Bygone Yorkshire Ed by W Andrews Author:William Andrews Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Castles: Some of tbeir Ibistoric associations, By Edward Lamplough. FENCING themselves in the wild Northland against warlike Saxon thanes and stubborn peas... more »ants, the Normans have left us many memorials of stormy mediaeval days. The frequent surges of Scottish invasion rolled back, or broke before they could reach the Humber, although Scottish spears flashed before the walls of York, and grim baronial fortresses frowned unscathed from savage wastes, where burning villages gleamed red in the distance when night closed over the scene. Built rather to hold the Northumbrians in check, than for the protection of the borders, the Castles of Yorkshire were remarkable for number, strength, and importance. Built on rocky eminences, by the margin of rivers, beside the sea, on storm-wasted cliffs, and in every position calculated to improve the prospect of defence, they are knit into the closest strands of national history—such strongholds asPontefract, Scarborough, and York, being only secondary to the national fortresses of Dover and London. Legend, verse, and romance tend to immortalise these famous Northumbrian fortresses, Con- ingsborough, not to be described within these limits, was once a possession of Harold Godwinsson, and Sir Walter Scott has set the massive old keep in the glittering pageantry of his " Ivanhoe " with all the grace of the master artist. Many-towered Pontefract, built of Ilbert de Lacy, a kingly pile indeed, should be depicted against a background of stormy darkness, with a lurid tinge of sunset fire upon its turrets, for it was indeed a place of tragedies. Through its gates passed the rebel Earl of Lancaster, captive to the sword and spear of Sir Andrew Harcla and Sir Simon Ward, after the sanguinary day of Boroughbridge; to emerge again, pallid from a...« less