The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: York to Edinburgh

The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: York to Edinburgh

At last we are safely arrived at York, perhaps no cause for comment in these days, but a circumstance which once upon a time might almost have warranted a special service of prayer and praise in the Minster. One comes to York as the capital of a country, rather than of a county, for it is a city that seems in more than one sense Metropolitan. Indeed, you cannot travel close upon two hundred miles, even in England and in these days of swift communication, without feeling the need of some dominating city, to act partly as a seat of civil and ecclesiastical government, and partly as a distributing centre; and if something of this need is even yet apparent, how much more keenly it must have been felt in those good old days which were really so bad! A half-way house, so to speak, between those other capitals of London and Edinburgh, York had all the appearance of a capital in days of old, and has lost but little of it, in these, p. 2even though in point of wealth and population it lags behind those rich and dirty neighbours, Leeds and Bradford. For one thing, it has a history to which they cannot lay claim, and keeps a firm hold upon titles and dignities conferred ages ago. We may ransack the pages of historians in vain in attempting to find the beginnings of York. Before history began it existed, and just because it seems a shocking thing to the well-ordered historical mind that the first founding of a city should go back beyond history or tradition, Geoffrey of Monmouth and other equally unveracious chroniclers have obligingly given preciseand quite untrustworthyaccounts of how it arose, at the bidding of kings who never had an existence outside their fertile brains. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 47239
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Release Date: Oct 30, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English