Ay up, it’s Yorkshire Day! (Also Lammas or Lughnasadh; also the Feast Day for a couple of dozen saints, none of whom I feel are worth mentioning.)

What is Yorkshire? Well, it’s a large chunk of the north of England, the heartland of what in the Iron Age would have been Brigante territory.

To some it’s God’s Own Country. To others simply the most beautiful land on earth. To an ignorant few, an uncouth, untutored place where the accent is incomprehensible. It’s the biggest county in the UK—by a factor of… Well, when it was the historical county of three ridings, by a factor of a lot, and even now that it’s been divided into four ceremonial counties, North Yorkshire, on its own, is still the biggest in the UK. So Yorkshire is big, and beautiful—moors, mountains, dales, cliffs, coasts, forests, lakes—and, well, belligerent.

It has always had its own identity. Lots of people born and bred there—like me—would think of themselves as Yorkshire folk first, Yorkshire before ‘English’ or ‘British’. It’s the UK equivalent of Texas: it inspires fierce loyalty. It has it’s own dialect, and several distinct regional accents—a mix of Iron Age Celtic rhythms, Old English, Norse, and that last few decades Jamaican and South Asian with a sprinkling of Polish.

The Domesday Book, compiled about a thousand years ago, noted which steadings, hamlets, demesnes etc stood where, and if you tot up all the mentions, to the tax-hungry Normans Yorkshire looked something like this:

From 1889, Yorkshire had three administrative regions or Ridings: West (the largest), North, and South. Like this:

There was a Sheriff of Yorkshire until 1974 when there was another reorg which frankly is best forgotten—they took part of Yorkshire away and called it something else!—and then in 1996 that miserable reorg was itself reorged, and Yorkshire was reconstituted and then split into four ceremonial counties: West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and the East Riding of Yorkshire (yes, those in the east have always been a bit different—their accent’s pretty different too, probably because they were never Brigantes but Parisi). Like this:

Why am I talking about all this on my research blog? Because I get tired of historians airily describing Elmet as Basically West Yorkshire to which I always want to respond, Yes, but *which* Yorkshire?? That of course, will be the subject of another post—or more probably a series of posts, because it’s already 11,000 words long and I haven’t finished it, ‘it’ being a disquisition on all things Elmet: What was it? Where was it? When was it? Why—and possibly, how—was it? All deliciously knotty problems.

But today is Yorkshire Day! I banish problems, exile them to eternal shame in the south! Today we unproblematically celebrate all things Yorkshire: a strong brew, chip butties, and a sup of Tetleys. And if any mardy bugger has owt to say to that, I’ll bray yer!