Taken from PrefaceIt is the intention of this thesis to examine late settlement on the wastes of former royal hunting forests in Yorkshire. Three forests only were selected for study in detail; those of Bowland, Knaresborough, and Pickering, but they were well spaced across the former county of Yorkshire with their extremities extending virtually from coast to coast. Although their origins were diverse, and they show considerable differences, they were chosen largely on account of their unifying characteristic - the fact that all became part eventually of the Duchy of Lancaster.This is of some importance since it conveys uniformity to a principal source of information - the lists of those fined at the forest courts for illegal encroachment on the forest wastes. It was, in fact, the principal means of colonisation ' in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the existence of many such lists at the Public Record Office - most particularly for the Forest of Knaresborough - constitutes a hitherto untapped source, for this Forest at least. It is clear that lists of names are of little use unless they can be related to particular places, and this information is never given explicitly. A large part of the research was therefore concerned with correlation of different sources with this end in view. In the process, it was discovered that other civil sources, too, were capable of revealing more about the geographical location of individuals than they are normally given credit for, particularly when used in conjunction with parish registers by utilising the technique of family reconstitution.

The history of peoples has always evoked a great deal of both academic and popular interest, and the peoples of Britain, with its island position and semi-mythic serial invasions, have evoked as much as any. As most of the period during which Britain has been inhabited by modern humans lies in prehistory, archaeology has long been the best method for elucidating the past. In recent years, however, genetics has come to complement the reconstruction of peoples' pasts, with its ability to trace lineal human biology instead of transferable human culture. The purpose of this thesis is to assess population genetics systems of Britain against the backdrop of archaeologically determined history, informed for later periods by linguistics, and attempt to ascertain any marked congruities or incongruities between this history and modern genetic data. The genetic datasets included in this work are the People of the British Isles Project collection, and some ancillary cohorts from surrounding countries. The genetic systems assessed include mitochondrial DNA, classical marker genes, lactase, pigmentation genes and some phenotypes, and finally a suite of candidate genes for determining normal facial variation. In a self-contained section, the principle of relating population genetic data to population histories is illustrated by a study focusing on Central Asia (a larger area), but using fewer genetic markers. The chosen markers systems overall reveal modest amounts of genetic differentiation among different groups in Britain, but consistently highlight Wales and Orkney especially as relatively distanced from the rest of Britain. This is in keeping with the historically quite isolated state of the former, and the comparatively recent heavy influx of Norse Vikings in the latter. Further details are observable from subsets of this study: all are discussed in the context of archaeological and linguistic evidence. These findings provide support and foundation for a forthcoming study from the People of the British Isles Project, using a genome-wide SNP approach rather than selected markers, which will likely increase the nuance of this initial picture and contribute further to answering specific questions regarding Britain's past.