Bishop William Stubbs (1825-1901): a devout Yorkshireman

This is something I meant to write before, but it got lost in other work.  I'm afraid the alignment of text in this is a little haphazard - Google Blogger was not co-operating!  

William Stubbs by Hubert von Herkomer

William Stubbs, scholar, clergyman, Regius Professor of History at Oxford and finally Bishop of Oxford, was much loved.   A contributor to the Bucks Herald on 18 January 1802 in a column looking back over the year in the diocese of Oxford wrote 

The one death which marks and makes a loss to diocese, Church, country, and literature is that of good Bishop Stubbs, kind Bishop Stubbs, grand Bishop Stubbs, of the winning face, fatherly heart, humorous fancy, fine nature, wide and magnanimous tolerance, keen sympathies.  

William Stubbs was born in Knaresborough in 1825 and his roots in Yorkshire were of importance to him to the end of his days.  "So long as I last, I continue a devout Yorkshireman," he wrote not long before his death.

He grew up in a place rich in historical associations with important national events.  All around him were places where his forebears had lived for generations – in the written records the Stubbs family can be found, farmers and yeomen, in the Forest of Knaresborough from the mid 14th century.  In Bishop William Stubbs & Knaresborough, an article by Robert M Koch in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal (Vol 82, 2010), you can find an evocative account of how the layers of history with which he was surrounded laid the foundation for William's career as a pioneering mediaeval historian.

He was drawn to the study of history very early on in his life and he recommended local and personal history to others as a way of connecting with the social and political history of the country.

His biographer W H Hutton (the biography can be read here) wrote that in 1886 William gave a talk in Crewe in which he took himself as an example.  Hutton doesn't give his source for his quotation and there are errors which William would not have made – perhaps it was an early draft or a newspaper report.

I wonder if the talk was at the Crewe Mechanics' Institute.  He presented prizes there on at least one occasion when he was Bishop of Chester and you will see that at the end of this quotation he encourages them with his own example of success, saying "please to remember that I am just as much a working man as any of you":

You do not mind my taking myself for an illustration.  

Where was I born? Under the shadow of the great castle where the murderers of Thomas Becket took refuge in 1170, and where Richard II was imprisoned in 1399.  My grandfather's house stood on the site where Earl Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner in 1322.  My first visits were paid as a child to the scene where Stephen defeated the Scots and where Cromwell defeated Prince Rupert; my great-grandfather had a farm in the township where King Harold of England defeated Harald Hardrada;  and one of my remoter forefathers had a gift of land from John of Gaunt in the very same neighbourhood where I was born.   

As you can see, William is referring to some famous battles fought in the North and West Ridings.  His forefather John Stubbs had a grant of newly cleared land at Birstwith in the Forest of Knaresborough from the prince and soldier John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, on 27 February 1387.  I think it wasn't his great-grandfather who farmed at Stamford Bridge, but his 3xgreat-grandfather, John Wright.  Further on, it was his great-grandfather who was out in the Gordon riots.

Now he turns – he was a precociously clever little boy – to events that happened when he was four and five: the arson at York Minster in 1829; the death of the King on 26 June 1830; the July Revolution  of 1830 in France when Louis Philippe, Duc d'Orléans, overthrew Charles X; and the election of the statesman Henry Brougham in 1830.  Brougham was a major force in the passing of the 1832 Reform Act and the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.  

What do I remember first?  Well, perhaps the first thing I do remember was the burning of York Minster – then the death of George IV, then the second French Revolution, then the election of Lord Brougham for Yorkshire, then the Reform Bill and the Emancipation of the West India Slaves. What sort of connection had I with soldiers and churchwardens, and such like?  Oh, my grandfather was out in Lord George Gordon's Riots; and all of my ancestors, so far as I can trace, served the office of churchwarden in their time.    

You may smile at this – perhaps I was lucky in the circumstances of birth and associations – but mind you, on every one of the points that I have mentioned hangs a lot of history to which my mind was drawn by the circumstances that I have jotted down, and from which the studies began which, not to speak of smaller successes, have landed me in the dignified position to-night of having to advocate the study of history before an audience of the most intelligent people in England!  

You like, I dare say, to be told so.  As I am flattering myself as you see, I may give you a little of the overflow of my self-complacency; and please to remember that I am just as much a working man as any of you, every step of the life which is now drawing to an end having had, under God's blessing, to be worked out by my own exertions, so that to some extent I may put myself forward as a precedent for you.

He had indeed worked his way through life by his own exertions.

Festivities in Stokesley become respectable

In the Cleveland market town of Stokesley at the beginning of the 19th century, festivities were lively and raucous.  As the decades went by, organised and decorous Victorian celebrations took their place.  This is a story about Stokesley – but it will have been true of so many towns and villages!

As I explain in Radicalism in Stokesley in the 1820s, during the Napoleonic Wars the town was particularly outward looking and full of activity.  There were nearly twenty inns and the Stokesley markets were the trading hub of a wide area.  Handloom weaving was at its height and weavers were known for their independence of thought.  The town was very much part of the coastal economy of Cleveland and was the home in the winter months of East India Company captains, merchant seamen, whalers and men of the Royal Navy – and there were plenty of places for them to drink and spend their wages.  

When the Wars ended in 1815, a severe economic depression followed – but all the same, during the 1820s when George IV was on the throne, Stokesley was a Georgian town riven by fractious debate and with a raucous sense of humour.

A lasting reminder of one of the acrimonious debates is the collection of pamphlets produced in the Stokesley Paper Wars (1822-4).  This was a war of the printed word between the radical watchmaker Robert Armstrong and the Methodist tradesman Thomas Mease (much more about his ventures here).  It was a bitter and noisy debate between the supporters of radicalism, Freethought and atheism on the one hand and the supporters of religion and orthodoxy on the other.   

That wasn't the only division – there was also ill-feeling between the various forms of Christianity.  The injustice of the system of tithes lay behind this because it meant that the Methodists, Calvinists and other Nonconformists, who were already financing their own chapels, had to support the Church of England as well in the person of its local representative, Stokesley's very well-to-do rector.  Thomas Mease was an active opponent of tithes and, according to his enemy Robert Armstrong, used to go to the parish church with his friend Robert Kneeshaw "for the purpose of laughing at the Parson". 

The town's bawdy sense of humour can be seen in the newspaper report of an event that took place in the spring of 1825.  The people gave themselves over to hours of fun to celebrate the moment when a 16 year old youth married a 55 year old woman.  The church and factory bells rang, the town-crier made his announcement, the barber shaved the groom with a 30-inch razor, everyone followed the town band to the church and after the ceremony the band led the married pair, carried on chairs and followed by a crowd of people, around the town.  "Rustic festivities followed", said the newspaper report, which can be found here in the account of the flax-spinning mill behind the High Street, where the bride and groom both worked.

By 1828 things were changing and Clarke's Topographical Dictionary described Stokesley as having rather an "air of retirement than business".  But it was still a lively place – in the winter of 1832/1833, there was something like a riot when the Tory candidate Hon William Duncombe visited the town electioneering.  Thomas Mease, who opposed Duncombe's politics, was said to have instigated it.