York had a good friend in Richard, Duke of Gloucester. The city was very loyal to him and helped him by raising troops in his support. When he visited York he was received with immense festivity and magnificence. The Mayor and Corporation in their correspondence with him addressed him as "our full tender and especial good lord." They had to thank him "for his great labour now late made unto ye king's good grace for the confirmation of the liberties of this city." But for his death at Bosworth, York would have benefited greatly by his munificence.
Henry VII. was in York in 1487. After Bosworth (1485) the city had assured him of its loyalty. The marriage of Henry of Richmond, who represented the House of Lancaster, and Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV. Duke of York, fittingly followed the conclusion of the Wars of the Roses. With Henry VII.'s reign a new era began in English history.
Throughout the century the city could not avoid contact with rival parties and powers. In spite, however, of rebellions and the Wars of the Roses, the capital of the north managed generally to steer a safe course through many storms.
Other links with national affairs were the periodic visits of the King's judges who travelled on circuit over the country, stopping at important centres to hold assize there. Their duties consisted not only in settling matters of litigation, but also in reviewing the way in which all the King's affairs were being conducted in each locality. They supervised the work of the sheriffs.
Galtres Forest and the Fish Pond, both royal property, helped to furnish the king's table with food. From the royal Larder at York such foodstuffs as venison, game, and fish were despatched salted to wherever the King required them.
C. Business Life [ToC]
Business, in one form or another, was the occupation of the majority of the citizens. There were a few capitalist merchants, many traders, and thousands of employed workpeople, skilled and unskilled. Such street names as Spurriergate, Fishergate, Girdlergate, Hosier Lane, and Colliergate would suggest that men in the same trade had their premises in the same quarter, possibly in the same street.
The English middle class, which had taken form in the fourteenth century, was well established in the fifteenth century, when it became so important as to be an appreciable factor in the national life. The middle class arose through currency, the use of money to bring in more money by trading. Trade became the monopoly of the middle class, the successful master-traders. It was men of this class, the capitalist employers, the merchants and traders who were the mayors and aldermen, who ruled the city. The exclusiveness, which was eminently characteristic of this class, appeared especially in their attitude towards national taxation and in that towards trade organisations. With regard to taxation the towns persistently avoided the assessment of individual traders, who did not wish to disclose the amount of their wealth, by agreeing that the whole town should pay to the Exchequer a sum to be raised by the Mayor and Corporation. The middle class achieved its aims politically by transformation from within. Instead of making a direct assertive attack, these master-traders usually so developed their own interests within the established institutions (such as the guilds) that they ultimately gained their object quietly and shrewdly. This class established itself against the King and the nobles on the one hand, and during the century in effective fashion against the workers on the other. This appears in the more definite distinctions of class among the citizens that arose. The masters had got the control of the guilds into their own power. While maintaining the original outward appearance of the guilds as societies of men affected by the same interests in daily life, the employers had actually become a powerful vested class that ruled both city and guild life. In the fifteenth century the workmen were founding fraternities of their own.
Memory of the Jews, the money-dealers of other times, survived if only from the harrowing stories of the various persecutions that had taken place all over England, and not least in York. The Jews had been expelled from the country by Edward I., with the encouragement of the Church, in 1290, partly for economic, partly for religious reasons. Their supplanters, the Italian bankers, whom Edward favoured, soon acquired from their trading an unpopularity equal to that of the Jews as traders. The rise of the middle class had coincided with the release of money in coin from the hoards of the Jews, and from the coffers of the Knights Templars, whose order was abolished in 1312.
The merchant and trading class, apart from the nobility and the Church, formed the bulk of the people of the nation. They were the solid part of the nation, that paid taxes, that supplied clerks, monks, and priests, that liberally supported the Church, that kept the nation progressive and solvent by commercial undertakings.