Howzat?: Cricket and the Yorkshire Historic Dictionary

A guest post by Dr George Redmonds, author of the Yorkshire Historic Dictionary 

Stool-ball, 1767, from A Little Pretty Pocket-book

The game of cricket is traditionally difficult to explain, especially to foreigners, but the history of the word itself also poses problems. Even the Oxford English Dictionary has no answer, placing the words ‘Etymology uncertain’ after the entry. The first recorded reference to ‘cricket’ as a game is in the Borough Records of Guildford in 1598 – in Surrey therefore! In that year a man called John Denwick testified that he had known a certain parcell of land ... for the space of Fyfty years and more, a fact secured in his memory because hee and several of his fellowes did runne and play there at Creckett. We can presume from this that cricket was being played at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, but unfortunately it makes no contribution to our understanding of the word.

A cricket stool

Several possible interpretations are commented on in the OED including one theory that links cricket with stool-ball, a game played especially by young women, to which there are references from before 1473. That game is still played in Sussex, where it is thought to have originated, and the relevant point for cricketers is that two stools were formerly the wickets. The fact that a low wooden stool was once called a ‘cricket’ persuaded some historians of the game that this was a vital link in the word’s meaning. The OED view on that theory is that any connection ‘is very doubtful’ since ‘cricket’ in the sense of stool ‘is itself not in evidence till a later date’, not until just before 1643. 

Excerpt from the inventory of George Brough, Selby, 1673,
Selby Peculiar probate

Evidence in a Yorkshire will now removes that particular objection to such a link. In 1559, when Ninian Staveley of Ripon Park died, an inventory was made of his goods, and In the Greate Chambre were 2 old chaires valued at 12s and one litill crekett stole, worth 4s. Similarly, a Selby blacksmith was in possession in 1656 of 1 letle clap table & a crekit stole. It was not invariably a compound term. In 1673, a tanner called George Brough, also from Selby, owned 2 crecketts and 5 greene chares. Of course this does not finally solve how ‘cricket’ came to be the name of the game but it certainly renews the debate about its connection with stool-ball and the south-east of England.  

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For more from the dictionary, please follow our Twitter feed @YorksDictionary.

You can click on the 'dictionary' tag below to see other blog-posts from the project.

Edit 25/01/2019 The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary is now available online at yorkshiredictionary.york.ac.uk

By Clog and Shoe

 With all the excitement surrounding the imminent Royal Wedding, I thought it would be interesting to look at an older and less formal kind of marriage.

Black leather clogs

We are all familiar with clogs, the traditional northern wooden shoe, strengthened with iron or brass at the heels and edges. Perhaps less familiar is its use in an enigmatic entry in the Haworth parish register for 1733, which gives a list of ‘marriages at Bradford and by clog and shoe in Lancashire’.

This entry has been the subject of much conjecture over the intervening years. The 1867 Notes and Queries correspondent Llallawg asked about the meaning of the entry, noting that ‘in some parts of the West Riding it is customary to throw old shoes and old slippers after the newly married pair when starting on their wedding tour.’ They further mentioned an ancient custom of the forest of Skipton, which is near to Haworth, where in the reign of Edward II ‘every bride coming that way should either give her left shoe or 3s 4d to the forester of Crookryse, by way of custom of gaytcloys’ (here gate will be in the dialectal usage meaning ‘journey’).

I don’t know if they received any responses, but later The Derbyshire Times of 1894 carried a similar query, noting that at a time when legal marriage did not require a priest of religious ceremony (Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was still twenty years away) many people married clandestinely or by unusual methods (similar to 'jumping the broom' which was still referred to as a folk practice when I was growing up). Two solutions were then offered to the ‘clog and shoe’ conundrum. One suggestion was that a pub called the ‘Clog and Shoe’ in the Bradford area might have been operating as ‘marriage shop’. Apparently, taverns were often popular locations for clandestine marriages. This idea was supported by a (poorly cited, so I can’t track down the original) reference to ‘a book at Elwick, Durham’, which suggested that marriages were celebrated ‘by’ the clog and shoe, ‘with’ the clog and shoe and ‘at’ the Clog and Shoe, the constructions seeming to suggest a place such as a tavern.

