Trip into York today …… it was cold, very cold!
But great to wander round the festive streets, including the Shambles. 

Apparently;
‘The Shambles’ ….. arguably the best preserved medieval street in the world.  It was mentioned in the Doomsday Book & many of the buildings on the street today date back to the late fourteenth and fifteenth century. The Shambles was a street of butchers’ shops and houses, many complete with a slaughterhouse at the back of the premises. The meat was hung up outside the shops and laid out for sale on what are now the shop window-bottoms.  It is still possible to see some of the original butcher’s meat-hooks attached to the shop fronts. The pavements are raised either side of the cobbled street to form a channel where the butchers would wash away their offal and blood twice a week. In some sections of the Shambles it is possible to touch both sides of the street with your arms outstretched.  

The name is thought to derive from ‘Shammel’, an anglo-saxon word for the shelves which were a prominent feature of the open shop-fronts