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MARKET TOWNS OF YORKSHIRE (from SDUK Penny Cyclopedia)

Pocklington in 1843

Pocklington is a parish and market-town, partly in the liberty of St. Peter of York, but chiefly in the Wilton-Beacon division of the wapentake of Harthill, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, about 195 miles from London, 13 miles east by south from York, and 7 miles north-west of Market-Weighton. The town is situated in a level country, about two miles from the western edge of the Wolds, and is connected with the river Derwent by the Pocklington Canal, which is described elsewhere.

The parish contains the townships of Pocklington, Meltonby, and Owsthorpe, and the chapelry of Yapham, and had an aggregate population of 2,265 in 1831, and 2,552 in 1841. The living is a discharged vicarage, with the curacy of Yapham-cum-Meltonby, a peculiar of the dean of York, with an income of £131.

The parish church, dedicated to All Saints, is a very plain homely structure, and the town also contains places of worship for Roman Catholics, Independents, and Primitive and Wesleyan Methodists ; a well-endowed free grammar-school, founded in the 6th year of Henry VIII, by John Dowman, LL.D., with which are connected five exhibitions at St. John's College, Cambridge, and which has an income exceeding £1,000 per annum ; and among several other daily schools, a national school, liberally supported by subscriptions. The buildings of the grammar-school were re-erected in 1819.

Pocklington is one of the polling-places for the East Riding, and the centre of a Poor-Law Union comprising 47 parishes ; it has three branch banks, and petty sessions for the Wilton-Beacon division are held here. It has a market on Saturday, and large sheep and cattle fairs are held on March 7 (or 6 in leap-year), May 6, August 5, and November 8, and a statute fair for hiring servants, on November 9. At Barnsley Field, near the town, four human skeletons, with an urn bearing some ancient characters, were discovered in 1763. The population of the township of Pocklington was 2,048 in 1831, and 2,323 in 1841.