Frontispiece and Title page from Richard Braithwaite, A Boulster Lecture, London 1640

An alternative was the custom of marrying by exchanging a man’s clog for a woman’s shoe in front of witnesses. A further illustration from Braithwaite’s A Boulster Lecture (1640) emphasizes the potential symbolism of some of these traditions:

When at any time a couple were married, the sole of the bridegroom’s shoe was to be laid upon the bride’s head, implying with what subjugation she should serve her husband.

Dr George Redmonds, the author of the Yorkshire Historic Dictionary, offers a less romantic explanation: it might simply have meant that the couple had walked over into Lancashire to get married. Haworth was, after all, right on the county boundary.

Allegations from CP.I.1110
Isaac Smith c. Benjamin Kennet, 1739

This more prosaic definition has some help from our archival records. In the 1730s, the minister to the Howarth curacy, Rev. Isaac Smith and the vicar of Bradford (its mother parish) Rev. Benjamin Kennet, engaged in a protracted dispute through the church courts around the issue of irregular marriages. Rev. Kennet was accused of conducting improper marriages, by marrying a couple without the publication of banns and out of ceremonial hours (after 12 noon on a Sunday), and by receiving additional payments for doing so. The couple in question, John Arthington and Ann Swaine, had been forbidden permission to marry by her father. When the case was brought several years later, Kennet attempted to clear his name by producing a witness, Lucy Brigg, who swore that she remembered the banns being read at Bradford church sometime in the June, July or August before the wedding but unfortunately it was shown that at the time she was confined to a room for lunacy. I don’t know what punishment, if any, was meted out to Kennet but he didn’t lose his position as he continued as vicar to Bradford until his death in 1752 (outliving Smith, I’m sure to his great satisfaction, by ten years).

The papers for the numerous back-and-forths in the church courts between Smith and Kennet (which include the memorable occasion when Smith hired the Bradford town crier to tell Kennet’s parishioners what he thought of him) are freely available online under the references CP.I.1739; CP.I.1099; CP.I.1100; CP.I.1101; CP.I.1102; CP.I.1103; CP.I.1104.

It’s interesting that we have a verifiable recorded case of improper marriage at exactly the same date as the ‘clog and shoe’ marriages. The situation in Haworth perfectly illustrates the motivation behind Hardwicke’s Act for the Better Prevention of Clandestine Marriage in 1754, to tighten up the legal definition of a marriage service once and for all.

Can you help us to tighten up our definition of clog? Do you know what marriage ‘by clog and shoe’ means? I’d love to hear from you!

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For more from the dictionary, please follow our Twitter feed @YorksDictionary.
You can click on the 'dictionary' tag below to see other blog-posts from the project.

Edit 25/01/2019 The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary is now available online at yorkshiredictionary.york.ac.uk

For Burn's Night, Scotland in Yorkshire

Interactions between Scotland and Yorkshire were clearly, from the surviving terms in the dictionary, many and common-place. Those words which explicitly reference Scotland seem mostly to do with trade between the two areas, as Scottish men brought wares down from their home country to be sold around the county.

Scotch cloth, for example, was a fabric said to resemble ‘lawn’ (a plain weave textile of linen or, latterly, cotton) but cheaper - it was sometimes said to have been made with the fibre of nettles.

And what better to wear with your scotch cloth shirt than a scotch cap? In his will of 1551, Thomas Greenwood of Wakefield stated:

Unto Edwarde Sundderland as it apperethe in my booke of parcels for a remnantte of calve skynes so that the said Edward do allowe to me xxs which I paid for hym to William Parkyns, besides a Scotche cappe that he had of me, and I owe unto hym for whitte carsaye

This was not a scotch bonnet or a tam o’shanter but something more like a Glengarry cap or Balmoral bonnet. The OED has examples from 1591 and describes it as ‘a man’s head-dress made of thick firm woolen cloth, without a brim, and decorated with two tails or streamers.’ Something similar is now worn by Scottish military regiments:

A Balmoral Bonnet, similar to a scotch cap

These items were probably brought down from Scotland by the scotchman: a sort of catch-all term for travelling drapers, hawkers and sellers of scotch cloth. They called regularly, in isolated rural hamlets, and offered a credit system which helped to make them successful. There are numerous references to scotchmen in the Quarter Sessions from the seventeenth century:

