Legends connected with the battle. The Siege of Preston under Wells and Carpenter in 1715. March of the "Young Pretender," in 1745. Doggrel ballad: "Long Preston Peggy to Proud Preston went." APPENDIX. The disposal of St. Oswald's remains. The dun bull, the badge of the Nevilles. The Genesis of Myths. Anglo-Saxon Helmet. ERRATA. On page 51, line 21, insert marks of quotation (") after--"_or without it_." Transpose the note on page 65, beginning--"_Bosworth, in his Anglo-Saxon Dictionary_," to page 64, and place the * after "_massacre, etc._," at the end of the sixth line from the bottom of the text. Transpose the note commencing on page 64 to page 65. For "_Downham_ IN _Yorkshire_" (page 143, fourteenth line from the bottom), read "_Downham_ INTO _Yorkshire_." CHAPTER I. EARLY HISTORICAL AND LEGENDARY BATTLES. THE ARTHUR OF HISTORY, LEGEND, AND ART. KING ARTHUR'S PRESUMED VICTORIES ON THE DOUGLAS, NEAR WIGAN AND BLACKROD. It has often been remarked, and with some truth, that our standard historical works, until very recent times at least, contained little more than the details of battles, the squabbles and intrigues of diplomatists and politicians, and the pedigrees of potentates, imperial or otherwise. Now-a-days we seek to know more of the domestic habits and conditions of the mass of the population, and the degree and kind of intellectual and moral culture which obtained amongst a people at any given period of their history. But man's advance from the savage to his present relatively civilized condition has been one of fierce and sanguinary strife, and the piratical and freebooting instincts which he inherited, along with some of his nobler attributes and aspirations, from his remote ancestors, are by no means extinguished at the present time, although, in their practical exhibition, they may generally assume a somewhat more decorous exterior. Still, courage and physical endurance, however rude and uncouth in outward aspect, as well as heroism of a higher mental or moral order, ever possessed, and ever will possess, a strange and uncontrollable fascination; and the associations, social, political, or religious, attendant upon the more prominent of the bloody struggles of the past, excite, in a most powerful degree, the emotional as well as the imaginative elements of our being. This is notoriously the case when any special interest is superinduced, national or provincial. "All men naturally feel more interested in the historical associations of their own race than they do in those of any other portion of mankind. The soil daily trodden by the foot of any reflecting being,--the locality with whose present struggles, progress or decay, he is practically acquainted,--whose traditions and folk-lore were first fixed in his memory and his heart, long before more exact knowledge or cultivated judgment enabled him to test their accuracy or correctly weigh their value,--must possess historic reminiscences not only capable