CASTELLO, ADRIAN DE (1460?– 1521?). [See Adrian de Castello.]
CASTILLO, JOHN (1792–1845), dialect poet, was born in 1792 at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, but his parents, who were Roman catholics, emigrated to England, and on the voyage were shipwrecked off the Isle of Man. Castillo was then only two or three years old. They settled at the quiet hamlet of Lealholm Bridge, nine miles from Whitby. Castillo identified himself completely with the county of York. His father having died when Castillo was eleven, he was taken from school to become a servant-boy in Lincolnshire, but two years later he returned and lived chiefly at Fryup in Cleveland, where he was a stonemason. He was admitted as a member of a Wesleyan ‘class’ at Danby End Chapel on 5 April 1818. He now became a local preacher and an energetic revivalist, having considerable success in the Dales. In 1838, when his name was not on any plan as preacher, he says that he ‘occasionally got severe lashes on that account, but endeavoured as much as possible to keep out of the pulpits by holding prayer meetings and giving exhortations out of the singing pews or from the forms.’ He wrote verses, some of them illustrative of Wesleyan religious sentiments and others suggested by incidents which occurred in the neighbourhood. The most important is ‘Awd Isaac,’ which is a valuable memorial of the Cleveland dialect (though the author allowed his ministerial friends to make some unhappy ‘corrections’), and has had a wide popularity among the peasantry. Old Isaac Hobb of Glaisdale is supposed to be the original of the piece. It is a description of Sunday in Cleveland. Another, ‘T' Leealholm Chap's Lucky Dream,’ is a Yorkshire variant of the legend of the chapman of Swaffham, a folk-tale of which the earliest form is that given in the Persian poem called the ‘Masnaví,’ written by Jalàuddin. This legend is discussed in the ‘Antiquary,’ 1884–5, x. 202, xi. 167. Castillo died at Pickering on 16 April 1845, and is buried in the graveyard of the Wesleyan chapel there. Of ‘Awd Isaac’ there have been many editions, chiefly without the author's name. Of his collected writings there are two editions, one published at Kirby Moorside in 1850, and the other at Stokesley in 1858. The ‘Dialect Poems’ were reissued at Stokesley in 1878. He was an habitual dialect speaker, and even employed it in his discourses as a local preacher. One of his sermons, ‘Jacob's Ladder,’ was printed in pamphlet form at Filey in 1858. He was locally known as the ‘Bard of the Dales,’ and his name is sometimes spelled Castello.
[Skeat's Bibliographical List (English Dialect Society), pp. 118, 119; Newsam's Poets of Yorkshire, p. 217; Grainge's Poets and Poetry of Yorkshire, p. 366; Poems in the North Yorkshire Dialect, by the late John Castillo, edited with Memoir by George Markham Tweddell, Stokesley, 1878.]
CASTINE, THOMAS (d. 1793?), a native of Ballyneille, parish of Loman, Isle of Man, is stated by the Manx historian Train to have enlisted in the ‘king's own’ regiment of foot (4th foot), in which he rose to the rank of sergeant. Returning on furlough after a few years' absence, the story continues, he married about 1773 a young woman named Helen Corlace, with whom he was acquainted before his departure, and indulging in dissipation with former companions, he overstayed his leave. Fearing apprehension as a deserter, he escaped in a smuggling lugger to Dunkirk, and, entering the French army, served in America. At the outbreak of the French revolution he held the rank of colonel of infantry. Train speaks of him as one of the most prominent chiefs of the revolutionary armies, and refers to his services at Mayence, and his execution in Paris in August 1793, apparently identifying him with the general of division, Adam Philip de Custine, who was executed at Paris on 17 Aug. 1793 for alleged treason at Mayence, and whose fate and the romantic circumstances attending it have been related by Alison and other writers. Train further states that Castine's wife was left behind when he absconded, and that the issue of the marriage, a son, was twenty years of age and a servant at the time of his father's death in 1793. This young man enlisted in the Manx Fencibles, and was subsequently a sergeant in the Galloway militia. In 1837 he was a shopkeeper in the village of Auchencuir, co. Galloway. Understanding that his father had died possessed of property in France, he had made application, through the late Mr. Cutlar Fergusson, M.P. for Kirkcudbright, to Prince Talleyrand, when French ambassador in London; but the inquiry instituted showed that all traces of such property, if it ever existed, had been lost in the troubles and confusion of 1793. The first and last portions of this story are, no doubt, authentic; but although there is reason to suppose that the Manx deserter, Castine, held rank in the French revolutionary army, there is nothing to connect him with the general of division, Custine. The name of Thomas Castine does not appear in the alphabetical lists of persons guillotined given by Prudhomme.
