Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
IN LINCOLNSHIRE

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
DALLAS . SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO

Boston.

Highways and Byways
IN
Lincolnshire

BY
WILLINGHAM FRANKLIN RAWNSLEY

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FREDERICK L. GRIGGS

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1914

COPYRIGHT

PREFACE

All writers make use of the labours of their predecessors. This is inevitable, and a custom as old as time. As Mr. Rudyard Kipling sings:—

“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre

’E’d ’eard men sing by land and sea,

And what ’e thought ’e might require

’E went and took, the same as me.”

In writing this book I have made use of all the sources that I could lay under contribution, and especially I have relied for help on “Murray’s Handbook,” edited by the Rev. G. E. Jeans, and the Journals of the associated Architectural Societies. I have recorded in the course of the volume my thanks to a few kind helpers, and to these I must add the name of Mr. A. R. Corns of the Lincoln Library, for his kindness in allowing me the use of many books on various subjects, and on several occasions, which have been of the utmost service to me. My best thanks, also, are due to my cousin, Mr. Preston Rawnsley, for his chapter on the Foxhounds of Lincolnshire. That the book owes much to the pencil of Mr. Griggs is obvious; his illustrations need no praise of mine but speak for themselves. [The drawing given on p. 254] is by Mrs. Rawnsley.

I have perhaps taken the title “Highways and Byways” more literally than has usually been done by writers in this interesting series, and in endeavouring to describe the county and its ways I have followed the course of all the main roads radiating from each large town, noticing most of the places through or near which they pass, and also pointing out some of the more picturesque byways, and describing the lie of the country. But I have all along supposed the tourist to be travelling by motor, and have accordingly said very little about Footpaths. This in a mountainous country would be entirely wrong, but Lincolnshire as a whole is not a pedestrian’s county. It is, however, a land of constantly occurring magnificent views, a land of hill as well as plain, and, as I hope the book will show, beyond all others a county teeming with splendid churches. I may add that, thanks to that modern devourer of time and space—the ubiquitous motor car—I have been able personally to visit almost everything I have described, a thing which in so large a county would, without such mercurial aid, have involved a much longer time for the doing. Even so, no one can be more conscious than I am that the book falls far short of what, with such a theme, was possible.

W. F. R.

CONTENTS

	PAGE
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY	[1]
CHAPTER II
STAMFORD	[7]
CHAPTER III
STAMFORD TO BOURNE	[18]
CHAPTER IV
ROADS FROM BOURNE	[28]
CHAPTER V
SOUTH-WEST LINCOLNSHIRE	[39]
CHAPTER VI
GRANTHAM	[52]
CHAPTER VII
ROADS FROM GRANTHAM	[64]
CHAPTER VIII
SLEAFORD	[76]
CHAPTER IX
LINCOLN CATHEDRAL	[91]
CHAPTER X
PAULINUS AND HUGH OF LINCOLN	[112]
CHAPTER XI
LINCOLN CITY	[120]
CHAPTER XII
ROADS FROM LINCOLN, WEST AND EAST	[137]
CHAPTER XIII
ROADS SOUTH FROM LINCOLN	[148]
CHAPTER XIV
PLACES OF NOTE NEAR LINCOLN	[165]
CHAPTER XV
HERMITAGES AND HOSPITALS	[178]
CHAPTER XVI
ROADS NORTH FROM LINCOLN	[182]
CHAPTER XVII
GAINSBOROUGH AND THE NORTH-WEST	[195]
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ISLE OF AXHOLME	[208]
CHAPTER XIX
GRIMSBY AND THE NORTH-EAST	[215]
CHAPTER XX
CAISTOR	[228]
CHAPTER XXI
LOUTH	[239]
CHAPTER XXII
ANGLO-SAXON, NORMAN AND MEDIÆVAL ART	[251]
CHAPTER XXIII
ROADS FROM LOUTH, NORTH AND WEST	[262]
CHAPTER XXIV
LINCOLNSHIRE BYWAYS	[278]
CHAPTER XXV
THE BOLLES FAMILY	[285]
CHAPTER XXVI
THE MARSH CHURCHES OF EAST LINDSEY	[290]
CHAPTER XXVII
LINCOLNSHIRE FOLKSONG	[296]
CHAPTER XXVIII
MARSH CHURCHES OF SOUTH LINDSEY	[305]
CHAPTER XXIX
WAINFLEET TO SPILSBY	[323]
CHAPTER XXX
SPILSBY AND NEIGHBOURHOOD	[333]
CHAPTER XXXI
SOMERSBY AND THE TENNYSONS	[343]
CHAPTER XXXII
ROADS FROM SPILSBY	[358]
CHAPTER XXXIII
SCRIVELSBY AND TATTERSHALL	[372]
CHAPTER XXXIV
BARDNEY ABBEY	[390]
CHAPTER XXXV
HOLLAND FEN	[400]
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FEN CHURCHES—NORTHERN DIVISION	[409]
CHAPTER XXXVII
ST. BOTOLPH’S TOWN (BOSTON)	[425]
CHAPTER XXXVIII
SPALDING AND THE CHURCHES NORTH OF IT	[441]
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHURCHES OF HOLLAND	[463]
CHAPTER XL
THE BLACK DEATH	[480]
CHAPTER XLI
CROYLAND	[483]
CHAPTER XLII
LINCOLNSHIRE FOXHOUNDS	[493]
APPENDIX I
SAMUEL WESLEY’S EPITAPH	[499]
APPENDIX II
DR. WM. STUKELEY	[500]
APPENDIX III
A LOWLAND PEASANT POET	[501]

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

	PAGE
BOSTON	[Frontispiece]
ST. LEONARD’S PRIORY, STAMFORD	[8]
ST. GEORGE’S SQUARE, STAMFORD	[10]
ST. MARY’S STREET, STAMFORD	[11]
ST. PAUL’S STREET, STAMFORD	[13]
ST. PETER’S HILL, STAMFORD	[15]
STAMFORD FROM FREEMAN’S CLOSE	[17]
BOURNE ABBEY CHURCH	[24]
THE STATION HOUSE, BOURNE	[26]
SEMPRINGHAM	[36]
THE WITHAM, BOSTON	[45]
THE ANGEL INN, GRANTHAM	[56]
GRANTHAM CHURCH	[61]
WITHAM-SIDE, BOSTON	[66]
HOUGH-ON-THE-HILL	[72]
NORTH TRANSEPT, ST. DENIS’S CHURCH, SLEAFORD	[78]
HECKINGTON CHURCH	[81]
GREAT HALE	[84]
HELPRINGHAM	[86]
SOUTH KYME	[88]
SOUTH KYME CHURCH	[89]
NEWPORT ARCH, LINCOLN	[92]
GATEWAY OF LINCOLN CASTLE	[94]
THE ROOD TOWER AND SOUTH TRANSEPT, LINCOLN	[100]
POTTERGATE, LINCOLN	[110]
ST. MARY’S GUILD, LINCOLN	[118]
THE POTTERGATE ARCH, LINCOLN	[121]
THE JEW’S HOUSE, LINCOLN	[123]
REMAINS OF THE WHITEFRIARS’ PRIORY, LINCOLN	[124]
ST. MARY’S GUILD AND ST. PETER’S AT GOWTS, LINCOLN	[125]
ST. BENEDICT’S CHURCH, LINCOLN	[127]
ST. MARY-LE-WIGFORD, LINCOLN	[128]
THE STONEBOW, LINCOLN	[130]
OLD INLAND REVENUE OFFICE, LINCOLN	[132]
JAMES STREET, LINCOLN	[133]
THORNGATE, LINCOLN	[135]
LINCOLN FROM THE WITHAM	[138]
STOW CHURCH	[142]
BRANT BROUGHTON	[152]
THE ERMINE STREET AT TEMPLE BRUER	[154]
TEMPLE BRUER TOWER	[158]
NAVENBY	[163]
WYKEHAM CHAPEL, NEAR SPALDING	[180]
THE AVON AT BARTON-ON-HUMBER	[189]
ST. PETER’S, BARTON-ON-HUMBER	[190]
ST. MARY’S, BARTON-ON-HUMBER	[192]
NORTH SIDE, OLD HALL, GAINSBOROUGH	[202]
SOUTH SIDE, OLD HALL, GAINSBOROUGH	[203]
GAINSBOROUGH CHURCH	[205]
GREAT GOXHILL PRIORY	[218]
THORNTON ABBEY GATEWAY	[220]
REMAINS OF CHAPTER HOUSE, THORNTON ABBEY	[221]
THE WELLAND, NEAR FULNEY, SPALDING	[237]
THORNTON ABBEY GATEWAY	[238]
BRIDGE STREET, LOUTH	[241]
HUBBARD’S MILL, LOUTH	[243]
THE LUD AT LOUTH	[246]
ANCIENT SAXON ORNAMENT FOUND IN 1826 IN CLEANING OUT THE WITHAM, NEAR THE VILLAGE OF FISKERTON, FOUR MILES EAST OF LINCOLN. DRAWN BY MRS. RAWNSLEY	[254]
CLEE CHURCH	[266]
WESTGATE, LOUTH	[275]
MANBY	[279]
MABLETHORPE CHURCH	[292]
SOUTHEND, BOSTON	[297]
MARKBY CHURCH	[306]
ADDLETHORPE AND INGOLDMELLS	[308]
THE ROMAN BANK AT WINTHORPE	[311]
BRIDGE OVER THE HOLLOW-GATE	[330]
HALTON CHURCH	[331]
SOMERSBY CHURCH	[341]
TENNYSON’S HOME, SOMERSBY	[351]
LITTLE STEEPING	[357]
SIBSEY	[362]
CONINGSBY	[369]
TATTERSHALL AND CONINGSBY	[370]
TATTERSHALL CHURCH	[371]
THE LION GATE AT SCRIVELSBY	[373]
TATTERSHALL CHURCH AND THE BAIN	[381]
TATTERSHALL CHURCH AND CASTLE	[386]
TATTERSHALL CHURCH WINDOWS	[388]
SCRIVELSBY STOCKS	[389]
KIRKSTEAD CHAPEL	[391]
REMAINS OF KIRKSTEAD ABBEY CHURCH	[396]
KIRKSTEAD CHAPEL, WEST END	[398]
DARLOW’S YARD, SLEAFORD	[403]
LEAKE CHURCH	[415]
LEVERTON WINDMILL	[417]
FRIESTON PRIORY CHURCH	[418]
BOSTON CHURCH FROM THE N.E.	[421]
BOSTON STUMP	[424]
CUSTOM HOUSE QUAY, BOSTON	[427]
SOUTH SQUARE, BOSTON	[429]
SPAIN LANE, BOSTON	[431]
THE HAVEN, BOSTON	[436]
THE GUILDHALL, BOSTON	[437]
HUSSEY’S TOWER, BOSTON	[439]
THE WELLAND AT COWBIT ROAD, SPALDING	[442]
THE WELLAND AT HIGH STREET, SPALDING	[443]
AYSCOUGH FEE HALL GARDENS, SPALDING	[445]
SPALDING CHURCH FROM THE S.E.	[447]
N. SIDE, SPALDING CHURCH	[449]
PINCHBECK	[450]
SURFLEET	[453]
SURFLEET WINDMILL	[454]
THE WELLAND AT MARSH ROAD, SPALDING	[458]
ALGARKIRK	[460]
AT FULNEY	[462]
WHAPLODE CHURCH	[467]
FLEET CHURCH	[469]
GEDNEY CHURCH	[471]
LONG SUTTON CHURCH	[473]
GEDNEY, FROM FLEET	[482]
COWBIT CHURCH	[484]
CROYLAND ABBEY	[488]
CROYLAND BRIDGE	[490]
MAP	[At end Volume]

HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
IN LINCOLNSHIRE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

In dealing with a county which measures seventy-five miles by forty-five, it will be best to assume that the tourist has either some form of “cycle” or, better still, a motor car. The railway helps one less in this than in most counties, as it naturally runs on the flat and unpicturesque portions, and also skirts the boundaries, and seldom attempts to pierce into the heart of the Wolds. Probably it would not be much good to the tourist if it did, as he would have to spend much of his time in tunnels which always come where there should be most to see, as on the Louth and Lincoln line between Withcal and South Willingham. As it is, the only bit of railway by which a person could gather that Lincolnshire was anything but an ugly county is that between Lincoln and Grantham.

But that it is a county with a great deal of beauty will be, I am sure, admitted by those who follow up the routes described in the following pages. They will find that it is a county famous for wide views, for wonderful sunsets, for hills and picturesque hollows; and full, too, of the human interest which clings round old buildings, and the uplifting pleasure which its many splendid specimens of architecture have power to bestow.

MARSH AND FEN

At the outset the reader must identify himself so far with the people of Lincolnshire as to make himself at home in the universally accepted meanings of certain words and expressions which he will hear constantly recurring. He will soon come to know that ‘siver’ means however, that ‘slaäpe’ means slippery, that ‘unheppen,’ a fine old word (—unhelpen), means awkward, that ‘owry’ or ‘howry’ means dirty; but, having learnt this, he must not conclude that the word ‘strange’ in ‘straänge an’ owry weather’ means anything unfamiliar. ‘Straänge’—perhaps the commonest adverbial epithet in general use in Lincolnshire—e.g. “you’ve bin a straänge long while coming” only means very. But besides common conversational expressions he will have to note that the well-known substantives ‘Marsh’ and ‘Fen’ bear in Lincolnshire a special meaning, neither of them now denoting bog or wet impassable places. The Fens are the rich flat corn lands, once perpetually flooded, but now drained and tilled; the divisions between field and field being mostly ditches, small or big, and all full of water; the soil is deep vegetable mould, fine, and free from stones, hardly to be excelled for both corn and roots; while the Marsh is nearly all pasture land, stiffer in nature, and producing such rich grass that the beasts can grow fat upon it without other food. Here, too, the fields are divided by ditches or “dykes” and the sea wind blows over them with untiring energy, for the Marsh is all next the coast, being a belt averaging seven or eight miles in width, and reaching from the Wash to the Humber.

