17/08/2026
A Highwayman’s Grave in Haworth Churchyard
Naila and her friend Donatella visited village of Haworth in West Yorkshire, the home village of the Brontë sisters, I found myself drawn to more than just the Parsonage Museum and the moors that inspired Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.
Wandering through the older part of St. Michael and All Angels’ Churchyard, just steps from the famous Black Bull pub where Branwell Brontë drank, I came across a weathered headstone that tells a very different story. The stone is marked simply “JS 1796” — grave C263. For years, local guides have pointed it out to visitors as the resting place of a man hanged for crime.
The burial register confirms the entry for 3rd April 1796: James Sutcliffe, a married man who had died in York.
Contemporary reports from the York Lenten Assizes fill in the rest. Presided over by Mr Justice Heath, the court heard the case against Sutcliffe, who was also recorded under the aliases Smith and Freeman. He was found guilty of highway robbery after assaulting John Wignall on the King’s Highway in the West Riding. Wignall was threatened and robbed of a parcel containing 60 guineas plus banknotes and bills.
Sutcliffe was one of ten men condemned to death that session. Six were later reprieved, but Sutcliffe was executed at York’s Tyburn gallows on Saturday 2nd April 1796. He was brought back and buried in Haworth the next day.
It’s easy to picture the Brontës walking past this very churchyard. Charlotte was born in Thornton in 1816 and the family moved to Haworth Parsonage in 1820, just 24 years after Sutcliffe’s burial. Patrick Brontë was curate here, and the children grew up surrounded by these same gravestones, steeped in local folklore. The wild moors above the village, the hardship of 19th-century life, and tales like Sutcliffe’s — of crime, punishment and justice — all fed into the dramatic, gothic atmosphere you can still feel in their novels.
Standing by that “JS 1796” stone, it struck me how Haworth holds two histories side by side: the literary legacy of the Brontës, and the grittier stories of ordinary people who lived, and died, here long before them.
