The story comes from Blount’s Fragmenta Antiquitatis (1815) via T F Thiselton Dyrer's British Popular Customs Present and Past (1911) but has no date. William Aislabie, mentioned below was born in 1700 and died in 1781, which puts it in the early- or mid-1700s..
 
I grew up in Hutton Conyers – it's near Ripon. We used to go to Ripon sometimes, when we had lambs to sell, or eggs and honey. My father would talk to the other men and my mother and I would go to buy fruit and vegetables. Sometimes she would buy me a little sweet pastry if I was good. My father told me about the Hornblower, who blew his horn at nine o clock at night at all four corners of the obelisk. Sometimes I would pretend to be the man blowing his horn, but that meant I didn't always get the pastry, though sometimes I swear I saw my father laughing and my mother telling him off. Those days he would give me a sweet from his pocket, so I wasn't too sad
 
We lived in a cottage with a garden where my mother raised hens and had her beehives and apple trees. I loved watching the bees on sunny summer afternoons, until my mother chased me indoors to do my spelling or help her make the bread.
 
William Aislabie was lord of the soil – that always sounded like he needed a wash to me – and my father and other men in the village kept their sheep on Hutton Conyers Moor. My father was the shepherd for the township of Hutton Conyers, and he looked out for all of the sheep. I knew the days when he'd had to move the sheep because the lord's shepherd demanded the best bits of grass, because he would come home cross and wouldn't play with me.  
 
On the first day of the year, my mother made a big apple pie from the apples stored in the cellar and a peck of flour, and my father took this to the bailiff, along with a two penny sweetcake he bought from the market. He had to take a wooden spoon as well. I didn't understand why until one day he agreed to take me along, provided I was as quiet as the little mice that live in the outhouse.
 
We got to the bailiff's house, and my father needn't have worried about me being quiet – I was too scared to say a word. There were the shepherds I knew from the moors, and the lord and the bailiff and steward looking tall and stern. I sat quiet in a corner and watched my father take up his pie and cake. It was as big as our oven, about 18 inches across, and the bailiff measured it with his rule.
 
He said that he would return it and fine the town if it wasn't big enough. I must have looked scared, because my father looked at me and winked. The bailiff cut it into four parts – one for the steward, one for the tenant of the coneywarren, and the rest cut into six, one piece for each shepherd. My father always brought the pieces home for my mother and I, and my favourite was the one that had an inner pie all filled with prunes, from the the shepherd of Rainton.
 
The sweetcakes were cut up just the same, and then the bailiff brought out an earthen pot of furmenty and a little bowl of mustard. You don't know what furmenty is? It's a porridge of wheat boiled up with broth, and it's tasty on a cold day.
 
The bailiff mixed mustard in, and took the pot outside, into his garth, and gave each shepherd a slice of cheese and a penny roll. The steward took a large spoonful, then the tenant of the warren, and then my father was the first shepherd to take a spoonful, using his own wooden spoon. My father told me that eating the furmenty showed that he was loyal to the lord. The last shepherd told the bailiff that he had forgotten his spoon to eat the furmenty, and I was worried and I asked what would happen to him. My father laughed and put me up on my shoulders so I could see. The bailiff’s face was cross, and then I realised that he was pretending, and was actually trying not to smile. The other shepherds made the man without a spoon lay down on the ground and eat out of the pot. He looked so funny when he stood up, yellow furmenty all over his face.
 
Everyone had a glass of ale and drank the health of the lord of the manor, and then we went back into the bailiff's house. I was so tired that father carried me all the way home, wrapped up tight in a blanket against the cold wind. 

The North Star, Monday 27 December 1886 and other sources
 
It was Christmas Day yesterday, and we had such a treat. We went into the chapel for the service in the morning, and it was so pretty. Holly on the walls and pews, and a cross of Christmas berries over the communion table. I can’t make out the words, but my friend read them to me – Emmanuel, God with us, they said. We had cake and hot sweet tea afterwards, which was grand.
 
