Barrie Dobson's wide-ranging and richly-detailed study of the massacre of the Jews of York in March 1190 remains the definitive history of that terrible event. Most importantly he demonstrated that the massacre did not mark the end of a Jewish community in the city but rather occurred near its beginning: very soon after their first settlement under Josce and Benedict of York in the 1170s and 1180s. The return of Jews to York after 1190, and the new Jewish community which flourished in the early thirteenth century, was the subject of later papers by Dobson, now reprinted in a single volume. Here we do not try to cover the same ground. Where Dobson's history focussed on the Jews of York and the national context for the events in March 1190, this chapter deals in more depth with the city of York itself, both as a place and as a community in the later twelfth century. Modern memorialization of the massacre of March 1190 has become indelibly associated with Clifford's Tower, at the foot of which there is now a plaque of commemoration for the victims of 1190. Yet this stone structure was built some fifty years after the massacre and named another eighty years after that: it was not the structure in which the massacre occurred. The stone tower does stand on the site of a previous wooden castle keep, which stood on top of a smaller earth motte at the centre of a castle first constructed by William the Conqueror in 1068-69. It is usually assumed that this was the site of the mass suicide and murder of the Jews in March 1190.