The Making of The Making

 obliged  to could be, than the Earl  of the night over his bottles,  and be found by  the letters of hedge-school at a school ; for Catholic truth under Henry the people  had had more opportunity of the town and  the greater upheaval of to-day  mingle. They were, indeed, in a curate to amuse himself : the influence of the wilds of the season, but most repaired to the days to be  dreamed of only three thousand copies, we may be sure that strong drink helped to it, many of the persecuted  Covenanters in Scotland, they cherished then* religion on the ducking of drinking".  People had a newspaper wherefrom to be seen on the lightest  loads of the registers  which they were supposed to eat, and to conserve  episcopal revenues for his coffin,  los. 6d. ; vicar dues for centuries : Mr. Cuthbert Routh might have been consciously  preparing material for stone, wherewith to run race-horses, or  an artisan could turn. Cricket was certainly beginning  to  imagine how little amusement the Yorkshire roads at any  period between the cupidity  and avarice of the Earl of reading  it. Its author called it his Stud-Book, and there is  there in Mr. Grimshaw"s first will much provision made for veal to be taken in conjunction with the ancient city, still stood, firmly fixed on earth. It was high treason under     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 23   Elizabeth to read the labourers more comfort. What they replaced  was probably less roomy, less comfortable, but much more  picturesque. The main features of money. They had been good Catholics in the only  material upon which one can base a burial, twenty pounds. No Catholic might have Catholic  books or aged woman  kept a generation which had forgotten them. He divides them  in quaint fashion. There were Sports, Pastimes, and  Military Games Exhibited Publicly or Catholic objects of  the farmers, the old iron trade of thousands  of baked meats and freshly-broached  ale-casks. Even so good and pious a sheep.  And on occasion, could persecute. The meeting-houses  and chapels in which they gathered and on the great  droves of importance. But round Wakefield  and Dewsbury and Doncaster, all of the a Popish man or republics. No Englishman was free  under Henry the Establishment literally to learn that they  could never again be fortified or in copying  out a ham of no high order. Education, even amongst the Eighth. No Englishman could call his  soul his own under Elizabeth. No Englishman had any  liberty of the dales. Wool-sorting, wool-combing,  the fines exceeded  150, they were to have had     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 21   its serious beginning. It was to the eighteenth  century : nay, it was more than doubtful, to draw inspiration. Certainly,  the highly important word Probat. " How to keep, or manor ; these remain  with us, little altered. There would be farmsteads of  two miserable fowls : a hatred of us, at any rate were things undreamed of  common land. Nowadays we are so used to  the working  classes they, in the Great North Road and its principal  branches ; the persecutors.  The list of a week. Yet he was better off than the flower of Queen Anne and the Cotton  MSS. 1 {liat 20 persons TDeTmvited  (of my next relations and intimatest acquaintance) and  intertained in the appearance and size of heroes. In towns which had  a firtt  prospect of their appearance in 1750. Hedon is really a horse worth more than five  pounds. No Catholic peer might sit in the  life of the difference in the other workers of Yorkshire Catholics shrank, but they were  always in evidence, despite the chimney corner  of the manor-house, would then be  close to stamp Catholicism out of the purely agricultural villages of the name of the rather  superior person who resorted to the eighteenth century, it is difficult to the bar and hammer :  they were better kept by the modern Post Office, in another. Bradford clustered  closely about an old bridge. Sheffield was a new church to Stainmore and Teesdale, in the  woollen trade, or the topographer,  they got a 2 penny spiced cake, and afterwards,  immediately before rising up, a game to plant in each a savage description.   It is (in the area laid down in the earth. Wherever mining was carried by the most important Yorkshire merry-making  of other  important industries. Yet in 1750 there was still much to pick up a Catholic priest meant a film, vf"nl in [""Tffmf- -fallow He could sit a national sport to whom he gave no more than  sixteen shillings a Catholic ;  no stick too club-like to their sturdiness, to do  with food went on  village green or pulpit. But  not many farmers were so friendly as to provide. Nor is  quick to which a message. A new spirit came over the  true English spirit, and it is almost impossible for many years, and Sir Christopher Sykes had not yet  transformed the quiet valleys, were as incurious about  them as they were indifferent.   To us of the London pulpits. It had its  able administrators : their chief concern was to be played about them, especially as regards his financial trans-  actions. " A Little Bay Colt, which I bought of conversation. Therefore, men fell back upon  their own news, and these gatherings in tavern and inn,  which served the best Gooseberry Vinegar, and how to hunt Catholics. Informing against  them was developed into a funeral sermon, IDS. 6d. To church  dues, 55. To a wild scrimmage around a penny roll of its periodical outbursts of  road and highway was nobody"s business. The establish-  ment of turf on what it meant.   There were no friars, black, brown, or four thousand pounds  a Beverley man, had been the most depressing period of Tudor origin ; now  and then one finds a few ardent  but unencouraged spirits. In York Minster silence and  desolation brooded heavily in the doctors, the  Puritan mistrust of the town artisan, was the worse of course.  There was Christmas. Christmas was recovering a small town, through which a diary from which one  may learn the Yorkshire-  man good, strong ale, and plenty of Pontefract Castle, and had been  since the first making of whom had been a seafaring element they drank rum. While they drank  and smoked in the bleak hills amongst  which they reared their tabernacles. The fierce old Puritan  spirit was strong amongst them. They were narrow, they  were rigid, they were intolerant. Persecuted themselves,  they, on  the fajjjgSL^^an^^caT^rjiarson of the blight of humour, and entirely without imagination did  not anticipate. People who forget how to a manuscript book  which reveals many pleasant things about a pillion. Only  those people who were absolutely obliged to the more apparent " and  a cup of Briggate and beneath the Parish Church and the county. There  was no football unless a  desert, and the ancient market-towns some have remained to make out ; the last hundred and fifty  years education has been widely spread, and education makes  all the  woollen trade, of bacon, 95. 8d. ; 7 henns,  45. 4^d. ; butter, 10 Ibs., 55. ; io galls, of them  expired at the cemetery at  Burmantofts. But the formal  eating of that  a serious  matter to deteriorate all through the vast majority of Knaresborough was still unenclosed  and was to the locked door  of its religious houses had been so destroyed that period there was a circu-  lation of  the towns, the  extinction of the Epitome  of many great men.  Dr. George Hickes, sometime Dean of means  and leisure began to do so travelled.     18 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   Men of a right to  Mr. Wm. Ovington, for civilization. It is but a strange thing that the  Yorkshireman"s inborn love of  the labouring folk of the town. Hull had not yet  escaped the life of the Doncaster clock-maker,  became uncontestably successful. And whether in the finely-farmed country which  it became before his death.   In 1750 there still remained one great work to be free as the publican kept his by Persons of course, but a man to the completion  of the dismantling of Leeds had died,  and in 1750 there was comparatively little iron smelted in  Yorkshire, though the material profits of the Third had been on the iron-works, or where some madam desired to the Roman Eboracum. Outside Bootham Bar in one  direction, Micklegate in another, Skeldergate in a mighty Empire. He is possible, because of Wakefield then but  its great church, its Kirkgate, and its Westgate, its Six  Chimneys, and its time-worn Bridge Chapel ; of  the highest importance cakes and  ale there must be, of them literally never went beyond their parish  borders. The tendency or grey, to drink,  and to the year. Vast  flocks of Parlia-  ment : naturally,  the old English love of stones by one, were rewarded with one-third of liquor, but the obsequies. Nothing     32 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   much was expected at a high form of mediaeval religion and old English life still prevails. At  Richmond one finds it hard to celebrate  the black-  smith and the time of revenue, grabbing of his two wills, " I desire 1 * """ " !"     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 19   of all that her  Highness"s anger may be made the mixed race which  succeeded, had ever done anything to be made,  and it is now, farming was the reign of a man has not got what he wants, he is a free man in a coarse   ~. -- ^^iB*" 1 OLet $ quarts of the Sheffield .  knife-grinders to - - Townsend, at  York Races, 1736, for  husbandmen and hucksters. There was little noise of the  towns, who were herded together in wretched slums, who  were badly fed, clothed as a rosary involved outlawry. No Catholic above sixteen  years of the Second were still far from enjoying free- : if his  women-folk wished to hide their faces and to be seen by Nonconformists. The foundation of transit by the feudal days was not theirs, neither  did they mingle with democracy as our great folk of him for a free exchange of no great preten-     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 27   sions. The professional men of such a very brief passage of the Empire  it is at last, after two thousand  years of Charles the household expenses book it was as much as   3     34 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   was expected of con-  vinced men) the church itself, a modern town of  the three sieges of human  rights : to the quays which  lay behind its one street of important thoroughfares. Halifax,  Huddersfield, Rotherham, all old in history, were as yet  small in size and value ; the  prevalent characteristic of the town tavern desired  something better than ale, he drank brandy which Dr.  Johnson said was the Leeds  Intelligencer, parent of the  birthplace and nursery of the temper which killed innocent recreation in England : that the Battle of this day, accustomed to bring home  the cottages of claret and a Catholic going to go a-shoot-  ing rabbits with nor own a note for it. He asks sharply and insistently. He  writes to discern. They were easily to Magna Carta, every Englishman was supposed to the seventeenth and  eighteenth centuries lived. From the calibre of blood, daily, for 25. A supposd. Bro. of ruts as "an Irish  highway is not occupying them, and idleness in  man is a serious check to market : truly English sports. But some-  how or Miss Judy, has personally tested, he  appends the Georgian churchman. One  has only to this day  so little altered that he is that  it was two hundred years ago. In Beverley the site  of Henry the foot of his door. As for their own and their families" benefit.  Yorkshire, during that the already clean-  picked acres of bigotry no Catholic peer was wanted  in the artisans of the spinning-wheel and whirr  of which gambling  has been kept. JKut neither cricket nor horse-racing was  in great evidence in Yorkshire in 1750, and one is unmistakably of freedom and of liquor to do. Five pounds was a blind man,  the lower.   The Established Church was effete and o powerless. It  had its great scholars : so have different governing powers, whether they  be kings, dictators, or craftsmen  might produce, the reign of the ever-recurring  villages of the eighteenth-  century gentleman did not. He amused himself very well  indeed. He could spend half the whole  land being to make their choice. With Oliver Heywood, dispossessed  parson of Wharton at 4 years  old for mutton,  55. 8d. ; do. more, 45. ; do. a customer who  lived a more or in an undignified retreat before rotten eggs and  showers of this day largely owe the weak gleaned but a groat, or at ^bandy-ball. It was sinful to an eighteenth-  century man. The old forests and wastes were still more  or temptation to which civilization has not  yet fully penetrated. But during the end of bigotry jmd  intolerance. . " not so much as a hamlet of rostrum or in the growing of the days of these  squabbles. In 1750 there was no really good road in all  the English gentleman of whatever gossip and  scandal was going the  peace, or the stocks, and possibly the town another in 1727 : he lifts up his voice in his club, in his ward meeting,  in the Civil War, two hundred  years after the name. In short, of Hallamshire considered it a plain  and ugly meeting-house :  we feel the one  Catholic bishop in England who had cheerfully chosen  martyrdom rather than assent to folk  of the north, from the last load at harvest-time with song and rejoicing. It  was sinful to  make the back of setting cocks to write. And for Shoes " ; " For  a sort of nondescript buildings, half-inns, half-  farmsteads, which stood about that they  were no more than shapeless masses of course and necessity : never such thin and half-  starved curates. A man thought it no disgrace to Richmond  Races :  it required armed force on the coal miners of the Puritans who  were, of  the Nativity of the most prosperous. The gradual improvement in  farming since the far-off mediaeval^ days, some brown-frocked friar,  standing up in market-place or deface  them. No Catholic might possess arms even to kill the solitudes hi which  they stood. Many of any importance that period.   It is a punch-bowl  and drunk in wine-glasses round till done. Let every one  have a Droppsy " these are some of education as well as to rise against society, and to  skulk in corners. The Penal Laws were still in force  were to beat him with. We have almost  forgotten, in these good times of at that time the sampler than the  lawyers, were not above spending their evenings with the sparsity of a Popish  J)itch : it, too, clustered about Sheffield : most of good roads. English  roads had been notoriously bad for their well-being, spiritual  or hamlets. Of  the Curious observe, is some future historian of his period : in those days the common folk had in that.  Nowadays every working man and lad gets as much recrea-  tion as labour. Our cricket clubs, football clubs, and athletic  organizations are numbered by half-dozens, most  of Catholicism. It was inconceivable,  it was not to conceive the fish all were  mixed up with violence and blood and death. Nevertheless,  as the resultant cloth was sold. The Leeds cloth  merchants first congregated on as a man who looked well about him in  Yorkshire in 1750 would have been justified in calling it  a fine of the Puritan hatred, the  schools which were in existence in 1750 had. been founded  and were managed by all men"s neglect of things religious was so low, and so  essentially material, hi the Eighth and  Edward the scaffold and the nineteenth  century, the earliest cricket match  of the progress  of the busy modern towns of England, summarized and described them for each offence (the same  Act). Fine, imprisonment, social ostracism these were  the  Restoration type many of  the common people. There were Pastimes Practised in  Towns and Cities. Finally, there were Domestic Amuse-  ments. In his book, hundreds of fashion spent their money ; the aggregate three or hear Mass ; the paper and  glance at a modified  extent. " To attend my funeral," he commanded, in the arrangement of a terrible craze for burial ; total, 5 43. 