State of the Dissertation

Objective: To complete the dissertation tomorrow so as to have it printed on Wednesday in preparation for the Thursday submission date.

Currently: 18,879 words. I will meet with my supervisor tomorrow to have one last glance at my conclusion and am in the process of adding a few more paragraphs to my introduction, so I'm perilously close to the word limit (20,000). This limit is enforced by docking marks for students who go over, although it is of course common for students to lie about the word count provided they're within about one or two thousand words; any more than that and the examiners start to notice.

My supervisor, it must be said, has been fantastic. He has always been happy, indeed eager, to read my work and has commented promptly (impressive considering the odd hours at which I have tended to send him drafts) and charitably... Maybe a bit too much so. His points have always been mostly about typographic errors, with some hints at further bibliography and the occasional request for clarification. Compare this, then, to the experience of some of my coursemates who have received drafts back so covered in red ink that they could barely read what it was they had written, with comments taking exception with everything from argument to word choice. I've had none of that, and I'm beginning to feel a bit nervous about it. Either my first drafts were indeed fantastic, which I seriously doubt, or perhaps he thinks this is just as good as it's going to get. If the external examiner savages it, I think I'll have my answer. On the other hand, if my supervisor hadn't been so gentle with me all along I probably would have had a nervous breakdown two months ago, so inasmuch as I've managed to finish the thing at all it's for the best.

Aside from any minor repairs or expansion that result from tomorrow's meeting, most of what I need to do now is fiddle with the formatting. I need to check all my footnotes and bibliography, do a final word count, then add an abstract of no more than 200 words and supply English translations for all of my quotations (neither the abstract nor the English translations count toward the word limit). Once I have that done I'll add the title page and table of contents, proofread it one last time, get it professionally printed and send it out into the world (i.e., give it to the CMS who will get it bound and send it to the examiners).

Many of my coursemates are panicking, even those who were mostly done long before I was; I'm actually feeling quite serene, mainly because I just want to be finished so badly that I don't even care how good it is. It can be said now, the hardest part is not the research -- that bit's actually fun, most of the time. But writing it up has been a completely miserable experience, perhaps more so for me than for others in my group because so much of mine has been fishing through Latin quotations from deposition documents that, after staring at them for a few hours, all looked the same. Our close personal bonds within the group have been both a source of relief, in that we've maintained active and fulfilling social lives, and a source of impediments. Distraction is the obvious problem, but we also reacted very strongly to how everyone else was feeling about the dissertation process; one person having a tough time could easily bring the rest of us down. The last few weeks have been especially difficult because our friends in the archaeology department submitted their dissertations much earlier in the month and have been free to have fun. Some of the overseas students have already gone home, leading to further distraction.

Happily, a good number of people will still be around following the official end of the course and ejection from university accommodation on Saturday; several friends living in town this next year will be opening their homes as medieval refugee camps until everyone has either gone home or gotten settled in their new lives. I was offered a hammock in the bikeshed at a friend's place, which sounded like a great idea until yesterday, when it suddenly got cold, so instead I'll be staying with a friend whose housemate is out of the country for a time.

A Lamentable Struggle

So, I've got a whole 1,554 words of my dissertation written! Leaving... 18,446 left to go. That's pretty depressing.

The daily life of the graduate student is a curious thing. Now that we don't have any classes (and haven't since the end of March), it's very difficult to keep track of time. The only thing which distinguishes the days from one another is the fact that I have rehearsals Tuesday through Thursday; otherwise I have no idea what day it is, and half the time I can't be sure whether it's morning, afternoon or evening. We're finally moving back toward a normal distribution of daylight hours to night, which is a profound relief. In the height of summer I actually experienced great difficulty sleeping due to the fact that sunset didn't occur until about 10:30 pm and the sun started coming back up again at about 3:30 am. And, of course, the torrential rainfall we've been experiencing since late April has meant that it was dark most of the day.

But the unenviable routine of research and writing must go on regardless. Some people insist on working in the library, but I can't do that. Not only is the JB Morrell library an uncongenial location in many respects (not least because its very existence calls to mind all of the books one was unable to find there, either because the university is too cheap to buy them or because someone has managed to lose them), but I find the presence of other books too distracting. It is my great misfortune to find my work deeply interesting -- until I actually have to do it, at which point I'd rather be doing just about anything else. So instead I work in my flat, where I am slowly figuring out techniques to keep myself productive. Unplugging the internet for a time seems to work wonders, as does ensuring that I have a hoard of snack food so I'm not tempted to skip off to the kitchen.

