Transpose the note commencing on page 64 to page 65.
For "Downham IN Yorkshire" (page 143, fourteenth line from the bottom), read "Downham INTO Yorkshire."
[CHAPTER I.]
EARLY HISTORICAL AND LEGENDARY BATTLES.
THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY, LEGEND, AND ART. KING ARTHUR'S PRESUMED VICTORIES ON THE DOUGLAS, NEAR WIGAN AND BLACKROD.
t has often been remarked, and with some truth, that our standard historical works, until very recent times at least, contained little more than the details of battles, the squabbles and intrigues of diplomatists and politicians, and the pedigrees of potentates, imperial or otherwise. Now-a-days we seek to know more of the domestic habits and conditions of the mass of the population, and the degree and kind of intellectual and moral culture which obtained amongst a people at any given period of their history. But man's advance from the savage to his present relatively civilized condition has been one of fierce and sanguinary strife, and the piratical and freebooting instincts which he inherited, along with some of his nobler attributes and aspirations, from his remote ancestors, are by no means extinguished at the present time, although, in their practical exhibition, they may generally assume a somewhat more decorous exterior. Still, courage and physical endurance, however rude and uncouth in outward aspect, as well as heroism of a higher mental or moral order, ever possessed, and ever will possess, a strange and uncontrollable fascination; and the associations, social, political, or religious, attendant upon the more prominent of the bloody struggles of the past, excite, in a most powerful degree, the emotional as well as the imaginative elements of our being. This is notoriously the case when any special interest is superinduced, national or provincial. "All men naturally feel more interested in the historical associations of their own race than they do in those of any other portion of mankind. The soil daily trodden by the foot of any reflecting being,—the locality with whose present struggles, progress or decay, he is practically acquainted,—whose traditions and folk-lore were first fixed in his memory and his heart, long before more exact knowledge or cultivated judgment enabled him to test their accuracy or correctly weigh their value,—must possess historic reminiscences not only capable of commanding his attention, by exciting in the imaginative faculty agreeable and healthy sensations, but of teaching him valuable lessons in profound practical wisdom."[1]
It might be said, without much exaggeration, that if the soil could be endowed with vocal utterance, we might learn that the surface area of the earth which has not sustained the shock of battle at some period of the world's history is not very much greater than that which has felt the tread of armed men in deadly conflict. In the early historic and pre-historic times, when clan or sept fought, as a matter of course, against clan or sept, for the privilege of existence or the means to secure it; or when baron or other chieftain "levied private war" against his neighbour, from ambition, passion or greed, numberless fierce and bloody struggles must have taken place of which no record has been preserved.