The Little History of Yorkshire E-Book

Ingrid Barton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 286

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

There is nothing 'little' about the history of England's largest county, Yorkshire! However, this small volume condenses a rich history into a collection of stories and facts that will make you marvel at the events this county has witnessed, from Mesolithic roots to Roman heritage, from medieval splendour to the industrial revolution and beyond. Discover the development of the woolen industry in Leeds, the coal, textile and steel industries in Sheffield and Rotherham, and the rise of spa towns at Harrogate and Scarborough. Take a journey through the historic - and heroic! - struggles and celebrations of past Yorkshire people, or jump into the era of your choice to discover the who, what and why of our county's history.

Leseprobe

First published 2018

The History PressThe Mill, Brimscombe PortStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QGwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Ingrid Barton, 2018

The right of Ingrid Barton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8952 7

Typesetting and origination by The History PressPrinted and bound in Europe by ImakeBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1   In the Beginning

2   Prehistory

3   The Bronze Age

4   The Iron Age

5   The Romans

6   The Anglo-Saxons

7   The Vikings

8   The Normans

9   Plenty and Disaster, Twelfth–Fourteenth centuries

10  The Later Middle Ages, 1400–1485

11  The Early Tudors, 1485–1547

12  Elizabethan and Jacobean Yorkshire

13  The Civil Wars

14  Years of Expansion, 1680–1780

15  The Industrial Revolution, 1780–1850

16  The Height of Empire

17  The Twentieth Century

Afterword

INTRODUCTION

Modern teaching of history is often too general to deal with the story of particular places, and yet that is precisely the sort of history to which people feel connected. Yorkshire has had a fabulous past and yet many Yorkshire people have little knowledge of it, which is why I wanted to write something for them.

Creating a little history of a county as big as Yorkshire was quite a challenge because so many important events happened here. Inevitably I have had to be selective, so I apologise if I’ve left out your favourite bit of Yorkshire history. What I have included is, at the end of each chapter, a paragraph about a particular Yorkshire person of the period, as well as a short list of relevant places that interested readers might like to visit.

My thanks go to my friends, Dr Charles Kightly (a real historian) who has very kindly corrected many of my mistakes, and Professor Pam King, who helped me with the Corpus Christi pageants. I’d also like to acknowledge my great obligation to Professor David Hey of Sheffield University, on whose really BIG history of Yorkshire I have modelled my own, and all those lovely people who created the hundreds of websites, helpful and otherwise, that I have consulted while writing this book.

Ingrid Barton,Yorkshire, 2018

1

IN THE BEGINNING

In the beginning was the land.

To the west are the Pennines, a long hard backbone, wet and mountainous. The upper part is carboniferous limestone, heathland, shot through with veins of lead; the lower part peaty shale and millstone grit; boggy, difficult land.

To the north is a range of lower hills, uplands and dales, shaped by the glaciers of the last Ice Age, merging with the Pennines to the west. Here, in places, carboniferous limestone has dissolved to form characteristic swallow holes, or potholes like Gaping Gill. This block of hills is cut by the wide and fertile Eden Valley, on the further side of which it rises again as the Yorkshire Moors, taking its old name of Blackamoor from the peaty soil.

To the east rise the Wolds, an arc of chalk hills, made from the crushed bodies of countless trillions of sea creatures who once swam in a warm sea before the world we know was formed. This land is softer. The Ice Age rounded its hills and flattened the bottoms of its long-vanished becks.

Further East and South lies flat Holderness, once covered with meres (Hornsey Mere is the last), and straggling becks left by the Ice Age. It has always been a boggy land, liable to flooding, cut off from the rest of the country, but its alluvial soil is rich.

Framed on three sides by these ranges of hills is the easier, fertile land of the huge Vale of York and the smaller vales of Cleveland, Mowbray and Pickering. These are made richer with silt from the great rivers Ouse, Nidd, and Derwent. They were once vast wetlands covered in game and flocking birds. A band of magnesium limestone cut by the gorges of Knaresborough, Wharfe and Don overlooks the Vale of York.

When humans first settled in Yorkshire this was the land they had to survive on: some places easy and generous, some hard and meagre, some quirky, needing generations to learn to use.

