“… all the thanes in Yorkshire and in Northumberland gathered themselves together at York, and outlawed their Earl Tostic; slaying all the men of his clan that they could reach, both Danish and English; and took all his weapons in York, with gold and silver, and all his money that they could anywhere there find.”
Well ladies and gentlemen and all others, what a way to introduce yourself. This quote came in 1065, as some of you may have guessed. It is part of one of the greatest and deadliest stories in English History, of a conquest that would change our future forever. It is also, however, the first written record we have of the name of England’s biggest county – and its inhabitants would say, ‘greatest’ as well as biggest. I speak indeed of God’s Own County – Yorkshire
In this series of three shedcasts, a pryle, a Royal Pair since I have recently learned cribbage, I am going to attempt the impossible, to tell part of the story of Yorkshire; though I should warn you I am finishing around 1913.
In this first episode I am sorry to say there’s quite a lot of introductory blathering and going on; the first 25 minutes about traditional stereotypes about the Yorkshire character, but mainly about the topography and environment – since for most of our history, nothing has been more important. Buit then we really start motoring, in chronological terms – 9000 years in 25 minutes, 9000 BC to the end of Roman Yorkshire in 410. I’d also like to point you to the webpage for this episode wherein I have posted a map or three.
Now you might ask why I should tell you the history of one part of England, however magnificent? If so, I am glad you asked me, because I can tell you there are several reasons. One, I have always had a pipe dream of doing a complete regional history of England. Clearly I am never going to make it, it would be a vast task, but it is appropriate that I start here, in the land of my mothers, to adapt a phrase. My father’s family oddly came from the wrong side of the Pennines, sorry, other side of the Pennines, hush my mouth. Which is odd, because I looked up Crowther on a census map of 1910, and back then it looked as though 90% of Crowthers lived in a small 2 up 2 down in Halifax. I exaggerate for effect. Anyway, essentially we spread, Over the Pennines at least and I think centred in Manchester. With the odd Brummie, and exiles like our family into in the deep midlands.
My main audience though, are the people who this year – which time of writing is 2025, around teatime – the brave if foolhardy people who have gallantly agreed to accompany me to Yorkshire on the History of England tour. It was a tourer from last year, Gayle, who suggested I do this, and it was a good suggestion. I hope you other non touring members are not too disgusted to have it in your feed and will also enjoy it. It should be noted, 2025 tourers, that although our tour is only of the western half of Yorkshire, the West and North Ridings, I will talk about all Yorkshire, and hopefully it will come in use for a future tour, because I’d love to go to the coast for an ice cream and some haddock.
Anyway, another interesting thing about the quote is that I think it will strike a cord in most of the country about the character of Yorkshire folk, by which I do not mean that they are unnecessarily fighty – though of the cap fits, and all that – but that they are undeniably blunt. So whereas in Sussex, a spade is an earth breaking agricultural instrument with major implications for the socio-economic development of social inequality, in Yorkshire it’s a spade. And nowt else. I mean stereotypes are just that of course, and famous people from Yorkshire include folks as different as David Hockey, or Geoff Boycott or the Bronte Sisters. But there is an unusually strong image of what Yorkshire folk are like. Coming as I do from Leicestershire, I am used to there being no strong image of my county characteristics; and indeed if they remember there is such a county at all, lucky folks might mutter something about David Attenborough or Gary Lineker; if you’re unlucky it might be Daniel Lambert instead, but that’s not the case for Yorkshire. And the stereotype has been around for a while. In 17th John Aubrey wrote that
The indigenes of Yorkshire are strong, tall and long legged and the call ‘em opprobriously long legged tyke’
The word tyke has a bit of a history; it could be derived from a Yorkshire dialect word for a particularly quarrelsome dog, whose bite was definitely worse than their bark; but also comes from a person who paid a particular type of tax, tallage, which marked them out as a villein, a peasant, churl. It’s come to mean someone who’s reasonably, um, in yer face. But in the way of such things it’s been taken on as a word for West Yorkshire people; the Leeds Tykes is a rugby club for example. Though I seem to remember that someone from Leeds is called a Loiner? Is that still a thing, I wonder?
In the 19th century, Elizabeth Gaskell, in her biography of Charlotte Bronte, wrote of the locals that
Their accost is curt; their accent and tone of speech blunt and harsh…they…have a quick sense of humour…and…observations [are] pithily expressed
Nicely put Lizzie, pithily. Gaskill praised their ‘force of character’, and commented on ‘the remarkable degree of self sufficiency they possess’.
