Now Then (eBook)

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OUTSIDERS

We just thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else, we didn’t realise they hated each other so much.

David Cameron, prime minister, 2014

In 2021, the Yorkshire Society issued a report into the future of the region. The survey answers were to be expected: people overwhelmingly saw themselves as from Yorkshire, not England; twice as many respondents would vote for a Yorkshire parliament than against it; a quarter said, yes, they could see Yorkshire being an independent country. Part of this is down to a superiority complex and part to the scars and suspicion of outsiders, southrons and offcumdens. Yorkshire welcomes you with terms and conditions and an understanding that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not coming for you.

Aliens and zombies

Before heading back to Tadcaster, the brewery town set between Leeds and York where I grew up (someone had to), I dug around in some archives. I came across one story that seemed to sum up the perceptions that outsiders have of Yorkshire, namely that people there are suspicious of them. It was the spring of 2012, and as the rest of Britain was warming up for the Olympic Games in a southern city called London, a town councillor in the Stakesby ward of Whitby went the extra mile to prove that people from Yorkshire were, as many had long suspected, different.

Tradition dictated that denizens of Yorkshire were mean, blunt and marinated in beef dripping, but Simon Parkes felt the other-worldliness went deeper, even past the perennial calls to turn the nation’s largest county into a republic. Councillor Parkes maintained that he had been adopted by a nine-foot-tall green alien and had been for a life-altering spin in her spaceship when he was only eleven. He elaborated in a series of internet videos, but had grown weary of explaining himself by the time the national media got wind of the tale. ‘It’s a personal matter and doesn’t affect my work,’ he told the Guardian. ‘People don’t want to talk to me about aliens and I’m more interested in fixing someone’s leaking roof or potholes.’ The mayor of Whitby said he was ‘completely in the dark’, but added generously that everyone was entitled to a private life. Effortlessly shifting perspective, Councillor Parkes then gained the support of Whitby’s townsfolk by turning his extraterrestrial parenthood into a parochial issue. ‘I get more sense out of the aliens than out of Scarborough Town Hall.’

Of course, as everyone in Whitby, Scarborough and the wider Wolds knows, everyone’s a bit funny when you get past Woodall Services, but it was an undeniably fresh take on the status of the outsider. This distrust is an age-old fact rather than fantasy, and if you get a few minutes, I heartily recommend looking through the Tripadvisor reviews for Wharram Percy, a deserted medieval village between York and Scarborough, and drink in the disillusionment you will find: ‘The angry farmer that lives next door decided to come out and scare us off by shooting his shotgun in the air for some unknown reason. I won’t be visiting again unless I have a police escort and a decent bulletproof vest. Can only recommend this place to someone who either doesn’t care about their life or would like to commit suicide. It’s a no from me.’ Or: ‘There was a boarded-up farmhouse and the remains of a church but not very much more to be seen. Disappointing couple of hours. Won’t be back.’ A more optimistic poster suggests: ‘May be of interest to aficionados of cross-country hikes and lumpy meadows.’ But the gist is undeniable, and the bottom line comes from the definitively blunt subject heading of another review: ‘You can see why it’s deserted’.

Why it is deserted has been a long source of debate. What we know for sure is that by 1086, William the Conqueror had confiscated Wharram, and the Percy family, best known for the less controversial village of Bolton Percy, near York, came to control the settlement, lumpy meadows and all. Southerners paid little attention until the 1960s, when an archaeological dig unearthed 137 human bones. This was a good haul by any digger’s standards, but those archaeologists must have been a slightly apathetic bunch, as it was not until 2017 that a team from Historic England and the University of Southampton looked closer and an ugly truth emerged. The bones were not just graveyard relics but had also been burnt and mutilated with axes, swords and knives. It was deduced that this had been an attempt to stop the corpses rising and wreaking havoc on the good, if undeniably violent, folk of Wharram Percy. Lingering malevolent life forces in individuals who had committed evil deeds when properly alive was big back then, when the preferred way of dealing with a revenant – or zombie, in modern parlance – was simply to dig up the corpse, dismember it and then have a good old sing-song round the campfire.

