Minster Lovell
The village lies in the lower Windrush Valley and is mainly built along a single street on the left bank of the river. The name is associated with the Lovell family, who owned the manor from the twelfth to the last quarter of the fifteenth century, when it was lost through backing the wrong side in the final struggle of the Wars of the Roses. The last holder was Francis, Lord Lovell, a Yorkist and strong supporter of Richard III. He is still remembered in most history books from that couplet coined by a political opponent:
The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our Dog Rule all England under a Hog.*
It was Lord William, the father of Francis, who built the fine church and whose effigy in alabaster lies there with the Yorkist chain of suns round his neck. He also rebuilt the adjoining Manor-house whose ruin is now cared for by the Ministry of Works.
The half-timbered building shown in the picture (a rare type of construction in the Cotswolds) and now part of a hotel, is said to date from 1490 - three years after the Battle of Stoke, when 'our Dog', fighting for the pretender Lambert Simnel, was defeated and mysteriously disappeared.
* It will be remembered that the Rat was Sir Richard Ratcliffe and the Cat, Sir William Catesby, both favourites of Richard III. The home of the Catesbys was not far away, at Chastleton, near Moreton-in-the-Marsh. Chastleton House was built in Elizabethan times on the site of their old manor-house and their tombs are in the church close by.