The walk along the walls from Bootham Bar to Monk Bar is glorious in spring, with the pink and white blossoms of apple, pear, and plum-trees, for here the well-ordered gardens of the ecclesiastical dignitaries are chiefly situated. Midway, the wall makes a return in a south-easterly direction. Monk Bar, whose name derives from General Monk, Duke of Albemarle, was once known as Goodramgate, and the street in which it stands still bears that name, supposed to be a corruption of “Guthram,” the name of some forgotten Danish chieftain. At some distance beyond it, the wall goes off due east, to touch the river Foss at Layerthorpe, where that stream and the quagmires that once bordered it afforded an excellent defence in themselves, without any artificial works. Thus it is that the wall ceases entirely until the Red Tower is reached, on the outer bank of the Foss, where it recommences and takes a bend to the south-west. From this point to Walmgate Bar and the Fishergate Postern it is particularly slight, the necessary strength being provided by the Foss itself, forming a second line of defence, with the castle behind it. Thence we come to the broad Ouse again, now crossed by the Skeldergate Bridge, but once protected, as at Lendal, by chains drawn from bank to bank. On the opposite bank, on the partly natural elevation of Baile Hill, stood a subsidiary castle, and here the wall is carried on a very high mound until it rejoins Micklegate Bar.

There are but few so-called “streets” in York. They are mostly “gates,” a peculiarity of description which is noticeable throughout the Midlands and the North. And queerly named some of these “gates” are. There is Jubbergate, whose name perpetuates the memory of an ancient Jewish quarter established here; Stonegate, the narrow lane leading to the Minster, along which went the stone with which to build it; Swinegate, a neighbourhood where the unclean beasts were kept, and many more. But most curious of all is “Whipmawhopmagate,” a continuation of Colliergate. This oddly named place is rarely brought to the notice of the stranger, because it has but two houses; but, despite its whimsical name, it has a real, and indeed a very old, existence. Connected with its name is the institution of “Whip Dog Day,” a celebration once honoured on every St. Luke’s Day, October 18, by the thrashing of all the dogs met with in the city. According to the legend still current, it seems that in mediæval times, while the priest was celebrating the sacrament at the neighbouring church of St. Crux, he dropped the consecrated pax, which was swallowed by a stray dog who had found his way into the building. For this crime the animal was sentenced to be severely whipped, and an annual day was set apart for the indiscriminate thrashing of his fellows. A more likely derivation of the name of Whipmawhopmagate is from the spot having been the whipping-place of religious penitents, or of merely secular misdemeanants.

II

The grim blackened walls of York Castle confront the traveller who approaches the city by Fishergate, and lend a gloomy air to the entrance; the more gloomy because those heavy piles of sooty masonry nowadays encircle a prison for malefactors, rather than forming the defences of a garrison, and keep our social enemies within, instead of a more chivalric foe without. For over two hundred years York Castle has been an assize court and a gaol, and the military element no longer lends it pure romance. Romance of the sordid kind it has, this beetle-browed place of vain regrets and expiated crimes, of dismal cells and clanking fetters; but if you would win back to the days of military glory which once distinguished it, your imaginary journey will be lengthy indeed. These battlemented walls, enclosing four acres of ground, and with a compass of over eleven hundred yards, were completed in 1856, and, with the prison arrangements within, cost £200,000. If, as the poet remarks, “peace hath her victories, no less renowned than war,” she also needs defences, as much against the villainous centre-bit as against the foreign foe.