It takes a surprising amount of stamina to do this. We have all reached the point where we detest our dissertations and want nothing more than for them to somehow write themselves so we can get on with our lives, and that goes even for the people who intend to go on to a PhD in the very near future. There are, according to my supervisor, several different types of graduate students, most of whom can be successful. My type, he says, are those who "have very high aspirations and perfectionist tendencies, coupled with an appalling lack of self-confidence." In order to cure my severe case of blank-page panic, he has instructed me to write something bad (he literally said that), just to learn how to write quickly and clearly. Tomorrow I'll meet with him to ravage what I've written, and then we'll try again.

But my supervisor is merciful. That is not the case for some of my coursemates. Indeed, the traditional week for most of the MA class consists of about four days of frantic writing and revising, followed by a meeting with one's supervisor in which she or he massacres the student's work and inquires whether there is something wrong with her/him. People have a variety of ways of coping with this -- a good cry, a long nap, and a pint of Ben and Jerry's (or some combination thereof) are amongst the most popular remedies -- but whatever they need to do to get over it, they do, and then spend a day or two going out to pubs and reading what we have come to call "crack fiction" (mostly young adult novels; supervisors have been horrified this week by how little people have accomplished on account of Harry Potter), before realising that they must again produce more work to be savaged.

At the moment we can only cling to the knowledge that virtually everyone somehow manages to finish, and in the meantime we channel our frustrations into Romeo and Juliet. The fact that that production is coming to be nearly as stressful as our academic work seems not to matter; and anyway, it'll be over in less than two weeks. Then we'll have nothing standing between us and the dissertation, which is quite frightening.

The Quick 'n' Dirty Update

So... yeah. It's been a long time since I've updated. That this is due to having been extremely busy goes without saying. I may go back and flesh out some details later, but here's a bullet-point survey of what I've been doing:

-- Lords of Misrule's spring production, Apollonius of Tyre (to be performed also at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in July)

-- finished spring term

-- took a weekend trip back in March to Santiago de Compostela (Spain) with a few friends, during which we mostly drank coffee and sat around doing nothing

-- did a whole lot of nothing over the spring holiday, although I did start learning Old Occitan (famed as the language of the troubadours) for my thesis research

-- decided on my thesis topic. I'll be working with Dr. Peter Biller (http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/hist/staff/biller.shtml) on the liturgy and ritual practice of the Cathar heretics, which we know about in large part thanks to inquisition documents of the 13th and 14th centuries.

-- took examinations in palaeography and Latin, gaining distinction in both (with scores of 75, where 50 is passing and 80 is phenomenal). Too bad they don't actually count toward our degrees.

-- started working on the Lords' summer production of Romeo and Juliet, very tentatively scheduled for August 10-12, in which I have been cast as Mercutio; I'll also be in charge of the fake blood, of which there will be a great deal

-- attended the 42nd annual International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, four wild days of paper sessions, open bars, fantastic book deals, and the infamous Saturday-night dance where one can see hundreds of world-famous academics thrashing around like they have some sort of motor-neuron disease (in the words of Dr. Guy Halsall). Other adventures that week included the homemade mead-and-ale tasting sponsored by the conference; meeting up with my art-history supervisor from Santa Cruz; leading a motley crew of assorted academics through all the verses of "American Pie" at the traditional Friday-night sing-along; and the taxi driver with the giant dent in the back of his skull. All this apparently qualifies as "networking."

-- as a result of my friend having incidentally met somebody at Kalamazoo, I've somehow ended up with a summer job: translating a number of short poems from English into Latin for a book project about which I know virtually nothing other than that I will be paid for my time and trouble; publication details, I hope, are forthcoming

That pretty much sums it up, I guess. I will resolve to update more frequently, but we'll see how that goes.

I've survived the first term...

...just barely. As you may have noticed by my complete lack of posts, I've been extremely busy here. Graduate school -- particularly when each class only meets once a week -- is the sort of place where one can easily lose track of the weeks, until one realises that first drafts of the final essays are due in two days and one hasn't even worked out what one's topic will be yet. But somehow one does find a topic, and spends Week Ten feverishly scribbling something acceptably academic and (inevitably) complaining about our woefully inadequate library to friends at the pub.

