Facing Bootham Bar is a modern public building judiciously screened by trees, and adjoining it to the south stands the beautiful old house where, before the Dissolution, the abbots of St. Mary's Abbey lived in stately fashion.
When Henry VIII paid his one visit to York it was after the Pilgrimage of Grace led by Robert Aske, who was hanged on one of the gates. The citizens who had welcomed the rebels pleaded pardon, which was granted three years afterwards; but Henry appointed a council, with the Duke of Norfolk as its president, which was held in the Abbots' house, and resulted in the Mayor and Corporation losing most of their powers. The beautiful fragments of St. Mary's Abbey are close to the river, and the site is now included in the museum grounds. In the museum building itself there is a wonderfully fine collection of Roman coffins, dug up when the new railway-station was being built. One inscription is particularly interesting in showing that the Romans set up altars in their palaces, thus explaining the reason for the Jews refusing to enter the praetorium at Jerusalem when Christ was made prisoner, because it was the Feast of the Passover.
We can see the restored front of the Guildhall overlooking the river from Lendal Bridge, which adjoins the gates of the Abbey grounds, but to reach the entrance we must go along the street called Lendal and turn into a narrow passage. The hall was put up in 1446, and is therefore in the Perpendicular style. A row of tall oak pillars on each side support the roof and form two aisles. The windows are filled with excellent modern stained glass representing several incidents in the history of the city, from the election of Constantine to be Roman Emperor, which took place at York in A.D. 306, down to the great dinner to the Prince Consort, held in the hall in 1850.
The Church of St. Michael Spurriergate, built at the same period as the Guildhall, is curiously similar in its interior, having only a nave and aisles. The stone pillars are so slight that they are scarcely of much greater diameter than the wooden ones in the civic structure, and some of them are perilously out of plumb. There is much old glass in the windows.
St. Margaret's Church has a splendid Norman doorway carved with the signs of the zodiac; St. Mary's Castlegate is an Early English or Transitional building transformed and patched in Perpendicular times; St. Mary's Bishophill Junior has a most interesting tower, containing Roman materials, and the list could be prolonged for many pages if there were space.