| abstract
| - Situated on a Roman road, the area was a convenient place for the barbarians to settle once the Romans got bored and left the island. Naturally, the road attracted an ample supply of poultry, and the people could always follow it someplace else if their new home proved to be a dump. Or so they thought. The Scots invaded without warning in the 1130's, but for unknown reasons decided to let the English administer things once again twenty years later, without ever officially giving the town up. Despite the uncharacteristically peaceful nature of the Scots' departure, the English built a wall around the place — just to be safe — and control all entry and exit points with gates. The inhabitants pondered their confinement and abandonment by their countrymen for centuries, and built up an immunity to Bubonic Plague due to frequent outbreaks. Despite these constraints, Doncaster flourished, growing exponentially from a hamlet of pretty much nobody to a village of several dozen more. Due to the gates, seventeenth century Doncastrians found themselves unable to resettle away from the town unless they paid to leave, a practise that the English Parliament determined in 1628 to be cruel and unusual punishment. By comparison, the English did not outlaw hanging, drawing and quartering until the mid-1800s. Doncastrians prompty expressed their eternal gratitude to Parliament by siding with Charles I against Parliament in the English Civil War. Natives continue to defend this seemingly trecherous act on the basis that his dad was Scottish. Life for those from Doncaster improved significantly following the Royalists' victory. The dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and in particular the town's rich coal reserves, offered employment opportunities to all those who had yet to master the art of living off of the English. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the proportion of families who properly clothed and fed their kids skyrocketed. Doncaster's roads, trains and waterways offered more opportunities for its inhabitants to up sticks for England than ever before. The unbearable smog from the mines, factories and trains cleared large swaths of land in whatever direction the wind blew. This land, combined with Doncaster's proximity to England, gave the locals the distinction of being the first ever Scottish people to practise cricket. This pastime was discontinued in the mid-20th century for unknown reasons. At a similar point in time, Doncaster made arguably its greatest contribution to the English language by inventing the word boycott.
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