Three dooms at Minster Lovell Hall

The ruins of Minster Lovell Hall stand by the River Windrush between Burford and Witney. The house was built in the 1430s by William, Lord Lovell, after he came home from the wars in France, and its four-storey south-west tower was added later in the century. English Heritage (opens in a new tab) looks after it, and it is free to visit in daylight.

The first doom: Francis Lovell

William's grandson Francis was one of Richard III's closest friends: a viscount, Lord Chamberlain and Knight of the Garter, mocked in a rhyme of 1484 as "Lovell our dog". After Bosworth in 1485 he fled, rose again in 1486, and fought for the pretender Lambert Simnel at the battle of Stoke in June 1487. He was seen escaping the field. After that, nobody knows what became of him.

The second doom: the skeleton

In 1737 William Cowper, clerk of the Parliaments, wrote down a story he had heard the Duke of Rutland tell in 1728: that in 1708, when a chimney was being built at Minster Lovell, workmen opened a hidden vault and found a man's skeleton seated at a table. It was taken to be Lovell, hiding from his enemies and starved to death. It is hearsay, set down nearly thirty years after the event, and nothing else ties the skeleton to Lovell.

The third doom: the house itself

After Bosworth the hall went to the Crown. Sir Edward Coke bought it in 1602, and his descendant Thomas Coke took the title Lord Lovell in 1728. But the Cokes built their great house at Holkham in Norfolk, and around 1747 most of Minster Lovell was pulled down and its stone reused. Only the ruins and a fifteenth-century round dovecote remain.

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The Mistletoe Bough

Minster Lovell is also one of many houses said to be the setting of "The Mistletoe Bough (opens in a new tab)", a song of about 1830 about a bride who hides in a chest during a Christmas game and is found years later. Houses in Hampshire and Norfolk make the same claim, and Samuel Rogers told the same story, set in Italy, in his poem "Ginevra", part of his Italy of the 1820s.

Visiting

The hall is free and open at any reasonable time in daylight (opens in a new tab); the dovecote can be seen from outside. There are no toilets. Park at St Kenelm's church, about five minutes' walk away, rather than in the lane, and keep dogs on leads.