Yorkshire (Day 5, part 1): Romans, Cafes and Belt Merchants

I knew the smell. Burning plastic.

My Nikon's battery has a freakishly long field life, so I left the spare in its plugged-in charging cradle at the hotel when we headed out in the morning. It was probably overkill to leave the thing charging all day, as it zaps up in two hours or less, but anyway I did. By the morning of our last full day in York, my charger was in meltdown. We couldn't figure out why - we had the requisite 220v converters on everything. But it was frying.

And Sharon had lost her spare battery somewhere Out There (a cemetery, we think, as if it matters), presumably leaping unnoticed like a startled rodent from the bottom of her camera bag, so our stay-in-York day was to kick off with a trip to a camera store. A tourist town like this, there has to be scads of camera stores.

Well, there are two, at least in the town center, and one was a Curry's, which is sort of a British Radio Shack, primary difference being native voltage and the fact that Curry's actually seems to have customers. We chatted up a nice older chap named Julian (he told us he was Catholic, although I don't recall that we asked), who apologized that he had neither a spare battery for Sharon, nor a Brit-version charger for my Nikon battery. (Conveniently enough, our batteries require different chargers.)

He sent us over to York Camera Mart, offering to at least charge my extra battery up with the store's universal charge in the meantime, to be sure that the overheated charger hadn't ruined it.

York Camera Mart

Unsurprisingly, the eager chap at the camera shop, which is smaller on the inside than it looks, also had neither item, but he did have an odd universal lithium battery charger that was fully Euro-voltage compliant (why wouldn't it be?) and should be suitable substitute for my heat-prostrated Nikon charger. It looked like an Empire Cruiser, from Star Wars. Sold. Sharon would just have to recharge each night - a modest inconvenience.

After a stop back the hotel, we ambled off church-crawling. First stop was St Martin-cum-Gregory, a dour Grade 1 structure outside the city walls, a block or two from the Lady Anne.

St Martin cum Gregory - York

St Martin cum Gregory - York

Like a number of York's medieval churches, the place had been re-purposed many years ago; it was the Stained Glass Centre now, an educational resource of some sort. Locked tight, we shot the cemetery through the fence, and left wondering what the inside was like.

St Martin cum Gregory - churchyard

St Martin cum Gregory - churchyard

St John sits quietly on the busy Mickelgate, not far from the Lady Anne, largely unchanged from its 14th and 15th century origins, but it closed as a church in 1934 and the interior is now a toney cafe. It was called The Parish when we were there, but appears now to be called Tiger 10. Someone on the internet was complaining about the bouncers there. It's a beautiful building, but it's not a church anymore, and never will be again.

Tiger 10 (formally The Parish, originally St John Mickelgate) - York

St Mary's Abbey was once the most important religious site in Yorkshire - Henry VIII's guys tore it down in 1539, or as much of it as they felt inclined to.

St Mary's Abbey - York

It's probably the heart of the city center now, at least as much as the Minster; the grounds are a gardened-lined park sloping down to the River Ouse, and the stately Yorkshire Museum sits on the site as well.

We had wanted to see the place in 2012, but they were in the process of setting up scaffolding and seating for some kind of theater presentation and most of the Abbey site was gated off.

The grounds are partially bordered by the seventeen hundred year old Roman walls, and huge Roman sarcophagi are scattered here and there. I guess I wondered why these immense tombs (yes, all empty, at least as far as we know) were just sitting outside, rather than being in a museum someplace. Turns out that these artifacts are being exhibited by the York Museums Trust, and they have some info on them here.

Roman sarcophagi  - York

Roman sarcophagi  - York

We debated briefly about going into the museum, but figured we'd be in there for much of the day, essentially foreclosing on the rest of the church tour. Too bad, since Richard III's recreated head was in there.

Picnickers and kids chasing dogs gave the place a relaxed, everyday kind of feel to it. And why not, it's a park.

Fancy a crisp? St Mary's Abbey - York

I suppose you get used to munching crisps in the shadow of Roman fortifications and an ancient Benedictine abbey.

At the back of the Abbey grounds we found St Olave, which we understand was founded pre-Conquest (meaning, prior to 1066). Cavernous and somewhat overbearing, a distant testimony of devotion to an ancient Viking Saint, I felt a little uncomfortable in there.

