BY HISTORIAN Roger Bingham of Ackenthwaite:

Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, was Westmorland’s greatest heiress ever.

But when, in the 1650s, she came into her inheritance, her vast estates had been depleted by 50 years of neglect and by recent civil wars.

With a dozen castles and churches to repair she needed every penny she could get – literally. To do so, she put up her rents on her Appleby domain.

She quickly - and often angrily - settled terms with her larger landholders. But her longest dispute concerned her smallest tenant who refused to pay a penny a year for the right to keep a solitary hen.

Determined to get her due, she went to court and won the day, though she had to meet the enormous costs of £400 herself.

But then, the story goes, 'she invited the tenant to dine and, having obtained the hen, had the fowl cooked and then made sure that he consumed exactly half the bird, explaining that now she had won her right she was prepared to be on pleasant terms with him.'

Significantly, the motto she had inscribed on the town cross outside Appleby Castle read 'retain your loyalty. Preserve your rights.'