We walk, well shod and warm, on cobbled streets, "pedestrianised", through a gauntlet, assailed on either side by Special Offers! outfits slashed in price and cheap enough to buy two at least and shoes in serried rows and temptations to eat something fattening in cream with a bit of strawberry on top, and why not a cup at Starbucks?
Tourists, mostly, pack these narrow ways through York, with students in the general mix and sometimes, rudely, someone poor whose usually drunk and might be now for all I know, and behind nearly all the eyes, affairs that concern a modern mind. Take them out, lay them down and examine what we have; then put them back and wonder how different they would have been if taken from the passers-by of 400 years ago.
Love - does he, doesn't she? - and misbehaving youth and "things were never bad as this in my childhood days" would, I guess, be obvious, but nearly all the rest would be wondrously peculiar, the culture which had shaped them being an alien thing to us, and most of it beyond our comprehension. And 400 years ago what rags! What filth! What stench! What casual, horrid cruelties and how mean those boney faces! And how the eyes stare and dart and broken, rotten teeth disfigure nearly every laugh. And there are blackened feet, carts are pushed and there's a donkey being abused.
Such things had been in days gone by,
in these streets below the Minster's towers.
Inside its doors, where columns rise
and arches flow in soaring poetic motion,
the great stone walls were soaked in sounds
of throats incanting praises.
And still they are in this massive temple
which spans the lives of men.
And will they still when I am dead and have been 200 years?
What will there be,
in those days,
in the streets
below the Minster's towers?
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