Long before the Romans moved northward in Britain to found another Rome on the triangular strip of land formed by the convergence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss, there were folk living in Yorkshire who had made sufficient progress in art and science to be able to spin and weave, to cultivate the land, to manage flocks and herds, and who showed as great a fondness for horses as modern Yorkshiremen do. 

  But even before these men of the Neolithic age lived in Yorkshire as tillers of the soil and breeders of sheep, goats, pigs, arid cattle, they had predecessors in the Palaeolithic men, who, if they knew little of aught but hunting, making tools, and lighting a fire, had yet developed the knack of drawing and carving figures to a state of remarkable proficiency, and left evidence of their skill on the walls of their cave-dwellings and the handles of their primitive weapons. 

  Into Yorkshire, Palaeolithic man, a nomadic hunter came a-hunting in the days when what are now the British Isles were an integral part of the continent of Europe.  His wants were almost entirely in the way of food, and Yorkshire offered him a comprehensive bill of fare.  In summer, he found hippopotami, bisons, horses, and stags for his eating; in winter, reindeer, grizzly bear, rhinoceros, and mammoth.  His life was decidedly elementary in contrast to that of his Neolithic successor who was much more advanced in arts, sciences, and securing for himself a much better general level of comfort.  

  Neolithic man learned the value of a settled habitation, preferring a circular enclosure, partly sunk into the earth, to the cave dwelling of his predecessors.  He surrounded himself with flocks of sheep and cattle, possessed horses and dogs, and if although he appears to have forfeited the art of drawing and sculpture, he had developed an acquaintance with carpentry which stood him in good stead.  

 It is from these ancients that the Yorkshireman derived his love of dogs and horses, and that peculiar aptitude for looking after his own interests and his own comfort which distinguishes every true son of the Noble county.  

 We know little of the folk who were living in Yorkshire when the Romans came northward.  They lived chiefly on the hills and moors and on the edge of the Wolds, and the new-comers gave them a common name, Brigantes, meaning ‘dwellers on high places.’  All accurate record of them is lost, and whatever greatness they had was eclipsed by the grandeur of Roman achievements. 

 The Roman legions came into Yorkshire around AD 70, and for the next three and a half centuries they were masters, lawgivers and makers.  Eboracum was a miniature Rome, the home of emperors and the capital of the British province; within its walls at least two emperors died and one is said to have been born, and from it the Prefect governed the whole of Britain and its attendant Islands. 

 Everywhere sprang up the evidences of the extraordinary ability of the colonisers—walled city and fortified town; the villas of the wealthy; the lead and tin mines of the merchant; the splendid roads, some traces and remains of which are still left to us, which connected the principal camps and centres. 

 This was a period of peace and prosperity to folk who dwelt between the Humber and the Roman wall, and whatever part the British natives played in the government of their own country, they owed their security against the savage tribes outside their borders to the presence of the mighty folk whose power was even then being undermined on the Continent.  

 The withdrawal of the Roman legions from Yorkshire was the signal for the outbreak of a series of long-continued wars and upheavals.  From the middle of the fifth century to the end of the eleventh, Yorkshire was never at rest.  Its history for five hundred years is one of continual battles, strifes, and contentions between various races struggling for supremacy of a nation slowly forging its way towards liberty and power.  

 But there were notable events in Yorkshire during that period; some of them as greatly contributory to peace as others were typical of the fiercest war.  When the Romans had gone, the English came from the England that we now call Sleswick, and by 593, when the kingdom of Northumbria was established, their presence and power had asserted itself in Yorkshire. 

 Under the rule of Eadwine, 617-633, the country was at peace.  He was not only king of Northumbria, but overlord of all England, and from his Yorkshire palace he ruled the country with such firmness that, as the old English proverb says, " A woman with her babe might walk scatheless from sea to sea in Eadwine's day." 

 During his reign one finds two pictures of rare significance—one the appearance of St. Paulinus, cross in hand, before the still then Pagan king whom he was to convert to Christianity and persuade to the foundation of York Minster; the other of Coifi, the heathen priest, casting his spear in defiance into the heathen temple of Godmanham, on the Wolds, in token that he too had become a convert to the new doctrines. 

 Whether this was the first time that Christianity was preached in Yorkshire is a question; it is more than probable that a Christian church existed in York during the Roman days.  But it is to Paulinus, "whose tall stooping form, slender aquiline nose, and black hair falling round a thin, worn face, were long remembered in the North," says Green, that Yorkshire owes the heritage which was ere long to blossom in such profusion. 

 Nevertheless, the old Pagan faith died hard, and Eadwine lost his life in endeavouring to combat it.  The great fight at Hatfield, near Doncaster, in 633, was one of the bloodiest in the history of that age, and the death of the Christian king seemed to destroy the last hopes of the infant Church.  Paulinus was forced into exile, and the Pagans overswept the land.  But in 655 the decisive victory which Oswi, king of Northumbria, fighting under the Cross, gained over King Penda and his fellow-heathens at the field of Winwood, near Leeds, probably around Swillington, on the river Aire, restored Christianity to a paramount position, and from that time the doctrines preached first by Paulinus, and afterwards by the Irish missionaries, spread throughout the country. 

