Memorials of Old Lincolnshire

by Unknown

THE TOWN AND CHURCH OF GRANTHAM

By A. Hamilton Thompson, M.A.

Grantham is still, and long has been, a name familiar to travellers between the north and south of England. Only a few miles west of the old Roman road from London to York, it lies directly in the course of the more modern road, and for more than fifty years has been one of the principal halting-places on a great railway system. The traveller from the south, who has left the Fenland behind him some ten miles north of Peterborough, and has for another ten miles or so ascended the valley of a stream whose waters eventually find their way into the Welland near the Wash, passes through a short tunnel, and rapidly descends into the Witham valley. On his left hand the Witham winds through pleasant meadows, with the noble tower of Great Ponton Church on its farther bank. The stream passes under the railway near the ford by which the traveller approached Grantham during the greater part of its history, leaving the Roman road not far west of Somerby for the by-road known as the Saltway. The smoke of engineering works begins to fill the air; and the tower of Spittlegate Church, close to the line, and, farther away, the rather attenuated tower and cupola of the Town Hall, promise little historical or architectural interest. But if he looks a little beyond his immediate surroundings he will see that beyond this industrial and modern suburb there lies a more inviting town, with a huge tower and spire and the body of a great church mounting high above its red-tiled roofs, with a pretty background of tree-crowned ridge, with the parks of Belton and Syston closing the view to the north-east, and to the north-west the line of the North Road as it cuts its way up Gonerby Hill.

Grantham is sometimes said to take its name from the river, one name of which, as of the Cam at Cambridge, may have been the Grant. The Witham, which rises across the border of Rutland some miles to the south, and flows northward from Grantham, approaching the Trent near Newark, and turning aside to take its own course to the sea by Lincoln and Boston, widened into a small lake or marsh as it drew near to Grantham. The first settlement of Grantham must have been dictated by the sight of a potentially fertile valley. It grew up, so far as we know, neither round an abbey nor beneath a castle, but as a community of agriculturists. The church, which grew to such proportions in its midst, grew probably with the prosperity of the town; while of the castle, which stood on the east side of the town, between it and the river, we know nothing but the name. Grantham was not one of those fortified river towns, like Stamford and Nottingham, which played a part in the campaigns of Edward the Elder and his sister. And its first definite appearance in history is the entry in Domesday Book, where it is numbered with the King’s possessions. It had belonged to Edith, Queen of Edward the Confessor; and included within it there was a right of jurisdiction, granted by a nun named Ælswith to Peterborough Abbey, and now held by Colegrim. The Queen had a hall in the demesne, and the church and its property are mentioned. The history of the manor and soke of Grantham is somewhat complicated, and a full account of it is beyond the scope of this article.[45] When Edward I.’s commissioners visited the town in 1275, to inquire by what warrant lands were held there and privileges exercised, the jurors gave an account of the descent of the lordship, which indicates that the Norman kings, like their successors, treated the manor and soke as grants to be held in dower by their wives or daughters.[46] They said that Maud “regina et heres Anglie”—obviously Henry I.’s daughter, the Empress—enfeoffed William de Tancarville, hereditary chamberlain of the duchy of Normandy, of Grantham and the whole soke, to be held of her in chief, apparently by service of ten knights’ fees, as he sub-enfeoffed this number of knights. The chamberlain’s grandson, Ralph, took part in the rebellion of Normandy against John, and forfeited the possession. John then gave the town with the soke to William, Earl of Warenne, on whose death in 1240 his widow, Maud, a daughter of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was allowed to remain in seisin. At her death, however, in 1249, Henry III. resumed the property, claiming that the Earl had held it only while the King was pleased to suffer him; and in 1254, when Prince Edward married Eleanor of Castile, it was granted to him, the claims of John, the then Earl Warenne, being overlooked.[47] Edward, however, a few years later gave the town and soke to the Earl, to be held of him by the service of four knights. The grant was confirmed by a royal charter, in which Henry III. laid stress on the principle that the manor was inalienable from the crown. The lordship and manor seem to have been in different hands from the later part of the reign of Henry II. to this period; but under Prince Edward and Earl John they seem to have been reunited.[48]

Earl John died in 1304, and the lordship escheated to the Crown. It was then granted to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who held it till his death in 1324.[49] Edward II. then granted it, or part of it—for here again there seems to have been a temporary divorcement of the lordship from the manor—to John, Earl Warenne, the younger.[50] But he first took care to preclude John from claiming it as his hereditary right by requiring him to quit-claim it to the Crown: this done, he allowed the grant. In 1338, shortly before John’s death, Edward III. gave the reversion of part of the tenement to William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton,[51] after whose death (1360) his son Humphrey was allowed to hold it. In 1363, the castle and town were granted to Edmund of Langley.[52] The manor was possibly retained by the young Earl of Northampton, and the grant of castle and town seems not to have included the soke. In 1399, the manor reverted to the Crown, by the attainder of its holder, the Earl of Northumberland, and was granted to Edmund of Langley. The soke also, on the death of Sir Robert Byron, passed into Edmund’s hands.[53] Edmund died in 1402; and castle and town, with manor and soke, were granted to his son Edward, Duke of York, who died at Agincourt. In 1420 they were given in dower to Katharine of France on her marriage. Edward IV., in 1461, granted the lordship with the manor to his mother Cicely, Duchess of York: his grant included the inn called “le George.”[54] On her death, the manor with its appurtenances was settled on her granddaughter, Elizabeth of York; and from that time till the time of William III., save for an alienation to private owners during the Commonwealth, it was regarded as Crown property, and held in dower by the Queen-Consort for the time being. The Earls of Rutland were stewards of the manor. William III., in 1696, alienated it to the first Earl of Portland, and since then it has remained in private hands, though not in the same family.