We had us dinner, at two. We had roast beef with baked and boiled potatoes, and a pint of beer, which was a gift from the Landlord of the Schooner Inn. And there was plum pudding as well. The lady who works in the kitchen, who sometimes comes to talk to me, said that the puddings were made with 35 pounds of currents, 20 pounds of raisins, 21 pounds of sugar and 30 eggs. I would have liked to see them stir and boil that.
 
The dining hall was full of decorations made out of bright coloured paper. All the men got an ounce of tobacco, and the old ladies got snuff. I got tea and an orange – it smelled like foreign places and spices – and the children got sweets and nuts. My Nancy’s face was a picture.
 
In the evening, we saw a magic lantern display, which was so clever and so merry, and the old men sang songs. There was cake too, but I was so full I couldn’t eat another thing.

Dates back to the 17th century or earlier
 
Back when I was a little girl, I played hide and seek in the marketplace, running around the stalls full of oranges and vegetables and birds and rabbits for the Christmas table. I peered out between the tables, looking for my brother, and I saw a ghost. It had a white horse’s skull with black eyes, and it floated in the air, and there were huntsmen, shouting and laughing and singing. There was a fiddle and a fife and a drum. The ghost chased people and then fell to the ground. The men played their hunting horns and he jumped back up. The ghost saw me and snapped his jaws, and I screamed so loudly that my brother came running. I had nightmares all through that Christmas, and my mama came every night to comfort me. My papa explained that it wasn’t real, but the bad dreams still came. So, he took me to meet the man who played the Poor Old Hoss. He showed me the skull, with black glass in its eye sockets, and the black cloak that made it look like it was floating in the dark. He let me hold the pole that supported the skull and showed me how to make its jaws open and shut. He told me that they sang the story of the horse, from his birth, then growing up, getting old and dying, then coming back to life, like the year getting to its end and then starting again.
 
My nightmares stopped, but I still don't really like horses.
 

​On the darkest day of the year, we visit the stones on the moor.
 
My father told me the same story every year, that the men of the tribe, led by my father’s father, put the stones up. My father lit the winter fires on the day that the shadows lined up. Now my father is gone, and he had no son, tonight I will be the one to tell the story and light the fire that brings the sun back.

Yorkshire Post, 2 September 1936

There’s a lot of sea frets round here – days when you can’t see one end of the street from the other  – and those are the days when the ships run aground. Early this year – January I think– well, months ago, anyway, there was a sea fret and the Heatherfield cargo boat from Liverpool went ashore, and it’s been sitting there ever since. It's September now and its been there so long it feels like part of the coastline, and there's always a line of seagulls across its top using it as a look out, when the salvage crew isn't aboard.

Yesterday I was in my sitting room, waiting for the postman with a parcel from my sister – the one who married a fisherman and went to live in Hartlepool, not the one who went away to London – I must tell you about her one day – anyway, I saw the Harvest Queen salvage crew working on the Heatherfield, getting the scrap iron off.

Something didn’t look quite right, and I saw that the lifeboat, the one they'd been using to ferry them to and from the Heatherfield, had come adrift. Perhaps someone hadn't tied it on properly – they'll get an earful for that. The little lifeboat capsized and got washed towards the shore.

Well, that meant the men on the Heatherfield were stuck. All six of them.

I shouted to Mr George Crabtree, the plumber who was looking at the leak under my kitchen sink, and off he ran to get Mr Oliver Storm, who was on the shore seeing to his nets. The two of them took a motorboat out. They got to the boat, but the swell tossed them about so much that the crew couldn’t climb in.

I could see Mr Crabtree and Mr Storm waving their arms about at each other, and then one of them started tying knots in a piece of rope – there’s always plenty of rope in a fishing boat. They tied up some kind of lifeline – it looked more like a cat’s cradle to me – and four men jumped down into the motorboat. But there were still two left, who had to tie themselves up in rope and be pulled through the waves. They got back on shore bruised and battered, soaked through and shivering – it might only be September but there was a chill in the air.

