Book a date with history

For those who love local history, there is a burgeoning selection of titles to choose from. Yesterday Once More has featured several over the year.

Today we look at some more potential gifts for the historian in your life, starting with two books that look at how the reader can turn researcher and writer.

Starting Out In Local History (Countryside Books, £7.95) is a beginner's guide for the potential historian. Author Simon Fowler, editor of Family History Monthly magazine, assumes no prior knowledge on the part of the reader.

The best thing to do, he writes, is to follow the advice of "Britain's greatest local historian" WG Hoskins, and leave the library to walk the streets. There is evidence of the past in every street and building if you go looking for it.

The Local Historian's Glossary Of Words And Terms by Joy Bristow (same publisher, £9.95) could be seen as a companion work. Making sense of old wills and parish records is never easy.

That is where this book comes in. It contains the definition or translation of more than 3,000 archaic and Latin words, commonly used in old wills, parish records and so on.

For those who would rather let someone else do the research, there are plenty of interesting reads.

Yorkshire People And Places: A Millennium Celebration (£7.50) is a book based on the series of lectures given to The Yorkshire Philosophical Society in the 2000-2001 season. Among the subjects, all recounted with passion and great expertise, are Rowntree's Poverty Study and Robin Hood: Yorkshire Outlaw or Yorkshire Myth?

The unforgettably-named Ivor Smullen, a contributor to Country Life and The Oldie magazine, has brought out a book, Yorkshire Pie (Fort Publishing, £9.99). He has gathered together 120 stories from Yorkshire's long and sometimes eccentric history, taking in crime, conflict, mysteries and royalty.

Along the way you meet many strange characters and encounter some odd traditions, such as the Staithes pigeon ceremony.

"Many of the coastal fishermen and their families were prone to bizarre superstitious practices," Ivor writes. "When a smack from Staithes had a run of bad luck, the fisherwives would gather at midnight and, in deep silence, kill a pigeon, extract its heart, stick it full of pins, and burn it over a charcoal fire." As you do.

In refined Harrogate, they had equally bizarre pastimes. In 1900, Harrogate council decided to take advantage of the growing demand for bathing in peat. Which just goes to show that silly health fads are not a new trend.

The council offered this facility at the Montpellier Pump Room. A local journalist gave it a go, and was ecstatic. "It is an exceedingly comfortable bath, and is practically adapted for rheumatism, rheumatic gout, internal inflammation and some forms of skin diseases.

"The effect of the bath may be described as comparing it to a huge poultice. The peat mud, of which there is an abundant supply, will be brought from the corporation water works and is of very fine quality. It will be specially prepared and free from all scratchy or objectionable particles."

Nothing worse than objectionable particles in your bath.

Characters baked into Ivor's Yorkshire Pie include many old favourites: George Hudson, Mother Shipton, Minster arsonist Jonathan Martin and Harry Ramsden. But there are some lesser known, but equally interesting, lives touched on here.

Among them is John Kemble. He was an actor who dared to tread the boards at the York Theatre Royal in the 18th century, when it was known to host one of the most raucous and truculent audiences around.

One night a woman took against Mr Kemble's acting and started to heckle him loudly. She greeted his solemn speeches with, according to a Victorian historian, "screeches of laughter".

The rest of the audience was on Mr Kemble's side and "hissed the lady out of the theatre".

To this, she did not take kindly. In the audience were a number of her admirers who were also officers of the North Riding Militia. On her behalf they challenged the actor in the manager's rooms.

Mr Kemble was not cowed, but agreed to make a statement on stage. This he did, defending his art. The army officers, intent on an apology, were not pleased, and said so. "We want none of your conversation or jabbering here. It is very imprudent and impertinent. Talk no more sir, but instantly ask pardon!"

Ivor writes: "The disdainful Kemble retorted 'Pardon? No sirs, never!' and left the stage amid bursts of applause from his supporters. The lady, in her turn, left the theatre 'pale and sick'."

Some of Yorkshire's strangest creatures also get a mention, such as Kirkdale's hyenas. John Gibson, a chemist on holiday in Yorkshire, happened upon a pile of bones in the Kirkdale, near Pickering. Workmen told him they came from a cave in a nearby quarry. They assumed them to be cattle bones.

But Gibson knew they were the bones of no known British animals.

Samples were sent to eminent scientists here and abroad. One Oxford don travelled to the cave where he found many more bones that, he said, once belonged to 300 hyenas as well as tigers and rhinoceroses.

They were deposited there, he decided, by the Biblical Flood. He later withdrew this theory, but only after his book Relics Of The Flood became a best-seller.

Another odd animal we come across in these pages is Ivor's high horse, which he climbs on in his summary of York's most infamous highwayman.

"The York-based Yorkshire Evening Press has published a series of columns under the by-line Dick Turpin. Why anyone should adopt the name of this squalid character as a pseudonym is hard to imagine."

Perhaps Ivor was miffed by his recent appearance in Turpin.

Finally, on to a book that will delight social historians and hypochondriacs alike. In Curious Cures Of Old Yorkshire (Countryside Books, £7.95) Dulcie Lewis has collected remedies, health superstitions and medical memories.

It is a fascinating read. Among the dodgy remedies are cowpats to draw boils, liquid paraffin to ease constipation and vinegar for almost everything. This is full of money-saving tips to - in the words of a Yorkshire saying - "keep the feet warm, the head cool and the bowels open."