 In Yorkshire, churches and religious houses were built everywhere, and amongst the first was that founded on the towering cliffs of Whitby by St. Hilda, daughter of King Oswi, who had dedicated her to the service of God in thankoffering for his victory at Winwood.  In that house Cædmon, first English poet, " learnt the art of poetry, not from men, nor of men, but from God."

  From the time of the coming of the Danes at the end of the eighth century there was almost continuous war in Yorkshire: sometimes of a serious sort, sometimes confining itself to personal differences between rival leaders during which towns and cities of the county suffered severely.  

  Out of the mists of the bygone ages we enjoy the peaceful vision of the little houses of an English village with its little church, the stockaded stronghold of the great man of the place close at hand, and round about all these sit pleasant meadows filled with sheep and cattle, all suddenly broken in upon by successive waves of barbaric marauders such as Danes, Norsemen, Scots, Picts, who transform the blessed peacefulness to scenes of horror and ruin.  

  Murder, destruction of property, utter sweeping away of life, and the laying waste of good land were the usual consequences of sudden incursions by invaders that had sailed up Humber and Ouse, or, in the case of the Norsemen, came over the western mountains from the Cumberland coasts.  Scarcely a Yorkshire town escaped fire and sword in those days.  York Minster was destroyed more than once, only to be rebuilt each time on a more magnificent scale.  

  William of Malmesbury says of Ripon that it was so devastated by the Danes in the ninth century that not a single soul was left alive, nor one stone left upon another.  With the destruction of these English towns went the destruction of the many Roman and Ancient British remains which must have been conspicuous in them.  

  The struggle between Harold Godwinsson and Harold Hardrada, which culminated in the fight at Stamford Bridge, on the Derwent, in 1066, may be said to have inaugurated a new era in the history of Yorkshire, for it decided the question between those two foes and paved the way for a greater man than either. 

  The slow, steady, but ever increasing rise of Yorkshire and the Yorkshire folk to prosperity and power began at the Norman Conquest.  Yet the folk who lived in the county at that time had little cause to love William the Conqueror, who, indeed, left very few of them to fear or love him.  After the terrible revenge William executed upon the county in 1068, by way of punishment for the rising which had ended in the slaughter of the Norman garrison at York, the population of Yorkshire must have been very insignificant, if the record is true that he left not one single house standing between York and the Tees, that he destroyed cattle, crops, and even implements of husbandry, and that in consequence of this devastation a hundred thousand people died of famine, one may readily conclude that there was little left of the old English population, and of those that were left there was no love lost between them and the Frenchman!    

  That York suffered is shown plainly by the entries concerning it in Domesday Book.  There were at that time 1600 houses in the city, and out of these 540 were in such an uninhabitable state that no rent could be got on their account, while a further 400 were empty because no tenants could be found for them. 

  There were 145 French [Norman] householders in the city at that period, and that their number was increased by immigrants from Normandy in France is without question.  When the country had finally passed under the Conqueror's yoke, his own countrymen came from abroad to share in the spoils, and it was well for the future of the race in which so many elements mingle that they were not all greedy land-grabbers, but included honest traders, skilled artists, and men of learning.

  Under the regime of the great Norman barons, everything changed in Yorkshire, even to the names of places.  Until Ilbert de Lacy began building his great castle at Pontefract, the place was called Kirkby, and Richmond had probably no name at all until Alan of Brittany christened it with its present appropriate one. 

  The county itself is first called Yorkshire (Euforwycskyra) in Domesday Book, and the City of York settled down into its present form from the Eoferwic of the Saxons, the Jorvic of the Danes, and the Euerwic of the first Normans. 

  But the greatest change was in the appearance of the countryside.  Out of the ashes and wreckage of William's devastating revenge rose the grim, menacing fortresses which he doubtless bade his great lieutenants to build as a condition of their fee.  A new Norman keep replaced the one torn down by the insurgents of 1068; on the rocky promontories of Richmond and Pontefract rose great castles; every baron made haste to entrench himself after the fashion he had practised in Normandy.  And in this work, they were doubtless largely guided by William himself, who had the keenest eye for positions of great strategic importance. 

  Whoever looks upon Pontefract Castle and marks its natural advantages of situation may be sure that they were noted many a time by the great Norman during the three weeks which he spent close by, waiting until the floods would subside in the Aire Valley and allow him to advance on York to wreak his vengeance with sword and fire.  

  But under this new state of things, there were more than castles and fortified houses built in Yorkshire.  The great Norman families which had settled in the county were builders of churches as well as of strongholds, and they were as generous in their support of the monastic communities as they were in their patronage of the architects, artists, and skilled workmen who followed them to England. 

  Almost every religious house in Yorkshire was indebted to the Norman barons, and of the greater ones, all but two — Mount Grace and Coverham — had been built within a hundred and twenty years of the completion of the Norman Conquest.

