Yorkshire Almanac The burial of George Crooks of Barnsley, who died of camping

18 May 1732: The burial of George Crooks of Barnsley, who died of camping

Francis T. Billam. 1806. A Walk Through Leeds. Leeds: J.H. Leach. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

This day Mr. George Crooks was buried at Royston. He died Monday last, at night, of a consumption, occasioned, as he thought, by too much liquor, which he got when he went to see Mrs. Spencer, of Cannon Hall, which overpowered him so much that he was obliged to lie in a close, under a hedge, all night.

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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

What does “consumption” mean here? Mrs Spencer only survived him by five years.

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Comment

What does “consumption” mean here? Mrs Spencer only survived him by five years.

Something to say? Get in touch

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29 May 1732: Old William Lindley of Dodworth tells various marvellous stories from his youth

17 December 1674: Michael Gilburn, a Halifax lawyer, terminates a drunken weekend in style

3 June 1648: Disguised as a furniture remover, John Morris takes Pontefract castle for the Stuarts (and for himself)

9 August 1845: Young George Boothby of Honley goes to Huddersfield for a night out, and four women are later transported for ten years

4 April 1825: A Leeds jury shows limited sympathy for Job Robinson, a London fashion designer sacked by Hardwick’s of Briggate

8 November 1852: Commander John R. Ward, R.N., rescues Ann Millanby from the Tees at Stockton

19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë

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Comment

Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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