Drax Priory Drax Priory Drax Priory was an Augustinian priory at Drax in North Yorkshire, England, founded between 1130 and 1139 by William Paynel. The Priory has sometimes been called an abbey, though this is judged to be incorrect. Permission was given to crenellate the priory in 1362. The Priory was run down in 1535 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the land was leased to Sir Marmaduke Constable to be used as a farm. In 1997, a geophysical survey and aerial imaging was undertaken which revealed wall lines of buried buildings and former ponds. The monks at Drax owned lands
Hugo Drax the "traitor within" throughout the course of the book. Drax, real name Graf Hugo von der Drache, is a "megalomaniac German Nazi who masquerades as an English gentleman", while his assistant, Krebs, bears the same name as Adolf Hitler's last Chief of Staff. In using a German as the novel's main enemy, "Fleming ... exploits another British cultural antipathy of the 1950s. Germans, in the wake of World War II, made another easy and obvious target for bad press." "Moonraker" uses two dictatorships that Fleming hated - the Nazis and the Soviets - as villains: Drax is German and works