  With castles and churches and religious houses rising all over it, the land began to recover from the devastated appearance which the Conqueror's fury had forced upon it.  But other things than church and castle and cloister were springing into existence.  During the reign of the Norman kings the Yorkshire boroughs were gradually shaping themselves, and by the time of the Poll-Tax of 1378—a century and a half after the strictly Norman rule had come to an end—they were in a position to assert themselves as places of consequence. 

  Of the Yorkshire towns of importance at this time it must be pointed out that some sprang up around a great castle, as in the case of Richmond and Pontefract; others had slowly fought their way to freedom and independence without the help and often in spite of the great feudal lords. 

  There were towns in Yorkshire that might be included in the class of English boroughs of which Green makes the following remarks:

  " In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the boroughs led the way; unnoticed and despised by prelate and nobles, they had alone preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty.  The rights of self-government, of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by one's equals, were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny by the traders and shop-keepers of the towns.  In the quiet, quaintly named streets; in town mead and market-place; in the lord's mill beside the stream; in the bell that swung out its summons to the crowded borough-mote; in the jealousies of craftsmen and guilds, lay the real life of Englishmen, the life of their home and trade, their ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied battle for self-government."

  But the towns referred to in this passage were, as a rule, situated on land belonging to the Crown; the majority of the Yorkshire boroughs sprang up in close proximity to the strongholds of the barons and on their manors.

 A trustworthy idea of the relative importance of the Yorkshire towns in the I4th century may be gained from the Poll Tax returns of 1378.  Then, as now, the West Riding was the most thickly crowded division of the county, and contained the most important towns; outside it, with the exception of York and Hull, there were few towns of any importance as regards population. 

 But the towns of the West Riding which were then of no importance are now the towns which rank first; the towns which were at that time of high standing are now of little commercial value.  In 1378 Pontefract was the principal town in the West Riding, and its assessment of £14 5s. 10d. was contributed to by over six hundred people, of whom four paid 6s. 5d. each.  There were then fifteen merchants of considerable wealth and standing in the town, and a large variety of trades—amongst them that of selling indulgences, which was carried on by two "pardoners.”  There were over a hundred artisans in the place.  Sixty-four houses were held by single women—spinsters or widows; thirty-eight by bachelors or widowers.  The Cluniacs, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Carmelites had houses in the town; and there were three hospitals, dedicated respectively to St Mary, St. Nicholas, and St Mary Magdalene. 

 Under the shadow of the mighty Norman castle of the Lacys stood the great church of All Saints; in the centre of the town, on the hill, rose the spire of the parish church of St. Giles.  The population, like the wealth, was superior to that of any other West Riding borough.  Next in importance came Doncaster; then followed Sheffield, Selby, Tickhill, Rotherham, Wake- field, Snaith, and Ripon.  Leeds ranked next to Ripon.  It paid but £3 0s. 0d. in assessment; its population was made up of fifty families and a few single persons, and its wealthiest man contributed 2d. to the tax.  Then came Tadcaster, Knaresborough, and Bawtry. 

  As for Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield, they were in those days of no importance whatever.  Outside the West Riding, York was still the principal city of the North, and occupied the same proud position which had belonged to it for fourteen centuries.  It was often the abiding-place of the sovereigns, and for a time the home of the English Parliament. 

 It was at a Parliament held at York in 1321 that the famous enactment was made which provided that "The estate of the Crown or of the realm and people must be treated, accorded, and established in Parliament by the king, by and with the consent of the prelates, earls, barons, and universality of the realm." 

 Edward III caused the old city walls to be repaired in 1327, and in the following year he was married in York Minster to Philippa of Hainault.  Between York and all other Yorkshire towns there lay a wide gulf; it was the city of kings, the headquarters of the Church in the North; it had traditions and associations unshared in by any other place in the county.

  Of the life of the common people in the Yorkshire towns of the Mediaeval Ages, it is possible to reconstruct a satisfactory picture.  Dr. Raine says of the people of York that at first they dwelt in narrow streets, in the shadow of the Minster, keeping as close to it and to each other as they possibly could.  Houses of stone were remarkable by their scarcity; most of the houses were of wood, of post and pan work, and in architecture of the style, which one sees, in the older streets of York at the present day. 

 Before each house stood two objects peculiar to the age—one a dunghill, which was constantly added to and but seldom cleared away; the other, a stoop, or post of wood, on which the householder sat of an evening to gossip with his neighbours. 

  Their speech was carried on in a dialect [Broad Yorkshire] which no man of the south could possibly understand.  All the trading they did was under the supervision of the civic authorities; their principal, and in many cases their only amusement was in decorating their parish church. 

 Folk of the same trade kept together; the butchers lived in the Shambles; the makers of spurs in Spurriergate; the coppersmiths in Coppersgate; the fishermen in the Water-lanes; the metal-workers near the Church of St. Helen.  But there were many trades in existence in York in the Middle Ages; at the time of Edward III, there were nearly two hundred different trades in operation in York.  Many of these were closely mixed up with the religious life of the city, as in the case of text-writers, chandlers, illuminators, embroiderers, organ-makers, glaziers, and the like.

