It seems the final resting place of Hugh Despenser the
Younger was Hulton Abbey, the remains of which were about half a mile from the
house where I lived. On the orders of Queen Isabella, poor old Hugh (or poor
young Hugh to be precise) was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1326 for having
been a favourite of her deposed husband, King Edward II. And maybe it should be
pointed out that only part of poor Hugh rested in Hulton Abbey. Several bits of
him had been set up on spikes atop the walls of various cities as a salutary
lesson in the fate which may befall those who transgress the accepted mores of
kingship. I expect the crows had the flesh and the dogs the bones.
But there was also an area of wild grassland just beyond the
estate of houses on which my house was situated. It was called The Butts, and
was where I spent many a happy summer’s day fishing for bullheads in the stream
which ran through it. It was also the favourite location for games of cowboys
and indians (in which I was always the cowboy called Jim. There was always a
cowboy called Jim in westerns.)
I gather it was so named because it was where the local men
practiced their archery skills during the Middle Ages, which was a legal
requirement at a time when the French and English kings were squabbling over
who owned which bits of France. The archers were indispensible to the need to
remove a few French knights from the equation. It was how Henry V ended up in Paris long before the
place became fashionable.
But the fact I found most interesting was a lot more up to
date. I discovered that during WWII a German plane had crashed on The
Butts, probably while returning home from a raid on Liverpool.
Why did nobody ever tell me that? My best friend’s mother was Austrian and had
a crush on Clark Gable, so surely she must have known.
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