The example set by Ben Preston has been followed by other dialect poets living in the district round Bradford. Mention may be made of James Burnley, whose poem, "Jim's Letter," is a telling illustration of the fine use which can be made of dialect in the service of the dramatic lyric; and of Abraham Holroyd, who not only wrote original verse, but also made a valuable collection of old Yorkshire songs and ballads.(6)
The rivalry between Bradford and Leeds is proverbial, and, though the latter city has lagged behing Bradford in the production of dialect literature, the Yorkshire Songs of J. H. Eccles, published in 1862, is a notable contribution to the movement whose history is here being recorded. In John Hartley, Halifax possessed the most versatile dialect-writer that Yorkshire has so far produced. For fifty years this writer, who died in 1915, poured forth lyric song and prose tale in unstinted measure. Most of his dialect work found a place in the Original Illuminated Clock Almanac, which he edited from 1867 until his death; but from time to time he gathered the best of his work into book form, and his Yorkshire Lyrics, published in 1898, occupy a place of honour in many a Yorkshire home. The examples from his works here given will serve to illustrate his fine ear for metrical harmony, his imaginative power, and his sympathetic interpretation of Yorkshire character. Of the younger generation of Yorkshire poets, most of them still alive, I must speak more briefly. But it must not be overlooked that, so far from there being any falling off in the volume or quality of dialect-verse, it is safe to say that it has never been in so flourishing a condition as at the present day. Dialect poems are now being written in all parts of the county. Editors of weekly papers welcome them gladly in their columns; the Yorkshire Dialect Society has recently opened the pages of its annual Transactions to original contributions in verse and prose, and every year the printing presses of London and Yorkshire publish volumes of dialect verse. Of individual writers, whose work finds illustration in this anthology, mention may be made of the Rev. W. H. Oxley, whose T' Fisher Folk o' Riley Brig (1888) marks, I believe, the first attempt to interpret in verse the hazardous life of the east-coast fisherman. Farther north, Mr. G. H. Cowling has given us in his A Yorkshire Tyke (1914) a number of spirited and winsome studies of the life and thought of the Hackness peasant. The wold country of the East Riding has found its interpreter in Mr. J. A. Carill, whose Woz'ls (1913) is full of delightful humour, as readers of "Love and Pie" will readily discover for themselves. "The File-cutter's L'ament " (see below), which I have selected from Mr. Downing's volume, Smook thru' a Shevvield Chimla, will show that the Sheffield "blade" is doing his best to carry on the tradition set by Abel Bywater eighty years ago. Airedale still has its poets, among the most ambitious of whom is Mr. Malham-Dembleby, who published in 1912 a volume of verse entitled, Original Tales and Ballads in the Yorkshire Dialect. Mr. F. J. Newboult has deservedly won fame as a prosewriter in dialect; his dialect sketches which have for some years appeared in The Yorkshire Observer are full of broad humour and dramatic power, and his dainty little lyric "Spring" (p. 87) is a sufficient indication that he has also the dower of the poet. In Alderman Ben Turner of Batley Yorkshire possesses a courageous advocate of the social betterment of the working man and woman, and in the midst of a busy life he has, found' time to give utterance to his indignation and his faith in dialect-poems which appeal from the heart to the heart. Mr. Walter Hampson, of Normanton, writes in a lighter vein in his Tykes Abrooad (1911); he is our Yorkshire Mark Twain, and his narrative of the adventures of a little party of Yorkshiremen in Normandy and Brittany is full of humour. Songs are scattered through the story, and one of these, "Owd England," finds a place in this collection. The Colne Valley and the country round Huddersfield has been somewhat slow in responding to the call of the homely muse of dialect but Mr. E. A. Lodge's little volume of verse and prose. entitled Odds an' Ends, marks a successful beginning.
