Riccall, and the country between it and York, should therefore be interesting, as the scene of the earlier of these invasions. Aside from the village flows the Ouse, deep in its channel and navigable for barges, than which the Norwegian ships were not much larger; but it could not in these days harbour a fleet, even of these primitive transports. The village itself bears nothing on its face telling of great events, and is of a placid dulness, a character shared by Escrick and Deighton, on the way to York; the road itself gradually becoming an abomination of desolate fields until the village of Gate Fulford is reached. The Great North Road is a businesslike highway. It goes as direct as may be to its destination, and gets there quite regardless of scenery or interest to right or left. Thus, although Escrick Park is reputed to be a demesne of great beauty, and the village of Naburn, lying hidden off the road, is a typical old English village actually boasting a maypole, all the traveller along the road perceives is an unromantic vista of cabbage-fields and other necessary but uninspiring domestic vegetables, through a haze of a particularly beastly kind of black dust peculiar to the last few miles of the way into York. Fulford itself is no fit herald of a cathedral city. A wide street, the terminus of a tramway, a mile-long row of cottages, a would-be Gothic church; here you have it. Before you, by degrees, York unfolds itself, past the military barracks and nondescript, but always disappointing, streets, until, emerging from Fishergate, the ancient city, free from suburban excrescences, opens out, with the grim castle in front, and the Ouse and Skeldergate Bridge to the left. The so-called “London Road” lies away beyond the Ouse, its name referring to the Doncaster, Ferrybridge, Sherburn, and Tadcaster route taken by some of the old-time coaches. By that route York is most romantically entered, across Knavesmire, where York’s martyrs, felons, and traitors were done to death in the old days, and where the racecourse now runs; coming to the walled city through Micklegate, the finest of all the mediæval defensible gateways which are York’s especial glory. By the Selby route, through Gate Fulford and along Fishergate, we seem to slink in by the back door; through Micklegate we follow in the steps of those who have marched with armed hosts at their heels, and have entered with the unquestioned right of conquerors. Thus came the young Duke of York at the head of his victorious army, after the crowning victory of Towton; the first thing to meet his gaze his father’s head, fixed on the topmost turret, and crowned in mockery with a paper crown by the fierce Lancastrians under whose swords he had fallen at the battle of Wakefield, three months before. Filial piety could not in those times rest content with removing the head from its shameful eminence, and so the Duke caused