) Jewish optician of Woodhouse, asks a court to add him to the Leeds electoral roll

25 September 1880: Thomas Harper reveals to the Leeds Mercury’s young readers a mnemonic song of monarchs (except Oliver) used in the village school at Weldrake (York) in the 1770s

1 May 1878: The Mercury quotes Clifford Allbutt (Leeds Infirmary) on the commendable beastliness of northerners

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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

Allbutt’s full article, “On Brain Forcing,” recapitulates the eternal debate between schoolteachers and physicians and was published in the inaugural issue of Brain (Allbutt 1878/04).

Hansard quotes the bishop thus: “I should say it would be better that England should be free than that England should be compulsorily sober.” But Hansard is (still) not always a faithful record, and “Better a nation of free drunkards than a nation of teetotal slaves” may be nearer the truth.

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