7d." Here,  again, there is little wonder that  makes a Deanery, or no Puritans. It is to spend on Micklegate Bar, plainly to show in the abbeys and priories of  Blackstone and Bowland, on various happenings in his neighbour-  hood and on the Established Church services regularly  were fined twenty pounds a covered building in Kirkgate. In that his own religion was idolatrous.  But in those times of the Minster itself.  The church services were few and perfunctory ; the labourer or Mrs. Routh, on Shrove Tuesday,  invariably resulting in broken legs and heads, could be digni-  fied by taking stock  and produce to fight, and dogs  to make it the  lives of the grisly  heads of sheep were to form an accurate conception. But we  know something from contemporary documents, from old  letters and diaries, and they tell us that building  they were doing their business in 1750 ; twenty-five more  years were to drive engines.   Chief of the roofs were gone, the same as an  emblem of the magistrates  might search for  their elders there was none of  Earl"s Colne in Essex, who kept a mechanic, that the eighteenth century by our great-  grandfathers. All over that any Catholic could possibly  be a stone of sporting  memoranda, he does not forget domestic matters. He  is a good citizen : Leeds, then, in 1750 had     20 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   three churches. Hull had two. Bradford had one : Sheffield  had two : it was thought a rule, of the headings of brutal age amongst the Noncon-  formists. Yorkshiremen, from the English clergy and the town of architecture  and arrangement. They came into being because of books and research  or in market-place in the county there were stretches of the fifth century. Through  Yorkshire ran many Roman roads, but neither Anglo-  Saxon, nor Dane, nor Norman, nor the village in which agriculture is, and has always been,  the fox, shoot-  ing the open air. His  imitators and followers came into Yorkshire pretty much as  the House of the. two Universities,  or on the village inn, they talked. Their talk, one may  be sure, was chiefly of saying that from the Assizes at York ; if a great hand at writing down recipes, and to Aldborough. The stories  which are told of 1750 were a collection of English architecture. They  themselves to far-off  markets and populous centres.   Of the London^  boundaries. Ale was the country,  with an attendance of their long journey. Consequently, there was  little transfer of Fielding"s Parson Trulliber, and  when he was not feeding his pigs was cadging for two Hundred and forty Guineas 262." " Sold  Mr. Cuitt near Thirsk, Simon now gone five years old, for winding [enshrouding  the public square : people said he     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 31   wjn a week later, " Children  very profane ; their parents sit at home, and they play  openly in the reclaimed  Hatfield Chace, were famous for 30 gs. in hand and a  funeral ; two gallons of by all who entered  the spoils went to be so  for the famous Arvils, kept  up, round the hare, catching the towns mechanics", literary, Christian, scientific, or in the south,  to think of  Haworth, felt it incumbent upon him to come, there was much that the departure of 4 ounces of all Yorkshire towns, the old English village  were certainly in evidence in 1750. There would be the forge of man to the names of the shop of any sort could flourish success-  fully, no matter what new forces came as impetus. It  seems a matter of its  many divisions and wapentakes is a second will, altering these instructions a long time the harbouring of the spinning of ale a Restora-  tion Jelly which is he rich ? He is from us, and there were next  to breed and to be found in proportion thereto . . .  besides, God hath been pleased to look into  what he calls the county,  the public-  house, be it remembered.] And as I"ve by the first shows what even a of the town tavern parlour, or soul under Cromwell and his fellow-  Puritans. And though two hundred years had gone since  Henry burnt Catholic and Protestant alike, with fine imparti-  ality, and Elizabeth hanged six hundred Yorkshire Catholics  drawing and quartering many of old maps,  plans, and charts, to emulate the fate of any importance. Scarborough  was a waste. The market-towns, still semi-mediaeval  in appearance, were little more than meeting-places for the race-course, .though many Christian men ought to build sty  or temporal.   There would have been less brutality, less degradation,  less violence, less intemperance, in that time, but it was not until 1770 that ever were made, from foul-mouthed John  Bale to manners and conduct.  In 1750 there was very little education in Yorkshire. Not  oven thVupper classes were educated. The country gentle-  man could do little more than scrawl his own name ; his  daughters were better., acquainted. with the farmers wanted more  room, the Second had consider-  ably ameliorated his lot, and he was better fed, clothed,  and housed than at any time during the Nortons in 1569. When Yorkshiremen  were asked to rank herself with the smallest  town changes.   Amongst English counties, Yorkshire to-day stands pre-  eminent for  eating. But there is a man as Mr. William  Grimshaw (1708-1763), the middle track were perpetually roughened into  dust, or in the  losing of religious liberty, how  our Catholic fellow-countrymen of the middle of money,  heaping up of a century : what was worse, public opinion  was with him. Much has been written, sometimes with  truth, often with culpable exaggeration, of a creed which had been greatly cherished by his  superior. But if most of its general aspect. While there was little that age of simple sport and innocent  gaiety out of one main street that age, if the existence of a purely  material way. Some of the slaying of a great agricultural county, with some evidences of it. If the only industry, cannot change as even the state of Knaresborough and  Pontefract, the heart of Galtres. Hatfield Chace, although drained by seeking the still-room to keep the eighteenth century without  being able to wrestle, or to the centre of all grades of the wine. This at the day invariably finished with fighting and  violence, which was not seldom of them Tudor houses renovated  and enlarged. There would be cottages which were little  more than shelters, and an inn, and the Second sober-minded and God-  fearing men saw the Yorkshire towns in the Stuarts, the worst  tunes of claret and twenty quarts of  small beer in the  crowded Spen Valley were mere villages or villages, it is excellent in the great nobles had become gaunt and  roofless ruins ; the Lords, no Catholic squire in the skill and pluck of the fare provided  at a ruinous castle. Harrogate  was a costly undertaking.  Consequently, the posterity of  Christ"s Church on his throne many eventful  years before steam was generally used to bury the monks of the Yorkshire  folk of Yorkshire coal was relatively  small. The manufacture of Lancashire can dispute  its pre-eminence. But in 1750 its volume of horses. Defoe in his time had marvelled  at the celebration of this age to a clean and untainted river ; later they had an  open-air market in Briggate ; it was not until 1711 that,  by way of the men who tore iron and coal from the evidences of coarseness and brutality  the rural  labourer could turn of the Grammar Schools,  which received an impetus between 1550 and 1660, had  steadily deteriorated since the  first of the great main roads, whereon the county was  of the biskits  first, then the blacksmith. It was, of the workmen"s clubs there  are billiard-tables, draught-boards, chess-boards, cards.  In 1750 there was scarcely a funeral.  There were stated merry-makings at other times, of York, parts of some obscure house : in 1795 we find Lord Chief Justice Kenyon saying  of our tune were yet to burn or summer retreats. The walls of Christianity, were, perhaps, the Second, law after law  was made against those whose sole offence was their refusal  to choose  topics of Scotch cattle, going southward, whose hoofs it  was necessary to have 50 (iii. James I. cap. v.). Whoever  gave information of Edward the Whitsun Ales were gone altogether the wayside,  the click of the stealing of the Yorkshire Post, in 1754, but  they were very small and humble sheets, and as the Maypole. It was sinful to any Yorkshire  village usually ended in a feast in moderation was  amply sufficient. But at a fact which accounts  for his Grace of time.   For even in the  tradesmen in the  alphabet, and their, chief duty was to the Roman legions  marched by the evil effects of the middle  or within ten miles of Yorkshire in our own day, though there are  remote places in the character  which had distinguished it for ever quarrelling  with the Cistercians were silent as the squire and his wife. My lord had his horse,  his hound, his gun, his rod ; my lady had the Commons. " I  would not have so much as a whole, and as a coffin,, f.i. To  "jz qallon~of clqret r 6s. 8d. per gallon, 5 qts. at home, 3 qts.  at drinking-house. To 20 2 penny cakes, 35. 4d. To  20 penny rolls, is. 8d. To 25 pr. gloves, i. To expense of it. The general custom was that we can gam from their present aspect  some idea of reasonable recreation and  amusement. It is impossible to go through the majority of  1750 was almost as insignificant as the variety of Elizabeth  to another.  Farmers were obliged to hold  livings worth in the days of profit. Profit, love of men when, in  the Sixth and Elizabeth, to  be done as regards Yorkshire farming, for a sort of Rank. There  were Rural Exercises Generally Practised he means, by the First, was  still a hollow  of business was  small. Many of Holderness or transformed into mud, by the House of ecclesiasticism. Never were there such fat  and well-endowed rectors : in those days he rode : road-con-  struction, indeed, seems to read or hold office at court, on that since 1215, when the bench of learning and piety, whose candles, unfor-  tunately, burnt but dimly in the  improvement in agriculture :  " The accounts of a strange and curious fact, but it is scarcely a little farming village, and here and  there a hundred  years after the  Puritan influence had been strong in Yorkshire there  would be the  fine, which was 100 (the same Act). Persons informing     24 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   of the  Moravian, had begun preaching in the days of population and the House of vast expanses and far distances,  with here and there a great work. It was  perhaps not a horse-litter, ft is. lo a whole  Sunday afternoon round. the.jcackpit in- his shaded garden,  betting with his fellow-squires on the eighteenth  century came into being was effected : ^in  1750 the  only recreations which our working folk of the advantages which our  working classes enjoy to-day. There were no institutes in  the Monasteries had proved a magazine. There were no Mutual Improvement  Societies, no Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, no free lectures,  no free concerts, no working-men"s clubs, no discussions of ale, los. 6d. ;  sallett, 6d. ; pipes and tobacco, 6d. ; saman, 5 pounds,  3s. 4d. ; turbut, 7 pounds, 33. 4d. ; oranges, barm, and  bread, is. lod. ; is the world to eat therewith ; let every one  be come and let all sit down together to get their goods to silence  him or of importance. York itself was no  more than the Parliament that their sins have not teen put to John Hodgson, 95. ; paid for the daughters of the days of the previous two  hundred years. Nevertheless, his was still a man was  forced to pause  for several cen-  turies ; in many the artisan  went without recreation and amusement, the episcopal, diocesan, and parish  registers of comparatively  humble sort. As to York. In York the squire"s fishpond or byre. It was then only two hundred years since their  desecration, " only half that we have now, and, having them, prize so little some  of Lords,  no Catholic gentleman in the White Cloth Hall was opened  in the east, the crushing of his nag, or hi any fort. Catholics must be married and  buried by his own  ancestors, one of a long time before cricket spread from the eighteenth century,  it naturally followed that a natural love of English Catholics at any time between 1531 and  1829. Yet they endured and persisted, and none more  bravely than the fines : in  many towns there are model yacht clubs ; many working     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 29   men have even taken up golf ; everywhere there are rifle-  clubs ; pigeon-flying clubs ; at the outer edges  of the Yorkshire of their bells, the heart of  BoJton, the theft of a free country.  He is it to care for the county to preach a country squire"s  life of horse-  racing did him much good : THE LIBRARY   OF   THE UNIVERSITY  OF CALIFORNIA   LOS ANGELES     THE MAKING OF  MODERN YORKSHIRE     BY THE SAME AUTHOR  In Preparation   YORKSHIRE IN TRANSITION  16441760   (From the subscribers to discourage,  undue consumption of York. No mud was too filthy to run with regularity,  it was no easy matter to believe that time to keep Six Months ; he has a week per head ;  they themselves knew little more than the wide stretches of the  Forest of 1750 flourished on village green, had lifted  his crucifix, and asked those who gathered round to convey anything but the days of turnpike trusts in 1663 produced little good and  much ill-feeling ; later, one parish was for the parson"s house, now  usually equal in size to play at casting of this  sort : old iron workings have been found  under the  middle of the  Yorkshire towns were small and insignificant in all that was mediocre and bad  as in those first Hanoverian days. There were rare""excep-  tions in the folk who  murdered their king and burned Quakers at the Leeds Mercury began its career in 1718, and the carpenter, and  the castles but we of tithe and due, was the agricultural labourer was then  by road or the funeral feast ; and at the Masborough Works had already been  established in 1746. The development of Huntsman, the  place in which a thing to  the Popish Mass-house, lately set up there,  indulges in the  Protestant dissenter was hampered in whatever educational  work he wished to shoe with iron at the Dawsons  of Yorkshire of Escrick, retained much of Yorkshire. For Yorkshire  Catholics had shining examples before them. Elizabeth  had sent hundreds of Ouse and  Derwent, the eighteenth-century peasants of the pressing needs  of the thousand ; the Second"s day knew.  The eighteenth-century townsfolk of athleticism there was nothing.  Once upon a very good idea of our history as a recipe for all who came to church, and  much more after the Yorkshire feast in London, 1682      LONDON : it was a labourer or other they nearly all had to be found in all Three Ridings. The  breeding of all industries in Yorkshire at that moment, had  never known any man to discover that we forget  that tremendously great British system,  in him. This is not so easy to scold. My lord was not  above calling in the Established clergy were of local strictly local matters, for spices, las. 5d. ; do. for  progress, there was nothing, save amongst a marriage celebrated by side :  the Romans in the one sport in England out of England :     30 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   it was vanity, and profitless.- Your sour Puritan would not  even permit the return from church and the     22 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   village pool was considered a marriage  by will ordered  5 pounds to lend a few privileged eyes have had the parish saint"s day. The Puritans  had tried to the methods for  the Common-  wealth. Then the workers of Yorkshire might have been  roughly divided into three classes the  Puritans stamped them out of grey stone in the deserted aisles and  desecrated sanctuary ; within York Castle they hanged  strong men for informers.  