But there is still something left of the York Castle of old, although you must win to it past frowning portals eloquent of a thousand crimes, great and small, guarded by prison warders and decorated with notice-boards of Prison Regulations. Clifford’s Tower, this ancient portion, itself goes no farther back into history than the time of Edward the First; and of the buildings that witnessed the appalling massacre of the Jews, in March 1190, nothing fortunately remains. It cannot be to the advantage of sightseers that the blood-stained stones of that awful time should stand. History alone, without the aid of sword or shattered wall, is more than sufficient to keep the barbarous tale alive, of how some five hundred Jews of all ages and sexes fled for protection to the Castle keep, and were besieged there for days by Christians, thirsting for their blood. Their death was sure: only the manner of it remained uncertain. The wholesale slaughter of Jews at Lynn, Lincoln, and Stamford rendered surrender impossible, and rather than die slowly in the agonies of starvation they set the Castle on fire, husbands and brothers slaying the women and children, and then stabbing themselves. Those few who feared to die thus opened the gates as morning dawned. “Affliction has taught us wisdom,” they said, “and we long for baptism and for the faith and peace of Christ”; but even as they said it the swords and axes of ruthless assassins struck them down. Christ was avenged, and, incidentally, many a Christian debtor cried quits with his Jewish creditor as he dashed out the infidel’s brains. It is not often given to champions of causes, religious or political, to make one blow serve both public and private ends, and those Christians were fortunate. At the same time, sympathy with the murdered Jews may easily be overstrained. They had but sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Trading and following the traditional Jewish occupation of usury, they had eaten like a canker into the heart of York. They had lived in princely style, and knew how to grind the faces of their Christian debtors, whose lives they had made miserable, and so simply fell victims to that revenge which has been aptly described as “a kind of wild justice.”

Clifford’s Tower, standing where these scenes were enacted, is a roofless shell, standing isolated on its mound within the Castle walls, and obtains its name, not from its builder, but from Francis Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who made a doorway in it in the time of Charles the First. It was ruined by explosion and fire in 1684, and so remains, shattered and overgrown with trees and grass, a picturesque object that the eye loves to linger upon in contrast with the classic buildings that occupy the old Castle wards, and speak of crime and its penalties. He who would bring back the crimes and ferocities of a hundred and fifty years or more to the mind’s eye can have his taste gratified and the most vivid pictures conjured up at the sight of such choice and thrilling relics as the horn-handled knife and fork with which the bodies of rebels captured in the ’45 were quartered; the leathern strap that Holroyd used for the purpose of hanging his father from the boughs of a cherry-tree; a fragment of the skull of Eugene Aram’s victim, Daniel Clark; the curiously varied implements used by wives and husbands who murdered their yoke-fellows, ranging from the unwifely sledge-hammer and razor wielded by wives, to the knives and pokers chiefly affected by the husbands; Jonathan Martin the incendiary’s impromptu flint and steel, and the bell rope by whose aid he escaped from the Minster; and those prime curiosities, Dick Turpin’s fetters. Even Turpin’s cell can be seen by those who, after much diligent application to the Prisons Department of the Home Office, procure the entrée to the Castle; and in that “stone jug,” as the criminals of old called their cells, the imaginative can reconstruct their Turpin as they will. Many a better man than he has occupied this gloomy dungeon, but scarce a worse.

III

One of the most notorious of the criminals who were haled forth from this condemned hold to end their days on Knavesmire was Richard Turpin, who was hanged on the 17th of April, 1739. This cruel and mean ruffian, around whose sordid career the glamour of countless legends of varying degrees of impossibility has gathered, was the son of a small innkeeper and farmer at the appropriately named village of Hempstead, in Essex. The inn, called the “Crown,” almost wholly rebuilt, however, is in existence to this day, and his baptismal record may yet be read in the parish register:—“1705, Sept. 21, Richardus, filius Johannis et Mariae Turpin.”

Apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel, he soon set up in business for himself, obtaining his cattle by the simple and ready expedient of stealing them. He married a girl named Palmer, whose name he afterwards took, and after a career of house-breaking and cattle-lifting in Essex and parts of Middlesex, in which he figured as one of a numerous gang who never attacked or plundered unless they were armed to the teeth and in a great numerical superiority, found the home counties too hot to hold him; and so, after shooting his friend, one of the three brothers King, all highwaymen, in the affray at Whitechapel in 1737, in which he escaped from the Bow Street officers, he fled first into Essex and then into Lincolnshire. Authorities disagree, both as to the particular King who was shot, and on the question of whether Turpin shot him accidentally in aiming at one of the officers, or with the purpose of preventing him giving evidence disclosing his haunts. The legends make Tom King the martyr on this occasion, and represent him as bidding Turpin to fly; but the facts seem to point to Matthew being the victim, and to his cursing Turpin for a coward, as he died. It is quite certain that a Tom King, a highwayman, suffered at Tyburn in 1755, eight years later.