In the beginning was the land, and the land brought forth the people!

YORKSHIRE FOLK:

The Reverend Fred Kendall is a forgotten early geologist, one of the founders of the Yorkshire Rotunda Museum. Expelled from Cambridge in 1817 for allegedly setting fire to his college (cleared at his trial) he went on to publish A Catalogue of the Minerals and Fossils of Scarborough, one of the pioneering works of geology.

PLACES TO VISIT:

Yorkshire is a feast for geologists where you will find rocks from many periods, such as:

Robin Hood’s Bay: Jurassic strata

Flamborough Head: upper cretaceous chalk cliffs

Nidd Gorge: dolomite limestone overlaid with gypsum

Gaping Gill: a fine example of a limestone pot

Rotunda Museum, Vernon Road, Scarborough, YO11 2PS

2

PREHISTORY

History is, technically, the study of evidence from written records, but humans were around in Yorkshire thousands of years before writing was invented. This ‘before’ time is called prehistory and relies on archaeological evidence. Prehistory was divided by Victorian archaeologists into three ages: the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, named after the commonest material for weapons and tools. These classifications, while still useful, are very rough. They vary depending on what resources were available to the people in any particular area and overlap in time a lot.

The Stone Age is also divided into three Ages: Old, Middle and New. The main material for tools in all three ages was flint, traded across Britain and Ireland. It was knapped with increasing skill over the years into artefacts often of great beauty. Actually, wood was probably the material in greatest use, but few artefacts survive.

OLD STONE AGE (PALEOLITHIC)

The first people to walk on the land we now call Yorkshire came here a very long time ago. It is hard for us to get our heads around the hundreds of thousands of years during which our ancestors lived hunting wild animals and gathering wild food. They were nomads, ranging over huge areas, exploiting seasonal sources of food. These early people came to Britain as visitors, not settlers.

The last Ice Age slowly drew to its conclusion at about 10,000 BC, but ice still covered the northern part of the country. At that time Britain was part of Europe, attached to the Netherlands, the west coast of Germany and Jutland by a low-lying area known to archaeologists as Doggerland: no English Channel, no North Sea. Doggerland was tundra, a good hunting country of mosses, lichens, marshes and bird-filled reedbeds over which small bands of hunter-gatherers occasionally crossed into southern Britain, and occasionally up into Yorkshire, though it was still very cold here. The animals they hunted were cold-weather ones: woolly mammoth, aurochs (a sort of giant bull), woolly rhinoceros, bison, elk and reindeer, some of which left their bones in Victoria Cave, near Settle. About 8,000 BC a hunter one day lost his harpoon point in a deer he had wounded; it died in Victoria Cave with the harpoon still in it and the skilfully-carved little tip is the first evidence of humans in Yorkshire.

MIDDLE STONE AGE (MESOLITHIC)

From about 10,000 BC big changes began to happen to Britain. As the climate warmed, the mosses and lichens on which the cold-weather animals fed began to be replaced by grass and trees, birch, alder and willow. While the ways from Europe were still open, the spread of grasslands enticed herds of different animals into Britain: deer, horses, wild cattle, wild pigs. However, as the ice melted Doggerland slowly began to flood and become impassable. The catastrophic collapse of a huge lake between England and Germany, in about 6,500 BC, scoured out the English Channel. From that time any humans and animals in Britain were effectually stranded. The Middle Stone Age covers this time of change, lasting from 10,000 to about 4,000 BC. Its most important archaeological site in Yorkshire – and probably in the whole country – is at Star Carr in North Yorkshire, where excavations carried out over many years have shed new light on the Mesolithic way of life.

Star Carr lies 5 miles south of Scarborough at the east end of the Vale of Pickering on the shores of a vanished lake, Lake Flixton. Dating from the time when Doggerland was still above water, this Mesolithic site was in a rich environment. Around the lake and along the wide Vale was an open mixed forest of birch, aspen and willow in which many animals lived. There were red and roe deer, wild horse, elk, aurochs, wild boar, wolves, lynx, pine marten and wildcat; beavers built dams in nearby becks; flocks of all sorts of birds flew among the water lilies, reeds and edible aquatic plants of the fish-filled lake; hares and hedgehogs hid in bushes on the shores; badgers trundled through the undergrowth. It was a perfect environment for humans to exploit.

