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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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

Yule and Yule's Wife

Today is December 21^st, Midwinter day and also the traditional date of the feast of St Thomas, which sees winter traditions continuing  all over Britain, Europe and further afield.

In York, the longest night and shortest day heralded the ancient custom of the Yule Riding and the beginning of Christmas festivities. During the reign of Elizabeth I, in around 1570, an anonymous balladeer wrote Yule in Yorke, a broadside ballad describing the Riding. [1] The custom included a disguised couple carrying a leg or shoulder of lamb and  a cake of ‘purest meale’, the playing of music and the throwing of nuts by the following crowds. The full text of this ballad and many others like it has been made available through the Bodleian Libraries Ballads Online project, which brings together a rich collection of often unique printed songs, satires, news and moral advice.

The ballad of Yule in Yorke, shared under Creative Commons licence.

This pious representation of the celebration links (sometimes rather tenuously) each part of the festivities to the birth of Jesus. A rather different view of St Thomas’ Day and ‘the very old, gray bearded Gentleman called Christmas’ is shown in a satirical passage printed in London in 1645, which describes a Bacchanalian Father Christmas enjoying, food, drink and gambling amongst other activities!

Printed by the festively named Simon Minc'd-Pye and Cissely Plum Porridge.
Thewhole document can be read at Early English Books Online

One can imagine that it was celebrations more like these that prompted the 1572 letter written to the Mayor and Aldermen of York decrying the city’s ‘verie rude and barbarouse’ Yule Riding. Recorded in the Act Book of the High Commission, the letter bemoans the profaning of the holy day and despairs at the crowds of people drawn from otherwise divine services to watch (and presumably participate in!) the spectacle.

HC.AB.7 f42v

HC.AB.7 f41r

Transcribed, the letter reads as follows:

13 November 1572

After our hartie commendacions, whereas there hath bene heretofore a verie rude and barbarouse custome mainteyned in this citie, and in no other citie or towne of this realme to our knowledge,

that yerelie upon St Thomas Daie before Christmas two disguised persons called Yule and Yules Wief should ryde thorow the citie verey undecentlie and uncomelie, drawinge great concurses of people after them to gaise, often times committinge other enormities, forasmuche as the said disguysed rydinge and concourse afforesaid besydes other enconvenientes tendeth also to the prophanynge of that daie appointed to holie uses and also withdrawethe great multitudes of people frome devyne service and sermons, we have thought good by thes presents to will and require yow & nevertheles in the Quenes Majesties name and by vertew of hir highnes commission for causeis ecclesiasticall within the Province of Yorke to us & others directed, straitlie to charge and commaunde yow that ye take order that no such ryding of Yule and Yules Wief be frome hencefurth attempted or used, and that yow cause this our preceipte and order to be registred of recorde and to be duelie observed not onelie for this yere but also for all other yeres ensueng, requiringe you hereof not to fale as our truste is you will not and as ye will answere for the contrarie.   Fare you hartelie well atYorke this XIII^th of November 1572

                                                   Your lovinge frendes

  Edm. Ebor

           Matth. Hutton[2]
John Rokbye

       Thomas Eymis

Will. Stryckland 

Chrisofer Asheburne

[To the]  

Maior and aldermen

of Yorke

The letter was signed by Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of York (previously Bishop of London and later Archbishop of Canterbury). Upon his appointment  two years earlier, he had already found that “many superstitious practices remained” amongst the people of York and he recommended that the boisterous Yule festival be banned ‘for all other yeres ensuing’. When read to the council, it was agreed that “no disguysed persons called Yule and Yule’s wif … shall ryde this yere nor any yere hensforth, on Saynt Thomas Day before Christmas”.

But do not despair! Although the Yule Riding was banned in 1572, to this day the York Waits process from Micklegate Bar around the city on Midwinter night, accompanied by traditional Tudor instruments and a crowd of followers. Maybe if you're out after dark, you'll be able to hear the sounds of Elizabethan York in the ancient streets once more.

Sources:
R. Davies, Municipal Records of the City of York, 1843.
F. Drake, Eboracum, 1736
A. F. Johnston, Records of Early English Drama, Vol.1, No.1. 1976

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[1] Broadside ballads were printed on large sheets of paper and sold from street-corners, or stuck up in pubs, by travelling ballad singers.

[2] Then Dean of the Minster and later Archbishop himself.