Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

Up at four, writing memoirs about the year 1544 till noon; then walked with Dutch cousin to Woodhouse Hill; where, in Cousin Fenton’s best chamber, I gathered some of the corn that was rained down the chimney upon the Lord’s-day seven-night [presumably 5 June rather than 29 May], when it likewise rained plentifully of the like upon Headingley Moor, as was confidently reported; but those I gathered with my own hands from the white hearth, which was stained with drops of blue where it had fallen, for it is of a pale red or a kind of sky colour, is pretty, and tastes like common wheat, of which I have one hundred corns. What it may signify, and whether it doth proceed from natural causes, (of which some may be prescribed) or preternatural, such an ignorant creature as I am cannot aver.

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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

Dated Saturday 11 June, so I guess “the Lord’s Day seven-night” (sennight) is Sunday 5 June rather than 29 May.

Via the editor’s notes to Abraham de la Pryme’s diary (Pryme 1870). Pryme himself mentions corn rain on 28 April 1687 in Lincolnshire, while editor Charles Jackson points to a similar report for 26 April 1661 in Spalding and Bourne (Lincs.) in Robert Burton’s Admirable curiosities (Crouch 1728), and notes an explanation in Jane Loudon’s British wild flowers:

The seeds of the ivy, when deprived of the pulpy matter which surrounds them, bear considerable resemblance to grains of wheat; and hence the numbers that are sometimes found lying about are supposed to have given rise to the stories of wheat being rained from the clouds, which were once so popular.
(Loudon 1846)

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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.

• Bourne, Lincolnshire (1) W/G ·
• 📌Far Headingley (2) W/G ·
• Grain (6) W/G ·
• 📌Headingley (15) W/G ·
• Hedera (1) W/G ·
• Jackson, Charles (1809-1882) (1), Doncaster-based banker and antiquary W/G ·
• Jane Wells Webb Loudon (1) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• Lincolnshire (15) W/G ·
• Nathaniel Crouch (1) W/G ·
• Netherlands (9) W/G ·
• Omen (4) W/G ·
• Pryme, Abraham de la (1671-1704) (13), Yorkshire antiquary and curate born to Huguenots: a Dutch-speaking father from Ypres and a Parisian mother W/G ·
• Rain (15) W/G ·
• Spalding, Lincolnshire (1) W/G ·
• Thoresby, Ralph (1658-1725) (11), Leeds-born antiquarian and its first historian, non-conformist, merchant, fellow of the Royal Society, diarist, author, common-councilman in the Corporation of Leeds, museum keeper W/G ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (150) W/G ·
• 📌Woodhouse Moor (13) 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

Dated Saturday 11 June, so I guess “the Lord’s Day seven-night” (sennight) is Sunday 5 June rather than 29 May.

Via the editor’s notes to Abraham de la Pryme’s diary (Pryme 1870). Pryme himself mentions corn rain on 28 April 1687 in Lincolnshire, while editor Charles Jackson points to a similar report for 26 April 1661 in Spalding and Bourne (Lincs.) in Robert Burton’s Admirable curiosities (Crouch 1728), and notes an explanation in Jane Loudon’s British wild flowers:

The seeds of the ivy, when deprived of the pulpy matter which surrounds them, bear considerable resemblance to grains of wheat; and hence the numbers that are sometimes found lying about are supposed to have given rise to the stories of wheat being rained from the clouds, which were once so popular.
(Loudon 1846)

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Similar

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26 May 1941: Headingley’s Shire Oak falls, legendary site of Anglo-Saxon local government between Aire and Wharfe

26 August 1693: Thomas Sharp, a Leeds nonconformist minister, finds some dying words for his wife

1 January 1680: The preacher Thomas Sharp compares New Year revellers in Leeds to the pagan Jews in Babylon

5 February 1643: Rioting locals reïnundate Hatfield Chase in protest at flooding and a loss of fishing and fowling caused by Netherlandish colonists and Cornelius Vermuyden’s land reclamation scheme

20 December 1697: Disastrous flooding in the lower Don, caused by the failure of the colonist Cornelius Vermuyden’s land reclamation scheme to cope with snow-melt

15 August 1677: John Thoresby writes from Leeds to his son Ralph in London recommending he keep a diary

14 July 1663: Leeds borough returns for the hearth tax, designed to pay for the household of Charles II

Reproduction through the blind benevolence of Leeds Other Paper (RIP).1 April 1979: Amid motorway mania in Leeds, West Yorkshire Council is today to reveal plans to link Chapeltown and Woodhouse by a ¼-mile suspension bridge across Meanwood Beck

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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

Via Remember LOP, a feed by Tony Harcup which pays tribute to some splendid local journalism, unimaginable today.

Council sources claim the scheme was a victim of the first wave of cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher following her General Election victory a month later.

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