I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Walking Tour of York First Stop, Clifford's Tower I've begun the second year of my PhD here at York, which means doing some teaching. My official designation has the relatively un-euphonious title of 'PGWT' - Post-Graduates Who Teach. I'm teaching two seminar groups of twelve students each. The overall class is called 'Making Histories,' and is primarily an introduction to historiography and 'doing' history at the university level; since I didn't study history as an undergrad, it's a useful combination of introduction and refresher for me. The assessment for the course is a case-study essay on some aspect of York's history (they're given a list of topics, but not questions), since York has a rich and deep history. As part of that, I was required to give my groups a walking tour of York, which would ideally point out some of the bits of history which are all around the city. I thought I'd share some of that with you all. Caveat Lector - I do not vouch for the complete accuracy of all of these bits and bobs. Do not quote me. Some of this is myth and legend. I ran the tour both ways, that is to say, starting at each end of the route. I think I like it slightly better starting with Clifford's Tower, and thus we find ourselves at stop one - Clifford's Tower. Clifford's Tower is a classic motte-and-bailey style fortification; the motte is the artificial hill the tower rests upon, and the bailey was an enclosed area beneath it. The bailey for this tower was off to the right and behind the view in the image. The original tower was built out of wood by William I ('The Conqueror,' 'The Bastard,' etc.) somewhere around 1070. Wood has the advantage of being relatively quick and inexpensive, as far as fortification-building goes. On the other hand, it does burn rather nicely. Somewhere in the Thirteenth Century, it was rebuilt in the stone you see in the picture. The castle was expanded around the tower, and the complex saw use by various royal officials and appointees, and the exchequer was housed in the castle when the court of Edward III moved to York for one of his little contretemps with the Scots. In 1190, one of the all-too-common episodes of rampant anti-Semitism hit York. A mob formed and the Jewish community of York fled to the castle to seek the protection of the King in the person of the constable. They were apparently unsure of how vigorously he would defend them, so they locked themselves in the tower. The constable did not contest the mob's entrance to the castle, either because he feared the mob, or because by locking themselves in the tower he felt the Jews had forgone his protection. In any case, rather than submit to the will of the mob, the Jewish community chose death at their own hands. It is generally held that the men slew the women and children, and then set fire to the tower. The few who did not perish in the castle were murdered by the mob. Excavations in the previous century have found remains, blackened by the conflagration. The tour gets cheerier from this point, which is one of the reasons I prefer to start with this rather than end with it. Luddite'sLog, 1 November 2014 © 2014 Jeff Berry

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