22 England's oldest hunt. 



concoctions of the dalesfolk, but are incidents which have 

 their place — a prominent place forsooth — in local history, 

 though, as has been said — and I make no apology for repeat- 

 ing myself so as to insist upon my point — they may have an 

 outer crust of superstitious belief. 



So far as Bilsdale, Farndale, and Bransdale are concerned, 

 Helmsley has ever been the great metropolis. This was even 

 more so in the days of the Duke of Buckingham, for then 

 there was no Middlesbrough, and a commercial Tees-side 

 was far ahead. Helmsley was — and to a great extent is 

 still — their market town, the centre of all gaiety, the ex- 

 chequer, the meeting-place of dales sportsmen and farmers — 

 the term is almost synonymous— who in the summer at any 

 rate never meet anywhere else. " Ti gan ta Hemsler " 

 is to journey out of the isolation of the imprisonment of the 

 hills — to take a drink of the world — and occasionally some- 

 thing else — in a word to visit the London of Daleland — a 

 land little known, and less understood, by most people. 



The Rev. M. C. F. Morris, in referring to this isolation 

 in his " Yorkshire Folk-talk " (p. 159) says :— 



No doubt in days gone by the local knowledge was often acquired 

 at the expense of the general, as what here follows will indicate. The 

 moorland district, north of Helmsley, is a wild, out-of-the-way region, 

 where old customs were kept up till lately with great tenacity, and 

 where the folk-speech is rich in archaic words and forms. The people 

 there seldom travelled far from their own homesteads, which were to 

 them their world. A former assistant-curate of Helmsle informed me 

 that he used to hear moorland farmers speak of Hemsley as t' coontthry. 

 They would sometimes complain, for instance, that the farmers in the 

 country, that is to say, round about Helmsley and the more lowland 

 parts, could feed their beasts, and get better prices at the markets than 

 they themselves could. He has even heard Helmsley spoken of as 

 *' England " ; in speaking, for example, of the doings of their neighbours 

 •a few miles below them, they would talk of that district as " doon in 

 England." 



I, too, have often heard the less isolated districts ayont 

 the hills spoken of as " t' coontry," and whilst the townsman 

 is often apt to speak with something of disdain regarding 

 " those country joskins," if he could but hear the sympathetic 

 terms in which the dales fox-hunter refers to " chaps frev 



