IF YOU'RE Yorkshire born and bred, you may have more German blood in you than you think.

David Palliser, the York-based medieval scholar, doesn't say this outright in his new book Medieval York. But it's implied in his discussion about what happened to the Roman city of Eburacum after the Romans left.

By the AD 700s, he writes, a Germanic people – the Angli, or English – had crossed the north sea and settled in the north east.

"That need not mean they they massacred, drove out or enslaved the native Britons," he writes. "A persuasive case has been made (for England as a whole) that Britons continued to form the mass of the people, but subordinate to the invading minority, and largely adopting their language and culture."

Genetic analysis, however, has revealed that in eastern coastal areas of England – including much of Yorkshire – the Germanic Angli make up a higher proportion of the population than elsewhere, he writes. So Yorkshiremen probably have more German in their blood than those from further west. Like, say, Lancastrians.

York, of course, was later the capital of a Viking kingdom – so we've got more than a dash of Viking blood, too. Quite a melting pot, in fact.

Professor Palliser – a visiting professor in history at the University of York – covers more than 1,000 years in his book: from the departure of the Romans soon after AD 400 to the end of the Tudor period.

It's a scholarly book, one for the serious student of history. But there's much to savour for those who want to know how York became the city it is today: from Prof Palliser's clear-sighted discussion of how the Anglian city of Eoforwic developed against a background of regional squabbles for power amongst rival kingdoms in the north of what became England, to an account of the 'harrying of the north' by William the Conqueror in 1066.

The Northumbrians – among them the men of York – were already exhausted by the battles of Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings, he points out. They were in no state to resist William's Normans once they came northward. He quotes from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle on what happened.

The Saxon prince Edgar Aetheling had come to York with a Northumbrian army, and united with the people of York to resist William's Normans.

"And King William came upon them by surprise... and put them to flight; and then killed those who could not flee – that was several hundreds of men; and ravaged the town, and made St Peter's Minster a disgrace, and also ravaged and humiliated all the others," the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records.

It was not, perhaps, the best time to be a native son of York. But from the comfort of an armchair, Prof Palliser's book makes for absorbing reading.