York sits where the River Ouse meets the River Foss. The Roman army chose the spot in AD 71. The Ninth Legion built a fortress here and named it Eboracum. Danish Vikings took the town in 866 and called it Jorvik. The Normans arrived in 1068 and raised two castles of earth and timber, one on each bank of the Ouse. York Castle stood on the east bank, on the mound where Clifford’s Tower stands now. The Old Baile stood across the river on Baile Hill.

Each group built on top of the one before. The medieval wall hides older Roman, Viking and Norman defenses inside it, and the Roman headquarters lies partly under the cathedral. We spent a day walking through those layers. We started on the city wall, toured the Minster and went down beneath it, and ate lunch at the Shambles. Then we visited the Jorvik Viking Centre, the Yorkshire Museum, the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey, Clifford’s Tower and the York Castle Museum.

The City Walls

The first defences were Roman. In AD 71 the Ninth Legion dug a ditch and raised a bank of turf and clay, topped with a timber fence, towers and gates. By the third century the Romans had rebuilt them in stone. One of their towers still stands in the Yorkshire Museum Gardens. When the Vikings took the city in 866, they buried the Roman walls under a broad earth bank and set a wooden fence along the top.

The stone wall we walked is medieval. In 1226 the king allowed the city to tax goods coming in, and the money paid for the walls. They took a beating in 1644, when Parliament’s army besieged York for three months during its war against the king. In 1800 the city council voted to pull them down. George III refused permission, but several stretches came down anyway. People who wanted to keep the walls formed the York Footpath Association, raised money and restored sections of them. Through the rest of the century the city itself restored most of the walls and bars.

The wall runs for about two miles. It stands about thirteen feet high and six feet wide, on top of a rampart, an earth bank up to thirty feet high that hides the older defenses inside. Five gateways, called bars, cross it. Four survive in good shape. The fifth, Fishergate Bar, does not. The bars were control points where traders paid their tolls, and at night the Mayor kept the keys.

The walkable wall comes in four stretches, broken by rivers and roads. We chose the north stretch, between Bootham Bar and Monk Bar. It curves around the Minster, and from up there the cathedral rises straight out of the rooftops.

A gateway has stood at Bootham Bar since AD 71. Roman legions marched out through it on their way to fight in Scotland. The oldest parts of the gatehouse are eleventh century, and cars still drive through the arch. At the other end, Monk Bar is the largest and most elaborate of the bars, built in the early fourteenth century. Each of its floors could be defended on its own. From a gallery above the arch, defenders could pour boiling oil on anyone below. The portcullis, the heavy gate lowered from above, still hangs there with its winding gear.

Between the two bars, in the corner behind the Minster, stands Robin Hood’s Tower. The Victorians built it in 1888 and 1889 to replace an earlier tower. The outside is neat limestone. The inside is concrete, reinforced with old tram rails.

York Minster

From the wall we walked to the Minster and spent three hours inside on the tour it offers. While my wife went to Mass at a nearby Catholic church, I went around a second time. It was worth it.

The Minster is one of the largest Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe, about five hundred and twenty five feet long, all pointed arches, tall windows and ribbed stone ceilings. Building ran from 1220 to 1472. Archbishop Walter de Gray started the work because he wanted a church to rival Canterbury. Two and a half centuries of building left different stages of English Gothic side by side. The transepts, the arms that cross the main hall, are Early English. The nave and the chapter house, where the clergy met, are in the later Decorated style.

The Minster keeps one hundred and twenty eight medieval stained glass windows. Most of England’s medieval glass was lost along the centuries. York kept most of its own. At the east end, the Great East Window fills the wall above you. It is the largest area of medieval glass in Britain, and its three hundred and eleven panels tell the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. In the north transept, the Five Sisters window is older, from the thirteenth century. It is five narrow windows, each about fifty three feet tall, glazed in grisaille, grey glass painted with pale patterns.

Walter de Gray, the archbishop who started all this, lies in the south transept. He was there in 1215 when King John sealed Magna Carta, the charter that limited the king’s power.

Outside, by the south transept, stands a Roman column thirty one feet tall. It came from the headquarters of the fortress below. Nearby sits a bronze Constantine, unveiled in 1998. It marks the year 306, when the army in York proclaimed him emperor.

The Undercroft Museum

Then we went down below the church, into the Undercroft. In the 1960s engineers found that the central tower, some seventeen thousand tons of stone, was sinking. Between 1967 and 1972 workers dug under the building to strengthen the foundations, and archaeologists dug alongside them. The space they opened became the museum.

The dig exposed everything under the Minster. At the bottom lies the Roman fortress. The Minster sits over part of its headquarters, the principia, and the central tower stands over one corner of it. Above the Roman layer is an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. Above that are the foundations of the Norman Minster, begun after 1066. The Gothic church stands on top of it all.

The wooden church where King Edwin of Northumbria was baptized in 627 probably stood nearby. The dig found no trace of it, and its site is still unknown.

The Shambles and the Market

We had lunch at Shambles Market, just behind the street called the Shambles, through a short lane called Little Shambles. Into the fourteenth century this whole quarter was called Marketshire, and its traders sold far more than meat.

The name comes from the Old English sceamol, a bench or stall. Butchers laid their meat out on those benches. The street changed names several times. It was Haymongergate by 1240 and Nedlergate by 1394. By 1426 it was the Great Flesh Shambles, later shortened to the Shambles.