There’s a certain salt of the earthiness too, as in John Dryden’s Yorkshire girl who was
Like a fair shepherdess in her country russet, talking in a Yorkshire tone
On that, my son Henry and I met the famed Yorkshire Shepherdess while walking Wainwright’s coast to coast, quite by chance it was, stopped for a cuppa and it turned out to be on her farm where she has a tea room. She made us a brew, and she was frighteningly in character, utterly straight forward and without side, absolutely glowing with rosy cheeked health like a stiff breeze off the moors on a sunny day.
Anyway, stereotypes are just that, stereotypes, all I’m saying is that there is one, sorry for perpetuating it, because there are, of course, all sorts in Yorkshire, and the modern population is wonderfully and gloriously diverse. As one historian put it
Is a continent unto itself, each of its three ridings contributing authors of worldwide fame, but local in their aspirations
But diversity is also true of its topography, so a history of Yorkshire is not really about one place, it’s about several places, formed by different landscapes, environments and history. Most striking to the modern eye would be the difference between the West Riding, which houses some of the largest conurbations in England and which was the beating heart of the Industrial revolution with all its excesses, achievements and indeed revolutions; whereas the North Riding for the most part seems barely touched by any of that.
But even the early modern antiquarians who started to realise that England was itself a place of wonder, worth exploring and talking about, the likes of Leland, Camden and Daniel Defoe, even they remarked on the enormous differences between the regions of this single county. So although we talk about Yorkshire as a thing, the historian David Hey makes the point that the vast majority of locals through most of its history would have done no such thing; their way of life and their identity would have been tied up in what they called ‘their country’ – by which they’d mean their corner of it, their parish, or their Wapentake. I was reading Daniel Defoe’s less famous magnus opus, ‘A Tour Through the whole Island of Great Britain’ for this year’s tour. Just for an example of one page, he talks of Richmondshire and north Allertonshire; the cutlery producing districts around Sheffield were called Hallamshire. None of these shires formally exist anymore; they may be a survival of the old Anglo Saxon extensive multiple estates, the scirs.
That begins to change for a few in society at the level of the gentry and lords maybe from say 16th century, but for the mass of people, Hey’s view is that it’s not until Yorkshire cricket club start doing their thing in the late 19th century that people think of themselves as right Yorkshire.
I should start by noting that Yorkshire itself seems to have been established before the conquest, but it’s all a bit vague. The basis of its extent combines two origins; the early Angle state of Deira, which stretched south to north from the Rivers Humber and the Tees. And then came the work of the Great Heathen Army, the Vikings, who captured Eoferwic in 876, and created a new state based on Jorvik.
Now, I have already mentioned the world the Ridings, and just to be sure you know, these are the three historic regions into which Yorkshire was divided. The tithing sounds like a terribly romantic word, but in fact comes from the Old Danish word thrithing, meaning a third; it’s a system not quite unique to Yorkshire – the old kingdom of Lindsey in north Lincolnshire has tithings too – but the Yorkshire Ridings have always been integral to their identity.
The West Riding stretches from Pennines in the West to the low lying marshy Humberhead Levels in the east. Its moors inspired the Brontes, though it will also become the home of the industrial revolution. There’s a well known phrase ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’, and while No-one knows exactly where it come from, Calderdale is surely a candidate. It’s also the place where club football and rugby league are born. For further insight into the muck, brass and Yorkshire character thing, in his book, local lad Richard Morris includes a local Yorkshire poem that goes like this:
See all, hear all say nowt
Eat all, sup all, pay nowt
An if ivver tha does owt fer nowt
Allus do it for thissen
Thank you Bill, long term loiner, but not born and bred he would say, so marks for the accent please sent on a postcared. Not sure the poem is particularly West Riding, but since I am talking about Brass… It’s fair to say that the West riding has seen the most dramatic change over its history. Let me give you two quotes to illustrate. In 1769 Arthur Young wrote
The country between Sheffield and Barnsley is fine, it abounds with the beauties of nature
Just 50 or so years later, William Cobbett went the same way and saw a very different landscape
All the way from Leeds to Sheffield it is coal and iron, iron and coal’
North Riding has been much less changed, and contains some of Yorkshire most dramatic and beautiful scenery, of the North York Moors in the north east, the Dales in the west, with the productive farmlands of the vale of Mowbray and York running through its heart. Then the East Riding is very different, much more open, much of it low lying land some of it reclaimed from marsh and bog from the headlands of the River Humber and of course – the coast.
