Yorkshire

• 1. Introduction

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  Yorkshire is not just a place on a map. It is a conviction. People here have long said they identify more strongly with their county than with their country, and the county has its own emblem, its own anthem, its own day. Every year on the 1st of August, Yorkshire Day is observed across the region, a celebration of the culture, history, and dialect of a place that technically no longer exists as an administrative unit. The county was abolished for official purposes in 1974, carved into pieces and renamed. And yet Yorkshire persisted.

  The white rose on its emblem traces back to the Plantagenet royal House of York. The unofficial anthem, "On Ilkley Moor Baht 'at", which translates roughly as "On Ilkley Moor without a hat", was probably written in the late 19th century to a Kent folk tune borrowed through a Methodist hymnal. The nickname "God's Own Country" has been claimed by Yorkshiremen for generations. This is a county that has been invaded by Romans, Angles, Vikings, and Normans, and has outlasted every one of them.

  How did a stretch of northern England become this? What made Yorkshire the largest county by area in the United Kingdom, and why did two separate Roman emperors die within its borders? How did a Danish Viking kingdom planted in the 860s give its name to a city that still stands today? And what connects the world's oldest football club, the Brontes, and the founding of gothic metal music? This documentary follows Yorkshire from its Iron Age tribes to its modern cities, one of the most layered places in Britain.

• 2. Before England Existed

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  By the late Iron Age, the inhabitants of what would become Yorkshire belonged to two peoples: the Brigantes in the north and west, and the Parisi in the east. The Brigantes were formidable. They controlled more territory than most Celtic tribes on the island of Great Britain, and six of the nine Brigantian settlements described by the geographer Claudius Ptolemaeus in his Geographia fall within the historic county boundaries.

  The Parisi of what is now the East Riding may have been related to the Parisii of Lutetia Parisiorum in Gaul, the settlement we know today as Paris. Under Roman rule their capital was at Petuaria, near the Humber Estuary, at the site of modern Brough.

  When the Romans arrived in Britain in AD 43, the Brigantes did not immediately fall. For decades they remained a client kingdom of Rome, ruled by the monarch Cartimandua and her husband Venutius. The arrangement was uneasy. Disputes between the two rulers eventually led Cartimandua to hand over the defeated British resistance leader Caratacus to Roman authority and to leave Venutius for his own armour bearer, Vellocatus. Even so, her alliance with Rome kept her in power while Venutius staged repeated rebellions. On his second attempt, during the chaotic AD 69 Year of the Four Emperors, Venutius finally seized control, which forced Rome's hand. The general Petillius Cerialis completed the conquest of Yorkshire in AD 71.

  Under Roman rule the Brigantian tribal centre shifted from the hillfort at Stanwick to a purpose-built capital at Isurium Brigantum, on the river Ure, at the site of modern Aldborough. York itself, known as Eboracum, was declared capital of the province of Britannia Inferior and joint capital of all Roman Britain. Two emperors died there: Septimius Severus ruled the empire from Eboracum for two years before his death, and Constantius Chlorus died during a visit in 306 AD. His son Constantine, who would become famous for his acceptance of Christianity, was proclaimed emperor in the city.

• 3. Vikings, York and Jórvík

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  An army of Danish Vikings, known to their enemies as the Great Heathen Army, invaded Northumbrian territory in 866 AD. They captured what is now York and renamed it Jórvík, making it the capital of a new Danish kingdom that covered most of southern Northumbria, territory roughly equivalent to the boundaries of Yorkshire extending further west.

  Founded by the Dane Halfdan Ragnarsson in 875, the Kingdom of Jórvík was the only truly Viking territory ever established on mainland Britain. While much of the Danelaw was English land in submission to Viking overlords, Jórvík was something different: a genuine Norse state. It plugged into the trading networks of the Viking world, establishing commercial connections with the British Isles, north-west Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East.

  Norse monarchy controlled varying portions of Northumbria from 875 to 954. English rule interrupted it between 927 and 954, until Yorkshire was finally annexed into England for good in 954. The last independent Viking king of Jórvík was Eric Bloodaxe, a former king of Norway. His reputation for violence may, in a dark irony, have made it easier for the Danish inhabitants to accept English sovereignty when the moment came.

