York: World Class Heritage City

 Key events, people and dates

AD71  Foundation of the Roman fortress
c.211  Provincial capital of Brittannia Inferior
211 African Septimius Severus, Emperor of Rome, died in Eboracum, at the end of four years' campaigning in Britain.
306 Roman Emperor Constantius dies in Eboracum. His son Constantine is acclaimed Emperor in the city
590 to 879  Capital of Northumbria.
627   King Edwin baptised by Paulinus in the Church of St Peter
866    Vikings first come to York
874 to 958 Viking Kingdom of York
1068 Construction of York Castle and Baile Hill by William of Normandy.
1190 York Castle keep burnt down in one of the first, most infamous pogroms against Jews in Europe
1212  York becomes an independent city with its own Charter and the right to raise its own taxes
1220 Work starts on York Minster – the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe.
1539  Council of the North established at King’s Manor.
1642 Charles I and his Court seek refuge in York before the start of the Civil War.
1686 The Bar Convent founded by Frances Bedingfield, an early member of Mary Ward`s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, providing education for girls.  The oldest living convent in England.
1732 Building of the Assembly Rooms, a seminal building in English architectural history.
1759  Publication of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, possibly the most influential novel published in Europe in the eighteenth century.
1782 York measures the universe! John Goodricke, astronomer, discovers the binary star Algol which laid the foundations for all future measurements of the universe.
1792 The Retreat founded by William Tuke, a Yorkshire Quaker, the first establishment in England with a humanitarian approach to mental illness.
1822  Founding of Yorkshire Philosophical Society leading to creation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831.
1877 York Station, then the largest railway station in the world opens.
1901 Important and pioneering study of poverty by Seebohm Rowntree.
1902 World’s first garden village created at New Earswick, funded by Joseph Rowntree.
1984 Opening of the Jorvik Viking Centre in April 1984.