In our account of the history of dialect poetry in Yorkshire it will have been noticed that the chief forms of verse to which local poets have had recourse have been the song, personal or dramatic, the ballad, and the dialogue. Among the most hopeful signs of the times has been the recent extension of dialect to poems of a more sustained character. Within the last twenty years two writers, associated with the far north and the far south of the county respectively, have made the bold attempt to use dialect in narrative poems of larger compass than the simple ballad. These are Mr. Richard Blakeborough, the author of T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg (1896), and Mr. J. S. Fletcher, who, as recently as 1915, published in the dialect of Osgoldcross his Leet Livvy. These two poems are in general character poles apart: that of Mr. Blakeborough is pure romance, whereas Mr. Fletcher never steps aside from the strait path of realism. T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg is steeped in all the eerie witch-lore of the Cleveland moors. The plot is laid in the district round the famous Roseberry Topping, and deals with the adventures which befall a certain Johnny Simpson, who, when crossed in love, seeks the aid of the witches to aid him in his work of vengeance on the woman who has cast him off. The story is told with great vividness, and the author has made an effective use of all the malevolent powers of witchcraft, seconded by the elemental forces of thunder and lightning, to aid him in telling a story of great dramatic power. Leet Livvy, on the other hand, is as sober and restrained as one of the verse-tales of Crabbe, and the only resemblance which it bears to Mr. Blakeborough's witch-story lies in the fact that its hero, like Johnny Simpson, belongs to the peasantry and has suffered at the hands of a woman. The tragic story of "Owd Mattha o' Marlby Moor" is recorded by the sexton whose duty it is to toll the passing bell, and Mr. Fletcher, whose reputation as a novelist is deservedly high, has rendered the narrative with consummate art. The use of dialect enhances the directness and dramatic realism of the story at every turn; the characters stand out sharp and clear, and we are brought face to face with the passion that makes for tragedy. The poem is purged clean of all sentiment and moralising: it is narrative pure and simple, but aglow with the lurid flame of a passion that burns to the very roots of life. It is no exaggeration to say that Leet Livvy is the greatest achievement in Yorkshire dialect poetry up to the present time; let us hope that it is an earnest of even greater things yet to come.
The duty still remains of offering a few words of explanation concerning the poems which find a place in the second part of this anthology, and which I have classified as "traditional poems." It is not contended that all of these are folk-poems in the strict sense of the term, but all of them are of unknown authorship, and for most of them a considerable antiquity may be claimed; moreover, like the folk-song, they owe their preservation rather to oral tradition than to the labours of the scribe. Many of these poems enshrine some of the customs and superstitions of the country-side and carry our thoughts back to a time when the Yorkshireman's habit of mind was far more primitive and childlike than it is to-day. Moreover, though many of the old popular beliefs and rites have vanished before the advance of education and industrialism, the Yorkshireman still clings to the past with a tenacity which exceeds that of the people farther to the south. For example, nowhere in England does the old folk-play which enacts the combats of St. George with his Saracen adversaries enjoy such popularity as in the upper waters of the Calder Valley and in busy Rochdale over the border. This play, known locally as "The Peace [or Pasque, i.e. Easter] Egg," was once acted all over England. Driven from the country-side, where old traditions usually live the longest, it survives amid the smoke-laden atmosphere of cotton-mills and in towns which pride themselves, not without reason, on their love of progress and their readiness to receive new ideas. It is, for our purpose, unfortunate that this fine old play preserves little of the local dialect and is therefore excluded from this anthology.(7) Apart from "The Peace Egg," it is the remote Cleveland country in the North Riding in which the old traditional poetry of Yorkshire has been best preserved. This is the land of the sword-dance, the bridal-garter, and the "mell- supper," the land in which primitive faiths and traditions survive with strange tenacity. The late Canon Atkinson has made this land familiar to us by his fascinating Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, and, to the lover of traditional dialect songs, an even greater service has been rendered by a later gleaner in this harvest-field, Mr. Richard Blakeborough of Norton-on-Tees, whose T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg has already been considered. In his supplement to the little volume which contains that poem, and again in his highly instructive and entertaining Wit, Character, Folklore, and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire, Mr. Blakeborough has brought together a number of traditional songs and proverbial rhymes of great interest, and, to some extent at least, of high antiquity. Many of these have been collected by him among the peasantry, others are taken from a manuscript collection of notes on North Riding folklore made by a certain George Calvert early in the nineteenth century, and now in Mr. Blakeborough's possession.