The Tithings were established before the Norman conquest and became the administrative centres; they themselves were divided into units – the Wapentakes. This is where regional assemblies and courts were held and decisions made, taxes collected, armies and voices raised. Wapentake is essentially the same institution as the southern Hundred, it’s the Danelaw version from the substantial Danish influence. The name seems to come from the traditional method of signifying assent by waving spears. That sounds like a good old tradition we should introduce back into the House of Commons.
For hundreds of years this was the way things were organised, but in 1974 everything changed with the Local government Act, which has always been controversial; so now, in the style of the Hitch Hikers Guide, Yorkshire has become a trilogy in four parts, and now there are four ceremonial counties, so South Yorkshire has finally completed the points of the compass, there are metropolitan and non metropolitan counties. It’s a tricky thing this; the world has changed since the Vikings invaded, but I think that the old Ridings are still firmly embedded in Yorkshire consciousness. Anyway, call me a Brontosaurus, but I’ll keep using them.
Let us have a quick flyby of the geographical regions, because that affects everything – building style, farming, way of life, all that. Yorkshire is framed by water on three sides – the river Tees in the North, the Humber in the south – and of course the north sea coast in the East. Then, when you look at a map of Yorkshire it’s dominated by a combination of highland and upland – the Pennines in the west, and the North York Moors in the north east; and lowland, the vale of York up and down the centre, into which drain all the rivers from the hills to left and right. And then to the east the gentle uplands of the Wolds, and the flats of the south east of Holderness. Let’s take a quick tour.
The Pennine Highlands have been described as the backbone of England, and run from Derbyshire to Northumberland, right up the middle. I say highlands – their peaks in Yorkshire run from 2,000 to almost 3,000 feet, that sort of thing. Not the Alpes. They have been my walking wonder at various times of my life, but it is only in the making of this programme that I understood the name is a forgery. Some bloke in the 18th century, Charles Bertram, in a time when to be honest people were making thing up about all sorts of supposedly old traditions, produced his very own supposedly ancient medieval map and made up a Latin sounding name – Alpes Peninni. What a fibber! Just shows crime does occasionally pay, because now Charles Bertram name is immortalised in the Pennines.
The geology of the Pennines in Yorkshire is broadly in two parts. The northern Dales down to the region called Craven, in Airedale along with Skipton and Haworth, they are Limestone, Carboniferous Limestone; South of that they turn into millstone Grit, and in the eastern foothills of that the geology is Coal Measure Sandstone, and that will be significant – rocks formed during the same period asd coal, we know where that is heading! Despite being a pretty rugged landscape outside of the valleys and dales, many parts of the west riding have been some of the most prosperous areas of England. To be fair the people who lived there often needed to combine crafts and pastoral farming, but it’s a combination that worked really well, the West Riding wool towns were well off, parts of Calderdale astonished Tudor contemporaries with their wealth. Then came the industrial revolution which made an absolute mint – or it did for some, anyway.
The northern patch of the Pennines, the Limestone parts, are where you can find the Dales, a word with a Danish or Norse origin. This is some of the most glorious countryside in England, green Dales running through high hills and thoroughly bleak moorland at the top. It’s a country of rough pasture and dry stone walls. Up in the hills was a gift, but a gift that was hard won – there was Lead in them there hills.
The other main highland area is in the very North East of Yorkshire over the vale of Mowbray and vale of York from the Dales, the North York Moors, sandstone and ironstone hills. The poorest, least productive part of Yorkshire for most of its history, when William Camden went through around 1600 ish, he was most unimpressed and described it as
Very barren ground and covered with ling and bent throughout
I need to translate. Ling is heather, Bent refers to a scrubby coarse grass.
