A guided tour of Knaresborough, showing how the town has changed over the past century and more.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... relation to Sir Richard Hutton. The common soldiers "without order let fly at it with their muskets, and so exchanging bullets after twenty-four hours the town is deserted; thence to Wetherby the retreat is continued." Hargrove describes the state of the town in various remarks, some of historic value. The old ditch and rampart had gone in the extensions of commerce. 1642. Lord Fairfax being posted at Wetherby intended to garrison Knaresburgh. The ancient rampart and ditch had been long disused and in many places houses had been built and gardens and orchards planted on the site, so that little more could be done than by barricading the entrances into the town and making up the want of fortifications by a strong and vigilant garrison. The only remains of works apparently then thrown up are part of a rampart on the west side of the churchyard, reaching from the Cliff in the Parsonage-yard to an orchard in the Bond-end Road, where a mount or bastion appears standing out from the rampart, on which a piece of ordnance being mounted would scour the whole length of the line from thence to the Cliff and entirely command the Bond-end Road. The work turned at this bastion and was continued in a direct line up the hill into the High Street, and crossing that street near the Charity School, at some distance behind which, it again appears to have turned and joined the north angle of the Old Borough Ditch, near the Row Gap, a work very necessary at that time, this being the most open part of the town and most easy of access. The documents cited refute these last statements; it is a question whether artillery was mounted in the Castle before this rebellion. The Burghers claim that their Burgh must have been a walled station. Hargrove fosters this...

Thornton also sheds light on areas where popular culture and politics were uneasily interlinked: the powerful political influence of those outside elite groups; the variations in political culture across the country; and the considerable continuing power of mystical, supernatural, and 'non-rational' ideas in British social and political life into the nineteenth century."--Jacket.