• Alexander Miller… and another Scotchman taken up with a pack on his back (1705, Gisburn) 
• Mary Hanson had bought the musling of one Robert Maxfield a Scotchman (1721) 
• One piece of red and white printed linen which she saith she exchanged with a Scotch Man for her son’s hair in 1736 (1738, West Riding)

Depositions given during Quarter Session give some excellent detail about the life of a scotchman. John Smith was arrested in Kirkheaton in 1682:

Saith that he was borne in Scotland and Dumfrees and he came into England the fooreende of May last and sells hollan and scotchcloath, cambrick, muslins, callecoe and blew linne and that he came Almondbury to Kirkheaton and there was taken up by the watch and hath used this pedding traide for five yeares last paste in England and that he byes the comodityes, except the scotchcloath, of Mr Hardwick and Mr Hey both of Leeds

There are also burial records for peddlars who died on the road. Many were buried without names, their peripatetic lifestyle meaning they were unknown to the inhabitants of their last resting places:

'A Scotchman borne att Edenborough Cominge out of the South dyd as he was brought from Borrowbridge and was buryed att Kirby' Oct 25 1666 N/PR/KM/1/1 North Yorkshire County Record Office 

By 1881, Joe Whiteley of Lancaster Street in Barnsley was referring to himself as a ‘Scotch Traveller Drapery’. His West Riding surname, combined with his birthplace of Holmfirth, suggests that by this date, scotchman had become a more generalised term for a travelling salesman:

    

From the 1881 Census, showing Joe Whiteley, Scotch Traveller

Scotchmen generally dealt in cloth, so they probably weren’t carrying pounds of nails on their backs. In addition, the existence of the word scotsemnail in Yorkshire from the medieval period seems to predate the arrival of the scotchman by several hundred years. The word is found frequently in the county from the early fourteenth century and seems to derive itself from a Scots dialect term: a seam was a nail, especially one which fixed together the planks of a clinker-built boat. The suffix ‘-nail’ may have been added by clerks who were unfamiliar with the regional word - probably the Yorkshiremen who bought and used them just referred to them as scotsem.

References to scotsemnails occur in the York area from the fourteenth century:

1371 Et in 10.m de Scotsomnail emptis pro celura, dando pro c. 5d, 41s 8d

1434 In v. m Scotesemnailes, 5s 5d

1518 Item paid for ij M skotsym, ijs

1535 It’m twoo thowsand skott Semes (Stillingfleet)

1537 scotsem nayles otherwise called lathe nayles (Sheriff Hutton)

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Scotch cloth: A textile fabric which resembled 'lawn' but was cheaper.

Scotch cap: A man's head-dress made of thick firm woollen cloth, without a brim, and decorated with two tails or streamers.

Scotsemnail: A 'scottish nail', one that could be clenched.

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Alexandra Medcalf

Project Archivist, Yorkshire Historic Dictionary (@YorksDictionary)

Edit 25/01/2019 The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary is now available online at yorkshiredictionary.york.ac.uk

A Yule... Clog?

"Wassail drink were allus best, when o'er a yule-clog boiled"

Illustration of people collecting a Yule log from Chambers Book of Days (1864), p.734. 

I think I can safely assume that any Brit, at least, reading this blog will be familiar with the concept of a Yule log at Christmas. These days, it probably takes the form of a delicious swiss roll coated in milk chocolate. However historically, in Yorkshire and further north into Scotland, the Yule log was more usually termed a Yule clog. Nothing to do with footwear - a clog was originally any substantial or roughly shaped piece of wood. This definition pre-dates the shoes by hundreds of years and in fact it’s probable that our modern day clogs take their name from the historic term for a piece of wood.

