July 20, Sunday

We’ve been to York in the past and liked it, but never had time to see it properly.  We scheduled 4 days this time so we could give our visit a little more depth.

Our first stop was the York Castle Museum.  It is housed in an old women’s prison.  They have exhibits about daily life in York throughout the ages, which is the type of history I find fascinating.  They had replicas of typical homes from different ages, kitchens and cooking exhibits, fashion exhibits, consumer goods, medicine, toys and child-rearing items, a look at marriage and death customs, and various other things typifying daily life for York (and English) citizens at different times in history.

This painting was in the death area.  It nearly made me cry … something about a mourning dog is really poignant.  He won’t leave the coffin of his departed human and best friend.  (This is merely a reproduction; the original is hanging in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.)

A little better photo of the center of the painting:

Death played a much more prominent role in life before about 1950.  Children weren’t sheltered from it, seeing as most children would have at least one sibling that died.  During the Victorian era, women were expected to wear “mourning clothes” that had strict dictations about style depending on the relationship to the deceased and the amount of time that had passed since the person died.  The mourning clothes were so expensive that poor women, who were expected to follow the customs as well, often went without food in order to spend money on the appropriate outfits.  It got so out of hand that people started to rebel against it.  When Queen Victoria died, the custom of long periods of public mourning pretty much died out, too.

The wedding displays were interesting, as well.  The modern wedding has it’s roots in the Victorian customs, but they were still quite different from what people generally do today.  For example, a bride would select her wedding dress with it’s versatility in mind — dresses were expensive, and a wedding dress would become a woman’s “best dress” after the marriage and worn on all other fancy occasions.  As such, the dresses tended to be colorful and versatile.

Wedding gifts were likewise much more practical, seeing as a young married couple was likely to have nothing to establish a new home.  One 1940s bride’s most extravagant wedding gift was a set of white pillow cases.  As recently as the 1970s a couple was likely to receive practical things necessary to the running of a home, like a toaster or a tea pot that were purchased from a local shop.  This is juxtaposed by a typical wedding registry list from a couple getting married in York in 2009, when people have likely been living away from their parents for quite some time and already have an established home of their own (and often have two homes between them) … most of the items were luxury items, like fancy crystal glasses, expensive flatware, espresso machines, etc.  Modern wedding dresses are usually one-use items, as well.

Here is a typical middle-class kitchen in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

Replica of a middle-class living room, circa 1950.

The museum is housed in an old women’s prison.  This was the Yard, where prisoners could get a little fresh air and exercise.  Josie is taking advantage.

York Castle … what’s left of it, anyway.

They had an area set up with authentic replicas of old armor from various times through history.  The oldest armor represented what wealthy soldiers wore in the 1000s, then ran up through the Crusades and Knights in the 14th century.

Meanwhile, the kids are getting dressed in armor and Adam is taking pictures from up on the top of the wall.

View from the top.  The carousel is in front of the York Museum (old prison, building on the left with the columns) we visited earlier.

Back to the kids, now dressed in the armor.  Holden is in the oldest (1000s maybe?) …. Isabella wearing a late Crusades helmet (1200s?) …. Josie in the most recent (1300s or so?)  I can’t remember the dates we were given for each one.  The weapons were period-correct, too.

The ladies giving the demonstration said that a kid from an affluent family would start his Knight training at age 7.  By 14, he would graduate to Squire and be assigned to a Knight.  The Squire’s job was to polish and maintain the Knight’s armor, as well as do any other tasks the Knight wanted done.  Only the very wealthy could become Knights because they had to furnish their own armor, weapons and horses, which was incredibly expensive.  If a Squire’s family could not afford these things, a Squire could conceivably remain a Squire his entire life.

The armor rusted overnight and had to be polished every morning.  They used goose fat mixed with sand as a polish; then moved on to finer minerals for a better polish; and finished off with a chalk polish.  The ladies said they have to polish these helmets every single day because they are made with the same materials the originals were made of.  It takes a long time just to polish the helmets; real Squires would have had to take care of an entire suit of armor.

Me up on the castle wall.  They had 360 views from up here, necessary for keeping an eye out for bad guys.

York.  This is The Shambles … originally a butcher’s alley.  It was once known as The Great Flesh Shambles, probably from the Anglo-Saxon Fleshammels (literally ‘flesh-shelves’), the word for the shelves that butchers used to display their meat.  [From wikipedia:  During that period there were no sanitary facilities or hygiene laws as exist today, and guts, offal, and blood were thrown into a runnel down the middle of the street or open space where the butchering was carried out. By extension, any scene of total disorganisation and mess is now referred to as, “a shambles”.]

Now it is one of the only alleys left in England that still has the original overhanging buildings.  In all the other towns and cities the overhanging buildings were cleared out to make way for automobiles.  The Shambles is, by necessity, pedestrian only.

In this photo (below) Holden has made Isabella angry doing who-knows-what.  Isabella is conspiring with Josie to form an anti-Holden alliance.  Holden has turned toward us because he is telling.

