Remembering and Forgetting Sites of Terrorism in New York, 1900–2001

Abstract

This article assesses the manner in which terrorist attacks have been remembered and forgotten within New York during the twentieth century. As a 'global city', New York has frequently been the focus of individuals and groups seeking to promote their cause by attacking targets in the city, its businesses, its infrastructure, its organizations, and its citizens. By examining how these events were reported and subsequently incorporated or dismissed within both the urban fabric and the city's 'collective memory', this article addresses how violent terrorism is engaged with by society. Building upon the advances made within the study of modern conflict archaeology, this article examines the possibility of an archaeology of terrorism.     

Burial Practices in the Northern Danelaw,c.650–1100

Abstract

The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 formed a watershed in the pastoral care of Western Europe. Aiming to transform nominal faith into a more active and personal religious experience, the Lateran IV decrees instigated an internal mission. In the decades immediately following the Council, its reforms were disseminated across Europe through diocesan legislation, where bishops adapted the decrees to fit local circumstances. This paper attempts to follow both the transmission and implementation of the 1215 decrees in the Northern Province, analysing both the reforming climate of northern England and the actual effects of the legislation in the approximate century and a quarter immediately following the Fourth Lateran Council.     

Employment on the Priory of Durham Estates, 1494–1519: The Priory as an Employer

Abstract

This article argues that during the years in which he was Archbishop of York, 1514 to 1530, Thomas Wolsey monopolised the patronage of the city of York's governing institution. Unlike previous patrons, Wolsey's status as both the prelate of the archdiocese and the most prominent Crown minister and favourite of Henry VIII, gave him an unprecedented position in the city's quest for securing royal favour. The mayor and commonalty of York were not only aware of Wolsey's pre-eminent standing, but sought to exploit their perceived special connection with him for the city's economic benefit. It was York's governors who initiated and strived to maintain a continual patron-client relationship with Wolsey. In doing so, they deviated from the typical pattern of clientage among sixteenth-century urban governments by forsaking multiple ties with other local and regional notables. Brokers formed the channel through which patronage and clientage were transmitted. These were both men associated with Wolsey through archidiocesan administration and resident locally, and men situated in Wolsey's London household at York Place. By examining patronage and clientage in the context of the city's most pressing issues, this article sheds light on urban-Crown relations in the early Henrician period under Wolsey's supremacy.     

Henry VIII's Progress Through Yorkshire in 1541 and its Implications for Northern Identities

Abstract

Henry's visit to the North in 1541 has been seen as, alternatively, a powerful response to the ongoing threat to order in the years after the Pilgrimage of Grace or a move in diplomatic relationships with Scotland and France. This paper suggests the level of immediate threat of disorder in the North was low and that the role of the journey in relations with Scotland was more its consequence than its cause. Rather it finds the significance of the visit in a potential renegotiation of the position of the North within the wider realm, a question opened by political and constitutional changes since 1530, a negotiation which the King himself overthrew. Instead of accommodation, Henry sought to emphasise the extent of his defeat of the Pilgrims and the Percy interest, and to humiliate utterly all but the most clearly loyal elements, especially in York itself. Yet the memory of his triumph, if triumph it was, was poisoned for Henry by his failure to meet James of Scotland and by the collapse of his marriage to Catherine Howard; and it passed remarkably quickly from the collective memory of the North, overlain by a developing sense of relations with the Tudors, as with their predecessors, as supportive of a distinctive northern identity.     

THE CITY OF GOD AND AFTER: RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND ORGANISATIONAL DECLINE IN GREAT ENGLISH TOWNS SINCE C. 1850

Abstract

The demands and effects of warfare have not been one of the traditional concerns of historians of early modern English towns. This essay looks at the way in which the townsmen of York, Hull and Beverley responded to the demands of war. It explores the level of urban involvement in the king's wars, mainly but not exclusively against the Scots, and the way in which the pressure of war acted to transform relations within towns and relations between towns and their neighbours. In a period when towns were experiencing rapid economic, social and religious change, war provided one means of renegotiating power relations and allowed urban elites to expand their authority, through partnership with the Crown, vis-à-vis their fellow citizens and non-urban elites. The balance between profiting from war and being ruined by its demands was a fine one, however, exemplified by the experience of Hull in the 1540s.     