THE WOLDS

From this belt the Romans, by means of a long embankment, excluded the waters of the sea; and Nature’s sand-dunes, aided by the works of man in places, keep up the Roman tradition. Even before the Roman bank was made, the Marsh differed from the Fen, in that the waters which used to cover the fens were fed by the river floods and the waters from the hills, and it was not, except occasionally and along the course of a tidal river, liable to inundation from the sea; whereas the Marsh was its natural prey. Of course both Marsh and Fen are all level. But the third portion of the county is of quite a different character, and immediately you get into it all the usual ideas about Lincolnshire being a flat, ugly county vanish, and as this upland country extends over most of the northern half of the county, viz., from Spilsby to the Humber on the eastern side and from Grantham to the Humber on the western, it is obvious that no one can claim to know Lincolnshire who does not know the long lines of the Wolds, which are two long spines of upland running north and south, with flat land on either side of them.

These, back-bones of the county, though seldom reaching 500 feet, come to their highest point of 530 between Walesby and Stainton-le-Vale, a valley set upon a hill over which a line would pass drawn from Grimsby to Market Rasen. The hilly Wold region is about the same width as the level Marsh belt, averaging eight miles, but north of Caistor this narrows. There are no great streams from these Wolds, the most notable being the long brook whose parent branches run from Stainton-in-the-Vale and “Roman hole” near Thoresway, and uniting at Hatcliffe go out to the sea with the Louth River “Lud,” the two streams joining at Tetney lock.

North of Caistor the Wolds not only narrow, but drop by Barnetby-le-Wold to 150 feet, and allow the railway lines from Barton-on-Humber, New Holland and Grimsby to pass through to Brigg. This, however, is only a ‘pass,’ as the chalk ridge rises again near Elsham, and at Saxby attains a height of 330 feet, whence it maintains itself at never less than 200 feet, right up to Ferriby-on-the-Humber. These Elsham and Saxby Wolds are but two miles across.

Naturally this Wold region with the villages situated in its folds or on its fringes is the pretty part of the county, though the Marsh with its extended views, its magnificent sunsets and cloud effects,

“The wide-winged sunsets of the misty Marsh,”

its splendid cattle and its interesting flora, its long sand-dunes covered with stout-growing grasses, sea holly and orange-berried buckthorn, and finally its magnificent sands, is full of a peculiar charm; and then there are its splendid churches; not so grand as the fen churches it is true, but so nobly planned and so unexpectedly full of beautiful old carved woodwork.

West of these Wolds is a belt of Fen-land lying between them and the ridge or ‘cliff’ on which the great Roman Ermine Street runs north from Lincoln in a bee line for over thirty miles to the Humber near Winteringham, only four miles west of the end of the Wolds already mentioned at South Ferriby.

PARALLEL RIDGES

The high ridge of the Lincoln Wold is very narrow, a regular ‘Hogs back’ and broken down into a lower altitude between Blyborough and Kirton-in-Lindsey, and lower again a little further north near Scawby and still more a few miles further on where the railway goes through the pass between Appleby Station and Scunthorpe.

From here a second ridge is developed parallel with the Lincoln Wold, and between the Wold and the Trent, the ground rising from Bottesford to Scunthorpe, reaching a height of 220 feet on the east bank of the Trent near Burton-on-Stather and thence descending by Alkborough to the Humber at Whitton. The Trent which, roughly speaking, from Newark, and actually from North Clifton to the Humber, bounds the county on the west, runs through a low country of but little interest, overlooked for miles from the height which is crowned by Lincoln Minster. Only the Isle of Axholme lies outside of the river westwards.

The towns of Gainsborough towards the north, and Stamford at the extreme south guard this western boundary. Beyond the Minster the Lincoln Wold continues south through the Sleaford division of Kesteven to Grantham, but in a modified form, rising into stiff hills only to the north-east and south-west of Grantham, and thence passing out of the county into Leicestershire. A glance at a good map will show that the ridge along which the Ermine Street and the highway from Lincoln to Grantham run for seventeen miles, as far, that is, as Ancaster, is not a wide one; but drops to the flats more gently east of the Ermine Street than it does to the west of the Grantham road. From Sleaford, where five railway lines converge, that which goes west passes through a natural break in the ridge by Ancaster, the place from which, next after the “Barnack rag,” all the best stone of the churches of Lincolnshire has always been quarried. South of Ancaster the area of high ground is much wider, extending east and west from the western boundary of the county to the road which runs from Sleaford to Bourne and Stamford.

Such being the main features of the county, it will be as well to lay down a sort of itinerary showing the direction in which we will proceed and the towns which we propose to visit as we go.

ITINERARY

Entering the county from the south, at Stamford, we will make for Sleaford. These are the two towns which give their names to the divisions of South and North Kesteven. Grantham lies off to the west, about midway between the two. As this is the most important town in the division of Kesteven, after taking some of the various roads which radiate from Sleaford we will make Grantham our centre, then leave South Kesteven for Sleaford again, and thence going on north we shall reach Lincoln just over the North Kesteven boundary, and so continue to Gainsborough and Brigg, from which the west and north divisions of Lindsey are named. From each of the towns we have mentioned we shall trace the roads which lead from them in all directions; and then, after entering the Isle of Axholme and touching the Humber at Barton and the North Sea at Cleethorpes and Grimsby, we shall turn south to the Louth and Horncastle (in other words the east and south) divisions of Lindsey, and, so going down the east coast, we shall, after visiting Alford and Spilsby, both in South Lindsey, arrive at Boston and then at Spalding, both in the “parts of Holland,” and finally pass out of the county near the ancient abbey of Croyland.

By this itinerary we shall journey all round the huge county, going up, roughly speaking, on the west and returning by the east; and shall see, not only how it is divided into the political “parts” of Kesteven, Lindsey and Holland, but also note as we go the characteristics of the land and its three component elements of Fen, Wold and Marsh.

We have seen that the Wolds, starting from the Humber, run in two parallel ridges; that on the west side of the county reaching the whole way from north to south, but that on the east only going half the way and ending abruptly at West Keal, near Spilsby.

All that lies east of the road running from Lincoln by Sleaford and Bourne to Stamford, and south of a line drawn from Lincoln to Wainfleet is “Fen,” and includes the southern portion of South Lindsey, the eastern half of Kesteven, and the whole of Holland.

In this Fen country great houses are scarce. But the great monasteries clung to the Fens and they were mainly responsible for the creation of the truly magnificent Fen churches which are most notably grouped in the neighbourhood of Boston, Sleaford and Spalding. In writing of the Fens, therefore, the churches are the chief things to be noticed, and this is largely, though not so entirely, the case in the Marsh district also. Hence I have ventured to describe these Lincolnshire churches of the Marsh and Fen at greater length than might at first sight seem warrantable.

PERIODS OF ARCHITECTURE

It would make it easier to follow these descriptions if the reader were first to master the dates and main characteristics of the different periods of architecture and their order of sequence. Thus, roughly speaking, we may assign each style to one century, though of course the style and the century were not in any case exactly coterminous.

11th	Century	Norman	⎫	With round arches.
12th	”	Transition	⎭
13th	”	Early English (E.E.)	⎫	With pointed arches.
14th	”	Decorated (Dec.)	⎬
15th	”	Perpendicular (Perp.)	⎭

CHAPTER II
STAMFORD

The North Road—Churches—Browne’s Hospital—Brasenose College—Daniel Lambert—Burghley House and “The Peasant Countess.”

The Great Northern line, after leaving Peterborough, enters the county at Tallington, five miles east of Stamford. Stamford is eighty-nine miles north of London, and forty miles south of Lincoln. Few towns in England are more interesting, none more picturesque. The Romans with their important station of Durobrivæ at Castor, and another still nearer at Great Casterton, had no need to occupy Stamford in force, though they doubtless guarded the ford where the Ermine Street crossed the Welland, and possibly paved the water-way, whence arose the name Stane-ford. The river here divides the counties of Lincoln and Northamptonshire, and on the north-west of the town a little bit of Rutland runs up, but over three-quarters of the town is in our county. The Saxons always considered it an important town, and as early as 664 mention is made in a charter of Wulfhere, King of Mercia, of “that part of Staunforde beyond the bridge,” so the town was already on both sides of the river. Later again, in Domesday Book, the King’s borough of Stamford is noticed as paying tax for the army, navy and Danegelt, also it is described as “having six wards, five in Lincolnshire and one in Hamptonshire, but all pay customs and dues alike, except the last in which the Abbot of Burgh (Peterborough) had and hath Gabell and toll.”

This early bridge was no doubt a pack-horse bridge, and an arch on the west side of St. Mary’s Hill still bears the name of Packhorse Arch.

St. Leonard’s Priory, Stamford.

ST. LEONARD’S PRIORY

St. Leonard’s Priory is the oldest building in the neighbourhood. After Oswy, King of Northumbria, had defeated Penda, the pagan King of Mercia, he gave the government of this part of the conquered province to Penda’s son Pæda, and gave land in Stamford to his son’s tutor, Wilfrid, and here, in 658, Wilfrid built the priory of St. Leonard which he bestowed on his monastery at Lindisfarne, and when the monks removed thence to Durham it became a cell of the priory of Durham. Doubtless the building was destroyed by the Danes, but it was refounded in 1082 by the Conqueror and William of Carilef, the then Bishop of Durham.

The Danish marauders ravaged the country, but were met at Stamford by a stout resistance from Saxons and Britons combined; but in the end they beat the Saxons and nearly destroyed Stamford in 870. A few years later, when, after the peace of Wedmore, Alfred the Great gave terms to Guthrum on condition that he kept away to the north of the Watling Street, the five towns of Stamford, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby and Lincoln were left to the Danes for strongholds; of these Lincoln then, as now, was the chief.

PARLIAMENT AT STAMFORD

The early importance of Stamford may be gauged by the facts that Parliament was convened there more than once in the fourteenth century, and several Councils of War and of State held there. One of these was called by Pope Boniface IX. to suppress the doctrines of Wyclif. There, too, a large number of nobles met to devise some check on King John, who was often in the neighbourhood either at Kingscliffe, in Rockingham Forest, or at Stamford itself—and from thence they marched to Runnymede.

STAMFORD TOWN

The town was on the Great North Road, so that kings, when moving up and down their realm, naturally stopped there. A good road also went east and west, hence, just outside the town gate on the road leading west towards Geddington and Northampton, a cross (the third) was set up in memory of the halting of Queen Eleanor’s funeral procession in 1293 on its way from Harby near Lincoln to Westminster.

St. George’s Square, Stamford.

CITY ARMS

There was a castle near the ford in the tenth century, and Danes and Saxons alternately held it until the Norman Conquest. The city, like the ancient Thebes, had a wall with seven gates besides posterns, one of which still exists in the garden of 9, Barn Hill, the house in which Alderman Wolph hid Charles I. on his last visit to Stamford in 1646. Most of the buildings which once made Stamford so very remarkable were the work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and as they comprised fifteen churches, six priories, with hospitals, schools and almshouses in corresponding numbers, the town must have presented a beautiful appearance, more especially so because the stone used in all these buildings, public and private, is of such exceptionally good character, being from the neighbouring quarries of Barnack, Ketton and Clipsham. But much of this glory of stone building and Gothic architecture was destroyed in the year 1461; and for this reason. It happened that, just as Henry III. had given it to his son Edward I. on his marriage with Eleanor of Castile in 1254, so, in 1363, Edward III. gave the castle and manor of Stamford to his son Edmund of Langley, Duke of York; this, by attaching the town to the Yorkist cause, when Lincolnshire was mostly Lancastrian, brought about its destruction, for after the battle of St. Alban’s in 1461, the Lancastrians under Sir Andrew Trollope utterly devastated the town, destroying everything, and, though some of the churches were rebuilt, the town never recovered its former magnificence. It still looks beautiful with its six churches, its many fragments of arch or wall and several fine old almshouses which were built subsequently, but it lost either then or at the dissolution more than double of what it has managed to retain. Ten years later the courage shown by the men of Stamford at the battle of Empingham or “Bloody Oaks” close by, on the North Road, where the Lancastrians were defeated, caused Edward IV. to grant permission for the royal lions to be placed on the civic shield of Stamford, side by side with the arms of Earl Warren. He had had the manorial rights of Stamford given to him by King John in 1206, and he is said to have given the butchers a field in which to keep a bull to be baited annually on November 13, and the barbarous practice of “bull running” in the streets was actually kept up till 1839, and then only abolished with difficulty.

St. Mary’s Street, Stamford.

St. Paul’s Street, Stamford.

