York

‘Great decayes and breaches’

In spite of attacks on the city during the English Civil War and on other occasions, York is unique in preserving most of its medieval city walls and gates. You can walk up stone steps on to the walks that run along the insides of the walls, giving good views of the city and a sense of how its defenders would have seen things in the Middle Ages and later. The gates, or bars as they’re called hereabouts, still look the business in many ways, with their small openings, good for shooting arrows out of but not letting missiles in, and their narrow ways through for traffic. They stand proud like miniature medieval castles and attract a good deal of interest.

There are four main gates in the walls.The most unusual and outstanding of them is Walmgate Bar, to the southeast. It’s unique, in that it still has its original barbican, the outwork or outer fortification that kept invaders at arms length, enabling defenders to pick many enemies off before they got close to attacking the inner gates into the city. To get in, you’d have to force your way through the narrow pointed arch (on the left in my picture), but your chances would be reduced because the top of the barbican would be teeming with archers taking pot shots at you. Other archers would be stationed on top of the main gate – the tall section in the centre of the picture, which has round corner turrets to give both excellent vantage points and a variety of angles of fire. Anyone who did get through the outer gate would have more barriers to pass through before reaching the city. The wider arch in the wall to the right, incidentally, is a modern insertion to take traffic into the city centre.

Much of what we see today is medieval. Some of the masonry in the inner structure dates to the 12th century, when the gateway is first mentioned in documentary records. The barbican, and probably quite a lot of the rest of the structure, is 14th century. Some of the wooden gates within are 15th century. The most damaging attack came in 1644, when York was under siege during the English Civil War. It is recorded that the Walmgate Bar suffered ‘great decayes and breaches’, and a thorough restoration took place in the following years – a date of 1648 on the building records the completion of these works. The siege ultimately resulted in the defeat of the city’s Royalist garrison by Parliamentarian forces and their Scottish allies, giving Parliament control of much of northern England. But there was a benefit for the people of York and for architectural historians. The incoming Parliamentarian Governor of York, Lord Fairfax, forebade the religious fundamentalists among Parliament’s forces to vandalise York Minister. This won him the respect of the people of the city – and the thanks of anyone interested in historic buildings, because the Minster’s magnificent set of medieval stained-glass windows was preserved almost in its entirety.