That wasn’t the only thing yesterday. Some visitors – relatives of the Storm family someone said to me, though the Storms I know would be too embarrassed to admit it. Well, these visitors had walked out to Cowling Scar. That’s the flat rock that goes out to the right of the beach at low tide. The one over there. It’s a fine spot to sit if you have time to do that sort of thing. I hear the views are good, but the tide comes in fast.
Well, the three women had been reading and hadn’t see the waves coming. Someone on the beach ran to get help, and Mr Thomas Storm – that’s Mr Oliver Storm’s brother you know, and there’s many a Storm in this village – well, he and Mr Harrison went out in a boat to pick the women up. By the time the boat was heading back, the rock they were on had been covered up by the waves. That would have given them quite a wetting, and perhaps it will learn them for next time they want to read a book.
​
All in all, it was quite a day. I’ve never known anything like it. My neighbour said that the only thing that didn’t happen to us yesterday was a visit by this sea serpent which is supposed to be off the Yorkshire coast. I don’t know about that, but I do know there’s still a leak under my kitchen sink.
 

Dear James
 
It’s been a long time since I wrote to you and I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know whether I would see you again.
 
Growing up together on your father’s estate, we saw each other every day. We played together. We studied together until I had to go and work in the kitchen. We walked in the garden and talked. And then you went away to war. To France. When you left, we were just children, but when you came home you had become a man.
 
My father told me that I had to keep away from you. That we were both grown and we needed to have friends from our own class. I watched you out with your father from my window in the gatekeeper’s lodge, and you didn’t even look for me.
 
That night you found me. You said that you were sorry. And you kissed me. It was the first time I had ever been kissed. You told me stories of the front, and you cried in my arms.
 
The next day you went back to war.
 
I didn’t have a mother to explain what was happening to me. Your mother’s maid, a girl not much older than me, told me that I was having a child.
 
Your mother found out. Said that I wasn’t to tell anyone. Not even you. Told me that my father wouldn’t lose his job if I married the gardener’s boy and went up to live in Northumberland on your uncle’s estate. Albert is kind. He looks after me and will bring Matilda up as his own.
 
I am making a bodice for our baby daughter from a linen sheet and scraps of lace, and I have sewn your name inside a seam, where no-one will see it.
 
I am going to burn this letter. But I just wanted to have one last chance to write these words. To say, James, I love you. I am ever your Lizzie

Lord have mercy on us all – they are going to blow us up. They’ve been and done and put the gas in at the Wesleyan Chapel and none of us will be safe in our beds.

They make the gas from coal, so my neighbour said. The smell – there’s nothing to describe it. The coal cart, with its wheels on skids, comes all the way down the hill from the railway station and ends up at the retort house behind the inn. The boys coming in the fields huddle next to the furnace to get warmed up. 

On Sunday last, Reverend Stokes told us he had raised £8 to fit gas lights and a boy lit them up. There was such a sound of popping that Mrs Hamsey and I ran out in fear, our aprons over our heads. Our Martha came to the house and told me not to be so daft, but you’re not getting me back in that place. Not as long as I live. God will have to find me up the hill at St Stephens. 

​I never quite saw the point of swimming in the sea. And when I heard the story about Mr Landsen from my friend Jane, who'd read it in the paper that she gets from the butcher when she cleans his house – well, that just showed I was right.
 
My friend Jane knew the lady in the story – Mrs Olaf Landsen – May Jeffrey as was. Jane's family were Quakers in Scarborough and May was a Scarborough lady who had met Mr Landsen when she was on a walking holiday in Norway. Jane said that the lady played the piano and the violin most beautifully, and that she would play the violin to the trees and the birds as she walked. Can you imagine that? I wonder if the birds sang back to her.
 
Well, apparently May Jeffrey married this Olaf Landsen two years ago. Some kind of novelist, though I'm sure I've never seen his books at the subscription library in Whitby. Jane was there when they got wed – 1894, that would be. Lovely it was, Jane said – the bride in a white costume and Mr Landsen looking so fine. The Meeting House had been sold and the new one not yet built, so they married in the Registrar's office.
 
But that's not telling you the story, is it. Well, Mr Landsen had drowned, down at Stoupe Beck. It's a week ago now, because the butcher gets the newspaper from the baker, who gets it from the vicar, who gets it from the doctor. But news is still news when you've not heard it before. Jane came round with the paper, and we read the story together.
 
