The nobles, great landowners, in many cases of Norman origin, were lords over a considerable number of people.  York, being a royal city, escaped many of the troubles consequent on rule by an immediate overlord.  Besides himself, his family, and personal servants, a lord provided for a retinue of armed retainers, who formed a kind of body-guard and a force to serve the king as occasion demanded; in addition, important household officials, such as secretaries and treasurers.  Among noblemen’s followers there were many dependents, some, no doubt, parasites, but a number, especially if literary men, in need of patronage to help them to live as well as to pursue their vocation.

[Illustration:  AN ABBOT.]

The different kinds of religious men have already been mentioned from archbishops and abbots to the scurrilous impostors who used a religious exterior to rob poor people, at whose expense they lived well a wandering, loose, hypocritical life.  In York, there were monks and friars, cathedral, parochial, and chantry priests, and clerks.  The monastic life was a recognised profession.  In the monasteries there were, besides regular monks, novices or those who aspired to take the full monastic vows, and, especially in the fifteenth century, by which time the importance of lowly, arduous service for the brethren and personal labour had lapsed, a very large number of semi-religious and lay brethren, who were really servants to the regular monks.  In the fifteenth century the religious houses were extremely wealthy.  Some of the monks were of noble birth.  Nobles, when travelling, usually lodged at the monastic houses, which were dotted all over England.  The kings resided often at abbeys when visiting the provinces.  Richard III., when Duke of Gloucester, resided at the Austin Friary in York.

The one monastic house for women was St. Clement’s Nunnery.  There were, moreover, sisterhoods in the hospitals of, for example, St. Leonard and St. Nicholas.

St. Leonard’s Hospital, among its many functions, was a home of royal pensioners.

The townspeople were chiefly merchants and tradesmen and those they employed, and the wives and families of all of them.  Men of this type, both rich and poor, rose to important positions in trade and city life, and in the King’s service.  Some entered the service of nobles.  Great dignity was attached to the higher positions of authority in city and guild life.  Trade led to wealth and increased comfort and a higher social state.  Men in the King’s service received preferment more often than direct monetary reward.

Women had only the monastic life to enter as a profession.  They could become full members of a number of the York trade-guilds.  The social position of women in the retrograde fifteenth century fully agrees with the absence of women from among those who achieved notability in the city during the century.