COME ALONG WITH ME....A History of York, England

[Music] hi so my name is Alan I'm a tour guide here in York and I'm gonna show you a few things around the city that may not have known about it beforehand there so let's start here with the museum gardens and the museum gardens they called that because this great big building over here is a big museum and the museum was actually built around 1830 by a group called the Yorkshire philosophical Society they still exist they have their main headquarters towards the entrance of these gardens they have this enormous collection of historical artifacts no a big enough to store them all so the authorities granted them all this land here and said build a museum put it all on display but there was a condition and obviously have to plant the rest of the land as a botanical garden for the benefit of the people that means what you find around these gardens is not just your local Yorkshire plant life there are plants from all over the world here the main attraction the gardens clearly is this great big thing behind me here which is called st. Mary's Abbey and in its dayson Mary's was actually the largest Abbey in the north of England fountains abbey became the largest but I was built about two hundred years after this one what you're looking at here is actually the lower end of the Abbey Church the arch over there is where the main tower of the church stood then the church stretched over in the gardens in that direction is about twice as long as the part that is still standing construction began in the year 1088 the man who had it built was called Alan Rufus and he was a distant cousin of William the Conqueror who had come over here with the Norman invasion he was also the richest man in the entire world at the time he had wealth in today's terms similar to Bill Gates and of course you can't take it with you so he wanted to be as rich in the next life as he was in this one and he started spending his money building great religious institutions around the north of England and this was his crowning glory he had William the Conqueror's son William the second lay the foundation stone was then given to an order of Benedictine monks they occupied this whole area here the chapter house actually was underneath where the museum now stands and actually in the basement of the museum they still have a fireplace in its original location which is the warming room of the chap decks where the monks would stay warm in the winter just over here there's something in the grass you might want to see this is the inner corner of the cloisters so the cloisters of course was a big square of corridors where monks would wander in quiet contemplation of the Lord and you see as I said that's the inner corner of it sticking out the grass just there the outer corner of it is sticking out the side of the main wall of the church just here so you can see how it turned the corner at that point and went off along the corridor in that direction when the abbey was built this point big churches and big cathedrals were big money-making machines and the last thing the Archbishop of York would wanted was an abbey that size to move into the city and compete with the minister for all the money so that's where the abbey was built outside the city walls but it was very wealthy so how'd it be protected so we out of its own set of walls and that's what you're looking at here these are not the city walls these are the abbey walls they come on the back here then this way and they actually covered the Abbey in three sides the fourth side of course is the river so you didn't need to have a wall on that side that still meant though the abbey was in its own self enclosed precinct and that was outside the city walls but still very close to them now after the dissolution the abbey became the obvious Prince precinct became a part of the city essentially but come the reign of Charles the first Charles the first believed in what he called the Divine Right of Kings which of course means Kings are appointed by God and therefore they get to do anything they want and Parliament didn't think so as they tried to curb his powers and he tried to have five members of parliament arrested they resisted him he really realized he couldn't work with parliament anymore and he moved government government up here to York and six months later declared war on parliament starting seven years of civil war ending with him having his head chopped off now York tried to stay loyal to the king and for the first few months of Hawaii based himself in the city in a place called Saint Williams College because of this it became a very strategic place for the royalist army and in 1644 the leading parliamentarian General Thomas Fairfax arrived at a city with his troops surrounded the whole city put it under siege about two months into the siege he realized he could if he could capture the Abbey precinct here he would have a stronghold that was literally right outside the city walls that he could attack the city from so he brought his troops down the road was just back here down to this tower over in the corner they don't have a big tunnel underneath the tower they filled that with gunpowder lit the fuse and retired to a safe distance so this enormous explosion went off underneath this tower and actually if you come around this side you'll see there are cracks all the way down the side of the tower where that explosion took place however what the main thing that happened was that this wall on this side collapsed and you can see it's been reconstructed up to a certain level but not all the way back up so that's where the gap in the wall was Fairfax's troops then came charging through this gap in the wall into this area just back just here and this at the time was a bowling