Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

One of those occurrences of selling a wife so disgraceful to civilized society, and especially to Englishmen, took place, last week, in a village near Bradford. The name of the seller is J. Wilkinson, and that, of the buyer James Ellison. The former being tired of his spouse, agreed to sell her to the latter, whose wife had run away, for 1s. The bargain was struck in the presence of a witness and the poor woman was hoisted away, bag and baggage, to the residence of her new lord. In the morning he heartlessly turned her out, and her husband refused to take her. We would just remind these unprincipled men that it is indictable at common law for a person to sell his wife, though the vulgar error has it that he can. They probably do not remember the ease of one Jackson, who was guilty of the offence of selling his wife at the Butter Cross here, with a halter round her neck. He pleaded guilty, and expressed contrition for his offence, and, on that account, was leniently sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. Let these persons mind the constables are not after 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.

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Via Helena Fairfax (Fairfax 2019).

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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.

• 📌Bradford (73) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• Misogyny (9) W/G ·
• Prostitution (15) W/G ·
• Slavery (22) W/G ·
• Wife selling (2), an illegal but often tolerated way of ending an unsatisfactory marriage without going to the expense of divorce, practised from the late 17th to the late 19th century - see e.g. Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge 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.

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Via Helena Fairfax (Fairfax 2019).

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Similar

19 May 1804: A woman is sold for the second time at Leeds market

26 November 1980: Following the Headingley murder of Jackie Hill, West Yorkshire Police receive a letter from Trevor Birdsall clearly identifying his friend Peter Sutcliffe of Heaton (Bradford) as the Yorkshire Ripper

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

23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

10 October 1857: Questions from the floor of the Leeds Chamber of Commerce to the explorer and missionary David Livingstone during his exposition of the wonders of Africa

21 May 1785: Aged 15, William Butterworth of Leeds runs away to sea and joins a slaver

5 February 1649: The Puritan John Sharp of Bradford, on military service at Hull, writes passionately to his “cousin” at York

20 June 1681: A Leeds court hears of the enslavement by North African pirates of the son of Alderman Foxcroft

30 May 1835: Alfred Austin, future poet laureate, “Banjo-Byron that twangs the strum-strum,” is born into rural splendour at Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds

23 March 1743: His monstrous penis today having terminated its earthly mission, Lancelot Blackburne, (absentee) Archbishop of York, bids his ladies farewell

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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

Malcolm Redfellow provides some good entry points, but I couldn’t find a source for this until I read Matthew Parris’s Great Unfrocked (Parris 1999). I take it that the Armagh reference can be explained by some personal rivalry with the Primate of All Ireland, rather than by St Patrick’s Purgatory or whatever.

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