The marking system here is entirely foreign to American students, and we are all a bit freaked out about it. For starters, our performance this term will be evaluated solely on the basis of one 4,000 word essay. Of course, for those of us in the interdisciplinary course that works out to something less than 15% of our final degree results, but it's worrying nonetheless. Furthermore, the module tutors are not the only ones responsible for our final marks -- all written work is submitted anonymously, and there are three markers for each piece: the module tutor, a second reader within the department for which it is submitted, and an external reader (I'm not sure where we get those people). This is true for all work done here at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and it's true for other UK universities as well (Oxbridge is a bit different, from what I understand, at least for undergraduates). The final mark is, therefore, a composite of the three marks. Finally, the marking scale baffles and frightens me, since it has nothing to do with percentages or, as far as I can tell, much of anything else -- above a 50 is passing, an 80 is brilliant, and a 90 is immediately publishable as is, without any further revision. Within that range, I don't really know what's respectable and what's marginally rubbish.

They try to assign second readers based on the subjects of our options modules -- for instance, a student writing an Archaeology essay will not be evaluated by a member of the Literature staff, even though the other members of the Archaeology department may not know any more about the specific topic of the student's essay than the literature tutor. The point of the second reader, as far as I can tell, is more about the discipline-specific conventions rather than exact content, since the module tutor will know the most about that anyway.

My essay, and those of my colleagues in the Text Criticism module, will present particular problems. Dr Mooney has already mentioned that the other staff members of the Literature department hate marking essays for her module, especially in cases when the student has chosen to edit a text, because they don't really know what they should be looking for. And if our second readers are unhappy, the external readers will be having heart attacks about some of our work.

For instance, my essay is an edition of the first nine chapters of a Wycliffite exposition of the Ten Commandments, found in York Minster XVI.L.12, a 15th century manuscript. My readers would no doubt be grateful that I at least had the good sense to select a Middle English text, rather than one in Latin, were it not for the fact that this is undoubtedly the most boring piece of work ever written. A brief sample:
Here bigynne[th] [th]e ten comaundementis
Alle maner of men: schulden holde goddis biddingis | for wi[th]outen holding of hem: may no man be saued | and so [th]e gospel telli[th]: howe oon axide crist. what he schulde do for to come to heuene | and crist bad him. if he wolde entre in to blis | [th]at he schulde kepe [th]e comaundementis of god | and [th]ese hepen Iewis: as alle sectis schulden | for alle we schulden be cristen men: and truli serue god...
I think you get the point. It goes on like that for 4,000 words (all of which, I might add, I had to copy out by hand, because only pencils and paper are allowed into the Minster archive room). Actually, the text itself goes on for nearly 26 folios, but I stopped on f.10 when I exceeded my word count. My favourite part is where it explains, in excruciating detail, that if one adds the three commandments believed to have been on the first tablet to the seven from the other tablet... one gets ten commandments. I can't imagine anything more boring than those hours I spent in the Minster Library, trying not to pay attention to what I was reading. I should have guessed there was a reason it hadn't been edited before.

But I'm really pretty proud of myself. This module usually runs in the spring, so that students will have had nearly two full terms of palaeography before leaping into a project of this scale, and the fact that I, with far less palaeography experience, only completely invented about five words and a few abbreviations is impressive, at least to me. We have yet to see what Dr Mooney thinks. And my second and third readers are going to hate me for making them read this text.

Meanwhile, we of the Lords of Misrule somehow made it through our disastrous dress rehearsals and put on an extremely successful production -- so successful, in fact, that we made about 100 pounds in profit; and when you can make a profit off a play in Middle English, you're doing something right. Of course, it helped that we spent virtually no money on the production anyway, paying mainly for the rental of the church (for a ridiculously low amount of money) and for photocopying. In fact, we spent a lot of money on photocopying, because the group's co-president and I had a miserable time trying to get the programmes put together. First the copier was making little dark lines all over the place, then I noticed some fairly major mistakes, then after running off about 140 pages I realised that the back page was facing the wrong way... 2.5 hours later we had produced a total of twelve usable programmes, and when we discovered that one of the musicians' biographies had been accidentally left out, we just gave up. However, if these sorts of things didn't happen, then the performances themselves, by the law of the theatre, would be a complete fiasco. In the end, we exceeded by far all expectations, both our own and those of the directors, and we are very confident that we'll be able to do brilliant work for the rest of the year. It's just as well: we've been invited to perform at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds next summer, and the audience will consist almost entirely of professional scholars whose respect we would like to obtain, especially since many of us hope to find academic employment in the future.

