“Palm Sunday chimes were chiming
All gladsome thro’ the air,
And village churls and maidens
Knelt in the church at pray’r;
When the Red Rose and the White Rose
In furious battle reel’d;
And yeomen fought like barons,
And barons died ere yield.
When mingling with the snow-storm,
The storm of arrows flew;
And York against proud Lancaster
His ranks of spearmen threw.
When thunder-like the uproar
Outshook from either side,
As hand to hand they battled
From morn to eventide.
When the river ran all gory,
And in hillocks lay the dead,
And seven and thirty thousand
Fell for the White and Red.
When o’er the Bar of Micklegate
They changed each ghastly head,
Set Lancaster upon the spikes
Where York had bleached and bled.
There still wild roses growing—
Frail tokens of the fray—
And the hedgerow green bear witness
Of Towton field that day.”
Did the decrepit old shambles, roofed with paving-flags, still encumber the spacious market-place at Thirsk? Did the sexton at Ripon Minster still deliver his anatomical lecture in the grim bone-house, and did the morality of that sedate town still accord with the venerable adage, “as true steel as Ripon rowels?” Was York still famous for muffins, or Northallerton for quoits, cricket, and spell-and-nurr? and was its beer as good as when Bacchus held a court somewhere within sight of the three Ridings, and asked one of his attendants where that new drink, “strong and mellow,” was to be found? and
“The boon good fellow answered, ‘I can tell
North-Allerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel
All England, nay, all Europe, for strong ale;
If thither we adjourn we shall not fail
To taste such humming stuff, as I dare say
Your Highness never tasted to this day.’”
Hence, when the summer sun revived my migratory instinct, I inclined to ramble once more in Yorkshire. There would be no lack of the freshness of new scenes, for my former wanderings had not led me to the coast, nor to the finest of the old abbeys—those ruins of wondrous beauty, nor to the remote dales where crowding hills abound with the picturesque. Here was novelty enough, to say nothing of the people and their ways, and the manifold appliances and results of industry which so eminently distinguish the county, and the grand historical associations of the metropolitan city, once the “other Rome,” of which the old rhymester says—
“Let London still the just precedence claim,
York ever shall be proud to be the next in fame.”
I was curious, moreover, to observe whether the peculiar dialect or the old habits were dying out quite so rapidly as some social and political economists would have us believe.