CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

LIFE in York in the fifteenth century was
active. Trade, home and continental, was
flourishing. Building operations were in hand;
work wras always proceeding at the Minster or at
one or other of the religious houses and churches.
There were so many social elements established in
and visiting York that something of interest was
always taking place. Entertainments were plentiful
and pageants were as well produced in York as
anywhere in the kingdom. The city enjoyed a
particularly large measure of local government.
Its reputation was great. According to contem-
porary standards it was a fine prosperous city, one
that contained resplendent ecclesiastical buildings
that were second to none. In short, it was a " full
nobill cite."

Although the present city looks, in parts, more
typically mediaeval than modern, York to-day forms
a very great contrast with the fifteenth-century city.
We are separated from the fifteenth century by the
Renaissance, the Reformation, and Tudor England,
by the Civil War and the Restoration, by the " age
of prose and reason/' the keen-minded and rough-
mannered eighteenth century, by the Industrial
Revolution, and by that second Renaissance, the