by Grant Allen
For three centuries Eburacum, not Londinium, was the real centre of all Britain, and the residence of the Emperor on his provincial tours. Severus died here; so did Constantius Chlorus; and here, too, Constantine took the purple. Vessels from Gaul brought dainty Samian ware and choice Italian wines to the port of the Ouse for the wealthy residents, relics of whose luxury are still picked up among the rubbish-heaps of the city. Roman pavements, tombs, coins, and pottery are dug up in making repairs or laying down railways to the present day. The legionaries also surrounded the town with massive walls, fragments of which may still be detected in an ashlar bastion at St. Leonards: doubtless their main object was the defence of the post from the English pirates, who had even then begun their attacks upon the eastern coast. Eburacum already covered the whole area of modern York; while suburban villas lined the great roads on either side towards Calcaria, Deva, or Isurium. The colony had its bishops, too, after the days of Constantine; and the name of one appears in the record of the Council of Arles. But when the Romans withdrew their troops from Britain it seems probable that Eburacum must have been exposed to attack at once from the Picts on the north and the English pirates from Sleswick, who would approach it by the Humber and the Ouse on the south. The first English colony in Yorkshire seems to have been settled in Holderness. It was at this time, apparently, that the deserted citizens surrounded their town with the earthen mound afterwards capped by the existing mediæval walls, and enclosing a wider space than the fortifications of Trajan’s day. But in the end the English pirates, advancing up the river, conquered in some nameless victory; and Eburacum is lost to sight for a while in the general mist of the renewed heathen period. That the new settlers did not utterly destroy the Romanised town and people, however, is clear both from the evidence of Alcuin, Charlemagne’s Northumbrian English secretary, who speaks long after with respect of its lofty Roman walls and towers, and still later from William of Malmesbury’s allusion to its “Roman refinement.” The date of the conquest may be roughly fixed as the end of the fifth century. Gradually the separate English clans who overran the vale of York coalesced into a single tribe of Deirans (the word is Celtic in origin) and grew obedient to the chief who ruled in Eburacum — the name of which, by a strange piece of popular etymology, they had Anglicised as Eofor-wic, the boar’s town. Thence, through the successive forms of Evrewic, Eurewic, Yorick, and York comes the modern title. Eofor-wic was the capital of Edwin, king of the Deirans and Bernicians, and the first of Northumbrian princes to accept Christianity. He was converted by the Roman missionary Paulinus, who had been sent from Kent with a Kentish Princess; and the story of his life as related by Bede has been familiarised to us by all English histories. From that time on, with a slight break of renewed heathendom, York became the site first of the bishopric and then of the archbishopric for all northern England.
Under Edwin and his successors Northumbria still remained, as in Roman times, the chief province of Britain, and York probably ranked as the principal town of the whole island. Retaining its Roman towers and fortifications, standing in the midst of a great agricultural district, and placed on a large navigable river, it might perhaps have run London close for the final position of capital of England had it not been for the untoward accident of the Danish invasions. The events of that lawless period threw back the north for a while into primitive barbarism, and perhaps established the political and social supremacy of the south for nearly ten centuries. Up to the date of the renewed northern incursions York had been slowly emerging from the early Northumbrian rudeness. Paulinus had built the first new minster, doubtless on the site of an older Roman basilica; and part of its ground-plan was discovered under the existing cathedral during the repairs rendered necessary by the incendiary Martin in the present century. Edwin had so far kept up the imperial traditions of the place as to appear in public with the Roman tufa [the feather fans of high official rank, and to wear the belt and diadem of a great official]: and indeed the continuity with Roman civilisation and Roman Christianity was doubtless nowhere more complete than in the city of Constantine and of Eborius. Wilfrith introduced glass for the minster windows, and covered its roof with lead; both acts implying a