A na­tive of Sligo, Black was ed­u­cat­ed at Trin­i­ty Coll­ege, Dub­lin, and in 1855 be­came Cur­ate of Burl­ey in Wharfe­dale. He was ap­par­ent­ly well con­nect­ed, and Speight, in his 1900 book Up­per Wharfe­dale, re­cords fam­i­ly links with Lord Palm­ers­ton, Prime Min­is­ter from 1855 to 1865. He al­so had ve­ry kind­ly and in­ti­mate re­la­tions with the late Prin­cess Alice, daugh­ter of Queen Vic­to­ria, mar­ried to a Ger­man roy­al, when in 1867-8 he was Eng­lish Chap­lain in the old Rhine­land spa town of Darm­stadt.

Black’s first act at Burl­ey was to make it a sep­a­rate par­ish from that of Ot­ley, thus be­com­ing the first Vi­car of Bur­ley. The par­ish in­clud­ed Mens­ton un­til 1876, when Black en­cour­aged its sep­a­ra­tion from Bur­ley. For 40 years, he re­mained vi­car, and saw much change in the vil­lage. The par­ish church was re­fur­bished in the 1870s, the mills pros­pered, the pop­u­la­tion grew, and he kept re­cords of the chang­es brought about in the Na­tion­al School in Back Lane. Black con­trib­ut­ed to the growth in pop­u­la­tion in no small way him­self, as cen­sus re­cords show. He and his wife Anne, who came from the Home Coun­ties, had ele­ven child­ren in Bur­ley. Ac­cord­ing to Speight, Black was a stu­dent all his life, an ex­cell­ent the­o­lo­gian and class­ic­al schol­ar, and a writ­er of prose and verse. He com­posed a num­ber of car­ols, and his me­mor­i­al win­dow in the church fea­tures scenes from the Na­tiv­i­ty. Speight al­so men­tions his ser­mons in glow­ing terms, though vill­age re­si­dent Jane Fors­ter in one of her let­ters was not so mag­nan­i­mous, claim­ing she got head­aches af­ter lis­ten­ing to him preach.

1. ’Twas in the Win­ter Cold