A complex set of land deeds relating to the transfer and assignment of various properties and land in West Yorkshire, including in Halifax and Birstall, to William Nicholson, following the death of his wife Bridget, from John Ashworth, Stansfeld Rawson and Mason Stanhope Kenny, neighbours and contemporaries of Yorkshire businesswoman, traveller, diarist and ‘the first modern lesbian,’ Anne Lister.
Families or individuals mentioned in the agreement include Robert Wood of Leeds, Thomas Balmforth of Birstall, Mary Hopkinson, Martha Strother “spinster niece”, Benjamin and Ann Hopperton, “Richard Emmet and Joseph Emmet of aforesaid Halifax leather merchants” as well as Bridget Emmet (later Nicholson), and Richard Mortimer.
Properties mentioned in the legal agreement include Heath Bank Head, Lower and Higher Rushy Fields, Broadgates, Uppermost Long Royd, Kiln Croft, The Croft and a mill, amongst others.
A near contemporary and neighbour of Shibdon Hall’s Anne Lister in the 1820s, Stansf(i)eld Rawson (1778-1856) was a wealthy Huddersfield banker and landowner, who built Wasdale Hall, Netherwasdale, Cumbria. Whilst at dinner with the Rawsons in 1822 – two years before this land agreement was signed – Lister was shown the plans for Rawson’s new home, of which she observed later in her diary: “There is certainly no uniformity, and it will look like one of the has-beens of about a century and a half ago, without conveying to me an idea of a gentleman’s place at present.” The Rawsons were related to Ann Walker, Lister’s later lover (from 1832 onwards).
Mason Stanhope Kenny (1786-1865) was an Irish-born, Edinburgh-trained physician who moved to Halifax when he married Sophia Fenton, of Spring Grove, in 1812 (the year Kenny also attended William Horsfall after he was shot by Luddites, an event later fictionalised by Charlotte Brontë in Shirley). The Kennys lived at Holly House, 6 Ward’s End, Halifax. Kenny would attend Ann Walker in August 1832, who discussed him with Lister, who recounted in her diary: “She [Walker] said.... how she disliked Doctor Kenny – as a medical man, he asked queer questions & made odd remarks – she would never have him again.” (cited in Liddington, 2019).
Jill Liddington (2019) Nature’s Domain: Anne Lister and the Landscape of Desire (Pennine Pens)
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