of the bridge.  During the fight a Welshman, armed with a long spear, and who was hidden somewhere beneath the bridge, contrived to thrust his spear through an opening in the timbers right into the bowels of Humphrey de Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, who fell forward mortally wounded.  Thus died one of the most renowned warriors in England.  The Earl of Lancaster made a final effort to cross the bridge, but his troops gave way and fled, the Earl taking refuge in the old chapel of Boroughbridge, from which he was dragged, stripped of his armour, and taken to York.  Thence he was conveyed to his own castle at Pontefract, and lowered into a deep dungeon, into which, we were told, when we visited that castle later, he had himself lowered others, and soon afterwards he was condemned to death by the revengeful Edward, who had not forgotten the Earl’s share in the death of his favourite, Piers Gaveston.  Mounted on a miserable-looking horse, amidst the gibes and insults of the populace, he was led to the block, and thus died another of England’s famous warriors.

[Illustration:  OLIVER CROMWELL, THE GREAT PARLIAMENTARIAN.]

Needless to relate, we had decided to visit York Minster as our next great object of interest after Fountains Abbey, and by accident rather than design we had in our journey to and from York to pass over two battle-fields of first importance as decisive factors in the history of England—­viz., Marston Moor and Towton Field.  Marston Moor lay along our direct road from Aldborough to York, a distance of about sixteen miles.  Here the first decisive battle was fought between the forces of King Charles I and those of the Parliament.  His victory at Marston Moor gave Cromwell great prestige and his party an improved status in all future operations in the Civil War.  Nearly all the other battles whose sites we had visited had been fought for reasons such as the crushing of a rebellion of ambitious and discontented nobles, or perhaps to repel a provoked invasion, and often for a mere change of rulers.  Men had fought and shed their blood for persons from whom they could receive no benefit, and for objects in which they had no interest, and the country had been convulsed and torn to pieces for the gratification of the privileged few.  But in the Battle of Marston Moor a great principle was involved which depended en the issue.  It was here that King and People contended—­the one for unlimited and absolute power, and the other for justice and liberty.  The iron grasp and liberty-crushing rule of the Tudors was succeeded by the disgraceful and degrading reign of the Stuarts.  The Divine Right of Kings was preached everywhere, while in Charles I’s corrupt and servile Court the worst crimes on earth were practised.  Charles had inherited from his father his presumptuous notions of prerogative and Divine Right, and was bent upon being an absolute and uncontrolled sovereign.  He had married Henrietta, the daughter of the King of France, who, though possessed of great wit and beauty, was of a haughty spirit, and influenced Charles to favour the Roman Catholic Church as against the Puritans, then very numerous in Britain, who “through the Bishop’s courts were fined, whipt, pilloried, and imprisoned, so that death was almost better than life.”