Abstract
1638 December 20th, Middleton near Leeds: The unmade track known locally as Town Street is deserted. At an hour past midnight in the depth of winter most folk are asleep in bed. No lamps light the track. Only the light of the full moon, this night lacking its usual vigour, illuminates the path. A strong wind sends thick clouds scudding across the sky, repeatedly plunging the terrain into darkness.
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- 1.
Dates are given, except where otherwise stated, according to the Julian Calendar that was used in England up to 1752 (see page 153).
- 2.
Taylor, R.V., Biographia Leodiensis (London, 1865), 90.
- 3.
Britten, B., et al., Belle Isle, Belle Isle Study Group (Leeds, 1985), 33.
- 4.
Hey, D., et al, Yorkshire West Riding Hearth Tax Assessment Lady Day 1677 (London, 2007), 272, The New Hall, Middleton cum Thorpe.
- 5.
The National Archives, RGO 1/40, f.19v. This is the 20–21 Dec 1638 (NS) eclipse.
- 6.
Ibid., f.22r, Christopher Towneley told Flamsteed that Gascoigne’s father ‘was much given to mechanick by which hee hoped to performe no meane thinges & once promised to show all sorts of manifactures workeing by them’.
- 7.
Rigaud, S.P. and S.J., Correspondence of scientific men of the seventeenth century (Oxford, 1841), 34.
- 8.
Sellers, David, The Transit of Venus: the quest to find the true distance of the Sun (Leeds, 2001); Sheehan, William & Westfall, John, The Transits of Venus (New York, 2004); Maor, Eli, Venus in Transit (Princeton & Oxford, 2004); Aughton, Peter, The Transit of Venus: the brief, brilliant life of Jeremiah Horrocks (London, 2004); Lomb, Nick, The Transit of Venus: 1631 to the present (Sydney, 2011); Applebaum, Wilbur, Venus seen on the Sun: the first observation of a transit of Venus by Jeremiah Horrocks (Leiden, 2012).
- 9.
Banks, W.S., Walks in Yorkshire: Wakefield and its Neighbourhood (London & Wakefield, 1871), 146.
- 10.
Perhaps the lengthiest account of William Gascoigne was provided in the 41-page pamphlet Three North Country Astronomers, by Allan Chapman (Farnworth, 1982). Other notable accounts include those by: Frances Willmoth in Encyclopedia of the Scientific Revolution (ed. Wilbur Applebaum) (New York & Abingdon, 2000), 255-6; Victor E.Thoren in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (ed Charles Coulston Gillespie) (New York, 1972), v.5, 278-9; Allan Chapman in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), v.21, 591–3, and in Dividing the Circle (Chichester, 1995), 35–45; R.V.Taylor in Biographia Leodiensis (London, 1865), 86–7.
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Sellers, D. (2012). Introduction. In: In Search of William Gascoigne. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 390. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4097-0_1
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