| Photo by] | North Bar Without, Beverley. | [C.W. Mason |
How early these Bars were built we do not know, but there have recently been discovered the complete accounts for the rebuilding of North Bar in 1409. This is the Bar which exists to-day, and it has, in its five hundred years’ existence, undergone little change, except for the cutting through it of two side-passages for foot traffic. It still has the massive oak folding doors which were shut every night at sunset, and the groove can yet be seen in which the portcullis worked. If you ride on through the Bar to York, you will enter that city by the Walmgate Bar, and above your head as you pass through this you may see the bottom spikes of its still remaining portcullis.
Hull was defended even more strongly than Beverley; for in 1322 the King granted to its townsfolk leave to defend themselves with a wall as well as a moat. A portion of the wall which they built is represented on the old plan of Hull reproduced in part on the opposite page.
This plan shows the town as it was about the year 1380, and makes very clear the difference between a town and a village five centuries ago. On the left bank of the river Hull is the village of Dripole, with its church and few scattered houses; on the right bank is the town of Kyngeston-upon-Hull, with its churches, houses, and gardens closely packed together within a castellated wall, and protected by a riverside battery armed with three small cannon. The shipping on the river is seen to be also protected, and this with an iron chain drawn across the mouth of the river.
In the part of the plan not here given, there is shown a more ominous sign of authority. Outside the Beverley Gate stands a gibbet on which hang the bodies of three culprits as warnings of the fate that comes to evil-doers.
To those accustomed to the wide and well-paved streets of our modern towns, the streets of a mediæval town would appear very strange. On the plan of Hull the two main streets, then known as Aldgate and Lowgate, are shown fairly wide. But High Street, which follows regularly in its course the windings of the river Hull, is much narrower; and the by-streets of the town are so narrow as not to appear at all.
Part of a Fourteenth-Century Plan of Hull.