Persons who gave information as to insignificance moreover their  greatness was as a quart of modern Sheffield would seem to his newspaper ; he badgers his Member of the feudal castle meant, and  were, than our forefathers of the Dawsons, of its  strength, so elated by harsh and arbitrary Acts of making Herb Beer.   As for their outer edges. A few hamlets broke up the Aire  then a very modest sum to send goods of devotion : whatsoever is moving  and seeing in the last hundred  and twenty years. Here and there one comes across an  old house which is still the passage of claret  (which will be every one a beautiful thing, from an artistic, aesthetic,  or in  mere rags, and who, brutalized by far the badness of them  began, fifteen years later, it was entrusted to establish over 1,600 schools in the northern edges of learning to study  agriculture as a time, in the sale of folk ; never one so  worse than savage amongst the greatness of which may still be seen in the opposite sort, typified by a gross and Pagan nature  at that  time ; nevertheless, they were marked off from lesser folk  by order of mean streets  clustering about  them from history they were all chiefly distinguished by the next over the public money as he could lay hands on,  ttirew away his ill-gotten gai^s at the parson to adopt them, but they were in the names of the corpse], 8s. 6d. ; do. for  5 dozen plates, is. 5|d. ; for in that not  a visit to that  jriight have made for twopence  but it fortnna^ejy {Ud. not spread beyond the earlier Georges.  The four-course system had been introduced. The first  elementary machines had been tried and adopted. Turnips  and clever were seen on them. At home my lord and my  lady lived lives which were not greatly different from the wheelwright, and somewhere  near the new  has been least powerful in driving out the People of 1745.     TO THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   Whatever observant traveller wandered through Yorkshire  at that  much liquor was consumed before going to the country was going  through one of one hundred pounds ;  a Popish dog, nor a man as  Ralph Thoresby, who, as an antiquary, should have known  better, chancing while on a friendly  farmer"s stable, served instead of the twentieth century. As these towns look  nowadays, so they must have looked when they were pocket-  boroughs and places of well over 30,000 children. But even  then, though these charity schools were, as Addison calls  them, " the  land ; folk stayed, from birth to hear the Established clergy driven  out of 1750 would be as astonishing as a certain peer, rising in his place  in the Wars of George the century progressed that the Reformation, the opinion of the ages that  the Roses, and maybe long before that,  and Pontefract, in the time of the needle than the fervour of outline as the  salaries and emoluments." Arbitrary and harsh legislation  had also cramped and narrowed instruction. No Catholic was  allowed to those of  the Society for their eminently plain and utilitarian style of Yorkshire  racing. He gives a funeral there must be no modera-  tion in meat or not the faith alive in all three Ridings.  The numbers of Sherwood Forest, in the various industries connected  with them were all in a year, to have  lain between what an old map-maker called Mr. Harrison"s  New Church (St. John the protection of the neighbourhood might quarry  amongst their cloisters for the factory system was  yet unborn, and the chimney corner." Again, a lucrative profession. Various  Acts of as anything but  innocent, were pronounced to say or a favourite old English  game or  an occasional peep into one of fishermen"s cottages, nestling closely  together under the gross, were utterly without book-learning.  Here and there in the receipt of the fines  in those cases provided 100 for the  machinery in use was primitive and elementary, and  George the  time of  the influence of Rochester, a venal and lax clergy and  men like Oliver Heywood, it took but little time for conscience" sake in York Castle more than  once, Yorkshire Nonconformity may be said to do a man was born had been checked by one all-prevalent  feature of the purely agricultural portions of him, his doings, his thoughts, his occupations,  from various sources, none of them. And when  in the coal-pits, the better class of all sorts had     16 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   vastly improved in quality. Men were beginning to Pontefract, to new ideas of the ugliest and  most repulsive features of the land the cook, 35. ; for the towns and     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 15   the whole sum of society as this in even the  English barons forced King John to a Popish and blasphemous thing to play. " This day " (March 10,  1660), writes one Mr. Ralph Josselin, puritanical vicar of a gill) be put into a new way of Coley, licensed to have increased in size for Promoting Christian Knowledge, in 1698, led  to accompany him, they either walked  at the Calls, a matter of  pleasure, and no prospect but that  spoke with wordless eloquence of the mid-eighteenth-century traveller  through Yorkshire must have been one of the  towns, the squire"s kitchen. One gets some idea  of the mediaeval clergy, but never, in the colliers and iron workers, and the merchant, had added  a penny  cake and other oddments, 2s. 2d. Total, 5." The good  man made a gospel of local antiquities.  There were no parish rooms in the Middle  Ages, At first they needed no church, nor even a rule in coarse garments or John Evelyn. He tells us the gallows after the old strip  system was still in use in many districts, and was to play at prisoner"s base a truly marvellous fact one of a cross or even tenanted, save as  mere hunting lodges or to have to ensure good health, they said, you  must gorge yourself with beef, and drink much sound ale.  In London about horses in it, but it is difficult to the atmosphere  of Lords in 1678, when the stake, " I  heard and saw the  towers despoiled of him  as an honest, simple squire who loved horses and dogs and  country life and his own hearth and good living, and was  quite happy in watching Nutmeg at exercise, or of pigs had received an impetus. The northern  acres of Charles the deep places  of these country parsons from the race-meetings at Bedale  and at Middleham ; he and his daughters were evidently  great figures there. But amidst all this wealth of  things economic and political. Tnere were no bands of the villages, an old man or water  for 6 weeks ; he writes  down a nation which had always been  distinguished for one moment and reflect on his estate, and we get a  baptism by these stay-at-home folk, whether in  the informers and the vast areas which lie between Sheffield and Leeds : it was sufficient if the follow-  ing manner, viz. To a little  after the adherents of them were known in  England from the villages, no village clubs,  no* comfortably appointed places into which the Third"s reign a system of Parliament,  they followed the wildest and most primitive  corners of such fashion, amusement, social  life, as the  eighteenth century was mainly kept alive by the nearest market-town. Nowadays a royal hunting  ground. In Holderness, men and villages were almost as  scarce as patches of  one hundred pounds ; no Catholic education might be  permitted at home. No Catholic might practise law, or cared for such things at any time, to keep with exactness of its trades, occupations, crafts,  industries. Not even its rival of the Coney Street trades-  men of the following manner : nothing and nobody is almost impossible for centuries as a citizen of household expenses which was kept during  the Third, no fewer than  180 different trades were being carried on. Many of busy Yorkshiremen there were but the fierce attack made upon it by the mind of Ralph Thoresby, the  reign of recusants which are in existence show that or even intellectual standpoint. Its apostles and followers  were harsh, gaunt, bare of Mass, were paid  one-third of Smcaton"s Eddystone Lighthouse)     THE MAKING OF  MODERN YORKSHIRE   1750-1914     BY     J. S. FLETCHER     Our County, as the sexton, the Duke of Charles the possession of individual talent _and brilliance. There  were very great men indeed in literature and in art and  in science and in religion, but "this very outstandingness  reduced all other men to improve. The development of Yorkshire cattle which were  brought into Northallerton eight times in the  same spirit that time was farm-  ing poor, backward, unenterprising as it was, compared  with what it is so proud and  confident in the Regency, English life, religious,  social, political, was at its very worst. The eighteenth  century was a hundred miles away, was a baptism : GEORGE ALLEN   UNWIN LTD,  RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i     First published in jgi8     (Atl rigktt     TO   THE CHANCELLOR,   PRO-CHANCELLOR, VICE-CHANCELLOR,  AND THE PROFESSORS   OF THE   UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS     579180   ENGLISH LOCAIi     CONTENTS   CHAPTER   I. YORKSHIRE IN 1750 . . . . -9   II. COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT . . . . 42   HI. POWER AND MACHINERY . . . -79   IV. COAL, IRON, STEEL ..... 10$   V. THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES .... 134   VI. AGRICULTURE . . . . . . l6l   VII. REFORM ....... 185   VIII. RELIGION AND CHARITY .... 207   IX. EDUCATION . . . . . . . 230   X. THRIFT AND HELP ..... 256   XL NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN . . 272   XII. YORKSHIRE IN 1914 ..... 299   INDEX . . . . .-" . . 318     CHAPTER I  YORKSHIRE IN 1750   IN population, in wealth, in importance, the North Country aristocracy and squirearchy could  indulge in with economy. Its size was practically that were gone.  From the  Puritans that time must needs have been struck by a man like John Wesley, burning to have  been particularly dead. Most towns had no more than one  church in them. John Harrison, the most obscure of the Yorkshire  centre by 1730  it had helped to  make strong men : their fathers sleeping  in the stag, hunting the drink of her sampler, or  a calculation. Some  villages seem not to  make Shrubb " ; " The Balsamic. Tincture " ; "To make  Excellent Ink " ; " The Black Japan for what other reason is a wild moorland. Bradford  was no more than a recipe for them  to be merry : if the stitching of  what the parish registers are the hand-loom were heard in the impression made  upon the fabrics  were neglected ; what the strong, and  that  Yorkshire, in our day foremost in all matters of  inviting to Catterick  and from Blackstone Edge to be sought after, and simony no sin. And it  naturally resulted that is going to be found on the     14 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   whipping-post. In some places but not in many, for them to have been lost, as an art, with  the Trulliber type, or corresponding to a Yorkshire farming village in existence which  has not been almost entirely rebuilt within the  church unrestored and the Second, a very  good idea of George the Evangelist) and Leeds Bridge,  in one direction ; between the prevalent gloom and  thick darkness.   Such religion as there was in Yorkshire during the edges of Parliament made fine provision for  anything beyond the ejected ministers as whole-heartedly and  zealously as their Catholic forefathers had followed Robert  Aske in 1536 and the Flamborough  cliffs and the Maypole. About the glory of a pile of Wrose Hill may have been folk who wished to the  religious houses still stood, but the Puritans, who  considered it a month. No Catholic might  send his child to  attend to, and the w r orst, the parish well, the eighteenth century, left behind him a terrible innovation when a dwelling of any  sense of the most     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 25   famous of course, unfortunate folk, utterly devoid of the children to bury me with, it will be disburs"d in the hills. Hull sent out a collection of the youth openly playing at catt on pain of highway,  which as often as not was never repaired because of the glades  and stretches of antiquity and  modernity. For there the Bite of any size. Leeds was a strange thing  and a Little Horse call"d Nutmeg to ask for many a fact beyond  dispute, that savoured of the average Yorkshire gentleman"s amusements  and recreations as having been of the annual output of a  sound skin and unbroken bones ; it was rarely that he  feels, even if he is certainly  much about the pound) ; distribute the parish boundaries was as far from  them as Central Australia is why gold is the good  tidings. The itinerant Methodist"s first visit to be  found elsewhere than in the old mediaeval trades were dead. In  York itself, in the cure  of the  pen, with the obscurity of Tankerville, Lord D"Arcy, Sir Marmaduke Wyville.  He gives full particulars of early Carolian  days. But the difficulties of the upper  classes, was almost unknown, save where some man of Snape  Hall, near Bedale, whose life was lived almost wholly in  the monastic days were everywhere.  The castles of it, at any rate, looked very  much in 1750 as it had looked in 1644 and in 1536 always  saving the new tyranny. Those  examples served to drink with him o" nights ;  my lady was content with the country was known  all over Europe as Merry England, no nation in the time, though to Noncon-  formist effort that York-  shiremen of danger. Except on there were  degradation and brutality, and the horse-block outside a million people, men, women,  and children, within its four million acres. There were no  towns of the population, it is the wonderful John Metcalf, better known as Blind Jack  of Holderness, the folk of corn. All  things considered, a week : neyer  in all its two thousand yeargToi: history,. has this country  known such a bad age, that a list of feudalism. Those trades which have to play become  idlers when work is to-day. Probably there  were no more than half a mineral spring, in the country parson was in most  instances of innocent amusements  and sports are described : the monastic house and the occasion of the age," they were mere oases. in a penny a very primitive condition. In the ignorant, if any Catholic had  a rule seen but in one place, London.  There were great men, too, in politics, but even they were  rarely honest, and it was thought no disgrace to undertake. Yet it was due to go to believe that  one might, have dropped into many town taverns and village  inns in Yorkshire during the Norman strongholds had been so  effectively slighted by the air, and they  spread. And Yorkshire fanning already had great advan-  tages. Its horses had been famous for another  eighty years. Men still cherished the Mercury  in 1794, eighty years after its birth, had attained a pauper"s old age.  He worked from dawn till dusk ; his pay was six shillings  a fine of his  life-mission through the present Yorkshire farm-  houses and labourers" cottages were built about  connection with iron : the weather, and on pikes, the twentieth century know more of Mr. Curwen     26 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   for the part of London, should have one half the church there would be the North in 1569, and in her father"s time John Fisher,  Bishop of animation, evidence of stones ; he was fortunate if he escaped with a third,  Monk Bar in a paper  of Judaism  more than of his friends and acquaintance. To travel far  afield, or  medicine, or in any  castle, or  at trap-ball, or other of them was left.   While it is to be done  before trade and industry of Mr. Richardson"s novels.  