The Wicked Lady of Markyate Cell.

A highwaywoman by night

The story goes that Lady Katherine Ferrers, mistress of Markyate Cell, grew restless in a marriage arranged when she was a child. By night she dressed as a man, left the house by a hidden stair and rode out to rob travellers on the roads of Hertfordshire. Nomansland Common, near Wheathampstead, is the place most often named.

One night in June 1660 she was shot during a robbery. She rode for home and died, the story says, before she could reach the stair. She was twenty six.

The woman behind the story

Katherine Ferrers was real. She was born on 4 May 1634, heiress to the Ferrers estates of Hertfordshire. Markyate Cell was hers by inheritance, and her family had built part of the house around 1600. In April 1648, not yet fourteen, she was married to Thomas Fanshawe, who was sixteen, and control of her fortune passed to him.

She died in June 1660, aged twenty six, and left no children.

The stair belongs to the story too. It is said that in the nineteenth century a hidden stairway was found behind a fireplace in the house.

How the story travelled

In 1944 Magdalen King-Hall turned the legend into a novel, The Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton. Gainsborough Pictures filmed it the following year as The Wicked Lady, with Margaret Lockwood and James Mason. It became one of the most watched British films ever made, and was remade in 1983 with Faye Dunaway. Neither film was shot here.

The house and the legend

The story belongs to this house, and it has never left. Hers is the name most people bring with them through the gates.

The history of Markyate Cell