 Religion, of course, gave great life and colour to the Yorkshire towns of the Middle Ages.  In the reign of Henry V, there were over forty parish churches in York, and between the people of one parish and the next there was a keen spirit of emulation and rivalry.  Each parish endeavoured to make its church superior in all things to the other churches of the city, and the contributions of the faithful were on a generous scale. 

 According to Dr. Raine, who estimates that there were at this time about five hundred clergy attached to the York churches, the stipends of rector, vicar, or curate were small, and they depended for sustenance largely upon voluntary contributions.  That the folk were deeply religious none can doubt; even business affairs were done, or attempted to be done, in a religious spirit, and there are in existence letters and statements of account headed by the Sacred Name or monogram. 

 As for colour the streets were perpetually witnessing processions and ceremonies, and on the great festivals of the Church, such as Corpus Christi, the whole city rang with the clashing of bells, the music of bands and choristers, and the prayers and acclamations of the people. 

  A family romance similar to that of the famous Dick Whittington hails from Wharfedale, and had its beginning about the middle of the sixteenth century.  There was at that time living in the village of Apple-treewick, a few miles from Bolton Priory, a boy named William Craven, whose father, according to some chroniclers, was a peasant, according to others, a farmer.  But, whether peasant or farmer, the father was a poor man, and when his son was apprenticed to a linen-draper the parish had to disburse the necessary money for his indentures.  The apprenticeship over, William Craven went to London to improve himself in position, travelling thither in a carrier's cart which compassed the intervening distance in three weeks.  In London he did so well and amassed so much money that he became a man of consequence, and was made Lord Mayor in 1611-12, and knighted shortly afterwards.  Yorkshire- man-like, he did not forget his native place; he restored the parish church of Burnsall, built a grammar school, and did many other things, as an inscription in the church testified, of which the record has been lost— " Many other workes of Charitie, whereof no mention here, True tokens of his bounty, in this parish did appeare."

 But Sir William Craven's son had an even more romantic career—he became a soldier, and after seeing much service under Gustavus Adolphus and the Prince of Orange, he devoted his energies to the cause of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, sister of Charles I., whom, on the death of the king and the return of the royal widow to England, he married.  Whitaker, the historian topographer, makes a moral reflection of great weight upon this event.

  "Thus," he observes, "the son of a Wharfedale peasant matched with a sister of Charles I.—a remarkable instance of that Providence which raiseth the poor out of the dust and setteth him among princes, even the princes of his people."  The gallant soldier was quickly raised to higher things; his royal brother-in-law created him a peer, and his nephew-in-law, Charles II advanced him to the dignity of Earl of Craven.

  While the peace-loving inhabitants of the boroughs and villages were desirous of nothing so much as the advancement of trade and the bettering of their own condition, the disturbing elements in military and political life kept Yorkshire well acquainted with war and contention.  

 Between the time of the Norman Conquest and the Restoration of the monarchy there was plenty of bloodshed in the county—sometimes on a vast scale, as at the battle of the Standard in 1138, the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, the battle of Wakefield in 1460, and the great fight at Towton in the following year; sometimes in the way of cutting off the heads of such great folk as Archbishop Scrope in his own palace of Bishopthorpe, and the mighty Earl of Lancaster under the walls of his own castle of Pontefract. The battles of the Wars of the Roses were sanguinary affairs enough —some three thousand Yorkists perished at Wakefield; at Towton the number of dead, Yorkists and Lancastrians, is said to have been at least thirty thousand, and some chroniclers estimate it at ten thousand more.

 When the Civil War broke out in the middle of the seventeenth century, Yorkshire folk, as a rule, took sides with the king; all the great families, with the notable exception of the Fairfaxes, taking up arms and garrisoning their castles and fortified houses in his behalf. 

   Charles himself was much in evidence in Yorkshire during the years immediately preceding the war; it was at York that he decided, after conferring with some of the principal peers, to summon the Long Parliament, which met at Westminster in November, 1640, and he was in residence in the city from January, 1642, until the end of April in the same year, when he rode to Hull to demand possession of the town from Sir John Hotham, who had garrisoned it for the Parliament. 

  During the king's residence in York in 1642 he lived in a house belonging to Sir Arthur Ingram in the Minster Yard, and it was by his orders that a printing press was set up in St. William's College, from which issued a number of pamphlets and proclamations in aid of the Royalist cause, and in answer to the demands of the Parliamentarian leaders. 

  The gradual subjugation of Yorkshire by the Parliamentarians under Fairfax, Manchester, and Cromwell, who personally superintended some of the operations, is a matter well known in history —all the chief cities and boroughs came under the popular cause without exception, and the others were taken one by one and eventually dismantled. 

  York surrendered, upon honourable conditions, immediately after the battle of Marston Moor in 1645, and when Charles was brought to the scaffold in 1649, no Yorkshire town or stronghold was held for him with the exception of Pontefract, whose garrison was the last in England to defend his cause, and the first to proclaim Charles II.  