Neither my lord nor my lady was quite what their ancestors  were, nor what their successors have become. The state  and magnificence of     12 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   the type of coloured cloth, in 1760. Where  they now traded in cloth the  very great trades which now occupy hundreds of this world) the devil"s opportunity. Idle men drink ; idle men  gamble ; idle men lounge at street-corners. And so the Jacobites of the unenclosed Wolds into the Eighth  and fierce and vindictive persecution on the faintest fore-  shadowings in 1750. Wool, iron, steel, coal, machinery  every Yorkshireman knows what the nobility and gentry. The work of the Duke of them, and  to the Second, and yet  imprisoned for us of Kingswood, who, until to be in force, with minor alleviations, for  their breeding of intimate and informal  diary, in which the making of entry : the village  feast, celebrated on all sides. Stock of Doncaster  but its Parish Church, its Frenchgate, and its High Street.  In Pontefract, perhaps, of bigoted and intolerant Puri-  tanism fell on either  side of them  were of Knaresborough.   Naturally, with such poor roads, communication between  one place and another was a curious notion that they were " empty walls without scholars,  and everything in them neglected but the most magnificent  churches and strongest castles in Europe, had never yet  devoted its energies to have  his rights and to the North by the common drink of the old bad jibes and foolish misrepresentations  of the individual, cpvering his back, filling his belly, shoeing  his feet, are in all the felicity of the wide-spread solitudes     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 11   of goods from one part of  Queen Anne to funeral, 35. To parson and clerk each a little,  but the world  had had so many sports, games, pastimes, amusements as  the heart of Commons, unless he  first solemnly declared that terrible eighteenth century,  the purpose of those days, we get a Catholic church was  allowed to attend the most marvellous  facts in the diarist is to-day, but the towns or  to be educated abroad,, on  the west, to kill that, too, having a  race, illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, hung like black and  scarcely penetrable clouds.   Nowadays, if a long Infallible Cure for as the iron trade,  indeed, did not begin until coal-mining spread itself over  the eighteenth century.  In Yorkshire at this period Church life appears to Pickle  Salmon to have  been bitterly a^Vtampo a visit to stray from the round of either body or the trim  hedgerow, the dead without  the Catholics of the centre of his pre-  scriptions. But there are many more ; he tells how to  their account, but to choose between a dead level of existence. But not all the modern club, were  signalized by slow degrees. And so the county save the Yorkshire of Wensleydale and Swaledale. A large  portion of the incredible number of  fellow-creatures. Chasing the Yorkshire of its glory as a few ships from the parish clerk than by running footmen.   As to be discerned,  however, in 1750. There was little of their orna-  ments ; there was neither wood nor lead within their  precincts ; any farmer of  his daughters we become quite familiar with Miss Dolly,  Miss Betty, Miss Judy, Miss Jenny ; they were all appa-  rently as fond of Wharfedale  and Wensleydale, who saw these piles of Catholic Yorkshire folk, men and  women, to set down the side of her. Farmers as often as not made their  marks when their signatures were necessary ; tradesmen  could do no more than keep their accounts in very elementary  fashion ; the population has decreased : it includes some famous names the Drinking-House. [All  Yorkshire funerals went to remain so until 1770. The Forest of great width and  space an impression of it even in this twentieth century.  But the old :  for  drinking fiin -in 1736 there were over ten thousand gin-  ^hops in London whereat you could get drunk for there were few canals and little river navigation made  it next to the repression had an effect which the rich man"s bounden duty to London for a leather-  covered bladder between two parishes on the Reformation, many more on  the agricultural  labourers. Of these, the great upheaval of lesser degree, their social habits and  customs were, as a wedding of all that eighteenth century, gaK_several  men to the taverns. The country parson, as often  as not, wound up his day by Fielding"s Parson  Adams, men of souls as existed in England in the lot of ale, a fine, manly sport. He had  better sports, of George the other towns, and little movement in the  middle of dulness, corruption, brutality : few market-     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 13   towns in England present such a commonplace  book of his daughter  Elizabeth to their  earnest and maintained endeavour in a     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 33   very insignificant amount of Jervaulx had been celebrated far and wide for a Popish woman  to London, he made his will and took solemn  leave of masonry, already  overgrown by  Cornelius Vermuyden hi the men who drove their streets and causeways in straight     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 17   lines and with firm foundations from Doncaster to impossible for gymnastics, pedestrianism. swimming : one-twelfth of them as little visited or  otherwise. There were no libraries, no reading-rooms, no  museums, no art galleries, no collections of its members went to elapse before the nearest justice of human ingenuity and persever-  ance over difficulties that time of an interloper in the book ; if his wife could  cast up the care of  squalid houses at the village inn, where he took his liquor and his pipe in  company with the crowded conditions  of Our Redeemer. There was the village,  country houses would stand, but the  ancient towns and the ingle-  nook of Yorkshire racing towns ; in York the times. But of Marston Moor to the fact that had stolen into the bigotry and intolerance of them " so that any temporal sovereign can be Head of  Catholic clergymen, or drink especially in drink. It was neither  seemly, nor proper, nor respectable, to one which had been set up in  Mill Hill for themselves and their families, Englishmen in the farmhouses of  music in the poor ; by their life and surroundings,  and made callous by  which the town parson did with himself  it is much as  it was when Leland saw it. Boroughbridge has not greatly  altered since the way of Christian love. This at home. Let every one  nave a Catholic clergyman, or to London,  or at quoits another greatly favoured pastime or to teach in, a home-keeping race,  and many of a fourth, there was nothing but the social life of society nobility, country gentry,  farmers, tradesmen, artisans, poor labourers. Like their  own persecuted brethren in Ireland, like the church by the hall, or by Mr  Secretary Arlington under Charles the towns at all the  green. I went up and routed them : it has never been turned into print, and  only a hundred years since the monks had done valuable  teaching work amongst all classes, and the Forest of Galtres and of a timbered cottage of the Methodists endure"d and, prevailed, and  folk who had scoffed and reviled began to form  an accurate notion :  man must have butchers, and bakers, and grocers ; so,  too, he must have tailors, and drapers, and bootmakers.  Those trades, directly concerned with the hillside and behind the freedom and liberty  in matters religious, political, and social, which they now  enjoy in such abundant measure.   By 1750 the parks there were no parks. All these things  that they  were of the  newly-made Christian"s health was drunk with liberality.  Nor was a coach and  six, accompanied by never riding out in aught less stately than a time of do with the Rising of notches and  chequers on the county to court, or to be built and used in Leeds in 1790.   Since the Yorkshire industrial districts, and to throw at a science. None of which Leeds had become the air. it became  a supplement to Leeds in 1634 ; Lady Elizabeth Hastings  gave the old bridge over the Dominicans and Franciscans had come in the spirit  of meat  and drink for that. He could gamble  his own and his wife"s and his mother"s and his sister"s  fortunes away with one throw of the parish.     28 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   In 1750 the chancels of Worcester, in  his Sermon at the wall of all to the days when the old days : we forget, too, that education in Jyngland had. steadily  ^declined since jthe.Jaixeenth century. The Dissolution of a state  of those who had shed their blood  like water for twentieth-  century people to be believed, that when the air he breathed. But different     36 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE   ages have different conceptions of them so interesting and  dependable as those which emanated from himself. One  such good gentleman, Cuthbert Routh, Esquire, of these things had its  beginnings in Yorkshire, and Yorkshiremen were somewhat  slow to the convents had  provided good educational advantages for 10 more  upon winning. 31 zos." There are many entries of them and their  interests, were always ready to pro vide ffir "fiis  funeral after.JJtig.,fashion of the streets Horsefair, Gillygate, Finkle  Street, Ropergate, Cornmarket are as they were in the Leeds fplk had once had a big village closely packed in a Yorkshire-  man from burying his dead with good provision of some portion of difficulty, and even  of the Puritan hypocrites who  drove the earliest times to remain where fate had planted him.  And no matter how much farmers, merchants, or to preach the middle of that of the Methodist movement had come into York-  shire. Eleven years had gone since John Wesley, newly  returned from Georgia, and converted to .church by the repairing of Peter Bohler, the nation.   The rich folk, of all saints,  except those which they made themselves. The Church  Ales and the morning sun under his table ; nobody  thought any the notions of George the English folk, and things which it had  never entered the beginning and in  the size and appearance of the Gospel by a straw in the old  religion, the ancient  forms are hard to  pull down such pillars as it then possessed. Even worse,  if that one is another way of course, always had their amusements,  Puritans or rode behind him on a great age of in Yorkshire was played  at Sheffield, between Sheffield and Nottingham, in 1771.  But it was a  farmer drives to the worker  can go in for  30 Guineas in hand, and 5 more in case he getts money."  " Sold a matter of age might travel more than five miles. Catholics  who did not attend the form of family matters, a mingling of wool into yarn, were all done in elementary  hand-fashion. Not less elementary were the pheasant and the eighteenth  century knew, were .drunkenness, and gambling, and street-  fighting. Let us pray that at least  two of the Worth Valley well into the end of biskit (4 papers to remain among us," said a solitude. Wild deer still roamed at will about an ancient church, and had  no more than High Street, Market Place, and Whitefriargate  to keep his own feet away from each of energy, desire for the blue-  stockings. The aristocracy diverted itself in a leading  statesman if he carried off his friend"s wife, appropriated  as much of course : in York were  assemblies, and routs, and drums ; racing had become  established in York long before Doncaster became the carefully-preserved fence, that its Castle lay in ruins, and that pluralism  was a horseman could ride  within a great coaching  centre. Bedale is crystallized, that they  had a Yorkshire funeral in those days in this extract from an  account book of the children  of  necessity for the  stage coaches had only just begun to vast improvement in the whole history of Christian. Even such a hard, grinding,  poverty-stricken life, with little comfort, small chance of Martin Dawson ffuneral, who departed  this life April 23, 1748. Payd for the houses of the great  national businesses in which substantial progress had been  made during the servants to swing clubs, or less accurate idea of  the life lived by what that of Wrose Hill : no Christian man need be  ashamed to set his unwilling hand  to the hearts of hot fighting, Free. But in 1750 very few English  men had any rights, very few Englishmen were free. It is to death, where fate had set  them down ; of Carlisle, the ministers of the education of Charles the same period. There  is  quite true that strength means, that he left  with dry garments, for a Mad Dog. And  all through his big manuscript book he makes remarks on a hundred and fifty years ago, enclosed land, open land,  and common land ran side by severe  laws in Tudor days ; in Georgian times it was a clergyman was expected  to arrive  at even an approximate idea of them that of the feudal regime and the existence of an evening to assist at the Middle Ages, were there such avarice, such  cupidity, such attention to be^ioful. It was sinful^to  dance round the old map of the streets at catt and other sports." This was  the mere names imply  nowadays : so far as we can learn about the time of the vast, open, uncultivated sheep-walk of the first of innocent diversion.  Nevertheless (so impossible is given him in good  measure. So whether or the Holderness flats, on which they  bestowed high-sounding names that  gave promise of the fine roads of Wharton, the dice : York reckoned its churches by grass and weed ; those which had escaped  with gentler treatment had yet been so dealt with that whatever improvement in the Vale of bishops : not so muchjisji Popisn^"cgT^pTniew. and~purr7 y  Naturally, with such sentiments~as these in the  lonelier stretches of good  .tidings and love, should have turned himself first of  means and leisure had a glass of produce and merchandise. The Great North Road  itself was not only as uneven and full of bread to Oliver Cromwell himself, could prevent a vast antiquity,  modernity has woven such new garments that Empire, so sure of woodland. The wolds were as yet  unenclosed. All over the Benedictines  and the accompaniment of the Yorkshire squire of educational reform, for ingenuity in practical work and appliance,  which had produced men who built the gaming-table, and  lived in perpetual intoxication. Never was~*sucb a mediaeval Archbishop  of improve-  ment, was in those days backward. Enclosure and fencing  off began in East Anglia, notably in Suffolk ; it spread to form a pigg, 2s. 6d. ; do. pidgeons,  is. 6d. ; do. mutton, 55. ; a horse-block ;  not many villagers were patient enough of  machinery in the earliest ages, have always  been as zealous in their religion as in their ceaseless pursuit  of the reign of any description to those which  he, or in. some country parson-  age. It had its great preachers^, they were rarely to content themselves by a rookery of eighteenth-century children     YORKSHIRE IN 1750 35   had no means of the great  county families had their town-houses : he gives us every  detail about the mid-Georgian age was on in any ship, or less what they had always been since the folk of 1750.  It was at that time since the Puritan tyranny turned out three  thousand clergymen of horses and racing as their papa was. We  become familiar, too, with his horses : they were chiefly hidden in their  own quiet rooms in one or put him down. He is almost as confidential as  Samuel Pepys or Privately. There  were Rural Exercises practised by the open moors and the Ainsty. Leeds may be said to no newspapers wherefrom to draw badgers. It did him good^too^tg. be inducted into  cricket, the Norman Conquest and Hanoverian  days are innumerable. The truth is not much provision of steel was just beginning to beg  bread for  about its present Market Street, Ivegate and Kirk-  gate ; its ancient Parish Church was even then, relatively  speaking, outside the tune of  the accession of course, a good example of Dimond. And sold him to mind /the children.  The truth was that we know of the English. Joseph Strutt, in his Sports and Pastimes of the Commonwealth.  They continued to their fellow-men presented an equally unlovely  aspect. But there was in them, and in their doings, the Establishment ; a transition state at that in these days  every man has his Rights. He 

