THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

That there may be a rowdyism among us still, it would be absurd to dispute; but, at least, it is limited rowdyism, and of a mitigated character. Time was, unquestionably, when such an assertion could not truthfully have been made. But that time had passed before I had ever heard of Danby. But there were men I had a personal acquaintance with soon after I came into residence, who were the last of an expiring class; men whose pastime it had been, if not whose object and desire, to provoke a row or a scuffle, and to fight it out then and there. One of these persons, a stout- built muscular man, even in his old age – he must have been turned of seventy – was described to me as literally the “hero of a hundred fights.”  Poor old William was quiet enough when and after I began to know him; but those who had known him in the elder days said he had, in the days of his youth and vigour, been the most turbulent of a turbulent group.  Rows, scuffles, scrimmages had been the rule then, and William, with another still then living, was never out of them. Hardly-contested boxing-bouts, with a cruel amount of “punishment,” were of continual occurrence, and truly William’s scarcely lovely countenance looked as if it had been sorely battered. From all I could hear, the stranger whose devious footsteps brought him to Danby in those old days, was likely to experience something of the “Heave ‘arf a brick at ‘im” treatment recorded by George Stephenson as the customary welcome extended by north-country natives to unlucky explorers of the country wilds.

Atkinson/Parish