  During the period between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy, considerable change was made in the aspect of Yorkshire by the destruction, complete or partial, of the castles and fortified houses.  All, without exception, had been garrisoned for the king; some had made a stout and lengthy resistance; some had speedily fallen.  Each came under the displeasure of the Parliamentarian leaders, but there was a difference in the treatment meted out to these last strongholds of the old feudal power.  Some of them had been literally knocked to pieces by the bombardments to which they had been subjected, and were easily demolished; others had suffered little, and might as easily have been repaired.  Where they were supposed to be of a menacing nature to the folk round about they were ordered to be razed to the ground, and in these cases, as at Pontefract, a place especially hated by the Parliaments, there is little left of the original structure. 

  With the destruction of the castles by Oliver Cromwell and his adherents, the work of despoliation of ancient buildings begun by Thomas Cromwell and his following a century earlier was completed, and the magnificent strongholds and religious houses for which Yorkshire had long been celebrated became mere stone quarries for the builder or resting-places for the birds.

  No county in England showed more rejoicing over the restoration of Charles II than Yorkshire was made evident in the Yorkshire fashion of feasting, drinking, and general jollity.  Yorkshirefolk as a whole had cared little for the rule of the Commonwealth, and when Fairfax, perhaps the most influential Yorkshireman of his time, who in 1660 was living in peaceful retirement at Nun Appleton, amusing himself with his coins and books, came forward to arrange the return and proclamation of Charles II with General Monk, his fellow-countymen were only too ready to follow his example, and welcome the king to his own again. 

  On May II, 1660, a grand celebration of the Merry Monarch's return was held at York, and shared in by those who had previously occupied opposite camps in matters political.  Fairfax sent a splendid horse from his stables for Charles's use at his coronation, and Yorkshire folk settled down with the rest of England to a system more in accord with their taste than that under which they had lived for eleven restless years. 

  But the newly restored monarch came to quarrelling with the York people before he died, and his highhanded action damaged the Stuart cause in Yorkshire beyond hope of repair.  In 1684, having already placed a garrison in the city, much against the desire of the citizens, Charles deprived York of its charters.  It then turned its back, in conjunction with all the rest of the county, upon the Stuart Pretenders in 1715 and 1745, and was liberal in its provision of men and money in defence of the House of Hanover.  

  During the eighteenth century Yorkshire remained in a period of quiescence – free from war, steady in its allegiance.  There was as yet no such impetus to trades and manufactures as that which was to come with the introduction of steam-power, and the great towns of the West Riding increased in size, wealth, and importance at a very gradual rate.  

  It is true that Defoe speaks of the cloth-making district as " a noble scene of industry and application," but all manufactures in Yorkshire were on a very small scale then when compared with the state of ‘things yet to come.’  

  Even at the end of the eighteenth century Leeds could not boast of a population exceeding fifty thousand, and Bradford had no more than twelve hundred people engaged in its staple trade.  The industrial towns were mean, dirty, ill-paved, badly lighted; it was not until 1755 that the Leeds folk were enterprising enough to make better provision in these directions. 

  Up to the beginning of the reign of George III, the cloth merchants sold their goods in the open streets.  The new Cloth Hall, built about that time, stood in the park outside the town, to which the present Boar Lane was a sort of pleasant, rural approach.  That the limits of Leeds were then very circumscribed one may gather from the fact that from the back of the house in which Ralph Thoresby, the topographer, lived in Kirkgate access was immediately had into open meadows, stretching far away into the country.

  To York itself, as capital of the county, the eighteenth century brought naught but peace from war and strife, fell off in commercial importance, but it gained much in social dignity.  It became the fashionable centre of the county, as London is today of the whole country. 

  The great people of the North had their town houses in the city, and spent the season there; folk of lesser degree, who had made fortunes in business, retired to York to live in great gentility.  Daniel Defoe, who visited the county at the beginning of the century, remarked of York that it contained much genteel society, an abundance of pleasant company, and that the cost of living in the city was very moderate. 

   Drake, the author of "Eboracum," agrees with Defoe.  He speaks of the great variety of provisions in the market, of the small cost of keeping an elegant table, and of the well-served ordinaries at the inns.  There were excellent schools in the city; assemblies were held in the rooms designed by Lord Burlington; the drama was well patronised, and there were opportunities for folk who loved dancing, music, cards, and the like. 

   The season was, of course, in winter; but there was a very fashionable week in August, during the races, and most of the folk met a month later at Doncaster for the September race-week, a social event of great importance.  For quite a hundred years York was a city of fashion and social pleasure, and it was not transformed until the introduction of steam-power initiated a striking change all over the county which bears its name.  

  Between the Yorkshire of the eighteenth century and the Yorkshire of today stretches a gulf so wide that one can scarcely see across it.  In the days when George the Third was King, when England was losing its American Colonies, and on the eve of the long and disastrously expensive French wars, Yorkshire was practically undeveloped, and more things happened to it and its people between 1760 and 1860 than had happened to them during the previous two thousand years.  