Otherwise, daily life for me mainly consists of an endless succession of class meetings, homework, additional seminars and conferences, and walking back and forth between my flat and the King's Manor. Thanks to classes and parties, the MA students are quite closely bonded; and as a consequence of the extra events, which invariably result in a trip to the pub afterward, I've gotten to know some of the PhD students quite well, including a few at other universities, which provides me both with friends and with future professional contacts -- which is extremely important in the competitive world of academia. Fortunately, extracurricular activities like the Lords of Misrule can add a great deal to one's CV, since they prove an overall dedication to medieval things above and beyond one's own area of concentration, and a willingness to work closely with others.

Next term I'll have two options modules: the first an interdisciplinary module on the so-called "twelfth-century Renaissance," and the second an Art History module on Anglo-Saxon church architecture and sculpture. All five skills modules will continue, culminating in final examinations in Palaeography and Latin; I'll also probably take the Toronto PhD Latin Exam in April, since even if I don't do my PhD there, a pass on the exam will look good on my CV. Over Christmas I've got work to do, of course, both for my modules and for another extra activity -- I'm translating a short Latin music drama, The Image of St Nicholas, from the Fleury Playbook, and helping a friend (a PhD student in the Music Department) put on a production of it in York Minster on 10 February. The Lords of Misrule, in the meantime, will commence working on next term's production, Apollonius of Tyre, some of it still in Old English and Latin. And, from time to time, there may even be quiet evenings in the pub for yet more geeky conversation.

The Lords of Misrule

So, when I'm not reading hundreds of pages every week on skaldic poetry and similarly obscure topics, I'm usually devoting myself to the major extracurricular activity at the CMS (apart from going to the pub). Named after the ancient tradition of appointing an officer for wild holiday revelry, the Lords of Misrule is our period drama company, founded in the 1960s by a group of postgraduates who thought it would be great fun to put on medieval plays in their original Middle English. Somehow this idea proved to work in performance, and now, some 40 years on, the troupe have expanded their range to include productions in Old English (an adaptation of Beowulf some years ago) and Old Norse (two or three of them, including an adaptation of part of the Poetic Edda last year). The OE and ON plays, of course, did include major sections in modern English and other devices to help people keep track of what was taking place, but the original-language aspect has always been key with the Lords; it is the major characteristic which distinguishes us from other groups putting on medieval theatre, and we are quite proud of our ability to make this sort of thing accessible to general audiences.

The thing about the Lords is, we're not actors. We're not even close to being real actors. Most of the current cast are MA students, with two PhD students directing this term's production, and the rest are either PhDs or former postgrads who happen to still be in the area. Everyone who wants a part gets a part, just like in elementary school. We only have time to rehearse once a week, so the production tends to get thrown together at the last minute; and we receive no funding from anybody -- we can only afford to put on the first terms' plays because the summer show is now usually Shakespeare, and we can get a good turnout for that. Otherwise we can (we hope) count on making enough money in ticket sales to pay for the venue, and that's it.

As they did last year, this term we're putting on a double-bill (with a theme of "Clerks Gone Wild") of adaptations from the Canterbury Tales: the Franklin's Tale and the Miller's Tale. Yes, the language is Middle English, and our pronunciation is still pretty uneven but doing a lot better than it was when we started. I play one of the leads in the Franklin's Tale: Aurelius, a lovesick squire who makes a deal with a magician to make some rocks disappear so he can get his lady, but has a change of heart in the end (obviously that's not a full synopsis -- I do recommend that people read it). The Miller's Tale, meanwhile, is 25 minutes of bawdy mayhem that can't fail to please audiences, since with so much slapstick it's not even really necessary to understand the dialogue.

Venues for the productions differ. Last year they put on the Norse double-bill in a replica Viking longhouse at Merton Park, which was very difficult logistically because the house could only fit about 35 audience members if you stacked them up virtually on the stage, and the only way to get the audience there was to hire a coach to take them, which cost the Lords a small fortune. The Shakespeare shows take place in a variety of locations, but usually they're done outside, in places like the Museum Gardens or the Minster Yard, which means that they can (and do) get rained on, although Yorkshirefolk are not easily scared off by rain. This term we're returning to an old standby, All Saints' Church on North Street.