Other proprietors also held property, and had certain forms of jurisdiction in the town. The traveller who entered it from the south in the year 1300, after crossing the Salters’ Ford and passing the leper hospital which about this time began to give its name to the suburb of Spittlegate, might have seen, on the wide space outside the town, near the modern Town Hall, the cross which within the last few years the King of England had built to mark the southward progress of his wife’s funeral procession.[55] On his right hand, on and near the modern St. Peter’s Hill, were the lands of the abbey of Peterborough, which had been granted to it by Ælswith before the Conquest, and by Colegrim afterwards, and had been confirmed to it by royal charter.[56] On this land probably stood the Church of St. Peter, of which too little is known to justify definite statement.[57] Near the church he would see the opening of Castlegate, east of which lay the Castle, the visible symbol of the royal lordship. He would keep straight on along the higher ground. Passing along High Street, he might already see here and there a handsome house of Ancaster stone, such as he certainly would see in forty or fifty years’ time. It is doubtful whether the inn, afterwards known as the “George,” was built yet: it is probable that the little guild chapel which stood on the same side of the street till late in the eighteenth century belonged to a later period. Farther on, on the opposite side, stood the “Angel Inn,” on the property of the Knights Templars of Temple Bruer. Within the next decade the Order of the Temple would be no more; and their property here, as elsewhere, would—at any rate, it seems likely—be granted to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in England. The gateway of the “Angel,” as we know it to-day, was not built till more than half a century later: the rest of the street front is of a still later date. Opposite the “Angel” was the opening, afterwards known as Coal Hill, leading to the market-place—if, indeed, the market-place was divided from the High Street then as now. On the west side of the market-place was the house of the Grey Friars, on the property known later as the Grange, and for some time, in accordance with the modern genius for confounding monks with friars, as Cistercian Place. It is possible that the Franciscans, who appeared in Grantham about 1290, may have come from the house of their order at Bury St. Edmunds, and that the Benedictine abbey of Bury may have allowed them to settle on the property which it had received in frankalmoin from William de Tancarville, and had been allowed to retain after the forfeiture of the Tancarville estates.[58] In 1318 Richard Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, allowed the Friars to convey water to their house from springs on his land at Gonerby; and the conduit, built in 1579, which is to be seen on the west side of the market-place, is the successor of the conduit of the Friars. But it is probable that already, in 1300, the chief of the four ancient wells from which Grantham took its supply was in the centre of the market: it may already have been roofed over, and the dyers may already have begun to spread their goods on market-days beneath the projecting eaves of the roof. At the “Angel” the traveller would be sure to find wool-merchants travelling from fair to fair, or the King’s buyers come to transact business with the rising wool-merchants of the town.[59] North of the “Angel,” the High Street was continued, under the name of Watergate, down the slope of the hill which led to the watering-place at the bridge over the Mowbeck, the little stream which, flowing down the Harlaxton valley, met the Witham below the town. Our traveller would leave this on his left: a narrow lane, now Vine Street, used till 1705 merely as a foot-path to the church, would take him to the head of Swinegate, the road along which the town swine were driven daily to spend the day on Manthorpe Moor. Here possibly markets had been held till within the last quarter of a century; and here, till 1645, stood the old Apple Cross, the High Cross of Grantham. But the space had been encroached upon by the westward extension of the church;[60] so that Grantham lost that magnificent combination of church and market-square which is the unrivalled distinction of its neighbour Newark. What the town had lost, however, the church had gained in architectural beauty; and in the year 1300 the west front, much as we now see it, had been finished, and the scaffolding was probably being removed from a spire which at that time was unsurpassed in England. The spire of the mother church of Salisbury was not to be completed for many years: the spire of Newark was not taken in hand till the second quarter of the century. More than a century later, Grantham spire would be surpassed in height and grace of proportion by the great lantern-tower at Boston: two hundred years later, the spire of Louth would challenge both. But in beauty of detail, whatever may be their advantages in design, neither Louth nor Boston can compare with Grantham; and in this respect the one steeple in England which has ever surpassed it is the “Broad” Tower of Lincoln. Yet even this was not yet completed for another ten or eleven years, so that for the moment the spire of Grantham stood without an equal.

The space by the Apple Cross was then, we may suppose, less impeded by houses than at present; and south and south-east of the churchyard were the outer works of the Castle, whose memory was long preserved in Castle Dyke, the lower part of Castlegate. But of the Castle itself, as has been said, little is known.[61] Only once in its history, and then apparently when the Castle existed no longer, was Grantham prominent as a military centre. The Kings of England, its nominal lords, must all have passed through Grantham in their progresses. Edward I. was often there.[62] Edward IV. came through the town at the head of the procession which brought the body of his father from Pontefract Priory to the College of Fotheringhay. Charles I. was there at least three times, on his way to Scotland in 1633, and again in 1640 and 1641. On none of these occasions do we hear of the Castle. And when, on the 19th of October 1483, Richard III. sealed the death-warrant of the Duke of Buckingham here, causing the Great Seal to be brought for that purpose post-haste from London, he did it, not in the Castle, but “in a chamber called the King’s Chamber in the Angel Inn”—the chamber whose outer wall, and at any rate one window, may be seen above the gateway of the “Angel.” The Castle may have risen in Norman times, possibly on the site of Queen Edith’s hall, the face of which, however, would have been completely altered by the new Norman earthworks. But, if this were so, the most that we hear of it is a casual mention here and there, and its survival in one or two local names.