As an aside, I am always surprised by the difference between modern and historical attitudes to wilderness. Nowadays people go on and on about the beautiful heather covered hills, oh it’s so lovely blah blah. Completely randomly, here is Slyvia Plath in 1956
“I am as happy here as I have ever been in my life: Ted and I take a long walk each day up to the moors…and never have I loved country so! All you can see us dark hills of heather stretching toward the horizon, as if you were striding on top of the world…
And so on. Sylvia stayed near to Hebden Bridge in the West Riding, so not far from the hills that inspired the Brontes, so they’ve got form. She was also buried in Heptonstall as Sylvia Hughes, with what is reputed to be one of the most consistently vandalised headstones in the country. So the point is =- we love the Yorkshire hills and their beauty now, and the dramatic contrast between moor and satanic mills in the valleys. It would take the picturesque movement of the 18th century and the likes of William Gilpin to move us from Camden’s distaste to Plath’s delight. Camden saw only barren land and hard lives.
Which is similar to I think the most ignored upland rural feature of Yorkshire, south of the North York Moors over the Vale of Pickering, into the East Riding. In the words of Camden
The middle is nothing but a heap of mountains called Yorkeswold
Which is rude. Well, Camden me old chum, David Hockey, born in Bradford, found them lovely enough and was inspired to paint many of his Yorkshire Landscapes there. The Wolds are an arc of chalk upland, definitively not mountains, rising to the princely peak of 800 feet, but hilly, and a sheep and corn district. It’s therefore just like the chalk Chilterns in the English south midlands; the sheep-corn system, just to explain, deals with often marginally fertile land by seasonal and annual rotation. Some years planting arable crops – barley, oats, occasionally wheat – and other years or seasons letting sheep onto the land to help fertilisation.
Almost finished, really sorry. Still in the East Riding, are the often flat as a pancake landscapes of Holderness, on the south East Yorkshire cost down to the Humber. Once upon a time the area was almost an island, separated from the rest of England by carrs of the valley carved by the River Hull. Carrs were waterlogged, boggy, mixed woodland areas. In Holderness, a bit like fenland, every slight rise is colonised by a village, everyone cramming together to keep their feet dry. Along the Humber at its southern edge, were rich trading towns, including the Daddy of them all, Hull.
Which brings us, finally, to the rest. The bits that lie in between all these hills, Wolds & stuff – the massive vale of York, and the smaller vales of Mowbray, Pickering and Cleveland. Here lies acre after acre of extensive farmland. It is not homogenous; there are differences in the type and quality of soils, for example, so each community made their own decisions about arable, pasture, and mixtures of same. Meanwhile, all those rivers from the uplands, the Swale, Ure, Wharfe and so on, all drain into the Ouse which runs through the vale of York to the Humber, which was a massive benefit to inland communications. But this is fruitful land, as Camden described them, happy at last now he finds order and propductiveness. Henry VIII saw them on his progress to York, and his Bishop Tunstall recalled them as
One of the greatest and richest valleys in all his travels through Europe.
Now, while I am not for a moment questioning the essential Yorkshire-ness of the folk that live there, I am put in mind of a quote by James Heriot, of who you may have heard, real name Alf Wright and a Sunderland lad. I ate his books when I was young, ate them I did – It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet and all of that; I didn’t get into the TV series All Creatures Great and Small or really the recent, massively popular reboot, but if you haven’t seen it and want to see a bit of Yorkshire landscape at its most beautiful, and stories on a scale from heart warming to twee depending on your frame of mind, then I recommend it too. But the books are best, they rarely get maudlin, and I regularly quote the line about the farmer who loved Ham so much he loved to feel the grease running down his chin, and the one with Heriot’s shock when the grizzled old farmer remembers his dead wife with the regretful line ‘Oh aye she was a good worker’.
Anyway as I say I am put in mind of a quote by Heriot about small holding farmers in the Dales in the 1930s, and how extraordinary and hard their lives were, and how idiosyncratic their character; and then says that in the vale, farmers, much as he loved them, were more like farmers everywhere; and David Hey the historian remarks that really farmers of the vale shared the same daily concerns, challenges and techniques more with the farmers of the midlands than with the Dales or the Moors. Not to say they are any less Yorkshire of course.
Now, am I finally done? can I finally get on with the history? I hear you wearily groan, this is after all not the Geography of England site. So let’s talk about Prehistory, baby, let’s talk about me and you. That is a song lyric isn’t it or am I wrong?
Back in 9000 BC, there was no coast in the east; there may well have been something of a shield wall, in the style of the Dune novels, a mountain ridge, but basically most of the east of England was still connected to Doggerland. At this time, the Mesolithic period as it is known, nestled between the soft buttocks of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, the population was tiny and still subject to the ebb and flow of ice ages. Life was deeply nomadic, hunter gatherers moving from place to place, life on a knife edge in the wildwood that covered Europe.
