Henry VIII is the King who changed most and changed England most as well. The King himself changed from the young, handsome and athletic “virtuous prince”, who was hailed by Thomas More as the liberator of his country, into the grotesquely bloated, brutal tyrant of his maturity, who judicially murdered More, two of his own wives, and hundreds of his subjects. The change inflicted on England was even greater as, standing his own religion on its head, he broke the kingdom’s thousand-year-old allegiance to Rome, dissolved the monasteries and made himself “Supreme Head on Earth” of the schismatic national Church of England. This lecture, which takes on added resonance from Markenfield’s past as a recusant house, asks why Henry changed and how he got away with revolutionary change he forced on England. And offers radically new and surprising answers.

Markenfield Hall is renowned as a masterpiece of medieval architecture. Enlarged and embellished under royal license in the early fourteenth century, it represented in stone the wealth and influence of its owner, John of Markenfield. But who was John and how did he acquire such power? In this talk, Paul Dryburgh, Principal Records Specialist at The National Archives, will explore some of the darker episodes in the life of the man who served both as canon of York Minster and, for two years, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, reveal the nefarious strategies John used to protect and extend his familial networks in the North and his position as a senior northern clerk in the service of King Edward II.

Between the reigns of Edward II and Charles I the Scroope family (as it was then spelt) produced an Archbishop, two Bishops, one Lord High Chancellor, two Chief Justices, four Treasurers, five Knights of the Garter, two Earls and 20 Barons. The family arrived in England with Edward the Confessor, before settling in Wensleydale in C12th. Here the histories of the Scropes and the Markenfields became intertwined through marriage and battle.