Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

I wish you a merry Kessenmas an’ a happy New Year,
A pokeful o’ money an’ a cellar-full o’ beer.
A good fat pig an’ a new-cauven coo;
Good maisther an’ misthress, hoo do you do?

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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

Year assigned as per Moorman, but someone will probably be able to find an older version. Moorman has versions of other songs which I, perhaps mistakenly, think of as more southerly: his Cleveland Christmas Song, which he has from Florence Cleveland (Tweddell 1875), is a version of God rest you merry gentlemen (“God a-rist you, merry gintlemen”), then there is a version of God bless the master of this house / Here we come a-wassailing. His Come all ye jolly mummers (A mumming we will go) has much in common with the eponymous, marvellous song in an anonymous 1830s/-40s Sheffield mummers’ chapbook (Pearce 1840).

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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.

• Christmas carol (4) W/G ·
• Christmas (16) W/G ·
• Cleveland (county) (3) W/G ·
• Moorman, Frederic William (1872–1919) (4), Devon-raised Yorkshire dialectologist, poet and playwright, Professor of English Language at the University of Leeds (1912-18), allegedly translator of rules of football into German W/G ·
• Poetry (75) W/G ·
• Yorkshireness (9) 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

Year assigned as per Moorman, but someone will probably be able to find an older version. Moorman has versions of other songs which I, perhaps mistakenly, think of as more southerly: his Cleveland Christmas Song, which he has from Florence Cleveland (Tweddell 1875), is a version of God rest you merry gentlemen (“God a-rist you, merry gintlemen”), then there is a version of God bless the master of this house / Here we come a-wassailing. His Come all ye jolly mummers (A mumming we will go) has much in common with the eponymous, marvellous song in an anonymous 1830s/-40s Sheffield mummers’ chapbook (Pearce 1840).

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Similar

1 January 1916: A newly published New Year’s Day first-foot verse tells Yorkshire readers that God helps those who help themselves

24 August 1870: Fakesong by an army captain about the sights of the St. Bartholomew’s Fair today at Reeth, Swaledale

15 December 1888: Leeds’s most popular wassailing song, according to Frank Kidson

5 November 1866: Bonfire Night firework riots at Halifax

18 December 1802: A stereotypical comedy Yorkshireman – “heir to a wealthy clothier” – sings during tonight’s Covent Garden première of Thomas Dibdin’s “Family Quarrels”

24 December 1777: Christmas Eve at Wuthering Heights, as told by housekeeper Nelly Dean

15 December 1888: Frank Kidson longs for Leeds’s musical Christmasses past

20 September 1635: Angry villagers bear William Hodshon on a pole into Sunday service at Appleton Wiske (Northallerton), assisted by a bagpiper and a churchwarden

24 January 1826: Samuel Hick, blacksmith and Methodist preacher of Micklefield (Leeds), writes to his “dear bosom frend and beloved wife” and daughter Jan

3 January 1915: Ex-prime minister Asquith on the Yorkshireness of his then chief whip, Percy Illingworth (Bradford), who died this day of typhoid

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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

In his tribute in the Commons a month after Illingworth’s death, Asquith was less geographically specific:

He was a man of stern, clean-cut convictions, indisposed by nature to compromise, with pronounced likes and dislikes, a manlike combustible temper, and with the full endowment of a Northern Englishman’s lust for battle and joy in the victory (Asquith 1915/02/03)

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