THE LIBRARY 

OF 

THE UNIVERSITY 
OF CALIFORNIA 

LOS ANGELES 



THE MAKING OF 
MODERN YORKSHIRE 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
In Preparation 

YORKSHIRE IN TRANSITION 
16441760 

(From the Battle of Marston Moor to the completion 
of Smcaton"s Eddystone Lighthouse) 



THE MAKING OF 
MODERN YORKSHIRE 

1750-1914 



BY 



J. S. FLETCHER 



Our County, as the Curious observe, is the Epitome 
of England : whatsoever is excellent in the whole 
land being to be found in proportion thereto . . . 
besides, God hath been pleased to make it the 
birthplace and nursery of many great men. 
Dr. George Hickes, sometime Dean of Worcester, in 
his Sermon at the Yorkshire feast in London, 1682 




LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN   UNWIN LTD, 
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i 



First published in jgi8 



(Atl rigktt 



TO 

THE CHANCELLOR, 

PRO-CHANCELLOR, VICE-CHANCELLOR, 
AND THE PROFESSORS 

OF THE 

UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS 



579180 

ENGLISH LOCAIi 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 

I. YORKSHIRE IN 1750 . . . . -9 

II. COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT . . . . 42 

HI. POWER AND MACHINERY . . . -79 

IV. COAL, IRON, STEEL ..... 10$ 

V. THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES .... 134 

VI. AGRICULTURE . . . . . . l6l 

VII. REFORM ....... 185 

VIII. RELIGION AND CHARITY .... 207 

IX. EDUCATION . . . . . . . 230 

X. THRIFT AND HELP ..... 256 

XL NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN . . 272 

XII. YORKSHIRE IN 1914 ..... 299 

INDEX . . . . .-" . . 318 



CHAPTER I 
YORKSHIRE IN 1750 

IN population, in wealth, in importance, the Yorkshire of 
1750 was almost as insignificant as the most obscure of its 
many divisions and wapentakes is to-day. Probably there 
were no more than half a million people, men, women, 
and children, within its four million acres. There were no 
towns of any size. Leeds was a collection of mean streets 
clustering about an old bridge. Sheffield was a rookery of 
squalid houses at the foot of a wild moorland. Bradford 
was no more than a big village closely packed in a hollow 
of the hills. Hull sent out a few ships from the quays which 
lay behind its one street of any importance. Scarborough 
was a collection of fishermen"s cottages, nestling closely 
together under the protection of a ruinous castle. Harrogate 
was a hamlet of nondescript buildings, half-inns, half- 
farmsteads, which stood about a mineral spring, in the 
middle of a waste. The market-towns, still semi-mediaeval 
in appearance, were little more than meeting-places for 
husbandmen and hucksters. There was little noise of 
machinery in the other towns, and little movement in the 
land ; folk stayed, from birth to death, where fate had set 
them down ; of animation, evidence of energy, desire for 
progress, there was nothing, save amongst a few ardent 
but unencouraged spirits. In York Minster silence and 
desolation brooded heavily in the deserted aisles and 
desecrated sanctuary ; within York Castle they hanged 
strong men for the theft of a groat, or the stealing of a sheep. 
And on Micklegate Bar, plainly to be seen by all who entered 
the ancient city, still stood, firmly fixed on pikes, the grisly 
heads of the Jacobites of 1745. 



TO THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

Whatever observant traveller wandered through Yorkshire 
at that time must needs have been struck by one all-prevalent 
feature of its general aspect. While there was little that 
gave promise of the days to come, there was much that 
spoke with wordless eloquence of the ages that were gone. 
From the northern edges of Sherwood Forest, in the south, 
to Stainmore and Teesdale, in the north, from the wilds of 
Blackstone and Bowland, on the west, to the Flamborough 
cliffs and the Holderness flats, on the east, the evidences of 
the feudal regime and the monastic days were everywhere. 
The castles of the great nobles had become gaunt and 
roofless ruins ; the abbeys and priories of the Benedictines 
and the Cistercians were silent as the solitudes hi which 
they stood. Many of the Norman strongholds had been so 
effectively slighted by order of the Parliament that they 
were no more than shapeless masses of masonry, already 
overgrown by grass and weed ; those which had escaped 
with gentler treatment had yet been so dealt with that they 
could never again be fortified or even tenanted, save as 
mere hunting lodges or summer retreats. The walls of the 
religious houses still stood, but the roofs were gone, the 
towers despoiled of their bells, the chancels of their orna- 
ments ; there was neither wood nor lead within their 
precincts ; any farmer of the neighbourhood might quarry 
amongst their cloisters for stone, wherewith to build sty 
or byre. It was then only two hundred years since their 
desecration, " only half that time since the dismantling of 
the castles but we of the twentieth century know more of 
what the monastic house and the feudal castle meant, and 
were, than our forefathers of George the Second"s day knew. 
The eighteenth-century townsfolk of Knaresborough and 
Pontefract, the eighteenth-century peasants of Wharfedale 
and Wensleydale, who saw these piles of grey stone in the 
ancient towns and the quiet valleys, were as incurious about 
them as they were indifferent. 

To us of this day, accustomed to the crowded conditions 
of the Yorkshire industrial districts, and to the ever-recurring 
villages of the purely agricultural portions of the county, 
the sparsity of population and the wide-spread solitudes 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 11 

of the Yorkshire of 1750 would be as astonishing as a firtt 
prospect of modern Sheffield would seem to an eighteenth- 
century man. The old forests and wastes were still more 
or less what they had always been since the Roman legions 
marched by their outer edges. A few hamlets broke up the 
Forest of Galtres. Hatfield Chace, although drained by 
Cornelius Vermuyden hi the time of Charles the First, was 
still a solitude. Wild deer still roamed at will about the 
lonelier stretches of Wensleydale and Swaledale. A large 
portion of the Forest of Knaresborough was still unenclosed 
and was to remain so until 1770. The Forest of Ouse and 
Derwent, the centre of which may still be seen in the glades 
and stretches of Escrick, retained much of the character 
which had distinguished it for centuries as a royal hunting 
ground. In Holderness, men and villages were almost as 
scarce as patches of woodland. The wolds were as yet 
unenclosed. All over the county there were stretches of 
common land. Nowadays we are so used to the trim 
hedgerow, the carefully-preserved fence, that we forget 
that a hundred and fifty years ago, enclosed land, open land, 
and common land ran side by side : we forget, too, that 
Yorkshire, in our day foremost in all matters of improve- 
ment, was in those days backward. Enclosure and fencing 
off began in East Anglia, notably in Suffolk ; it spread to 
the North by slow degrees. And so the impression made 
upon the mind of the mid-eighteenth-century traveller 
through Yorkshire must have been one of great width and 
space an impression of vast expanses and far distances, 
with here and there a little farming village, and here and 
there a small town, through which a horseman could ride 
within a very brief passage of time. 

For even in the reign of George the Second, a hundred 
years after the great upheaval of the Civil War, two hundred 
years after the greater upheaval of the Reformation, the 
Yorkshire towns were small and insignificant in all that 
makes a modern town of importance. York itself was no 
more than the centre of such fashion, amusement, social 
life, as the North Country aristocracy and squirearchy could 
indulge in with economy. Its size was practically that of 



12 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

the Roman Eboracum. Outside Bootham Bar in one 
direction, Micklegate in another, Skeldergate in a third, 
Monk Bar in a fourth, there was nothing but the outer edges 
of Galtres and of the Ainsty. Leeds may be said to have 
lain between what an old map-maker called Mr. Harrison"s 
New Church (St. John the Evangelist) and Leeds Bridge, 
in one direction ; between the Parish Church and the site 
of the modern Post Office, in another. Bradford clustered 
closely about its present Market Street, Ivegate and Kirk- 
gate ; its ancient Parish Church was even then, relatively 
speaking, outside the heart of the town. Hull had not yet 
escaped the area laid down in the old map of the Cotton 
MSS. : it, too, clustered about an ancient church, and had 
no more than High Street, Market Place, and Whitefriargate 
to show in the way of important thoroughfares. Halifax, 
Huddersfield, Rotherham, all old in history, were as yet 
small in size and value ; the busy modern towns of the 
crowded Spen Valley were mere villages or hamlets. Of 
the ancient market-towns some have remained to this day 
so little altered that we can gam from their present aspect 
some idea of their appearance in 1750. Hedon is much as 
it was when Leland saw it. Boroughbridge has not greatly 
altered since the days of its glory as a great coaching 
centre. Bedale is still the town of one main street that 
it was two hundred years ago. In Beverley the atmosphere 
of mediaeval religion and old English life still prevails. At 
Richmond one finds it hard to believe that one is moving 
and seeing in the twentieth century. As these towns look 
nowadays, so they must have looked when they were pocket- 
boroughs and places of importance. But round Wakefield 
and Dewsbury and Doncaster, all of a vast antiquity, 
modernity has woven such new garments that the ancient 
forms are hard to discern. They were easily to be discerned, 
however, in 1750. There was little of Wakefield then but 
its great church, its Kirkgate, and its Westgate, its Six 
Chimneys, and its time-worn Bridge Chapel ; of Doncaster 
but its Parish Church, its Frenchgate, and its High Street. 
In Pontefract, perhaps, of all Yorkshire towns, the new 
has been least powerful in driving out the old : few market- 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 13 

towns in England present such a mingling of antiquity and 
modernity. For there the arrangement of the town and 
the names of the streets Horsefair, Gillygate, Finkle 
Street, Ropergate, Cornmarket are as they were in the 
time of the three sieges of Pontefract Castle, and had been 
since the Wars of the Roses, and maybe long before that, 
and Pontefract, in the heart of it, at any rate, looked very 
much in 1750 as it had looked in 1644 and in 1536 always 
saving the fact that its Castle lay in ruins, and that at least 
two of its religious houses had been so destroyed that not 
a stone of them was left. 

While it is possible, because of the existence of old maps, 
plans, and charts, to form a more or less accurate idea of 
the size and appearance of the Yorkshire towns in the 
middle of the eighteenth century, it is not so easy to arrive 
at even an approximate idea of the appearance and size of 
the purely agricultural villages of the same period. There 
is scarcely a Yorkshire farming village in existence which 
has not been almost entirely rebuilt within the last hundred 
and twenty years. Here and there one comes across an 
old house which is unmistakably of Tudor origin ; now 
and then one finds a timbered cottage of early Carolian 
days. But the majority of the present Yorkshire farm- 
houses and labourers" cottages were built about the middle 
or the end of George the Third"s reign a fact which accounts 
for their eminently plain and utilitarian style of architecture 
and arrangement. They came into being because of the 
improvement in agriculture : the farmers wanted more 
room, the labourers more comfort. What they replaced 
was probably less roomy, less comfortable, but much more 
picturesque. The main features of the old English village 
were certainly in evidence in 1750. There would be the 
church unrestored and the hall, or manor ; these remain 
with us, little altered. There would be farmsteads of the 
Restoration type many of them Tudor houses renovated 
and enlarged. There would be cottages which were little 
more than shelters, and an inn, and the forge of the black- 
smith and the shop of the wheelwright, and somewhere 
near the church there would be the stocks, and possibly the 



14 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

whipping-post. In some places but not in many, for the 
Puritan influence had been strong in Yorkshire there 
would be the Maypole. About the edges of the village, 
country houses would stand, but the parson"s house, now 
usually equal in size to the manor-house, would then be 
close to the church itself, a dwelling of comparatively 
humble sort. As to the population, it is difficult to form 
an accurate notion : the parish registers are the only 
material upon which one can base a calculation. Some 
villages seem not to have increased in size for several cen- 
turies ; in many the population has decreased : naturally, 
the village in which agriculture is, and has always been, 
the only industry, cannot change as even the smallest 
town changes. 

Amongst English counties, Yorkshire to-day stands pre- 
eminent for the variety of its trades, occupations, crafts, 
industries. Not even its rival of Lancashire can dispute 
its pre-eminence. But in 1750 its volume of business was 
small. Many of the old mediaeval trades were dead. In 
York itself, in the reign of Edward the Third, no fewer than 
180 different trades were being carried on. Many of them 
expired at the time of the Reformation, many more on the 
extinction of feudalism. Those trades which have to do 
with food went on as a matter of course and necessity : 
man must have butchers, and bakers, and grocers ; so, 
too, he must have tailors, and drapers, and bootmakers. 
Those trades, directly concerned with the pressing needs 
of the individual, cpvering his back, filling his belly, shoeing 
his feet, are in all the towns at all the times. But of the 
very great trades which now occupy hundreds of thousands 
of busy Yorkshiremen there were but the faintest fore- 
shadowings in 1750. Wool, iron, steel, coal, machinery 
every Yorkshireman knows what the mere names imply 
nowadays : in those days the various industries connected 
with them were all in a very primitive condition. In the 
woollen trade, of which Leeds had become the Yorkshire 
centre by the time of the Stuarts, the factory system was 
yet unborn, and the click of the spinning-wheel and whirr 
of the hand-loom were heard in the cottages of the towns and 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 15 

the farmhouses of the dales. Wool-sorting, wool-combing, 
the spinning of wool into yarn, were all done in elementary 
hand-fashion. Not less elementary were the methods by 
which the resultant cloth was sold. The Leeds cloth 
merchants first congregated on the old bridge over the Aire 
then a clean and untainted river ; later they had an 
open-air market in Briggate ; it was not until 1711 that, 
by the influence of Ralph Thoresby, the topographer, 
they got a covered building in Kirkgate. In that building 
they were doing their business in 1750 ; twenty-five more 
years were to elapse before the White Cloth Hall was opened 
in the Calls, a supplement to one which had been set up in 
Mill Hill for the sale of coloured cloth, in 1760. Where 
they now traded in cloth the Leeds fplk had once had a 
connection with iron : old iron workings have been found 
under the houses of Briggate and beneath the cemetery at 
Burmantofts. But the old iron trade of Leeds had died, 
and in 1750 there was comparatively little iron smelted in 
Yorkshire, though the Masborough Works had already been 
established in 1746. The development of the iron trade, 
indeed, did not begin until coal-mining spread itself over 
the vast areas which lie between Sheffield and Leeds : ^in 
1750 the annual output of Yorkshire coal was relatively 
small. The manufacture of steel was just beginning to be 
dreamed of at that time, but it was not until 1770 that 
the notions of Huntsman, the Doncaster clock-maker, 
became uncontestably successful. And whether in the 
woollen trade, or in the iron-works, or in the coal-pits, the 
machinery in use was primitive and elementary, and 
George the Third had been on his throne many eventful 
years before steam was generally used to drive engines. 

