There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage; and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually, we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and not another is indeed its name.
It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own, with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and twelfth century contemporaries.
We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford's Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built and rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But the tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it by hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with his party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the city, and it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the Christians had harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and riches, when the Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time to time the Jew-hate breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel effect. They were followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that they must be captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew themselves. Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed by their brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown milder, and now they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their homes.