The 600 years from the Roman withdrawal to the Battles of Hastings and nearby Stamford Bridge in 1066 saw York’s status change from that of Roman fortress to the foremost city in the north of Britain and an important outpost of the Christian church.

Roman soldiers left York – in fact, abandoned much of their empire – in the fifth century AD, and it seems that for around 200 years the city was gradually deserted, stripped of the military, administrative and political role it carried out under the Romans. It is likely that its inhabitants went back to rural farming for this period.

The Roman bridge from the bottom of Tanner’s Row to the Guildhall fell in the river, and a new crossing point was established at the present-day Ouse Bridge. This is why Micklegate curves as it does from the old Roman gate to the Tadcaster Road down to the river while Bootham and Walmgate bars lead on to streets that follow the original Roman straight lines: apart from the loss of the bridge, much of York’s basic street plan stayed intact.

Burial sites at Heworth and The Mount suggest that the people who re-settled York were Anglo-Saxons, Germanic settlers from across the North Sea. They, too, may have been farmers rather than city-dwellers, though, and it wasn’t until the baptism of Edwin of Deira in 627AD that York’s revival really began.

The conversion of Edwin and the foundation of York Minster
Edwin was King of Northumbria, a vast land stretching from the Humber River to Scotland. He was baptised by Bishop Paulinus, one of a band of missionaries sent by Pope Gregory in 597AD.

Richard Hall, in The History of York, Yorkshire, suggests that Paulinus’s knowledge that York was the seat of a Roman bishop may have influenced his choice of location for Edwin’s conversion as he tried to imply continuity between the ordered, established church of Rome and the pagan traditions of the Anglo Saxons.

What is sure is that Edwin ordered a stone church be built on the spot where he was converted – almost exactly where the Roman basilica had been. His church was to be dedicated to Saint Peter and, although he himself was killed in battle in 633, it was the forerunner of the greatest church in the north: York Minster.

Alcuin of York
The bishopric of York was elevated to Archbishopric status in 735, indicating that York’s former importance in the church was being regained.

Meanwhile, a school associated with the church of St Peter in the city had been founded in 627AD (it was sited either near the Minster itself or, more likely based on archaeological evidence, in the Bishophill area south of the river) and it was around the 730s that its most famous headmaster was born: Alcuin of York.

Apart from inventing lower-case letters – I can’t help thinking what the Dragon’s Den panel would have made of that – Alcuin became one of the foremost scholars and ecclesiastical thinkers of his day.

He’s widely credited as the chief architect of the re-birth of scholarship and philosophy in the post-Roman Christian world: he lit the torch that would eventually light up the Dark Ages.

By the time he did most of this, though, Alcuin had left St Peter’s School and York, leaving it to wrestle with just capital letters for another generation or more while he revolutionised the court of Charlemagne in Aachen, Germany.

Eoforwick becomes Jorvik
A century after Alcuin’s exit from the York stage the city would be settled by another wave of non-Christian invaders: the Vikings.

The Vikings, or Norsemen, as they are often called, came from modern-day Scandinavia and, unlike the Anglo-Saxons chose robbery and pillage to farming and settlement. However, as is faithfully recreated at the Jorvik Viking Centre, they did develop at York a trading centre which added a mercantile aspect to the religious settlements at the Minster and Bishophill.

The settlement of the Vikings took perhaps another hundred years, but there is evidence that by 950AD, around the time of the excellently named Eric Bloodaxe, York was trading with the Baltic regions and the Pictish tribes of Ireland and Scotland as well as importing goods from Arabia and the Red Sea via Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul).

York and the Norman Conquest
Such peace as descended on York from this period was ended when some Vikings who had previously settled in northern France, giving it the name Normandy, decided to invade England themselves.

The Norman invasion is principally associated with the Battle of Hastings, but a decisive event in that battle occurred just days earlier near York.

Harold Hardraada, a Norwegian Viking king allied with William of Normandy, led a fleet of ships up the Humber river and fought a battle with the Northumbrians at Fulford, just south of York, on 20th September 1065.

Two days later Harold Godwin, King of England, led his own army through York on his way to crushing the Viking army at Stamford Bridge, just a few miles north-east of the city.

Hardraada’s army was only a diversion from the main invasion force, however: while Harold Godwin was occupied in the North, the Normans landed on the South Coast and by the time the Saxon army could face them they would have marched up and down the country in just a few days and been in no position to fight a battle.

The Normans would prove victorious, and that would be bad news for the city of York. As part of his conquest, William would invade York in 1068 and build a castle – precursor to Clifford’s Tower – from which the Normans would rule with an iron fist. At different times the invaders desecrated the cathedral, burnt the city down – much of the Viking settlement around Coppergate was made from mud and wood – and plundered its treasures.

Fortunately York’s position in the north of England was by now assured. Its role in the church ensured it played a pivotal role in administration and politics in the medieval world, and its established mercantile position would attract investment and bring financial rewards. The Norman invasion must have hurt the city of York, but the its finest hour was still to come.

Go back to Part I: Roman York or on to Part III: Medieval York