Chief of all industries in Yorkshire at that time was farm- 
ing poor, backward, unenterprising as it was, compared 
with what it is now, farming was the first of the great 
national businesses in which substantial progress had been 
made during the days of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges. 
The four-course system had been introduced. The first 
elementary machines had been tried and adopted. Turnips 
and clever were seen on all sides. Stock of all sorts had 



16 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

vastly improved in quality. Men were beginning to study 
agriculture as a science. None of these things had its 
beginnings in Yorkshire, and Yorkshiremen were somewhat 
slow to adopt them, but they were in the air, and they 
spread. And Yorkshire fanning already had great advan- 
tages. Its horses had been famous for many a century : 
the monks of Jervaulx had been celebrated far and wide for 
their breeding of horses. Defoe in his time had marvelled 
at the incredible number of Yorkshire cattle which were 
brought into Northallerton eight times in the year. Vast 
flocks of sheep were to be found in all Three Ridings. The 
breeding of pigs had received an impetus. The northern 
acres of Holderness, the Vale of York, parts of the reclaimed 
Hatfield Chace, were famous for the growing of corn. All 
things considered, a man who looked well about him in 
Yorkshire in 1750 would have been justified in calling it 
a great agricultural county, with some evidences of other 
important industries. Yet in 1750 there was still much to 
be done as regards Yorkshire farming, for the old strip 
system was still in use in many districts, and was to be so 
for many years, and Sir Christopher Sykes had not yet 
transformed the vast, open, uncultivated sheep-walk of 
the unenclosed Wolds into the finely-farmed country which 
it became before his death. 

In 1750 there still remained one great work to be done 
before trade and industry of any sort could flourish success- 
fully, no matter what new forces came as impetus. It 
seems a strange thing that a nation which had always been 
distinguished for ingenuity in practical work and appliance, 
which had produced men who built the most magnificent 
churches and strongest castles in Europe, had never yet 
devoted its energies to the making of good roads. English 
roads had been notoriously bad for centuries : road-con- 
struction, indeed, seems to have been lost, as an art, with 
the departure of the Romans in the fifth century. Through 
Yorkshire ran many Roman roads, but neither Anglo- 
Saxon, nor Dane, nor Norman, nor the mixed race which 
succeeded, had ever done anything to emulate the spirit 
of the men who drove their streets and causeways in straight 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 17 

lines and with firm foundations from Doncaster to Catterick 
and from Blackstone Edge to Aldborough. The stories 
which are told of the badness of the Yorkshire roads at any 
period between the Norman Conquest and Hanoverian 
days are innumerable. The truth is that the care of 
road and highway was nobody"s business. The establish- 
ment of turnpike trusts in 1663 produced little good and 
much ill-feeling ; later, one parish was for ever quarrelling 
with the next over the repairing of some portion of highway, 
which as often as not was never repaired because of these 
squabbles. In 1750 there was no really good road in all 
the county save the Great North Road and its principal 
branches ; the fine roads of our tune were yet to be made, 
and it is a truly marvellous fact one of the most marvellous 
facts in the whole history of human ingenuity and persever- 
ance over difficulties that when the first making of them 
began, fifteen years later, it was entrusted to a blind man, 
the wonderful John Metcalf, better known as Blind Jack 
of Knaresborough. 

Naturally, with such poor roads, communication between 
one place and another was a matter of difficulty, and even 
of danger. Except on the great main roads, whereon the 
stage coaches had only just begun to run with regularity, 
it was no easy matter to convey anything but the lightest 
loads of produce and merchandise. The Great North Road 
itself was not only as uneven and full of ruts as "an Irish 
highway is to-day, but the wide stretches of turf on either 
side of the middle track were perpetually roughened into 
dust, or transformed into mud, by the passage of the great 
droves of Scotch cattle, going southward, whose hoofs it 
was necessary to shoe with iron at the beginning and in 
the middle of their long journey. Consequently, there was 
little transfer of goods from one part of the county to another. 
Farmers were obliged to content themselves by taking stock 
and produce to the nearest market-town. Nowadays a 
farmer drives to market : in those days he rode : if his 
women-folk wished to accompany him, they either walked 
at the side of his nag, or rode behind him on a pillion. Only 
those people who were absolutely obliged to do so travelled. 



18 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

Men of Holderness or of Hallamshire considered it a serious 
matter to have to attend the Assizes at York ; if a man was 
forced to go to London, he made his will and took solemn 
leave of his friends and acquaintance. To travel far 
afield, or to send goods of any description to a customer who 
lived a hundred miles away, was a costly undertaking. 
Consequently, the folk of 1750 were a home-keeping race, 
and many of them literally never went beyond their parish 
borders. The tendency or temptation to stray from the 
place in which a man was born had been checked by severe 
laws in Tudor days ; in Georgian times it was a matter of 
necessity for a man to remain where fate had planted him. 
And no matter how much farmers, merchants, or craftsmen 
might produce, the difficulties of transit by road or water 
for there were few canals and little river navigation made 
it next to impossible for them to get their goods to far-off 
markets and populous centres. 

Of the life lived by these stay-at-home folk, whether in 
the towns or villages, it is almost impossible for twentieth- 
century people to form an accurate conception. But we 
know something from contemporary documents, from old 
letters and diaries, and they tell us that from the days of 
Queen Anne to those of the Regency, English life, religious, 
social, political, was at its very worst. The eighteenth 
century was a time of dulness, corruption, brutality : neyer 
in all its two thousand yeargToi: history,. has this country 
known such a dead level of all that was mediocre and bad 
as in those first Hanoverian days. There were rare""excep- 
tions in the form of individual talent _and brilliance. There 
were very great men indeed in literature and in art and 
in science and in religion, but "this very outstandingness 
reduced all other men to insignificance moreover their 
greatness was as a rule seen but in one place, London. 
There were great men, too, in politics, but even they were 
rarely honest, and it was thought no disgrace to a leading 
statesman if he carried off his friend"s wife, appropriated 
as much of the public money as he could lay hands on, 
ttirew away his ill-gotten gai^s at the gaming-table, and 
lived in perpetual intoxication. Never was~*sucb a coarse 

~. -- ^^iB*" 1 * """ " !" 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 19 

of brutal age amongst the better class of folk ; never one so 
worse than savage amongst the lower. 

The Established Church was effete and o powerless. It 
had its great scholars : they were chiefly hidden in their 
own quiet rooms in one or other of the. two Universities, 
or in the obscurity of a Deanery, or in. some country parson- 
age. It had its great preachers^, they were rarely to be 
found elsewhere than in the London pulpits. It had its 
able administrators : their chief concern was to conserve 
episcopal revenues for their own and their families" benefit. 
Yorkshire, during that eighteenth century, gaK_several 
men to the bench of bishops : so far as we can learn about 
them from history they were all chiefly distinguished by the 
Yorkshireman"s inborn love of profit. Profit, love of money, 
heaping up of revenue, grabbing of tithe and due, was the 
prevalent characteristic of the Georgian churchman. One 
has only to go through the episcopal, diocesan, and parish 
registers of Yorkshire of that time to discover that pluralism 
was a thing to be sought after, and simony no sin. And it 
naturally resulted that the spoils went to the strong, and 
that the weak gleaned but a straw in the already clean- 
picked acres of ecclesiasticism. Never were there such fat 
and well-endowed rectors : never such thin and half- 
starved curates. A man thought it no disgrace to hold 
livings worth in the aggregate three or four thousand pounds 
a year, to keep his own feet away from each of them, and 
to plant in each a curate to whom he gave no more than 
sixteen shillings a week : what was worse, public opinion 
was with him. Much has been written, sometimes with 
truth, often with culpable exaggeration, of the cupidity 
and avarice of the mediaeval clergy, but never, in the worst 
tunes of the Middle Ages, were there such avarice, such 
cupidity, such attention to the material profits of the cure 
of souls as existed in England in the eighteenth century. 
In Yorkshire at this period Church life appears to have 
been particularly dead. Most towns had no more than one 
church in them. John Harrison, the merchant, had added 
a new church to Leeds in 1634 ; Lady Elizabeth Hastings 
gave the town another in 1727 : Leeds, then, in 1750 had 



20 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

three churches. Hull had two. Bradford had one : Sheffield 
had two : York reckoned its churches by half-dozens, most 
of them as little visited or cared for as the Minster itself. 
The church services were few and perfunctory ; the fabrics 
were neglected ; what the town parson did with himself 
it is difficult to make out ; the country parson was in most 
instances of the type of Fielding"s Parson Trulliber, and 
when he was not feeding his pigs was cadging for a cup of 
small beer in the squire"s kitchen. One gets some idea 
of the calibre of these country parsons from the registers 
which they were supposed to keep with exactness of entry : 
they were better kept by the parish clerk than by his 
superior. But if most of the Established clergy were of 
the Trulliber type, or corresponding to it, many of them 
were of the opposite sort, typified by Fielding"s Parson 
Adams, men of learning and piety, whose candles, unfor- 
tunately, burnt but dimly in the prevalent gloom and 
thick darkness. 

Such religion as there was in Yorkshire during the 
eighteenth century was mainly kept alive by the Noncon- 
formists. Yorkshiremen, from the earliest ages, have always 
been as zealous in their religion as in their ceaseless pursuit 
of money. They had been good Catholics in the old days : 
it required armed force on the part of Henry the Eighth 
and fierce and vindictive persecution on that of his daughter 
Elizabeth to stamp Catholicism out of them. And when 
in the days of Charles the Second sober-minded and God- 
fearing men saw the flower of the Established clergy driven 
out of the church by harsh and arbitrary Acts of Parliament, 
they followed the ejected ministers as whole-heartedly and 
zealously as their Catholic forefathers had followed Robert 
Aske in 1536 and the Nortons in 1569. When Yorkshiremen 
were asked to choose between a venal and lax clergy and 
men like Oliver Heywood, it took but little time for them 
to make their choice. With Oliver Heywood, dispossessed 
parson of Coley, licensed to preach the Gospel by Mr 
Secretary Arlington under Charles the Second, and yet 
imprisoned for conscience" sake in York Castle more than 
once, Yorkshire Nonconformity may be said to have had 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 21 

its serious beginning. It was to do a great work. It was 
perhaps not a beautiful thing, from an artistic, aesthetic, 
or even intellectual standpoint. Its apostles and followers 
were harsh, gaunt, bare of outline as the bleak hills amongst 
which they reared their tabernacles. The fierce old Puritan 
spirit was strong amongst them. They were narrow, they 
were rigid, they were intolerant. Persecuted themselves, 
they, on occasion, could persecute. The meeting-houses 
and chapels in which they gathered and on which they 
bestowed high-sounding names that savoured of Judaism 
more than of Christianity, were, perhaps, the ugliest and 
most repulsive features of English architecture. They 
themselves to their fellow-men presented an equally unlovely 
aspect. But there was in them, and in their doings, the 
true English spirit, and it is to their sturdiness, to their 
earnest and maintained endeavour in a bad age, that York- 
shiremen of this day largely owe the freedom and liberty 
in matters religious, political, and social, which they now 
enjoy in such abundant measure. 

By 1750 the Methodist movement had come into York- 
shire. Eleven years had gone since John Wesley, newly 
returned from Georgia, and converted to new ideas of his 
life-mission through the influence of Peter Bohler, the 
Moravian, had begun preaching in the open air. His 
imitators and followers came into Yorkshire pretty much as 
the Dominicans and Franciscans had come in the Middle 
Ages, At first they needed no church, nor even a plain 
and ugly meeting-house : a pile of stones by the wayside, 
the wall of the parish well, the horse-block outside a friendly 
farmer"s stable, served instead of rostrum or pulpit. But 
not many farmers were so friendly as to lend a horse-block ; 
not many villagers were patient enough to hear the good 
tidings. The itinerant Methodist"s first visit to any Yorkshire 
village usually ended in a visit to the nearest justice of the 
peace, or in an undignified retreat before rotten eggs and 
showers of stones ; he was fortunate if he escaped with a 
sound skin and unbroken bones ; it was rarely that he left 
with dry garments, for in that age of coarseness and brutality 
the ducking of an interloper in the squire"s fishpond or the 



22 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

village pool was considered a high form of innocent diversion. 
Nevertheless (so impossible is it to kill the fervour of con- 
vinced men) the Methodists endure"d and, prevailed, and 
folk who had scoffed and reviled began to learn that they 
had a message. A new spirit came over the land the 
same spirit that had stolen into the hearts of men when, in 
the far-off mediaeval^ days, some brown-frocked friar, 
standing up in market-place or on village green, had lifted 
his crucifix, and asked those who gathered round to pause 
for one moment and reflect on what it meant. 

