Excerpt from The Making of Modern Yorkshire: 1750-1914

Whatever observant traveller wandered through Yorkshire at that time must needs have been struck by one all-prevalent feature of its general aspect. While there was little that gave promise of the days to come, there was much that spoke with wordless eloquence of the ages that were gone. From the northern edges of Sherwood Forest, in the south, to Stainmore and Teesdale, in the north, from the wilds of Blackstone and Bowland, on the west, to the F lamborough cliffs and the Holderness flats, on the east, the evidences of the feudal régime and the monastic days were everywhere. The castles of the great nobles had become gaunt and roofless ruins the abbeys and priories of the Benedictines and the Cistercians were silent as the solitudes in which they stood. Many of the Norman strongholds had been so effectively slighted by order of the Parliament that they were no more than shapeless masses of masonry, already overgrown by grass and weed; those which had escaped with gentler treatment had yet been so dealt with that they could never again be fortified or even tenanted, save as mere hunting lodges or summer retreats. The walls of the religious houses still stood, but the roofs were gone, the towers despoiled of their bells, the chancels of their orna ments there was neither wood nor lead within their precincts any farmer of the neighbourhood might quarry amongst their Cloisters for stone, wherewith to build sty or byre. It was then only two hundred years since their desecration, only half that time since the dismantling of the castles - but we of the twentieth century know more of what the monastic house and the feudal castle meant, and were, than our forefathers of George the Second's day knew. The eighteenth-century townsfolk of Knaresborough and Pontefract, the eighteenth-century peasants of Wharfedale and Wensleydale, who saw these piles of grey stone in the ancient towns and the quiet valleys, were as incurious about them as they were indifferent.

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