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This etext was produced by Dave Fawthrop

Contents

• Preface to the etext edition
• Dedication
• Preface
• A Dalesman's Litany
• Cambodunum
• Telling the Bees
• The Two Lamplighters
• Our Beck
• Lord George
• Jenny Storm
• The New Englishman
• The Bells of Kirkby Overblow
• The gardener and the Robin
• Lile Doad
• His last Sail
• One Year older
• The Hungry Forties
• The Flowers of Knaresborough Forest
• The Miller by the Shore
• The Bride's Homecoming
• The Artist
• Marra to Bonney
• Mary Mecca
• The Local Preacher
• The Courting Gate
• Fieldfares
• A Song of the Yorkshire Dales
• The Flower of Wensleydale

Preface to etext edition

I am making a much treasured copy of Songs of the Ridings, F. W. Moorman, Elkin Mathews, Cork Street, London 1918. into etext so that it may enjoy a wider readership.   It is out of Copyright. This Preface, and all minor changes made by me, Dave Fawthrop, are hereby placed in the Public Domain. Enjoy!

The book is a slim volume (70 pages) of 25 Yorkshire Dialect poems.  One of these "A Dalesman's Litany", with slightly different wording, is much quoted in Yorkshire and regularly sung in English folk clubs.  It is wrongly considered as "Traditional" in the folk scene.

The book is rare in paper copies, and of great interest to Yorkshire people with a bent towards the Yorkshire Dialect.  As one who was born in Hull and lives in Halifax :-), I am proud to be a Yorshireman

In reading this one must remember that these poems were written about 1900.  Moorman is describing a world which is long forgotten and totally alien to a modern reader.  His peasants no longer exist. Modern farmers would consider the word an insult.  I can think of no acquaintance who would consider him/her self an artisan.  In the hundred years which have passed since then the Yorkshire dialect has changed quite dramatically.  Even the English language has changed so much that I had to look up several footnotes in the dictionary.   It has been noted, rightly,  by several people from uk.local.yorkshire that many words and pronunciations used are now only found in the Geordie, Cumbrian, or Lowland Scots dialects.  Prof Moorman clearly used the dialect as he heard it in about 1900,   These must have been lost in Yorkshire over the last one hundred years.

It will be archived in the Project Gutenberg  http://www.gutenberg.net/ when it is completed, but it is made available here parts become available, in response to email requests.

There is a mass of, out of copyright, Yorkshire Dialect prose and verse.  If you wish to make this available to a wide audience, why not make some of it into etext?   A good place to start searching is the Preface to F. W. Moorman's Yorkshire Dialect Poems (1673 -1915).   Just announce what you are doing on uk.local.yorkshire, to avoid two people doing the same work.  For more information on etext see www.gutenberg.net.

Dave Fawthrop   <[email protected]>

Dedication

Preface

Abut two years ago I published a collection of Yorkshire dialect poems,  chosen from many authors and extending over a period of two hundred and fifty years(1). The volume was well received, and there are abundant signs that the interest in dialect literature is steadily growing in all parts of the county and beyond its borders. What is most encouraging is to find that the book has found an entrance into the homes of Yorkshire peasants and artisans where the works of our great national poets are unknown. I now essay the more venturesome task of publishing dialect verses of my own. Most of the poems contained in this little volume have appeared, anonymously, in the Yorkshire press, and I have now decided to reissue them in book form and with my name on the title-page.

A generation ago the minor poet was, in the eyes of most Englishmen, an object of ridicule. Dickens and Thackeray had done their worst with him: we knew him--or her--as Augustus Snodgrass or Blanche Amory--an amiable fool or an unamiable minx. The twentieth century has already, in its short course, done much to remove this prejudice, and the minor poet is no longer expected to be apologetic; his circle of readers, though small, is sympathetic, and the outside public is learning to tolerate him and to recognise that it is as natural and wholesome for him to write and publish his verses as it is for the minor painter to depict and exhibit in public his interpretation of the beauty and power which he sees in human life and in nature. All this is clear gain, and the time may not be far distant when England will again become what it was in Elizabethan days - a nest of
singing birds, where te minor poets will be able to take their share in the chorus of song,