Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

On Saturday morning my sons having not made their Latin in expectation to go to Halifax were loath to go to school, yet I threatened them, they went crying, my bowels worked and I sent to call them back and I went into my study and fell on my knees and found sweet meltings – if God set in a little they will occasion much good.

Comment

Comment

Meltings are defined here. Heywood’s bowels do not here perform their normal biological function, as imagined by the facetious, but are “the seat of the tender and sympathetic emotions” (OED), like our “heart.” KJV Philippians 2:1-2:

If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any bowels and mercies,
Fulfil ye my joy, that ye be likeminded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.

Cox’s description of the school as it was prior to the 19th century rebuild would have not been unfamiliar to the young Heywoods:

It was … obscured from the road by several insignificant and private buildings, and was approached through an uneven and almost private yard… When examined carefully, it would seem as if it consisted of a long room with three Elizabethan windows in the side, over which had been erected at a later period a series of dormitories, with four windows of a very cottage-like nature. It is probable that the school-room had originally a high-pitched roof, and it was found when the building was pulled down, that the old oak timbers had been used as far as they served, and the deficiencies were supplied by new deal. At the west end of the north side there was an entrance, screened from the north winds by a low porch. On entering, the pupil beheld a room which was fifty feet six inches long, twenty-one feet ten inches broad, and fourteen feet six inches high. [Author note: This room ran so truly east and west that the rays of the setting sun on the day of the Autumnal Equinox shone straight through the west window. The house crossed the east end, due north and south, and projected beyond the school-room, so that the whole formed a Latin Cross with the eastern apex mutilated.] His eye would perhaps light first on the master’s awful desk at the east end, masking a door, by which he would afterwards frequently see a pleasant or frowning face emerge from the school-house: he would at first however become more familiar with the usher’s desk, which was placed near the entrance at the west end, exactly facing the master’s throne. As time went on, and he had opportunities of looking about him, he would observe three mullioned windows on the north side, each with two uprights and a transom, and three similar windows on the south side, but each having three uprights and a transom. A few observant boys would discover that these windows were a foot broader than the northern ones, and would account for it by the north side having to give room to a large fire-place as well as the entrance. But the most attractive sight to the new pupil would be a circular window at the west end, which he would soon learn to distinguish as the apple-and-pear window, though he might at first imagine it to contain a representation in glass of a series of sections of snail shells revolving round a central circle. If he was inquisitive enough, he might learn that it was a Catherine-wheel window, or perhaps a rose window, or even be told that it was an oriel. But it would ever be a puzzle, how or why it got there. Some of his communicative school-fellows would soon be asking him if he had ever heard of old Laury, and would point out a partition of the ceiling where he was said to have painted his name: and he would look at the 28 partitions into which the ceiling was divided by the beams that supported the dormitories, and wonder if he could not himself do something of the kind in future days; but he would soon find an easier way of transmitting his name to after days as he looked at the wainscoting that surrounded the room, ancient and venerable in his eyes, but in reality of so late a date as 1816. If his position allowed him, his eyes would often be taken from his book, by the Stancliffe Tablet on the north side, and he would gaze and gaze again at the awful head on its top, which he would irreverently style “the Nigger”, though he might be emboldened some day with school-boy wit to put a pipe in its mouth. And if transferred, as he might be, to the opposite side of the room, he might (if he was a pupil in the last days) have gazed wistfully at the Tablet which told the Scholarships and the Honour of Senior Classic gained by a former pupil, J.W. Bonser, between 1866 and 1870, dreaming perhaps that such things were often done, but not knowing that few schools except the greatest ever gain such a distinction as Senior Classic. There would be nothing else to engage his attention: he would not care to know that the sash windows went out, and diamond panes came in, with the New Year 1862, and that the desk at which he sat, consisting of a sloping slab of wood on an iron frame that was screwed down to the floor, was no older than the diamond panes. Often however did he feel annoyed by the stone floor on which he had to stand, though there was wood where he sat, and at the distance which lay between him and the fire, a distance so severely felt on a cold day, especially if he was in one of the upper classes (Cox 1879).

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

On Saturday morning my sons having not made their Latin in expectation to go to Halifax were loath to go to school, yet I threatened them, they went crying, my bowels worked and I sent to call them back and I went into my study and fell on my knees and found sweet meltings — if God set in a little they will occasion much good – this was February 13 1668-9.

71 words.

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.

• Bible (15) ·
• Corporal punishment (8) ·
• Education (8) ·
• Epistle to the Philippians (1) ·
• Flagellation (6) ·
• Grammar school (1) ·
• 📌Halifax (43) ·
• 📌Heath Grammar School (1), the Free Grammar School of Queen Elizabeth on Free School Lane, Halifax, founded 1585 by Dr. John Favour, since 1985 part of Crossley Heath School ·
• Heywood, Oliver (1630-1702) (34), Bolton-born nonconformist minister and diarist, active in the West Riding, resident at Northowram, ejected for his beliefs ·
• Latin (9) ·
• 📌Northowram (14) ·
• One-room school (3) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 2 April 1683: A domestic dispute at the Heywoods’ in Northowram (Halifax)
• 11 April 1667: A hubristic Sam Mitchell impersonates a gypsy in a Halifax pub, and nemesis follows
• 17 December 1674: Michael Gilburn, a Halifax lawyer, terminates a drunken weekend in style
• 8 June 1679: At death’s door, Brian Bentley, the Halifax Poet, refuses a cap unless it be a barley-cap
• 12 February 1677: Heavy snow leaves Oliver Heywood unsure whether to cross the Pennines into Lancashire
• 18 September 1880: An elderly reader of the Leeds Mercury recounts in its children’s column a pre-1839 alternative to flogging in a one-room school
• 11 December 1680: The Great Comet is seen at Halifax as a natural event, in London – amid Popish Plot hysteria – as a portent
• 19 August 1817: An encounter with John Oates of Halifax, autodidact optician
• 18 June 1664: Jane Thompson of Craven, “a swinish drunkard,” dies of a barely-treated compound fracture
• 24 February 1673: Oliver Heywood regrets impulsively baptising the child of an irresponsible Quaker father