In York, as everywhere, ecclesiastical building flourished throughout the 15th century. The minster was nearing completion. Predominantly it is not a 15th-century building but its mere size—by 1500 it had attained its present-day dimensions—cannot have suggested to contemporaries that York was in decline. The churches and conventual buildings of the religious houses in the city were likewise complete by 1450; and the 12-acre site of St. Mary's can only have seemed a monument to established monastic prosperity. Less impressive but more in the citizens' eye were the parish churches. St. Martin's, Coney Street, was entirely rebuilt in 1443 and survived until the Second World War as the finest example of Perpendicular work in the city parish churches. At least six other churches (St. Crux, St. Saviour's, All Saints', Pavement, All Saints', North Street, St. Martin's, Micklegate, St. Mary's, Castlegate) were entirely or partly rebuilt, or their fabrics were considerably augmented, between 1420 and 1500. Many church interiors were extensively ornamented. Most striking to modern eyes is the stained glass of their windows. That in the minster was admired in 1430 by Aeneas Sylvius who was thus one of the first of many visitors to comment on the magnificence of John Thornton's east window. The 14th- and 15th-century glass of St. Denys's, St. Michael, Spurriergate, St. Martin's, Coney Street, and Holy Trinity, Goodramgate, suggests, since there seems no reason why these alone should be so embellished, that many another parish church, now lost or altered beyond recognition, possessed similar fine examples of this form of English religious art. In All Saints', North Street, such glass survives more abundantly than in any other church; here, the younger Nicholas Blackburn tells us he used to sit at service; and above the high altar the family window testifies directly to York's mercantile prosperity in the 14th and early 15th centuries. Other monuments of 15th-century piety are less conspicuous both because they were less durable and because they more frequently attracted the attention of 16th- and 17thcentury iconoclasts; but the lectern of St. Crux and Sir Richard York's tomb remain to indicate the surroundings of the 15th-century worshipper.
The sanitary condition of the streets, however, appears to have improved not at all since the 13th century. In 1332 Edward III told the citizens that he detested the abominable smell that pervaded the city more than any other in the realm; and later in the century the Friars Minor complained that butchers cast offal round their walls and into the Ouse beside their house, so that the air of their church was poisoned and they were plagued by flies and other vermin. The city authorities fought a continuous battle against this anti-social conduct of the butchers, against the multitude of roaming pigs and against the throwing of garbage into the streets—all engendering 'great corruptions and horrible and pernicious air' and increasing the danger of pestilence. In 1419 the canons of the minster had to be told to remove the privies they had built along the banks of the city moat; in 1428 the butchers were ordered to take their offal to a point on the river bank opposite Clementhorpe were countrymen could collect it for manure; and in 1501 every ward was to have a dung-cart and was allotted a place outside the walls for dumping refuse 'so that husbands of the country may come there to have it away'. Even the better streets were not necessarily easy to pass along: an order of 1495 forbade anyone to set earthenware pots, tar barrels, and dishes of fruit in the gutter outside his shop, or to hang ropes, halters, and other harness out of his windows. The wardens, who in 1485 were given the oversight of the streets to see that they were 'cleanly kept and weekly swept', no doubt performed their task only with difficulty.
The city council was sometimes concerned with other sorts of human frailty, including the problem of prostitutes and 'misgoverned' women. In 1482, for example, all such were banished to the suburbs outside the city walls. Perhaps significant of economic decay was the attention that the council began to devote at the beginning of the 16th century to those without employment. In 1501 stocks were to be provided in every ward for punishing vagabonds; in 1503 all vagabonds, beggars, and idle persons who had lately come to the city were to leave on pain of imprisonment; in 1505 the wardens and parish constables were ordered to expel such persons in accordance with the Act of Parliament lately made.
At the end of the Middle Ages, indeed, freedom was becoming less accessible because it was becoming more expensive. In the 1480's an apprentice appears to have been able to become free on payment of 6s., but by 1502 this had been raised to £1 while 'strangers' had to pay £2; only the son of a freeman got his freedom cheaply on payment of 1s. It can only be said that the possibility of paying by instalments somewhat mitigated the severity of these charges.
Down to the end of the Middle Ages a high proportion of the freemen were incomers. Most of these continued to come from the villages of the Vale of York and its margins; but in the second half of the 14th century they included men from as far north as Berwick and Carlisle and from as far south as Colchester, Canterbury, and Bristol. Even at the end of the Middle Ages migrants appear from Newark, Kendal, Lincoln, and Southwold. Throughout the 15th century, too, despite severe legislation directed against them, there was a fairly steady trickle of Scots, including one from Aberdeen and an Irishman who had lived for ten years in Scotland; there had been Irish immigrants, too, in the 14th century. There had also been a quite notable inflow from the Continent. In the later 14th century, 26 natives of the Low Countries, mainly textile workers, 13 Germans, mainly metal workers, but also including a few merchants and Peterkin the pouchmaker of Eastland, and 3 Italian moneyers, received the freedom of the city. This movement became less marked in the 15th century, though the German merchant Henry Market was naturalized in 1430, married his daughter to an alderman and served as sheriff in 1442-3. Even later, a Spanish doctor, a Dutch felt-hat-maker, and an Icelander settled in York and became freemen. On the whole, however, there seems to be a slackening of immigration not only from abroad but from all sources.
Many of the incomers, of course, gained little substance and we know nothing of them but their names. A few, on the other hand, prospered greatly. Robert Holme, though his father migrated to York and founded the family fortunes, recalled in his will that he was born at Holme on the Wolds in the East Riding; and William and Robert Savage were from Tynemouth, members of a family which had provided the priors of that place with their bakers in the 13th century. It is no less remarkable that Germans like Henry Wyman and Henry Market throve to high civic office in a relatively short time; or that Nicholas Blackburn, the elder, one of the richest men of his day in York, was a firstgeneration immigrant from Lancashire via Richmond. Thomas Easingwold, too, who was mayor in 1428, had a brother living in his native village to be remembered in his will; Richard Russell was brought up in Durham Cathedral Priory; and Richard York, for all his name, was apparently a native of Berwick-on-Tweed. To the end of the Middle Ages the population of the city was a fluid one, with roots and enduring connexions in many places: one bequest of Henry Market's was for a brother in Cologne.
This fluidity, of course, was reciprocal. There was a tendency for men to move out from the city to the country which will be considered later. Apart from that, a York bowyer and Alderman Thomas Bracebridge's son became citizens of London; and other York men moved to Kent, and Grantham and Hull. Yet another York bowyer settled in Norwich, and it was perhaps poetic justice that he was noised abroad as a Scot.
There is little evidence about the antecedents of the incomers. Many doubtless came with small resources, like the fugitive labourers who left Sutton upon Derwent (E.R.) for York in the 14th century or the tanner who was a villein's son manumitted by a Lord Nevill. Servile birth, indeed, was not incompatible with considerable success, for William Burton, a notable merchant at the end of the 14th century, was manumitted by the archbishop only in 1397. On the other hand, it was probably an advantage to have the backing of a gentle or a prosperous peasant family; and certainly some such families sent their sons to the city: the Hays of Aughton (E.R.), the Salvins of Harswell (E.R.), Sir William Plumpton whose bastard became city clerk, and John de la Pole of Newburgh (N.R.). George Kirke (mayor in 1495 and 1512) was the son of a Lincolnshire gentle family, and Brian Conyers a younger son of Christopher Conyers of Hornby (near Bedale, N.R.). Conyers became a merchant and died soon after serving as city chamberlain; he might, had he lived, have gone on to better things, for he seemed to be on the way to prosperity and had married the daughter of Alderman Thomas Nelson.