Receiving Royals in Later Medieval York: Civic Ceremony and the Municipal Elite, 1478–1503

Abstract

This article examines the later medieval royal entry ceremony in York from the perspective of the social groups that designed and produced the spectacle. Deliberations of York's civic council comprise the main body of evidence for this study. It is argued that a mercantile oligarchy controlled the production of ceremony at every level. York's merchants dominated the design of civic receptions by excluding other secular and ecclesiastical groups native to the city from the decision-making process, and by resisting external interference by groups such as the nobility. The civic council made use of the topography of the city to reinforce the mercantile dimensions of the ceremony and to create a ceremonial space where they could communicate with the royal visitor. The merchant élite also adapted the form and content of the city's nuanced Corpus Christi celebrations to the royal entry. By these means they displayed and consolidated their position at the pinnacle of urban society at a time when their dominance over the city's economic, social and political structures was weakening.     

Social Science and the Discovery of a 'Post-Protestant People': Rowntree's Surveys of York and their other Legacy

Abstract

Despite the bitter criticism it evoked, both from clerical professionals and lay experts on its publication in 1951, Rowntree's and Lavers's English Life and Leisure survived to become an enduring classic of modern British social science. Yet, in many ways, the respectability it eventually achieved now masks the true radicalism of its findings. Building on fifty years of his own social survey work in York, Rowntree (and his collaborator) were able to show the full extent of the decline of church organization, affiliation and attendance in twentieth-century Britain. They also demonstrated just how these processes had particularly affected the Protestant community — most notably the Nonconformist Protestant community — in England. Finally, they went on to demonstrate how that — institutional — decline was increasingly related to changes in, and a diminution of, specifically Christian beliefs amongst the population as a whole. Their results anticipated many of the conclusions of the 'pessimistic' sociologists of religion in the 1960s. They also constitute a profound critique of 'optimistic' historical revisionism in more recent years. As such, they are perhaps more relevant than ever.     

The Merchant Adventurers of England: The Place of the Adventurers of York and the North in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract

The 1478 complaint of the northern adventurers over their alleged ill-treatment by the governor of the Londoners is the starting point for this investigation. The Merchant Adventurers of England was the popular name for the Merchants of the Nation of England trading to the Parties of Brabant, Flanders, Holland and Zeeland. Its religious fraternity was dedicated to St Thomas Becket. Its first grant of privileges was from Brabant in 1296, and its governor was made permanent and salaried in 1421. The wool merchants, including those of York, were prominent in the company until their transfer to Calais. With the decline of the wool trade and the rise of the English cloth industry, the dominant role passed to those merchants who exported cloth to the Low Countries. In York, the Mercers, the dry-goods merchants, benefited from this change, and became the leading mercantile guild of the city, incorporated in 1430. Northern adventurers suffered from considerable competition from those of London, who were numerically always able to control decisions made at the overseas meetings, and they in their turn were dominated by the Mercers of London. The complaints of 1478, nevertheless, greatly misrepresented the situation, and all branches of the company benefited from the increased privileges acquired for the English by the governor at this date in Antwerp and elsewhere. Trading conditions had again changed by the time the York Mercers were re-incorporated as the Society of Merchant Adventurers of the City of York in 1580.     

The Accounts of the Medieval Paternoster Gild of York

Abstract

The 1399 account roll of the Paternoster Gild of York, missing since the 1880s, has recently been discovered amongst papers donated to the Borthwick Institute, University of York. These accounts, edited at the end of this paper, reveal the names of over 150 gild members from all over the city of York and beyond and allow them to be placed within their social context, showing members and their families receiving bequests in each other's wills, and revealing several of them as members of the later Corpus Christi gild at York. The accounts also demonstrate the extent of the gild's property ownership and give details of preparations and purchases for the elaborate gild feast. The gild was responsible for performances of the Paternoster play, and examination of the accounts allows revision of confused, earlier reports of their contents relating to the plays. It is now clear that two pageants from the play are mentioned in the accounts, supporting Johnstone's suggestion that the play was based on seven pageants, each one reflecting one of the seven petitions of the Lord's Prayer, matched against one of the seven deadly sins.     

WILLIAM HERON, ‘HAMMER OF THE POOR,PERSECUTOR OF THE RELIGIOUS’, SHERIFF OF NORTHUMBERLAND, 1246–58

Abstract

In 1895 Richard Holmes identified Paulinus of Leeds, the late-twelfth-century vicar of Leeds and master of St Leonard's Hospital in York, with Master Paulinus, a son of Ralph Nowell, Bishop of Orkney, who was consecrated in 1110 × 1114. Holmes' identification, though dubious on chronological grounds, has generally been accepted. But a recently published charter of Hugh du Puiset, Bishop of Durham, shows that Paulinus son of the Bishop was dead in 1184, so cannot have been the same man as Paulinus of Leeds, who was still living in 1201. The careers of these two men, and others named Paulinus, are here disentangled, and the suggestion is made that Paulinus of Leeds may have been a member of a family of hereditary priests of Leeds. The much misunderstood life of Adam of Birkin, who seems to have been a relative of Paulinus of Leeds, is also re-examined.