It used to be thought that these hunter-gatherers did not build houses but lived in temporary camps; however, this is proving not to be the case. There was some sort of structure built on the shores of the lake, 3.5m wide, constructed of log posts, with an unknown infill, possibly skins. Its floor was covered with a thick layer of moss, reeds and soft plant material. While the building may possibly have been inhabited only seasonally it continued to be used for up to 500 years. There was also a trackway leading to a platform over the lake which may have been used for fishing.

The finds at Star Carr have been amazing. Large numbers of bone tools, flint scrapers and axes have been found as well as the only engraved Mesolithic pendant in Britain. The most exciting finds are twenty-one deer skull frontlets which seem to relate to a deer cult. They are made from the top of skulls of red deer, with the antlers still attached. They are pierced with eyeholes so they were clearly intended for wearing, probably by shamans, during some hunting ceremony. Other items include rolls of birch bark and lumps of pyrites for lighting fires, and pieces of haematite for red paint.

NEW STONE AGE (NEOLITHIC)

There were comparatively few humans in existence anywhere at the beginning of the Middle Stone Age but, few as they were, they were well on their way to becoming top predator. The disadvantage of being a hunter, however, is that hunting takes time, co-operation and energy. It can seldom supply enough food to support a large population. Gathering, too, takes time because plants are seasonal and have to be found. How much simpler to scatter the seeds near where you live! The people who first thought of scattering seeds in a convenient place took a huge step towards farming, which developed slowly from about 4,500 BC onwards. Having more food led to the invention of techniques for preserving it and so to increased survival in the winter months. Animals began to be domesticated and herded, with the new help of dogs; horses were tamed and ridden; simple ploughs were developed. Population numbers began to rise.

In Yorkshire, as in other parts of Britain, the larger population made it possible for communities to leave a lasting mark on the landscape. In the Wolds, where the lighter soils made clearing the land easier, communities worked together to mark some of their dead with the cigar-shaped mounds of chalk known as long barrows. Most have now been ploughed out, but the one excavated at Willerby Wold had a concave forecourt where burial rituals took place before the dead were laid in a wooden chamber. The whole thing was then covered with a chalk mound and burned.

Long barrows can be found all over Britain, but it’s only in the Wolds that Neolithic round barrows can be found (much larger than the later ones from the Bronze Age). Willey and Duggleby Howes (from haugr, a Norse word for burial mound) stand impressively high above the road. Although quite a few people, including children, are interred in them, either as burials or cremations, we don’t know why these particular people were chosen for the honour; most of the dead must have been disposed of in some other way.

Both howes are in the Great Wold Valley, the widest of the valleys that cut the Yorkshire Wolds. It contains the Gypsey Race, a mysteriously intermittent river which seems to have been the centre of a Neolithic sacred landscape. Duggleby Howe is surrounded by a recently discovered henge and further down the valley at a sharp bend in the Gypsey Race are the strange avenues of unknown use called cursuses as well as the massive Rudston Monument. This last is a huge standing stone some 8m high, cut from Jurassic gritstone and dragged 28 miles from an outcrop at Grosmont. A row of similar stones called the Devil’s Arrows stand outside Boroughbridge.

Henges are supposedly sacred circular spaces defined by a bank with an internal ditch. There are many, large and small, in Britain, but three of the most intriguing and impressive stand in a row near Thornborough, near Ripon, a place which seems to have been very important in the New Stone Age. If you stand on the northern bank the central henge seems irritatingly out of alignment with the other two, but recent computer analysis has revealed that the three henges are an exact match with the stars of Orion’s Belt. Don’t underestimate Neolithic astronomers!

There are many other important Neolithic features in Yorkshire. Henges can be found in the Pennines and there are at least a dozen long barrows on the North Yorkshire Moors. Rock art – small strange carvings and cup-and-ring markings – are being discovered all the time, some hidden on the undersides of rocks, some indicating droveways or paths across marshland, sometimes in full view overlooking a valley. Rombolds Moor, near Ilkley, has the best collection of rock art in Yorkshire, but the interpretation of these signs is still in its infancy.