  The Viking presence left permanent marks on the landscape and the language. The word "riding", which divided Yorkshire into three administrative zones, derives from the Old Norse Threthingr, meaning a third part. Many placenames in Yorkshire carry their Scandinavian origins still. The dialects of North Yorkshire and the East Riding retain a much stronger Scandinavian influence than those of the West and South, a distinction that linguists formalised at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by drawing an isophone diagonally across the county, sometimes called the Humber-Lune Line.

• 4. Conquest and Devastation

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  In the weeks before the Battle of Hastings in 1066, King Harold II of England was fighting in Yorkshire, not in the south. His brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, had won the Battle of Fulford. Harold marched north and decisively defeated them at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, killing both Tostig and Hardrada. He then turned his exhausted army around and marched them south to face William the Conqueror. The rest is known.

  The North's response to Norman rule was rebellion. In September 1069, the people of the region rose up, bringing in Sweyn II of Denmark. They tried to retake York. The Normans burned the city before they could. What came next was the Harrying of the North, ordered by William. From York to Durham, crops, livestock, and farming tools were scorched. Villages were burned. Northerners were killed indiscriminately. During the following winter, families starved. Orderic Vitalis, a contemporary chronicler, estimated that "more than 100,000" people from the North died from hunger.

  Yorkshire took generations to recover, and its scars were visible in the Norman building programme that followed. Abbeys and priories went up across the county. New towns were established by Norman landowners: Barnsley, Doncaster, Hull, Leeds, Scarborough, and Sheffield all emerged or expanded in this period. Of the towns that had existed before the conquest, only Bridlington, Pocklington, and York continued at a significant level.

  Two centuries later, the violence returned in a different form. The Great Famine of 1315 struck a population that had been booming. The English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 sent the Scottish army rampaging through northern England. During the Great Raid of 1322, Scottish forces pillaged from the suburbs of York as far as the East Riding and the Humber. Some towns, including Richmond, paid the Scots to spare them. The Black Death arrived in Yorkshire by 1349, killing around a third of the population.

• 5. The Wars That Shaped England

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  When King Richard II was overthrown in 1399, a rivalry between two branches of the same royal family began to harden. The House of York and the House of Lancaster were both descended from the Plantagenet line. Their conflict for the English throne produced what became known as the Wars of the Roses, and some of the war's most decisive moments happened in Yorkshire.

  The Battle of Towton, fought in Yorkshire, is considered the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. The eventual victor in the broader conflict was Henry Tudor, a Lancaster sympathiser, who defeated and killed the Yorkist king Richard III at Bosworth Field. Henry then became King Henry VII and married Elizabeth of York, daughter of the Yorkist Edward IV, formally ending the wars. The two roses, white for York and red for Lancaster, were combined into the Tudor Rose.

  The rivalry between the houses has since passed into popular culture as a rivalry between the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire, particularly in cricket, where the contest is still known as the Roses Match. There is an irony embedded in this: the House of Lancaster was actually based in York, and the House of York had its base in London.

  The next major upheaval came in 1536. Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries provoked a popular uprising that began in Yorkshire, known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. Catholics who continued to practise their faith under Elizabeth I risked execution. One of them was a woman from York named Margaret Clitherow, who was later canonised. A century later, during the English Civil War that began in 1642, Yorkshire was split. Hull famously shut the city gates on the king when he came to enter, months before fighting began. York was the Royalist base. The Parliamentarians ultimately won control of the entire North at the Battle of Marston Moor.

• 6. Industry, Identity and the Dialect

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  Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Sheffield: the names of Yorkshire's great industrial cities ring through the story of the British economy. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the wool textile industry shifted from a cottage operation in old market towns to a mill-based enterprise in the West Riding, where rivers and streams flowing from the Pennines provided water power. Wakefield and Halifax grew with the textile trade.

  By the 19th century, Yorkshire led in coal, textiles, and steel. Sheffield and Rotherham became steel centres. Cholera struck the overcrowded industrial towns in 1832 and again in 1848, before modern sewers and water supplies brought improvements by the end of the century. Canals, turnpike roads, and railway networks spread through the region. Coal mining remained a vast employer well into the 20th century; as late as the 1970s, the number of miners working in the area was still in six figures. The industry began to collapse after the 6th of March 1984, when the National Coal Board announced the closure of 20 pits nationwide, some of them in South Yorkshire. By March 2004, three coalpits remained open. The last one, Maltby Colliery near Rotherham, closed in 2013.