Most of the houses date from about 1350 to 1475. Their timber upper floors lean out over the street, which sheltered the walls and kept the meat in shade. The pavements sit raised on both sides of the cobbles. Twice a week the butchers washed blood and waste down the channel between them. Some shop fronts still have their meat hooks.

The Jorvik Viking Centre

After lunch we walked a few minutes to the Jorvik Viking Centre on Coppergate. The name has nothing to do with copper. It comes from the Old Norse koppari, cup maker, and gata, street.

The Centre is built on the dig itself. Between 1976 and 1981, before a planned shopping centre went up, the York Archaeological Trust, a charity, excavated about eleven thousand square feet here, in places thirty feet down. The ground was waterlogged and short of oxygen. Wood, leather and cloth, which normally rot away, came out of it after a thousand years.

The team recovered more than forty thousand objects. There were the remains of houses and workshops, shoes, tools and household goods, and things traded in from across the Viking world. There were seeds, insects, and a toilet with its contents still in it. Together they show how ordinary people lived.

The dig showed that York was a busy trading town from the Viking capture in 866 to the Norman Conquest in 1066. The Vikings took the city by force, but many Scandinavians settled and worked beside the English as traders, farmers and craftspeople. That mix is why archaeologists call the finds Anglo-Scandinavian.

The visit comes in three parts. A pre-show tells the story of the dig. A ride then carries visitors in small cars through a full size rebuild of Coppergate around AD 975, with houses, workshops, animals and animatronic people. Last comes a gallery of the real objects.

It sits somewhere between a family attraction and a museum. The ride is a reconstruction, built on real evidence with judgment filling the gaps. For us it all came together in the gallery. We went for what the dig found, and we learned a lot. In our opinion it was worth the price.

The Yorkshire Museum and St Mary’s Abbey

From Coppergate we walked to the Museum Gardens. The Yorkshire Philosophical Society built the Yorkshire Museum there, on part of the old abbey cloister, the covered walk that once ran around its courtyard.

The museum follows the people of this region from prehistory to the medieval city. It holds the Towton Torcs, two gold bracelets from the Iron Age that probably belonged to someone wealthy among the Brigantes, the tribe that held most of Yorkshire before Rome. It also has Viking weapons and clothing, a gilded Anglo-Saxon bowl, and the Coppergate helmet from the Jorvik dig.

The Roman gallery covers the city after AD 71. There is a statue of Mars, mosaics from Roman York, and the tombstone of Lucius Duccius Rufinus, a standard bearer of the Ninth Legion. Hadrian, Septimius Severus and Constantius all held court in York while campaigning.

We saw the marble head of Constantine. It is about sixteen and a half inches high, a fragment of a statue twice life size, and it was found on Stonegate around 1823.

His father, Constantius, was the Roman emperor of the west. He led campaigns against the Picts, in what is now Scotland, and died in York on 25 July 306. The army in York declared Constantine emperor. By 324 he ruled the whole empire.

Constantine went on to favour Christianity. In 313 he and Licinius, emperor of the east, agreed in the Edict of Milan that Christians could worship freely. It did not make Christianity the state religion. In 325 he called the Council of Nicaea. He was baptised shortly before he died in 337. Most historians name Eusebius of Nicomedia as the bishop who baptised him. The Catholic Church holds that it was Pope Sylvester.

York already had Christians by then. A bishop of York attended the Council of Arles in 314, though archaeologists have found little other trace of Christianity in the Roman city.

In the gardens stands the Multangular Tower, ten sided, at what was the western corner of the fortress. It was probably built under Septimius Severus, who ruled the empire from York between 208 and 211. The lower part is Roman. The upper part is medieval.

We finished at the ruins of St Mary’s Abbey, next to the museum, once home to Benedictine monks. The first church on the site, from 1055, was dedicated to Saint Olaf, a Norwegian king. After the Norman Conquest the land went to Alan Rufus, a Breton lord, who gave it to Benedictine monks from Whitby. King William II refounded the abbey in 1088, and the foundation stone of a new church was laid the following year.

In 1132 a group of monks who wanted a stricter life left to found Fountains Abbey. St Mary’s carried on and grew into the largest and richest Benedictine abbey in the north of England. Henry VIII closed it in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and much of it was pulled down afterward. The ruins we saw come from a rebuilding between 1271 and 1294. Parts of the north and west walls still stand, just outside the city wall where our day began.

Clifford’s Tower and the York Castle Museum

We visited York Castle. William the Conqueror raised it in 1068 as a mound of rammed earth with a large yard beside it. Clifford’s Tower, the stone keep, sits on top of the mound. It was finished between 1245 and 1260. A fire in 1684 took the roof and floors, and it has stood as an empty shell ever since. English Heritage looks after it today.

In 1190 a group of local Jews took refuge in the castle from rioters. The rioters set it on fire. According to the accounts, many of those inside died at each other’s hands rather than be burned.

Beside the tower, the York Castle Museum fills two former prisons. The Debtors’ Prison was built between 1701 and 1705 as the county jail, and the Female Prison followed in 1780. The last prison on the site closed in 1929. The museum opened in 1938.

Its first collection came from Dr John Kirk, a physician from Pickering, who gathered everyday objects from a way of life that was disappearing. Today the museum holds national collections of social history, military history, and costume and textiles. It also has Kirkgate, a full size Victorian street, the first of its kind in Britain.