YORKSHIRE FOLK:

Born near Wetherby, Augustus Pitt Rivers became, during a successful military career, increasingly interested in archaeology and ethnology (the study of peoples). He believed that ordinary objects were important and collected a vast number of archaeological and ethnological items, ranging from shrunken heads to Eskimo trousers, which form the basis of the fascinating Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

PLACES TO VISIT:

Victoria Cave: east of Langcliffe in Ribblesdale

Thornborough Rings: Thornborough, near Masham

Duggleby Howe: near village of Duggleby, Ryedale

The Rudston Monument: Rudston, East Riding of Yorkshire on the B1253 between Driffield and Bridlington

3

THE BRONZE AGE

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. At some time around 2,200 BC tools and weapons made of this material began to enter the country from the Continent. These could be sharpened more than flint and did not shatter, although they were easily blunted. Traders must have brought the first ones but copper was easy to find in Britain, and the secret of turning it into bronze was soon discovered. There are several bronze smelting sites from this age in Yorkshire.

Things crafted by a magical process into such a beautiful and powerful material – didn’t it shine like the sun itself? – were very special. An axe with a socketed bronze head made you an important person and superior to those who continued to use flint. A tiny bronze axe-head pendent recently discovered in an excavation at Thixendale in the Wolds was probably a good luck charm, and there is evidence that many full-size bronze axe heads and spears were never used, but thrown into Yorkshire rivers as gifts for the gods. To the south of the county, in Holderness, a great range of bronze tools and weapons, probably offered in this way, have been found over the years.

In our county, as in other parts of Britain, it seems that the use of bronze was connected in some way with increasing social divisions. There were still big communal projects, such as the building of huge dykes (banks with associated ditches) to mark tribal boundaries, but powerful people were now buried in their own mounds, accompanied by their most prized possessions and food for the afterlife placed in decorated pottery vessels.

In this period it is, once again, in the Yorkshire Wolds that the most important centres of population were located. The hills of the Wolds are covered with round Bronze Age burial mounds (smaller than the communal Neolithic ones), while dykes and earthworks show that the land continued to be divided up. Few actual settlements have yet been found, but a huge site at Paddock Hill, Thwing, shows what could be achieved. A deep outer ditch and chalk rampart 115m in diameter surrounded an internal ditch and very large round house, 25m across. In the centre of the house was a smaller ring of posts around a cremation, giving rise to the idea that the whole complex may have been a temple. However, as there is also evidence that bronze smelting, feasting, weaving and corn grinding went on there, it may have had some more everyday purpose.

In North Ferriby by the Humber, four log boats have been found. These are thought to be the oldest boats in Europe and date from the early Bronze Age, about 4,000 years old. They are made of huge slabs of oak sewn together with twisted yew branches and were big enough to carry animals. It is not known whether they had masts or not, but recent experiments show that they were sturdy enough to have been used in coastal waters and even, perhaps, to cross the North Sea.

The North York Moors might not, nowadays, seem the best place to farm, but the climate was warmer in the past and the land more fertile; there is evidence for many small field enclosures in Eskdale and Upper Ryedale, marked by rubble walls and cairns of cleared stones. Those who farmed there left their important dead in the more than 200 burial mounds scattered over the area; some of them, like Lilla Howe, are prominent landmarks, well-loved by travellers heading towards Whitby. Most of the mounds contain only pottery food vessels, but a few people were buried with extra items, such as bronze daggers. One such was the so-called ‘Gristhorpe Man’, discovered in the 1830s at Gristhorpe near Scarborough. He was 6ft tall; a sign, possibly, of a superior diet, and died at a good age of natural causes, although he had a few healed fractures, consistent with his having been a warrior. He was wrapped in a skin cloak and laid in a hollowed tree trunk. Buried with him were a bronze dagger, a bark vessel, flint tools, and a wicker basket containing food residue.

Population increase in Bronze Age Yorkshire seems to have led to disputes over access to resources. This inevitably resulted in the increased demarcation of the land. Lines of howes across the horizon, or increased building of dykes warned neighbouring groups whose territory they were entering. Some of these dykes, probably major tribal boundaries, are huge with multiple banks, like the Scamridge Dykes. Some, such as those in the Hambledon and Tabular Hills, enclose areas that include all the different types of land necessary for successful farming: grazing, arable and meadow land.