THE SIX CHURCHES

THE CALLISES

STAMFORD UNIVERSITY

Of the six churches, St. Mary’s and All Saints have spires. St. Mary’s, on a hill which slopes to the river, is a fine arcaded Early English tower with a broach spire of later date, but full of beautiful work in statue and canopy, very much resembling that at Ketton in Rutland. There are three curious round panels with interlaced work over the porch, and a rich altar tomb with very lofty canopy that commemorates Sir David Phillips and his wife. They had served Margaret Countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., who resided at Collyweston close by. The body of the church is rather crowded together and not easy to view. In this respect All Saints, with its turrets, pinnacles and graceful spire, and its double belfry lights under one hood moulding as at Grantham, has the advantage. Moreover the North Road goes up past it, and the market place gives plenty of space all round it. Inside, the arcade columns are cylindrical and plain on the north, but clustered on the south side, with foliated capitals. This church is rich in brasses, chiefly of the great wool-merchant family of Browne, one of whom, William, founded a magnificent hospital and enlarged the church, and in all probability built the handsome spire; he was buried in 1489. The other churches all have square towers, that of St. John’s Church is over the last bay of the north aisle, and at the last bay of the south aisle is a porch. The whole construction is excellent, pillars tall, roof rich and windows graceful, and it once was filled with exceptionally fine stained glass. St. George’s Church, being rebuilt with fragments of other destroyed churches, shows a curious mixture of octagonal and cylindrical work in the same pillars. St. Michael’s and St. Martin’s are the other two, of which the latter is across the water in what is called Stamford Baron, it is the burial place of the Cecils and it is not far from the imposing gateway into Burghley Park. This church and park, with the splendid house designed by John Thorpe for the great William Cecil in 1565, are all in the diocese of Peterborough, and the county of Northampton. We shall have to recall the church when we speak of the beautiful windows which Lord Exeter was allowed by the Fortescue family to take from the Collegiate Church of Tattershall, and which are now in St. Martin’s, where they are extremely badly set with bands of modern glass interrupting the old. Another remnant of a church stands on the north-west of the town, St. Paul’s. This ruin was made over as early as the sixteenth century for use as a schoolroom for Radcliffe’s Grammar School. Schools, hospitals or almshouses once abounded in Stamford, where the latter are often called Callises, being the benefactions of the great wool merchants of the Staple of Calais. The chief of all these, and one which is still in use, is Browne’s Hospital, founded in 1480 by a Stamford merchant who had been six times Mayor, for a Warden, a Confrater, ten poor men, and two poor women. It had a long dormitory hall, with central passage from which the brethren’s rooms opened on either side, and, at one end, beyond a carved screen, is the chapel with tall windows, stalls and carved bench-ends, and a granite alms box. An audit room is above the hall or dormitory, with good glass, and Browne’s own house, with large gateway to admit the wool-wagons, adjoined the chapel. It was partly rebuilt with new accommodation in 1870; the cloister and hall and chapel remain as they were. One more thing must be noted. In the north-west and near the old St. Paul’s Church schoolroom is a beautiful Early English gateway, which is all that remains of Brasenose College. The history is a curious one. Violent town and gown quarrels resulting even in murders, at Oxford in 1260, had caused several students to migrate to Northampton, where Henry III. directed the mayor to give them every accommodation; but in 1266, probably for reasons connected with civil strife, the license was revoked, and, whilst many returned to Oxford, many preferred to go further, and so came to Stamford, a place known to be well supplied with halls and requisites for learning. Here they were joined in 1333 by a further body of Oxford men who were involved in a dispute between the northern and southern scholars, the former complaining that they were unjustly excluded from Merton College Fellowships. The Durham Monastery took their side and doubtless offered them shelter at their priory of St. Leonard’s, Stamford. Then, as other bodies of University seceders kept joining them, they thought seriously of setting up a University, and petitioned King Edward III. to be allowed to remain under his protection at Stamford. But the Universities petitioned against them, and the King ordered the Sheriff of Lincolnshire to turn them out, promising them redress when they were back in Oxford. Those who refused were punished by confiscation of goods and fines, and the two Universities passed Statutes imposing an oath on all freshmen that they would not read or attend lectures at Stamford. In 1292 Robert Luttrell of Irnham gave a manor and the parish church of St. Peter, near Stamford, to the priory at Sempringham, being “desirous to increase the numbers of the convent and that it might ever have scholars at Stamford studying divinity and philosophy.” This refers to Sempringham Hall, one of the earliest buildings of Stamford University.

St. Peter’s Hill, Stamford.

A MAZE OF STREETS

STAMFORD’S GREAT MEN

A glance at a plan of the town would show that it is exactly like a maze, no street runs on right through it in any direction, and, for a stranger, it is incredibly difficult to find a way out. To the south-west, and all along the eastern edge on the river-meadows outside the walls, were large enclosures belonging to the different Friaries, on either side of the road to St. Leonard’s Priory. No town has lost more by the constant depredations of successive attacking forces; first the Danes, then the Wars of the Roses, then the dissolution of the religious houses, then the Civil War, ending with a visit from Cromwell in his most truculent mood, fresh from the mischief done by his soldiers in and around Croyland and Peterborough. But, even now, its grey stone buildings, its well-chosen site, its river, its neighbouring hills and wooded park, make it a town more than ordinarily attractive. Of distinguished natives, we need only mention the great Lord Burleigh, who served with distinction through four reigns, and Archdeacon Johnson, the founder of the Oakham and Uppingham Schools and hospitals in 1584, though Uppingham as it now is, was the creation of a far greater man, the famous Edward Thring, a pioneer of modern educational methods, in the last half of the nineteenth century. Archbishop Laud, who is so persistently mentioned as having been once Vicar of St. Martin’s, Stamford, was never there; his vicarage was Stanford-on-Avon. But undoubtedly Stamford’s greatest man in one sense was Daniel Lambert, whose monument, in St. Martin’s churchyard, date 1809, speaks of his “personal greatness” and tells us that he weighed 52 stone 11 lbs., adding “N.B. the stone of 14 lb.” The writer once, when a schoolboy, went with another to see his clothes, which were shown at the Daniel Lambert Inn; and, when the two stood back to back, the armhole of his spacious waistcoat was slipped over their heads and fell loosely round them to the ground.

This enormous personage must not be confounded with another Daniel Lambert, who was Lord Mayor and Member for the City of London in Walpole’s time, about 1740.

THE PEASANT COUNTESS

It is quite a matter of regret that “Burleigh House near Stamford town” is outside the county boundary. Of all the great houses in England, it always strikes me as being the most satisfying and altogether the finest, and a fitting memorial of the great Lincolnshire man William Cecil, who, after serving in the two previous reigns, was Elizabeth’s chief Minister for forty years. “The Lord of Burleigh” of Tennyson’s poem lived two centuries later, but he, too, with “the peasant Countess” lived eventually in the great house. Lady Dorothy Nevill, in My Own Times published in 1912, gives a clear account of the facts commemorated in the poem. She tells us that Henry Cecil, tenth Earl of Exeter, before he came into the title was divorced from his wife in 1791, owing to her misconduct; being almost broken-hearted he retired to a village in Shropshire, called Bolas Magna, where he worked as a farm servant to one Hoggins who had a mill. Tennyson makes him more picturesquely “a landscape painter.” He often looked in at the vicarage and had a mug of ale with the servants, who called him “Gentleman Harry.” The clergyman, Mr. Dickenson, became interested in him, and often talked with him, and used to invite him to smoke an evening pipe with him in the study. Mr. Hoggins had a daughter Sarah, the beauty of Bolas, and they became lovers. With the clergyman’s aid Cecil, not without difficulty, persuaded Hoggins to allow the marriage, which took place at St. Mildred’s, Bread Street, October 30th, 1791, his broken heart having mended fairly quickly. He was now forty years of age, and before the marriage he had told Dickenson who he was. For two years they lived in a small farm, when, from a Shrewsbury paper, “Mr. Cecil” learnt that he had succeeded his uncle in the title and the possession of Burleigh House and estate. Thither in due course he took his bride. Her picture is on the wall, but she did not live long.

“For a trouble weighed upon her,

And perplexed her night and morn,

With the burthen of an honour

Unto which she was not born.

Faint she grew and even fainter,

And she murmured ‘Oh that he

Were once more that landscape painter

That did win my heart from me’!

So she drooped and drooped before him,

Fading slowly from his side:

Three fair children first she bore him,

Then before her time she died.”

Stamford from Freeman’s Close.

CHAPTER III
STAMFORD TO BOURNE

Tickencote—“Bloody Oaks”—Holywell—Tallington—Barholm—Greatford—Witham-on-the-Hill—Dr. Willis—West Deeping—Market Deeping—Deeping-St.-James—Richard de Rulos—Braceborough—Bourne.

Of the eight roads which run to Stamford, the Great North Road which here coincides with the Roman Ermine Street is the chief; and this enters from the south through Northamptonshire and goes out by the street called “Scotgate” in a north-westerly direction through Rutland. It leaves Lincolnshire at Great or Bridge Casterton on the river Gwash; one mile further it passes the celebrated church of Tickencote nestling in a hollow to the left, where the wonderful Norman chancel arch of five orders outdoes even the work at Iffley near Oxford, and the wooden effigy of a knight reminds one of that of Robert Duke of Normandy at Gloucester. Tickencote is the home of the Wingfields, and the villagers in 1471 were near enough to hear “the Shouts of war” when the Lincolnshire Lancastrians fled from the fight on Loosecoat Field after a slaughter which is commemorated on the map by the name “Bloody Oaks.” Further on, the road passes Stretton, ‘the village on the street,’ whence a lane to the right takes you to the famed Clipsham quarries just on the Rutland side of the boundary, and over it to the beautiful residence of Colonel Birch Reynardson at Holywell. Very soon now the Ermine Street, after doing its ten miles in Rutland, passes by “Morkery Wood” back into Lincolnshire.

The only Stamford Road which is all the time in our county is the eastern road through Market Deeping to Spalding, this soon after leaving Stamford passes near Uffington Hall, built in 1688 by Robert Bertie, son of Montague, second Earl of Lindsey, he whose father fell at Edgehill. On the northern outskirt of the parish Lord Kesteven has a fine Elizabethan house called Casewick Hall. Round each house is a well-timbered park, and at Uffington Hall the approach is by a fine avenue of limes. At Tallington, where the road crosses the Great Northern line, the church, like several in the neighbourhood, has some Saxon as well as Norman work, and the original Sanctus bell still hangs in a cot surmounting the east end of the nave. It is dedicated to St. Lawrence.

South Lincolnshire seems to have been rather rich in Saxon churches, and two of the best existing towers of that period at Barnack and Wittering in Northamptonshire are within three miles of Stamford, one on either side of the Great North Road.

Barholm Church, near Tallington, has some extremely massive Norman arches and a fine door with diapered tympanum. The tower was restored in the last year of Charles I., and no one seems to have been more surprised than the churchwarden or parson or mason of the time, for we find carved on it these lines:—

“Was ever such a thing

Sence the creation?

A new steeple built

In the time of vexation.

I. H. 1643.”

FORDS OF THE WELLAND

An old Hall adds to the interest of the place, and another charming old building is Mr. Peacock’s Elizabethan house in the next parish of Greatford, or, as it should be spelt, Gretford or Gritford, the grit or gravel ford of the river Glen, just as Stamford should be Stanford or Staneford, the stone-paved ford of the Welland. Gretford Church is remarkable if only for the unusual position of the tower as a south transept, a similar thing being seen at Witham-on-the-Hill, four miles off, in Rutland. Five of the bells there are re-casts of some which once hung in Peterborough Cathedral, and the fifth has the date 1831 and a curious inscription. General Johnson I used to see when I was a boy at Uppingham; he was the patron of the school, and the one man among the governors of the school who was always a friend to her famous headmaster, Edward Thring. But why he wrote the last line of this inscription I can’t conceive:—

“’Twas not to prosper pride and hate

William Augustus Johnson gave me,

But peace and joy to celebrate;

And call to prayer to heaven to save ye.

Then keep the terms, and e’er remember,

May 29 ye must not ring

Nor yet the 5th of each November

Nor on the crowning of a king.”

THE DEEPINGS

DEEPING FEN

To return to Gretford. In the north transept is a square opening, in the sill of which is a curious hollow all carved with foliage, resembling one in the chancel at East Kirkby, near Spilsby, where it is supposed to have been a sort of alms dish for votive offerings. Here, too, is a bust by Nollekens of a man who had a considerable reputation in his time, and who occupied more than one house in this neighbourhood and built a private asylum at Shillingthorpe near Braceborough for his patients, a distinguished clientèle who used to drive their teams all about the neighbourhood; this was Dr. F. Willis, the mad-doctor who attended George III. But these are all ‘side shows,’ and we must get back to Tallington. The road from here goes through West Deeping, which, like the manor of Market Deeping, belonged to the Wakes. Here we find a good font with eight shields of arms, that of the Wakes being one, and an almost unique old low chancel screen of stone, the surmounting woodwork has gone and the west face is filled in with poor modern mosaic. Within three miles the Bourne-and-Peterborough road crosses the Stamford-and-Spalding road at Market Deeping, where there is a large church, once attached to Croyland, and a most interesting old house used as the rectory. This was the refectory of a priory, and has fine roof timbers. The manor passed through Joan, daughter of Margaret Wake, to the Black Prince. Two miles further, the grand old priory church of Deeping-St.-James lies a mile to the left. This was attached as a cell to Thorney Abbey in 1139, by the same Baldwin FitzGilbert who had founded Bourne Abbey. A diversion of a couple of miles northwards would bring us to a fine tower and spire at Langtoft, once a dependency of Medehamstead[1] Abbey at Peterborough, together with which it was ruthlessly destroyed by Swegen in 1013. On the roof timbers are some beautifully carved figures of angels, and carved heads project from the nave pillars. The south chantry is a large one, with three arches opening into the chancel, and has several interesting features. Amongst these is a handsome aumbry, which may have been used as an Easter sepulchre. The south chantry opens from the chancel with three arches, and has some good carving and a piscina with a finely constructed canopy. There is a monument to Elizabeth Moulesworth, 1648, and a brass plate on the tomb of Sarah, wife of Bernard Walcot, has this pretty inscription:—

Thou bedd of rest, reserve for him a roome

Who lives a man divorced from his deare wife,

That as they were one hart so this one tombe

May hold them near in death as linckt in life,

She’s gone before, and after comes her head

To sleepe with her among the blessed dead.

At Scamblesby, between Louth and Horncastle, is another pathetic inscription on a wife’s tomb:—

To Margaret Coppinger wife of Francis Thorndike 1629.
Dilectissimæ conjugi Mæstissimus maritorum Franciscus
Thorndike.

L.(apidem) M.(armoreum) P.(osuit)

The old manor house of the Hyde family is at the north end of the village. The road for the next ten miles over Deeping Fen is uninteresting as a road can be. But this will be amply made up for in another chapter when we shape our eastward course from Spalding to Holbeach and Gedney.

