This month Minster Lovell in Oxfordshire gives up its secrets as we delve into a dark period of British history and meet the ghosts of the manor
In 1487, a figure was seen escaping from a battlefield in Nottinghamshire. He’d backed the wrong horse, not just once, but twice, and now, after spending much of the previous year in hiding, he was on the run again. It seems he got to Scotland, where he, with various other noblemen, was granted safe conduct by King James IV in 1488. After that, he disappears.
He is, of course, ‘Lovell the Dog’, Sir Francis Lovell, a close childhood friend and lifelong supporter of King Richard III. He’d been at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 when Richard fell, but he stayed true to the Yorkist cause. He fled the Battle of Stoke Fields in 1487 after supporting the pretender claiming to be Edward, Earl of Warwick, Richard III’s nephew, known to history as Lambert Simnel. Henry VII, the victorious Tudor king, reigned on. Richard III would become one of England’s most hated kings, thanks, in part, to the Shakespeare play, a propagandist piece written during the equally Tudor reign of Elizabeth I. We all know that the remains of Richard III have now been found. But what about Francis Lovell?
We’re visiting that part of Minster Lovell known as Old Minster, where the church, manor house, and the Old Swan can be found right alongside the River Windrush. Wear stout shoes if it’s been wet! Heading through the churchyard, you’ll come to the ruins of Minster Lovell Hall, built by William Lovell III in the 15th century, but owned by the Lovell family since the 12th century.
The hall was dismantled for building stone in the 18th century, but just before that, when it was in the hands of the Coke family, workmen discovered a cellar, the story goes, and they came upon a locked door – a secret room! They forced the door and, in the flickering light of their candles, they saw a horror – the figure of a man, a disturbing mix of bone and flesh, sitting at a table, book in hand, and staring straight back at them. Then, as the 18th-century air rushed into the room, the figure crumbled and nothing but dust remained …
When questioned, the local farmers knew exactly what had happened. Instead of escaping to the continent, Francis had fled home. Hiding from Henry VII, he had himself locked in this room and there was fed by a faithful servant while he plotted and schemed … but the servant died, and poor Francis, his cries for help ever more desperate in the empty house, starved to death. He arranged to meet the inevitable with dignity, upright, with a book in his hand.
My friend Cathy, who very kindly took these photos, wrote to me, ‘The ruins at Minster Lovell speak eloquently of how rapidly the mighty can fall from grace.’ Walking through the ruins and musing on Lovell’s fate, and the eventual fate of the house, reduced, not long after the supposed finding of the skeleton, to the ruins we now see, she said that she ‘felt an echo of The Fellowship of the Ring, in the house of Tom Bombadil’. These words of Bombadil could apply to the Wars of the Roses:
Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and the flames went up into the sky.
That’s not the only sad body found at Minster Lovell. There’s a tale of a wedding that took place there one Christmas long ago, of one of the Lords Lovell and his bride, Ginevra. They played hide and seek, and to make sure he could give his bride a smacking kiss when he caught her, Lovell wound mistletoe around her head to make a coronet. But Ginevra was not found. They searched the house, the snow-bound grounds, everywhere – Oxford, Gloucester, even London – but she was gone. It was assumed she had run, perhaps with a more favoured lover. Then one day, many years later, when the servants were cleaning in the attics, a long-disused chest sprang open and there was a skeleton with a withered chaplet of leaves and shrunken berries in what remained of her yellow hair …
The poor remains were swiftly buried, and the chest spirited away to another Lovell property, Grey’s Court in Henley; but it was too late, the spirit was out, and a lady in white is seen among the ruins, perhaps still hoping her new bridegroom will find her. Haunting the grounds alongside her is a tall man in a cloak – Francis Lovell, free at last from his accidental tomb, but as trapped in the mortal world as the mistletoe bride.
From here, weather permitting, you can head out of the kissing gate and along the footpath by the River Windrush. You’d have to go as far as Witney to meet yet another ghost, a sad drowned monk. You can do a circular walk up to Crawley from here, but you can instead simply head back to the churchyard and into the church, which, like the hall, was built by William Lovell III. It’s thought that Lovell had the church rededicated to the local Saint Kenelm. Here you’ll find the carved heads of William Lovell and his wife, as well as Henry VI, on the capitals in the Lady Chapel. The impressive alabaster tomb is that of his son, John Lovell IX, who in turn was the father of Francis. John died in 1465, when his son was just a boy. This set in train the connections, through his fosterage by the Earl of Warwick, that would lead Francis to friendship with Richard III and, as Cathy said, suffering ‘the consequences of picking the wrong side’.
For various reasons, however, it may be that the man in the cloak and the white lady are entirely other spirits. The mistletoe bride was one of the most widespread macabre stories of the Victorian age, spawning an incredibly popular song, The Mistletoe Bough. By 1859, this song’s ‘solemn chanting’ was referred to as a ‘national occurrence at Christmas’. The ghost of the bride is known in several stately homes, though none but Minster Lovell has such a strong link to the real Lords Lovell. Dr Monika Simon, who has written the definitive book on the Lovell family, says of the discovery of Francis that, firstly, there is no record of a cellar in the hall and, secondly, that, as he ‘had spent little time at Minster Lovell it was highly unlikely that he knew a servant working there long enough to trust him with his life’, especially since Francis had forfeited the manor in 1485 after Bosworth Field and it was then owned by Henry VII’s uncle, Jaspar Tudor. Nonetheless, the ghosts are seen, and the ruins, so close to the water’s edge, have a special magic of their own.
ESSENTIALS
Distance: The circular walk to Crawley is 3 miles.
Duration: 2 hours.
Level: Fairly level, but liable to flooding
Parking: St Kenelm’s Church.
Toilets and refreshments: The Old Swan or the Minster Mill Hotel.
Transport links: Stagecoach bus no. 223 from Burford and Witney.
Further reading: From Robber Barons to Courtiers: The Changing World of the Lovell’s of Titchmarsh, by Dr Monika E. Simon; Oxfordshire Folk Tales, by Kevan Manwaring.
LINKS
Route: gb.mapometer.com/walking/route_5424552
Blaise Castle: www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/minster-lovell-hall-and-dovecote
Kirsty Hartsiotis is based in Stroud and available for hire as a storyteller and speaker. She is an Accredited Arts Society lecturer. Her books include Wiltshire Folk Tales and (with Anthony Nanson) Gloucestershire Ghost Tales and Gloucestershire Folk Tales for Children. She is also the curator of decorative art at a Gloucestershire museum.
