An armed robber has been jailed for four years after he terrified staff at a York supermarket with an eight-inch cleaver.

Nicholas Lee Williams, 39, had taken a cocktail of drugs and drink before the Christmas time raid on the Spar shop in Lowther Street, York Crown Court heard.

Colin Burn, prosecuting, said Williams had been acting strangely before he left home at 6pm, wearing a woolly hat and with blood trickling down his face.

Shortly afterwards, customers at the shop fled in terror as he entered shouting "everyone out".

Singling out shop assistant Vikki Pearson by pointing his knife at her with its blade of two to three inches, he made her open the till and grabbed a handful of £10 notes.

Williams, of Walpole Street, The Groves, pleaded guilty to the robbery on December 18, 1999.

Jailing him for four years, Mr Justice Bennett told him: "You seem to have taken a cocktail of drugs.

"It seems to have made you irrational."

He heard that the robber had taken three bottles of Lambrini, methadone, cannabis and possibly amphetamine and had locked himself in the bathroom and the front room of his home in the hours leading up to the raid.

As he left the house, his wife noticed that an eight-inch cleaver knife was missing from the table of the front room.

Four days after the raid, Williams telephoned police to give himself up.

For Williams, David Bradshaw said he had no recollection of the raid. In the past, he had committed crimes to fund a drug habit but he had tried to go straight after leaving prison in March 1998.

At the time of the raid, the shop manageress, who preferred to remain anonymous, praised her shop assistant, who was a student at the College of Ripon and York St John.