YORKSHIRE FOLK:

Ted Wright and his brother Will were teenagers in 1937 when they discovered the remains of a Bronze Age boat in North Ferriby on the Humber foreshore. Ted had found two more by 1963. All of the same type, they would have been 16m long and were built of oak planks sewn together with yew withies. ‘Ferriby 3’ was dated to 1900 BC, making it the oldest sewn-plank boat in Europe.

PLACES TO VISIT:

Cockmore Dykes: These massive boundary dykes can be viewed from the adjacent National Park car park

Scamridge Dykes

Bronze Age rock art can be found in many places on the West Yorkshire moors. See the ‘Elephant’s Eye’ stone among others on Ilkley Moor

The Hull and East Riding Museum: Featuring Bronze Age food vessels and a model of the Thwing temple. Entrance free

4

THE IRON AGE

Theoretically the Iron Age dates from the first introduction of iron to Britain, in around 700 BC, up until the Roman invasion. In fact, life for most folk went on in much the same way as it had for hundreds of years before. Archaeological evidence from Staple Howe farm, Knapton and elsewhere show that family groups lived, as their ancestors had, in large round houses made of wood or stone with thatched roofs. Pigs wandered and rooted around them. They cultivated small arable plots of barley, spelt and emmer wheat and grazed herds of small sturdy sheep, cattle and horses on high ground in summer, driving them down to lower ground in winter, as farmers still do in the Lake District. Trade, however, inevitably brings change and things were altering slowly as new ideas, fashions and people filtered into the country from abroad; above all there were the exciting possibilities of this new metal: iron.

Iron was not as beautiful as bronze, but it was stronger and kept its edge better, which was ideal for weapons. Warriors quickly took to it but, just as in the Bronze Age, it was initially only those at the top of society who possessed iron objects. Gradually techniques for smelting iron were learned and sources of iron-rich stone discovered, though in Yorkshire bog iron – impure iron deposits that develop in swampy areas – was sometimes used, notably in Nidderdale and the River Foulness area near Market Weighton.

Aerial photography has revealed that much more of Yorkshire was farmed in the Iron Age than appears on the ground. Extensive hut circles, field boundaries and ladder settlements (where houses and fields are connected together in straight lines like ladders) can be seen as crop marks in many places. The Wolds were, it seems, once again more heavily populated than the rest of Yorkshire. Early ploughs could cope better with the light Wold soils than the heavier clays of the Vale of York. New land was brought into cultivation as the population increased, and the system of Bronze Age dykes was greatly extended as land was divided more and more.

It is in the Iron Age that we first hear the names of local tribes, thanks to Roman writers such as Ptolemy. The most important were the Brigantes, whose name means something like ‘The High Ones’. The precise boundaries of their territory are uncertain but they spread right across most of what is now Yorkshire, probably as far south as the Don. It is now thought that their tribal capital was at Stanwick, north of Richmond, where there is a huge complex of ramparts and buildings like a town. In its day it must have been very impressive, a place to which traders brought exotic Roman goods such as Samian pottery, wine and glass.

Demonstrating power as a warlord seems to have been a particular feature of the Iron Age throughout Britain. Hillforts were the must-have items for every petty kinglet. The highest in Yorkshire (and England) is on the cold, windswept, waterless top of Ingleborough, where its benighted inhabitants lived in twenty round houses. Other more accessible Brigantian hillforts can be found at Castle Hill, Almondbury, Brierley Common and Bolton Scar on the moors. Recognised only in 2001, the huge hillfort at Roulston Scar near Sutton Bank has walls nearly 8ft high.

The other Iron Age tribe in Yorkshire was that of the Parisi, who lived in what is now East Yorkshire. Possibly related to the Parisii tribe who founded Paris, they differed from other British tribes in that they buried their adult dead in barrows surrounded by square ditches with rounded corners (children were buried in ordinary graves nearby). Joints of pork as well as personal possessions often accompanied the dead. Huge cemeteries containing hundreds of these barrows in all sizes have been found on the slopes of the Wolds. The site called ‘Danes’ Graves’ near Driffield is a still visible example.

