In York, Name That Century
An English Town of Many Ages, From Vikings to Victorians

By Christine H. O'Toole
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, June 11, 2006

On a cold spring morning in northwest England, on ground first contested more than a thousand years ago, a group of Viking warriors girded once again for battle.

They were oddly short, pink-cheeked Vikings, clad in sneakers, plastic breastplates and fleece jackets, and the broadswords they brandished toward the towers of York Minster were actually green Styrofoam noodles. Urged on by the battle cries of bloodthirsty parents, they were celebrating the first morning of the city's annual Viking Festival with a salute to their 9th-century ancestors' style of mayhem and pillage.

"Declan, kill him swiftly!" a bearded warrior-coach roared, through a body microphone hidden under chain mail. Eight-year-old Declan bent his noodle against an adult's chest, and the older man fell obligingly to the ground.

In York, it's 866 all over again. The city, 210 miles north of London, is a nicely kid-size serving of Britain's most fascinating layers of history. The compact pedestrian center along the River Ouse (pronounced "ooze") is a dignified, un-Disneyfied city, with enough London-caliber sights to fill a weekend family visit.

This summer, York serves up the past with a side of special events. The Roman emperor Constantine succeeded his father here, and that 1,700-year anniversary in July spotlights the city's Roman era. A cycle of the medieval Bible dramas called "mystery plays" will be performed by the craft guilds that still flourish here, and a new museum hands visitors trowels to explore ages from Victorian back to Tudor, Viking and pre-Christian.

Even its newest attraction is a smaller version of a big-city favorite: the Yorkshire Wheel is a gondola-style ride that apes London's bigger Eye for a view of the skyline.

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I saw the Victorian era first, as I arrived at the 1877 rail station adjoining the National Railway Museum. (Part of the fun was the high-speed, two-hour trip on the Flying Scotsman from London's King's Cross station.) In five minutes, I walked across the Lendal Bridge and further back in time.

Sheltered by Roman walls and crowned by the city's famous cathedral, York's handsome downtown is the tourist and shopping mecca. Topshop, a snazzy clothing chain, flaunts 21st-century fashions alongside Roman baths and museums. The medieval Shambles, a merchant lane mentioned in William the Conqueror's 1086 census, the Domesday Book, is still open for business. On this street, "family business" means living above the shop for 700 years. Honey-colored limestone squares festooned with red and white flowers (Wars of the Roses references are big here) offer a variety of scenes: young buskers in St. Helen's Square, a greengrocer in Kings Square, and in St. Sampson's Square, an introduction to the Viking past.

Vikings invaded from across the North Sea in 866 and stayed 200 years. As the conquerors married the conquered, the city became one of the largest in Europe (its current population is 181,000). Borrowing the Romans' city walls and plumbing, the Vikings built a wooden town along the river port. In 1976, while building a downtown shopping center, bulldozers unearthed the whole down-and-dirty town, then called Jorvik, buried below.

The nearby Jorvik Viking Centre, which opened in 1984, promises to make the settlement come to life, and the families patiently queuing through a well-stocked gift shop suggested it was an attraction worth waiting for.

Alas, it wasn't. Jorvik's main draw is a jampacked amusement ride through a staid diorama of the year AD 975, with a few wall displays, skeletal remains and craft demonstrations ("make a Viking coin: £1.50") thrown in. It's probably the only one of the town's attractions where a judicious touch of Disney might be welcome.

A nearby extension, opened in March, delves deeper.

"Dig! is a first. It's unique in the world," museum staffer Emma Hunt told us. She sidestepped power cords and sawdust to give me a preview. Housed in the 15th-century Church of St. Saviour, one of many reused local chapels, Dig! tries the hands-on approach. Visitors sift through synthetic dirt to find artifacts modeled on real ones in four trenches: a Roman wall, a Viking hut, a medieval grave and a bug-ridden Victorian home.

