The museum stands in the middle of the ruined precinct of St Mary’s Abbey, on ten acres granted to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society in 1828, and the abbey’s own stonework is part of the display. Go down to the basement gallery, Medieval York: Capital of the North, and work along it — this is why you came, and it is the strongest medieval collection in the north.
Four objects carry the room. The Middleham Jewel is a lozenge-shaped gold pendant of about 1460, set with a large blue sapphire, found in 1985 by a metal detectorist in a field near Middleham Castle — Richard III’s northern home. It is engraved on both faces, the Trinity on one side and the Nativity with a rank of female saints on the other, and the border carries a Latin prayer that ends in the charm-words Tetragrammaton and Ananizapta. It is hollow, engraved inside too, and is generally read as a high-status woman’s amulet for surviving childbirth. The museum paid £2.5 million at auction for it. Its companion Middleham Ring is shown alongside.
The York Helmet — better known as the Coppergate Helmet, dug from the JORVIK site in 1982 — is an iron and copper-alloy Anglian helmet of the second half of the 8th century, with a brass crest inscribed in Latin, mail neck-curtain and hinged cheekpieces. It is one of only seven Anglo-Saxon helmets known to survive anywhere and by a distance the best preserved. Near it are the 9th-century Gilling Sword, found by a schoolboy in a Yorkshire stream, and the 8th-century Ormside Bowl, silver-gilt over copper.
Then the abbey material: the museum holds what it fairly calls some of the finest medieval architectural and monastic sculpture in England, including a series of twelfth-century life-size statues of saints and prophets from St Mary’s, displayed so that you see them through a surviving arcade of the abbey itself.
The rest of the building is Roman and natural history, both good — the head of Constantine and the tombstone of Lucius Duccius Rufinus of the Ninth Legion are in the Roman gallery. Museum Gardens outside are free and open to anyone.
