Yorkshire is England’s largest historic county, covering a substantial slice of the north of the country from the Pennines to the North Sea. It is also, by common consent including its own, the English county with the strongest sense of itself.
God’s Own County
Yorkshire people call it this without embarrassment. The identity is genuine and unusually intense: Yorkshire has its own flag, its own day on 1 August, its own dialect society, and a widely observed conviction that being from Yorkshire is a qualification in itself.
The stereotype — blunt, plain-speaking, careful with money, suspicious of anything southern — is enthusiastically maintained by Yorkshire people themselves. The county motto, unofficially, is often given as: hear all, see all, say nowt; eat all, sup all, pay nowt; and if ever tha does owt for nowt, do it for thysen.
The ridings
Yorkshire was historically divided into three ridings — North, East and West. The word comes from Old Norse thrithjungr, a third part, and it is a direct legacy of Viking administration, as is a great deal of Yorkshire place naming: anything ending in -by, -thorpe or -thwaite.
The ridings were abolished as administrative units in 1974 and replaced with North, South and West Yorkshire plus Humberside, a reorganisation that was resented at the time and has never been fully accepted. The East Riding was restored as a name in 1996.
The places
- York — Roman Eboracum, Viking Jorvik, and one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe, with its walls, the Shambles and York Minster.
- Leeds — the largest city, a Victorian commercial centre now dominated by finance and law.
- Sheffield — steel and cutlery, and the greenest large city in England, with a third of it inside the Peak District national park.
- Bradford — wool, and a substantial British Asian population.
- Hull — fishing and docks, and UK City of Culture in 2017.
- Whitby, Scarborough and Robin Hood’s Bay on the coast.
The landscape
Two national parks: the Yorkshire Dales, with its limestone and dry stone walls, and the North York Moors, which turns purple with heather in August. Between and around them lie the Vale of York, the Wolds and a coastline of high cliffs and fishing villages.
The exports
Yorkshire has given Britain a disproportionate amount of its culture: the Brontës at Haworth, Yorkshire Tea, Yorkshire pudding, rhubarb from the “Rhubarb Triangle” near Wakefield, the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, and All Creatures Great and Small.
It is also the historic home of rugby league, which split from union in a Huddersfield hotel in 1895 — a dispute about paying working men that is covered under rugby.
The rivalry
Yorkshire’s ancient antagonism is with Lancashire, across the Pennines. The historical root is the Wars of the Roses — white rose for York, red for Lancaster — and it is expressed now through cricket’s Roses Match and through general mutual disparagement conducted with considerable warmth.