Angel Hotel, Grantham.

The visit of Richard III. to Grantham was marked by his grant of a charter to the Corporation of the town, which exempted them from the authority of the Sheriff of Lincolnshire in the execution and return of writs, making the Alderman and his twelve Comburgesses magistrates within the town and soke, and giving them a prison in the town. A charter had been granted to the Alderman and Burgesses by Richard II. in 1377; and Richard III.’s charter was probably an extension of the privileges granted by a charter of Edward IV. in 1463. From 1463 Grantham dates its existence as a corporate borough, the recognition of its Merchant Guild, and the right of sending two burgesses to Parliament. Its Alderman was elected by the Comburgesses annually in the church, the Corpus Christi chapel of the chancel being used, as time went on, for that purpose.[63] Probably the members of Parliament were at first elected in the church: their election later on took place in the Grammar School, until in 1765 Corpus Christi College at Oxford, as trustee of the foundation, objected to the damage done on these occasions. It was then decided to transfer parliamentary elections to the church or the Guildhall. Grantham lost one of its members in 1832, but still returns one. James II. converted the Alderman into a Mayor by a charter of 1685. In April 1688, however, a Quo warranto summons was served on the Mayor; and in the following November the Corporation, taking advantage of the banished King’s proclamation which restored such bodies to their ancient rights, reverted to their old state. Their later constitution included an Alderman, twelve senior and twelve junior Comburgesses. For these the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 substituted a Mayor, four Aldermen, and twelve Councillors.

We have seen the connection of the church with the civic life of the town; and it is to the church and its history that we now turn. In 1085 it formed part of the royal manor, and the right of presentation to it belonged then and for some time after to the King. The parish of Grantham was then probably conterminous with the soke. The churches at Houghton, which corresponds to the modern parish of Spittlegate, Londonthorpe, and in the outlying member of the soke at Braceby, were regarded as chapels of Grantham from early times. The extent of the mediæval parish is fairly represented by the report of Henry VIII.’s commissioners in 1535-6. They found the vicar of the northern mediety of Grantham holding as part of his charge North Gonerby and Londonthorpe; while South Gonerby and Braceby were in charge of the vicar of the southern mediety. Belton and Sapperton, also members of the soke, formed independent parishes from an early date: one can scarcely doubt that the alienation of property there to religious houses was followed quickly by the alienation of the townships from their mother church and the building of churches of their own, to which their new lords presented.[64] In 1091 the lands and endowments of the Church of Grantham were granted to St. Osmund, who gave them to his new cathedral at Old Sarum. The presentation still remained with the Crown. If we may trust the shaky memories of the jurors of 1275, with whose statements the justices apparently were satisfied, the Empress Maud granted the advowson and right of presentation to the Church of Sarum.[65] From that time it became a prebendal church of the Cathedral of Sarum, divided into medieties, whose rectors, the prebendaries of North and South Grantham, impropriated the endowments already granted, and claimed some jurisdiction within their prebends. The church was probably served by chaplains, until Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln, whose energy in providing regular incumbents and stipends for the impropriated benefices of his diocese, has a memorial in the priceless rolls of institutions and charters belonging to his episcopate, and in his book of ordinations of vicarages, arranged for the presentation and institution of regularly paid vicars. The first vicar of North Grantham was instituted on September 23, 1223; the first vicar of South Grantham about two years later.[66] It is not at all unlikely that many of these vicars were careless about residence, and that their duties were often delegated to the chantry priests, whose number grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: we know that, in the seventeenth century, the care of the parish was left often, if not habitually, to one of the two incumbents. But each of the two prebendaries in Salisbury presented his own nominee on a vacancy in his particular vicarage till 1713, when, on the voidance of the vicarage of North Grantham by death, Mr. John Harrison, the south vicar, was instituted also to the other mediety. There are still prebendaries of North and South Grantham in Salisbury, who presented to the vicarage until 1870; but their connection with the prebendal church is now severed save in name, and, while the impropriation has passed into other hands, the vicar is collated by the Bishop of Lincoln.

On its first connection with the Cathedral of Sarum the church was much smaller than it is now. As we stand beneath the tower and look along the nave, we shall see that the second pillar east of the tower in both arcades is a pier composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on either side; and, coming nearer, we shall see that the western respond is much later in character than the eastern. Across the space between these composite piers, covering their site, and extending a little farther to north and south, came the west front of the twelfth-century church, possibly even that of the church mentioned in 1085.[67] It had no aisles; its side walls stood a little outside the line of the present arcades, where their foundations still exist. Of its connection with the chancel we can say nothing, but high up in the north wall of the chancel there is “herring-bone” masonry; there is “Norman” tooling on the stones in the wall below the east window, and in the south wall it is possible that some of the masonry is of the same date. If the chancel was originally of its present length, it was as long as the nave—a most unusual proportion in Norman times; but the nave may have extended farther east, or there may have been a tower between nave and chancel. If so, the tower was possibly built either as a continuation upward of the eastern parts of the nave walls, or straight from the ground without transepts. The imposing provisions for a rood-screen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries removed all possible traces of the earlier arrangement.

