It was on this day that Jonathan Martin, who worked for six years in Darlington, torched York Minster. He came from near Hexham, and was press-ganged into the Royal Navy in 1804, aged 22. After six years, he escaped and settled at Norton, near Stockton, where he began having visions and gained a reputation for storming Anglican pulpits mid-sermon. His estranged wife informed the authorities in 1818 that he intended to shoot the Bishop of Durham, and he was sent to a Gateshead asylum. He escaped and settled in Darlington where he courted a saddler’s housekeeper in Tubwell Row.
In 1825, he wrote an autobiographical pamphlet entitled ‘The Life of Jonathan Martin, of Darlington, Tanner’, and for three years he toured the region, selling 14,000 copies of the 1s pamphlet, until visions of fires took over his mind.
After evensong in York Minster, he hid while everyone left and then made a fire of hymnbooks and gold tassels on the bishop’s pew. Knocking out a window, he escaped down a bell rope. By noon next day, the minster was so well ablaze that its fourteenth-century roof came crashing down. Martin was arrested near Hexham five days later. He spent the remaining seven years of his life in a lunatic asylum in Lambeth, proclaiming: ‘It was not me … but my God did it.’
(‘Memories’, The Northern Echo, 2005)