  In 1760 there were no railways, and intercommunication was poor and dilatory; weavers worked in their own houses and cottages, as did my own Great-great-grandfather, James Bray of Deighton, instead of in huge factories; education was in a very rudimentary state, and there were neither free libraries nor newspapers; the Yorkshire Wolds were still unenclosed, and much land north of the Humber was worthless, not having come under the plough; the chief towns of the county were mean, dirty, and, in relation to their present condition, of no real wealth or importance, except as the dwelling places of their inhabitants.  

   At the end of the eighteenth century, Leeds, the largest town in the three Ridings, could not boast a population of more than fifty thousand, and that of Sheffield was about ten thousand less.  In Bradford, a black, filthy town, intersected by a narrow beck, choked and polluted with refuse, there were only twelve hundred persons who were actually engaged in the staple trades, and the place was of small commercial value or rank. 

  The older towns of the county, such as Pontefract, Beverley, Knaresborough, Richmond, were mere market centres, unlikely to increase in population or wealth.  The most flourishing and busiest houses in them, as in all the little towns along the chief highroads, were the inns, which filled a place in the social and business life of that time that would later be occupied by the great railway stations and junctions.  Naturally, the king's highway was much more full of life and colour, of noise and excitement, in those days than it is now.   

  All along the Great North Road, from the borders of Durham to those of Nottinghamshire, there was continual movement – stage coach and private carriages, solitary horseman and crowded post-chaise, the express waggon and the local carrier's cart, were for ever proceeding north or south, and the cobble-paved streets of towns like Boroughbridge and Wetherby, Doncaster and Ferrybridge, were always ringing to the clatter of horses' feet and the ringing of iron-bound wheels.  It was a very old-world, elementary, slow- going Yorkshire that one might have seen a hundred and fifty years ago, and there were few signs of a mighty change observable even in 1760, when Farmer George came to the throne.

  The foundation-stone of the great modern fabric of industry, enterprise, and wealth which has been reared in Yorkshire since those days was undoubtedly the application of steam-power to the manufactures of the county.  After the important demonstration of James Watt in 1765, a revolution in methods and manners set in which overspread the country in rapidly widening waves, and by the end of the century had brought about a truly amazing difference in many respects. 

  Nevertheless, the introduction of steam-power into Yorkshire was made with comparative slowness and not without opposition on the part of the working classes.  The first steam-mill for grinding purposes was not set up at Sheffield until 1787 ; the preliminary attempts to introduce steam-power into the Bradford trade at a time when there were only three mills or factories in the town met with such opposition that nothing came of them.  It was not until 1798 that a steam-engine of 15-horse-power began to run at Bradford, and speedily convinced the folk thereabouts that the new force would, and must be allowed to, revolutionise the conditions of trade.  

  At Leeds the new motive power was at an early date applied to the haulage of coal from the Middleton collieries, and steam-engines were running over the tram-lines which linked the collieries with Leeds at a very early period of the nineteenth century.

  A notion of the methods of conveying men and merchandise which existed in Yorkshire until—practically speaking—1841 may be gathered from the case of Leeds; then, as now, the most important industrial centre in the county.  The Leeds services, whether for conveying passengers or goods, were of the best, as befitted a great trading town.  On the Leeds-to-London route, and vice versa, there was a service of very fine, well-horsed coaches, which ran through in twenty hours, calling at the principal towns of the Midland counties on their way.  There were eight departures per diem each way, so that one could have been certain of getting a coach north or south, from Leeds or London, every three hours, night or day, and of arriving well within the next twenty-four. 

  As for the merchandise waggons, there was a daily departure of a train of these once a day in each direction, and they were booked to run through from Leeds to London, or London to Leeds, in thirty-six hours.  Similar communication existed between the other large towns.

  Contemporaneous with the improvements made in travelling and carriage of merchandise were those effected in political, social, and educational matters.  Always a keen politician, successive Reform Acts and extensions of the franchise made the Yorkshireman able to take a more active part in the political life of the nation, and the power to vote extending first to the shopkeeping classes, then to the working-folk of the towns, and finally to the rural labourer, brought into the arena of party politics whole armies of new forces.” 

  The various Factory Acts passed during the nineteenth century all tended in one direction—the improvement in the conditions under which tens of thousands of men, women, and children worked in the mills and workshops of the crowded manufacturing districts.  One may gain an accurate idea of some of the earlier conditions of that life from contemporary fiction, such as the " Mary Barton " of Mrs. Gaskell, and, in a different way, from the " Shirley " of Charlotte Brontë.  Nowadays all the worst features of the factory system have been entirely eliminated—the operatives work under conditions which would have been surprising to their grandfathers, and labour is as jealously guarded as capital is protected.  The result is that the Yorkshire factory worker of to-day is a man of sturdy independence—he has his vote, and therefore his share and his "say" in the affairs of his country; he lives in a good cottage, eats good food, and wears good clothes; he generally has money in the bank or in a building society, and as often as not can boast the possession of a piano or a harmonium in the front parlour.