Father Christmas with a Yule log,
Illustrated London News, 23 Dec 1848

The Yule clog was burnt on the fire at Christmas and was the subject of lots of traditions and superstitions. In the East Riding, it would be brought into the house on Christmas Eve and set on the hearthrug in front of the fire. In some areas the clog was sprinkled with corn and cider, or a girl would sit on top as it was dragged inside. Each person in the house would then sit silently upon it and wish three wishes (which were sure to come true if only they were kept secret). In Swaledale, it was deemed unlucky to have to light it again after it had been begun and it shouldn’t be allowed to go out until the whole clog had burned away. However, a fragment of it must be rescued and kept as kindling to light the next year’s clog. In Ripon, the chandlers sent large mold-candles and the coopers yule clogs, which had to be large enough that it didn’t all burn away in one night. On some farms, the servants were entitled to ale with their meals as long as the Yule clog lasted.

Unsurprisingly, candles were closely associated with the yule clog. Mrs Day, a native of Swaledale, related in 1914 that

‘just before supper on Christmas Eve (where furmety is eaten), while the Yule log is burning, all other lights are put out, and the candles lit from the Yule log by the youngest person present. While they are lit, all are silent and wish. It is common practice that the wish be kept a secret. Once the candles are on the table, silence may be broken. They must be allowed to burn themselves out, and no other lights may be lit that night’.

The similarity in spelling between the Yule log and the Yule clog is interesting. You could easily be forgiven for assuming that they are closely related terms. Possibly they are, but the etymology (that is, the roots of the words, back into Old English or Norse) for both words are so obscure that it’s impossible to say with any certainty.

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Yule clog: the heavy piece of wood burnt on the fire at Christmas, in Scotland in particular.

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Alexandra Medcalf

Project Archivist, Yorkshire Historic Dictionary (@YorksDictionary)

Edit 25/01/2019 The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary is now available online at yorkshiredictionary.york.ac.uk

Bibliography

• Brand, John, Observations on popular Antiquities, Vol. 1, 1813.
• Crowther, Jan, ‘Christmas Facts and Fancies (with particular reference to East Yorkshire), www.skeals.co.uk/Articles/Christmas%20Facts%20and%20Fancies.html, accessed 6th December 2017.
• Partridge, J. B., ‘ Folklore from Yorkshire (North Riding)’, Folklore, Vol. 25, no. 3, 1914, pp. 375-377.
• Rose, H. J., ‘Folklore Scraps’, Folklore, Vol. 34, no. 2, 1923, pp. 154-158.
• Turner, J Horsfall, Yorkshire Anthology: Ballads and Songs - Ancient and Modern, 1901.  

The World’s Largest Telescope

Anyone attending the Great Industrial Exhibition in London in 1862 could have been forgiven for passing by the sight of two circular blocks of glass, 26 inches in diameter and two inches thick, standing on their edges being displayed by Messrs Chance of Birmingham. Impressive though they were these optical glasses could easily be missed alongside the great machines - such as Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, cotton mills, maritime engines, and London and North Western’s passenger locomotive, Lady of the Lake - being displayed by the 28,000 exhibitors from 36 countries.

However, there was one visitor to the event who saw the opportunity to create a lasting legacy. Robert Stirling Newall of Gateshead, whose fortune was made from the manufacture of wire rope,  purchased the glasses for £500 pounds each. They were the largest in the world at the time, being nearly twice the diameter of the previous largest, and Newall’s intention was that they would be the foundation of a telescope that would exceed in size all that had gone before.

The project would thrust England, and York in particular, to the forefront of the optical arts, ‘as we were in Dolland’s time’ according to the journal Nature. Contemporary commentators believed the optical art had been stifled in England by an ill-advised duty on glass, and for many years England had been dependent on foreign built telescopes, mainly from France and Germany. At the time of the Great Industrial Exhibition the telescopes with the largest object glasses in England - at Greenwich, Oxford and Cambridge - were all of foreign make. Newall, however, opted to use T. Cooke and Sons of York for his grand project.

Cooke had been at the forefront of resurrecting the art of optical manufacture in England. Samuel Smiles in Men of Invention and Industry relates that Cooke made his first object glass from the base of a glass tumbler, and from this unlikely beginning set up T. Cooke & Sons in 1837. Based at No. 50 Stonegate, York, he specialised in making telescopes and other optical instruments, such as surveying equipment, microscopes, turret clocks and later steam engines (for an unsuccessful steam carriage or motor car). He gained a reputation for excellence, and in 1860 constructed a 5.25 inch telescope for HRH the Prince Consort that was erected at Osborne House, and also provided Sir Norman Lockyer a telescope for his Wimbledon Observatory in 1861. In 1862 he exhibited his creations at the Great Industrial Exhibition in London, bringing home two First Class Medals, one for the excellence of the object glasses and mountings of his telescopes, the other for the construction and finish of his turret clock, and it was here that he came into contact with Mr Newall.

