History
Traditionally the origins of the emblem are said to go back to Edmund of Langley in the fourteenth century, the first Duke of York and the founder of the House of York as a cadet branch of the then ruling House of Plantagenet. The actual symbolism behind the rose has religious connotations as it represents the Virgin Mary, who was often called the Mystical Rose of Heaven. The Yorkist rose is white in colour, because in Christian liturgical symbolism, white is the symbol of light, typifying innocence and purity, joy and glory.
During the civil wars of the fifteenth century, the White Rose was the symbol of Yorkist forces opposed to the rival House of Lancaster. The red rose of Lancaster would be a later invention used to represent the House of Lancaster, but was not in use during the actual conflict. The opposition of the two roses gave the wars their name: the Wars of the Roses which was coined in the 19th century. The conflict was ended by King Henry VII of England, who symbolically united the White and Red Roses to create the Tudor Rose, symbol of the Tudor dynasty. In the late Seventeenth Century the Jacobites took up the White Rose of York as their emblem, celebrating "White Rose Day" on 10 June, the anniversary of the birth of James III and VIII in 1688.
At the Battle of Minden on 1 August 1759, Yorkshiremen of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry's predecessor the 51st Regiment picked white roses from bushes near to the battlefields as a tribute to their fallen comrades who had died. They stuck the plucked white roses in their coats as a tribute. Yorkshire Day is held on this date each year.
Read more about this topic: White Rose Of York
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)