So far twenty of these graves have been found to contain dismantled two-wheeled ‘chariots’ and, unexpectedly, a number of their deceased owners were women. These vehicles were probably not war chariots but light swift carts. Only two have ever been found outside Parisi territory, one in Scotland and one near Ferrybridge, where there is evidence of a particularly lavish funeral feast including some 250 cattle. Quite a party!

YORKSHIRE FOLK:

John Robert Mortimer (15 June 1825–19 August 1911) was an archaeologist living in Driffield who was responsible for excavating most of the main burial mounds in the Yorkshire Wolds, publishing his findings in his snappily-titled book Forty Years Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire. The museum of archaeology that he established in Driffield was one of the earliest of its kind and he was one of the first archaeologists to apply scientific methods to archaeology.

PLACES TO VISIT:

The Hull and East Riding Museum: Iron Age (Celtic) exhibition with reconstruction of a chariot. Open 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Monday to Saturday and 1.30–4.30 p.m. on Sunday. Entrance free

Castle Hill: Iron Age fort in Almondbury overlooking Huddersfield West Yorkshire

Wincobank Hill Fort: near Sheffield. Thought to have been built by the Brigantes

5

THE ROMANS

Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC but the Romans did nothing more until AD 43 when the Emperor Claudius, ostensibly at the request of a British king, landed near what is now Colchester and began a conquest of the land.

Soon Roman armies had advanced as far north as the river Don and the silence of prehistory is broken as, for the first time, individual people in our region are mentioned by Roman historians.

Immediately we are in the middle of a story. It concerns that dominating northern tribe, the Brigantes. Its reigning queen, Cartimandua and her consort, Venutius, are not getting on too well – keep an eye on the handsome armour-bearer! It seems she has decided that these new invaders are powerful enough to make good allies and has agreed a peace treaty with them (whether, as the Romans said, she has also agreed to give them sovereignty over her tribe will never be known – there are no Brigantian historians).

One day, to ingratiate herself still further with the Romans, Cartimandua sends back to them, in chains, Caractacus, a rebellious British prince of the Catuvellauni tribe who had come to her court seeking asylum. Venutius has been unhappy for some time about the cosy deal with the Romans, but treating a suppliant and guest in this way is going too far. The relationship with his wife completely breaks down. She abruptly divorces Venutius and installs the armour-bearer in his place. He raises an army and attacks: she calls on her new allies for help. The Romans are delighted: now they have a perfect excuse to send troops north of the Don.

The leader responsible for the pacification of what was later to became Yorkshire is Quintus Petilius Cerialis, the Roman governor of Britain who, ten years before Cartimandua asked for help, had helped to defeat Queen Boudicca. He now leads the Ninth Legion from its base at Lincoln, crosses the Humber, probably at Petuaria (Brough) and, at about two days further march north, establishes a fort on a well-positioned site between two rivers. It is given the name Eboracum (now York). Cartimandua is restored to power, but it is only a matter of time before further revolts lead to more extensive occupation and eventually to the total conquest of Brigantia; York, in time, becomes the capitol of Northern Britain. Cartumandua’s story, unlike Boudicca’s, remains without an ending.

The strategic siting of York had lasting effects on the subsequent history of Yorkshire, as it became the pivotal point of the all-important northern road system when the conquest moved up country. From here, for centuries, expeditions against troublesome northern tribes were organised. York connected Ermine Street, coming up from the South, with the most important forts: Calcaria (Tadcaster), Isurium Brigantium (Aldborough), Cataractonium (Catterick) and, in time, all the marching camps and forts established in the Pennines right up to Hadrian’s Wall. Roads from York also went east, to Bridlington on the coast, and to Delgovicia (probably Malton).

Eboracum itself became one of the biggest military centres in Europe. Its impressive fort walls stretched along the river Ouse, strengthened with multi-angular towers, one of which can still be seen. Behind this, where the Minster now stands, was the pillar-lined main administration building. (One of its pillars, erected upside down, stands outside the South door of the Minster.) Stonegate and Petergate are on the line of the original fort’s thoroughfares.

