The Devil in God’s own country: Yorkshire in the English imagination

Uncanny presentiment and rugged hope will forever vie in this imaginative conflict.

‘All were endangered; young and old were hunted down by that dark death-shadow who lurked and swooped in the long nights on the misty moors’

Beowulf(Heaney translation)

Stalking a forbidding landscape the terrific Grendel emerges from Anglo-Saxon and Danish lore to haunt every nightmare; a miscellany of horrors that permeates the fragile order of the Northern world.

Beowulf marks the point at which the Viking and Christian cultures meet - an English poem evoking a near Scandinavian past and an allegory of faith draped over a saga of vengeance.

It shows life at its most precarious and the striving of community with nature.

Yorkshire embodies that cusp: a sprawling disparate territory girded by sea, mountains, and rivers. Its remoteness made authority contingent and subject to powerful interruption. Emanating from York the writ of the Danelaw radiated from three centres, ‘thridings’ (later Ridings), which offered courts and administration.

Always varied, the region was notable for its contrasts. York was England’s third city and undisputed cultural centre of the North.

Birth place of Roman Emperor Constantinus and an educational hub, the settlement had been an international beacon. England’s first poet, Caedmon, was a seventh century monk at nearby Whitby Abbey where he composed Caedmons Hymn, a meditation on providence.

To the north lay the Scottish marches, a space of desolate beauty and contested rule. Cumbered with limestone the dales and moors revealed glacial forces, a place where human agency could seem trivial and temporary.

Settling this were Anglo-Danes, a hardy blend of warriors and farmers for whom self-reliance was the only assurance of survival.

1066 was the termination of many aspects of this Anglo-Saxon life but Yorkshire bore a terrible savagery from William I and his Norman armies. Following a period of resistance the chronicler Orderic Vitalis records:

‘Nowhere else had William shown so much cruelty. Shamefully he succumbed to this vice, for he made no effort to restrain his fury and punished the innocent with the guilty.’

Up to 100,000 people may have died from the resultant famine caused by the harrying of the North and it left a legacy of destruction lasting generations.

Norman sovereignty continued to modify England gradually but inexorably over the next century. Yorkshire become studded with fortresses and suborned by a new generation of foreign castellans but older realities prevented total submission.

Paul Dalton notes in his book Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship 1066-1154 that:

‘In large parts of the North, military ‘feudalism’ was just a thin veneer laid over pre-existing forms of tenure.’

Remoteness and resilience ensured that much of the county retained its character and traditions within the framework of occupation.

Instead Norman influence was expressed most efficaciously by the Church. Extending from the see of York a network of monasteries was rapidly established bringing the regime to populace in a way that cemented loyalty and compliance.

Here they provided education, primitive healthcare, sanctuary and consolation. They become wholly intertwined in the economy of the area.

Southerners sometimes mocked the piety, or even credulity, of Northern folk. Chaucer set The Summoner’s Tale in Holderness, within the county. A Yorkshire man, Thomas is preyed upon by a friar set to take advantage of the deference traditionally accorded to mendicants. Predictably the friar’s strategy doesn’t go entirely to plan.

Throughout the medieval era Yorkshire was often characterised as a rough and violent place far from courtly refinement and cultural innovations, a stereotype that became threatening during The Wars of the Roses.

A maelstrom of woes assailed England in the 1450s. Bad harvests, the loss of French possessions and most fatally a weak king.

Henry VI of Lancaster and Edward IV of York assembled clusters of armed retainers which coalesced into opposing armies.

Yorkshire was the graveyard of the Lancastrian cause. At Towton near York in 1461 the bloodiest battle on English soil ended in a crushing victory for the Yorkist cause.

This cycle of chaos ended with the reign of Shakespeare’s most venomous monarch Richard III. Richard had built a powerbase around York supported by a committed retinue of local gentry. Raised in a martial climate these squires were feared in the South as recorded in the Paston family correspondence:

‘The people in the north rob and steal and have been appointed to pillage all this country, and to give away men’s goods and livelihoods in the South country.’

Tudor propaganda skilfully posited Richard and the North as arbiters of chaos, a clan who gained power through blood feud and usurpation. Henry VII, it was claimed, sought legitimacy and the rule of law.

Later, after the Reformation despoiled the great abbeys of Yorkshire and tamed the magnates, the London establishment could reflect on both a lost faith and a broken power. Yorkshire would never be an independent polity again.

Yorkshireman continued to play a prominent role in affairs. Both Guy Fawkes and Parliamentary general Thomas Fairfax were from the county.

After the Stuart restoration, poet Andrew Marvell from the East Riding proved a deft and irreverent witness to a gilded age. Even in this time of classicism and refinement Marvell was alive to something unyielding in his home, a character resistant to courtly prettiness. Reflecting on Appleton House he wrote:

‘Within this sober frame expect    

Work of no foreign architect;

That unto caves the quarries drew,

And forests did do pastures hew’

The pastoral elegance of Claude Lorrain was checked by the irreducible frontier of the North.

Romanticism discovered vast new vistas in the land as the grandeur and turmoil of nature was found to resonate with internal human dramas.

Collectively the preternaturally gifted Bronte sisters reformed the brooding environment of the moors to a place of psychic peril where the elements conspire to unsettle and distort.

Settled complacencies are shattered by the directness and candour of the novels which explore social, racial and sexual imbalances.

Wordsworth saw a witness to lost integrity and idealism in the ruins of Bolton Abbey. His verse The White Doe Of Rylstone narrates the fall of a Catholic recusant family during the depredations of Elizabeth I:

‘That sumptuous Pile, with all its peers,

  Too harshly hath been doomed to taste

The bitterness of wrong and waste:

 Its courts are ravaged; but the tower

 Is standing with a voice of power’

Here defeat is heroic.

Today, new dynamics explore age old tensions. The series ‘Happy Valley’ explores themes of evil, endurance and community in ways which express ancient fears and modern uncertainties; Benjamin Myers penetrates the marginal and precarious lives of Yorkshires past in a contemporary gothic idiom.

Uncanny presentiment and rugged hope will forever vie in this imaginative conflict, seeming peace and secret malice. As Bram Stoker writes of Dracula’s arrival in Whitby:

‘Already the sudden storm is passing, and its fierceness is abating. Crowds are scattering backwards, and the sky is beginning to redden over the Yorkshire wolds.’