The French connection
Iwonder if, in directing the Tour de France away from East Yorkshire, the organisers have not completely underestimated "the French connection" of city and county?
It goes back as far as the Parisi who, after the decline of the Roman Empire, left the shores of the Humber on which they had been settled for 400 years and returned to France to found Paris.
Time passed and knights and monks from Meaux, east of Paris, arrived here to establish the abbey of Meaux, near Beverley.
The monks who lived there tended sheep whose wool was exported to the French weaving town of Arras.
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The bishop then sold land that Edward, the First Duke of Aquitaine, developed into the city of Hull.
To more modern times, and Wilberforce had strong links with the Paris slave abolitionists. Hull welcomed refugees from the French Revolution.
One of them originated the church of Charles Borromeo and then there was the Convent of French Nuns in Pearson Park.
More modern would be the sacrifices of the East Yorkshire Regiment in being the saviour of Lille, northern France, in 1914/18.
To the Second World War, and the Second Armoured Division of LeClerc's Free French were given the hospitality of East Yorkshire and Hull in 1944.
Talking of 1944, and the D Day of French liberation, the first soldier to set foot on Sword Beach, Normandy, was from East Yorkshire.
Ronald Fairfax,
Princes Avenue, Hull.
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