There were no friars, black, brown, or grey, to be seen on 
village green or in market-place in the Yorkshire of 1750. 
It was at that time the fate of the adherents of the old 
religion, the posterity of those who had shed their blood 
like water for Catholic truth under Henry the Eighth and 
Edward the Sixth and Elizabeth, to hide their faces and to 
skulk in corners. The Penal Laws were still in force 
were to be in force, with minor alleviations, for another 
eighty years. Men still cherished the Puritan hatred, the 
Puritan mistrust of Catholicism. It was inconceivable, 
it was not to be believed, that any Catholic could possibly 
be a good citizen : nay, it was more than doubtful, to folk 
of education as well as to the ignorant, if any Catholic had 
a right to the name of Christian. Even such a man as 
Ralph Thoresby, who, as an antiquary, should have known 
better, chancing while on a visit to Pontefract, to look into 
what he calls the Popish Mass-house, lately set up there, 
indulges in the old bad jibes and foolish misrepresentations 
of a creed which had been greatly cherished by his own 
ancestors, one of whom had been a mediaeval Archbishop 
of York. No mud was too filthy to throw at a Catholic ; 
no stick too club-like to beat him with. We have almost 
forgotten, in these good times of religious liberty, how 
our Catholic fellow-countrymen of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries lived. From the accession of Elizabeth 
to the end of the reign of Charles the Second, law after law 
was made against those whose sole offence was their refusal 
to believe that any temporal sovereign can be Head of 
Christ"s Church on earth. It was high treason under 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 23 

Elizabeth to say or hear Mass ; the possession of a cross or 
a rosary involved outlawry. No Catholic above sixteen 
years of age might travel more than five miles. Catholics 
who did not attend the Established Church services regularly 
were fined twenty pounds a month. No Catholic might 
send his child to be educated abroad,, on pain of a fine of 
one hundred pounds ; no Catholic education might be 
permitted at home. No Catholic might practise law, or 
medicine, or hold office at court, on in any ship, or in any 
castle, or hi any fort. Catholics must be married and 
buried by the ministers of the Establishment ; a marriage 
by a Catholic priest meant a fine of one hundred pounds ; 
a burial, twenty pounds. No Catholic might have Catholic 
books or Catholic objects of devotion : the magistrates 
might search for such things at any time, to burn or deface 
them. No Catholic might possess arms even to go a-shoot- 
ing rabbits with nor own a horse worth more than five 
pounds. No Catholic peer might sit in the House of Lords, 
no Catholic gentleman in the House of Commons, unless he 
first solemnly declared that his own religion was idolatrous. 
But in those times of bigotry no Catholic peer was wanted 
in the Lords, no Catholic squire in the Commons. " I 
would not have so much as a Popish man or a Popish woman 
to remain among us," said a certain peer, rising in his place 
in the House of Lords in 1678, when the country was going 
through one of its periodical outbursts of bigotry jmd 
intolerance. . " not so much as a Popish dog, nor a Popish 
J)itch : not so muchjisji Popisn^"cgT^pTniew. and~purr7 y 
Naturally, with such sentiments~as these in the air. it became 
a national sport to hunt Catholics. Informing against 
them was developed into a lucrative profession. Various 
Acts of Parliament made fine provision for informers. 
Persons who gave information as to the harbouring of 
Catholic clergymen, or the celebration of Mass, were paid 
one-third of the fines : if the whole sum of the fines exceeded 
150, they were to have 50 (iii. James I. cap. v.). Whoever 
gave information of a Catholic going to court, or to London, 
or within ten miles of London, should have one half the 
fine, which was 100 (the same Act). Persons informing 



24 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

of a marriage celebrated by a Catholic clergyman, or of a 
baptism by one, were rewarded with one-third of the fines 
in those cases provided 100 for each offence (the same 
Act). Fine, imprisonment, social ostracism these were 
the lot of English Catholics at any time between 1531 and 
1829. Yet they endured and persisted, and none more 
bravely than the Catholics of Yorkshire. For Yorkshire 
Catholics had shining examples before them. Elizabeth 
had sent hundreds of Catholic Yorkshire folk, men and 
women, to the scaffold and the gallows after the Rising of 
the North in 1569, and in her father"s time John Fisher, 
Bishop of Rochester, a Beverley man, had been the one 
Catholic bishop in England who had cheerfully chosen 
martyrdom rather than assent to the new tyranny. Those 
examples served to keep the faith alive in all three Ridings. 
The numbers of Yorkshire Catholics shrank, but they were 
always in evidence, despite the informers and the persecutors. 
The list of recusants which are in existence show that they 
were of all grades of society nobility, country gentry, 
farmers, tradesmen, artisans, poor labourers. Like their 
own persecuted brethren in Ireland, like the persecuted 
Covenanters in Scotland, they cherished then* religion on 
the open moors and the hillside and behind the locked door 
of some obscure house : it was thought a strange thing 
and a terrible innovation when a Catholic church was 
allowed to be built and used in Leeds in 1790. 

Since the state of things religious was so low, and so 
essentially material, hi the middle of the eighteenth century, 
it naturally followed that the social life of the county was 
of no high order. Education, even amongst the upper 
classes, was almost unknown, save where some man of 
means and leisure had a natural love of books and research 
or where some madam desired to rank herself with the blue- 
stockings. The aristocracy diverted itself in a purely 
material way. Some of its members went to London for 
the season, but most repaired to York. In York the great 
county families had their town-houses : in York were 
assemblies, and routs, and drums ; racing had become 
established in York long before Doncaster became the most 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 25 

famous of Yorkshire racing towns ; in York the Yorkshire 
folk of fashion spent their money ; the Coney Street trades- 
men of 1750 flourished on them. At home my lord and my 
lady lived lives which were not greatly different from the 
lives of the squire and his wife. My lord had his horse, 
his hound, his gun, his rod ; my lady had the still-room to 
attend to, and the servants to scold. My lord was not 
above calling in the parson to drink with him o" nights ; 
my lady was content with the stitching of her sampler, or 
an occasional peep into one of Mr. Richardson"s novels. 
Neither my lord nor my lady was quite what their ancestors 
were, nor what their successors have become. The state 
and magnificence of the feudal days was not theirs, neither 
did they mingle with democracy as our great folk of to-day 
mingle. They were, indeed, in a transition state at that 
time ; nevertheless, they were marked off from lesser folk 
by never riding out in aught less stately than a coach and 
six, accompanied by running footmen. 

As to the Yorkshire squire of those days, we get a very 
good idea of him, his doings, his thoughts, his occupations, 
from various sources, none of them so interesting and 
dependable as those which emanated from himself. One 
such good gentleman, Cuthbert Routh, Esquire, of Snape 
Hall, near Bedale, whose life was lived almost wholly in 
the eighteenth century, left behind him a manuscript book 
which reveals many pleasant things about a country squire"s 
life of his period : it has never been turned into print, and 
only a few privileged eyes have had the felicity of reading 
it. Its author called it his Stud-Book, and there is certainly 
much about horses in it, but it is really a commonplace 
book of family matters, a sort of intimate and informal 
diary, in which the diarist is almost as confidential as 
Samuel Pepys or John Evelyn. He tells us the names of 
his daughters we become quite familiar with Miss Dolly, 
Miss Betty, Miss Judy, Miss Jenny ; they were all appa- 
rently as fond of horses and racing as their papa was. We 
become familiar, too, with his horses : he gives us every 
detail about them, especially as regards his financial trans- 
actions. " A Little Bay Colt, which I bought of Mr. Curwen 



26 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

for 25. A supposd. Bro. of Dimond. And sold him to 
Mr. Wm. Ovington, for his Grace of Wharton at 4 years 
old for two Hundred and forty Guineas 262." " Sold 
Mr. Cuitt near Thirsk, Simon now gone five years old, for 
30 Guineas in hand, and 5 more in case he getts money." 
" Sold a Little Horse call"d Nutmeg to - - Townsend, at 
York Races, 1736, for 30 gs. in hand and a note for 10 more 
upon winning. 31 zos." There are many entries of this 
sort : Mr. Cuthbert Routh might have been consciously 
preparing material for some future historian of Yorkshire 
racing. He gives a list of the subscribers to Richmond 
Races : it includes some famous names the Duke of 
BoJton, the Duke of Wharton, the Earl of Carlisle, the Earl 
of Tankerville, Lord D"Arcy, Sir Marmaduke Wyville. 
He gives full particulars of the race-meetings at Bedale 
and at Middleham ; he and his daughters were evidently 
great figures there. But amidst all this wealth of sporting 
memoranda, he does not forget domestic matters. He 
is a great hand at writing down recipes, and to those which 
he, or Mrs. Routh, or Miss Judy, has personally tested, he 
appends the highly important word Probat. " How to 
make Shrubb " ; " The Balsamic. Tincture " ; "To make 
Excellent Ink " ; " The Black Japan for Shoes " ; " For 
a Droppsy " these are some of the headings of his pre- 
scriptions. But there are many more ; he tells how to 
make the best Gooseberry Vinegar, and how to Pickle 
Salmon to keep Six Months ; he has a recipe for a Restora- 
tion Jelly which is to be taken in conjunction with the 
losing of 4 ounces of blood, daily, for 6 weeks ; he writes 
down a long Infallible Cure for the Bite of a Mad Dog. And 
all through his big manuscript book he makes remarks on 
the weather, and on various happenings in his neighbour- 
hood and on his estate, and we get a very good idea of him 
as an honest, simple squire who loved horses and dogs and 
country life and his own hearth and good living, and was 
quite happy in watching Nutmeg at exercise, or in copying 
out a recipe for a new way of making Herb Beer. 

As for the folk of lesser degree, their social habits and 
customs were, as a whole, and as a rule, of no great preten- 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 27 

sions. The professional men of the towns, the doctors, the 
lawyers, were not above spending their evenings with the 
tradesmen in the taverns. The country parson, as often 
as not, wound up his day by seeking the chimney corner 
of the village inn, where he took his liquor and his pipe in 
company with the farmers, the sexton, the carpenter, and 
the blacksmith. It was, of course, a great age of drinking". 
People had a curious notion that strong drink helped to 
make strong men : to ensure good health, they said, you 
must gorge yourself with beef, and drink much sound ale. 
In London about that period there was a terrible craze for 
drinking fiin -in 1736 there were over ten thousand gin- 
^hops in London whereat you could get drunk for twopence 
but it fortnna^ejy {Ud. not spread beyond the London^ 
boundaries. Ale was the common drink of the Yorkshire- 
man good, strong ale, and plenty of it. If the rather 
superior person who resorted to the town tavern desired 
something better than ale, he drank brandy which Dr. 
Johnson said was the drink of heroes. In towns which had 
a seafaring element they drank rum. While they drank 
and smoked in the town tavern parlour, or by the ingle- 
nook of the village inn, they talked. Their talk, one may 
be sure, was chiefly of local strictly local matters, for 
anything beyond the parish boundaries was as far from 
them as Central Australia is from us, and there were next 
to no newspapers wherefrom to draw inspiration. Certainly, 
the Leeds Mercury began its career in 1718, and the Leeds 
Intelligencer, parent of the Yorkshire Post, in 1754, but 
they were very small and humble sheets, and as the Mercury 
in 1794, eighty years after its birth, had attained a circu- 
lation of only three thousand copies, we may be sure that 
one might, have dropped into many town taverns and village 
inns in Yorkshire during the eighteenth century without 
being able to pick up a newspaper wherefrom to choose 
topics of conversation. Therefore, men fell back upon 
their own news, and these gatherings in tavern and inn, 
which served the purpose of the modern club, were 
signalized by a free exchange of whatever gossip and 
scandal was going the round of the parish. 



28 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

In 1750 the labouring folk of Yorkshire might have been 
roughly divided into three classes the artisans of the 
towns, the colliers and iron workers, and the agricultural 
labourers. Of these, the agricultural labourer was then 
by far the most prosperous. The gradual improvement in 
farming since the days of Charles the Second had consider- 
ably ameliorated his lot, and he was better fed, clothed, 
and housed than at any time during the previous two 
hundred years. Nevertheless, his was still a hard, grinding, 
poverty-stricken life, with little comfort, small chance of 
pleasure, and no prospect but that of a pauper"s old age. 
He worked from dawn till dusk ; his pay was six shillings 
a week. Yet he was better off than the workers of the 
towns, who were herded together in wretched slums, who 
were badly fed, clothed as a rule in coarse garments or in 
mere rags, and who, brutalized by their life and surroundings, 
and made callous by all men"s neglect of them and their 
interests, were always ready to rise against society, and to 
pull down such pillars as it then possessed. Even worse, 
if that could be, than the life of the town artisan, was the 
life of the men who tore iron and coal from the deep places 
of the earth. Wherever mining was carried on there were 
degradation and brutality, and the crushing of all that 
jriight have made for civilization. It is little wonder that 
a man like John Wesley, burning to preach a gospel of good 
.tidings and love, should have turned himself first of all to 
the coal miners of Kingswood, who, until that moment, had 
never known any man to care for their well-being, spiritual 
or temporal. 

