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BATTLE OF THE STANDARD.
I25
and power as Archbishop of York. He is no exception
to the strange anomaly which is so commonly
found to characterise the mediaeval prelates. They
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bishops of the Church, and therefore they exercised
spiritual functions. On great occasions they
celebrated pontifical high mass in their cathedrals.
But they were also great statesmen, petty sovereigns,
and, what seems most of all alien to their episcopal
character, they took the command of armies in the
field. The hand which one day held aloft the crosier,
wielded perchance on the very next the battle-axe or
the sword. However brief and imperfect our sketch
of Thurstan's career, it would be incomplete without
the mention of the battle of the Standard, and the
jiart he took in gathering together the baronage of
the north, in rousing the spirit of the Yorkshiremen,
and uniting them under the holy and venerated banners
of St. Cuthbert of Durham, St. Peter of York,
St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of Ripon, which
floated from a pole reared high upon a wheeled car
which was dragged to a little eminence near North
Allerton, still known as Standard Hill. It is needless
to recount the story of the repulse of the Scottish
hordes, and the gallant stand by which the Yorkshiremen
saved the north of England from the devastation
of those ruthless and implacable foes.
His chief fame rests, however, upon works of a
different character, destined for something like four
succeeding centuries to exercise a most powerful influence,
religious, political,
and social, upon the wide
district over which his episcopal rule extended.
When Thurstan came to York he found some great