The Walled City of York

We arrived in York on another fine day. How lucky we have been with the weather the entire time that we have been here. Some rain, yes, but lots of blue sky, too.

York is a beautiful historic city, located in the north of England in the county of North Yorkshire. It can be a bit overwhelming. There is evidence everywhere of over 2000 years of history and influence from the Romans, Vikings, Normans, and the Georgian and Victorian eras, so the architecture is a mix of all of these influences. (Here is a web site with pictures of all the different types of architecture throughout the city: http://www.york360.co.uk/york-gallery.htm

During Roman times, York was an entirely walled city (a feature common to many cities in England). Very large segments of the original wall have been preserved and/or repaired which makes the York Wall the longest intact medieval wall in all of England. The first thing we did after arriving at our B&B and settling our bags was to go out and climb up on the wall. You can access it by stairwells at several points, and so we scurried up onto the wall and walked our way around the city to York Minster, via the wall. This vantage point provided a great view of the city and a fantastic first view of the York Minster. The site where York Minster now stands was first used for building a church in the 600's. This first church is long gone, and several different versions were built and re-built up until the 1700's. All of the churches saw dramatic changes wrought by fire, invaders, and changes in regime. The cathedral that stands here today is an amalgam of all of these different events and influences. It's a majestic place and we spent our time viewing it with our mouths agape. This cathedral is so immense, the ceilings are vaulted so spectacularly high, there are so many bosses (carvings on the ceiling that tell a story), so much carved wood throughout on the alters and pews, so many statues from different eras, so many tombs, alters, chapels, and side-chapels, that it is very difficult to take it all in at one time. In addition, the undercroft (the 'basement'), is itself an amazing sight to behold with lots of mysterious tunnels and displays and artifacts from throughout the Minster's history. What a treasure.

After spending the morning in the church, we hopped a mini-steam engine trolley, made to look like an old fashioned steam engine, and rode it to the National Railway Museum, which is the world's largest train museum. Sophia loved it since all trains are very exciting to her right now. It had an example of each type of train engine ever used, from the first used in England to the super-fast Bullet train now used in Japan. We had a nice lunch here and then we went back to our B&B so Sophia could take a nap. While Sophia slept, I wrote post cards and read, and Steve took a tour called "The Secret York", where he heard some very gruesome tales.

Steve learned that the Vikings successfully invaded York using hundreds of ships under the cover of mist and fog, floating quietly in on the River Ouse, which runs through all of York. Literally, one morning in 800 A.D, Yorkers woke up to find an entire army of tens of thousands of Vikings in the heart of their city. Much plundering and pillaging followed (the guide gave many details, which I will leave out here), and thousands of the Vikings settled in "Jorvick". To this day, 1 in every 4 persons in York is descended from the Vikings.

Another sad and terrible story that Steve was told, was about a local York woman, Margaret Clitherow, who was a secret Catholic during a time when it was against the law to be Catholic in England (1500's). She also harbored priests who traveled through the town giving mass and communion in secret. There was much religious persecution through the centuries and York was no exception. Margaret was taken into custody by local officials. She was asked to confess her crime but she refused, saying that she had committed no crime for which she needed to be tried. At the time, the penalty for refusing to go to trial was death by crushing with stones. If she had confessed, they might have let her live out her life in jail. But, she also would have lost her claim to the property she owned. If this had happened, her children would have been left homeless and destitute, or they might have been thrown into prison with her (a common, horrible, practice when a woman was put in jail). So, by refusing to go to trial, she lost her life but her children were able to keep their home. According to Steve's tour guide, this punishment of crushing was usually drawn out for days so that the victim suffered greatly. But, the guards carrying out the sentencing were shamed by the fact it was a woman and so they crushed her "mercifully and she died within minutes". In 1970, she was made a saint by Pope Paul VI, who called her the "Pearl of York".