  The people who worked these industries developed a culture with a strong sense of its own distinctiveness. The Yorkshire dialect, rooted in Old English and Old Norse, was once known as Broad Yorkshire or Tykes. The British Library holds a four-minute recording made in 1955 by a woman identified as Miss Madge Dibnahon, described as a "female housekeeper", providing an example of the dialect as it sounded at the time. Linguists have noted that the dialects of the North and East carry a much stronger Scandinavian influence than those of the West and South. The Humber-Lune Line separates them. Some have argued the dialect was a fully fledged language in its own right, though its use in everyday speech has declined heavily.

• 7. Culture, Sport and Sound

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  Yorkshire is officially recognised by FIFA as the birthplace of club football. Sheffield FC, founded in 1857, is certified as the oldest association football club in the world. The Laws of the Game used worldwide were drafted by Ebenezer Cobb Morley from Hull. Huddersfield Town were the first club to win three consecutive league titles.

  Yorkshire County Cricket Club has won 33 championship titles, including one shared, which is 13 more than any other county. The county has produced cricketers including Len Hutton, Fred Trueman, Geoffrey Boycott, Joe Root, and Jonny Bairstow. The Rugby Football League was founded in 1895 at the George Hotel in Huddersfield, after a schism within the Rugby Football Union. Nicola Adams, born in Leeds, became the first female athlete to win a boxing gold medal at the Olympics, in 2012. Jessica Ennis-Hill from Sheffield won gold at the same Games and silver at the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

  In literature, the three Brontë sisters produced novels in the mid-19th century that caused a sensation and entered the canon of English literature. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall all came from the family home near Haworth. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula while living in Whitby, drawing on local folklore including the beaching of a Russian ship called the Dmitri, which became the basis for the Demeter in the novel. James Herriot, whose books about his experiences as a veterinarian in Thirsk sold over 60 million copies, called the view from Sutton Bank "the finest view in England" in his 1979 guidebook.

  In music, David Bowie recruited three musicians from Hull for his Ziggy Stardust project: Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder, and Mick Woodmansey. Def Leppard from Sheffield sold 12 million copies of their 1983 album Pyromania and 25 million of their 1987 album Hysteria. The Arctic Monkeys hold the record for the fastest-selling debut album in British music history with Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not. Earlier, Yorkshire-based bands Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride laid the foundations of gothic metal in the early to mid-1990s. The 1982 Eurovision Song Contest was held at the Harrogate International Centre.

• 8. The Land Itself

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  Yorkshire's geology is a journey through deep time compressed into a single county. The Pennine chain in the west formed during the Carboniferous period. The central vale is Permo-Triassic. The North York Moors in the north-east are Jurassic in age. The Yorkshire Wolds to the south-east are chalk uplands of Cretaceous origin.

  At the western edge, the highest point in Yorkshire is Mickle Fell at 788 metres above sea level, in the North Pennines. The three most popular peaks, the Yorkshire Three Peaks, are Whernside at 736 metres, Ingleborough at 723 metres, and Pen-y-Ghent at 694 metres; all three can be climbed in a single day's walk. At High Force on the border with County Durham, the River Tees drops 22 metres over the Whin Sill, a sheet of igneous rock. It is not, despite the claim sometimes made, the highest waterfall in England: Hardraw Force in Wensleydale, also in Yorkshire, has a 30-metre drop. But High Force carries a greater volume of water than any higher waterfall in England.

  Spurn Point, a narrow sand spit three miles long on the Yorkshire coast, is owned by the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. It is destroyed and re-created approximately once every 250 years. Scarborough is Britain's oldest seaside resort, its origins tracing to the spa town era of the 17th century. The county's coastline features jet cliffs at Whitby, limestone cliffs at Filey, and chalk cliffs at Flamborough Head.

  The food the land produces has its own geography. Wensleydale cheese comes from the Wensleydale valley. Rhubarb from the Rhubarb Triangle supplies most of the county's crop. Ginger beer has existed in Yorkshire since the mid-18th century. Liquorice sweets were first created in the 1760s by George Dunhill from Pontefract, who mixed the liquorice plant with sugar. Brewing at Fountains Abbey, now derelict, once produced 60 barrels of strong ale every ten days, and has been taking place on a large scale since at least the 12th century.