Prologue

Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage

And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,

To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.

And specially from every shires’s end

Of England they to Canterbury wend,

The holy blessed martyr there to seek

Who helped them when they lay so ill and weak.

Befell that, in that season, on a day

In Southwark, at the Tabard, as I lay

Ready to start upon my pilgrimage

To Canterbury, full of devout homage…..

What better way to start this pilgrimage of my own than with the prologue from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  I wont be actually starting the North Downs Way walk yet. As a warm up the first week George and I are going to another place of pilgrimage, the historic medieval Viking city of Jorvik – YORK and the PEAK DISTRICT.

York History in a Nutshell

71 AD Romans invade Yorkshire

200 The city is walled and named EBORACUM “Place of the Yew Trees”

866 Vikings conquer Northern England

1069 Wm the Conquerer takes York

1220 York Minster is begun

1349 Black Death

1539 H8 dissolves St Mary’s Abbey

1550 Plague

1604 Plague

1631 and 1645 Good grief, more Plague

2015 I arrive

On To YORK!