continued or renewed connection with the continent, doubtless by the mouth of the Ouse. For several generations the town formed the capital of the leading English kings: and even after Mercia had risen to the hegemony in Britain under Offa, it must still have ranked as the largest and most civilised city in the island. But when the heathen pirates from Denmark swooped down upon defenceless Christian England, as the heathen English themselves had swooped down earlier upon defenceless Christian Britain, York again lay right in the way of their sea-snakes, swarming up the open Humber mouth to sack the wealthy shrines of [the district]. After a few preliminary harryings of Wearmouth and other monasteries, an organised Danish host fell at last, during the disastrous reign of the first Athelred in Wessex, upon York itself. [Three] sea-kings, [Halfdene], Ingwar, and Ubba, led the host up the Humber stream; and they found a pair of rival Northumbrian princes at that moment engaged in fighting for the throne of York. The burghers, making terms with the heathen, admitted them within the Roman walls. The rival kings fell upon the town, and were defeated by the Danes with great slaughter. Halfdene, Ingwar, and Ubba at once proceeded to [“rope out”] the lands of [the northern kingdom] among their followers, and York city [lay] for at least 60 years in the hands of the Danes. A second period of darkness supervenes, during which we are left to decipher the local history from the scanty allusions of Norse sagas and the rude coins of the Danish kings. A regular Scandinavian dynasty ruled in the city during all that time, though the archbishops continued their succession undisturbed side by side with the heathen kings, and apparently exercised some sort of independent jurisdiction over the Christian English burghers. When Edward the Elder reached York in his great campaigns for the recovery of the north, Ragnald, the local Danish king, acknowledged his supremacy and did homage to him (if we may thus early employ the language of feudalism); but Danish under-kings still reigned at York as vassals of the West Saxon overlord, till on the death of Sihtric, a little later, Athelstan annexed Northumbria to his own immediate dominions. Even so, the Danish element remained very powerful throughout the north: the wicking ships made the Humber their chief port of entry; and under Edmund the rebellious men of York once more chose Anlaf of Ireland, one of the Dublin Northmen, for their king. Indeed, the renewed barbarism of Yorkshire throughout all this period is very conspicuous: the Danish colonisation had been powerful in effect, if not in numbers, and York remained thoroughly Danish in spirit up to the date of the Norman conquest — a trusty Scandinavian outpost in the very heart of Britain. The Northmen had completely undone the work of the Romans. After the English reaction under Dunstan broke down, the Danes once more began their ceaseless incursions. In the reign of Athelred the Redeless they stormed Bamborough, and sailed again up Humber mouth. There, in the midst of the old Danish kingdom, they found Earl Uhtred and the men of York ready to fraternise with them. The north, indeed, preferred the kindred Scandinavian to the West Saxon stranger. Swegen Forkbeard and Cnut his son, starting from this secure and friendly basis, soon completed the conquest of all England. Even after the Scandinavians were fairly expelled, a generation later, York kept up its old position as the natural headquarters of their race. The town was thronged with Danish merchants; and Earl Siward himself was a Dane at heart as by birth. When Harold Hardrada of Norway came to attack Harold son of Godwin, just before William’s invasion, he landed in the old Scandinavian stronghold of Northumbria, and was defeated at Stamford Bridge, not far from York. After the Norman conquest itself, indeed, before the nation had yet learned that its relations must henceforth lie with Normandy and the Romance civilisation of the south, not with Denmark and the Scandinavian barbarism of the north, Swegen the Dane brought his fleet into the Humber mouth, and roused all England as one man in the last great unsuccessful struggle against the Norman rule. With the Norman
conquest, however, the fate of York as an independent capital was sealed, and it sank of necessity into the second place, as local metropolis of the north; while Winchester, London, and Westminster became the acknowledged royal cities of the new dynasty. Its later history deserves and requires separate treatment; but the victory of Hastings naturally closes the first great chapter in the annals of York.
