The History of York
York is a place that is near and dear to our hearts. We have our own personal history we have developed here over the past 14 years, which has included multiple trips. Our first backpacking trip in Europe together in 2009 was our first brief visit to this city, where we fell in love with it! We returned in 2010 while we were engaged to do our wedding planning, and then again in 2011 to get married at the Barley Hall. I returned to England on my own in 2014 to do a walking holiday in Cornwall and spend some time in York. I had gone through over 3 years of unsuccessful fertility treatments and had been told I would likely not be having any children. England was the place where I came to be alone, reflect, and try to heal and come to some form of peace with this. Little did I know, that only 2.5 months later, I’d be pregnant with my beautiful identical twin girls! We returned here in 2017 for a family vacation with our little 1.5-year-old girls.
Unfortunately, the world decided that our hoped-for 10th-anniversary trip in 2021 was not going to happen. But here we are again in 2023, spending more than three months in my favourite city in the world. A city that fills me with a sense of peace, contentment, and fulfillment every time I step foot in it. It truly feels like home here for me. Jon also loves this city nearly as much as I do. And over the past three months, the girls have fallen utterly in love with this city. They are devastated to be leaving and wish we could stay here for six months rather than three! Needless to say, our history with this city is not over. This place is near and dear to the hearts of everyone in our family, and we look forward to building more and more memories here on future trips.
Not only do we have our own personal history in this city, but York itself is steeped in an unbelievable amount of history! It was founded in AD 71 by the Romans. After the collapse of the Roman empire, not a lot happened here for a while. The settlers in the Dark Ages left few written records, but what we have learned from a museum here in town was that the people in that period did not like towns, preferring instead to live more remotely. York did get populated again, and there was a large Viking settlement here. It was a vast and thriving community, which sounded quite a bit more advanced and peaceful than we would have expected from the various Viking-related shows you see on TV!
After the Viking era in York came the medieval period. York truly flourished during the medieval period. While there are remains from all of the more important eras in York’s history, when you walk around this town it has a distinctly medieval feel to it. William the Conqueror built two castles here in York in 1068, one on each side of the river. There are medieval buildings, walls, a cathedral (York Minster), abbey ruins, etc everywhere you look.
In amongst all these Roman, Viking, and Medieval buildings, you will also see some gorgeous Georgian architecture. There is not a ton of it, but what they do have is beautiful and well-maintained. We have toured some of the houses, most notably the Fairfax House. It was decorated for Christmas and they had a Townmouse Christmas event there. They had tons of mice hidden all over the house, up to all kinds of naughty mischief. There was a contest to count all the mice and try to find them all. My eagle-eyed daughters and I took up this quest and counted 291 mice in the house! We need to wait until January to learn how many there truly were and if we won a prize or not! We even took Georgian dance lessons at the Mansion House. We learned three dances: the Cotillion, Boulanger, and Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot. We had sooooo much fun learning how to do these dances! The girls were loving every minute of it. It reminded us very much of a more formal and refined ceilidh!
After the Georgian period was the Victorian period, and there is soooo much Victorian history here! Even a re-created Victorian street in the local, Castle Museum. During this period there was a large amount of industrial advancement, with the City becoming an important railway hub and manufacturing centre, particularly for chocolate! Terry’s, Rowntree’s, and other historically important chocolatiers made York their home and left their permanent marks on this City. Today there are amazing chocolatiers and cocoa shops everywhere you look. And some days, while walking the walls or through York centre there is an overwhelming smell of chocolate in the air. We joke that there’s so much chocolate history in York that it seeps up from the ground and into the air and you just can’t escape from all the chocolate everywhere! We are still trying to figure out what truly causes this because it is not limited to one area of the town. You will smell the same tantalizing aroma for literally miles.
Jon and I both love history, and it’s amazing to see history literally before your eyes everywhere you look in this gorgeous city. And it was amazing to watch the girls learn so much about so many periods of history in person, and in a very hands-on way. This is the type of education they would never get sitting in a classroom and learning about these periods in a book!