The format promises a prize in every pit, in 20-minute sessions. (Artifacts return to the trenches for recycling.) My lucky finds in the Roman trench, young staffers helped me deduce, were centurions' dice. Nearby holograms re-create fieldwork, and real-life Indiana Joneses offer show-and-tell on the latest local finds. There's no shortage: Four beheaded Roman-era skeletons were recently unearthed along an old Roman road. This summer, young volunteers can spend a day at a real site next door.

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That evening, I found it was just as easy to unearth the past at street level. Ignoring dueling 19th-century "ghost tours," I joined a Viking walk led by Shona Griffiths. Imposing in a long woolen gown, gold Viking jewelry and head scarf, she briskly led a dozen followers across town, pointing out the town's Nordic foundations and dispensing descriptions of their tanneries ("absolutely fetid and vile," she said cheerfully), wedding customs and bloodlines. "Do you want to see Vikings?" she asked. "Just stand in line at Marks and Sparks [rhyming slang for Marks & Spencer, the iconic British superstore]!"

DNA mapping proves the genetic link between the Norse invaders, more than 35 generations back, and present-day Britons. (At least one recent descendant was easy to picture as a Valkyrie: Margaret Thatcher, Griffiths told us, had Viking blood.) The invaders' imprint shows up in town planning, too. Griffiths explained that York's narrow storefronts still follow the Viking property measurement of a peck, or 17 feet.

Griffiths dispelled one myth: those horned helmets. The Vikings never wore 'em. Call it error by association: Helmets excavated from digs were found near animal horns, but the style was simply an armored cap with a long extension over the nose (a style mimicked in the souvenir headgear of little Vikings cruising the streets).

York boasts lots of hospitality for a little town. Pubs and restaurants stay open late. An authentically English choice would be Jaipur Spice, but it's just as easy to find tapas, Mexican or my dinner choice, northern Italian. At Zizzi on St. Helen's Square, the sleek interior design was, appropriately, Scandinavian.

The brilliantly lit York Minster provided a beacon on the way back to the hotel. It's officially dubbed a minster because of its Anglo-Saxon origins as a missionary teaching church; as the seat of the archbishop of York, it's also a cathedral. Its traditions and towers would be my focus the next day.

Built over the Roman basilica near the longest right angle of the city wall, the Minster describes itself as the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe. Its lower level, a first-class museum, exposes part of the fortress that the empire maintained here. Another reminder lounges outside: the seated statue of Constantine. He was proclaimed emperor here in 306; festivities on July 25 mark the 17-century anniversary.

Rebuilt several times over the last millennium, the Minster's most recent renovation gave a shout-out to kids. After a fire destroyed the roof of the south transept in 1984, a national TV contest allowed children to design the ceiling bosses, the ornate medallions that hold the new transept's oak ribs in place. That's why designs on saving the whales, the first lunar landing and famine relief flank medieval saints and knights.

The view from the open tower of the Minster was worth the corkscrewed 275-step workout (and the extra admission charge). Fences keep little ones from launching themselves over the flying buttresses. The lanes radiating from the cathedral showed the path that the York mystery plays would take in July. When the 12 short plays are performed July 9 and 16, on wagons pulled through the streets, the best seats will be standing room in the town squares.

Rob Wright, a bearded university professor who's played Jesus in the plays, says the hazards of street theater (hecklers, drunks and dogs) haven't changed much since 1376, the year of the first recorded performance. Another threat: runaway wagons. The current master of the Guild of Building, Paul Deamer, muscles one of the half-ton wagons through the streets every four years. The chief stonemason at the Minster, he says jeering other pushers when they lose control of their wagons is another pageant tradition.

I ended my visit with lunch at a riverfront cafe. Sunshine poured in as red-and-white YorkBoats glided past on the Ouse. Kids on the promenade waved to grannies on the tour boats, while teenagers slouched toward Orgasmic Cafe for pizza. As I savored the scene, I listed all the places I hadn't covered: the city's Norman-era tower, Guy Fawkes's church, the Yorkshire Air Museum. There was time for only one more stroll, but I covered plenty of ground -- a few millenniums, in fact. I walked the Roman wall to catch the 3 o'clock train back to King's Cross.

Christine H. O'Toole last wrote for Travel about Chattanooga.