green and in history books what happened next is referred to as the Battle of the bowling green I personally think they should call it the great big brawl on the bowling green it was about two to three hundred men involved about fifteen to thirty were killed but a lot was really happening of course the Fairfax's men were coming through this gap in the wall and the defenders were just lined up along here waiting there picking them off as they came through so wasn't really worth the effort when they all he could do is start to do a wait outside and starve every act so I Bettis a month after that Prince Rupert of the Rhine arrived here he was Charles's cousin he sidestepped Fairfax's army and got his own army into the city he then added all the soldiers in the city to that army they'll marched off to the west of here to a place called Marston Moor where they tried to break the siege and were thoroughly defeated so it's actually said that after the Battle of Marston Moor there were less than five hundred and able-bodied men left in all of York which is nowhere near enough to defend the city with so of course at that point there was no choice they had to negotiate a surrender so this set of buildings is known as the King's Manor is was basically Henry the eighth's Palace in New York and it was built actually originally started out as being the Abbott's house wasn't Mary's Abbey but the Abbott's house itself is buried in the middle there somewhere and everything you're looking at in here is Tudor most of it was built during the reign of Henry the eighth's bits were then added on during Elizabeth the first frame now Henry actually came to visit here himself in the year 1541 he arrived with his fifth wife which is Catherine Howard she was 18 years old so I'm very pretty girl very popular with a gentleman court before she married Henry very popular with the gentleman court after she married Henry Henry was 50 years old massively obese have both gout and diabetes and all these things together and resulted in barely walk and he had pus-filled running sores all up and down his legs and he may have had syphilis as well so not the most pleasant man around so Catherine star the river dalliance with the young man in Henry's train called Thomas Culpepper while they were here in New York tonight Catherine and Thomas were said to be seen most days arm in arm deep in conversation wandering around this square that we are currently standing it obviously at the time that went all the way to this all over the back here and also got warmed by to the back behind this building here now didn't end well for either one of them Thomas Culpepper was executed for treason best way to ramble to the wives of Henry the eighth's divorced beheaded died divorced beheaded survived fifth wife that one is a beheaded Catherine actually was arrested about a week after they got back to London from door ma'am to other Kings out actually spent time here in these buildings first those was King James the sixth of Scotland when he was appointed King James the first of England and he actually had this door over here added into the building so you can see actually if you look at the structure of the building that there's various there's been various different things changes made to it you can see up here there's some brickwork that used to be a window is now just a wall and he had this door added into it and actually this if you can follow me over here as one of these things I'll show you this door here which is a bit more obvious but you might notice there's the heads at the top of the two doors there the one on that Saito furthest away from us is a head of James the first himself and then on this side is an of Norway which is his wife so he had these two built doors added onto the building he when he came here on his way from Scotland to England to take up the throne and of course he didn't he knew that the English wouldn't might not be very happy to have a Scotsman as a king so he's actually sent about three days here in New York occupying the building here with his train and then having parades through the city center to introduce himself to the people one more King spent time here and that was Charles the first who have already mentioned he arrived here after he broke with Parliament he moved his Treasury and his ministry of state into here and this is his crest just above the door here my hope is just about the just below the crown at the top of it you've got the letters C er picked out in gold that stands for Carolus Rex which is Charles the King in Latin the crown at the crest itself actually displays the fact that from James the first onwards Inglot he monarchs with a king of both England and Scotland at the same time so the crest which used to have a lion on each side from the time of James the first would have a lion on one side for the English king and a unicorn on the other side that representing the Scottish King so you can actually read the crests and real and decide exactly who the the King or who which part period of history or in from what the the shape of the crest would be the building themselves are now part of the University of York York being an old venerated and great city of Europe of course has to be a great seat of learning a great University City so York applied for its charter the Open University during the reign of Queen Elizabeth the first and were granted it during the reign of queen elizabeth ii 1963 so actually there 56 years old but in the National t-tables York is now considered one of the better universities in England so they are doing pretty well for themselves you

Channel: Come Along With Me Europe

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Id: EaQJKbFZTV4

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 02 2019