Yorkshire Dialect Poems (1673-1915) and Traditional Poems

Two and a half centuries of Yorkshire speech, preserved in verse. This anthology gathers dialect poems from 1673 to 1915, capturing a world where the everyday transactions of market, farm, and pub were rendered in language that was rough, funny, and startlingly alive. F.W. Moorman's editorial mission was simple: to preserve the authentic speech of Yorkshire before the century's changes swept it away. The collection opens with 'A Yorkshire Dialogue between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher,' a collision of voices that establishes the book's energies immediately: gossip, haggling, stubbornness, warmth. What emerges is not quaint folklore but something more valuable: a record of how real people in a specific place talked to each other about the things that mattered. The dialect shifts across regions and decades, but the concerns remain constant work, weather, love, death, and the small wars of family life. For anyone interested in the way language carries identity, or for anyone who grew up hearing versions of this speech and wants to hear it again, these poems are a kind of resurrection.