Slide 2 – Admitting to a great quadrangle encompassed by a broad and placid moat, and composed of out buildings, that stretch as outliers to the main block, which forms an L shaped building at the north-east corner of the court. In this wide courtyard the tenantry must have mustered for the march to Flodden in 1513, where Sir Ninian Markenfield had command, and long after, the Northmen chanted: “Next went Sir Ninian Markenfield, In armour coat of cunning work. The next went Sir John Maundville, With him the citizens of York.” And here too, three generations later, Sir Thomas Markenfield, the brave but head strong grandson of the old warrior just named, wrecked the fortunes of a time honoured race by becoming one of the principal leaders of the Rising in the North, in 1569, and died far away in a foreign land, a broken fugitive, a landless exile! “By strangers honoured and by strangers mourned “ And so perished the old family of Markenfield, lost, like many others in this great Kingdom, by their adherence to a cause which so strongly appealed to their hearts, and in which they staked both life and fortune.