THE FATHER OF FEN FARMERS

In Deeping Fen between Bourne, Spalding, Crowland and Market Deeping there is about fifty square miles of fine fat land, and Marrat tells us that as early as the reign of Edward the Confessor, Egelric, the Bishop of Durham, who, having been once a monk at Peterborough, knew the value of the land, in order to develop the district, made a cord road of timber and gravel all the way from Deeping to Spalding. The province then belonged to the Lords of Brunne or Bourne. In Norman times Richard De Rulos, Chamberlain of the Conqueror, married the daughter of Hugh de Evermue, Lord of Deeping. Their only daughter married Baldwin FitzGilbert, and his daughter and heiress married Hugh de Wake, who managed the forest of Kesteven for Henry III., which forest reached to the bridge at Market Deeping. Richard De Rulos, who was the father of all Lincolnshire farmers, aided by Ingulphus, Abbot of Croyland, set himself to enclose and drain the fen land, to till the soil or convert it into pasture and to breed cattle. He banked out the Welland which used to flood the fen every year, whence it got its name of Deeping or the deep meadows, and on the bank he set up tenements with gardens attached, which were the beginnings of Market Deeping. He further enlarged St. Guthlac’s chapel into a church, and then planted another little colony at Deeping-St.-James, where his son-in-law, who carried on his activities, built the priory. De Rulos was in fact a model landlord, and the result was that the men of Deeping, like Jeshuron, “waxed fat and kicked,” and the abbots of Croyland had endless contests with them for the next 300 years for constant trespass and damage. Probably this was the reason why the Wakes set up a castle close by Deeping, but on the Northampton side of the Welland at Maxey, which was inhabited later by Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., who, in addition to all her educational benefactions, was also a capital farmer and an active member of the Commissioners of Sewers.

THE LIMESTONE SPRINGS

We must now get back to Stamford. Even the road which goes due north to Bourne soon finds itself outside the county; for Stamford is placed on a mere tongue or long pointed nose of land belonging to Lincolnshire, in what is aptly termed the Wapentake of ‘Ness.’ However, after four miles in Rutland, it passes the four cross railroads at Essendine Junction, and soon after re-crosses the boundary near Carlby. Essendine Church consists simply of a Norman nave and chancel. Here, a little to the right lies Braceborough Spa, where water gushes from the limestone at the rate of a million and a half gallons daily. This is a great district for curative springs. There is one five miles to the west at Holywell which, with its stream and lake and finely timbered grounds, is one of the beauty spots of Lincolnshire, and at the same distance to the north are the strong springs of Bourne. We hear of a chalybeate spring “continually boiling” or gushing up, for it was not hot, near the church at Billingborough, and another at Stoke Rochford, each place a good ten miles from Bourne and in opposite directions. Great Ponton too, near Stoke Rochford, is said to “abound in Springs of pure water rising out of the rock and running into the river Witham.” The church at Braceborough had a fine brass once to Thomas De Wasteneys, who died of the Black Death in 1349. After Carlby there is little of interest on the road itself till it tops the hill beyond Toft whence, on an autumn day, a grand view opens out across the fens to the Wash and to Boston on the north-east, and the panorama sweeps southward past Spalding to the time-honoured abbey of Croyland, and on again to the long grey pile of Peterborough Minster, once islands in a trackless fen (the impenetrable refuge of the warlike and unconquered Gervii or fenmen), but now a level plain of cornland covered, as far as eye can see, with the richest crops imaginable. A little further north we reach the Colsterworth road, and turning east, enter the old town of Bourne, now only notable as the junction of the Great Northern and Midland Railways. Since 1893 the inhabitants have used an “e” at the end of the name to distinguish it from Bourn in Cambridgeshire. Near the castle hill is a strong spring called “Peter’s Pool,” or Bournwell-head, the water of which runs through the town and is copious enough to furnish a water supply for Spalding. This castle, mentioned by Ingulphus in his history of Croyland Abbey, existed in the eleventh century; possibly the Romans had a fort here to guard both the ‘Carr Dyke’ which passes by the east side of the town, and also the King’s Street, a Roman road which, splitting off from the Ermine Street at Castor, runs through Bourne due north to Sleaford. There was an outer moat enclosing eight acres, and an inner moat of one acre, inside which “on a mount of earth cast up with mene’s hands” stood the castle, once the stronghold of the Wakes. To-day a maze of grassy mounds alone attests the site, amongst which the “Bourn or Brunne gushes out in a strong clear stream.” Marrat in his “History of Lincolnshire” tells us that as early as 870 Morchar, Lord of Brun, fell fighting at the battle of Threekingham. Two hundred years later we have “Hereward the Wake” living at Bourn, and in the twelfth century “Hugh De Wac” married Emma, daughter and heir of Baldwin FitzGilbert, who led some of King Stephen’s forces in the battle of Lincoln and refused to desert his king. Hugh founded the abbey of Bourn in 1138 on the site of an older building of the eighth or ninth century.

Bourne Abbey Church.

BOURNE

FAMOUS NATIVES

Six generations later, Margaret de Wake married Edmund Plantagenet of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the sixth son of Edward I., and their daughter, born 1328, was Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, who was finally married to Edward the Black Prince. Their son was the unfortunate Richard II., and through them the manor of Bourn, which is said to have been bestowed on Baldwin, Count of Brienne, by William Rufus, passed back to the Crown. Hereward is supposed to have been buried in the abbey in which only a little of the early building remains. Certainly he was one of Bourn’s famous natives, Cecil Lord Burleigh, the great Lord Treasurer, being another, of whom it was said that “his very enemies sorrowed for his death.” Job Hartop, born 1550, who sailed with Sir John Hawkins and spent ten years in the galleys, and thirteen more in a Spanish prison, but came at last safe home to Bourn, deserves honourable mention, and Worth, the Parisian costumier, was also a native who has made himself a name; but one of the most noteworthy of all Bourn’s residents was Robert Manning, born at Malton, and canon of the Gilbertine Priory of Six Hills. He is best known as Robert de Brunne, from his long residence in Bourn, where he wrote his “Chronicle of the History of England.” This is a Saxon or English metrical version of Wace’s Norman-French translation of the “Chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” and of Peter Langtoft’s “History of England,” which was also written in French. This work he finished in 1338, on the 200th anniversary of the founding of the abbey; and in 1303, when he was appointed “Magister” in Bourn Abbey, he wrote his “Handlynge of Sin,” also a translation from the French, in the preface to which he has the following lines:—

For men unlearned I undertook

In English speech to write this book,

For many be of such mannere

That tales and rhymes will gladly hear.

On games and feasts and at the ale

Men love to hear a gossip’s tale

That leads perhaps to villainy

Or deadly sin, or dull folly.

For such men have I made this rhyme

That they may better spend their time.

To all true Christians under sun,

To good and loyal men of Brunn,

And specially all by name

O’ the Brotherhood of Sempringhame,

Robert of Brunn now greeteth ye,

And prays for your prosperity.

ROBERT DE BRUNNE

Robert was a translator and no original composer, but he was the first after Layamon, the Worcestershire monk who lived just before him, to write English in its present form. Chaucer followed him, then Spenser, after which all was easy. But he was, according to Freeman, the pioneer who created standard English by giving the language of the natives a literary expression.

The Station House, Bourne.

BLACKSMITH’S EPITAPH

It is difficult to see the abbey church, it is so hemmed in by buildings, and it never seems to have been completed. At the west end is some very massive work. In the churchyard there is a curious epitaph on Thomas Tye, a blacksmith, the first six lines of which are also found on a gravestone in Haltham churchyard near Horncastle:—

My sledge and hammer lie reclined,

My bellows too have lost their wind,

My fire’s extinct, my forge decayed,

And in the dust my vice is laid,

My coal is spent, my iron’s gone,

My nails are drawn, my work is done.

My fire-dryed corpse lies here at rest,

My soul like smoke is soaring to the bles’t.

There is a charming old grey stone grammar school, possibly the very building in which Robert De Brunne taught when “Magister” at the abbey at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The station-master’s house, called “Red Hall,” is a picturesque Elizabethan brick building once the home of the Roman Catholic leader, Sir John Thimbleby, and afterwards of the Digbys. Sir Everard Digby, whose fine monument is in Stoke Dry Church near Uppingham, was born here. Another house is called “Cavalry House” because Thomas Rawnsley, great grandfather of the writer, was living there when he raised at his own expense and drilled a troop of “Light Horse Rangers” at the time when Buonaparte threatened to invade England. Lady Heathcote, whose husband commanded them, gave him a handsome silver goblet in 1808, in recognition of his services. He died in 1826, and in the spandrils of the north arcade in Bourne Abbey Church are memorial tablets to him and to his wife Deborah (Hardwicke) “and six of their children who died infants.”

CHAPTER IV
ROADS FROM BOURNE

The Carr Dyke—Thurlby—Edenham—Grimsthorpe Castle—King’s Street—Swinstead—Stow Green—Folkingham—Haydor—Silk Willoughby—Rippingale—Billingborough—Horbling—Sempringham and the Gilbertines.

Bourne itself is in the fen, just off the Lincolnshire limestone. From it the railways run to all the four points of the compass, but it is only on the west, towards Nottingham, that any cutting was needed. Due north and south runs the old Roman road, keeping just along the eastern edge of the Wold; parallel with it, and never far off, the railway line keeps on the level fen by Billingborough and Sleaford to Lincoln, a distance of five-and-thirty miles, and all the way the whole of the land to the east right up to the coast is one huge tract of flat fenland scored with dykes, with only few roads, but with railways fairly frequent, running in absolute straight lines for miles, and with constant level crossings.

One road which goes south from Bourne is interesting because it goes along by the ‘Carr Dyke,’ that great engineering work of the Romans, which served to catch the water from the hills and drain it off so as to prevent the flooding of the fens. Rennie greatly admired it, and adopted the same principle in laying out his great “Catchwater” drain, affectionately spoken of by the men in the fens as ‘the owd Catch.’ The Carr Dyke was a canal fifty-six miles long and fifty feet wide, with broad, flat banks, and connected the Nene at Peterborough with the Witham at Washingborough near Lincoln. From Washingborough southwards to Martin it is difficult to trace, but it is visible at Walcot, thence it passed by Billinghay and north Kyme through Heckington Fen, east of Horbling and Billingborough and the Great Northern Railway line to Bourne. Two miles south of this we come to the best preserved bit of it in the parish of Thurlby, or Thoroldby, once a Northman now a Lincolnshire name. The “Bourne Eau” now crosses it and empties into the River Glen, which itself joins the Welland at Stamford.

THURLBY

Thurlby Church stands only a few yards from the ‘Carr Dyke,’ it is full of interesting work, and is curiously dedicated to St. Firmin, a bishop of Amiens, of Spanish birth. He was sent as a missionary to Gaul, where he converted the Roman prefect, Faustinian. He was martyred, when bishop, in 303, by order of Diocletian. The son of Faustinian was his godson, and was baptized with his name of Firmin, and he, too, eventually became Bishop of Amiens. Part of the church is pre-Norman and even exhibits “long and short” work. The Norman arcades have massive piers and cushion capitals. In the transepts are Early English arcades and squints, and there is a canopied piscina and a font of very unusual design. There is also an old ladder with handrail as in some of the Marsh churches, leading to the belfry. Three miles south is Baston, where there is a Saxon churchyard in a field. Hence the road continues to Market Deeping on the Welland, which is here the southern boundary of the county, and thence to Deeping-St.-James and Peterborough. Deeping-St.-James has a grand priory church, which was founded by Baldwin Fitz-Gilbert as a cell to Thorney Abbey in 1136, the year after he had founded Bourne Abbey. It contains effigies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Shameful to say a fountain near the church was erected in 1819 by mutilating and using the material of a fine village cross. Peakirk, with its little chapel of St. Pega, and Northborough and Woodcroft, both with remarkable houses built of the good gray stone of the neighbourhood, Woodcroft being a perfect specimen of a fortified dwelling-house, though near, are in the county of Northants.

EDENHAM CHURCH

The Corby-Colsterworth-and-Grantham Road leaves Bourne on the west and, passing through Bourne Wood at about four miles’ distance, reaches Edenham. On the west front of the church tower, at a height of forty feet, is the brass of an archbishop. Inside the church are two stones, one being the figure of a lady and the other being part of an ancient cross, both carved with very early interlaced work. The chancel is a museum of monuments of the Bertie family, the Dukes of Ancaster, continued from the earliest series at Spilsby of the Willoughby D’Eresbys, and beginning with Robert Bertie,[2] eleventh Lord Willoughby and first Earl of Lindsey, who fell at Edgehill while leading the Lincolnshire regiment, 1642. The present Earls of Lindsey and Uffington are descended from Lord Albemarle Bertie, fifth son of Robert, third Earl of Lindsey, who has a huge monument here, dated 1738, adorned with no less than seven marble busts.

Two fine altar tombs of the fourteenth century, with effigies of knight and lady, seem to be treated somewhat negligently, being thrust away together at the entrance. The nave pillars are very lofty, but the whole church has a bare and disappointing appearance from the plainness of the architecture, and the ugly coat of yellow wash, both on walls and pillars, and the badness of the stained glass.

On the north wall of the chancel and reaching to the roof there is a very lofty monument, with life-size effigy to the first Duke of Ancaster, 1723. East of this, one to the second duke with a marble cupid holding a big medallion of his duchess, Jane Brownlow, 1741, and on the south wall are equally huge memorials. In the family pew we hailed with relief a very good alabaster tablet with white marble medallion of the late Lady Willoughby “Clementina Elizabeth wife of the first Baron Aveland, Baroness Willoughby d’Eresby in her own right, joint hereditary Lord Chamberlain of England,” 1888.

The font is transition Norman, the cylindrical bowl surrounded by eight columns not detached, and a circle of arcading consisting of two Norman arches between each column springing from the capitals of the pillars.