Newall sought quotes from both Cooke and Thomas Grubb of Dublin, but Cooke was so eager for the contract that he bid too low and underestimated how long it would take to construct. The project took far longer than the year he had anticipated. Newall became increasingly frustrated throughout the endeavour, whereas Cooke frequently sought advances to cover his costs. The project nearly caused the demise of Cooke’s business which was still suffering financial difficulties as a result several years after the completion of the telescope; Sir Norman Lockyer writing in 1878 stated, ‘Cooke did not hesitate to risk thousands of pounds in one great experiment, the success of which will have a most important bearing upon the astronomy of the future’.

The general design was the same as Cooke’s equatorials  but the huge size necessitated special arrangements. The main issue was the crafting of the glass lenses. Special equipment had to be designed to handle the discs, and the lenses had to be floated in mercury to prevent them breaking under their own weight. Lockyer stated that it took 1560 hours to grind the discs to the required shape, the thickness being reduced by an inch in the process. The work took place at Cooke’s Buckingham Works, Duke’s Hall, in the Bishophill area of York, but the scale of the project required the final assembly take place in the open near the city wall; Employee Mr Graham recalled the telescope “…..was a big undertaking and it had to be erected on the moat, near the City walls about the place where Newton Terrace now stands.”. It was 1870, and the telescope had taken around six years to complete. Once assembled it was taken to Newall’s observatory at Ferndene, Gateshead, and it was not until 1871 that it was fully installed in the observatory.

The resulting instrument weighed 9 tons and was 32 feet in length. At a time when the largest lenses in Greenwich, Oxford, and Cambridge were 15. 5 inches, the largest in Russia at Pulkova were 15 inches, and the largest in the U.S. were 18.5 inches, the step forward in manufacturing techniques required to produce a telescope with 25 inch discs, weighing 144lb, was considerable. The telescope was nearly twice as powerful as the 18 inch Chicago instrument, having a 485 inch area compared to 268, and had a focal length of 29 feet. The diameter of the object end was 29 inches, the diameter of the tube centre 34 inches, the diameter of the eye end 22 inches, and the support pillar was 19 feet high.

The tube was cigar shaped and made of steel plates riveted together in 5 sections. Inside there were five other tubes of zinc increasing in diameter from eye end to object end. The wide end of each tube overlapped the narrow end of the next with an inch of space left around the end of each to aid ventilation and prevent currents of warm air interfering with the light. The ends were lighter than the centre to prevent them destabilising the telescope.

Fixed above and below the eye end of the tube were two finders, each of 4 inches aperture, 12.5 inches in area, to aid accessibility. An additional telescope with an object glass of 6.5 inches was fixed between the two finders to assist the observation of objects (such as comets) for which the main telescope was not suited.

The observatory housing the instrument was between 40 and 50 feet in diameter and packed with apparatus to allow the telescope to be easily maneuvered, the temperature always the same inside and out to prevent currents of air interfering with observations. However, the atmosphere in England was ‘not the best suited for such an instrument’ and as early as 1870 the journal Nature was reporting that Mr Newall intended to move the instrument after preliminary testing to a location more suited to astronomical observation. This was taken to mean that it would not remain in England ‘every increase in the size of the object-glass or mirror increases the perturbating effects of the atmosphere, so that the larger the telescope, the purer must be the air’. However this was not to be the case, and Mr Marth, known for his work with the Lassel Reflector at Malta, was given charge of the instrument in Ferndene.