We're doing four shows -- three evening performances on the 9-11 December, plus a matinee on the 9th which will apparently be attended by 50 to 60 first-year undergraduates from Hull, who are being dragged to see us for reasons nobody has explained to us yet. This is not especially great timing, since our course essays are due on the 15th and we will be in a fairly frantic state about it, but it can't be helped.

I'm not sure whether anyone will be videotaping the performances, but surely there will be photographs from our dress rehearsals, which I'll add to Mieraus.com once I have them in my possession.

A little bit about the University of York (again with help from Wikipedia)

As I promised, some details about the University:

The University of York was founded in 1963, and shows it in its architecture. Seriously, the nursery (i.e., daycare) looks like the Beatles' Yellow Submarine fell out of the sky and landed in the middle of our campus. And it is actually a campus, being a good 25 minutes' walk or so from the city walls. Fortunately, the campus has most of the basic amenities one requires, and there is no shortage of cheap takeout in the surrounding area. There are approximately 9,500 students, of whom about 1,800 are postgraduates. The university has an excellent reputation in the UK and internationally, and its postgraduate teaching is especially highly regarded. Being a small university, however, there are subjects it just doesn't do; classics, alas, is one of them.

Like UC Santa Cruz, the university population is divided into residential colleges, most of which are centrally located. Meanwhile, my college, Halifax, is in the middle of nowhere on the far side of campus. To its credit, it is conveniently close to the village of Heslington, southeast of the city, which boasts a downtown area consisting of four banks, two pubs, a sandwich shop, and a hairdresser. This is not exactly urban living. Halifax is the largest college, consisting of some 2,000 students, both undergraduate and postgraduate, although all of the residents of my house are postgraduates. Halifax, like Kresge College (as the Slugs here will know), is comprised of flats rather than dorms. There is really no fundamental difference -- the layout is essentially the same -- but there are fewer rooms to a flat (8) than a traditional dormitory floor would have. Our rooms can be charitably described as “cells,” in a correctional rather than a monastic sense; they're extremely small and one does feel rather trapped, but they are en-suite, which makes all the difference in the world. We have no common room, but we do have a kitchen.

At the centre of the campus lies Europe’s largest man-made lake. No – that’s not true. I don’t recall where I heard that, but it’s not true. The lake was, however, the largest plastic-lined lake in Europe at the time it was created, which is not at all the same thing. The water is entirely unsuitable for contact with any part of your body, and lore has it that even gazing at it directly could prove infectious. The paths around the lake might be a good venue for an invigorating stroll, were it not for the marauding flocks of vicious geese which roam its banks, waiting for an unsuspecting student to meander by, clutching a jacket potato or other such delicacy. Spring is evidently the worst time for avian banditry; the geese are in the habit of laying eggs wherever they feel like it and will not hesitate to pursue intruders, which I discovered first-hand last week when an entirely innocent turn down the wrong path earned me a painful nip on the rear from a goose I never even saw coming.

The Centre for Medieval Studies is the home of interdisciplinary work in conjunction with the Departments of History, English, Art History, and Archaeology. In addition to my course, which currently has 20 students, there are also MA courses in Medieval Literatures (11 students), Medieval History (5?), and Medieval Archaeology (I've met a couple but don't know how many there are). Because we share many course modules, we do have a good deal of contact with the students on those other programs (indeed, cannot always remember who is on which course), and those lucky folks who got accommodation in the two houses located within the city walls share living space with them as well.

The CMS and several other departments/research units are housed within the King's Manor, a Grade I listed building on the opposite side of York from where I live (behind the Minster, in fact). The structure began life as a house for the abbots of St Mary's Abbey, and the earliest remains date from the fifteenth century. After the dissolution of the abbey, it became the seat of the Council of the North; it then passed into the control of private tenants until the nineteenth century when it housed the Yorkshire School for the Blind until the late 1950s. Now it is ours, and it provides a congenial place to have class, except that it takes me about 45 minutes to get there every day (and sometimes I have to go back and forth repeatedly over the course of the day, since the main library is on campus). Aside from classroom and office space, the King's Manor has a computer lab, a small library, and a refectory, which serves surprisingly good food for a decent price, although that may have something to do with the fact that the general public are also permitted to eat there, as the building is open to visitors. The KM is also entirely devoid of geese, which is an important fringe benefit.