That evening, we went out for the first of what would be many dinners at Indian restaurants. The food was good except for one quirk - it seems the English like their food sweet. So a dish I have ordered dozens of times at other Indian restaurants came out in a thick, sweet sauce. I learned my lesson and ordered more carefully after that (as an aside, I'm reading a book on Shakespeare by Bill Bryson right now, and I just read that in the 1600's the English put sugar on everything - from fish to lamb to vegetables, and added it to their beer and wine. It was a sign of prosperity to afford sugar. They ate so much sugar, in fact, that it was very common for their teeth to turn black. (Queen Elizabeth I had black teeth) Some folks, Bryson writes, intentionally blackened their teeth so as to appear more prosperous.).

After dinner, we explored a very famous area of York known as the "Shambles". There is actually just one street called 'The Shamble' and it is the oldest intact medieval street in Europe. It is a meandering, very narrow street with Elizabethan architecture. The second stories of the houses jut out as much as 35 feet over the 1st floor of the house. Many of the houses also have a dramatic lean, so the effect is of a street that looks as if all the buildings are straining to touch one another. It is now common to call the area around this original street the "Shambles" because so many of these streets are also narrow and meandering and have similarly leaning and packed in buildings. Because these streets are so narrow, traffic is greatly restricted, especially at night, when it gets very dark. So Sophia was able to run pretty freely through this area, and run she did. She seemed to love how close all the buildings were and literally ran around and around these blocks for an hour the first night and again the second night. It was great fun, as Steve and I would take turns being on "Sophia watch", while the other got to peer into shops and buildings and down alleys. It was a bit spooky, I thought, and I rather expected some unsavory character to come 'round the corner cloaked in black at any moment, but nothing of the sort took place, thank goodness.

The next day we walked along the wall some more and visited the York Castle Museum. The York Castle Museum isn't a castle at all. It is called this because this is where the castle once stood. I really enjoyed this museum. It is a look at everyday York (and England) life during much of history, with an emphasis on Victorian times. The Victorian era has always intrigued me, and so I much enjoyed the displays of what a home would look like for the upper classes, middle classes and lower classes, and the fine displays of the clothing worn and food eaten by each. Women were astonishingly small, if one is to judge by the shoes and dresses on display. The bottom floor was a recreated street from the times, with a "chemist" (pharmacist), sweet shop, barber shop, a "gaol" (jail), a notions shop, a butcher, a bakery and a general store, all lit by torches. While you walked through the displays, a recording played the sounds you would have heard: clippety-clopping horses and carriages, voices of street vendors "buy my rosy raspberries" and the like. We thought it was very well done. After the museum, we went to "Betty's"!!!

I've spoken of English 'cream tea' before. Well, we asked around in York for the place to get the best cream tea and we were told without hesitation that it was Betty's. So off we went. There was quite a line to get in, but it moved fairly quickly. It is a lovely, old fashioned tea room with big windows and lots of light. All of the staff are dressed in black uniforms and the women have crisp, white, frilly aprons and caps. We ordered the traditional cream tea. It came with a personal size pot of delicious tea for me and one for Steve, and juice for Sophia. Then they brought out the beautiful silver tiered scone and cream tray. The scones were fresh and scrumptious, the strawberry jam was so rich and tasty and the clotted cream - well, let's just say that it is impossible to describe just how delicious it was and that the 3 of us ate every bit of it, spreading it heavily on our scones. Marvelous.

We went back to our B&B for Sophia to take a nap and Steve stayed in while I roamed around a bit. I found a thrift store (called 'charity shop' here because they are all run by charities - cancer society, save the children, salvation army, etc) and had fun poking around. I found a great pair of 'wellies' (rain boots) for Sophia. We tried a different Indian restaurant that night and had much better luck. Afterward we traipsed through the Shambles again and went up and down streets for hours and took in as much as we could since it was our last night.

We left early the next morning (after one last yummy "full English" breakfast at our B&B, the Dairy House, which was run by ever so lovely people who were very kind to Sophia) to catch a train to Norwich, the city in which we would live for the rest of our time in England.