We cannot leave these old towers of Skipton Castle without going back to the days of John, the ninth Lord Clifford, that ‘Bloody Clifford’ who was one of the leaders of the Lancastrians at Wakefield, where his merciless slaughter earned him the title of ‘the Butcher.’ He died by a chance arrow the night before the Battle of Towton, so fatal to the cause of Lancaster, and Lady Clifford and the children took refuge in her father’s castle at Brough. For greater safety Henry, the heir, was placed under the care of a shepherd whose wife had nursed the boy’s mother when a child. In this way the future baron grew up as an entirely uneducated shepherd lad, spending his days on the fells in the primitive fashion of the peasants of the fifteenth century. When he was about twelve years old Lady Clifford, hearing rumours that the whereabouts of her children had become known, sent the shepherd and his wife with the boy into an extremely inaccessible part of Cumberland. He remained there until his thirty-second year, when the Battle of Bosworth placed Henry VII. on the throne. Then the shepherd lord was brought to Londesborough, and when the family estates had been restored, he went back to Skipton Castle. The strangeness of his new life being irksome to him, Lord Clifford spent most of his time in Barden Forest at one of the keeper’s lodges, which he adapted for his own use. There he hunted and studied astronomy and astrology with the canons of Bolton. At Flodden Field he led the men-at-arms from Craven, and showed that by his life of extreme simplicity he had in no way diminished the traditional valour of the Cliffords. When he died they buried him at Bolton Abbey, where many of his ancestors lay, and as his successor died after the dissolution of the monasteries, the ‘Shepherd Lord’ was the last to be buried in that secluded spot by the Wharfe.