St Olave - York

St Olave - York

St Olave - York

We walked over to the side door leading to the churchyard. Aha! Here was something new - an open church, with a locked cemetery. What? We shot as much as we could from the gated doorway, which wasn't much, left the church and walked around the block, which was way around the block. On the way, we had to find a rest room, so we went into the University of York Archaeology college  - there was nobody there, but at least it was open - and then found our way to the Abbey grounds' north entrance, figuring we'd find a way into the cemetery.

Not really. Sharon and I took turns climbing up on the stone wall and shooting headstones from a one-handhold perch.

Things we do for dead guys - Sharon shooting St Olave churchyard

St Olave churchyard - York

St Olave churchyard - York

St Olave churchyard - York

Must have looked funny to the picnickers. Maybe it's a common site - tourists craning their necks over the Roman wall to shoot 18th century headstones in St Olave's churchyard - but I doubt it.

On the way back, we went through the oddly hidden side of the Abbey park - the Multiangular Tower (Roman and medieval)

Multiangular Tower - York

Multiangular Tower - York

and the remains of the 11th century St Leonard's Hospital, with its arched undercroft. It was the largest medieval hospital in the north of England, although little except these semi-roofed ruins remains of it. Reminded me a little of the cellarium at Fountains.

St Leonard's Hospital - York

St Leonard's Hospital - York

No picnickers here, and it wasn't locked.



We went back into town. Sharon had misplaced (actually, had left at home) her belt, so we found a little open air market and a vendor with about 3000 belts, headed back to Curry's for my battery, and went off looking for more medievalia.

And no, that's not a word.

Thrones, real and imagined

I checked into the Games of Thrones mythos a little late, somewhere around the third episode of Season 2 in 2012, and while I picked things up along the way, I was conscious of missing the full depth of Martin's story. The characters, the alliances, the history, the back stories.

The fact is, though, that the televised series is a sumptuous visual treat - elegantly recreated (albeit mythological) renderings of the late middle ages, modestly veiled references to War of the Roses history, arched and convincingly archaic dialogue, big money production values. A dragon here and ice ghoul there to remind us that the thing is rooted in fantasy. GoT is just  fun to look at, even if you don't always know what the hell is going on, and I was content to enjoy the spectacle even if the plot had to reveal itself to me in bits and pieces, with scattered subtitling from Sharon.

Sharon was so taken by the series, though, that she speed-read all of the books over this past summer and fall, and decided that I needed to go back and catch the series from the beginning. She borrowed the first two seasons on DVD from a co-worker, and we've spent much of the holiday break watching them, two episodes a night on and off over the last couple of weeks, and yeah, I mostly get it now.

Last night, we caught a couple of episodes from the beginning of Season Two, and afterwards, we found quite by accident a 2003 film called Henry VIII , a sort of Masterpiece Theater/made-for-TV thing, directed by Pete Travis and starring Ray Winstone in the title role; Winstone is a reasonably well known British actor best known for tough-bloke movie roles and TV commercials, and he was a plausible Henry, to whatever extent that can be accurately judged. Big, bearded and bullying.

Henry VIII

One presumes Britain must claim only a limited number of credible medieval-lord types in their actor sub-population, so it was no surprise that the two productions had some commonalities - Charles Dance, who plays the Lannister patriarch in GoT, appeared the doomed Duke of Buckingham in Henry VIII (we stayed at the real Duke's castle in 2012), and Sean Bean, known as Eddard Stark in GoT, plays the brave and also-doomed Robert Aske, leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Yorkist Catholic uprising against Henry's Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. (Bean also played Boromir in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy a few years ago.)

Familiar faces, interwoven between history and fantasy. We did derive a little charge from seeing a couple of the historic sites portrayed in the film, as we had actually been to a few of them; Traitor's Gate at the Tower of London (through which Anne Boleyn was escorted on her way to her beheading), Clifford's Tower in York, where Aske was strung up after being convicted of treason and sentenced to death by Henry.

After wincing through the explicit and pitiless violence of GoT, however, I thought Henry VIII came across as somewhat tame and sanitized, more of a costumed theater piece than the gritty and aggressively visceral GoT. It's also worth noting that the real Henry ruled for almost 38 years - his marital woes are the best-recalled aspect to his legacy, but the film didn't (and really couldn't) fully describe the man and his reign in its full complexity and in context of the times. Henry remains one of the English monarchy's most controversial figures; he's an easy guy to revile from a distance, but he did a lot more than behead wives.

And clearly, the two productions - one fantasy, one quasi-historic - were poised and directed to accomplish different aims. They made for awkward but curiously compelling bookends.

I think I've had enough beheading, medieval scheming and brutish sexual conquests to last a while, at least until...oh, probably tonight.