York through the ages

York was founded in AD 71, when Quintus Petillius Cerialis and the Ninth Legion pushed north of the Humber against the Brigantes and built a fortress on flat ground above the Ouse, close to its junction with the Foss. Its walls were later rebuilt in stone, enclosing fifty acres garrisoned by 6,000 legionary soldiers; the headquarters building lay under what became York Minster. The earliest known mention of the place by name is a stylus tablet from Vindolanda, dated to about AD 95–104, which calls it Eburaci, a Latinisation of the Brittonic *Eburācon, which may mean 'place of yew trees', though as Eburos is also recorded as a personal name an alternative reading is 'property of Eburos'.

The Ninth Legion's garrison was replaced by the Sixth between AD 109 and 122; the Ninth leaves no documented trace after 117, and various theories have been proposed about what became of it. The Sixth stayed until Roman occupation ended around AD 400. The military presence set the town's economy: workshops supplied the troops with pottery until the mid-third century, tile from kilns around Aldwark and Peasholme Green, glass from Coppergate, and metal and leather equipment from Tanner Row. Local people built a permanent civilian settlement on the south-west bank opposite the fortress, and by 237 it had been made a colonia, one of only four in Britain, self-governing under a council of wealthy locals, merchants and veteran soldiers.

During his stay between AD 207 and 211 the emperor Septimius Severus proclaimed the town capital of the province of Britannia Inferior, and it was probably he who granted it the privileges of a colonia. Constantius I died in York in AD 306 and his son Constantine the Great was proclaimed emperor by the troops in the fortress. A Christian community existed, though it is not known when it formed and there is virtually no archaeological trace of it; the first evidence is the attendance of Bishop Eborius of Eboracum at the Council of Arles in 314. By AD 400 winter floods came off the Ouse and Foss, the wharf-side facilities lay buried under silt, and the main bridge to the fortress may have fallen derelict. The colonia stood above flood level but was largely abandoned.

Angles settled the area in the early sixth century — cremation cemeteries of that date have been excavated on The Mount and at Heworth — though whether York itself was occupied then remains unclear. It became the Anglian capital of Deira and, after Deira united with Bernicia, one of the capitals of Northumbria. Reclamation of the flooded ground began in the seventh century under Edwin of Northumbria, who was baptised in 627 in the wooden church Paulinus set up here, the precursor of the Minster; Edwin ordered it rebuilt in stone but was killed in 633, leaving Oswald to finish the work. The see became an archbishopric in 735. York grew into a centre of learning around its library and school, the ancestor of St Peter's School, whose most distinguished pupil and later master was Alcuin, afterwards adviser to Charlemagne. By the eighth century it traded with other parts of England, northern France, the Low Countries and the Rhineland.

In November 866 a large Danish army, the force the Anglo-Saxons called the Great Heathen Army and led by Ivar the Boneless and Halfdan, took York unopposed while Northumbria was consumed by its own conflicts. The assault fell on All Saints' Day, when most of the town's leaders were in the cathedral. The Northumbrians tried and failed to retake the city the next year; the army withdrew, leaving a puppet king over the territory it held, and returned in 875 when Halfdan took control directly.

Under Viking rule the renamed Jórvík became the capital of Scandinavian territory in Britain and a river port on trading routes across northern Europe, with Danes settling in large numbers. At its peak it held more than 10,000 inhabitants, a population second only to London within Great Britain. Coin was struck at the Jórvík mint, and excavation around Coppergate has found workshops for textiles, metalwork, carving, glasswork and jewellery-making, alongside materials brought from as far as the Persian Gulf. In 954 the last Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, was driven out by King Eadred and the kingdom was absorbed into the consolidating Anglo-Saxon state.

The people of York rebelled in 1068, two years after the Norman conquest, and succeeded until William the Conqueror arrived and put the rising down. He raised a wooden fortress on a motte at once, and after a further rebellion in 1069 built a second timber castle across the Ouse. Both were destroyed that year and rebuilt in the course of the harrying of the north, William's punitive campaign that laid waste the country from York to Durham. The first stone minster was badly damaged by fire during the uprising, and around 1080 Archbishop Thomas began, on a new site, the cathedral that became the present Minster. The city recovered as the administrative centre of Yorkshire, the seat of an archbishop and, at times in the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an alternative seat of royal government.

As a possession of the crown it also came to house a substantial Jewish community, under the protection of the sheriff. On 16 March 1190 a mob of townsfolk forced the Jews of York to take refuge in the castle keep, on the site later occupied by Clifford's Tower. The castle was set on fire and the Jews were massacred. Accounts of the toll differ: at least 150 people were killed, and some authorities put the number as high as 500. Local magnates who were in debt to the Jews are likely to have instigated the killings or at least done nothing to prevent them; the massacre came during a period of widespread attacks on Jews in Britain. The community did recover afterwards, and a Jewish presence remained in York until the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

Its position on the Ouse and its nearness to the Great North Road made York a major trading centre. King John granted the city its first charter in 1212, confirming trading rights in England and Europe. Through the later Middle Ages its merchants imported wine from France, cloth, wax, canvas and oats from the Low Countries and timber and furs from the Baltic, and exported grain to Gascony and grain and wool to the Low Countries. The city became a cloth-manufacturing centre in its own right, and Edward I stimulated its economy by using it as a base for his war in Scotland. There was significant unrest here during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. York steadily won autonomy from central government, including privileges granted by a charter of Richard II in 1396, and was designated a county corporate, giving it effective county status.

