20th March 2022 - clipping the coin

 Yesterday I read Paul Knights post ' The Ebbing Past'.  He lives somewhere around Hebden Bridge and I am fascinated the way he gathers the landscape in and examines it. This time it was two old derelict farms  at a place called Reaps, interesting to me because they are near Standing Stone Hill.  I occasionally complain because of the lack of prehistory around here and especially standing stones, and yes the hill does have one.

It took me back to Gallow's Pole again, a book I had not got on with particularly.  I had not mentioned it too much because I know of two bloggers who were yet to read the book and that Pat had agreed with me it was rather a violent book to read, and of course you knew the ending.  Well yesterday studying the map I came across the moor on which King David Hartley and his family lived.  It was called Bell Moor and the house, Bell House still remains, though now it has been tarted up with one of those large 'barn' windows so beloved of the middle class.

I listened to the Calder valley History - Women and Coiners in the Calder Valley.  David Hartley's wife Grace escaped the hangman's noose and seemed to have squirrelled away enough money to live on for the rest of her life buying a new farm on the death of her father-in-law.  In this story by the way, there is a gruesome fragment of what happened to the informer who ratted on the killers of the tax man - William Dighton.  I would skip it if I were you.

You can still walk down to Cragg Vale from Bell House.  The farmhouse is this one, a typical Yorkshire windowed house.  Its history still intact in the walls.

It was here that the clipping of coins shook up the foundations of money for a brief time in the 18th century, and the law of the land chased the citizens, for there were many involved, and punished them severely.

Was it a time of lawlessness with the Turville gang?  Perhaps but in one thing often overlooked in the retelling of history is the role of the female.  Air brushed out of a lot history it would seem that women also had a hand in this clipping of the coin.  For who spends the money on housekeeping?  The Calder Valley video mentions names, it was the women who passed the clipped coins into the hands of the vendors, a bit like today of fake notes that are covertly passed over the counter for goods, not much different.

Watching the video you are aware of the surrounding countryside, the high moors on which the Hartleys lived.  The inhabitants had to be self-sufficient in food, but money was needed for essentials.  It was a trade born out of hunger and poverty and a certain amount of lawlessness.

Clough - Steep valley or ravine