Gallows in Ripon

We decided to make the journey to Scotland more like one of our road trip holidays. 

Instead of taking the most direct route, we'd let ourselves wander, and here we are in Ripon, about which I knew very little. 

Ripon was once famous for making spurs but in the 1500s saw the most macabre side of the Reformation. George Bowes was ordered ‘to invade, resist, subdue, slay, kill and put to execution of death by all ways and means.’

Here's the order from the Earl of Sussex to round up 300 or so men from Ripon and to execute them on Gallows Hill, in 1570.

It wasn't only this city where these deeds occurred. There was a list of towns and the accounted-for number of victims like some grotesque spreadsheet exercise.