Mr and Mrs Landsen had been staying at Robin Hood's Bay for 12 months, so it said, and they went to the beach near Stoupe Beck to swim. It's pretty there, but the sea round here is as cold as cold, even on a summer's day. And the currents on that bit of the water are strong, so the fishermen say. I go down to the bay to collect the lobster pots for mending, and that's as close as I'm getting to the water. Why go in the sea when you've got a cosy kitchen and a sunny little yard.
 
Mr Landsen went into bathe. He was a good swimmer and went out some distance, but he got into trouble. As I said, the currents can be powerful around here. Jane said she'd heard from the Quakers that Mrs Landsen went in first and then she came out and gave her husband her bathing dress to swim in as they'd only bought one with them.
 
The paper said that there was a Mr Owen on the beach with two other men. He was from some place called Christchurch in Oxford. That's a long way to travel to see the sea, I think. Well, anyway, they heard Mrs Landsen shouting for help. Mr Owen was a strong swimmer, and he was the first to reach Mr Landsen, but the current meant that he couldn't rescue him, and they both sank under the waves. Mr George Hutton, who was driving his horse and cart on the sands, went in and pulled Mr Owen out unconscious, but couldn't get Mr Landsen. They had to give Mr Owen artificial respiration to get him breathing again. Poor Mrs Landsen – she wouldn't leave the beach because she really believed her husband had floated out to sea and reached some rocks, and was just waiting for rescue. I wonder if they've found his body yet.
 
Mr Hutton and Mr Owen were so brave. Not everyone round here can swim, you see. Some of the fishermen see it as bad luck – to be able to swim, that is – because they think it means your boat will sink one day. I think I will just stick to my kitchen and my sunny yard with its pots of lavender and rosemary and mint. And my cup of tea. 

Well. I'm so cross I don't know what to do with myself. You will never guess what that Mr Farsyde has done now. Look! Look at this handbill! He's gone and told the village that after next Thursday – 13 May 1864 that is – we have to ask his permission to dry our clothes at the drying grounds. I ask you.

You don't know what the drying grounds are? Well, you're a lucky one then. Got someone to do your washing for you have you? They do it different in the city I expect. It's where we dry our fishnets, and our washing. And he owns it. We've always used the drying grounds, but now he says it's an 'intolerable nuisance'. But where else can we dry our nets and our sheets? And the baby's tailclouts? Not in the house. There's not the space with me and Alfred and his mother and father. And the damp goes straight to his father's chest.

And if we don't get the special leave and licence he's asking for? He's just going to take all our drying things away. Our clothes, our nets and sails. Our washing lines and posts. Well, probably not him. He'll get someone as works for him to do it. And he says he'll auction what he takes away. Well, I can tell you something. He's not going to sell my drawers and my Alfred's nets. Over my dead body.

And the land where we take our ashes and our night soil – you know what night soil is, don't you?, Of course he owns that field too. We can carry on with that at least, as we've got a long lease on our cottage in Fisherhead. But some folk are going to have to ask now, and what will they do if he says no? Can you imagine.

​I was talking to Mrs Granger at the drying grounds – her brother's got a shop in the village – and she said that he rents from Mr Farsyde and the old bugger wants him to sign a new agreement. And new agreements are never good things. My Alfred said I shouldn’t talk like that about Mr Farsyde. He is Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant, and he owns our house and the drying grounds. So I should hush and do what he says. I don't know about that. But I do know that I don't expect Mr Farsyde ever had to do his own basket of washing. Or dry it neither. Perhaps if he did he might not be so particular.

​My great-granddaughter Annie gave me that postcard. She found it in a shop in that London. That’s where she lives now. Have you ever been to London? I’ve never been. Whitby is far enough for me.
 
That’s me in the picture. Annie didn’t believe me. She’s only 20. Doesn’t know anything of the world.
 
I was 17. I was married to William Porritt, and he and his dad had a coble – that’s what we called the fishing boats – at Runswick. I met Will when my father, who was the carpenter in Hinderwell, made some chairs for his father and Will came in his cart to collect them. He was so handsome, in his white shirt and red neckerchief. His hair was as black as a raven's wing, and he had strong brown arms. We got married that year, at midsummer, and my ma gave me her best dress to wear, with roses pinned at the neck. Roses for Rose, she said. She liked my Will.
 
