DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATION. 
5 
Ouse, and Agricola, about the Both year of our era, pushed his 
conquests so far north as to construct a chain of forts between the 
Forth and the Clyde in order to obtain the advantage of a scientific 
frontier. This demanded an administrative centre, and for that 
purpose no place was so obviously fitted as Eboracum, now York. 
Hither came Hadrian on his way to check the northern barbarians 
more effectively by that marvellous wall, with its strongholds and 
garrison fortresses, which once extended from the Tyne to the 
Solway. In the days that followed, your predecessors must many 
a time have watched the Roman troops as they marched through 
Bootham Bar (as we now call it) northward to chastise the ever 
aggressive Caledonians, and once, in the days of Antoninus Pius to 
re-establish the frontier defences of Agricola. On the events of the 
next hundred years I must not linger, though the peace of your 
shire was too often disturbed by Saxon and Frisian pirates or 
by pretenders to empire. The coming of Constantius Chlorus 
with his son Constantine brought quieter times, and Eboracum 
witnessed the last hours of the one and the accession to the purple 
of the other. 
But the great Empire of Rome was doomed, and your shire, 
no less than the rest of our land, shared in the disasters of its 
decline and fall. The Ouse, in later days a source of prosperity, 
offered an easy access for pirates—Saxons and Angles, Frisians 
and Danes,—to plunder, burn and slaughter. There was also war 
at home, for the days of the Heptarchy illustrate the drawbacks 
of duodecimo nationalities. But this shire and your city, then 
gradually transforming its name to York, were again beginning to 
play an important part in the history of Britain. The fair-haired 
boys in the slave market at Rome, who stirred so deeply the tender 
heart of Gregory the Great, came from Yorkshire, which thus may 
claim to have initiated the mission of Augustine. The baptism of 
Ethelbert at Canterbury marks the restoration of Christianity to 
Southern England, but that was brought back to the North by 
the baptism of Edwin in the year 627, of which, as you well know, 
York was the scene. Though the log built church, hastily erected 
for that occasion, has long since disappeared, your Minster covers 
a site what will ever be memorable in English history. But peace 
was not yet to be ; for the convert was to fall by the sword of his 
foes, and the bishop to wander for many years as an exile from 
his diocese. For a time there was strife within the Church between 
the Roman and the Celtic use, and for still longer—almost two 
