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Friday 6/29

Robin led us on a tour of the Viking city of York, seeing Clifford’s Tower (Roman AD78), the River Ouse, going down Shamble’s Street, dating from 1066 where butchers sold meat on benches and giving the street its name from the word shammels, probably from the Anglo-Saxon Fleshammels (literally 'flesh-shelves').   Houses were extended out over the street as families grew, but most streets were the width of a Roman chariot. Size of bricks indicate the period of brick buildings.  Wider bricks began to be used ~1772 when a brick tax was instituted.  Many establishments had figures outside to indicate the nature of their business – for example, an Indian indicated tobacco.  Proceeding on, we saw St Thomas Church where Constantine was crowned emperor, and Guy Fawkes’s birthplace.

We returned to the York Castle Museum to see rooms reperesenting historical periods in England from 1700 to the present. They also had exhibits on past and present slavery. York was a center of the abolitionist movement in England. To mark the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in England, the York Castle Museum mounted an extensive addition to its exhibits. "Unfair Trade" did not add many new exhibits but instead offered additional comments relating the existing exhibits to African slaves of the period. For instance, next to an early Victorian drawing room was the following information: "On the Backs of Slaves. Although slavery had been abolished in Britain and her colonies in the 1830s, the Victorians still enjoyed the benefits that the slave trade had brought to Britain. Britain's rise to economic and imperial greatness cannot be divorced from its connections with slavery. Three hundred years of trading in African slaves allowed Britain to become a world economic power, and the money from this helped finance the Industrial Revolution. Slaves in the British colonies, especially those on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, worked to make Britain wealthy. Many high street banks and insurance companies grew out of the profits of slave labour and slave dealing - as did the Bank of England, the British Museum, and the Church of England." At the end of the UnFair Trade exhibits, people were invited to share their feelings or thoughts about slavery and to reflect on what types of trade we take part in today might in fact be unfair.

Enjoyed wild boar sandwiches from the local market for lunch before seeing the Jorvik Viking Center, a Disneyland like travel rail past exhibits of Viking life, built underground at a Viking archaeological site.

Then Chris attended evensong at York Minster while I birded at Yorkshire Museum Gardens and along the river and walking along a section of the 13th Century city walls.  After that, both of us walked along the northern section of the wall before eating a light dinner of potato and leak soup with the Kennards. 

We had an evening Ghost Walk with a local guide, ending with a walk along the river back to our hotel. We heard from him about a headless ghost seen by numerous people in York, an apparent viking ghost seen in the Jorvik Center by an employee there, and the famous lost Roman legion.

New birds seen in York included Greylag goose, goldfinch, green finch, mistle thrush, and gray heron.