Elizabeth Petyt

• General Notes
  • @NI749@
    1891 living with widow mother. Census lists them between Old chaple house and watshaw
    
    Taken from http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~petyt/petytbiog.h
    
    Elizabeth Petyt was born at Hazlewood, Bolton Abbey in1861, She was the daughter of Henry Petyt (1825-1886), a shoemaker, and his wife Ann Gill (183 1-1909).
    
    On the 1891 census returns Elizabeth was described as a dressmaker but later in life she was better known for her skill as a baker. Her speciality w as a delicious sponge cake, which she called a light luncheon cake. She made these cakes for the Devonshire Arms at Bolton Abbey for many years. It was the practise at the Devonshire Arms to serve one of these cakes or part of one, depending on the size of the party, for the last course of luncheon, accompanied by a whole Stilton which was passed from table to table with a napkin round it and port inside it.
    
    The following is taken from an account that appeared in the Craven Hera ld and Pioneer in early August 1933. By the side of the road that climbs steadily from Bolton Abbey, and winds its way across Blubberhouses Moor towards Harrogate, there stands two weather-beaten cottages, whose quaintness betrays their antiquity.
    Original ly they were one house, the homestead of a Wharfedale farm, which for over two hundred years was occupied by the Petyt family. Now one of the cottages shelters one of the last of this family, Miss E Petyt, who will reach her 72nd birthday on 29th August.
    
    There have been Petyts in the Bolton Abbey district ever since the beginning of the 16th century and a John Petyt married the sister of Richard Moon, the last Prior of Bolton. Three generations later there were Petyts living at Storiths and today Miss Petyt's home is in the joint township of Hazlewood with Storiths.
    It was at Storiths that William and Silvester Petyt, the two most famous members of the family were born. In the vestry at Skipton Parish church there hangs a portrait of Silvester and once when Miss Petyt visited the church the verger told her that he recognised her from her ancestor's portrait. She replied that she did not know that she was so ugly.
    
    From her mother, who died at the ripe old age of 78, and who knew four Dukes of Devonshire, Miss Petyt has received a rare legacy. It is an old fashioned recipe of how to make the most delicious sponge cakes one could wish to taste. There are sponge cakes and sponge cakes. Some are as tough as leather and as heavy as lead, but those, which come out of Miss Petyt's oven, have a fairylike lightness. They are unique, as several of her friends have discovered. Often they keep her so busy with orders that her hens cannot lay eggs fast enough to meet requirements. And when her customer's needs are satisfied, she can sit and look through the mullioned windo ws across the valley to Beamsley Beacon. She thinks of it as the hill her grandmother, one of the Demaine family, climbed in the early 19th century to visit the soldier who was guarding the beacon anxiously wondering how much longer he had to wait before telling Wharfedale that the threaten ed Napoleonic invasion was an accomplished fact. Fate decreed that that day should never come.
    Today Miss Petyt surveys the world through her gold-rimmed spectacles and declares that it is mad on pleasure. 'My mother walked to Skipton Parish Church and back to be confirmed' she told a Pioneer reporter. 'Now they wont walk two yards to church. Some of the clothes modern girls wear in vites insults, I think men will soon have to take to petticoats if they want to be different'.
    
    Elizabeth died unmarried in 1936 and is buried in the churchyard at Bolton Abbey.