The magnificent set of gold Communion plate was presented by the Willoughby family. It is of French, Spanish, and Italian workmanship. Humby church has also a fine gold service, presented by Lady Brownlow in 1682. It gives one pleasure to find good cedar trees and yews growing in the churchyard.

GRIMSTHORPE

Grimsthorpe Castle is a mile beyond Edenham. The park, the finest in the county, in which are herds of both fallow and red deer, is very large, and full of old oaks and hawthorns; the latter in winter are quite green with the amount of mistletoe which grows on them. The lake covers one hundred acres. The house is a vast building and contains a magnificent hall 110 feet long, with a double staircase at either end, and rising to the full height of the roof. In the state dining-room is the Gobelin tapestry which came to the Duke of Suffolk by his marriage with Mary, the widow of Louis XII. of France. Here, too, are several Coronation chairs, the perquisites of the Hereditary Grand Chamberlain. The Willoughby d’Eresby family have discharged this office ever since 1630 in virtue of descent from Alberic De Vere, Earl of Oxford, Grand Chamberlain to Henry I., but in 1779, on the death of the fourth Duke of Ancaster, the office was adjudged to be the right of both his sisters, from which time the Willoughby family have held it conjointly with the Earl of Carrington and the Marquis of Cholmondeley. Among the pictures are several Holbeins. The manor of Grimsthorpe was granted to William, the ninth Lord Willoughby, by Henry VIII. on his marriage with Mary de Salinas, a Spanish lady in attendance on Katharine of Aragon, and it was their daughter Katherine who became Duchess of Suffolk and afterwards married Richard Bertie.

Just outside Grimsthorpe Park is the village of Swinstead, in whose church is a large monument to the last Duke of Ancaster, 1809, and an effigy of one of the numerous thirteenth century crusaders. Somehow one never looks on the four crusades of that century as at all up to the mark in interest and importance of the first and third under Godfrey de Bouillon and Cœur de Lion in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; as for the second (St. Bernard’s) that was nothing but a wretched muddle all through.

Two miles further on is Corby, where the market cross remains, but not the market. The station on the Great Northern main line is about five miles east of Woolsthorpe, Sir Isaac Newton’s birthplace and early home.

I think the most remarkable of the Bourne roads is the Roman “Kings Street,” which starts for the north and, after passing on the right the fine cruciform church of Morton and then the graceful spire of Hacconby, a name of unmistakable Danish origin, sends first an offshoot to the right to pass through the fens to Heckington, and three or four miles further on another to the left to run on the higher ground to Folkingham, whilst it keeps on its own rigidly straight course to the Roman station on the ford of the river Slea, passing through no villages all the way, and only one other Roman station which guarded a smaller ford at Threckingham.

STOW GREEN, ALGAR AND MORCAR

This place is popularly supposed to be named from the three Danish kings who fell in the battle at Stow Green, between Threckingham and Billingborough, in 870; but the fine recumbent figures of Judge Lambert de Treckingham, 1300, and a lady of the same family, and the fact that the Threckingham family lived here in the fourteenth century points to a less romantic origin of the name. The names of the Victors, Earl Algar and Morcar, or Morkere, Lord of Bourne, survive in ‘Algarkirk’ and ‘Morkery Wood’ in South Wytham.

Stow Green had one of the earliest chartered fairs in the kingdom. It was held in the open, away from any habitation. Like Tan Hill near Avebury, and St. Anne de Palue in Brittany, and Stonehenge, all originally were probably assembling-places for fire-worship, for tan = fire.

But as we go to-day from Bourne to Sleaford, we shall not use the Roman road for more than the first six miles, but take then the off-shoot to the left, and passing Aslackby, where, in the twelfth century, as at Temple-Bruer, the Templars had one of their round churches, afterwards given to the Hospitallers, come to the little town of Folkingham, which had been granted by the Conqueror to Gilbert de Gaunt or Ghent, Earl of Lincoln.

He was the nephew of Queen Matilda, and on none of his followers, except Odo Bishop of Bayeux, did the Conqueror bestow his favours with a more liberal hand; for we read that he gave him 172 Lordships of which 113 were in Lincolnshire. He made his seat at Folkingham, but, having lands in Yorkshire, he was a benefactor to St. Mary’s Abbey, York, at the same time that he restored and endowed Bardney Abbey after its destruction by the Danes under Inguar and Hubba.

The wide street seems to have been laid out for more people than now frequent it. The church is spacious and lofty, with a fine roof and singularly rich oak screen and pulpit, into which the rood screen doorway opens. It was well restored about eighty years ago, by the rector, the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, who was far ahead of his time in the reverend spirit with which he handled old architecture. The neighbouring church of Walcot has a fine fourteenth century oak chest, similar to one at Hacconby. Three and a half miles further on we come to Osbournby, with a quite remarkable number of old carved bench-ends and some beautiful canopied Sedilia. Another Danish village, Aswardby—originally, I suppose, Asgarby, one can fancy a hero called ‘Asgard the Dane’ but hardly Asward—has a fine house and park, sold by one of the Sleaford Carr family to Sir Francis Whichcote in 1723.

Four miles west of Aswardby is the village of Haydor (Norse, heide = heath). Here, in the north aisle of the church, which has a tall tower and spire, is some very good stained glass. It was given by Geoffrey le Scrope, who was Prebend of Haydor 1325 to 1380, and much resembles the fine glass in York Minster, which was put in in 1338. In this parish is the old manor of Culverthorpe, belonging to the Houblon family. It has a very fine drawing-room and staircase and a painted ceiling.

SILK-WILLOUGHBY

We must now come back to the Sleaford road which, a couple of miles beyond Aswardby Park, turns sharp to the right for Silk-Willoughby, or Silkby cum Willoughby. Here we have a really beautiful church, with finely proportioned tower and spire of the Decorated period. The Norman font is interesting and the old carved bench-ends, and so is the large base of a wayside cross in the village, with bold representations of the four Evangelists, each occupying the whole of one side. Three miles further we reach Sleaford.

One of the features of the county is the number of roads it has running north and south in the same direction as the Wolds. The Roman road generally goes straightest, though at times the railway line, as for instance between Bourne and Spalding, or between Boston and Burgh, takes an absolute bee line which outdoes even the Romans.

We saw that the two roads going north from Bourne sloped off right and left of the “Kings Street.” That on the left or western side keeps a parallel course to Sleaford, but that on the right, after reaching Horbling, diverges still further to the east and makes for Heckington. These two places are situated about six miles apart, and it is through the Horbling and Heckington fens that the only two roads which run east and west in all South Lincolnshire make their way. They both start from the Grantham and Lincoln Road at Grantham and at Honington, the former crossing the “Kings Street” at Threckingham, and thence to Horbling fen, the latter passing by Sleaford and Heckington. Both of these roads curve towards one another when they have passed the fens, and, uniting near Swineshead, make for Boston and the Wash. The whole of the land in South Lincolnshire slopes from west to east, falling between Grantham and Boston about 440 feet, but really this fall takes place almost entirely in the first third of the way on the western side of “The Roman Street” which was cleverly laid out on the Fen-side fringe of the higher ground. The road from Bourne to Heckington East of the “Street” is absolutely on the fen level and the railway goes parallel to it, between the road and the Roman ‘Carr Dyke.’ Thus we have a Roman road, a Roman canal, two modern roads and a railway, all running side by side to the north.

RIPPINGALE

The Heckington road, after leaving the “Street,” passes through Dunsby and Dowsby, where there is an old Elizabethan house once inhabited by the Burrell family. Rippingale lies off to the left between the two and has in its church a rood screen canopy but no screen, which is very rare, and a large number of old monuments from the thirteenth century onwards, the oldest being two thirteenth century knights in chain mail of the family of Gobaud, who lived at the Hall, now the merest ruin, where they were succeeded by the Bowet, Marmion, Haslewood and Brownlow families. An effigy of a deacon with the open book of the Gospels has this unusual inscription, “Ici git Hwe Geboed le palmer le fils Jhoan Geboed. Millᵒ 446 Prees pur le alme.” It is interesting to find here a fifteenth century monument to a Roger de Quincey. Was he, I wonder, an ancestor of the famous opium eater? There is in the pavement a Marmion slab of 1505. The register records the death in July, 1815, of “the Lincolnshire Giantess” Anne Hardy, aged 16, height 7 ft. 2 in. The Brownlow family emigrated hence to Belton near Grantham. They had another Manor House at Great Humby, which is just half-way between Rippingale and Belton, of which the little brick-built domestic chapel now serves as a church. As we go on we notice that the whole of the land eastwards is a desolate and dreary fen, which extends from the Welland in the south to the Witham near Lincoln. Of this Fenland, the Witham, when it turns southwards, forms the eastern boundary, and alongside of it goes the Lincoln and Boston railway, while the line from Bourne viâ Sleaford and on to Lincoln forms the western boundary. I use the term ‘fen’ in the Lincolnshire sense for an endless flat stretch of black corn-land without tree or hedge, and intersected by straight-cut dykes or drains in long parallels. This is the winter aspect; in autumn, when the wind blows over the miles of ripened corn, the picture is a very different one.

It is curious that on the Roman road line all the way from the Welland to the Humber so few villages are found, whilst on the roads which skirt the very edge of the fen from Bourne to Heckington and then north again from Sleaford to Lincoln, villages abound.

Sempringham.

A LONG TRUDGE

SEMPRINGHAM

MONK AND NUN

ST. GILBERT

I once walked with an Undergraduate friend on a winter’s day from Uppingham to Boston, about 57 miles, the road led pleasantly at first through Normanton, Exton and Grimsthorpe Parks, in the last of which the mistletoe was at its best; but when we got off the high ground and came to Dunsby and Dowsby the only pleasure was the walking, and as we reached Billingborough and Horbling, about 30 miles on our way, and had still more than twenty to trudge and in a very uninviting country, snow began to fall, and then the pleasure went out of the walking. By the time we reached Boston it was four inches deep. It had been very heavy going for the last fourteen miles, and never were people more glad to come to the end of their journey. Neither of us ever felt any great desire to visit that bit of Lincolnshire again; and yet, under less untoward circumstances, there would have been something to stop for at Billingborough with its lofty spire, its fine gable-crosses, and great west window, and at the still older small cruciform church at Horbling, exhibiting work of every period but Saxon, but most of which, owing to bad foundations, has had to be at different times taken down and rebuilt. It contains a fine fourteenth century monument to the De la Maine family. Even more interesting would it have been to see the remains of the famous priory church at Sempringham, a mile and a half south of Billingborough, for Sempringham was the birthplace of a remarkable Englishman. Gilbert, eldest son of a Norman knight and heir to a large estate, was born in 1083; he was deformed, but possessing both wit and courage he travelled on the Continent. Later in life he was Chaplain to Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, who built Sleaford Castle in 1137, and Rector of Sempringham, and Torrington, near Wragby. Being both wealthy and devoted to the church, he, with the Bishop’s approval, applied in the year 1148 to Pope Eugenius III. for a licence to found a religious house to receive both men and women; this was granted him, and so he became the founder of the only pure English order of monks and nuns, called after him, the Gilbertines. Eugenius III. suffered a good deal at the hands of the Italians, who at that time were led by Arnold of Brescia, the patriotic disciple of Abelard, insomuch that he was constrained to live at Viterbo, Rome not being a safe place for him; but he seems to have thought rather well of the English, for he it was who picked out the monk, Nicolas Breakspeare, from St. Alban’s Abbey and promoted him to be Papal legate at the Court of Denmark, which led eventually to his becoming Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever reached that dignity. The elevation does not seem to have improved his character, as his abominable cruelty to the above-mentioned Arnold of Brescia indicates. Eugenius, however, is not responsible for this, and at Gilbert’s request he instituted a new order in which monks following the rules of St. Augustine were to live under the same roof with nuns following the rules of St. Benedict. Their distinctive dress was a black cassock with a white hood, and the canons wore beards. What possible good Gilbert thought could come of this new departure it is difficult to guess. Nowadays we have some duplicate public schools where boys and girls are taught together and eat and play together, and it is not unlikely that the girls gain something of stability from this, and that their presence has a useful and far-reaching effect upon the boys, besides that obvious one which is conveyed in the old line

“Emollit mores nec sinit esse feros;”

but these monks and nuns never saw one another except at some very occasional service in chapel; even at Mass, though they might hear each other’s voices in the canticles, they were parted by a wall and invisible to each other, and as they thus had no communication with one another they might, one would think, have just as well been in separate buildings. Gilbert thought otherwise. He was a great educator, and especially had given much thought to the education of women, at all events he believed that the plan worked well, for he increased his houses to the number of thirteen, which held 1,500 nuns and 700 canons. Most of these were in Lincolnshire, and all were dissolved by Henry VIII. Gilbert was certainly both pious and wise, and being a clever man, when Bishop Alexander moved his Cistercians from Haverholme Priory to Louth Park Abbey, because they suffered so much at Haverholme from rheumatism, and handed over the priory, a chilly gift, to the Gilbertines, their founder managed to keep his Order there in excellent health. He harboured, as we know, Thomas à Becket there in 1164, and got into trouble with Henry II. for doing so. He was over 80 then, but he survived it and lived on for another five and twenty years, visiting occasionally his other homes at Lincoln, Alvingham, Bolington, Sixhills, North Ormsby, Catley, Tunstal and Newstead, and died in 1189 at the age of 106. Thirteen years later he was canonised by Pope Innocent III., and his remains transferred to Lincoln Minster, where he became known as St. Gilbert of Sempringham. Part of the nave of his priory at Sempringham is now the Parish Church; it stands on a hill three-quarters of a mile from Pointon, where is the vicarage and the few houses which form the village. Much of the old Norman work was unhappily pulled down in 1788, but a doorway richly carved and an old door with good iron scroll-work is still there. At the time of the dissolution the priory, which was a valuable one, being worth £359 12s. 6d., equal to £3,000 nowadays, was given to Lord Clinton. Campden, 300 years ago, spoke of “Sempringham now famous for the beautiful house built by Edward Baron Clinton, afterwards Earl of Lincoln,” the same man to whom Edward VI. granted Tattershall. Of this nothing is left but the garden wall, and Marrat, writing in 1815, says: “At this time the church stands alone, and there are but five houses in the parish, which are two miles from the church and in the fen.”

