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1st edition. 2 volumes in full brown calf; these volumes are in the process of restoration and are offered for sale refurbished. Two good hardbacks in full leather with very little foxing. 

George Young was born on 25th July 1777 to John and Jean Young, a modest and pious couple, in a farmhouse named Coxiedean in the parish of Kirk-Newton and East Calder, Scotland. He was the fourth of ten children and was born without his left hand which throughout his childhood was a cause for great concern to his parents. Unable to follow on the family business of farming, his parents encouraged him to enter into education, a path which was to shape the rest of his life. He regarded his disability in a very positive light and insisted that over the years he learned to perform everyday tasks without any trouble. At age 14 he was deeply affected by the death of his sister, an experience that influenced him in regards to a life of religion.

George Young spent four years at the University of Edinburgh studying in the literary and philosophical field, and a further five years studying theology as was required by the Presbyterian Church he wished to enter. This led to him being licensed to preach the gospel in March 1801. Following a visit to Whitby in summer 1805, George Young entered a ministry at the Cliff Lane Chapel in Whitby in January, 1806 and remained there until his death forty-two years later in May 1848. During this period his sermons began to be published and within the next twenty-seven years a total of 15 letters, sermons, lectures, and discourses were made available. It is reported that he was a man of spiritual generosity and was very involved with his parish, taking his contemporaries to the homes of the poor and afflicted as well as the more wealthy members of the community.

George Young had a wide range of interests and this is reflected in the literary works he published. He wrote books about botany, the history of Whitby, geology, and Captain Cook. He also edited the Whitby Panorama.

In 1817 he published a two volume “History of Whitby and Streoneshalh Abbey”: there was a list of subscribers who before publication subscribed for more than 840 copies. With the help of his artist friend, John Bird, then a teacher of drawing in Whitby, he published a “Geological Survey of the Yorkshire Coast”. Young published a smaller volume of history in 1824 entitled “A picture of Whitby and its environs”. The new discoveries in geology prompted Young to write “Scriptural Geology” in 1838 in which he attempted to reconcile geology and the teachings of the Bible. As well as his published works, George Young was instrumental in establishing both the Whitby Botanic Garden (1812) and the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society (1823). He became one of the two secretaries of the Society and remained so until his death in 1848.

On the 8th of May, 1848 Rev. George Young passed away following a bout of influenza. He was buried in St. Mary’s Churchyard, the ceremony being performed by his friend Dr William Scoresby junior, “amidst a grief so deep and general as to show that Whitby had lost a great benefactor”.

Whitby is a seaside town, port and civil parish in North Yorkshire, England. It is on the Yorkshire Coast at the mouth of the River Esk. It has a maritime, mineral and tourist economy. The fishing port emerged during the Middle Ages, supporting important herring and whaling fleets, and was where Captain Cook learned seamanship and, coincidentally, where his first vessel to explore the southern ocean, HMS Endeavour, was built. Jet and alum were mined locally, and Whitby jet, which was mined by the Romans and Victorians, became fashionable during the 19th century.

The earliest record of a permanent settlement is in 656 AD, when as Streanæshealh it was the place where Oswy, the Christian king of Northumbria, founded the first abbey, under the abbess Hilda. The Synod of Whitby was held there in 664 AD. In 867 AD, Viking raiders destroyed the monastery. The town’s East Cliff is home to the ruins of Whitby Abbey, where Cædmon, the earliest recognised English poet, lived. Another monastery was founded in 1078 AD. It was in this period that it gained its current name, Whitby (from “white settlement” in Old Norse). In the following centuries Whitby functioned as a fishing settlement until, in the 18th century, it developed as a port and centre for shipbuilding and whaling, the trade in locally mined alum, and the manufacture of Whitby jet jewellery. Tourism started in Whitby during the Georgian period and developed with the arrival of the railway in 1839.

Whitby’s attraction as a tourist destination is enhanced by the nearby high ground of the North York Moors national park and the heritage coastline and by association with the horror novel Dracula. The abbey ruin at the top of the East Cliff is the town’s oldest and most prominent landmark. Other significant features include the swing bridge, which crosses the River Esk and the harbour, which is sheltered by the grade II listed East and West piers. Its maritime heritage is commemorated by statues of the explorer Captain Cook and the whaler and scientist William Scoresby, as well as the whalebone arch that sits at the top of the West Cliff. It also has a strong literary tradition and has featured in literary works, television and cinema, most famously in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula.