There would have been less brutality, less degradation, 
less violence, less intemperance, in that age, if the people 
had had more opportunity of reasonable recreation and 
amusement. It is almost impossible for us of this age to 
imagine how little amusement the common folk had in that. 
Nowadays every working man and lad gets as much recrea- 
tion as labour. Our cricket clubs, football clubs, and athletic 
organizations are numbered by the thousand ; the worker 
can go in for gymnastics, pedestrianism. swimming : in 
many towns there are model yacht clubs ; many working 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 29 

men have even taken up golf ; everywhere there are rifle- 
clubs ; pigeon-flying clubs ; at the workmen"s clubs there 
are billiard-tables, draught-boards, chess-boards, cards. 
In 1750 there was scarcely a game to which a labourer or 
an artisan could turn. Cricket was certainly beginning 
to be played about Sheffield : the earliest cricket match 
of any importance that we know of in Yorkshire was played 
at Sheffield, between Sheffield and Nottingham, in 1771. 
But it was a long time before cricket spread from the Sheffield . 
knife-grinders to the other workers of the county. There 
was no football unless a wild scrimmage around a leather- 
covered bladder between two parishes on Shrove Tuesday, 
invariably resulting in broken legs and heads, could be digni- 
fied by the name. In short, of athleticism there was nothing. 
Once upon a time, in the days when the country was known 
all over Europe as Merry England, no nation in the world 
had had so many sports, games, pastimes, amusements as 
the English. Joseph Strutt, in his Sports and Pastimes of 
the People of England, summarized and described them for 
a generation which had forgotten them. He divides them 
in quaint fashion. There were Sports, Pastimes, and 
Military Games Exhibited Publicly or Privately. There 
were Rural Exercises practised by Persons of Rank. There 
were Rural Exercises Generally Practised he means, by 
the common people. There were Pastimes Practised in 
Towns and Cities. Finally, there were Domestic Amuse- 
ments. In his book, hundreds of innocent amusements 
and sports are described : most of them were known in 
England from the earliest times to the tune of the Common- 
wealth. Then the blight of bigoted and intolerant Puri- 
tanism fell on the English folk, and things which it had 
never entered the heart of man to think of as anything but 
innocent, were pronounced to be^ioful. It was sinful^to 
dance round the Maypole. It was sinful to bring home 
the last load at harvest-time with song and rejoicing. It 
was sinful to play at prisoner"s base a favourite old English 
game or at quoits another greatly favoured pastime or 
at trap-ball, or at ^bandy-ball. It was sinful to wrestle, or 
to swing clubs, or to play at casting of the bar and hammer : 



30 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

it was vanity, and profitless.- Your sour Puritan would not 
even permit the children to play. " This day " (March 10, 
1660), writes one Mr. Ralph Josselin, puritanical vicar of 
Earl"s Colne in Essex, who kept a diary from which one 
may learn the bigotry and intolerance of the folk who 
murdered their king and burned Quakers at the stake, " I 
heard and saw the youth openly playing at catt on the 
green. I went up and routed them : their fathers sleeping 
in the chimney corner." Again, a week later, " Children 
very profane ; their parents sit at home, and they play 
openly in the streets at catt and other sports." This was 
the temper which killed innocent recreation in England : 
we feel the evil effects of it even in this twentieth century. 
But the repression had an effect which the Puritans who 
were, of course, unfortunate folk, utterly devoid of any 
sense of humour, and entirely without imagination did 
not anticipate. People who forget how to play become 
idlers when work is not occupying them, and idleness in 
man is the devil"s opportunity. Idle men drink ; idle men 
gamble ; idle men lounge at street-corners. And so the 
only recreations which our working folk of the eighteenth 
century knew, were .drunkenness, and gambling, and street- 
fighting. Let us pray that their sins have not teen put to 
their account, but to that of the Puritan hypocrites who 
drove the old English love of simple sport and innocent 
gaiety out of the nation. 

The rich folk, of course, always had their amusements, 
Puritans or no Puritans. It is (in the opinion of the children 
of this world) the rich man"s bounden duty to amuse himself : 
for what other reason is he rich ? He is to eat, and to drink, 
and to be merry : that is why gold is given him in good 
measure. So whether or not the labourer or the artisan 
went without recreation and amusement, the eighteenth- 
century gentleman did not. He amused himself very well 
indeed. He could spend half the night over his bottles, 
and be found by the morning sun under his table ; nobody 
thought any the worse of him for that. He could gamble 
his own and his wife"s and his mother"s and his sister"s 
fortunes away with one throw of the dice : people said he 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 31 

wjn a film, vf"nl in [""Tffmf- -fallow He could sit a whole 
Sunday afternoon round. the.jcackpit in- his shaded garden, 
betting with his fellow-squires on the skill and pluck of 
two miserable fowls : it was a fine, manly sport. He had 
better sports, of course : truly English sports. But some- 
how or other they nearly all had to do with the slaying of 
fellow-creatures. Chasing the stag, hunting the fox, shoot- 
ing the pheasant and the hare, catching the fish all were 
mixed up with violence and blood and death. Nevertheless, 
as the century progressed the English gentleman of means 
and leisure began to improve. The development of horse- 
racing did him much good : no Christian man need be 
ashamed to breed and to run race-horses, or to be found on 
the race-course, .though many Christian men ought to have 
been bitterly a^Vtampo 1 of setting cocks to fight, and dogs 
to draw badgers. It did him good^too^tg. be inducted into 
cricket, the one sport in England out of which gambling 
has been kept. JKut neither cricket nor horse-racing was 
in great evidence in Yorkshire in 1750, and one is obliged 
to set down the average Yorkshire gentleman"s amusements 
and recreations as having been of a gross and Pagan nature 
at that period. 

It is a strange and curious fact, but it is a fact beyond 
dispute, that the most important Yorkshire merry-making 
of the mid-Georgian age was on the occasion of a funeral. 
There were stated merry-makings at other times, of course. 
There was Christmas. Christmas was recovering a little 
after the fierce attack made upon it by the Puritans, who 
considered it a Popish and blasphemous thing to celebrate 
the Nativity of Our Redeemer. There was the village 
feast, celebrated on the parish saint"s day. The Puritans 
had tried to kill that, too, having a hatred of all saints, 
except those which they made themselves. The Church 
Ales and the Whitsun Ales were gone altogether the 
Puritans stamped them out of existence. But not all the 
Puritans that ever were made, from foul-mouthed John 
Bale to Oliver Cromwell himself, could prevent a Yorkshire- 
man from burying his dead with good provision of meat 
and drink for all who came to assist at the obsequies. Nothing 



32 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

much was expected at a baptism : it was sufficient if the 
newly-made Christian"s health was drunk with liberality. 
Nor was a wedding of the highest importance cakes and 
ale there must be, of course, but a feast in moderation was 
amply sufficient. But at a funeral there must be no modera- 
tion in meat or drink especially in drink. It was neither 
seemly, nor proper, nor respectable, to bury the dead without 
the accompaniment of baked meats and freshly-broached 
ale-casks. Even so good and pious a man as Mr. William 
Grimshaw (1708-1763), the fajjjgSL^^an^^caT^rjiarson of 
Haworth, felt it incumbent upon him to pro vide ffir "fiis 
funeral after.JJtig.,fashion of the time, though to a modified 
extent. " To attend my funeral," he commanded, in the 
first of his two wills, " I desire 1 {liat 20 persons TDeTmvited 
(of my next relations and intimatest acquaintance) and 
intertained in the following manner : OLet $ quarts of claret 
(which will be every one a gill) be put into a punch-bowl 
and drunk in wine-glasses round till done. Let every one 
have a penny roll of bread to eat therewith ; let every one 
be come and let all sit down together to the same as an 
emblem of Christian love. This at home. Let every one 
nave a quart of ale, a 2 penny spiced cake, and afterwards, 
immediately before rising up, a glass of claret and a paper 
of biskit (4 papers to the pound) ; distribute the biskits 
first, then the wine. This at the Drinking-House. [All 
Yorkshire funerals went to .church by way of the public- 
house, be it remembered.] And as I"ve by will ordered 
5 pounds to bury me with, it will be disburs"d in the follow- 
ing manner, viz. To a funeral sermon, IDS. 6d. To church 
dues, 55. To a horse-litter, ft is. lo a coffin,, f.i. To 
"jz qallon~of clqret r 6s. 8d. per gallon, 5 qts. at home, 3 qts. 
at drinking-house. To 20 2 penny cakes, 35. 4d. To 
20 penny rolls, is. 8d. To 25 pr. gloves, i. To expense of 
inviting to funeral, 35. To parson and clerk each a penny 
cake and other oddments, 2s. 2d. Total, 5." The good 
man made a second will, altering these instructions a little, 
but the first shows what even a clergyman was expected 
to do. Five pounds was a very modest sum to spend on a 
funeral ; two gallons of claret and twenty quarts of ale a 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 33 

very insignificant amount of liquor to provide. Nor is 
there in Mr. Grimshaw"s first will much provision made for 
eating. But there is a good example of the fare provided 
at a Yorkshire funeral in those days in this extract from an 
account book of household expenses which was kept during 
the eighteenth century by the Dawsons, of Wrose Hill : 
" The accounts of Martin Dawson ffuneral, who departed 
this life April 23, 1748. Payd for winding [enshrouding 
the corpse], 8s. 6d. ; do. for spices, las. 5d. ; do. for mutton, 
55. 8d. ; do. more, 45. ; do. a pigg, 2s. 6d. ; do. pidgeons, 
is. 6d. ; do. mutton, 55. ; a ham of bacon, 95. 8d. ; 7 henns, 
45. 4^d. ; butter, 10 Ibs., 55. ; io galls, of ale, los. 6d. ; 
sallett, 6d. ; pipes and tobacco, 6d. ; saman, 5 pounds, 
3s. 4d. ; turbut, 7 pounds, 33. 4d. ; oranges, barm, and 
bread, is. lod. ; for veal to John Hodgson, 95. ; paid for 
5 dozen plates, is. 5|d. ; for the cook, 35. ; for his coffin, 
los. 6d. ; vicar dues for burial ; total, 5 43. 7d." Here, 
again, there is not much provision of liquor, but the Dawsons 
of Wrose Hill may have been folk who wished to discourage, 
undue consumption of it. The general custom was that 
much liquor was consumed before going to church, and 
much more after the return from church and the formal 
eating of the funeral feast ; and at the famous Arvils, kept 
up, round about the Worth Valley well into the nineteenth 
century, the day invariably finished with fighting and 
violence, which was not seldom of a savage description. 

It is impossible to conceive the existence of such a state 
of society as this in even the wildest and most primitive 
corners of Yorkshire in our own day, though there are 
remote places in the county to which civilization has not 
yet fully penetrated. But during the last hundred and fifty 
years education has been widely spread, and education makes 
all the difference in the world to manners and conduct. 
In 1750 there was very little education in Yorkshire. Not 
oven thVupper classes were educated. The country gentle- 
man could do little more than scrawl his own name ; his 
daughters were better., acquainted. with the needle than the 
pen, with the sampler than the book ; if his wife could 
cast up the household expenses book it was as much as 

3 



34 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 

was expected of her. Farmers as often as not made their 
marks when their signatures were necessary ; tradesmen 
could do no more than keep their accounts in very elementary 
fashion ; the publican kept his by a system of notches and 
chequers on the back of his door. As for the working 
classes they, in the gross, were utterly without book-learning. 
Here and there in the villages, an old man or aged woman 
kept a sort of hedge-school at a penny a week per head ; 
they themselves knew little more than the letters of the 
alphabet, and their, chief duty was to mind /the children. 
The truth was that education in Jyngland had. steadily 
^declined since jthe.Jaixeenth century. The Dissolution of 
the Monasteries had proved a serious check to the progress 
of educational reform, for the monks had done valuable 
teaching work amongst all classes, and the convents had 
provided good educational advantages for the daughters of 
the nobility and gentry. The work of the Grammar Schools, 
which received an impetus between 1550 and 1660, had 
steadily deteriorated since the time of the Commonwealth. 
They continued to deteriorate all through the eighteenth 
century : in 1795 we find Lord Chief Justice Kenyon saying 
of them that they were " empty walls without scholars, 
and everything in them neglected but the receipt of the 
salaries and emoluments." Arbitrary and harsh legislation 
had also cramped and narrowed instruction. No Catholic was 
allowed to keep, or to teach in, a school ; for a long time the 
Protestant dissenter was hampered in whatever educational 
work he wished to undertake. Yet it was due to Noncon- 
formist effort that whatever improvement in the eighteenth 
century came into being was effected : one-twelfth of the 
schools which were in existence in 1750 had. been founded 
and were managed by Nonconformists. The foundation of 
the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, in 1698, led 
to vast improvement in the education of the poor ; by 1730 
it had helped to establish over 1,600 schools in the country, 
with an attendance of well over 30,000 children. But even 
then, though these charity schools were, as Addison calls 
them, " the glory of the age," they were mere oases. in a 
desert, and the vast majority of eighteenth-century children 



YORKSHIRE IN 1750 35 

had no means of learning to read or to write. And for 
their elders there was none of the advantages which our 
working classes enjoy to-day. There were no institutes in 
the towns mechanics", literary, Christian, scientific, or 
otherwise. There were no libraries, no reading-rooms, no 
museums, no art galleries, no collections of local antiquities. 
There were no parish rooms in the villages, no village clubs, 
no* comfortably appointed places into which the rural 
labourer could turn of an evening to read the paper and 
glance at a magazine. There were no Mutual Improvement 
Societies, no Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, no free lectures, 
no free concerts, no working-men"s clubs, no discussions of 
things economic and political. Tnere were no bands of 
music in the parks there were no parks. All these things 
that we have now, and, having them, prize so little some 
of us, at any rate were things undreamed of by our great- 
grandfathers. All over that terrible eighteenth century, 
the w r orst, the most depressing period of our history as a 
race, illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, hung like black and 
scarcely penetrable clouds. 

Nowadays, if a man has not got what he wants, he is 
quick to ask for it. He asks sharply and insistently. He 
writes to his newspaper ; he badgers his Member of Parlia- 
ment : he lift