About 1180, or a few years later, aisles were added to the nave. To this work belong the two eastern responds already mentioned, and the three beautiful clustered columns on either side between them and the chancel-screen. These columns are of that type, in which the shafts, although approaching the detachment and individual emphasis of each member which are the great features of early Gothic art, have not yet wholly broken away from their absorption by the main mass of stonework. That mass, however, has acquired grace and slenderness without losing strength; the pier, adequate to the weight it has to bear, has taken the place of the shafted mass of wall, the bearing power of which was out of proportion to its real function. The carving of the capitals, too, marks the Transitional character of the work. The respond of the north arcade has a carved capital of distinctly late Norman character. As we go eastward, this conventional arabesque sculpture disappears, and foliage, at first here and there, then altogether, takes its place.[68] The carving of the capitals of the south arcade was evidently begun after the north arcade was completed, and only one of them was finished. These piers were connected by semicircular arches, the lower voussoirs of which were in some cases retained as springing-points for the pointed arches which we see at present. These later arches, with their acute points, led to the blocking of the round-headed clerestory windows, the openings of one or two of which may be traced in the wall above. This new arcade was not built, as was so common, by taking the old church walls gradually to pieces and building piers and arches in specially made gaps and breaches; but the older walls seem to have been taken down, and the arcades built, as has been noted, slightly within their line. The east responds of the arcade are gone altogether, owing to the later widening of the eastern bay; and of the aisles which were now added to the church it is difficult to premise anything but this, that they were in all likelihood about half as broad as the present aisles, if as much, and were covered by lean-to roofs, abutting on the nave walls below the clerestory. The earlier chancel, and, if there was one, the central tower (a little to the east of centre), were probably left unaltered.

In this state the church remained until the last quarter of the thirteenth century, a building handsome and interesting, but not specially remarkable for size, and without any peculiar or unique feature. Its western doorway may have opened straight upon what was then, it appears, the market-place of the town. The commercial prosperity of the place, its trade in wool, were growing; and we are justified in supposing that the merchants of the town took their part in the great extension of their parish church. This extension was no mere result of the fact that Grantham was a lordship belonging to the Crown; nor, we may be sure, did the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury undertake the gratuitous task of enlarging to nearly double its size a church which represented to them a portion of their income, and would certainly never occur to them in the light of a cherished possession demanding expensive care. But to the men of the town it was a cherished possession; and the greater part of the cost was doubtless supplied by merchants, the fathers and kinsfolk of the Haryngtons and Saltebys who founded chantries in the next century within its walls. But the mother church at Salisbury helped to supply at any rate some of the ideas to which the townsmen’s money-gifts gave shape. Her chapter-house was finished somewhere between 1270 and 1280, and the cusped circles in the heads of the windows of the north aisle at Grantham, the shafted mullions with plainly moulded caps and bases, are accurate reminiscences of its simple and beautiful geometrical tracery. Lincoln, too, where, in 1280, the great eastern chapel—the so-called “Angel Quire,” built to contain St. Hugh’s shrine—had been consecrated, supplied its share: the west window of the north aisle at Grantham is an ingenious adaptation to six lights, with a slight improvement, of the eight-light east window at Lincoln. These, however, are merely details by which the work at Grantham may be assigned to the year 1280 or a little later. The design of the masons included a western extension of the church, accompanied by a widening of the aisles, and, with this, the building of a western tower.

In setting out their plan, they remembered what had been done at Newark some fifty years before. There a western tower had been begun, standing free of the aisles on three sides; but, as the work advanced, the builders had determined to bring their aisles westward flush with the west wall of the tower, and had pierced arches, as an afterthought, in its north and south walls. The work at Newark was temporarily stopped, and, when it went on again, Grantham led the way with one splendid effort. The Grantham builders apparently began work with their north aisle. It was on a vast scale, and spaced with so little regard to the spacing of the columns of the nave that the north doorway, instead of opening against an interval between columns, has a column and part of an interval opposite it.[69] The earlier north aisle was totally enclosed by this new work, which not merely stretched three bays to the westward—the third of these bays, which roughly corresponds to the internal space occupied by the tower and its piers, being nearly as wide as the other two together—but also was extended a bay eastward, so that it encroached on the chancel wall, or, it may be, on the space hitherto occupied by the tower. From the walls of the aisle the builders probably passed to the lower courses of the tower piers, the arches from the tower into the new aisles, and the western doorway,[70] and then joined the tower piers to the west angles of the older nave by two arches on each side, with intermediate columns whose form was evidently suggested by that of the earlier columns east of them. If this hint was taken from the older work, the imitation did not extend to the rounded arches. The new arches were sharply pointed, and, to give uniformity to the connected work, new pointed arches were built up in place of the old rounded ones. This obviously was done by removing just as much of the upper wall of the nave as was necessary, and blocking the clerestory. No clerestory seems to have formed part of the new design. As part of this task, the chancel was connected by an arch with the eastern part of the new aisle, and the old west front and north aisle walls were removed.