Newall’s telescope drew widespread attention, the US government sent Commodore BF Sands of the US Naval Observatory with a deputation of astronomers to examine it and this resulted in a commission of a telescope that would be one inch larger. Austria ordered one the same size.
Cooke never got to see the result of his work as he died in October 1868, whilst Newall was only able to claim to be the owner of the world’s largest refracting telescope for a short period, being overshadowed by the 26 inch Washington Naval Observatory telescope in 1873. However, the telescope was of such exceptional quality that it was used for years to come. On Newall’s death in 1889 it was moved from Gateshead to Cambridge University Observatory and by 1925 it was in the charge of Prof James Newall, Mr Newall’s son, director of the Polar/Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge. There it stayed until the 1950’s when it was donated to the Greek National Observatory, Mt Penteli, Athens, where it can still be found today having undergone a complete restoration in 2013.

T. Cooke and Sons continued to produce telescopes and exported all over the world, eventually merging with Troughton and Simms in 1922, and Vickers Instruments in 1963. The records of the company can be found at the Borthwick Institute for Archives as part of the Vickers Instruments archive. An online catalogue for the archives of Vickers, Cooke, and Troughton and Simms can be viewed on Borthcat.

Further information:
http://www.instrumentsoflight.com/newall.html 
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/218396

A full technical description of the telescope can be found in ‘Stargazing, past and present’, by Joseph Lockyer.

Graham Hughes,
Archives Assistant.

71 Years Wild: cataloguing and exploring the archive of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust

 Reed Warbler at Askham Bog in the 1930s, by Arthur Gilpin.
BI/YWT/5/1/1/6/1

As we come into the last days of this year's #30DaysWild campaign, it seemed fitting to celebrate the end of my year-long project cataloguing the archive of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust - and what a year it's been! I've been lucky enough to delve right into the most detailed of archives, from the papers marking the establishment of the Trust and its day-to-day correspondence, right through to the note documenting the sighting of a single rare moth and a letter recording a daring dolphin rescue mission off Spurn Point. It's been a real dream come true for anyone with an interest in the natural world, the history of the conservation movement and also for me as an archivist at the start of my career. You can explore the 2000+ entries through our online catalogue, Borthcat.

When I started the project back in April 2016, there were 3.5 cubic metres of boxes to work through. A year later and there's almost double that amount as additional material has been sorted and deposited with us. Through the project we've also been able to develop new relationships with other organisations around Yorkshire which have led to the deposit of new archives relating to natural history, including Kit Rob's botanical notes and Dr Michael Thompson's bat recording study. It's really exciting to be able to build on our existing natural science records and to open these up as as research resource for everyone to use. 

Just part of one of  the lists of evocative
English plant names - among my favourite items!

As my first post as a qualified archivist, I felt equally excited and trepidatious to take on such a significant project and I feel like I've really learned a lot over the last year, not just about the incredible work YWT have been undertaking in Yorkshire over the last seven decades, but also about working on a collaborative project, balancing the different aims of the work across a fixed timescale and (on a practical level) learning my trade! I've been able to really get my teeth into some large-scale cataloguing work, and have also had the opportunity to blend these traditional archival skills with exploring the flexibility and functionality of  our cataloguing software, Access to Memory (AtoM), the open-source interface developed by the ICA and Artefactual Systems.

Perhaps most importantly, it's allowed me to share the archive with a wide range of user communities and to gather different perspectives on what archives mean to them. The YWT archive is so heavy with the histories of people across Yorkshire; the founders of the Trust, the pioneering staff who developed the Trust and cemented its position as a fearsome campaigning body at national and international level, and - crucially in an archive like this - documenting the vast contribution made by volunteers and members of the public who have been (and still are) dedicated to the landscapes of Yorkshire and to recording and preserving its wild places. 

Environmental data on Askham Bog, 1933.
BI/YWT/5/1/2/4/1

Although the funded term of the project is now over, there is still a lot of scope to develop the YWT archive and to continue to unlock its research potential. The newly-catalogued material covers a wide range of disciplines and its relevance can be seen in the ongoing development of public policy. This is especially evident in the relationship between wildlife, habitats and agriculture - particularly in developing campaigns for raptor protection, in the control of bovine tuberculosis through badger culling and in the effects, and the mitigation of the effects, of coastal erosion. Even more recently, political changes in this country and America mean that records documenting climate and other environmental changes are ever more important. This project has allowed us to bring together an authoritative and accessible source of environmental data and to make it available to everyone. It has been a real privilege to work on this project and, although I am no longer working on the archive full-time, I will definitely be keeping things ticking over!