The flagged footway leading round the modern promenade of the city walls marks the inhabited area of York at the date of the Norman conquest, and shows that the town must even then have been almost as large as it is at the present day. But, judging from the number of houses returned in Domesday, its population may not have exceeded seven thousand persons. Of course, William’s victory in Sussex by no means necessarily implied the immediate submission of the lands beyond the Humber; for England was yet far from being consolidated into a single firmly-united whole. The possession of London and Winchester secured, indeed, the obedience of the Saxon south; but York might still hope to become the separate capital of an independent Danish north. The supremacy of the old Roman city died hard. It was not until a year after his victory at Hastings that the Conqueror marched against the organised English and Danish resistance in York. Edgar Atheling was there to represent the kingly line of Wessex, with the Mercian princes of the house of Leofric, earls severally of the Midlands and the North; backed up by Gospatric, the native lord of English Bernicia. As usual, however, the resistance crumbled away before William’s approach, and he occupied the city without serious difficulty. It was then that he raised the first Norman castle on the site of the British dun and the Roman fortress, though hardly any trace now remains of this earliest mediæval stronghold. Shortly afterwards, on a slight insurrection, he built a second castle on Baile Hill, beyond the Ouse, near the modern House of Correction. Still, it must never be forgotten that Yorkshire even at that date remained essentially Danish in blood and feeling; and when in the succeeding year Swegen of Denmark led his fleet into the Humber and up to the gates of York, the whole North rose to welcome him. Three thousand Normans who formed the garrison of the two castles were attacked and slaughtered; and in their frantic attempts to fire the neighbouring buildings in self-defence they set the city in flames, which swept away most of its wooden houses, as well as the old minster, erected during the earlier days of Offa. It is to this fire, doubtless, that we must set down for the most part the destruction of the Roman walls and of that “Roman magnificence” which Alcuin saw still surviving in the York of his own time. William swore revenge, per splendorem Dei, and went northward forthwith on his mission of vengeance. He bought off Swegen by a bribe; and then, after securing his rear, proceeded to that memorable harrying of Northumbria, which left the north, from Humber to Tweed, a waste for centuries to come. York was effectually subdued: the Danes never again appeared as a factor in English politics; and the relative position of north and south was reversed till the great industrial revolution of the present century once more turned the tide of wealth and population towards the coalfields of the West Riding and the Lancashire cotton country.
Mediæval York consisted of a pentagon lying within the existing walls, which surround it on every side, save where the marshes of what is now Foss Island (still liable to floods) proved a sufficient natural defence for the long gap between St. Cuthbert’s and the Red Tower. Although most of the present masonry is Edwardian, fragments of Norman and even of Roman work occur abundantly in places. The Castle and Baile Hill guarded the entrance by the Ouse, and effectually prevented the further interference of the northern invaders. Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop, rebuilt his burnt cathedral from the ground; but little now remains of his great work. The existing minster was erected at different times, piecemeal, by partial demolitions and rebuildings of the Norman cathedral between that time and the fifteenth century. On the whole, in spite of the slow recovery of the north from William’s desolation, York still maintained its lessened dignity as the second capital of England; and the proud Leonine inscription on the chapter-house, —
Ut rosa flos florum, sic est domus ista domorum, —
shows the exalted notions which its citizens continued to entertain of their own importance. The existence of a Jewry is always a clear proof of considerable commercial activity during the Middle Ages; and the King’s Jews had, as everybody knows, their own quarter in York, long designated by the name of Jubbergate; that is to say, the gate or street of the Jew-bar — a title now superseded by that of Market Street. Here the Jewish merchants and bankers lived in a degree of prosperity which scandalised the monks of St. Mary’s Abbey and the soldiers of the castle; and when during the first frenzy of the Crusades an English mob began the suicidal work of exterminating the only capitalists and financiers whom the country then possessed, the Jewry of York met with the most terrible fate of any in England. In that strange siege, too familiar to need description, the Conqueror’s castle was almost entirely destroyed; and the present massive keep, known as Clifford’s Tower, dates accordingly only from the days of Edward I. In the same reign the Jews were finally expelled from England, and with them went a large part of the trade of York. Meanwhile, events had been gradually lessening the commercial importance of the city on the Ouse. It had from the beginning two main reasons for its existence: its situation in the very heart of the Plain of York, which ensured its position as an agricultural centre; and its command of a navigable river, the chief inland port of the Humber mouth. The first of these advantages it can never lose; the second it was fast losing by the combined influence of social and natural causes. Originally it had stood to the Humber as London stood to the Thames; but while the north was ruined by war and given over to anarchy, especially during the Wars of the Roses, the Ouse was slowly silting up, and at the same time ships were coming daily to demand a greater draught of water. Thus the port of the Humber shifted imperceptibly — first to Ravenspur in Holderness, a famous mediæval harbour; and after Ravenspur was swallowed up by the sea, to the place which mariners then knew by the old-fashioned name of Kingston-upon-Hull. Nevertheless, York continued to possess great administrative and military importance as the capital of the north; while it never ceased to rank as the chief agricultural centre of the largest fertile plain in the island. There can be very little doubt that down to the days of Charles I., at least, it might fairly claim to be considered the second city of England.