To survive and thrive was dependant on the skill and knowledge of your family group in exploiting the environment around you. People searched out ‘ecotones’; areas where different types of environments met, and you had access to a range of food and resources. Doggerland was perfect for this – low lying, a combination of water, woods, open grassland.
Somewhere around 9000 BC, a family group came through a gap in what are now the cliffs of Yorkshire’s glorious east coast, and came up into an area not a million miles from modern Scarborough, the east of the vale of Pickering in the shadow of the North York Moors. They were in an area of Carrs – which as I have mentioned are marshy, boggy areas, perfect ecotones of water, wood and nearby open grassland. And there we get the first evidence of some level of residence – it’s not a permanent settlement, though there is what seems to be one of Britain’s earliest houses there, a roundhouse scooped out of the earth. But mainly there was a ceremonial platform on the edge of water. Lots of materials have been found deposited at a place called Starr Carr, microliths, antler picks, and what seems to be a paddle – so evidence of boats. And bones give evidence of the wildlife of the time; red deer, wild pig, aurochs, elk, fox, wolf, pine marten. And most intriguingly – these remarkable deer skull ceremonial headdresses. Starr Carr wasn’t a settlement exactly, we are thousands of years before that happens, but it is a site that was returned to, by multiple family groups at a time, and revisited and maintained for close to a thousand years.
By 6000 BC, Doggerland had been inundated, and somewhere around 4500 BC the ideas of the neolithic reach Yorkshire; the idea of agriculture, cereal crops, of domesticated animals, sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. Neolithic society remains highly mobile – so don’t imagine yet farms, fields and folks sitting outside the cottage door before going to do a spot more weeding. Although the wildwood is increasingly being cleared, cereal was a useful add-on, maybe 60-80% of calories came from meat, family groups would move with their animals according to the seasons, not inhabit a specific patch of land. There’s no real evidence of tribes or kings or anything like that.
But what the neolithic is notable for, and has marked our landscape with dreams and mysteries, is the culture of megalith building, extraordinary megaliths like Pentre Ifan in Wales, or of course Stonehenge and the extraordinary Wiltshire ceremonial landscape of causewayed enclosures, henges, wood circles, cursuses and barrows.
Megalith culture tended to focus on dramatic landscapes, hills and water like the ring of Brogar in Orkneys and so on, and so east of the Vale of York, Yorkshire is not necessarily the best place to go searching for monuments. But the traditions were there. The megalith at Rudston in the east riding is the tallest megalith in Britain, and it’s genuinely a whopper – 7 ½ metres, 25 feet high. It was probably planted in 3500, and the effort required was considerable – 40 tons of millstone grit, brought from 28 miles away. It’s also a lovely example of how the Christian world tried to deal with these mysterious objects whose original purpose was long forgotten, possibly worryingly pagan but in some way spiritual, mystical. So they built a church beside it, and popped a crucifix on the top.
There are not the profusion of henges and stone circles you get further west, but there are some, and most dramatically at Thornborough, on the edge of the Dales, where the earthworks survive of 3 henges, connected by wide processional cursus; the walls of the earthwork were covered with gypsum crystals, so although they look green and lumpy now, back in 2500 BC they would have glittered stark white in the sun. As and when the sun appeared.
Despite their size, henges don’t appear to have been constructed by sedentary societies, or a society with clear hierarchies and tribes. It takes until the late Bronze Age, 1500 BC and more recent, for Britain and Yorkshire to adopt the kind of landscape we are used to today – one where the land is enclosed, to maximise agricultural efficiency. Despite the vagaries of climate, the population was growing, and pressure on resources with it. Population predictions in Prehistory are best done with a set of shaman’s bones, but by now maybe we are around 500,000 people.
This is probably an increasingly violent society, and weapons in Bronze are found deposited in great numbers, the sword has appeared, and swords with big winged hilts which suggest horse warfare, because the hilt could have been hoicked up into your hand as you rode, when you saw a head chopping opportunity present itself. Yorkshire is not a region noted for early hillforts; the main settlement pattern is based on the Roundhouse, based within single Farmsteads with palisades around. Some of those farmsteads become bigger, with multiple roundhouses, with something between 40 and 100 for some settlements. As the Bronze age moves towards the Iron Age around 800 BC, the extent of defensive palisades becomes stronger, and settlements bigger.
