The rich were few, the authorities were disinterested, and the poor were many, and these conditions rendered West Yorkshire the perfect setting for the greatest fraud in British history. Allen notes in The Industrial Revolution, for the average person that meant less autonomy, less income, and more rules and regulations to be bound by. The Industrial Age was beginning and, as Robert C. Most Yorkshiremen of the time made their money from weaving or agriculture, but life was brutal and poverty unrelenting.
For a while, the business of coining proves lucrative, and Hartley’s kingdom of counterfeiters spreads across Yorkshire, but it remains a dangerous business.Īs Stephen Welsh makes clear in Cragg Vale: A Pennine Valley, the Calder Valley of the 1760s was a desolate, impoverished place so remote as to appear almost cut off from the rest of England. In The Gallows Pole, Myers turns his attention to West Yorkshire and relates the story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners, their successes, their daring, their savagery, and their ultimate downfall at the hands of a persistent excise officer and a turncoat. Taken together, his work, which focuses on “rural landscapes, mythology, marginalised characters, morality, class, nature, dialect and post-industrialisation,” forms a sequence dedicated to the beauty and the brutality of the counties of northern England. When The Gallows Pole won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2018, it catapulted Benjamin Myers into the mainstream literary spotlight, but before that his innovative use of language and his almost uncanny ability to capture a sense of place had ensured that his novels (including Pig Iron and Beastings ) were underground sensations.
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