CHAPTER V
SOUTH-WEST LINCOLNSHIRE AND ITS RIVERS

The Glen—Burton Coggles—Wilsthorpe—The Eden—Verdant Green—Irnham Manor and Church—The Luttrell Tomb—Walcot—Somerby—Ropsley—Castle Bytham—The Witham—Colsterworth—The Newton Chapel—Sir Isaac Newton—Stoke Rochford—Great Ponton—Boothby Bagnell—A Norman House.

I have said that the whole of the county south of Lincoln slopes from west to east, the slope for the first few miles being pretty sharp. The only exception to the rule is in the tract on the west of the county, which lies north of the Grantham and Nottingham road, between the Grantham to Lincoln ridge and the western boundary of the county. This tract is simply the flat wide-spread valley of the Rivers Brant and Witham, which all slopes gently to the north. North Lincolnshire rivers run to the Humber; these are the Ancholme and the Trent; but there is a peculiarity about the rivers in South Lincolnshire; for though the Welland runs a consistent course eastward to the Wash, and is joined not far from its mouth by the River Glen, that river and the Witham each run very devious courses before they find the Eastern Sea. The Glen flowing first to the south then to the north and north-east, the Witham flowing first to the north and then to the south with an easterly trend to Boston Haven.

THE GLEN AND THE EDEN

Both these streams are of considerable length, the course of the Glen measured without its windings being five and thirty miles, and that of the Witham as much again.

All the other streams which go from the ridge drain eastwards into the fens, and they effectually kept the fens under water until the Romans cut the Carr Dyke, intercepting the water from the hills and taking it into the river.

IRNHAM

To follow the “Glen” from its source in the high ground between Somerby and Boothby Pagnell to its most southerly point two miles below Braceborough, will take us through a very pleasant country. A tributary, the first of many, runs in from Bassingthorpe, whose church, like that of Burton Coggles, three miles to the south, is dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury. A beautiful little house, built here by the Grantham wool merchant, Thomas Coney, in 1568, has a counterpart at Ponton in the immediate neighbourhood, where Antony Ellys, also a merchant of the staple at Calais, built himself a charming little Tudor house about the same time. Augmented by the Bassingthorpe brook, the Glen goes on past Bitchfield, Burton-Coggles and Corby, and on between Swayfield and Swinstead to Creeton, where are to be seen many stone coffins, probably of the monks of Vaudey Abbey in Grimsthorpe Park, a corruption of Valdei (Vallis dei or God’s Vale). It then winds along by Little Bytham, and, passing Careby and Carlby, gets into a plain country, and turns north near Shillingthorpe Hall. The last place it sees before entering the region of the Bedford Levels is Gretford. But near the church of Wilsthorpe—in which is the effigy of a thirteenth century knight with the arms of the Wake family, who claim descent from the famous Hereward the Wake—we find another stream joining the Glen to help it on its straight-cut course through Deeping fen. We may well spend an afternoon in tracing this stream from its source some sixteen miles away. It flows all the way through a valley of no great width, and, with the exception of Edenham, undistinguished by any villages. A purely rustic stream, it is known as the Eden, though it has no name on the maps, and its only distinction since it left its source near Humby is that it divides the villages of Lenton or Lavington, where the author of “Verdant Green,” Rev. E. Bradley, best known as “Cuthbert Bede,” was once rector, and Ingoldsby, the village of Ingold or Ingulph, the Dane, which, however, has nothing to do with the well-known “Ingoldsby Legends.” A little to the south of Ingoldsby are the prettily named villages Irnham, Kirkby-Underwood, and Rippingale; of these Irnham has a picturesque Tudor hall in a fine park. This was built in 1510 by Richard Thimelby in the form of the letter L; the north wing was mostly destroyed by fire in 1887, but the great hall remains, and there is a priest’s hiding-place entered by a hinged step in the stairs in which was found a straw pallet and a book of hours.

The manor was granted by the Conqueror to Ralph Paganel along with others, e.g., Boothby Bagnell and Newport Pagnell, and there was even then, in the eleventh century, a church here. This manor passed by marriage in 1220 to Sir Andrew Luttrell, Baron of Irnham, whence, through an heiress, it passed to the Thimelbys. In the church is a fine brass to “Andrew Luttrell Miles Dominus de Irnham,” 1390. He is in plate armour with helmet, and has his feet on a lion. In the north aisle, which is sometimes called the Luttrell Chapel, is a beautifully carved Easter sepulchre, the design and work being much like that of the rood screen in Southwell Cathedral. This was really a founder’s tomb of the Luttrell family, and stood east and west under the easternmost arch on the north side of the nave, whence it was most improperly moved in 1858 and should certainly be put back again. Doubtless it was used as an Easter sepulchre, and it is of about the same date, 1370, as those at Heckington, Navenby, and Lincoln. In the pavement of the north aisle is an altar slab, with the five consecration crosses well preserved.

Since the Thimelbys, who followed the Hiltons, the house has been in possession of the Conquest, Arundel, and Clifford families. Not more than two miles to the east is a fine avenue leading to an Elizabethan house in the form of an E, called Bulby Hall. Later the stream goes through its one village of Edenham, passes near Bowthorpe Park with its great oak, fifty feet in girth, and so joins the river Glen at Kotes Bridge, near Wilsthorpe. Though the stream, Edenham excepted, has nothing particular on its banks, near its source are several interesting churches. Sapperton, which still exhibits the pulpit hour-glass-stand for the use of the preacher to insure that the congregation got their full hour; Pickworth, with chantry chapels at each end of the south aisle, a rood screen and a fine old south door; and Walcot, with its curious double “squint” from the south chantry and its beautiful little priest’s door, evidently once a low-side window, for its sill is two feet from the ground and is grooved for glazing. Here the economy of the Early English builders is shown by their use of the caps of an earlier Norman arcade to form the bases of their new pillars. Hard by is Newton with its lofty tower, Haceby, where once the Romans had a small settlement, and Braceby, which, with Ropsley and Somerby, complete an octave of Early English churches all near together.

SOMERBY

Somerby is within four miles of Grantham. The church contains a singular effigy, date 1300, of a knight with a saddled horse at his feet, and a groom wearing the hooded short cloak of the period, holding the horse’s head. Among the Brownlow monuments is the following inscription to Jane Brownlow, daughter of Sir Richard Brownlow of Humby, 1670,

She was of a solid serious temper, of a competent

Stature and a fayre compleaciton, whoes soul

now is perfectly butyfyed with the friution of

God in glory and whose body in her dew time

he will rais to the enjoyment of the same.

It is curious to find notes on stature and complexion in an epitaph, but it was only lately that I saw a tomb slab in the church of Dorchester-on-Thames, where, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, some of our Lindsey bishops had their Bishop-stool (see Cap. [XII.]), on which it was thought worth while to record, inter alia, that Rebekah Granger who died in 1753 was “respectful to her friends, and chearful and innocent in her deportment”; whilst close by is a somewhat minute description of the nervous idiosyncrasy of Mrs. S. Fletcher, who died in 1799 at the age of 29, ending with “She sank and died a martyr to excessive sensibility.”

The feature of the church is the Norman chancel arch with double moulding. It is especially interesting as showing that the carving of the stones which form the arch was done not by plan but by eye; though the same pattern goes throughout, no two stones are exactly similar, and the pattern is larger or smaller as the mason cut it by guess, and has two zigzags or two and a half accordingly, and therefore the pattern in some places does not properly meet, but the whole effect is all right. The manor was held by the Threckingham family in the fourteenth century, and their arms are in one of the windows. In the feet of fines, Lincoln file 86, we have an agreement between Lambert de Trikingham and Robert, son of Walter le Clerk, of Trikingham, and Hawysia his wife, made at Westminster in the second year of Edward II. (1319). The lady with this charming name seeming to have afterwards married Sir Henry de Wellington, for in the thirty-second year of Edward III. (1359) another settlement is recorded of a dispute about Somerby Manor between Enericus de Welyngton Miles and Hawysia his wife on one side, and John Bluet and Alan Rynsley (one of the sixteen various spellings of Rawnsley) and his wife Margaret on the other, by which Alan and Margaret, for conceding their claims, receive 100 marks of silver. This and much other interesting information is to be found in a paper on The Manor of Somerby, by Gilbert George Walker, rector of the parish.

In the fifteenth century John Bluet held the living, one of whose ancestors was probably the civilian with his feet on a fleece, whose fine recumbent effigy is in Harlaxton church. His daughter married Robert Bawde, whose brass is in the church, and their family were in possession till 1720. A large monument on the north wall commemorates Elizabeth Lady Brownlow, née Freke, whose son John built Belton House. She died in 1684. There is also a brass to Peregrine Bradshaw and his wife, who died in 1669 and 1673.

Dr. William Stukeley, the famous antiquary, who was a Lincolnshire man, born at Holbeach in 1687, was, at one time, rector of Somerby.

Ropsley, two and a half miles to the east, shows some ‘Long and Short’ Saxon work at the north-east angle of the nave. The tower has a Decorated broach spire. At the south porch is the couplet,

“Hac non vade via

Nisi dices Ave Maria.”

BISHOP FOX

The church has also a very notable little stained glass window with an armed figure of Johannes de Welby. In the church a curious broad projection from the east window of the north aisle forms a bridge to the rood loft. In the eyes of a Corpus man, like the writer, Ropsley is sacred as being the birthplace of Bishop Fox, who held successively the sees of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham and Winchester, and founded, or helped to found, the Grantham Grammar School near his old home in 1528, and also, in 1516, the College of Corpus Christi, Oxford.

The Eden, whose course we have been tracing, having joined the Glen, crosses the Carr Dyke a mile beyond Wilsthorpe, after which the Glen becomes for a time simply a fen drain. The “Bourne Eau” goes into it and they proceed together with many duck decoys marked in the 1828 map on each side of them till they come to the beginning of the great “Forty foot drain.” The Glen then turning east resumes more or less its river character, joins the Welland and goes seawards to the Wash, while the Forty foot going northwards parallel to and with the same purpose as the “Carr Dyke” but a few miles to the east of that famous work, receives the water from the many “Droves” which are all cut east and west and conveys them to the outfall in Boston Haven.

PRIZE-FIGHTING

We will now, without having to go outside the parallelogram of pleasant upland country which lies between the four towns of Stamford, Bourne, Sleaford and Grantham, find the sources of the river Witham and follow them through Grantham as far as Barkston and Marston, and thence through a totally different country to Lincoln. To begin at the beginning of things. Just at the junction of the three counties of Lincoln, Leicester, and Rutland, is a place near ‘Crown point’ called Cribbs Lodge. This commemorates the great boxing match between Molyneux, the black, and Tom Cribb, when, as the Stamford Mercury has it, “after a severe fight Molyneux was beat, and a reel was danced by Gully and Cribb amidst shouts of applause. There were 15,000 people present.” Gully afterwards became an M.P.

Close to this spot, but in the county of Leicestershire, is the source of our river Witham, which takes its name from the little village of South Witham close by.

The infant stream skirts the western side of Witham Common, which is something like 400 feet above sea level; nearly all its feeders come from still higher ground just outside the western edge of the county. A glance at the map will show with what remarkable unanimity all the streams which feed the South Lincolnshire rivers flow eastwards. Thus from Witham Common a brook goes through Castle Bytham to join the Glen at Little Bytham. The castle, of which only huge mounds now remain, was perched on a hill and divided by the brook from the village which covers the slope of the valley and is crowned by its very early Norman church, making altogether a very pretty picture. The church contains a fine canopied tomb of the Colville family, who owned the castle in the thirteenth century, and also in the tower is a ladder eloquent of the Restoration, with the inscription “This ware the May Poul, 1660.” Middleton, first Bishop of Calcutta, once held this living.

The Witham, Boston.

CASTLE BYTHAM

The castle is of considerable interest. At the time of the Conquest the land belonged to Morcar, Earl of Northumbria, whose name survives in “Mockery or Morkery Wood” near South Witham, and was given by William the First to his brother-in-law Drogo, who began the castle, and afterwards to Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, the same who gave his name to “Bayons Manor.” When Odo began to show signs of contumacy Henry III. in person fought against and took the castle, and when dismantled gave it to the Colvilles, but it was not completely destroyed until the Wars of the Roses.

“PRAY AND PLOUGH”

Little Bytham, two miles to the east, is the station for Grimsthorpe, which is approached by a drive of three miles through the park. The church is dedicated to St. Medard, Bishop of Noyon, A.D. 531, a name familiar to us from the “Ingoldsby Legends.” It shows some Saxon “Long and Short” work and a good deal of Norman, notably a doorway with a curious tympanum ornamented with birds in circles. There is a small lowside window of two lights on the west and a little Norman window high up on the east of this doorway, which is at the south-east angle of the nave. The Norman tower is surmounted by a transition upper story and spire. The south porch and chancel arch are Early English and all round the chancel runs a most interesting stone seat, broken only by a fine canopied recess for a tomb. A good agricultural motto is cut on the stone base of the pulpit, “Orate et arate,” “pray and plough.” The motto is not inapt, for the land about here is mostly plough land, and one wonders it should be as good as it is, for the limestone is very near the surface, indeed the Great Northern line has stone in situ on each side of it about five feet high, which seems to have very few inches of soil above it, and this runs the whole way from Little Bytham to Corby, and again at Ponton the lines pass through it in a deeper cutting.