  Old people whose memories carry back to the first half of the nineteenth century will tell you that there was in those days nothing like the chances of " eddication " that exist now all over the county.  As the modern spirit made its influence felt in Yorkshire, a great desire to learn and to know sprang up amongst the people. 

  Every Act of Parliament passed in furtherance of the cause of education was eagerly taken advantage of, and none more readily seized upon than that of 1870, which led to the establishment of School Boards.  Nor was education confined to the imparting of knowledge to the young. 

  The foundation of Mechanics' Institutes in the great towns has proved one of the greatest blessings ever accorded to an intelligent working community.  With the Mechanics' Institutes sprang up Literary and Philosophical Societies, and in connection with them Museums, wherein scientific collections were housed.  More opportunities came with the establishing of Free Public Libraries, Art Galleries, and Reading Rooms.  There is no county in England, there are not many capitals in Europe, wherein better provision is made for the education, the self-improvement, the mental uplifting of the people, than the careful observer will notice in Yorkshire.  No worker of the towns need be without good books, good pictures, good music, good lectures—and he can have them all for nothing.  Nor are there many counties better equipped with secondary schools, technical colleges, and facilities for higher education.  There is never any need to impress upon the Yorkshireman of modern days that education and knowledge mean power and influence — and brass!  [money].

  One of the greatest factors in the modern life of Yorkshire is undoubtedly the newspaper.  For nearly two hundred years the county has had its own journals, and many of them have been characteristically Yorkshire in their outspokenness and in their fearless advocacy of what their directors have conceived to be the truth.  In later days, these great newspapers have exerted a vast influence, political and social, over Yorkshire life and thought

 Some idea of the remarkable development of the great Yorkshire towns during the hundred years which elapsed between 1801 and 1901 may be gained from the bare statistics of the census-takers and other official returns.  The population of Leeds in 1801 was 53,612 ; in 1901, it was 428,968.  In the same period, Sheffield increased from 45,755 to 380,793, and Hull from about 30,000 to 240,259.  Bradford in 1831 could only number 43,527; by 1901, its population had swelled to 279,767.  Between 1821 and 1901 the population of Halifax increased from 14,064 to 104,936.  

  That Yorkshire is essentially a county of hardworking folk all observant Yorkshiremen are very well aware, just as they are equally well aware that Yorkshire folk play as earnestly as they labour.  The opportunities for labour are abundant — there is the land, there are the textile industries, there are coal mines, iron mines, lead mines, stone quarries; there is the steel trade of Sheffield, there are the various occupations of the seaport towns, and there are a score minor industries, some of them of considerable importance.  Few counties are richer in natural resources or in developed trades and occupations.

  Agriculture, if not one of the most flourishing, is certainly the most venerable industry in Yorkshire, and can be traced back to the Neolithic age.  Taking it altogether the county is more of a grazing than an arable district, and much of the land that is now under cultivation was formerly waste or morass. 

  In some parts of the North Riding the mountain sheep find it difficult to pick up a living.  There is a story told of an old North-country farmer in the neighbourhood of Stainmoor who was asked by a would-be student of such matters how many sheep he reckoned to the acre.  " How monny sheep ti t' acre ?" he exclaimed.  " Eh, mon, ye begin at t' wrang end— ye should ha' asked hoo monny acres do we reckon ti a sheep.”  But for all that there is a vast number of sheep in the county and a great many varieties of breed. 

  In the breeding of horses Yorkshire- men take a well-known pride, and will produce anything equine from the nervous race-horse to the mighty Shire horse.  Perhaps the training establishments of the county are not so famous in these days as in the time of John Scott, but no one who has ever visited a Yorkshire horse-fair, race-meeting, or meet of foxhounds will doubt the Yorkshire love of horse-flesh.

 Perhaps the most characteristic of the Yorkshire industries is that which gives employment to the great bulk of the crowded populations of the West Riding, and may be classed under one comprehensive term—the making of clothes.  All the great towns of the West Riding are engaged in the spinning and manufacturing of silk, linen, cotton, and wool. 

  Woollen goods and worsted goods are the chief objects of manufacture, and have their own particular homes and centres.  When a Yorkshireman speaks of "Leeds goods" he means all kinds of goods of the woollen industry; when he speaks of " Bradford," he means worsted goods, and by Huddersfield goods” he means the finest worsteds the world has ever known. 

 All the other towns and districts have some specialty—the towns of the Spen Valley, Batley, Dewsbury, Cleckheaton, and their smaller neighbours produce clothing from reworked material, and place it on the market under the names of Shoddy and Mungo. 

  Wakefield turns out yarns and medium woollens and worsteds; Huddersfield worsteds and woollens of superfine quality.  Halifax produces worsted yarns, a variety of ornamental fabrics, and has also a great trade in carpets.  Some of the manufactories —"mills" as they are called in the textile-producing districts—are of vast size; the silk and velvet mill at Manningham, near Bradford, once covered an area of eleven acres and cost £500,000 to build ; at the great Saltaire mill, where Sir Titus Salt begun the manufacture of alpaca, between two and three thousand work-people were employed; at Crossley's famous carpet mills in Halifax work was found for nearly five thousand persons. 

