Following swift on the heels of the news that Robert Markenfield may have prepared the way for one of ‘the Princes in the Tower’ to move to Devon, where he may have lived out his life in relative obscurity, came another fabulous find.
This research, carried out on the cusp of the new year by Eleanor, really did bring a smile to our faces. Her email to us read as follows:
“Just as midnight New Year struck, I made a little, chance discovery relating to Thomas Markenfield III. I happened to be having a look at a will I’d seen at York, a will for William Yeresley of Bishopton, 1482. I’d downloaded the will some time ago because I noticed a court case on Waalt (the Wiki of the Anglo America Legal Tradition) dating from 1484. It was a dispute over debt between John Norton, Knight, Yorkshire, and the executors of William Yeresley. Among those executors were John Markynfeld and his wife, Alice, formerly the wife of William Yeresley. So John Markenfield had married William’s widow, Alice.
“Going back to William Yeresley’s will, he left Thomas a piece of coloured unicorn horn, blue-grey in colour. That, with my awful Latin, is how I read the line. I don’t think William could have left a pair of unicorn horns because that would be a stunning bequest, way more than I’d expect, and in any case, unicorn horns don’t come in pairs…
“I have had a look online and pieces of unicorn horn do turn up in bequests but they don’t seem common and no-one appears to have picked up on this one before.” Eleanor continued her research, and her original Latin translation of unum par precularium was largely correct and the bequest was “a pair of beads”. This was a bit more tricky, but it transpired that ‘a pair of beads’ can refer to a set of rosary beads.
“Overall, the bequest of the unicorn horn ‘pair of beads’ / rosary that William left to Sir Thomas Markenfield stands out as a very personal gift. In contrast, William left his wife, Alice, a Flanders chest, some coffers, four cows and an allowance.
“I think there can be no doubt that Sir Thomas would have know he was receiving something very special and rare with this rosary. He may well have seen objects made from unicorn horn and he would have been well aware of its symbolism. And no matter what the unicorn rosary was really made from, to William Yeresley and Sir Thomas, it would have been seen as being genuine unicorn horn.”
We have a moat 