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.

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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

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• 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

14 April 1792: The ballad of Spence Broughton, hung this day at the York Tyburn for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail

18 January 1966: Barbara Castle (Lab.) swings the Hull North by-election with a bridge over the Humber, convincing Harold Wilson that he has the momentum to win a general election

7 January 1397: On the longest of the 42 days of his carnivalesque reign, boy-bishop John de Cave of York goes on a 200-mile begging spree

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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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Comment

Rimbault quotes one John Gregory, who in the Sarum Processionale found the following:

The Episcopus Choristarum was a chorister-bishop chosen by his fellow children upon St. Nicholas’ day… From this day till Innocents’ day at night (it lasted longer at the first), the Episcopus Puerorum [Boy-Bishop] was to bear the name and hold up the state of a bishop, answerably habited, with a crosier or pastoral staff in his hand, and a miter upon his head; and such an one too som had, as was multis episcoporum mitris sumtuosior, saith one – very much richer than those of bishops indeed. The rest of his fellows from the same time being were to take upon them the style and counterfeit of prebends, yielding to their bishops (or else as if it were) no less then canonical obedience. And look what service the very bishop himself with his dean and prebends (had they been to officiate) was to have performed, the mass excepted, the verie same was done by the chorister-bishop and his canons upon this Eve and the Holy Day.

This may be the origin of the York ritual, which nevertheless, and for reasons unknown to me, starts and ends later. The “account of Nicholas of Newark, guardian of the property of John de Cave, boy bishop in the year of our Lord 96” accounts for receipts (offerings in the cathedral, from canons, and from the nobility and monasteries visited) and expenditure (clothing, beer, food, music, etc.). The world-turned-upside-down visitations of the episcopus puerorum/Innocencium and his band remind me somewhat like those practised by the Raad van Elf of carnival associations in the Catholic Netherlands. Was there a similar serious business + drunken fun combination? For example, “the medieval breviary in the Sarum (but not in the Roman) use prescribed ‘O Virgo Virginum’ as antiphon upon the Magnificat for December 23, but was it sung for the boy-bishop on 23 December in humorous reference to his postulated sexual inexperience?

O Virgin of Virgins, how shall this be? For neither before thee was any like thee, nor shall there be after. Daughters of Jerusalem, why marvel ye at me? That which ye behold is a divine mystery (Bls 2007/12/23).

Yann Dahhaoui has compiled a map showing the locations visited by John de Cave numbered in chronological order:

(Dahhaoui 2006)

There is a 13th century sculpture of what some say is a boy bishop at the marvellous St Oswald’s Church, Filey – the church guide suggests that it might instead by

one of the canons regular of St Augustine, a member of Bridlington Priory who served the church at Filey. It was not uncommon in the 13th and 14th centuries for such a person to keep up his connection with the church by having his heart buried there with an appropriate miniature representation of himself in stone.

The account documents 42 days starting on 23 December, but I don’t know how long John de Cave’s rule actually lasted. Liz Truss managed 49 days.

Irrelevant, but St. William is presumably William of Donjeon/Bourges, whose feast day is 10 January, to which 7 January was the closest Sunday.

https://archive.org/details/stationsofsunhis0000hutt/page/100/mode/1up

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