This third picture of blackthorn bushes shows wild strawberry in flower at ground level below the bush. Given that wild strawberry like a calcareous soil it would have been unlikely that any would have grown across historic Myton, plus the grazing sheep would have soon nibbled off the flower-heads. Wild strawberries always remind me of annual school trips back in the ’70s and ’80s to Gordale Scar, Malham Tarn and Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales and organised by the late Dave Blamires. In early July the plants were in fruit on the Carboniferous Limestone.
In the 1290s when King Edward I acquired Wyk and the berewick of Myton we get the first use of the term ‘Manor’ (instead of berewick) of Myton. His son Edward II had a manor-house built, probably on the site of the previous monastic grange and at a site now where Kingston Retail Park stands (or this is my interpretation of Travis Cook’s supposition – s.p.b.s). An inquisition of 1312, studied by Travis Cook, recorded that the roofs, walls of the hall, chamber, kitchen and outlying buildings of Myton manor house were all ‘in decay’, also the bridge over the moat needed repairing.
When the brothers Richard and William De la Pole acquired the manor of Myton from King Edward III they had a new manor-house built at ‘Tupcotes’. In 1552 King Edward VI granted the royal manor of ‘Tupcotts with Myton’ to the mayor and burgesses of Kingstown upon the River Hull. Tupcoats was a name, now lost, defining a grazing area for male sheep, ‘pasture for the tups’.
(to be continued)