There are three tales told by Delapre (pron Duh-la-PREY) Abbey…

… the nuns who lived there for four hundred years, the two families who lived there for a couple of hundred years each, and the great battle fought in the grounds. Let’s start with the battle of Northampton, which was way back in the first season of the Wars of the Roses.

Here we see a recreation of the battle in a format that is a cross between Terry Gilliam and Punch and Judy. I kept expecting a giant foot to come down and crush the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The year is 1460. In the red corner we have the house of Lancaster, led by King Henry VI, a madman or saint, or perhaps both. In the white corner we have the house of York, led by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, and his cousin Edward, Earl of March. The Lancastrians have arrived first, and built a fortified camp with a moat and wooden walls. Both sides have weapons of mass destruction – cannons, capable of killing or maiming several soldiers with a single shot – but the Lancastrians have the larger weapons. The Yorkists are outnumbered two to one.

Warwick was a good enough general to know that he could not win by force of arms alone. He attempted to negotiate with the king, but was refused. So he attacked the king’s camp anyway. He had a secret weapon.

It was a rainy day. The Lancastrian gunpowder was damp, and their canons did not work. The Yorkists charged through a rain of arrows to the left flank of the Lancastrian encampment, where the defenders laid down their arms and helped the Yorkists invade the camp. Warwick had cut a deal with Lord Grey of Ruthin, who had agreed to switch sides in exchange for land and titles. (History does not record if he also pissed in the gunpowder.) The Lancastrians, the rest of them, the ones who hadn’t changed sides, were devastated. Attacked from inside their own camp, they ran away and were hunted down. Many Lancastrian nobles were killed, and the king himself was captured.

The king later escaped, was deposed, was recaptured, was restored to the throne when Warwick changed sides, was deposed again, imprisoned, and finally murdered. Kinging used to be a real job. You tell that to monarchs today, and they just don’t believe you.

The battle room at Delapre Abbey is full of fun interactive games explaining medieval warfare. The abbey has only been open as a museum for a few months, so all the exhibits with moving parts are still in working order. There’s mix your own gunpowder…

… cannon ball bowling…

… and a peepshow with a nuns eye view of the battle.

My favorite was the wind up feudal system.

When you wind the handle, the king goes mad and the whole system collapses around him. You let go of the handle, he zooms back to sanity and the system is restored.

On to the nuns, who dedicated their lives to sanctity and prayer. Well, most of them did, anyway.

Around the same time one of the abbesses was excommunicated for wearing a velvet dress to mass. That seems like a pretty minor sin. I bet she was thinking, Darn, if I’d know I was going to be excommunicated I could have been abandoning myself to lust of the flesh all this time.

The building was a nunnery from 1145 till 1538, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries. Not much of the original nunnery survives. The building has been mucked around with over the centuries. The central courtyard still occupies the same place as in the nunnery, but hardly any of the buildings surrounding it are original.

There’s a mixture of limestone, ironstone, brick, slate, and stucco.

The building was owned by the Tate family from 1550 till 1756, and by the Bouverie family from then until 1943. In the 1950s Northampton Council planned to demolish it to put up a housing estate, but a determined activist managed to save it.

It was recently restored for use as a museum.

Several of the rooms have been decorated in the way they were after John Augustus Shiel Bouverie inherited the building in 1872.

He was the rightful heir but a poor nephew who had grown up in Ireland. Of course, in true Downton Abbey fashion the family welcomed him with open arms.

Bullshit. The landed gentry are not nearly as nice in real life as they are on TV. First of all the previous owner sued John Bouverie claiming that he was illegitimate, and when he lost that lawsuit, he made sure that John got nothing but the bare minimum required by law, the house and the land. All the furniture, art, silver, even the farm animals on the estate, were left to other relatives. John was forced to mortgage the property in order to move in.

My favorite of the restored rooms is the library.

Unlike stately homes where the furniture and books are original and you can’t touch anything, here you are welcome to sit on the sofa and read the books from the shelves.

Outside the water garden is dry, but still lovely.

Somewhere on the estate, hundreds of bodies from the battle of Northampton are buried. There are worse places to be buried than these woods.