However, the existence of hierarchy, tribes and so on is not clear; the early hillforts elsewhere seem to be communal meeting places rather than the halls of the mighty, or indeed military forts – many are far too big to be defended. Instead they are a place where communities come from territories around to trade, carry out ceremonies, and the building of the structure itself may have been an important way to bring far flung communities together. That’s very much disputed; many historians do think we are now in an age of chiefdoms, and territories; but we can’t really be sure until the Iron Age, after 800 BC.
The Iron Age of course is a period where once upon a time it was thought that Britain was invaded by waves of Celts from Europe, who brought their culture, genes and language to a Britain which then became Celtic Britain. That story has been heavily modified over the last 30 years; particularly the invasion hypothesis. I mean invasions were completely outlawed for a while – well I say outlawed, I exaggerate for effect – but the idea of change by cultural assimilation had taken over, ideas move, not necessarily many people and people therefore look different in the record – pots not people was the strapline. The science of Genetic analysis has changed things though, and meant that invasion theories have made a big come back – I mean big. Some people did move en masse. So, in the late Neolithic and early Bronze age, The Beaker People really did come over between 2400 and 1900 and replaced 90% of Britain’s DNA.
But it is still thought that there was no mass Celtic invasion around 450 BC as was once thought, and there is no standard Celtic DNA profile across the regions of Britain that today consider themselves Celtic. But the Celtic language was indeed adopted – anywhere between 3000 BC and 400 BC actually; cultural ideas came over in terms of social hierarchy, warfare and art, but not enough people to have a common genetic profile. And the ideas very much adapted and changed to become a distinctively British culture.
However, what that story does mean is that by the time of the Iron Age, Britain as a whole was deeply influenced culturally by the north West continent of Europe; and by the later iron Age historians have divided Britain into three zones. In the South East, there is the emergence of tribes, hierarchies, kings and culture that strongly reflects Gaulish culture, and is beginning to be influenced by the Roman Empire – British coins, with kings on them are produced. And oppida – proper nucleated and defended mini towns. Beyond that was the periphery, parts of the country from Devon to Yorkshire, where the influence sort of seeps through. Outside of that – the far west and northwest, there seems remarkably little influence from Europe at this time.
But we begin to hear from written sources about us Brits, and so we are in sort of proto history. And some of them mentioned tribes and there are two tribes relevant to our Yorkshire story.
One of those were once very obscure; a single line in Ptolomy’s Geographica, written in 150 AD, where he just drops in the line casualty oiff hand, off the toga cuff as it were
Near which on the Opportunum bay are the Parisi and the town Petuaria
Well Petuaria is a Roman town on the Humber, and Opportunum Bay obviously refers to a good harbour so you know, you could take your pick as to the modern location, but the point is this is a tribe called the Parisi in the East Riding of Yorkshire, around the 4th century BC. No-one really knew any more than that, but then the most extraordinary series of excavations were made in the East Riding around the Wolds, especially one at Pocklington. They are absolutely distinctive from anything else we know about in Britain; square barrows, but most significantly Chariot burials with figures planted in crouched position. Unique in Britain – but not in Europe. A map plotting Chariot burial strongly suggests this is a group of people, and certainly a culture, that came from the Marne area of France, and maintained that culture from 400 to 100 BC.
So that’s the Parisi, but the main tribe of Yorkshire and indeed most of northern England, was the Brigantes, translated as ‘elevated ones’; noble ones probably, mainly people of the Highlands. It is usually referred to as a confederation, because it seems to include some other less well known tribes, but really we know very little about any of them. We do know that population was growing, settlement spreading; agriculture on the light soils of the Yorkshire Wolds became more intensive, and spread to lands previously thought a bit marginal; the same applies to the Humberhead lowlands which become settled at this time. The Roundhouse remained the core homestead, co axial field systems were widespread, and at last Hill forts appear. One in particular at Ingleborough, about which I feel rather ashamed. I did the Yorkshire three peaks once – Pen-y-gent, Whernside and Ingleborough, and do not remember noticing an iron age fort. Though to be fair it was 2 ½ thousand feet up, so I was a bit knackered when I got up there.