PLAN OF GRANTHAM CHURCH.

We need not dwell on the beauty of this work, which touches exactly the Transition from the first to the second period of English Gothic, on the north doorway, with its array of mouldings and shafts, on the details of the windows, the grotesque carvings of the eaves, the boldness and cleanness of the outlines of buttresses and base-courses. The next work was the completion of the steeple, and this was done well, but apparently with some rapidity, about the year 1300. There is, perhaps, a slight indecision of design in the small stages of arcading and “smocking” above the west window; and the west window itself, with its mullions crossing in the head, is more effective from the point of view of its parade of “ball-flower” than from that of design; but there can be no question as to the beauty of the twin two-light windows above the “smocking” stage, or to the character which the belfry-lights, with their strongly defined central mullion, their crocketed triangular hoods, and the statued niches in the spandrils they form with the parapet, give to the tower.[71] Nor can there be anything but admiration for the great angle-buttresses, rising from their niched lower stages by a series of sloping offsets into four tall crocketed pinnacles round the base of the spire; nor for the method by which the diagonal sides of the spire, which rises from within a plain parapet, are connected by broaches with the pinnacled angles of the tower: nor for the crocketing, plain in detail but elaborate in effect, and the three ranges of lights of the spire itself. The top was rebuilt in 1664, probably a few feet lower than it had been. It was struck by lightning in 1797, and repaired rather timorously.[72]

The south aisle was already set out on a scale little less than that of the north aisle, and probably it was completed as far as a point corresponding to the east end of the nave, soon after the completion of the spire. This work was done more hastily, and with less consistent magnificence than that of the north aisle; but it has been so much restored that it is difficult to realise its appearance when it was built. The masonry, however, is of a poorer kind, and seems to indicate that funds were not so easily forthcoming as before. The south doorway and the outer doorway of the porch are thirteenth-century structures, removed from their original positions to corresponding places in relation to the new aisle. The windows, where they are original, show the design of crossing mullions which we have noticed in the west window of the tower, but the shafts used in some of them seem to be re-used from windows in the older south aisle.

Whether this aisle was closed by some temporary arrangement at the east end, or whether an east wall was ever built, we cannot tell; no foundations of such a wall exist, so far as is known. Work, at any rate, seems to have stopped about 1310-20. It was not long before it was resumed, but the resumption was gradual. Three great works belong to the next stage—the building of the south chapel of the chancel and the crypt beneath, the rebuilding and northward extension of the north porch, and the building of the rood-screen. Both the south chapel and the extended porch were the result of the foundation of guilds and the multiplication of chantry services.[73] The south chapel itself, extending the whole length of the chancel, and connected with it by an arcade of four bays cut in its south wall, was probably the chapel of the chantry of St. Mary, founded by William Gunthorp. Richard Salteby, whose canopied tomb is in the south wall of the nave, immediately east of the south porch, founded the chantry of St. John the Baptist, whose services were probably performed at an altar near the southern staircase to the roof. This altar may have stood at first against the east wall of the aisle; later, it would have stood against the screen across the entrance of the Lady Chapel. Of the position of the other fourteenth-century chantries we know little; but one helpful document, enrolled among the public records, tells us of some of the altars and services in the church in 1349, and, in particular, of the altar in the rood-loft (in solario coram magna cruce in medio ecclesie), at which a chaplain said mass daily “after the first stroke of the bell which is called Daybelle”—the bell which still rings at five o’clock every morning from Lady Day to Michaelmas.[74] The crypt below the Lady Chapel, divided into an eastern and western portion, and approached by two doors on the outside of the church, may have contained other chantry chapels; but the western portion was possibly used as a bone-hole.

North Porch, Grantham Church (St. Wolfran’s).

The church, in addition to chantry foundations, contained valuable relics, among which were portions of the bodies of the patron saints of the church, St. Wulfran, Archbishop of Sens, missionary to Friesland, and monk of Fontenelle,[75] and of St. Symphorian, the martyr of Autun. It is highly probable that, as time went on, these relics were preserved in the eastern crypt; the beautiful staircase, with its elaborate doorway, by which this crypt in the fifteenth century was connected with the chancel, had evidently some special purpose. But it is almost certain that, on such days as the 15th of October, the feast of the translation of St. Wulfran, when people flocked into the town for what is now known as the Onion Fair, the relics would be exhibited to the devout visitors from the chamber above the north porch, through the small traceried window above the north door. This chamber was approached by staircases in the outer pinnacles of the north porch. Its construction seems to have been the raison d’être of the rebuilding of which we have spoken; the whole lower storey, the inner porch, the open way in the middle, left to give room to church processions, the outer porch, were vaulted over, and, to admit of this vaulting, the pediment of the north doorway was ruthlessly mutilated. Those who have discovered in this upper chamber the vicarage of North Grantham will find in it rather a chapel where the relics belonging to the church were kept and exposed to the faithful, and in the two staircases (an expensive provision for so small a vicarage) a way of entrance and of exit for those who wished to visit the shrine and seek contact with its treasure.[76] The floor and the vaulting beneath it have now been removed, and the destruction which it caused to the north doorway is only too clearly visible. The date of the chamber above the south porch, in its present state, is rather uncertain; the little window looking into the church, which points to its use as a watching-chamber, is of the fifteenth century.

