Stories are told of the Parliamentary troops being quartered in Pickering church, and, if this were true, we have every reason to bless the coats of whitewash which probably hid the wall-paintings from their view.  The series of fifteenth century pictures that now cover both walls of the nave would have proved so very distasteful to the puritan soldiery that it is impossible to believe that they could have tolerated their existence, especially when we find it recorded that the font was smashed and the large prayer-book torn to pieces at that time.

[Illustration:  Rosamund Tower, Pickering Castle.]

Pickering church has a fascination for the antiquary, and does not fail to impress even the most casual person who wanders into the churchyard and enters the spacious porch.  The solemn massiveness of the Norman nave, the unusual effect of the coloured paintings above the arches, and the carved stone effigies of knights whose names are almost forgotten, carry one away from the familiar impressions of a present-day Yorkshire town, and almost suggest that one is living in mediaeval times.  One can wander, too, on the moors a few miles to the north and see heather stretching away to the most distant horizon and feel that there, also, are scenes which have been identically the same for many centuries.  The men of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages may have swept their eyes over landscapes so similar that they would find the moorlands quite as they knew them, although they would miss the dense forests of the valleys and the lower levels.

The cottages in the villages are, many of them, of great age, and most of them have been the silent witnesses of innumerable superstitious rites and customs.  When one thoroughly realises the degrading character of the beliefs that so powerfully swayed the lives of the villagers and moorland-folk of this district, as late as the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, one can only rejoice that influences arose sufficiently powerful to destroy them.  Along with the revolting practises, however, it is extremely unfortunate to have to record the disappearance of many picturesque, and in themselves, entirely harmless customs.  The roots of the great mass of superstitions have their beginnings so far away from the present time, that to embrace them all necessitates an exploration of all the centuries that lie between us and the pre-historic ages, and in the pages that follow, some of these connections with the past may be discovered.

CHAPTER II

The Forest and Vale of Pickering in Palaeolithic and Pre-Glacial Times.

The Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age preceded and succeeded the Great Glacial Epochs in the Glacialid.