Lydia Dean
Project Archivist

Box count: 212/200 (couldn't resist!)

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about the project or how we approached it, do feel free to comment below or to get in touch through our Twitter or Facebook. You can also read other blogs on this project here.

Revealing the Registers: thoughts of an indexer

Our Marc Fitch Fund Project Archivist, Helen Watt, gives us some thoughts and reflections following the completion of initial work in indexing one of our Archbishops' Registers and attempts to answer and old indexers' question - can you ever really be sure when using a previous index? 

Having worked on the pilot for ‘York's Archbishops’ Registers Revealed’ in 2012, generously funded by the  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, it is excellent to be able to put the theory devised during that pilot into practice. Thanks to funding from the Marc Fitch Fund, since October 2015, work has been underway on Registers 31 and 32 using the newly-developed indexing tool. This period covers 1576-1650 and includes the tenures of Archbishops Edwin Sandys (1577-1588), John Piers (1589-1594), Matthew Hutton (1595-1606) in Register 31; and the archiepiscopates of Archbishops Samuel Harsnett (1619-1631), Richard Neile (1632-1640) and John Williams (1641-1650) in Register 32. 

Since the examination of Register 31 was completed last month, it is now possible to reflect on the process of indexing a register of the Archbishops of York of this date and, crucially, the kind of material found within it. To put them into some context, none of the registers for this period have been subject to any previous indexing work - unlike their medieval predecessors where various published and indexed versions have been created since the 19th century. 

First of all, the quality of images of the registers produced during the Mellon project is excellent, especially for remote use, The images may also be greatly enlarged, so that even the smallest, faintest penstrokes may be read with ease.

Thanks to the quality of the images, we were able to discern this date as being the 'xvth day of febuarie' (Reg 31 f 76v)

The schema of subject headings compiled during the pilot has been integral to indexing subjects found in register entries, although some amendments have had to be made to cater for the post-reformation matters found in this register, as well as for matters to do with probate and archbishops’ visitations.

When indexing persons, there are two methods of dealing with personal names in the tool, either by inputting details of an individual straight into an entry, or by populating the Persons List with details before indexing. Using the second method, it was possible to draw on the work of several other projects, such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae (via British History Online), the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, particularly for parish and higher clergy, to build up the required information and so streamline input of persons.

Similarly, to speed up the indexing of places, not only could the project draw on lists of places compiled during the Borthwick Institute’s previous work on the Cause Papers, but also automatically harvest place-names from the Digital Exposure of English Place-names (DEEP) and the online Ordnance Survey.

As regards the contents of the register, these have mainly comprised probate of wills and grants of administrations, confirmations of elections of bishops and archbishops’ visitations, and guides to the procedures involved in all of these topics will be made available shortly. Wills copied into the register are mostly those of clergymen and although there is an existing index in the Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series vol. 93 (1937), comparison between this index and the original wills has allowed small errors to be corrected, mostly concerning dates of wills and probate - understandable when you consider the quality of the images we are working with now!

Notification of the Vacancy after the death of Abp Sandys, 1588 

Even though these wills are well-known through that index, the new indexing tool has made it possible for them to be searched and explored online, making them so much more widely accessible and available and opening up their contents for research, so that many aspects of clerical life could now be studied. 

For instance, the pious preambles of wills, often not simply formulaic in nature, but long and involved, together with the titles of books left as bequests, may reflect the doctrinal inclinations and learning of these clergymen. We might also see the clergyman as farmer, and father of his family as well as shepherd of his flock. We can sometimes see far-reaching connections with the Universities, with court, members of London Livery Companies, and relationships with gentry and noble patrons. 

Long preamble in the will of  Ralph Kay, vicar of Topcliffe, 1613

With the commencement of work on Register 32, all these topics and more are bound to be further illuminated, so, as they say, watch this space!

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust: 70 years on

Certificate of Incorporation
BIA/YWT/A108/2

On 2nd May 1946, Yorkshire Wildlife Trust, then called Yorkshire Naturalists’ Trust, was legally incorporated. Founded in a post-war context, where the Government was keen to provide a ‘vision of a brighter Britain’¹, the Trust’s first objective was “to protect places and objects of natural beauty or of ornithological, botanical, geological, zoological or scientific interest from injury, ill-treatment or destruction.”