The Lady Chapel is one of the most perplexing portions of the church: the masonry of its walls and the early fourteenth-century tracery of one of its windows suggest that, if there was a more than temporary wall at the east end of the south aisle, its materials were re-used here. The arcade and the tracery of the remaining windows, almost disagreeably fantastic in its exaggerated curves, point to an advanced period in the fourteenth century for its completion, and show signs of that failing force which was an immediate result of the Black Death. We may assign the ten years between 1350 and 1360 to this work. The circular buttress-turrets at the east end are very like those which flank the north porch at Holbeach Church in South Lincolnshire, a building of much the same date. When this work was finished, only one thing remained to be done to give the church the form of a regular aisled parallelogram. This was the building of a north chapel to the chancel, a continuation eastward of the great north aisle. As we have seen, the eastern bay of that aisle already opened into the chancel. The lengthening was not taken in hand until a century and a quarter after the Lady Chapel was built; and, in the interval, one important piece of work was achieved, the widening and heightening of the eastern bay of the nave on either side, evidently to give dignity to the rood-screen and loft. It is not at all unlikely that there may have been a chancel arch up to this time, perhaps with twelfth-century jambs supporting a pointed arch, like those which had been added to the nave arcades. If so, it was now cut away: the responds of the arcades on either side were destroyed, and from the wall-face thus mutilated—the recklessly hacked surface may be seen by opening a hinged panel in the side of the modern screen—wide and lofty arches were thrown across to single dwarf-shafts resting on the abaci of the twelfth-century piers to the west. Thus unimpeded space was obtained for the screen with its loft, and the great rood on its beam above. The character of the work is later than 1350; and the screen to which the document of 1349 refers probably underwent some alteration, or was now replaced by a new one, the central portion of which was certainly of stone.[77] Of fifteenth-century work is the crypt door, with its solid panelled screen on the south of the chancel; a window of much the same date was inserted in the south aisle, just east of the south doorway of the nave. In the latter half of the century the east wall of the north aisle was removed; the north wall of the chancel was pierced with three wide arches with slender responds and intermediate piers, poor in design and detail; and the north chancel chapel, with its large Perpendicular windows, was built. This was known as the “Corpus Christi Quire.” This has been repeatedly referred to the munificence of Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, a great benefactor of Grantham Grammar School and the founder of Corpus Christi College at Oxford. Foxe certainly was one of the trustees for the foundation of a chantry in Grantham Church, served by two priests, one of whom was to be the grammar schoolmaster; but the chief founder of the Corpus Christi chantry was a certain John Orston, whose name also occurs as founder of the Trinity chantry. This foundation (1392) was nearly a century earlier than the actual building of the “Corpus Christi Quire.” We have seen how the chapel was the scene of the election of aldermen. For many years the records of the borough were preserved in the eastern crypt, in a great wooden chest with three locks. Foxe’s emblem of the pelican is said to occur on the lower side of the bowl of the octagonal font. However, the font, with its sculptured panels of events in the life of our Lord, is probably earlier than Foxe’s day; and the pelican is, of course, a common emblem of the Blessed Sacrament.

Early in the sixteenth century the present vestry, a long room at right angles to the western bay of the north chancel chapel, was built as a chantry chapel by a wealthy family named Hall. It is now entered through the arch which formerly stood above the founder’s tomb; the small doorway at the side has been blocked. This building abutted against one of the pinnacled turrets by which the roof was approached, and blocked its entrances. This was the last structural alteration to the church during the Middle Ages. The great building, served by its two vicars and at least eight chantry priests—to say nothing of the chaplain, whose stipend bound him to read the Gospel as deacon at the daily mass at the high altar—stood, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in something like its cathedral-like seclusion of to-day. The vicars had their houses on either side of the church; the chantry priest of St. Mary lived in a house whose site is now absorbed by the south-west corner of the churchyard. The houses of the other members of what was now called the College were either round the church or not far away. A house called the Chantry House stood in Watergate till the middle of the nineteenth century; it was then removed and entirely rebuilt in Belton village, where the date 1470 may be seen above one of the old windows, which was preserved in the rebuilding. East of the church was the mansion of the Halls, where Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII., stayed in 1503, on her way to Scotland to become the wife of James IV. A handsome house of the later seventeenth century stands on the site; the pretty little thirteenth-century doorway in the garden wall may possibly have belonged to the church; its mouldings agree with those of the south doorway and some of the jamb-shafts of the windows of the south aisle, which are obviously remains of work of this period. On the north side of the churchyard still stands the sixteenth-century Grammar School, founded with the aid of Bishop Foxe in 1528, and endowed by Edward VI. in 1553 with the possessions of the Trinity and Lady chantries. Foxe was born at Ropsley, in the hilly country south of Grantham. From Woolsthorpe, in the same district, but further west, came the most famous pupil of the school, Sir Isaac Newton. Among its earliest scholars was William Cecil, a native of Bourn, afterwards famous as Lord Burghley; and a third name, this time of a native of Grantham itself, is that of the metaphysician, Henry More, the head of the school of Cambridge Platonists. Colley Cibber was also educated here, an interesting if not altogether illustrious pupil. The schoolroom was used till within the last few years. Since then handsome school buildings have been completed on the opposite side of the headmaster’s house, in the dip through which the Mowbeck used to flow visibly, and the old schoolroom has been fitted up as a school chapel.