The Reformation somewhat diminished the relative importance of all ecclesiastical towns; and York was not only the metropolis of the northern archiepiscopal province, but also the seat of St. Mary’s Abbey and of several smaller conventual establishments. Nowhere was discontent at the changes imposed by royal authority greater than in Yorkshire, where the trading element was still very weak, and the territorial and monastic element exceedingly strong. The Parliament of the North, which met at Pontefract and decreed the Pilgrimage of Grace, was backed by all the nobles of Yorkshire, as well as by the great abbots of Kirkstead, of Fountains, and of Jervaulx. After its suppression, the semi-independence of the country beyond the Trent was admitted in the institution of President of the Great Council of the North, who had his residence in the picturesque building still known as the King’s Manor, and standing on the site formerly occupied by the Abbot’s House of St. Mary’s. Later still, when Charles I. fled from London, he went at once to York as the second capital of his dominions. Meanwhile, the tide of affairs was already beginning slowly to turn, and the north was putting itself in readiness to recover its lost commercial and political supremacy. The industrial stagnation and social anarchy, which had long paralysed its energies, were gradually passing away before the peaceable and anti-feudal régime of the business-like Tudors. Even in Elizabeth’s time, Manchester was manufacturing friezes; Halifax was the seat of a rising cloth trade; and York had become the nascent centre of a considerable woollen industry. In the days of the Stuarts, Hull was a great port and the second arsenal of the kingdom. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the
north continued step by step to overtake the south; and with the nineteenth century steam and coal completed the industrial revolution. Yet York failed to keep up with the rest of the shire in its onward march. In the days of the Georges it sank into a quiet and respectable archiepiscopal town, a county centre, and a little local metropolis in its way, where the neighbouring squires often spent the winter; but trade drifted to the coal country or the water-powers; and Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Wakefield, Huddersfield, and Barnsley — once, as their very names declare, mere clearings in the wealds of Hallamshire or the West Riding — rose to supersede their old Roman and British mother-city. With the growth of the railway system things have changed again a little for the better. York has grown into a great modern junction-station; while still more recent alterations have turned it once more into a military centre for the north. But its [proud] position is now perhaps irrevocably lost. Hull has carried away its shipping trade, and coal has shifted the heart of Yorkshire from the lowland agricultural plain to the dales and uplands of the West Riding. Yet no town of England, not even London itself, still contains so much of historical interest as ancient Eburacum and modern York. From the Celtic dun beneath Clifford’s Keep, through the Roman interior of the multangular Tower, the Norman work of the walls, and the mediæval turrets of Micklegate Bar (where once mouldered the head of the last native Prince of Wales), down to the perpendicular Lady Chapel, the Elizabethan Manor, the Georgian street architecture, and the modern railway station, every stage of British history finds abundant representatives within its limits. Even now, popular saws have not wholly forgotten its former greatness; for, says the rhyming proverb —