The Trust was established to receive the gift of two plots of land at Askham Bog, a remnant of ancient Yorkshire fenland to the south of York. The bog was considered of particular interest due to the survival of many original species of flora and fauna. Indeed, it was later described as being "as uniquely interesting to the botanist and entomologist as is any archaeological treasure to the historian or antiquarian."² The plots had been purchased two years earlier, in 1944,  by keen naturalists and confectioners Sir Francis Terry and Arnold Rowntree. These plots, along with the plot of land entrusted by Mr Lycett Green, made up the Trust's first reserve.³

Vegetation Map of Askham Bog, 1933. BIA/YWT/A182

At its formation the Trust had a Council of eleven members, including President Sir Francis Terry and Vice President A.S. Rowntree, and five aristocratic patrons - the Duke of Devonshire, the Marquess of Zetland, the Earl of Feversham, the Earl of Halifax and Lord Middleton. 

Individuals could become Ordinary members of the Trust upon application and a subsequent annual payment of 10 shillings, or a Life Member for £10.

In 1946, the aims of the Trust were already clear - a letter to the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves, written by Sir Francis Terry in that year, stated that 'the acquisition of this Sanctuary is regarded as a first step only, as it is hoped that other suitable areas in Yorkshire will come into the hands of the Trust'.⁴ In the seventy years since that letter was written, the Trust has certainly fulfilled this early vision and now cares for over 100 reserves across Yorkshire, as well as campaigning for wildlife on a regional and national level. 

The archive itself, even at this early stage of the project, has been fascinating to work through. With documents ranging from minutes of the first meetings to detailed site reports, from correspondence with local members to relationships with national organisations, it presents a unique and vital record of the important work of the Trust both in 1946 and in 2016.

Lydia Dean
Project Archivist


Box count: 32.5 boxes surveyed...


----Sources:
1. Sands, Tim. Wildlife In Trust (2012) p.19
2. Report on Askham Bog (BIA/YWT/A177/5)
3. Correspondence on Askham Bog 1966-1973. (BIA/YWT/A177/5)
4. Letter from Francis Terry, August 1946 (BIA/YWT/A108/2)

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust Project

A robin, after bathing, at Askham Bog. (BIA/YWT/A177)

The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust (YWT) is one of the largest Wildlife Trusts in Britain and its 97 reserves cover some of the most varied landscapes in the UK. It works to protect and conserve Yorkshire's wild places and wildlife, with reserves including Spurn National Nature Reserve, Flamborough Cliffs, Potteric Carr, and my local reserve of Askham Bog. The Trust was established in 1946 and in the year it celebrates its 70th anniversary, it is very exciting to have launched a 12 month project to catalogue and promote the Trust’s extensive archive.

Working in partnership with YWT and supported by funding from the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives, by 2017 we will have described the archive to file level and to have made this accessible through the Borthwick’s online catalogue. The archive of YWT, like their reserves, is of national and international importance. It documents the establishment of the Trust and its development through to the modern day, as well as the bio-recording of internationally scarce habitats, relationships with landowners and the precedent-making legal cases led by the Trust in the 1970s. The archive highlights the UK’s unique role in the development of nature conservation and is the largest body (both in volume and subject coverage) of such material as yet deposited in any public institution. It includes paper, photographs and digital material and covers 3.5m3.

As well as cataloguing the archive, thereby releasing its research potential to new and existing audiences, the project will also include the running of workshops on archival appraisal and conservation. We'll also be using new and traditional media to continue to promote the archive throughout the year.

The archive as it looks today!

Over the next few weeks, I will be starting some preliminary survey work on the boxes which will help me develop a structure for the catalogue. I’ll also be familiarising myself with Access to Memory (AtoM) the open-source, web-based application we're using to host our online catalogue. Personally and professionally, I am very excited to be working as the archivist on this project. It really will be a fascinating (not to mention busy!) twelve months and I look forward to keeping you all up-to-date as it develops. In the meantime, if there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about the project or how we’re approaching it do feel free to comment below or to get in touch through our Twitter or Facebook.

Lydia Dean

Project Archivist

Box count: 2/200 surveyed...