Most significantly though was the fort at Stanwick, which is almost on the northern border of Yorkshire near Darlington. Stanwick was big, so big that it qualifies as the kind of settlement that Julius Casear wrote about in The Conquest of Gaul; an Oppidum, a large fortified settlement, almost a fortified town. There were many in Gaul, and there were some in the South East of Britain – Camulodunum, Colchester as will be, for example, the head seat of the Trinovantes and Catuvellauni. They were very rare north of the River Trent – and yet the Brigantes could have been the largest of all the British Tribes. So it looks as though Stanwick was not only an iron fort, but an oppidum, and one of the most important of the Brigantian settlements, possibly the seat of its leaders. Though that is it traditionally further south, at Isurium, just outside Boroughbridge in the vale of York; where it is thought the Leaders of the Brigantes held their court.
Now then wherever the court was, let’s zip forward to AD57. The head of the Brigantes was a queen, Cartimandua. After JC’s limited expeditions in 55 and 54 BC, Roman influence in Britain had become enormous; most British tribes had to be careful of tweaking the tail of the beast. So when Claudius ordered an invasion of conquest of Britain in AD43, Cartimandua had absolutely no intention of manning, or indeed womanning the barricades. So, much like Boudicca’s husband Prasutagus of the East Anglian tribe the Iceni, she made common cause with Rome, an alliance, and probably paid tribute. It seemed to pay off – when the Romans reached the River Don in South Yorkshire, probably the southern boundary of Brigantia – they stopped, built a fort, opened an amphora of wine, drizzled some olive oil and left it at that.
In the south, the war went on, led by Rome’s greatest British adversary of the time, the indomitable Caractacus. For over 10 years Caractacus led the resistance. And then one day, in AD 57 a traveller arrived at Cartimandua’s court. He was tired, weary and seeking sanctuary. It was Caractacus, following yet another defeat.
Cartimandua was a canny politician, and knew she knew resisting the Toman Juggernaut would have consequences, with a capital C. So she welcomed Caractacus, and turned over to the Romans. Though this has been considered an act even the Bill and Ted would have described as heinous, it’s much more likely that Caractacus went to Cartimandua specifically because she was a Roman ally. His long resistance had reached the end of the line, and he needed someone to broker a deal. And indeed Caractacus landed a much better deal than his Gaulish equivalent Vercingetorix. Rather than being strangled, Caractacus made a great speech and lived out a life of comfort in Rome. Possibly due more to Cartimandua than to the speech.
In said speech, he is attributed with the question to the senators
And can you, then, who have got such possessions and so many of them, still covet our poor huts?
Which is a good question, but hey, they did, and so when Cartimandua’s reign came to an end in civil war in AD71, the legio nona Hispania marched over the Don, to ahem, restore order nudge, nudge and all that, and so we have arrived at Roman Yorkshire.
Now then, on 25th July 306 AD, a Roman Emperor died in a province at the furthest flung northern corner of the mightiest empire of the Western World, Britannia. He wasn’t the first to die there. Septimus Severus had died there a hundred years before. What followed was unique though
– his son was immediately proclaimed Emperor by his legions in the capital of a province of Britannia, which had been called Britannia Inferior in 197, and then reformed into Maxima Caesariensis by the 3rd century reforms of Diocletian. The Usurper then went on to beat all opposition, and become one of Rome’s most famous Emperors, Constantine the Great.
The province was broadly based on the old lands of the Brigantes, But the city in which he was proclaimed had not existed when Cartimandua ruled – Constantine was proclaimed in Eboracum. So, how had it come to be that far away Britain had a city important enough to proclaim an emperor? We should go back a bit and talk about what did the Romans ever do for us.
It is interesting to that our attitude to the Roman Empire has traditional been quite dewy-eyed, positive. But I learn that there is another point of view. The great archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, brought up in the early 1900s near Bradford in Yorkshire, once wrote
I suffered from a surfeit of things Roman. I felt disgusted by the mechanistic quality of their art and by the nearness of their civilisation at all times to cruelty and corruption.
Well, golly. And recently historians in Britain have begun to write of Rome as what it was – a coloniser, and one that retained control by Imperial forces that had little interaction with the way of life the existing Britons. Obviously that varies a bit depending on where you go, and integration was stronger in the south of Britain – but the Roman army, even most of the auxiliaries, continued to come from elsewhere in the Empire. As an example of that, the man that persuaded Constantine to go ahead with his usurpation of the imperial diadem, was Crocus, king of the Alemanni, probably leader of German auxillary troops in York.