  All over this district, from Bradford on the north to Huddersfield on the south, from Wakefield on the east to Todmorden on the west, the mills are everywhere —vast, many-windowed erections which fill up every valley.  In the twilight of autumn and winter or in the early winter mornings their lights are seen across the hills for mile upon mile, producing an effect which—save in Lancashire—cannot be seen elsewhere in England.

  People who travel into Yorkshire for the first time are apt to take their impressions of the country from what they first see.  To enter it by way of Huddersfield, from Manchester, one would take it to be a land of great factories; by way of Sheffield, from Derbyshire, a land of furnaces and awful gloom ; by way of Skipton, from the Lancashire border, a pastoral country with signs of a romantic past.  If a man could be set down at, say, Barnsley, and told to make his way northward, by way of Normanton, to Leeds, he might well be forgiven if he came to the conclusion that Yorkshire is a land of coal-mines.  In this district they are everywhere in evidence, and the collier is the dominant factor, with his powerful Union, his direct representatives in Parliament, and his own world of life and amusements. 

  Besides vast coal deposits, there are minerals of great value in the county — the hillsides which overlook the Swale, beyond Richmond, are pitted with lead mines, and there are more along the valley of the Nidd; stone of the most excellent quality is found in great bulk near Bradford, Tadcaster, Ackworth, and Elland; marble may be quarried in some of the Northern dales; fine grained sandstone at Huddersfield, and jet and alum are found in considerable quantity amongst the headlands and in the neighbourhood of Whitby.

  There are so many things of which the Yorkshireman can boast without fear of contradiction that travellers who see Sheffield for the first time may well wonder whether the inhabitants of the county would not prefer to keep globe-trotters away from it.  Sheffield, by the arduous, if somewhat dilatory, labours of its folk, has gradually washed much of its face, and no longer merits the remark of Horace Walpole, who in 1760 considered it "one of the foulest towns in England.”  Smoke or no smoke, grime or none, Yorkshiremen are proud of Sheffield as being the centre of the steel trade, the world's workshop for knives, scissors, razors, surgical instruments, armour-plates, rails, saws, files, castings, and heavy forgings. 

  Within the smoke-canopied boundaries of the town are some of the largest steel and iron works in the world; in their sheds wonderful things are done with steel—one may watch steel wire drawn out to the consistency of the finest human hair or vast masses of metal dealt with as if they were so much dough. 

  Little wonder that out of the midst of such a wonderful hive of modern industry all traces of the historic past have almost vanished or that the Sheffield man should forget that in the centre of his crowded bustling town Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years in captivity.

  It is somewhat strange that a county possessing such a lengthy seaboard as Yorkshire should have so few seaports, and only one of the first importance.  As a matter of fact, there are only three seaports actually on the coast; for Hull is several miles along the Humber from Spurn Point, and Middlesbrough is about as far from the mouth of the Tees, while Goole and Selby are, properly speaking, inland riverside ports. 

   Of the three coast ports, Whitby, Scarborough, and Bridlington, there is little that can be said of their former commercial importance.  Whitby had some foreign trade, and ships coal and ironstone; but has decreased in importance and wealth since the days when it built ships for Captain Cook wherewith he journeyed round the world, and sent out its fleet to the whaling-grounds. 

  Scarborough also had some foreign trade, and so had Bridlington; but the greater number of craft which came into their harbours were connected with the now severely depleted fishing industry.  Goole has an extensive water trade with Hull, and sends steamships to Rotterdam, Antwerp, some of the northern French ports, and to the Channel Islands, but her docks can only accommodate comparatively small vessels.  Middlesbrough, where extensive docks were built after the rapid development of the iron trade, once did a large trade in exporting its own products. 

   But when one talks of a seaport in Yorkshire, one's thoughts naturally turn to Hull, which, since the time of Edward I., has steadily risen in importance, and now does a vast export and import trade with all parts of the world, but especially with the North European ports. 

  Modern Hull has lost much of the romantic air that distinguished her in the days when the High Street merchants sent out ships to the Greenland and Arctic whaling-grounds.  That branch of seacraft began at Hull in the sixteenth century, and flourished there until 1857, when the last of the whalers, the ancient Diana, was wrecked on the Lincolnshire coast.  

Further Information [external sites]:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigantes 

http://www.yorkshireridingsmagazine.com/index.php/history/76-prehistoricyorkshire

http://www.yorkshireridingsmagazine.com/index.php/wildlife/65-livinglandscape

http://www.brigantesnation.com/SiteResearch/Iron%20Age/Almondbury/Almondbury.htm

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Neolithic-site-is-North39s-answer.519767.jp 

http://ezinearticles.com/?Upper-Paleolithic-Man-and-His-Maglemosian-Cousins&id=2337255

http://archaeology.about.com/od/sterms/qt/star_carr.htm