But to return to our Witham river. This keeps due north by North-Witham, Colsterworth, Easton, Stoke Rockford, Great and Little Ponton to Grantham, a distance of ten miles. The church at North Wytham has a long nave, a narrow massive Norman chancel arch, and the floor descending to the east. In the 1887 restoration by Withers, a choir was formed out of the east end of the nave, and the chancel has been left as a monumental chapel for the Sherard family monuments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a decidedly clever arrangement. Robert Sherard seems to have been a scholar, for he occupied his thoughts when on his deathbed in writing twenty-six Latin elegiacs now on his brass and dated 1592.

WOOLSTHORPE. THE NEWTON CHAPEL

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

From Colsterworth a road runs east past Twyford Forest, twelve miles to Bourne. In the church, which is both Norman, Decorated, and Perpendicular, there is the Newton chapel, with tombs of Sir Isaac’s parents and grandparents. This is modern, but is on the site of the old Woolsthorpe Manor chapel. It contains a sundial with an inscription, which says that it was cut by Newton when a boy of nine. His baptism appears in the Register thus:—“Isaac son of Isaac and Hanna Newton Janʳʸ 1, 1643.” She was an Ayscough, and married for her second husband the Rev. Barnabas Smith of North Wytham. On the left bank of the Witham, at a distance of half a mile, is the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, which must not be confused with the Woolsthorpe near Belvoir. The name was probably Wolph’s or Ulfsthorpe, and nothing to do with Wool. In Domesday Book it is Ulstanthorp. In Woolsthorpe Manor House Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1641. The window is shown from which he saw the apple fall and the Newton Arms—two cross-bones—are sculptured over the door. In the days of the Commonwealth he was at Bishop Fox’s school at Grantham, 1651-1656. His mother thought to make a farmer of him, but kindly fate took him to Cambridge when he was eighteen, and he spent more than four years there, taking his degree in 1665. The incident of the apple dates from 1666, the year of the great Plague and the Fire of London. Starting from this he deduced the reasons for the movement of the planets which Galileo in 1610 and Copernicus in 1540 had noted. He had by this time accumulated much of the material for his great work the “Principia,” and for the next thirty years he worked and wrote unceasingly. He was appointed Master of the Mint in 1695, and President of the Royal Society in 1703, and was knighted in 1705. He died in March, 1727. His own view of his life’s work may be given in his own words: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” After lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the Lord Chancellor, two dukes, and three earls being pall-bearers; his monument, near the entrance to the choir on the north side, shows a recumbent figure with the right arm on four folios named Divinity, Chronology, Optics, and Phil. Prin. Math. Above is a large globe showing the planets, etc., projecting from a pyramid, and on the globe the figure of Astronomy with a closed book, in a very pensive mood. Below is a bas-relief representing Newton’s various labours and discoveries.

The inscription, written by Pope, is as follows:—

“Isaacus Newtonius
Quem Immortalem
Testantur Tempus, Natura, Coelum:
Mortalem
Hoc Marmor fatetur.

Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;

God said let Newton be! and all was light.”

His statue is also in the ante-chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, so eloquently described by Wordsworth as

“The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone.”

Newton is represented standing, and faces to the east, and of the other seated figures in the ante-chapel, which all face north or south, the latest addition and the finest work is Thornicroft’s statue of another Lincolnshire celebrity Alfred Lord Tennyson. This is an admirable likeness; the best view of it is from the east side.

West of Woolsthorpe is Buckminster, just over the border, but remarkable for having once had a beacon on the tower. The circular chimney of the Watcher’s shelter still stands in the north-west angle. At Weldon near Kettering is a lantern fifteen feet high with a cupola put up 200 years ago to guide folk through Rockingham Forest. It is lit now on New Year’s Eve.

From Colsterworth and Woolsthorpe we follow the river to Stoke Rockford, which is wedged in between the parks of Stoke and Easton. Both these manors were once held by the Rochfords and each had a separate church. Now one church serves for both and has a chapel for each manor, one on either side and extending the full length of the chancel. The Stoke Chapel has monuments of John de Neville 1320 and of the family of the present owners, the Turners. The Easton Chapel has a very fine one to the Cholmeleys, 1641, whose descendants still live in the old Elizabethan “Hall” with its triple avenue of limes which reach to the Great North Road. On the other side of the road the house at Stoke Park is also Elizabethan in style, but not in date, being by Salvin. It belongs to Christopher Turner, who also owns Panton Hall, near East Barkwith. The park has many fine trees and some very old thorns. In the chancel of Stoke Rochford is a brass to Henry Rochford, 1470, and on a brass plate this inscription to Oliver St. John and his wife Elizabeth Bygod, 1503:—

“Pray for the soil of Master Olyr-Sentjehn Squier, sonne unto ye right excellent hye and mightty pryncess of Som~sete g~ndame unto ou~ sovey~n Lord Kynge Herre the VII. and for the soll of Dame Elizabeth Bygod his wiff, whoo dep~ted from this t~nsitore liffe ye XII daye of June, i~ ye year of ou~ Lord MCCCCC and III.”

THE LADY MARGARET

Thus Oliver was brother to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, the mother of the King. She made a great mark on the history of her time, which was the fifteenth century. Daughter of the first Duke of Somerset and wife successively of the Earl of Richmond, who was half-brother to Henry VI., and of Henry Stafford, son to the Duke of Buckingham, and of Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby, and mother, by her first marriage, of Henry VII., she was a magnificent patron of learning, for she endowed Christ’s College and St. John’s College, Cambridge, and founded the “Lady Margaret” professorships of Divinity both at Cambridge and at Oxford. Oliver’s mother had been the wife of Sir John Bigod, who with his father was killed on Towton field, near Leeds, in 1461, when, after a very bloody fight, the throne was secured to Edward IV., 28,000 Lancastrians, it is said, though this is hardly credible, having been left on the field of battle. Oliver, whom Leland describes as a big black fellow, died at Fontarabia, in Spain, but was buried at Stoke Rochford. It shows of how little account the spelling even of proper names was in the fifteenth century when we find here the brass plate on his daughter’s tomb inscribed, “Hic jacet Sibella Seyntjohn quondam filia Oliveri Sentjohn.” Perhaps there is something after all in the remark I heard a farmer make in the train at Boston: “Well, I reckon it is a clear gift, is spelling. My boy John, he’s nobbut eleven, and he can spell owt, but I’m noä hand at it mysen, and I reckon theer’s a stränge many is makes but a poor job on it.” In the museum at Peterborough there is a notebook of The Lord Chief Justice, Oliver St. John, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, dated 1649, who earned for himself the undying gratitude of his own and all future generations by saving Peterborough Cathedral.

OLIVER ST. JOHN

Henry VIII., when urged to erect a suitable monument to Queen Katherine of Aragon in the cathedral, had said he would leave her one of the goodliest monuments in Christendom, meaning that he would spare the cathedral for her sake, but at the time of the civil war nearly all in the nature of ornamentation was destroyed, including the organ, the windows, the reredos, and the tombs and escutcheons of Queen Katherine herself, and of Mary Queen of Scots. After a time Oliver St. John, who had married twice over into the Cromwell family, as a reward for political services in Holland obtained a grant of the ruined minster, which was actually “propounded to be sold and demolished,” and gave it to the town for use as a parish church. It still remained in a sad state, but was being gradually put into order all through the nineteenth century, and at last the tower, which rested on four piers, all of which were found to be simply pipes of Ashlar masonry filled with sand, was taken down in 1883 and solidly rebuilt, and the whole fabric put in order, the white-washed walls scraped, new stalls excellently carved by Thompson of Peterborough and a beautiful inlaid marble floor, the gift of Dean Argles, placed in the choir, which was prolonged westwards two bays into the nave, on the old Benedictine lines, till now the interior is fully worthy of the uniquely magnificent west front.

At Easton there was a Roman station, halfway between Casterton and Ancaster. It was important as being the last roadside watering place, the Ermine Street passing through a waterless tract for the next twelve miles.

A NORMAN HOUSE

A mile and a half to the east, the Great Northern line tunnels under Bassingthorpe hill at 370 feet above sea level, and, with the exception of one spot in Berwickshire, this is the highest point the line attains between London and Edinburgh. Immediately after this the line crosses the “Ermine Street,” which from Stamford to Colsterworth is identical with “the Great North Road,” but it splits off to the right a mile south of Easton Park, and keeping always to the right bank of the Witham, takes a straight course to Ancaster, leaving Grantham three miles to the left. After this parting, the North Road crosses to the left bank of the river and runs up to Great Ponton. The tall tower of the late Perpendicular church, built in 1519 by Anthony Ellys, merchant of the staple, of Calais, who lived in a manor house in the middle of the village, has Chaucer’s phrase, “Thynke and thanke God of all,” carved on three sides of it.

Inside is a very early font, possibly Saxon; a large square bowl chamfered on the under side resting on a square stone. The tower is unlike anything in the county, but has counterparts among the churches of Somersetshire. The base moulding is enriched with carving, and the double buttresses have canopied niches excellently worked. The belfry has large double two-light windows under a carved hood-mould, as at Grantham and All Saints, Stamford. The gargoyles are remarkably fine, one shows a face wearing spectacles, and the whole is finished by a fine parapet and eight pinnacles.

Little Ponton is dedicated to St. Guthlac, which implies a connection with Croyland. Four miles east of Great Ponton is the village of Boothby Pagnell, where the Glen rises. Here is a twelfth century manor house, supremely interesting as being one of the very few surviving examples of Norman Domestic architecture. It is in the grounds of the modern hall. The lower story is carried on vaulted arches and the upper rooms were reached by an outside staircase. These are a hall and a chamber with a thick partition wall; each had a two-light window in the east wall, with window seats on either side. On the opposite side is a fine fireplace with a flat arch formed by joggled stones and a projecting hood, and a round chimney-shaft. The lower groined story had also two rooms, possibly the larger was a kitchen, and the other a cellar. The barrel roof of this has its axis at right angles to the larger room, the heavy vault-ribs of which are in two bays, with low buttresses outside to take the thrust of the roof. The building at St. Mary’s Guild, Lincoln, the hall at Oakham, and a somewhat similar building at the north-eastern boundary of Windsor Castle are of corresponding date to this. Robert Sanderson, who was expelled as a Royalist, but on the restoration was made Bishop of Lincoln, and whose saintly life is dwelt on in “Walton’s Lives,” was incumbent here from 1619 to 1660. The whole building has been beautifully restored by Pearson, thanks to the munificence of Mrs. Thorold of the Hall.

The course of the river between Grantham and Lincoln is through a totally different country and may well claim another chapter.

CHAPTER VI
GRANTHAM

Cromwell’s Letter—The George and the Angel—The Elections—Fox’s Grammar School—The Church of St. Wolfram—The Market Place.

The usual way of reaching Grantham is by the Great Northern main line—all expresses stop here. It is 105 miles from London, and often the only stop between that and York. After the levels of Huntingdonshire and the brief sight of Peterborough Cathedral, across the river Nene, the line enters Lincolnshire near Tallington, after which it follows up the valley of the river Glen, then climbs the wold and, just beyond Bassingthorpe tunnel, crosses the Ermine Street and runs down the Witham Valley into Grantham. Viewed from the train the town looks a mass of ugly red brick houses with slate roofs, but the magnificent tower and spire soon come into sight, and one feels that this must be indeed a church worth visiting.

Coming, as we prefer to do, by road, the view is better; for there is a background of hill and woodland with the fine park of Belton and the commanding height of Syston Hall beyond to the north-east; and to the left you see the Great North Road climbing up Gonerby Hill to a height of 200 feet above the town.

THE MANOR AND THE GEORGE

Grantham has no Roman associations, nor did it grow up round a feudal castle or a great abbey; for, though a castle of some kind must once have stood on the west side near the junction of the Mowbeck and the Witham, the only proof of it is the name Castlegate and a reference in an old deed to “Castle Dyke.” That the town was once walled, the streets called Watergate, Castlegate, Swinegate, Spittalgate sufficiently attest, but no trace of wall now exists. The name Spittalgate points to the existence of a leper hospital, and I see from Miss Rotha Clay’s interesting and exhaustive book, “The Mediæval Hospitals of England,” that there have been two at Grantham—St. Margaret’s, founded in 1328, and St. Leonard’s in 1428.

The flat pastoral valley watered by the Wytham, then called in that neighbourhood the Granta, as the Cam was at Cambridge, seems to have been its own recommendation to an agricultural people; and the fact that the manor was from the time of Edward the Confessor an appanage of the queen, and remained all through the times of the Norman kings and their successors down to William III. a Crown property, used as a dower for the queen consort of the time, was no doubt some benefit to it. Even when the town was bestowed, as, for instance, by King John on the Earl of Warren who also owned Stamford, or by Edward I., who knew Grantham well, on Aylmer Valence Earl of Pembroke, it was looked on as inalienable from the Crown to which it always reverted. In the reign of Edward III., on August 3, 1359, King John of France, captured at Poictiers, slept at Grantham on his way from Hereford to Somerton Castle in custody of Lord d’Eyncourt and a company of forty-four knights and men-at-arms. In 1420 Henry V. allotted it as a dower to Katherine of France. In 1460 Edward IV. headed the procession which brought from Pontefract to Fotheringay for burial the body of his father Richard Duke of York, who was killed at the battle of Wakefield. In 1461 he granted the lordship and the manor to his mother Cicely Duchess of York, and the grant, it is interesting to know, included the inn called “le George.”

In 1503 Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII., passed with her attendant cavalcade through Grantham on her way to meet her affianced bridegroom,[3] James IV., King of Scotland. She arrived in state, and was met by a fine civic and ecclesiastical procession which conducted her the last few miles into and out of the town, and she lay all “Sounday the 9ᵗʰ day of the monneth of Jully in the sayde towne of Grauntham.”

