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most of the greater landholders outlasted the calamities
of nearly twenty years, perhaps taking refuge in
Scotland and returning to make their peace. The
common people, though agriculture was destroyed,
still were not entirely without resources ; there must
have been sheep, bees, hens, fish, swine and wood
left—means of life not then taxable, and therefore
not mentioned in Domesday. At the same time, the
distress and depopulation, however we minimise it,
was terrible and widespread.
Whence, then, was Yorkshire re-peopled? To a
great extent it must have been by immigration from
Cumbria and Westmorland. All over the west of
Yorkshire are place-names containing "thwaite," and
in situations suggesting more recent settlement than
surrounding hamlets or villages ; these seem to represent
the additional land taken up by the new-comers,
who betray their presence by these "thwaites" and
other Norse "test-words," among which may be
reckoned ergh and airy, -bergh (common in Westmorland,
but only occasional in Yorkshire), and possibly
force and gill. The close resemblance of Cleveland
characteristics, as described by Canon Atkinson in his
Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, to those of the
Lake District suggests a common origin, reaching back
rather to the eleventh and the twelfth centuries than
to the days of Halfdan. The East Riding (as Beverley
was a sanctuary) perhaps retained much of its
population though the farms were destroyed ; but the
coast, and especially Holderness, had only too frequent
experiences of the kind, and with Lindsey must have
suffered enormously.
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