Isabella and I sampling jasmine tea.  Isabella really liked the jasmine tea (I don’t care for it much) but we both hated the rhubarb tea, which tasted like sugar-free cough syrup.

Another shot of the tea shop.  You can see Isabella in the bright pinkish-orange shirt.

Here you can see the overhanging buildings … the are only about 3 feet apart up at the top.

York Minster Cathedral in the distance.  Even in person, it looks like it’s been CGI’d in.

This shop, Miss Diva, had dresses that were cute and — most importantly — met the dress code at Isabella’s school.  We girls went into inspect the wares, and Holden waited outside.  We could compile an entire album of photos of Holden sitting outside shops waiting.  At least in this photo he has a bag full of candy to clutch.

He’s decided to settle in for the long haul.

Another view of the York Minster cathedral.

Constantine; the guy largely responsible for bringing Christianity to the West.

There was some kind of memorial celebration going on.  A lot of these guys had Normandy ’44 Survivor buttons/ribbons on their jackets.

You can still walk along the old city wall.

Fairfax House.  This old house has one of the best collections of Georgian furniture in the world.

This lady (below) captured the kids and regaled them will all sorts of educational details of the sort they try to avoid on principle.  Namely, that little boys and girls were all dressed in dresses until about the age of 7, when boys were switched to breeches.  This was called “breeching” a boy.  As a result, family portrait paintings of the time showed little boys all in frilly lace dresses.  “It was considered normal,” she assured them.

Josie giving Isabella the “how do we get out of learning stuff without being rude?” face.

The kitchen.  The old kitchens are fascinating to me.  I love seeing how people used to prepare food.  I spend 3 to 4 hours each day on food-related activities when we’re at home, so I’m really interested in how food handling and preparation has been done in the past.

They had a table set with fake examples of typical foods served in this stately home.  The kids are inspecting what looks like huge molded jelly filled with little suspended eels — complete with heads and tails.  They all say, “Ewwwwwwwww!!!”

Their impressive entrance.  This blue color was quite rare and a big deal at the time.

We checked into our house for the next four days, in a little town about 30 miles from York.  It’s a fantastic little house, with the one caveat that the internet doesn’t work.  We went from a house in Manchester with no TV but great internet to a house outside York with a TV and no internet.  We can’t seem to get all our ducks in a row this week.

July 21, Monday

In light of not having any internet access, we drove to York this morning and took up temporary residence in a Starbucks.  Adam had work (real work) to get done, and I did play/work on my blog posting from yesterday.  The kids brought their iPads and plugged in with their headphones.

To all the strangers milling about, we probably look like “those people” who sit in public so totally immersed in their electronic devices that they can’t be bothered to pay attention to each other.  I wouldn’t be surprised if someone snapped a phone pic of us and posted it with a judgmental caption like, “This is what’s wrong with families today!”  In reality, we’ve spent so much time together for the past two months that we’re starting to get sick of each other.  But mostly, we had stuff that needed to get done that normally gets done in the evenings once we’ve settled in for the night.

Adam finished up his work first and headed out for a little walk in York by himself.  He snuck into the York Minster Cathedral and snapped one pic before being chased out for not purchasing a ticket.

Another shot of The Shambles.

Our big event of the day was a visit to Castle Howard.  It’s an absolutely amazing old rich family’s house.  It’s so fancy you tour through it in awe, which gives way to becoming kind of disgusted at how extravagantly the family lived.  It’s kind of gross for some people to have this kind of wealth compared to everyone else.  The line delineating what is nice and what is ostentatious is a moving target, but these folks were way across it.  My Puritan genetic inheritance kicks in and I can’t help but decide I hate these people and everything they stood for.  Josie looks cute in the garden, though.

Really big koi.

Here is the house.  This is only part of it, mind you.  One wing isn’t showing, and you can’t see the extensive back side.

One family owns this.

True to form, Holden doesn’t care.  Here he is, sitting next to the bowl of water left out for dogs that have to wait outside.  Holden had to go into the house, which made him jealous of the dogs.

One of the lesser hallways.  In the 1740s, one of the earls went to Italy and bought up every 1st-3rd century statue he could find.  At the time, relics like these were dirt cheap.  He, and others like him, literally shipped boatloads of crates of statues and art home to decorate their places.

Main entrance, designed to impress people.  Mission accomplished.

Sitting room.

Of course the house comes with extensive grounds.  Here the kids are running to the lake cafe and playground area.

Ice cream in the Boar Garden.

This statue is to commemorate a Greek boy who was tasked with delivering an important message to someone.  He didn’t stop to pull the thorn out of his foot until after the message had been delivered.  Holden, who has perpetual trouble with his shoes, would not have had a commemorative statue made of him.  He totally would have stopped to remove the thorn before the message delivery.  (This is perhaps my favorite picture from the entire trip.  I plan to frame it when we get home.)

Then we found peacocks.  They were molting and we found many fancy tail feathers strewn about the property.  I collected 5 or 6 of them … score!!

Last stop of the day was Kirkham Priory.  Unfortunately it was closed so all we could do is stand at the gate and peer over.