The later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth centuries were a period of particular prosperity. It was then that the York Mystery Plays grew up, a cycle of religious pageants attached to Corpus Christi and performed by the craft guilds. Among the leading figures of the period was the merchant Nicholas Blackburn senior, Lord Mayor in 1412, shown with his wife Margaret in glass at All Saints', North Street. From the later fifteenth century the economy appears to have contracted and York's regional importance to have dwindled; the new Guildhall built around the middle of that century can be read as an attempt to project civic confidence against growing uncertainty.

York declined economically under the Tudors. The dissolution of the monasteries closed every monastic institution in the city, including St Leonard's Hospital — the largest such institution in the north of England — and, in 1539, St Mary's Abbey. It helped provoke the Pilgrimage of Grace, a rising of northern Catholics in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire against religious reform, after which Henry VIII reasserted his authority by establishing the Council of the North in the dissolved abbey; from 1537 to 1641 it sat in the King's Manor. In 1547 fifteen parish churches were closed, cutting the number from forty to twenty-five, a measure of the fall in population. Although the Reformation made Roman Catholicism illegal, a largely secret Catholic community persisted. Margaret Clitherow was executed in 1586 for harbouring a priest. Guy Fawkes, baptised in the rebuilt church of St Michael le Belfrey in 1570, was born and educated in York and joined the group that planned to blow up Parliament in 1605.

After his break with Parliament, Charles I moved his court to York in 1642 and held it there for six months. The city was treated as a Royalist stronghold, and in 1644 the Parliamentarians besieged it; many medieval houses outside the walls were lost. The barbican at Walmgate Bar was undermined and explosives laid, but the plot was found out. Prince Rupert arrived with 15,000 men and lifted the siege, pursued the retreating Parliamentarians some six miles, and was then turned on and heavily defeated at Marston Moor, losing 4,000 men killed and 1,500 captured. The siege was resumed and the city surrendered to Fairfax on 15 July. York slowly regained its standing in the north, and by 1660 was the third-largest city in England after London and Norwich. The Bar Convent was founded in 1686, in secret because of the anti-Catholic laws.

With the monarchy restored in 1660 and the garrison removed in 1688, the city was dominated by its gentry and merchants. Competition from Leeds and Hull, together with the silting of the Ouse, cost York its pre-eminence as a trading centre, while its role as the social and cultural capital for wealthy northerners grew: the Mansion House, Fairfax House, the Assembly Rooms, the Theatre Royal and the racecourse all date from this time. In 1796 the Quaker William Tuke founded The Retreat outside the walls, a hospital for the mentally ill run on moral treatment.

George Hudson brought the railway to York in 1839, and his promotion of the city over Leeds, and of his own York and North Midland Railway, established it as a major railway centre by the late nineteenth century, though his own career ended in disgrace and bankruptcy. Engineering followed: by the turn of the twentieth century the North Eastern Railway's headquarters and works employed more than 5,500 people, and the York Carriage Works had employed 5,500 at its height in the 1880s. The railway also carried the growth of Rowntree's Cocoa Works, founded in 1862 by Henry Isaac Rowntree and joined in 1869 by his brother Joseph; Terry's was the other large confectioner. By 1900 railways and confectionery were the city's two major industries. Both went. The Carriage Works closed in the mid-1990s and its site was redeveloped as offices; Terry's factory closed on 30 September 2005 when Kraft Foods moved production to Poland; and on 20 September 2006 Nestlé announced 645 job cuts at Rowntree's.

On 29 April 1942 York was bombed by the Luftwaffe as part of the retaliatory Baedeker Blitz. Ninety-two people were killed and hundreds injured. The buildings damaged included the railway station, Rowntree's factory, St Martin-le-Grand Church, the Bar Convent and the Guildhall, which was gutted and left unrestored until 1960.

As tourism grew, the historic core became one of the city's principal assets and was designated a conservation area in 1968. The University of York took its first students in 1963; the National Railway Museum opened in 1975 and the Jorvik Viking Centre in 1984. In October and November 2000 the Ouse rose and the city flooded severely, more than 300 houses affected. York holds 34 conservation areas, 2,084 listed buildings and 22 scheduled ancient monuments, and sits on the tentative list for World Heritage inscription. It is the traditional county town of Yorkshire and the administrative centre of the City of York district; at the 2021 census the built-up area had 141,685 people and the wider city about 202,800.