While Whitby’s cultural and historical heritage contribute to the local economy, it is financially constrained by its remote location, ongoing changes in the fishing industry, relatively underdeveloped transport infrastructure and limitations on available land and property. As a result, tourism and some forms of fishing remain the mainstay of its economy. It is the closest port to a proposed wind farm development in the North Sea, 47 miles (76 km) from York and 22 miles (35 km) from Middlesbrough. There are transport links to the rest of North Yorkshire and North East England, primarily through national rail links to Middlesbrough and road links to Teesside, via both the A171 and A174, and Scarborough by the former. As at 2011, the town had a population of 13,213.Abbey of Whitby (Formerly called Streoneshalh). A Benedictine monastery in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England, was founded about 657, as a double monastery, by Oswy, King of Northumberland. The first abbess was St. Hilda, under whom the community seems to have reached a considerable size, the ‘conventual’ buildings being large enough to accommodate the council, held in 664, to determine the controversy respecting the observance of Easter. On St. Hilda’s death, about 680, Aelfleda, daughter of King Oswy, succeeded as abbess, and the Monastery continued to flourish until about 687, when it was entirely destroyed by the Danes. The community was dispersed, the abbot, Titus, fleeing to Glastonbury and taking with him the relics of St. Hilda. No attempt was made to restore the monastery until after the Norman conquest, when this district of Yorkshire was granted to Hugh Lupus, first Earl of Chester, who assigned Whitby to William de Percy, ancestor of the earls of Northumberland, by whom the monastery was refounded toward the end of the conqueror’s reign. Reinfrid, a monk of Evesham, was appointed prior to the restored foundation, which was richly endowed by the founder. William the Conqueror himself also granted to the monastery a charter of privileges. These were confirmed and extended by Henry I, in whose reign the priory was raised to the rank of an abbey, but the abbot, though regarded as one of the spiritual barons of England, did not sit in Parliament. The story of the house during the Middle Ages does not call for any special comment, the only exceptional circumstances in its history being occasional damage by pirates, to which its position on the coast laid it open. When the lesser religious houses had all been suppressed by Henry VIII and it became clear that the same fate awaited the larger ones, the Abbot of Whitby obtained permission to resign his office so that he might not be called upon to hand over the house to the king. The surrender was therefore made by the prior under date 14 December 1540, the net income at the time being returned as 437 pounds; the site and ruins being granted some years later to John, Earl of Warwick. Among the monks of Whitby the most famous is the Saxon poet, Caedmon.

The Monastery of St. Hilda was so completely destroyed by the Danes that nothing even of its foundations is known to remain. Of de Percy’s building the greater part was pulled down and the monastery rebuilt on a larger scale in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At the dissolution the roofs were removed, but most of the walls remained standing until 1763, when the entire western side of the monastery was blown down. Since that date the destruction has been rapid owing to the very exposed position of the ruins. In 1830, the remains of the central tower collapsed, and nine years later a large part of the choir also fell, so that only a small part of the church still stands on the cliff some two hundred feet above the sea. The arms of the abbey, three snakes rolled up, are said to have their origin in the number of fossil ammonites found in the vicinity. Of these Camden writes in his “Britannia”: “Here are found stones resembling snakes rolled up . . . you would think they had once been snakes, covered with a crust of stone.”

Hilda of Whitby (or Hild of Whitby) (c. 614 – 680) was a saint of the early Church in Britain. She was the founder and first abbess of the monastery at Whitby which was chosen as the venue for the Synod of Whitby in 664. An important figure in the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England, she was abbess in several convents and recognised for the wisdom that drew kings to her for advice.

The source of information about Hilda is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede in 731, who was born approximately eight years before her death. He documented much of the Christian conversion of the English.

Cædmon (fl. c. 657–684) is the earliest English poet whose name is known. A Northumbrian cowherd who cared for the animals at the double monastery of Streonæshalch (now known as Whitby Abbey) during the abbacy of St. Hilda, he was originally ignorant of “the art of song” but learned to compose one night in the course of a dream, according to the 8th-century historian Bede. He later became a zealous monk and an accomplished and inspirational Christian poet.

Cædmon is one of twelve Anglo-Saxon poets identified in medieval sources, and one of three of these for whom both roughly contemporary biographical information and examples of literary output have survived. His story is related in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (“Ecclesiastical History of the English People”) by Bede, who wrote, “[t]here was in the Monastery of this Abbess a certain brother particularly remarkable for the Grace of God, who was wont to make religious verses, so that whatever was interpreted to him out of scripture, he soon after put the same into poetical expressions of much sweetness and humility in Old English, which was his native language. By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world, and to aspire to heaven.”

Cædmon’s only known surviving work is Cædmon’s Hymn, a nine-line alliterative vernacular praise poem in honour of God. The poem is one of the early attested examples of Old English and is, with the runic Ruthwell Cross and Franks Casket inscriptions, one of three candidates for the earliest attested example of Old English poetry. It is also one of the early recorded examples of sustained poetry in a Germanic language. In 1898, Cædmon’s Cross was erected in his honour in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church in Whitby.

Synod of Whitby: The prestige of Whitby is reflected in the fact that King Oswiu of Northumbria chose Hilda’s monastery as the venue for the Synod of Whitby, the first synod of the Church in his kingdom. He invited churchmen from as far away as Wessex to attend the synod. Most of those present, including Hilda, accepted the King’s decision to adopt the method of calculating Easter currently used in Rome, establishing Roman practice as the norm in Northumbria. The monks from Lindisfarne, who would not accept this, withdrew to Iona, and later to Ireland.