With 42 participating sights and organizations, we managed to see a few new things. We concentrated on the things in town that you usually have to pay for and that didn't have ridiculous lines. On Saturday, we saw the Richard III museum consisting of a poorly designed exhibit examining whether he was truly a villain or just misunderstood. Thumbs down. Looks like someone went crazy with a laminator and plastered the place with letter-sized pages—total information overload. The most interesting thing about it was that it is housed inside Monk Bar (one of the gateways in the city wall). It's the only Bar where the floors still exist and you can climb them all. Being able to see the architecture, the portucullis mechanism, and the guard/potty chambers was the best part.
Then we went to Hungate, the current archaeological dig in what were York slums. This is a site that will become apartments after 2012, but before it does they are digging down as far as they can to learn about the history of the area. They are in the relatively early stages and have uncovered the Victorian layer across the whole thing and are down to the medieval layer in some areas. The hope is to uncover some Viking artifacts as they get lower. Ironically, the construction barricade surrounding the site had better information than you got from walking through the dig itself. You were also able to see some of the finds extracted from the site which included some combs, game pieces, dishes, shoe soles, and a bone skate. Apparently the Vikings introduced ice skating to England and, in that time, it's thought that the rivers iced over on a regular basis. They made the skate blades from an animal femur with some minor modifications. The only downside to animal bone skates is that if you stay in one place too long, you stick to the ice.
After that, we joined a walking tour of York. We saw and learned some interesting things including...
• An original Georgian building feature was a torch snuffer (the black cone on the right of the doorway in this picture. After carrying a fiery torch with you to light up the dark streets at night, what do you do with it when you get to your destination? Why snuff it of course. Then you deposit it into an umbrella-like stand by the entrance. How polite. Even today, the British call flashlights torches.
• A group of the richest families in York commissioned the Assembly Rooms in 1730 for their private balls and social gatherings. It was trendy at the time and allowed them to strut their stuff and meet the "right people." It is thought to probably be the "...earliest neo-classical building in Europe." It still looks much like it did then and now holds an Italian restaurant—pretty fancy digs for pizza and pasta.
• York has 19 surviving medieval churches, the most in England after the bombing of WWII. Originally there were "...40 churches, eight monasteries and friaries and countless chapels and chantries" in medieval times.
• York had the first hospital in England, first built in around the 10th century. Towards the end of its life-span, it occupied 4 acres and is thought to have been the largest in Northern England. Some of the remnants of St. Leonard's Hospital can still be seen in the Museum Gardens.
• York is home to Rowntree Limited who invented the KitKat, among other candies. Nestlé acquired Rowntree and now produces the KitKat for everywhere except the US (Hershey makes it there). There's still a Nestlé factory here in York and, sometimes when the wind is right, the air smells like baking cookies when you go outside. I can think of worse things :)
On Sunday we went to Barley Hall, a medieval building largely forgotten as the city grew around it.
Excavation in the 1980s revealed that under this jumble was a surviving example of a medieval townhouse, originally the town house of the Priors of Nostell but later to be the townhouse of its best known inhabitant, Alderman William Snawsell, goldsmith and Mayor of York. It has now been restored to how it looked at the time of Alderman Snawsell, towards the end of the fifteenth century.
It has been very faithfully restored using evidence found in the excavations and 15th century techniques. They have even recreated a horn window, which they say might be the only horn window in England. Apparently they soak cow's horns until the white exterior becomes pliable, strip it off of the bony inside, and roll it into strips. The strips are then overlapped to create a semi-translucent window. In that time, it was a much cheaper alternative to glass and was used in the lesser rooms of Barley Hall.
Horn was also used as an early lamination device. Thin strips were placed on top of fragile parchment in early "textbooks" to make them more durable.
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