The lower portion, owing to the quoins which somewhat resemble the “long and short” work of the Saxons, has been thought to be of pre-Norman date.  The blocked doorway appearing in the drawing has every appearance of Saxon workmanship.]

Goathland, which was often spelt Gothland, has a most suggestive sound, and the family names of Scoby and Scoresby seem to be of Danish origin.  The “gate” of the streets of Pickering is a modification of the Danish “gade,” meaning a “way,” for the town was never walled.  The influence of the Danes on the speech of this part of Yorkshire seems to me apparent in the slight sing-song modulation so similar to that of the present day people of Denmark.

In A.D. 597 Augustine commenced his missionary work among the Saxons, and King Ethelbert of Kent was baptised on June the 2nd of that year.  Twenty-seven years later Edwin, the powerful king of Northumbria, married Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert.  When she accompanied her husband to his northern kingdom she took with her Paulinus, who was ordained bishop of the Northumbrians.  “King Aldwin, therefore,” Bede tells us,[1] “together with all the nobles of his nation, and very many of the common people, received the faith and washing of sacred regeneration, in the eleventh year of his reign, which is the year of the Lord’s incarnation, 627, and about the year 180 from the coming of the Angles into Britain.  Moreover, he was baptised at York, on the holy day of Easter, the day before the Ides of April, in the church of the holy apostle Peter, which he himself built of wood in that place with expeditious labour, while he was being catechised and prepared in order to receive baptism.”  The Northumbrians from this time forward were at least a nominally Christian people, and the seventh century certainly witnessed the destruction of many of the idols and their shrines that had hitherto formed the centre for the religious rites of the Anglo-Saxons.  Woden or Odin, Thor and the other deities did not lose their adherents in a day, and Bede records the relapses into idolatry of Northumbria as well as the other parts of England.  There can be no doubt that fairies and elves entered largely into the mythology of the Anglo-Saxons, and the firmness of the beliefs in beings of that nature can be easily understood when we realise that it required no fewer than twelve centuries of Christianity to finally destroy them among the people of Yorkshire.  In Chapter XI. we see something of the form the beliefs and superstitions had assumed at the time of their disappearance.

[Footnote 1:  Bede’s “Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,” translated by Gidley, Rev. L., 1870, p. 152.]

In the seventh century most of the churches erected in Yorkshire were probably of wood, but the example of King Edwin at York, who quickly replaced the timber structure with a larger one of stone, must soon have made itself felt in the country.  Nothing, however, in the form of buildings or inscribed stones for which we have any evidence for placing at such an early date remains in the neighbourhood of Pickering, although there are numerous crosses and traces of the masonry that may be termed Saxon or Pre-Conquest.