In Yorkshire, the evidence suggests that the landscape changed little over the Roman period – the wildwood was already cleared, the brigantes continued to live in their roundhouses and settlements, and farm the system of fields using the same methods. The plough is still a glorified stick, the ard plough, though I think they add a wheel to it at some point. There relatively few examples of large estates based on Villas, though there are some, but even those tend to be comparatively small and weedy.
Obviously, having set that up, we can present a more positive view. A brass plate has been dug up which makes it clear that at least one Roman soldier came back after his service and settled down to farm in Yorkshire; it is surely inevitable that soldiers and local women would have married – but as yet, no one has found a significant imprint on the genetic record. The Romans built a network of forts, each with its own small vicus, or township, and it’s here that the main interactions and trade would have taken place. In addition, local British farms would have been affected by the demand to supply garrisons, legions and auxiliary troops. And there does seem to have been some positive improvement work carried out in some areas; it’s now thought the Empire may have drained a large area called Hatfield Chase in South Yorkshire, and developed a dense network of farms – which were later inundated by water when Rome went home.
And the Romans made a mark on Yorkshire which survives to this day. Not least, a network of roads, including Dere Street, the main artery up the vale of York, parts of which are still today’s great North Road, the A1. The roads connected a series of forts; though they were not necessarily built for the good of the locals you understand, who by and large continued to use the old ways and tracks they knew. And building a fort was a statement of power and domination – sometimes making the point absolutely obvious by being built slap bang on an existing Iron Age settlement. This is our now. And that was the fate of Cartimandua’s capital – which now became Isurium Brigantum. I would let down Jan, of this parish, if I did not mention that this is modern Aldborough, there you can still see the remains of Isurium, along with some magnificent mosaics, and I feel guilty now that we are not visiting there on the tour. Mea Culpa.
Roads connected forts and marching camps in the Pennines formed by the IXth Legion in their campaign of conquest, all the way through to the those built along the shore at Scarborough, Filey and Ravenscar against occasional raids, and in the wake of the year of the Great Conspiracy, 367, mass attacks by the Scotti and Picti from the north and west.
And of course, the Romans founded the glorious and beautiful capital of the North – York; or Eboracum as they called it. The site for York was carefully chosen; firstly, it seems to have been built near some Yew trees – because that’s what Eboracum means, place of the yews. But probably more significant than that, was its superb control of communication. It lies at the junction of two rivers – the Mighty Ouse, and the less than mighty Foss. But it also lies on a ridge formed by glacial action, a ridge which provides a safe route across the Vale.
York was initially a fortress, built in the conquest year of 71, and the home of Legio Nonus Hispania. The legion had disappeared by 120 AD. It’s not clear where they went. Some academics say they ended their days redeployed to the Eastern Empire; others that they went to Germany. But we know you and I; we know because we have of course, read, Eagle of the 9th by Rosemary Sutcliffe. As she clearly explains, they left Eboracum, into the vast wilderness of the north…never to return…slaughtered by the tribes…
…to be replaced by Legio Sextus Vitrix. I hope you realise I remember none of my latin, despite having studied it for 5 long years. Anyway, the Sixth legion the legion involved in the building of Hadrian’s Wall further North, after which many of Yorkshire’s Roman Forts, like the one at Catterick, lost a lot of their troops and fell in size and importance.
York became a major centre, the civilian colonia sat beside the military fortress. It lay at the heart of the Roman road system. It was a thriving urban centre, with all the bits and bobs you associate with Roman cities – bathhouse, amphitheatre, administrative and public buildings. The Imperial palace was there, the first church was right by it, and York had its first Bishop by 314 AD, when Bishop Eborius attended the Council of Arles.
We don’t know much about the last decades of the Roman Empire in Yorkshire, it does not seem as though the raiders from beyond the borders ever overwhelmed the garrisons. But around 400, the VIth legion, had left their home in York by 400, and by 410 the Emperor had told Britons they were on their own. Brigantia would split into a number of territories under the rule of petty tyrants, to face the arrival of growing numbers of the Germanic tribes.
But that my friends will be a story of next time, I hope you see you back in God’s Own County soon, to talk of Romano British, Anglo Saxon and Medieval Yorkshire.
