George Harrison was baptised at Bubwith on the 10th of October 1756, the register writing him "George S: of Tho: Harrison of Foggathorpe" — elder of the two sons of Thomas Harrison and Ann, née Baylier. He grew up on the Foggathorpe side of the parish and settled on the Breighton side, by the river; on the 1st of December 1778, at Bubwith, he married Hannah Otley by banns, both of them making their marks.
They raised four children at Breighton — George in 1779, Sarah in 1782, Robert in 1785, Elizabeth in 1791 — and the record gives George two stations at once: the registers write him labourer, the church-court file of 1787 writes him husbandman, a man farming a little on his own account. Breighton was a hamlet of a few dozen households strung along the Derwent bank; everyone in what follows lived within shouting distance of everyone else.
Which is how, in 1787, the family found itself inside a case before the Archbishop of York's Consistory Court. On the evening of the 25th of May, on Breighton's town street, Elizabeth Wilson, a labourer's wife, was heard to call her neighbour Elizabeth Underwood — standing at her own shop door, just home from weeding in the fields — "a Whore several times over"; one witness added that Wilson said she "had been a Whore for nine and twenty Years past". Underwood sued, and on the 14th of July Hannah Harrison went to York to swear what she had heard. Her deposition survives, careful and plain: she gives the hour, the street and the words, declines to guess at the cause — "but this Deponent does not know what was the occasion of her doing so" — and signs with her mark, "aged about thirty eight Years". The defence answered in kind: the defendant's sister swore that Hannah and her fellow witness had not been present at all, and had been bought — a shilling and her dinner pressed into Hannah's hand at her own gate, with a promise, so the story went, to "Swear Black's White". That is the defence's allegation, sworn by the defendant's own family, and the court never recorded a sentence; the case, like most of its kind, seems simply to have stopped. What it leaves is rarer than a verdict — the reported speech of a village street in the summer of 1787, with Hannah's own sworn words in the middle of it.
George was buried at Bubwith on the 3rd of August 1805 — "of Brighton, Labourer", says the register, giving no age; the family's "aged 50" was reckoning, and the font makes him forty-eight. Hannah outlived him by twenty-nine years, and was buried at Bubwith in February 1834, aged eighty-one.
Composed from validated records · 2026-07-04