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Excerpt from Six North Country Diaries Of the diaries printed in this volume, the most important, in every way, is the first. Written by John Aston, a younger son of the ancient family of Aston of Aston, in Cheshire, who was attached to the suite of Charles I. on his expedition through the counties of York, Durham and Northumberland in the first Bishops' War of 1659, the journal corroborates incidents mentioned in Edward Norgate's letters, written, from Newcastle and Berwick, to Secretary Windebank and others, as abstracted in the Calendar of State Papers, Domestic for 1659. To the members of the Surtees Society it affords further evidence of the then waste and poverty-stricken condition of the Border lands, enlarging the report sent to the Doge and Senate of Venice in 1617 by their Secretary Lionello, who stated that the country 'at a distance of from forty to fifty miles from the frontier, and especially the county of Northumberland, was very pour, uncultivated and exceedingly wretched, ' a condition proceeding 'from the sterility of the ground, and also from the perpetual wars with which these nations have savagely destroyed each other' (Calendar of State Papers, Venice, 1615-1617, p. 550). The second diary, from which only extracts are given, is of the Commonwealth and Restoration period. The third, although of the period of the Great Revolution, is singularly silent about that event. In the fourth diary, written by a young clergyman, who reveals his self-seeking propensities with artless candour, are echoes of the Rebellion of 1715. The fifth is that of a sagacious lawyer, whose pithy and analytical comments on Durham people and events are always decided; the sixth is that of an Alnwick attorney with personal tastes inclining to sermons and to cock-fighting, who noted many domestic events concerning his family, his neighbours and his widespread connections. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.