Day 169-exploring York

   June 21-We all slept very well back out in the quiet of the country.  It was awful easy to sleep in, because the skies had clouded up overnight.  Our run of good luck with the weather finally ran out, since it started to rain in the morning.  We got around and drove back into York.  We only got lost a little bit before we found a parking garage.  The adults grabbed some traditional British breakfast food and the kids had doughnuts.  Sally picked up the annual family pass we bought to gain access to a number of history centers in town and then we walked around in the light rain to do some shopping.  First, we went to a post office so Alex could buy some cheap stamps to add to her collection.  Then, we went to a school uniform store where the kids got some screaming deals on rugby shirts and logoed shirts; now they are all set to go to some posh, private British boarding school!
   We started using the annual pass at “the Dig,” which is the site of excavations at Hungate, where artifacts from the last 2000 years of settlement have been found.  An employee who is just beginning her Masters studies in English history gave us a one hour guided tour through the place.  She explained some of the history of York and how it related to this specific location.  In 71 AD, The Romans established a fort here and named it and the settlement that grew up around it Eboracum.  The Hungate site was a Roman cemetery and a number of interesting Roman burials have been excavated.  It is unclear what happened in Eboracum after the legions departed Britain in 410, but the name remained attached to the site, indicating that some sort of settlement remained and it slowly developed into a major regional center over the next few centuries under the Angle and Saxon newcomers.  This site did not contain many artifacts from that time period, because the ground was mostly used for farming. 
   Danish Vikings of “the Great Heathen Army” took the town, whose name had morphed into Eoforwic, in 867 AD .  They turned the urban center into one of the major centers of power during the Viking era and further morphed the name into Jórvík.  The area around Hungate was redeveloped during this era, subdivided into long plots of land with narrow street fronts.  This plan has roughly dictated the look of York to this day.  There were many artifacts from this time period on display. 
   The Norman invasion in 1066 effectively brought Viking influence to an end.  The Hungate area was flooded by the King’s Fishpool due to a dam built on the neighboring Foss River to generate the moat around William the Conqueror’s castle.  The castle and the city became known as York, which is the Norman French derivative of Jórvík.  The Hungate area became a dumping ground for waste, making it an archaeologist’s dream site!  As the site slowly was reclaimed, a friary was built on it and it may have been used for more smelly industries, like tanneries.  Later, the friary was torn down and Hungate became the site for orchards and the homes of the wealthier merchants.  Light industry moved in early in the 19^th century and the area turned into one of the dirtier slums in England by the end of the century.  These represent the uppermost layers in the site and are particularly interesting for the excavators, because they could use accurate historical records to guide their digs. 

   After going through that, our guide showed us the skull of a Norman-era horse that had had a red hot poker shoved into the roof of its mouth to (successfully) cure an abscessed bone infection.  That must have been quite the operation!  Then we moved on to the hands-on part of the exhibit, where the kids used trowels to dig through “dirt” to find artifacts at different levels.  As they found them, the guide explained how they fit together and could be used to understand the people who lived at that location during that time period.  Next, she took us over to another table with trays of actual artifacts that had come from the same location and had us sort them out and then had us guess what the people had done at that location.  The kids mostly enjoyed playing with the animal bones and guessing what animals they had come from.  Finally, the guide pulled out a human coprolite and had the kids handle it before she told them it is petrified human poop.  She showed them a cast of big coprolite from the Viking era and explained that it provided evidenced of the wide-spread problem of stomach worms during this time.  The kids came away with a better appreciation of modern medical technology and sanitation, I think! 
   We explored other parts of the exhibit for a while and then grabbed dinner at a neighboring restaurant.  We all had more standard British foods and enjoyed it immensely.  We next trooped over to the Jórvík Viking center in the middle of town.  This exhibit was in the basement and dealt almost exclusively with the buildings and life in York during the Viking era.  Conditions in the water-logged ground preserved wood in an excellent condition, so archaeologists were able to excavate wood foundations of buildings in this location along with many artifacts from this time period as well. 
   We took a ceiling-mounted ride through a mock-up of Jórvík.  Interestingly, the rebuilt houses actually were sitting at the ground level of that time period, but it was in the basement of the building, because the street level of the modern city is a good ten feet higher, having been built on the accumulated detritus of the intervening years.  This ride turned out to be a particular highlight for the family.  Speakers near our heads allowed a recorded voice to tell us what we were seeing as the animated exhibits, including many mannequins, actively engaged in activities common to this time period.  What most struck us, though, was when they talked, because we could partially understand it.  The reason?  They were speaking in Old Norse, the language of the Vikings, and, thus, (almost) of modern Icelanders!  When we disembarked, we asked one of the docents about this and he explained that the choice was made to use Icelandic and Faeroese in the exhibit, since they most closely resemble the language spoken in Jórvík at that time.  The phonology has changed some, so it is not absolutely correct, but the languages are close.  Speaking of linguistics, we also noted that this docent had a slight British accent but he sounded more American than not.  It turns out that he is from Montana and is pursuing his doctorate in medieval history in York and he helped his advisor set up the exhibit.  In fact, he spoke some of the Icelandic for one of the mannequins in the exhibit! 

   The rest of the exhibit was almost as interactive and we all had a great time.  Since excavations uncovered the dye for making silver coins, a copy was made and one of the docents was making pewter copies of the coins using the reconstructed dyes.  There were also a few skeletons from the Viking era, along with analysis of the health of each person based on their bones.  The kids were amazed at how much information could be gleaned from bones.  We also got to see the skeleton of a young man, whose bones revealed a dozen unhealed wounds from weapons, including at least three or four that were mortal wounds in their own right.  Obviously, he got the worse end of things in a battle early in the Norman era! 

   We finally left when the exhibit shut down and grabbed some stuffed pastries for supper.  We ate them while we wandered over to the city wall of York, climbed it, and began to walk along it.  It was dry when we started, but then a light rain began to fall and a little later, we started to hear thunder.  We figured that being on a high wall was not a good idea in a thunderstorm, so we came down just as the rain really started pouring.  We walked in it for a short distance until we came across an Indian restaurant, which we ducked into for drinks and dessert while we waited for the storm passed.  We walked back through the old part of town to the car and drove back to the cottage for an early evening.  The kids played around in the place for a couple hours and went to bed.  The adults stayed up a little longer relaxing and enjoying some tasty English beers, before we hit the sack as well.

These beers were unavailable to Sally when she studied in England 22 years ago.