Barley Hall

About this place

For most of the twentieth century nobody paid this house any attention. Its fourteenth-century timber frame sat behind a plain modern front in Coffee Yard, the narrow snickelway between Stonegate and Grape Lane, latterly as a plumber's workshop and showroom; it was only officially recorded as medieval in 1980, and the full extent of the structure emerged in 1984 when the site was sold for redevelopment. York Archaeological Trust bought it in 1987, found barely a third of the original timbers usable, and rebuilt it as it might have looked in 1483. The name has nothing to do with grain: the hall honours Professor Maurice Barley, the Trust's chairman at the time. The house went up in 1360 as a town lodging for the Priors of Nostell, gained its hall range around 1430, and by the 1460s was home to William Snawsell, a goldsmith who became Lord Mayor of York in 1468. What you see inside is a reconstruction based on an inventory written in 1478: a great hall with an open hearth, a window glazed with translucent horn instead of glass (possibly the only one in England), painted cloths on the walls, and a laid table whose plates and jugs you are allowed to pick up. This is not a museum behind glass; it is a house you are invited to wander through. That is why it works so well with children: medieval clothes to dress up in, things to handle, narrow stairs up to the bedchambers. There is no lift, the thresholds are raised and the steps are many, so pushchairs stay at the door, and wheelchair users are taken in by a side entrance to the Great Hall and Steward's Room only (free of charge in that case). After thirty to forty-five minutes you will have seen everything, which is less a flaw than a fact worth knowing before you pay. Be honest with yourself: with two hours in York this is not a priority, because the Minster, the city walls and the Shambles matter more. But on a wet afternoon, or with children who have had enough of walking, or bundled into the Pastport ticket with JORVIK and DIG, it becomes a warm, clever half hour ten minutes on foot from the railway station.