Viking York
By Jonathan Jones
“The history of York is the history of England,” said the future King George the Sixth in 1923. A visit to York bears that out. It was founded in 70 AD by the Romans who had invaded Britannia a few decades earlier. The city grew in importance as the Roman Empire strengthened its grip on the island as a key military centre in the north of what was to become England.
The Romans called York Eboracum. The Anglo Saxons maintained that name as the capital of their Kingdom of Northumbria. The Vikings who took up occupation in the year 866 called it Jorvik, the most prominent of their towns in Britain. This name mutated into the name York and the county Yorkshire.
The magnificent cathedral of York Minster had its origins in 627 but its current building, the largest Gothic cathedral north of the Alps, was built between 1220 and 1472. The first Archbishop of York was appointed in 735. nearly sixty years before the first major Viking raid at Lindisfarne. The city is full of medieval churches.
York’s medieval history is a bloody one. Brutal destruction of Yorkshire and surrounding counties from a base in York by the Normans in their Harrying of the North (a suppression of an English rebellion against Norman rule) in the late 1060s may have caused the deaths of 100,000 people and had devastating consequences on the economy. In 1190, a destruction of the local Jewish population at York castle reflected the spread of antisemitic feeling throughout the kingdom at that time.
There is so much for the history enthusiast to see in York. A good deal of planning is needed to do it justice. My recent visit and my article in Medieval World: Culture & Conflict focus on the Viking period of Jorvik, which began in 866 when a Viking Great Army (perhaps just a few thousand men) under the command of Halfdan and Ivar the Boneless, sons of the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok (a central figure in the recent series VIKINGS) captured the city. It swiftly grew as the key Viking stronghold in the north of England with direct links to Scandinavia, Ireland, and the other substantial aeras of Viking England that became known as the Danelaw. Viking warships and trading ships found their way up the rivers that served Jorvik from the sea, and the city grew and became part of a Viking trading network that stretched all the way to modern Istanbul (Miklagard) and other parts of central Asia through Scandinavia, Ireland, Iceland, and Greenland.While there, I was fortunate to have a session with one of the leading archaeologists of the Viking Archaeological Trust. The trust had originally excavated a large portion of Viking Jorvik in the 1970s and it then went on to set up the Jorvik Viking Centre to showcase its finds and also to create an experience of walking through a ninth/tenth century Viking town.
The York Trust project DIG based at St Saviours Church is dedicated to giving budding archaeologists a chance to see how archaeology works and is a good place for children to learn and understand this fascinating subject.
Read more about Viking York in issue 14 of Medieval World: Culture & Conflict - Jonathan H. Jones, "Viking York: Life and Conflict in Medieval Jórvík," 50-53.
