York 1066 to 1500
A history of York after the Norman
Conquest
There is an
accompanying York chronology, with references
to source material. This page needs more work.
Norman
York
In 1068, two
years after the Norman conquest of England, the people of York rebelled.
Initially they were successful, but upon the arrival of William the Conqueror
the rebellion was put down. William at once built a wooden motte and bailey
fortresses at the site of Clifford’s Tower.
In 1069,
after another rebellion, the king built another timbered castle across the
River Ouse. The original wooden castles were destroyed in 1069 by another
rebellion supported by the Danish King Sweyn II Estridsson.
The Norman
response was to set fires that destroyed swathes of York, including the
Minster. William bribed the Danes to leave, then stamped out local rebellion
during the Harrying of the
North. and rebuilt the City and the two
castles. The remains of the rebuilt
castles, now in stone, are visible on either side of the River Ouse.
The first
stone minster church was badly damaged by fire in the uprising, and the Normans
built a minster on a new site, parts of which can be seen in the modern undercroft. Around the year 1080, Archbishop Thomas started
building the first Norman Cathedral that in time became the current Minster.
Religious
communities emerged, including the hugely wealthy Benedictine monastery of St
Mary’s Abbey, the ruins of which are in gardens of the Yorkshire Museum. The
original church on the site was founded in 1055 and dedicated to Saint Olaf.
After the Norman Conquest the church came into the possession of the
Anglo-Breton magnate Alan Rufus who granted the lands to Abbot Stephen and a
group of monks from Whitby. The abbey church
was refounded in 1088 when the King, William Rufus,
visited York in January or February of that year and gave the monks additional
lands.
Within a few
decades, as many as 40 parish churches stood within the city of York, giving an
indication of its growing population. York once more had become an important,
bustling commercial city.
Plantagenet
York
By the
twelfth century York prospered as a major wool trading centre and became the
capital of the northern ecclesiastical province of the Church of England.
Under the
protection of its sheriff, York had a substantial Jewish community. In 1190,
Clifford’s Tower was the site of an infamous massacre of its Jewish
inhabitants, in which at least 150 Jews died.
The city,
through its location on the River Ouse and its proximity to the Great North
Road, became a major trading centre. King John granted the city's first charter
in 1212, confirming trading rights in England and Europe. The city was no
longer controlled by a sheriff, but headed by a mayor
elected by the citizens.
During the
later Middle Ages, York merchants imported wine from France, cloth, wax,
canvas, and oats from the Low Countries, timber and furs from the Baltic and
exported grain to Gascony and grain and wool to the Low Countries.
The Shambles
was originally a street for butchers, and the outdoor shelves and hooks on
which meat was hung are still visible.
York became
a major cloth manufacturing and trading centre. Edward I further stimulated the
city's economy by using the city as a base for his war in Scotland.
In 1226 work
started on the construction of York’s town walls.
Royal
government relocated to York during the Scottish Wars.
Clifford’s
Tower housed the royal treasury.
The city was
the location of significant unrest during the so-called Peasants' Revolt in
1381.
The city
acquired an increasing degree of autonomy from central government including the
privileges granted by a charter of Richard II in 1396. The timber-framed
Merchant Adventurers’ Hall, built in the mid fourteenth century, is a remnant
of that era.
During the
fifteenth century the city fathers built a new guildhall and St Williams
College as accommodation for the Minster’s Chantry priests.
York
Minster, the largest Gothic cathedral north of the Alps, was finally completed
in 1472.
However, the
cloth industry, the mainstay of the city’s economy, had gradually moved to
other parts of Yorkshire, Halifax, Wakefield, Leeds, where trade was less
strictly controlled and regulated. The population fell, houses were abandoned.
The city underwent a period of economic decline during Tudor times. Under King
Henry VIII, the Dissolution of the Monasteries saw the end of York's many
monastic houses, including several orders of friars, the hospitals of St
Nicholas and of St Leonard, the largest such institution in the north of
England.
This led to the Pilgrimage of Grace, an
uprising of northern Catholics in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire opposed to
religious reform. Henry VIII restored his authority by establishing the Council
of the North in York in the dissolved St Mary's Abbey. The city became a
trading and service centre during this period. The
reestablishment of the King’s Council in the North, turned York again
into a major administrative and judicial centre.
or
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