With the cloud base at around 250m, a hot and muggy morning. I grabbed this shot on the climb up Easby Moor. Below the gate, the path descends across fields to Easby village.
One point of interest in this photo is the gate post on the left, which is dated ‘1668’. Now it may well have been moved to this position from somewhere else, but that doesn’t really matter. The carving is a connection to a past life.
In 1668, King Charles II was in the 7th year of his reign, Isaac Newton built the first reflecting telescope, and George Villiers, the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, fought a duel with Francis Talbot, 11th Earl of Shrewsbury who was fatally wounded.
The duel arose because of Villiers supposed romantic entanglement with the Countess of Shrewsbury. After the duel, he packed his wife off to her father’s house and the widowed Countess moved in with him. As you can imagine this called quite an outrage.
Villiers has a local connection. One of his many estates was Helmsley including the castle and most of Bilsdale, in which he supposedly created the “sport” of fox hunting. He was to die in a house of one of his tenants in Kirbymoorside after getting a chill whilst out hunting.
However, Villiers most distasteful contribution to history was that he supported and funded England’s burgeoning slave industry. The Royal African Company was a corporation created in the late 1660s to monopolize the slave trade in England. Villiers was a signatory to a document published in 1667 “The Several Declarations of The Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa.”
Within two decades, the Company was transporting about 5,000 enslaved people a year from Africa to the Caribbean. Between 1689 and 1690 the Deputy Governor of the Royal African Company was Edward Colston whose statue recently ended up in Bristol Docks.
It just goes to show that no place in Britain was immune to the cancer of slavery.
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