Have you recovered from springing forward yet? UK based readers of this blog will be aware that this morning marked the date when clocks go forward an hour – we lose an hour of sleep, and to me it always feels like a personal insult when that alarm clock goes off! There is one other annual occasion taking place today – and it’s one the Brontë’ sisters would have been very aware of: Palm Sunday.
Being children of the Haworth curate, Reverend Patrick Brontë’, the Brontë’ siblings would have taken their pews at the front of St. Michael’s and All Angels’ Church for a traditional service one week before Easter Sunday. Many people have been marking the same thing today, and I myself brought home a new palm leaf cross this morning. In the West Riding of Yorkshire, however, there was also a much older tradition – the Brontë’s would undoubtedly have known about it, but would they have taken part in it?
Haworth is a spiritual place in the oldest sense. Surrounded by moors, with fogs and storms rolling across the landscape at frequent intervals, and with purported fairy caves at Penistone Crags (as featured in Wuthering Heights), Haworth can seem sometimes a liminal, other-worldly place. It’s one which has a rich folk history, and local tales told to the young Brontë’s by parsonage servant Tabby Aykroyd fired their imagination and, eventually, their writing.
It is not Haworth we turn to on this occasion, however, but rather the heavy woollen district of Mirfield, Birstall and Gomersal – the region which gave birth to Brontë’ friends Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor, and which was the location of Roe Head school where Charlotte, Emily and Anne studied, and where Charlotte Brontë’ later took her first steps as a teacher.
During the writing of her seminal work The Life Of Charlotte Brontë’, Elizabeth Gaskell spent considerable time in the district, talking to all who may have encountered the Brontë’s and finding out what life was like in the area. In the work, Gaskell included this interesting account:
“Although Roe Head and Haworth are not twenty miles apart, the aspect of the country is as totally dissimilar as if they enjoyed a different climate. The soft curving and heaving landscape round the former gives a stranger the idea of cheerful airiness on the heights, and of sunny warmth in the broad green valleys below. It is just such a neighbourhood as the monks loved, and traces of the old Plantagenet times are to be met with everywhere, side by side with the manufacturing interests of the West Riding of to-day. There is the park of Kirklees, full of sunny glades, speckled with black shadows of immemorial yew-trees; the grey pile of building, formerly a “House of professed Ladies;” the mouldering stone in the depth of the wood, under which Robin Hood is said to lie; close outside the park, an old stone-gabled house, now a roadside inn, but which bears the name of the “Three Nuns,” and has a pictured sign to correspond. And this quaint old inn is frequented by fustian-dressed mill-hands from the neighbouring worsted factories, which strew the high road from Leeds to Huddersfield, and form the centres round which future villages gather. Such are the contrasts of modes of living, and of times and seasons, brought before the traveller on the great roads that traverse the West Riding. In no other part of England, I fancy, are the centuries brought into such close, strange contact as in the district in which Roe Head is situated. Within six miles of Miss Wooler’s house – on the left of the road, coming from Leeds – lie the remains of Howley Hall, now the property of Lord Cardigan, but formerly belonging to a branch of the Saviles. Near to it is Lady Anne’s well; “Lady Anne,” according to tradition, having been worried and eaten by wolves as she sat at the well, to which the indigo-dyed factory people from Birstall and Batley woollen mills would formerly repair on Palm Sunday, when the waters possess remarkable medicinal efficacy; and it is still believed by some that they assume a strange variety of colours at six o’clock on the morning of that day.”
Would the Brontë’s as teenage schoolchildren, or as a teacher in Charlotte’s case, have repaired to Lady Anne’s well when Palm Sunday arrived? Would they have seen the colours change miraculously at six in the morning?
It’s an intriguing question – we all know that the Brontë’s possessed a great curiosity for all things strange and different, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Charlotte and Anne, together, had investigated the famed well (Emily’s short stay at Roe Head did not coincide with a Palm Sunday).
The Easter period is upon us – it is one, of course, that encapsulates life, and it encapsulates death – despair and hope again. This coming week it also encapsulates the anniversary of the tragic death of Charlotte Brontë’. This Tuesday, on 31st March, we will remember her.
I hope you can join me next Sunday for another new, chocolate egg strewn, Brontë’ blog post.