Henry VIII. numbered Grantham among those sees which he intended to found. Not till lately has a suffragan bishop in the diocese of Lincoln taken the title of Bishop of Grantham. The dissolution of the chantries put an end to the “College,” and the vicars of the “prebendary church” in post-Reformation times had to be content with very small stipends. Puritanism raised its head in Grantham formidably, as in most parts of Lincolnshire; and the Corporation, though in the main orthodox, had, in 1620, established a weekly lecture in the church on Tuesday, to which they invited the most eloquent clergy of the neighbourhood. The preacher afterwards attended a Corporation dinner, and was allowed a pint of sack. These lectures, although doubtless intended to afford a substitute for irregular prophesying, also gave opportunities to lecturers of a Puritan cast of thought. Preaching was evidently regarded at Grantham as of more importance than the decency of ritual. The communion-table stood in the middle of the chancel without a rail round it, and was treated without reverence. Peter Titley, instituted to the south vicarage in 1625, removed it, set it altar-wise against the east wall, and railed it in. Unhappily, the Alderman of Grantham in 1627 was a Puritan, and Titley had made himself unpopular by inhibiting the lecturers. Attending the church in state, the Alderman ordered his mace-bearers to remove the altar to its old position. A free fight followed, and Alderman and Vicar appealed to Bishop Williams. The Bishop delayed a final decision; and, a few days later, the Alderman, followed by the Vicar, rode off to seek a personal interview at Buckden. Williams, although he had expressed approval of Titley’s action, and after Titley’s death officiated at the altar itself, acted with some partiality towards the Puritans. His answer to the Vicar, which he sent through the hands of the inhibited lecturers, raised a controversy beyond Grantham; and the war of pamphlets, in which Heylyn, Prynne, Burton, and others took part, became a matter of other than local history. Titley seems to have held his own, and the altar was still against the east wall after his death in 1633.[78] During Titley’s incumbency some additions were made to the church. Possibly the east window, of a very plain Perpendicular type, resting on a fourteenth-century sill, was inserted at this time.[79] A clerestory was added to the chancel about 1628, when the roofs of the church were lowered; and it is much to be regretted that this was destroyed at a nineteenth-century restoration, in that spirit of iconoclasm which imagines that, by destroying post-mediæval masonry and furniture, it is restoring churches to their “original state.” In 1640 the Chancellor of the diocese presented the church with an organ; but although the Corporation approved, the Puritans opposed the gift for the time successfully.[80] The organ was erected, but probably was not used; and the great event of the year was the re-hanging of the bells and the blocking up of the ground floor of the tower by a wooden ringers’ gallery.

Three times between 1601 and 1640 had plague visited the town; and early in 1643 came the scourge of civil war. The Royalists were the first to occupy the town, their troops being quartered in the tithe-barn of the prebendaries, to the south-east of the churchyard, and close to the site of the Castle. In spite of a temporary repulse, they held Grantham till May 22, 1643, when Cromwell won his first battle on a field to the north of the town. “Belton fight” was followed by the battle of Winceby, in October. The year before the Corporation plate had been seized by order of Parliament, but was fortunately restored to the town. This year Fairfax demanded a vote of £300 from the Corporation, who did as they were told; but the town refused to pay, and the Alderman and some of the Comburgesses were sent to Nottingham Castle. Released in 1644, they formed a Royalist faction in and outside the town, corresponding with the garrison at Belvoir, and taking part in the guerilla warfare of the countryside. But in 1646 came the end of the war. Belvoir and Newark castles were surrendered, and their fortifications slighted. Under Puritan rule the Royalist burgesses were deprived of their rights; but the town returned to something of its old quiet and prosperity. The woodwork of the church had been destroyed by the soldiers during the Civil War, who used it for fuel, and probably the state of the building was rather dreary. When in 1648 an Alderman was elected in church, the deprived Royalists took the occasion to brawl. The weekly lectures were restored in 1646, and, somewhat earlier, the poorly paid vicars had their stipends augmented by the sequestration of the Salisbury prebends. In spite of this, one of the vicars found it more agreeable to his conscience to be non-resident. In 1651, the Mercers’ Company, trustees of an investment left by Lady Campden to form the endowment of two lectureships, one of which was to be in Lincolnshire, granted the moiety to Grantham. The Campden Lecture is still preached on Wednesday morning in every week; and yearly by the provisions of another endowment, chargeable on the “Angel Inn,” a sermon is preached against the sin of drunkenness. Of course, after 1646, the colour of the lectures in Church were strictly Puritan; but the ejected parsons of Boothby Pagnell and Barrowby, Dr. Sanderson and Dr. Hurst, were living in Grantham; and their spotless life and example seem to have won the respect of all. Sanderson became Bishop of Lincoln at the Restoration. It was during the Commonwealth period, from 1651 to 1656, that Isaac Newton was at school in Grantham, lodging with one Mr. Clarke, and experimenting with an amateur sundial and with models of horsemills and windmills.

