In the history of our national evolution Yorkshire occupies a most important position, and the sanguinary record of Yorkshire Battles possesses something more than material for the poet and the artist. Valour, loyalty, patriotism, honour and self-sacrifice are virtues not uncommon to the warrior, and the blood of true and brave men has liberally bedewed our fields.
It was on Yorkshire soil that the tides of foreign invasion were rolled back in blood at Stamford Bridge and Northallerton; the misfortunes attendant upon the reign of weak and incapable princes are illustrated by the fields of Boroughbridge, Byland Abbey, and Myton-upon-Swale, and, in the first days of our greatest national struggle, the true men of Yorkshire freely shed their blood at Tadcaster, Bradford, Leeds, Wakefield, Adwalton Moor and Hull, keeping[x] open the pathway by which Fairfax passed from Selby to Marston Moor.
Let pedants prate of wars of kites and crows; we take national life as a unity, and dare to face its evolution through all the throes of birth, owning ourselves debtors to the old times before us, without being either so unwise or ungenerous as to contemn the bonds of association, and affect a false and impossible isolation.
To the educated and intelligent our Yorkshire Battles present interesting and important studies of those subtle and natural processes by which nations achieve liberty, prosperity, and greatness.