Our first baby was born on an ice-cold windy day in January 1901. Her name was Martha, and she was the prettiest thing you ever saw, with shiny black curls just like her dad's. She died last year. Seventy she was. That broke my heart more than any other loss. Even Will.
 
When the men were late back from fishing, or when there was a storm brewing up out at sea, there were always women watching from windows, or standing on the sand, wrapped tight in woollen shawls. An old woman waiting for her grandson, a child watching for her father. A fisherwife looking out for her husband.
 
That day, I’d seen Will off at dawn, warm in the gansey I’d knitted him, with his bottle of tea and his bread and cheese wrapped tight in oilskin to keep out the salt water. The sun shone on the waves and the water was smooth as a millpond. It looked like a good day for fishing and all the men were going out, shouting their farewells to their women.
 
I was scrubbing the step when I felt the weather change. The wind shifted around, and there was a chill in the air, cold even for April. Clouds started to gather. I'd put Martha down, but the wind got louder and rattled the shutters. She woke up sobbing.
 
The sun set and the men weren't home. I grabbed Martha and tied her tight to me in my shawl. I ran to the sea, and other women joined me, all looking out into the darkness and the crashing waves to see the cobles. The wind blew cold, and rain and sea spray soaked us.
 
I heard someone shouting for the lifeboat through the wind and the waves, and I grabbed my friend Nancy's hand – the ‘Cape of Good Hope’ was in the boathouse, but all the lifeboat men, including my Will and Nancy's John, were out fishing. My heart sank.
 
And then a group of men came forward – the men who were too old or too injured to go out on the fishing boats every day. Will’s grandfather and Nancy's father were among them. They pulled open the doors of the boathouse, pulled the chocks free and winched the boat on its carriage down the slipway to the sand. We watched them try to push the boat on its huge wheels, but it just wouldn't move. A woman ran to help them. Nancy grabbed my daughter and her baby son and thrust them into her grandmother’s arms and pulled me towards the boat. Soon there were about twenty of us women gathered round the boat. The fitter men scrambled aboard, pulling the others up behind them, and we threw their cork lifejackets up to them.
 
The strongest of us pushed the launching racks from behind, and the others pulled the ropes at the front. It was icy cold and wet, and the sand and pebbles pulled at my feet. My hands were numb, and I pushed so hard I could almost feel my bones creak. It was like pushing a house and it was only the thought of Will that kept me going. Just when I thought I couldn't push any more, I felt it start to move. Inch by slow and painful inch.
 
The boat eventually rolled into the waves after what seemed like hours. Everyone who was at the front ran to the back and we shoved and shouted as the boat finally floated. Freezing cold and soaked to the waist from the sea, hair coming down and bonnets blowing away, we huddled and waited and the old women wrapped us in blankets.
 
The old men fought the waves, and then we heard them shout over the sound of the storm – the cobles were coming home.
 
The cobles crunched onto the sand one by one, and women and children ran to help the men pull the boats up on to the shore. The rest of us stood and watched and waited. And then the beach was empty of fisherwives, and I stood there alone amongst the fishermen. I'd made Nancy go back and her grandmother took Martha home with her, as the little mite was blue with cold. The lifeboat stood out at sea, fighting the waves, and I strained my eyes for any sign of Will’s boat.
 
And… there he was. The lifeboat waited until he was on the shore. He and his father pulled the boat onto the sand, and I just stood there, dazed and daft. I ran into his arms and held him tight. I felt like I would never let go, until his father gruffly told me to get home, because they had a lifeboat to put away. I trudged home up the hill, weeping for I don't know what. Behind me I could hear the exhausted men who'd rowed the lifeboat being taken home by their families, and the lifeboat crew, saved by their own boat, hauling it back into the boathouse.
 
I said I’d never been further than Whitby – well that wasn’t true. We women were taken to Manchester, which was full of smoke and noise and people, and given dinner and a photograph and a plaque. That photograph on the postcard. What a lot of fuss and nonsense. We only did what any fisherwife would.