HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY 39 



especially upon monasteries, wrought havoc which reduced their 

 entertainers to poverty. 



During this period York was from time to time the royal headquarters, 

 the scene of parliaments summoned for the defence of the realm, and, in 

 the imminence of danger from France in the Hundred Years' War, the 

 place to which the royal exchequer and the offices of government could be 

 temporarily transferred. In the later days of feudal warfare it became an 

 object of contention between rival parties. Thomas of Lancaster, the 

 rebellious cousin of Edward II, occupied a strong position in Yorkshire, 

 commanding the valleys of the Aire and Calder from his great castle of 

 Pontefract ; and his hold upon the approaches to the city was broken only 

 by his defeat and capture at Boroughbridge upon the Ure in 1322. The 

 neighbourhood of Pontefract to York and the support which the house of 

 Lancaster could command from its tenants in the county secured the 

 unopposed march of Henry IV from his landing-place at the mouth of 

 the Humber in 1399, a success repeated by Edward IV in 1461, when the 

 position of the Lancastrian cause in Yorkshire was precarious. In the 

 interval between these two events the strife between the houses of 

 Lancaster and York had arisen. The central battles of the Wars of the 

 Roses were fought upon the main approach to York from the south. In 

 1460 the battle of Wakefield, fought at Sandal, south of the Calder, was 

 followed by the triumphant entry of Margaret of Anjou and her royal 

 husband into York ; but the success of that year was reversed in the next, 

 when the Yorkists forced the passage of the Aire at Ferrybridge and won 

 a complete victory at Tovrton, in the country between the Aire and Wharfe. 



In all these military operations the rivers of Yorkshire have played 

 a large part, and it is within the area watered by the western tributaries of 

 the Ouse that the strife of rival parties for supremacy in the north has been 

 contested. The rally points of the rebels in the Pilgrimage of Grace, 

 after York had been seized, were Pontefract and Doncaster. It is notice- 

 able that, while warfare throughout the Middle Ages again and again 

 came near the gates of York, it stopped short of the city. From the time 

 when the Conqueror quelled the Anglo-Danish rebellion in 1070 to the 

 era of the Civil Wars in the seventeenth century, York suffered no siege, 

 and the nearest approach to a battle close to its walls was the abortive 

 muster of an ill-disciplined crowd on Shipton Moor, north of the city, in 

 1405, to meet a royal army, which was followed by the summary execution 

 of Archbishop Scrope. But in 1642 York was besieged by a Parliamentary 

 army under Fairfax. The siege was relieved by the Earl of Newcastle, 

 whose defeat of Fairfax at Tadcaster gave Pontefract to the Royalists and 

 isolated the Parliamentary base at Hull. Early in 1644 York was again 

 besieged. Prince Rupert, coming from Lancashire at the end of June, 

 relieved the city ; but his attack upon the besiegers, who were about to 

 retreat along the line of the Wharfe, ended in the battle of Marston Moor, 

 to the west of York, on July 2, and the surrender of York to the Parliament. 



If York was thus important as a military base in a disturbed age, its 

 communications by road and water gave it a commercial pre-eminence as 

 the chief market of Yorkshire, and the centre of northern trade. Its 

 citizens received from Henry II, soon after the beginning of his reign, the 



