Pub Crawl

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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby hvered » 7:15 pm

It looks a fairly typical commemorative plaque, English Renaissance style. William Button was a biggish wig, MP and county administrator, and variously imprisoned in the Tower or 'a loyal servant' to Cromwell. By the time the plaque was made it wouldn't have been wise to be associated with the old religion.

Drake family history page http://www.xroyvision.com.au/drake/history/hist10.htm says Mount Drake is Musbury fort (or Castle)

Mount Drake, the original home of the Drakes, is situated in the manor of Musbury, Axminster, Devon County. Musbury is a pure Saxon name, "Maest Barrow," or "The Biggest Hill." The British name of the place was "Mae Dun," of which Maist Barrow is a translation. The old name, Mae Dun, survives in a cluster of houses about a quarter of a mile from the present village, where it is corrupted into "Mayden-hayne."
Mount Drake is a table-land or plateau of about 160 acres, half way up the great ridge which goes by the name of Musbury Castle. It was one the seat of a British, and then of a Roman, encampment, and was a fortified camp, quite capable of accommodating two hundred persons or more. It was defended on three sides by a natural ravine, and on the upper side by bogs and a tangle of brush-wood, part of which still remains.


The passage above points out that it's a pre-Saxon site yet says it's a "pure Saxon name"!
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 9:53 pm

Parliamentary records
http://www.historyofparliamentonline.or ... -1560-1628
say similar.

He was at one time the MP for Lyme Regis, the western end of the Wessex Ridgeway. The eastern of which is close to Avebury and Alton Barnes.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 10:03 pm

hvered wrote:It looks a fairly typical commemorative plaque, English Renaissance style.


Are you sure?

Just to get a benchmark, what is a typical commemorative plaque, English Renaissance style?
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby hvered » 7:22 am

It was a tongue-in-cheek comment, you're quite right to pick up on it... no such thing as the English Renaissance, and as you'll have gathered from Ishmael's posts on AEL, the Renaissance too may turn out to be non-existent. The plaque has a certain ornateness or Classical feel which presumably was in vogue in the mid-sixteenth century when Button died.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 8:04 am

I'm still intrigued by the symbols and motifs on the plaque, but need better quality images to really get anywhere.

For example, is that really a Knights Templar cross on the plaque?

And why would it matter?

1) There is definitely a connection between the Drake family and KT, evidenced by Drake getting his finance for his adventures from La Rochelle, and returning there on the last leg of his Round The World voyage, before he returned home to Plymouth. Not all the treasure from that voyage returned to England.

2) Temple Farm, close to Avebury, not far from Alton Prior, is well-known as a KT site.

I will put a visit to Alton Barnes on the "To Do ASAP" list, along with the best camera I can find.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Mick Harper » 5:12 pm

Mount Drake, the original home of the Drakes .... The British name of the place was "Mae Dun," .... The old name, Mae Dun, survives in a cluster of houses about a quarter of a mile from the present village .... Mount Drake is a table-land or plateau of about 160 acres,


All this is quite significant. The point about 'maidens' is that they are artificial hills, the grandaddy of them being the Dorset Maiden Castle. Ignore the tosh about military uses, they are completely hopeless for any such purpose. The Drake connection is especially important. The Drake family more likely got their name from Drake (= Draco = Dragon) Hill rather than vice versa. Perhaps they were the ancient keepers of this important navigational waystation.

We do not mention the Drakes specifically in TME but we emphasise the importance of West Country gentry families in various activities, notably long distance seafaring and cider making. Elizabethan gentry families (especially mysteriously nouveau Elizabethan gentry families) are always of particular interest.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby TisILeclerc » 9:50 pm

In the link to the Drake Family in England in the above post by Hvered we are told, after a discussion of the importance of the dragon name:

' This person went from Devonshire and undoubtedly settled in Ireland, as a family of the name appears there shortly afterwards at Drakerath, County of Meathe, bearing the coat-of-arms of the English Drakes. Richard, a member of this family, was high sheriff of County Meathe in 1368, and one John also in 1422. This same John, or another, was Mayor of Dublin in 1402.'

Drakerath incorporates the word Rath in a similar way in which the Mae Dun becomes Maest Barrow.

Rath is an old circular enclosure, often associated with the fairies, very old any way.

Barrow is the old Burgh, bury etc.

Looking up the word Mae doesn't really lead to anything although it is reminiscent of Maes Howe the Orkney megalithic site.

Google translator gives the Welsh 'dun' as tin. Although I would have thought it had more to do with hill which is what Howe means.

Maol means bare in gaelic and is often used to describe bare hills. Perhaps mae is related to that.

Perhaps the Dragon man was relocating to another related site.

Meath is one of the most densely covered megalith sites in Ireland and is rich in minerals.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Boreades » 11:10 pm

Meath is also the home county of Newgrange.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby Mick Harper » 1:02 am

Maol means bare in gaelic and is often used to describe bare hills. Perhaps mae is related to that.

It is never pointed out that these megalithic 'hills' are characteristically bare. There is no particular reason why they should be since they have presumably been left to nature for many thousands of years. Of course they needed to be bare when used either as navigational markers or as animal enclosures.

We speculated in TME when discussing how come circular copses round the summit of (non-bare) megalithic hills could feasibly have lasted into the present and we came to the conclusion that the Megalithics had some way of permanently preventing trees spreading. Possibly bare hills are subject to the same mechanism. Since they are still there and still bare it shouldn't be difficult finding out what it was.
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Re: Pub Crawl

Postby hvered » 7:51 am

Google translator gives the Welsh 'dun' as tin. Although I would have thought it had more to do with hill which is what Howe means.

It could be that a dun is, or was assumed to be, the result of mining spoil, i.e. a slag heap, not a 'real' hill. How would you tell the difference, except perhaps by the absence of vegetation (at least to begin with)? In certain contexts dun means a dull brown which ties in with bareness, barrenness.

When scrambling up and down Uffington's white horse I saw a couple of crows or rooks (hard to tell) flying quite close, more or less at eye level, not so unusual as The Ridgeway is noted for rookeries, It seems the hill-top copses are particularly suited to their roosting needs or it could be the copses were always for their benefit. Do crows really fly in straight lines or is this observation due to their roosting sites being in copses planted in straight lines?

The largest corvid nesting site is in Norfolk at Buckenham and Claxton, about ten miles south-east of Caister-on-Sea. The two small villages are close, on each side of the Ridgeway/Michael Line.

The corvid roost at Buckenham Carrs is an extraordinary phenomenon. Every night from October until February the jackdaws and rooks from an area of about 400 sq km of the Norfolk Broads drain steadily out of their many individual sites dotted across the parishes, into a series of ever-increasing pre-roost flocks. Come the hour before dusk, the entire regional population is probably in a dozen fields. By the end of evening all those birds are together in one wood, while the surrounding countryside is devoid of either species.
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