York is identified as the setting of a public assize at which a preacher claimed to have delivered Yorick’s sermon before a thousand witnesses and then printed it. The episode makes the city a place where the sermon’s uncertain passage from loss to public circulation becomes central: its purported recovery is also an act of appropriation, and the narrator’s telling reopens the question of who may claim the text.

The Assize and the Sermon

The narrator reports that a prebendary of York Cathedral preached the sermon at an assize before a thousand witnesses, each supposedly ready to swear that it happened. The preacher then printed it. These details give the claim an emphatic appearance of public verification, while the circumstances of the sermon’s earlier disappearance make its reappearance deeply suspect.

A Claim Complicated by Its Telling

The account says the sermon was printed within two years and three months of Yorick’s death. Its publisher, the narrator concedes, was in perfect charity with Yorick and printed only a few copies to give away; the narrator also says he had heard the man could have written an equally good sermon himself. Yet he describes the publication as maltreatment and posthumous plunder, and says he would not have made the anecdote public merely to injure the preacher’s character or church advancement. He claims instead to be moved by the wish to give rest to Yorick’s ghost. York’s reported assize thus becomes more than a location: it anchors a story of contested authorship whose narrator’s professed restraint sits uneasily beside his decision to expose the episode.