Of the first importance in this anthology of traditional song are the "Cleveland Lyke-wake Dirge" and "A Dree Neet." The former has been well known to lovers of poetry since Sir Walter Scott included it in his Border Minstrelsy; the latter, I believe, was never published until the appearance of T' Hunt o' Yatton Brigg in 1896. The tragic power and suggestiveness of these two poems is very remarkable. It is, I think, fairly certain that they stand in intimate association with one another and point back to a time when the prevailing creed of Yorkshire was Roman Catholicism. Both depict with deep solemnity the terrors of death and of the Judgment which lies beyond. Whinny Moor appears in either poem as the desolate moorland tract, beset with prickly whin-bushes and flinty stones, which the dead man must traverse on "shoonless feet" on his journey from life. And beyond this moor lies the still more mysterious "Brig o' Dreead," or "' Brig o' Deead," as "A Dree Neet" renders it. It would be tempting to conjecture the precise significance of this allusion, and to connect it with other primitive myths and legends of a similar character; but space fails us, and it may well be that the very vagueness of the allusion is of more haunting tragic power than precise knowledge. It is also interesting to notice the effective use which is made in "A Dree Neet" of all the superstitions which gather about the great pageant of death. The flight of the Gabriel ratchets, or Gabriel hounds, through the sky, the fluttering of bats at the casement and of moths at the candle flame, and the shroud of soot which falls from the chimney of the room where the dying man lies, are introduced with fine effect; while the curious reference to the folk that draw nigh from the other side of the grave has an Homeric ring about it, and recalls the great scene in the Odyssey where the ghosts of Elpenor, Teiresias, and other dead heroes gather about the trench that Odysseus has digged on the other side of the great stream of Oceanus, hard by the dank house of Hades.
It is unnecessary to speak at any length of the other songs, proverbial rhymes, and "nominies" which find a place among the traditional poems in this collection. The mumming-songs, the boisterous "Ridin' t' stang" verses, and all the snatches of folk-song which are, associated with the festive ritual of the circling year either carry their own explanation with them or have been elucidated by those who have written on the subject of Yorkshire customs and folklore. I heartily commend to the reader's notice the three songs entitled "The Bridal Bands," "The Bridal Garter," and "Nance and Tom," which we owe to Mr. Blakeborough, and which present to us in so delightful a manner the picture of the bride tying her garter of wheaten and oaten straws about her left leg and the bride-groom unloosing it after the wedding. It is hoped, too, that the reader may find much that is interesting in the singing-games, verses and the rhymes which throw light upon the vanishing customs, folklore, and faiths of the county. They serve to lift the veil which hides the past from the present, and to give us visions of a world which is fast passing out of sight and out of memory. It is a world where one may still faintly hear the horns of elfland blowing, and where Hob-trush Hob and little Nanny Button-cap wander on printless feet through the star-lit glades; where charms are still recited when the moon is new, and where on St. Agnes' Eve the milkmaid lets the twelve sage-leaves fall from her casement-window and, like Keats's Madeline, peers through "the honey'd middle of the night "for a glimpse of the Porphyro to whom she must pledge her troth.
1. Some years before Thoresby's letter was written, another
Yorkshireman, Francis Brokesby, rector of Rowley in the East
Riding, communicated with Ray about dialect words in use in
his district. See Ray's Collection of English Words, second
edition, pp. 170-73 (1691).
2. It has been republished by the late Professor Skeat in
the English Dialect Society's volume, Nine Specimens of
English Dialects.
3. Two editions of this ballad-opera were published in 1736.
The title of the first (? pirated) edition runs as follows:
A Wonder; or, An Honest Yorkshire-man. A Ballad Opera; As it
is Performed at the Theatres with Universal Applause. In the
second edition the words, "A Wonder," disappear from the
title.
4. Edited by J. O. Halliwell in his Yorkshire Anthology,
1851.
5. The first edition of Ben Preston's poems appeared in 1860
with the title, Poems and Songs in the Dialect of Bradford
Dale.
6. A. Holroyd: A Collection of Yorkshire Ballads, ed. by C.
F. Forshaw. (G. Bell, 1892.)
7. The reader will find a reprint of the West Riding version
of The Peace Egg, with an attempt by the editor of this
anthology to throw light upon its inner meaning, in the
second volume of Essays and Studies of the English
Association (Clarendon Press, 1911).