Oh yeah -- I'm at school

While I'm still logged in, I thought maybe I should tell people what it is I'm doing here.

I'm doing the MA in Medieval Studies course, a one-year programme culminating in a thesis of about 20,000 words. The year is divided into a fall term which ends at Christmas, a spring term ending at spring break, and a summer term which ends in June. Our degree results depend on the coursework (30%) and the thesis (70%).

In our first term we're required to take the core module, one options module (both of which are only for the one term), and two "skills courses" which run through both fall and spring. We are also "strongly encouraged" to audit the other skills courses on offer, according to our interests and other activities. In the spring term we take two options modules, and in the summer term we begin work on the dreaded thesis, the writing of which is achieved over the summer vacation. So, the programme lasts until late September of 2007. Throughout the year the Centre for Medieval Studies also runs a wide variety of lectures and conferences, at which our attendance is also strongly encouraged.

At the moment I'm taking the core module, which is divided into four sections, each of which we were allowed to pick according to our interests and previous experience. At the moment I'm doing some archaeology. In weeks 5-7 I'll be working more closely on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, then I'll have a seminar on Christina of Markyate, and finally a seminar on the Middleham Jewel (I'll say more about all of those later). For my options module I'm taking Textual Criticism and Codicology, but I missed our first class meeting this week because I was ill and my professor made me go home. For the skills courses I'm doing Palaeography and Advanced Medieval Latin for assessment, and auditing introductory courses in Old English, Old Norse, and Old French. All of these classes meet only once a week for two hours. Alas, whoever scheduled the language courses apparently thought it would be really funny to have them meet at 9.30 AM; and, due to reasons I'll discuss in a later post, that means I have to wake up at 7.30 Monday through Wednesday, which sucks. And, just for fun, my friend, a visiting student from the Netherlands, is trying to teach a few of us Dutch.

A little bit about York (with help from Wikipedia)

York is in nothern England, located at the confluence of the rivers Ouse (pronounced more or less like "ooze") and Foss. It is the traditional county town of Yorkshire (the Traditional County) and lies in the Ceremonial County of North Yorkshire, and anybody who comprehends the differences between the different types of British counties is a smarter person than I am. The city was founded by the Romans in AD 71 and called Eboracum; later on the Viking kingdom of Jorvik was centred here. It is still the seat of the Archbishop of York, Primate of England, head of the (now) Anglican Province of York. In 1996 the modern City of York, a unitary authority, was created, which expanded the city's borders beyond the walls; this unitary authority has a population of approximately 185,000, while the urban area has a population of about 140,000.

York lies within the predictably named Vale of York, a flat, green area of land consisting mainly of meadows and marshes. The rivers are prone to flooding; there are flood walls and other defences, but apparently these have not always proved effective.

The local economy is based chiefly on tourism and service industries, although its prosperity until the 1950s came mainly from the railways and chocolate-manufacturing. Nestle Rowntree is still a major employer, although it was very recently announced that they will be cutting 645 jobs at the factory in York.

The unitary authority is governed by a council, currently controlled by the Liberal Democrats; and it has four MPs, two Labour, two Conservative.

Aside from the University of York (about which more will be said later), York is the home of York St John University, an Anglican institution which just received university status this year (more on that when I figure out the exact difference between colleges, university colleges, and universities). York College and Askham Bryan College offer many further-education and foundation courses and some honours degrees, specialising in vocational subjects.

In addition to possessing the greatest concentration of medieval stained glass in Britain, York also has a surviving medieval town hall (the Merchant Adventurer's Hall); the largest Gothic structure in the UK (York Minster); the world's "largest static collection of railway locomotives" (at the National Railway Museum); a nearly complete circuit of medieval walls, which can be walked by the public (about 3 miles) encircling the city centre; and, evidently, a street seen in the first Harry Potter movie (The Shambles). The City has a football team, York City (who seem to be not very good), and a rugby league side, the York City Knights (also apparently not very good). York was home to Guy Fawkes, the Catholic conspirator who prepared the explosives for the Gunpowder Plot and was of course executed. And, according to Wikipedia, Dame Judi Dench lives in the city, but I'm more impressed by the fact that York was once home to a Viking chieftain named Ivar the Boneless.