In his twelfth-century hit Life and Miracles of St Modwenna, Geoffrey of Burton insisted this behaviour was commonplace. He wrote of two men rising from the grave in another village and, despite the not inconsiderable burden of having coffins on their backs, proceeding to terrorise villagers, who developed a tendency to be found dead the following morning. This was before Agatha Christie, and so the villagers did what any decent medieval person would do and, ignoring parish council protocols, started to rip out the hearts of the undead. Severed heads were placed between the legs of the corpses in a final act of indignity, although in hindsight it was generally accepted that dignity was probably not at the forefront of a zombie’s warped mind.

I had visited Wharram Percy a couple of years before deciding to write this book, and could not help but think that Historic England had not played on this in the same way that the more mercenary entrepreneur might. There is no zombie gift shop, no black or blue plaques, not even a café selling headless beer. In fact, there is no evidence of the walking dead at all. It is basically a field exercise. Perhaps Historic England deserves credit for this. History owes as much to imagination as to fact, and if you sit in the lumpy meadow between the lake and the cemetery, it is not hard to envisage a dark night and some flaming pitchforks.

Many people will recognise that Yorkshire. For them it is a small-minded place, like one of those interview rooms in the detective programmes where you can see in but they can’t see out, and no doubt these critics would warm to another theory, namely that the mutilations were down to a fear not of revenants, but outsiders. This seemed plausible to me, but Alistair Pike, professor in Archaeological Science at the University of Southampton, dismissed the idea. ‘Strontium isotopes in teeth reflect the geology on which an individual was living as their teeth formed in childhood,’ he began in an assessment in the Yorkshire Post. ‘A match between the isotopes in the teeth and the geology around Wharram Percy suggests they grew up in an area close to where they were buried, possibly in the village.’ The professor did admit that this had caught his team of isotope testers off guard; they had feared this was Yorkshire, imbued with the spirit of Brian Glover, baring its teeth to newcomers. ‘This was surprising to us as we first wondered if the unusual treatment of the bodies might relate to them being from further afield rather than local.’

We know the village was deserted not long after 1636. Skeletal scientists, archaeologists and historians wondered if it was down to this ghoulish past, or perhaps the Black Death. Eventually they deduced it was sheep. In the post-medieval period, common land was closed off by walls and ditches, and the price of wool meant landowners turned away from arable farming. Across Britain, settlements succumbed to depopulation, and families who had lived by the plough were rendered useless. They left, and for the living, the dead and the disgruntled of Tripadvisor, there would be no coming back.

Who do you think you are?

2 November 2022 is a historic date, and I take a drive over to Langton Matravers, near Swanage in Dorset. This small village is set in the heart of the Purbeck Hills. You could easily call it God’s Own Country. Here today is where the three norths will meet for the first time over Britain. Three norths? you ask. Well, yes. There is true north, which is the direction of the lines of longitude that go to the North Pole. Grid north caters to cartography and nods to the fact that maps are flat representations of a curved surface. These norths merge two degrees west of Greenwich. Then there is magnetic north, which is where your compass points, though unhelpfully it changes due to variations in the earth’s magnetic field. Indeed, it has been moving up to 30 miles a year, according to the British Geological Survey. Leeds University scientists have also found that two competing magnetic blobs on the earth’s outer core have caused magnetic north to move from Canada to Siberia. Now, for the first time in British mapping history, the three norths have chosen Langton Matravers as their meeting place. This sounds confusing. The most northern place in Britain today is just off the South West Coast Path. The one man I see as I reach the village sounds equally confused when I ask if he’s here for the three norths. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m waiting for the boilerman.’

If the north is confusing as a single entity, Yorkshireness can be just as baffling....