York’s military importance meant that no less than two Roman emperors were in Eboracum when they died. The first was Septimius Severus in 211. His sons, Caracalla and Geta, were declared co-emperors (Caracalla murdered Geta not long afterwards). The second was Constantius Chlorus whose son, Constantine, was hailed emperor by the army in 306. He went on to Christianise the empire and move its centre from Rome to Constantinople.

Although never really officially approved, it was common for a civilian town or vicus to grow up next to a Roman fort. The one at York was located on the west side of the Ouse, where the cemetery and, probably, the yet-to-be-discovered amphitheatre were also situated. (The beheaded skeletons of possible gladiators were discovered nearby in 2004.)

Eboracum’s vicus was declared to be a ‘colonia’ by the emperor Caracalla. This term was used for a settlement of veterans and once carried with it certain benefits including freedom from taxes, but we don’t know if that was the case with York.

Isurium Brigantium (Aldborough near Boroughbridge), although only a small village today, was the second largest military settlement in the area. The road that runs next to it (mostly on the line of the A1) connected Eboracum with forts right up to the Antonine Wall, while another road branched off from it to Luguvalium (Carlisle). Aldborough’s church stands on what was the forum of the town. Its amphitheatre, the largest in northern England but lost for centuries, was located in 2011 at nearby Studforth Hill, thanks to the help of geomagnetic scanners, but it has yet to be excavated. The fort itself is in the care of English Heritage.

But what of that other Yorkshire tribe, the cart-driving Parisi? It seems that they were friendly with the Romans from the beginning and so their immediate fate was rather different to that of the Brigantes. It is likely that their territory provided safe passage for Roman troops during the first phases of the conquest of the Brigantes (who were tribal rivals). If so, the Romans were suitably grateful, for there is no evidence of any violence in the capitol, Petuaria (Brough) and the area seems to have gone its own way and prospered quietly as the Parisi too came under Roman rule.

Life for ordinary farming people in Roman Yorkshire was far less influenced by the occupation than further south, where large slave-run farms provided huge amounts of grain for the army. Field systems remained much the same as before and the traditional round houses, some of them hundreds of years old, remained in use. A few villas were built, notably those at Rudston and Langton, but there is curiously little evidence that typical Roman goods like glass, kitchen ware and amphorae of wine found their way down to ordinary people. Even the mosaic floors that survive are merely crude country versions of the more splendid ones in southern villas.

There was a fort at Hayton, a day’s march from Eboracum at the foot of the Wolds, and extensive excavation nearby has revealed the remains of bath houses, a timber-lined well and stone-built buildings, as well as a number of more traditional round houses. A little further down the road at Shiptonthorpe there was another ribbon development, of wooden houses this time, probably belonging to retired soldiers. Roman export items were found in all the places associated with the fort, whereas nearby Holme-upon-Spalding-Moor, where there were industries such as potteries, had almost nothing in the way of luxury goods.

The main point of conquest (apart from providing career opportunities for aspiring young Roman commanders) was to obtain resources and taxes. In Yorkshire there was lead, coal and ironstone to be exploited and good clay to be turned into saleable pots. There were potteries at Crambeck, Knapton and Norton as well as Holme-upon-Spalding-Moor, leather tanneries at Catterick, and iron foundries in many places. Ordinary folk, no doubt, bought some of these products but they were mostly sold to the military, along with food supplies, bringing modest prosperity to the region. The security provided by the army maintained peace during years that in much of Europe were very turbulent.

This peace deteriorated during the fifth century when Anglo-Saxon raiders from Germany began to attack the coast. For many years they were successfully turned back by the army, which built defensive coastal forts at Scarborough, Filey, Flamborough, Goldsborough, Huntcliff and Ravenscar. However, Rome itself was in trouble, coming under increasing attack from the Goths, and riven with internal dissentions. It began recalling its soldiers from the outskirts of the empire. In 410 the last of the Roman army left Britain. Its inhabitants, used to someone else defending them, were now left alone to face the invaders.

YORKSHIRE FOLK:

From the tombstone in York of Corellia Optata, 13 years old, possibly from the vicus: