When, in a subsequent insurrection, the Norman king again marched northward, in full resolve to carry his conquering arms to the frontiers of Scotland, and, sustained by his ferocious energy, did actually force his way through the misty moorlands and mountainous mid-regions of Durham, Northumberland, and Westmoreland, he had to traverse about sixty miles of country, once not the least fertile of his newly-conquered realm, in which his mail-clad men-at-arms saw neither green leaves on the trees, nor green crops in the field; for the ax and the torch had done their work, not negligently; passed neither standing roof nor burning hearth; encountered neither human being nor cattle of the field; only the wolves, which had become so numerous from desuetude to the sight of man, that they scarce cared to fly before the clash and clang of the marching squadrons. To the northward and north-westward, yet, of Yorkshire, including what are now Lancashire, Westmoreland, Northumberland, and Cumberland, though the Conqueror, in his first irresistible prosecution of red-handed victory, had marched and countermarched across them, there was, even at the time of my narrative, when nearly a century had fled, little if any thing of permanent progress or civilization, beyond the establishment of a few feudal holds and border fortresses, each with its petty hamlet clustered beneath its shelter. The marches, indeed, of Lancashire, toward its southern extremity, were in some degree permanently settled by military colonists, in not a few instances composed of Flemings, as were the Welch frontiers of the neighboring province of Cheshire, planted there to check the inroads of the still unconquered Cymri, to the protection of whose mountains, and late-preserved independence, their whilom enemies, the now persecuted Saxons, had fled in their extremity. It is from these industrious artisans, then the scorn of the high-born men-at-arms, that the trade had its origin, which has filled the bleak moors, and every torrent gorge of Lancaster and Western York, with a teeming population and a manufacturing opulence, such as, elsewhere, the wide earth has not witnessed. Even at the time of which I write, the clack of their fulling-mills, the click of their looms, and the din of their trip-hammers, resounded by the side of many a lonely Cheshire stream; but all to the north and westward, where the wildest hillsides and most forbidding glens are now more populous and richer than the greatest cities of those days, all was desolate as the aspect of the scenery, and inhospitable as the climate that lowers over it in constant mist and darkness.