After the Restoration the history of Grantham is that of any quiet country town, until the coming of the railway and the establishment of the engineering works. The most startling event in its story was the pulling down of the Market Cross by Mr. John Manners, then lord of the manor, in 1779. He was compelled to restore it by mandamus the following year. The ecclesiastical history of the town is equally peaceful. The church was invaded by galleries and box-pews; the rood-screen, if it had not already gone, was taken down; the western part of the nave was left unused, and glass screens to shut out the draught closed in the eastern bays of the nave and the chancel. The ringing gallery, which blocked up the lower part of the tower, was removed in 1752; and, though one cannot regret the opening out of the noble western arch, it is probable that other woodwork in the church might have been better spared. The encumbrances of the building were removed during the nineteenth century. Something was done at a restoration which took place in 1851, during the incumbency of Mr. William Potchett. The western part of the south aisle was re-roofed, and the present tracery of the west window of the aisle seems to have been put in. Part of a fund left in 1795 for the beautifying of the church was applied in 1853 to filling the west window of the north aisle with stained glass of a painful brilliance, and the staining of the other two windows of the west front took place between 1852 and 1855. Under Mr. George Maddison, vicar from 1856 to 1874, Sir Gilbert Scott thoroughly restored the whole building. This restoration, completed in October 1868, gave us the church substantially in its present state. While the chancel clerestory was removed, an act of compensation was performed in the recusping of the tracery in the windows of the north aisle. Eight years later followed the restoration of the north porch. Since then, the church has received many beautiful gifts—Sir Gilbert Scott’s chancel-screen; Mr. G. F. Bodley’s reredos, which has been heightened of late years to conceal the east window and add a gradine to the altar; Mr. Kempe’s stained glass; and, latest of all, the restored reredos in the crypt, the lofty font-cover, the organ-case, and the restoration of Hall’s chapel, which are the work of Mr. W. T. Tapper.

One thing remains to be noted in connection with the church—its two libraries. The second of these is of no special interest. It was given to the church in 1764 by Dr. John Newcome, Dean of Rochester, and Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and placed within rails at the east end of the south aisle. It was then removed to Hall’s chapel in 1806, and found a third home at the west end of the south aisle towards the end of the century. It has been removed again within recent years. The other library was given in 1598 by Francis Trigg, vicar of Welbourn, and was housed in the room over the south porch, which seems to have been repaired, if not rebuilt, about this time. The books, bound for the most part in stout oak boards, are set, as in mediæval libraries, with their leaves outwards, and are chained to rings on an iron rod in front of each shelf. The collection includes some early printed books of the fifteenth century, and editions of Fathers and mediæval theologians. The library was intended for the use of the vicars; and in 1642 one Edward Skipworth left a small endowment to supply it with firewood in winter, that the vicars might prosecute their studies. Gifts were made to it from time to time. Henry More presented his writings to it, and Dr. Sanderson gave it one of the few copies of Philip II.’s Polyglot, printed at Antwerp, which had escaped destruction by sea. Of the eight volumes, only two and a fragment remain. A verger is said to have been found lighting a fire with some of the leaves. Fortunately, the full value of the library is now appreciated; and, if it does not attract many earnest students, it is at any rate regarded with intelligent curiosity.[81]

With the gift of Francis Trigg, “Welborne quondam Concionator amans,” we leave Grantham. No longer the small market town, whose City Fathers never stirred in the streets without their gowns, the Alderman distinguished by his tippet with its gold clasps, but a busy manufacturing and railway town, with growing suburbs and a population of from 20,000 to 30,000, it yet keeps something of its country aspect. The trees at the back of the church and along the North Road, the splendid chestnut in Finkin Street, close to the middle of the town, the easy escape from the houses to the slopes of the Harrowby Hills, or the canal path to Harlaxton, make it a pleasant place to see or stay in, and compensate for the bleak features of its approach from the south. Though no one could claim for its surroundings the privilege of startling beauty, yet there is no more smiling a piece of country in the English Midlands than that of which it is the centre. Cut off from the Fenland flats on the east by a long table-land with a gradual eastward slope, and on the south by the broken country towards Bourn and Stamford, it has on the north the long line of pretty villages which mark the road to Lincoln, and on the west the vale of Belvoir, overhung by the wooded escarpments of the Leicestershire Wolds. It is the centre of a country which possesses some of the most beautiful village churches and the noblest houses in England. Due north of the town is Belton House, where Wren’s gifts of moderation in proportion and of masterly internal spacing are at their best; and just beyond is Syston, high on the brow of a hill, and gazing across the intervening ridges at Belvoir. Between Grantham and Belvoir are the great modern houses of Harlaxton and Denton. Harlaxton, a palace in size, is set on a terrace at the end of a straight drive which dips down from the Melton road and then rises gradually towards the house, and is backed by a view of wood and hill. And on the south, not comparing with these in size, are the beautiful little houses which the wool merchants of these parts built for themselves—Anthony Ellys’ house at Great Ponton, and Thomas Coney’s high stone mansion at Bassingthorpe, and, farther on, the larger hall which Richard Thimelby built in 1510 at Irnham. These are all within no long distance from the town, and all, except Belvoir, within the county. For those whose acquaintance with Lincolnshire is limited to its legendary reputation of flatness, fogginess, and, if one may use the word, fenniness, there could be no better object-lesson than the climb along the lane from Great Ponton to Bassingthorpe, or the walk from Harlaxton to Grantham, with the great spire of St. Wulfran’s framed, like the vignette on the title-page of a book, within the arches formed by the intervening trees.