York Castle

York had been a Viking capital in the tenth century and was still an important northern city when William the Conqueror, on his first northern expedition after the Conquest, built a wooden motte-and-bailey between the Ouse and the Foss in 1068. It went up in haste — contemporary accounts imply eight days, though the claim has been challenged — and hundreds of houses had to be destroyed to clear the ground. William Malet, sheriff of Yorkshire, was placed in charge and successfully defended it against an immediate uprising by the local population.

A second campaign in 1069 added another motte-and-bailey across the Ouse at what is now Baile Hill, and later that year a Danish fleet came up the Humber and the Ouse to attack both, alongside Cospatrick of Northumbria and a number of local rebels. The Normans set fire to some of the city's houses to drive the rebels back; the blaze ran out of control and took York Minster with it. Both castles were captured and partially dismantled, and Malet was taken hostage by the Danes. The Harrying of the North in 1069 and 1070 restored order enough to rebuild them in timber, and by the Domesday survey of 1086 the castle was ringed by a water-filled moat and a large artificial lake, the King's Pool, dammed from the Foss.

The Normans had introduced the first Jewish communities into England, where some worked as moneylenders, an essential activity otherwise banned, and English Jews lived mainly in towns with a royal castle that could shelter them from the Christian majority. Richard I's coronation in 1189 and his announcement that he would join the Crusades inflamed anti-Jewish feeling, and rumours spread that the king had ordered the English Jews attacked.

In York the violence came the following year. Richard de Malbis, who owed money to the Jewish merchant Aaron of Lincoln, used an accidental house fire as his occasion to incite a mob against the home and family of a recently deceased employee of Aaron's. Josce of York, the leader of the Jewish community, led the local Jewish families into the royal castle, where they took refuge in the wooden keep. The mob surrounded the castle; when the constable went out to discuss the situation, those inside — fearing the mob would be admitted or that they would be handed to the sheriff — refused to let him back in. The constable appealed to the sheriff, who called out his own men and laid siege to the keep. The siege ran until 16 March, when the position inside became untenable. Their religious leader, Rabbi Yomtob, proposed an act of collective suicide rather than death at the hands of the mob, and the keep was set on fire so the bodies could not be mutilated afterwards. Several died in the flames and most took their own lives; a handful who surrendered, promising to convert to Christianity, were killed by the crowd. Around 150 Jews died in total. The keep was rebuilt in wood on the motte, which was raised by 13 ft (4 m) at a cost of £207.

Official histories of the castle underplayed the killings until the 1970s, and early official guides made no reference to them at all. The first memorial tablet to the victims was laid at the base of Clifford's Tower in 1978, and the 800th anniversary was commemorated there in 1990.

A gale during Henry III's Christmas visit of 1228 destroyed the wooden keep on the motte, and it was apparently never repaired. In 1244, with the Scots threatening to invade, Henry ordered the castle rebuilt in white limestone at a cost of about £2,600; the work of 1245 to 1270 produced a towered curtain wall, a great gatehouse with two large towers, a chapel and a new stone keep. That keep, raised by the master mason Henry de Rayns and the chief carpenter Simon of Northampton, was first called the King's Tower: a quatrefoil of four circular lobes, each 22 ft (6.7 m) across, with walls 9 ft 6 in (2.9 m) thick and loopholes of a design unique to York, believed to have been an experiment in improving flanking fire by opening more ground to view from the summit. The weight told — around 1358-60 the south-eastern lobe cracked from top to bottom, and instead of the complete rebuild royal officials recommended it was patched for £200. Its later name may record the Clifford family's claim that the constableship was hereditary, or Roger Clifford, 2nd Baron Clifford, executed after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322 and hung on a gibbet at the castle.

Through the Scottish wars under Edward I and his son, York Castle served as the centre of royal administration in England for almost half the years between 1298 and 1338, Westminster institutions following the king north into the castle compound. The Exchequer took over Clifford's Tower, the courts at York began to compete with those in London in a pattern that lasted into the 1360s, and in 1344 Edward III established a permanent mint in the castle to strike gold and silver for the north.

It was a jail throughout, and increasingly little else: up to 310 prisoners were held at once in conditions described as appalling, and 28 broke out successfully in 1298. Many of the Knights Templar arrested when the order was dissolved in England in 1307 were held here, as were Edward II's rebel barons, many of them executed here after Boroughbridge in 1322. Repairs grew infrequent from 1400, and by Elizabeth I's reign the castle was reckoned to have lost all military value; her tower keeper Robert Redhead grew notorious for selling off its stonework, and a proposal in 1596 to demolish the tower outright was refused because of the strength of local feeling.

Forces loyal to Charles I under Henry Clifford garrisoned the castle and city in 1643, making York the northern capital of the Royalist cause; Clifford strengthened the walls to carry cannon and turned Baile Hill into a gun emplacement, while the mint reopened to coin for the king's forces. Parliamentary forces opened the siege of York on 23 April 1644, a Scottish army under Alexander Leslie coming from the south and Ferdinando Fairfax's force from the east, joined six weeks later by a third contingent under Edward Montagu that took the besiegers past 30,000 men. Bombardment, attempts to undermine the walls and attacks on the gates all failed, and the city held through May and June until Prince Rupert's manoeuvring forced the besiegers to withdraw on 1 July. The next day Rupert was beaten at Marston Moor, six miles west, and on 14 July the city and castle surrendered, the Royalists marching out with full honours.

A garrison stayed on after the Restoration, holding the tower as a magazine for powder and shot, and both the garrison and its cost were resented in York. At around ten at night on St George's Day in 1684 the magazine exploded and destroyed the tower's interior. The official explanation was that the celebratory salute from the guns on the roof had set fire to the woodwork; most historians believe it was not accidental, noting the local habit of toasting the demolition of the "Minced Pie", the garrison men who moved their belongings to safety beforehand, and that no one in it was hurt. The bailey was rebuilt through the eighteenth century as the county's jail and assize courts, and in 1825 the county bought the ruined tower meaning to clear it for a new prison, until Sydney Smith, the writer and vicar of Foston-le-Clay, led a successful campaign to save it. The tower outlasted the prison, which closed in 1929.