OLIVER CROMWELL

In 1642 the town was taken by Colonel Charles Cavendish for Charles I., but his success was wiped out next year by Cromwell. Defoe in his “Memoir of a Cavalier,” writing of this, says “About this time it was that we began to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose out of the East and spread first into the North, till it shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three Kingdoms.... The first action in which we heard of his exploits and which emblazoned his character was at Grantham.” Cromwell was with the Earl of Manchester, but was in command of his own regiment of horse. Where the battle actually took place is uncertain, but probably on Gonerby Moor. We happen to have Cromwell’s own account of the skirmish—see vol. I., p. 177, of ‘Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,’ by Carlyle. It was written to some official, and is the first letter of Cromwell’s ever published in the newspapers:—

“Grantham, 13ᵗʰ May, 1643.

“Sir,

“God hath given us, this evening, a glorious victory over our enemies. They were, as we are informed, one and twenty colours of horse troops, and three or four of dragoons.

“It was late in the evening when we drew out; they came and faced us within two miles of the town. So soon as we had the alarm we drew out our forces, consisting of about twelve troops whereof some of them so poor and broken, that you shall seldom see worse: with this handful it pleased God to cast the scale. For after we had stood a little, above musket shot the one body from the other; and the dragooners had fired on both sides, for the space of half an hour or more; they were not advancing towards us, we agreed to charge them; and, advancing the body after many shots on both sides, we came on with our troops a pretty round trot; they standing firm to receive us; and our men charging fiercely upon them, by God’s providence they were immediately routed, and ran all away, and we had the execution of them two or three miles.

“I believe some of our soldiers did kill two or three men apiece in the pursuit; but what the number of dead is we are not certain. We took forty-five prisoners, besides divers of their horse and arms and rescued many Prisoners whom they had lately taken of ours, and we took four or five of their colours.

“I rest ...

“Oliver Cromwell.”

A fortnight later he writes from Lincolnshire to the Mayor and Corporation of Colchester announcing the victory of Fairfax at Wakefield, and asking for immediate supplies both of men and money. He tells them how greatly Lord Newcastle outnumbers Fairfax, infantry two to one, horse more than six to one. And he ends with:—

“Our motion and yours must be exceeding speedye or else it will do you no good at all. If you send, let your men come to Boston. I beseech you to hasten the supply to us:—forget not money! I press not hard; though I do so need, that I assure you the foot and dragooners are ready to mutiny. Lay not too much upon the back of a poor gentleman, who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life, and bleed the last drop to serve the Cause and you. I ask not your money for myself; if that were my end and hope,—viz. the pay of my place,—I would not open my mouth at this time. I desire to deny myself; but others will not be satisfied. I beseech you to hasten supplies. Forget not your prayers

“Gentlemen, I am,

“Yours

“Oliver Cromwell.”

It was six years after this that Isaac Newton went to school in Grantham. Since the Restoration, but for the pulling down of the market cross by Mr. John Manners in 1779, which he was compelled to put up again the following year, nothing of note happened at Grantham till the Great Northern Railway came and subsequently Hornsby’s great agricultural implement works arose.

PRICE OF VOTES

Grantham had been incorporated in 1463, and received the elective franchise four years later, in the reign of Edward IV., who more than once visited the town. The two families at Belvoir and Belton usually influenced the elections. But in 1802 their united interests were opposed by Sir William Manners, who had bought most of the houses in the borough. But the Duke of Rutland and Lord Brownlow won. There were then two members, and the historian makes the naïve statement, “previous to this election it had been customary for the voters to receive two guineas from each candidate; at this election the price rose to ten guineas.”

The Angel Inn, Grantham.

THE ANGEL

The mention of “le George” inn in the grant of 1461 brings to mind the other ancient hostel opposite to it. The Angel stands on the site of an earlier inn which goes back to the twelfth century. King John is said to have held his court in it in 1203. On October 19, 1483, Richard III., having sent to London for the Great Seal, signed the warrant for the execution of Buckingham “in a chamber called the King’s Chamber in the present Angel Inn.” This was a fine room extending the whole length of the front, and now cut up into three rooms. There are two oriel windows in this, and two more in the rooms beneath, which have all curved and vaulted alcoves of stone. The present front dates from 1450, the gateway from about 1350, and shows the heads of Edward III. and Queen Philippa on the hood-mould. Next to it is a very pretty half-timbered house, figured in Allan’s “History of the County of Lincoln,” 1830. This and the Angel stand on land once the property of the Knights Templars of Temple-Bruer.

Among the misdeeds of the eighteenth century are the pulling down of the George Inn and a beautiful stone oratory or guild chapel which stood near it. The Free Grammar school, founded by Bishop Fox 1528, still stands on the north side of the churchyard; but new buildings having been lately erected, the fine old schoolroom has been fitted up as a school chapel.

Fox endowed his school with the revenue of two chantries, which before the dissolution belonged to the church of St. Peter. This church is gone, but doubtless it stood on St. Peter’s Hill on lands which had been granted by Æslwith, before the Conquest, to the abbey of Peterborough. Close by now is a good bronze statue of Sir Isaac Newton, and once there was an Eleanor cross, which, with those at Lincoln and Stamford, were destroyed by the fanatical soldiery in 1645.

ST. WULFRAM’S

We now come to the great feature of the town, its magnificent church dedicated to St. Wulfram, Archbishop of Sens, 680. We might almost call this the third church, for the first has entirely disappeared though its foundations remain beneath the floor of the eastern part of the nave, and the second has been so enlarged and added to, that it is now practically a different building; the tower, built at the end of the thirteenth century, belongs entirely to number three.

The ground plan is singularly simple, one long parallelogram nearly 200 feet long and eighty feet wide, with no transepts, its only projections being the north and south porches and the “Hall” chapel used as a vestry.

THE INTERIOR

The second, or Norman, church, ended two bays east of the present tower, as is plain to see from the second pillar from the tower being, as is the case in Peterborough Cathedral, composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on either side, the western respond being of much later character than the eastern. If the chancel was originally as it is now, it must have been as long as the nave, but the nave then perhaps included two of the chancel bays. At present the lengthening of the nave westward and the adding of the tower has made the nave twice the length of the chancel. At first the church had just a nave and a chancel, but, about 1180, aisles were added to the nave; to do this the nave walls were taken down and the eastern responds made, which we have just spoken of, and the beautiful clustered columns of the arcades, three on each side, set up. The aisles were narrow and probably covered by a lean-to roof. The arches springing from these columns would be round-headed, the pointed arches we see now being the work of a century later, when much wider north and south aisles were built; that on the north being on a particularly grand and massive scale. The westernmost bay on either side was made nearly twice the width of the others so as to correspond with the breadth of the tower, because one of the features of the church is that the two aisles run out westwards and align with the tower, and as the chapels on either side run out in the same way eastwards, as far as the chancel, we get the parallelogram above mentioned. As you enter the west door you are at once struck by the great size of the tower piers, and next you will notice the beauty of the tower arch, with its mouldings five deep. There is no chancel arch, and the church has one long roof from end to end. The aisles are very wide, and the pillars tall and slender, so that you are able to see over the whole body of the church as if it were one big hall. Curiously, the west window of the south aisle is not in the centre of the wall, and looks very awkward. Below it is a bookcase lined with old books. There are two arched recesses for tombs in the south wall, and there is a monument between two of the south arcade pillars, where a black marble top to an altar tomb is inscribed to Francis Malham de Elslacke, 1660. The east end of the north aisle is used as a morning chapel. A tall gilt reredos much blocks the chancel east window. When I last visited the church the north and south doorways being wide open gave the church plenty of wholesome fresh air, so different from the well-known Sabbath “frowst” which, in the days of high pews, and when a church was only opened on Sunday, never departed from the building.

THE TOWER

The north porch is very large, and has a passage-way east and west right through; it was built with the north aisle about 1280, and was extended and a room built over it about 1325, when the head of the north doorway was much mutilated to let the floor in, at the same time a Lady chapel was constructed on the south side of the chancel, and with a double vaulted crypt, entered from outside, and also from the chancel, by a beautiful staircase with richly carved doorway. The rood screen was also built now, on which was an altar served by the chaplain daily at 5 a.m. “after the first stroke of the bell which is called Daybelle.” It is said that this bell is still rung daily from Lady Day to Michaelmas, but whether at 5 o’clock deponent sayeth not. The Lincoln daybell rang at 6. To reach this rood loft there is an octagon turret with a staircase on the south side at the junction of the nave and chancel. The south porch has also a staircase to the upper chamber, and the north porch has two turreted staircases, probably for the ingress and egress of pilgrims to the sacred relics kept there. Besides this there were at least five chantries attached to the church; the latest of these were the fifteenth century Corpus Christi chapel along the north side of the chancel, and the contiguous “Hall” chapel which dates from the fifteenth century. There is a good corbel table all along the aisles outside, and the west front is very fine and striking.

But the great glory of the building is the steeple. We have seen that the nave runs up to the large eastern piers of the tower, and the aisles run on past each side of it as far as the western piers, and so with the tower form a magnificent western façade, examples of which might even then have been seen at Newark, which was begun before Grantham, and at Tickhill near Doncaster.

LINCOLNSHIRE SPIRES

The tower, one of the finest bits of fourteenth century work in the kingdom, has four stages: first, the west door and window, both richly adorned with ballflower, reminiscent of the then recent work at Salisbury, to which North and South Grantham were attached as prebends. Then comes a stage of two bands of arcading on the western face only, and a band of quatrefoil diaper work all round. In the third stage are twin deep-set double-light windows and then come two very lofty double lights under one crocketed hood mould. Both this stage and the last show a very strong central mullion and the fourth, or belfry stage, has statued niches reaching to the parapet and filling the spandrils on either side of the window head. Inside the parapet at the south-west corner is a curious old stone arch like a sentry-box or bell turret. The magnificent angle buttresses are crowned by pinnacles, from within which rises the spire with three rows of lights and lines of crockets at each angle running up 140 feet above a tower of equal height. It seems at that distance to come to a slender point; but we are told that when it was struck by lightning in 1797 a mill-stone was set on the apex into which the weathercock was mortised. There are ten bells, a larger ring than is possessed by any church in the county but one, viz., Ewerby near Sleaford.

The date 1280 is assigned to the tower and north aisle because the windows of that aisle reproduce in the cusped circles of their head-lights the patterns of windows which had just a few years before been inserted in Salisbury chapter-house, and the west window of the aisle is a reduction to six lights of the great eight-light east window at Lincoln; but neither Lincoln great tower nor Salisbury spire had yet been built, and as they are the only buildings which are admitted to surpass Grantham steeple—the former in richness of detail, the latter in its soaring spire—and as Boston was not built till a hundred years later, nor Louth till 200 years after Boston, it is clear that in 1300 Grantham for height and beauty stood without a rival. Now-a-days, of course, we have both Boston and Louth, and have them in the same county, and though Sir Gilbert Scott puts Grantham as second only to Salisbury among English steeples, and though in the grandeur and interest of its interior as well as in the profuse ornamentation of its exterior Louth cannot compete with it at all, yet there is in the delicate tapering lines of Louth spire and the beautiful way in which it rises from its lofty tower-pinnacles connected with their four pairs of light flying buttresses a satisfying grace and a beauty of proportion which no other church seems to possess; and when we look closely at the somewhat aimless bands of diaper work and arcading in the second stage of Grantham tower and then turn to the harmonious simplicity of the three stages in the Louth tower and the incomparable beauty of the belfry lights with their crocketed hood-mouldings which are carried up in lines ascending like a canopy to the pinnacled parapet, it seems to satisfy the eye and the desire for beauty and symmetry in the fullest possible measure.

The church has not a great number of monuments; that to Richard de Salteby, 1362, is the earliest, and there is, besides the Malham tomb, one of the Harrington family, and a huge erection to Chief Justice Ryder, whose descendants derive their title of Harrowby from a hamlet close by. There are two libraries in the church, one with no less than seventy-four chained books. But a church forms a bad library, and many are gone and some of the best are mutilated, for as Tennyson says in “The Village Wife”:—

“The lasses ’ed teäred out leäves i’ the middle to kindle the fire.”

Only here it was not the lasses but the mediæval verger.

Grantham Church.

The bowl of the font has most interesting carved panels of the Annunciation, the Magi, the Nativity, Circumcision, Baptism, Blessing of Children, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and one other. The oak chancel screen and the parcloses by Scott, the reredos by Bodley, and the rest of the oak fittings by Blomfield, are all very good. The screen takes the place of the old stone screen which is quite gone. There is some excellent modern glass, and for those who understand heraldry, I might mention that in the east window were once many coats of arms of which Marrat gives a list with notes by Gervase Holles, from which I gather that the armorial glass was very fine, and that the arms of “La Warre” are “G. crusily, botony, fitchy, a lion rampant or.” It is pleasant to know this, even if one does not quite understand it.

THE MARKET CROSS

The extending of the church westwards encroached upon the open space in which stood the reinstated “Applecross,” at one time replaced by a quite uncalled-for stone obelisk in the market-place, opposite the Angel, with an inscription to say that the Eleanor Cross once stood there, which was not true, as that was set up in the broad street or square called “St. Peter’s Hill,” where now the bronze statue of Newton stands. In Finkin Street the town, until ten years ago, preserved a splendid chestnut tree, and other fine trees near the church add a beauty which towns now-a-days rarely possess.

As at Lincoln, the Grey Friars first brought good drinking water to the town, and their conduit is still a picturesque object in the market square. It is on the south side, close to the Blue Sheep. Blue seems to have been the Grantham colour, for there are at least twelve inns whose sign is some blue thing—Bell, Sheep, Pig, Lion, Dragon, Boy, etc. Blue pill is almost the only thing of that colour not represented.

The connection of Grantham with Salisbury is a very old one, as far back as 1091 the lands and endowments of the church were granted to St. Osmund, and by him given to his new cathedral at Old Sarum, the site of which is now being cleared in much the same manner as has been adopted at Bardney Abbey. The Empress Maud added the gift of the living and the right of presentation, so the prebendaries of North and South Grantham became the rectors; North Grantham comprising Londonthorpe and North Gonerby, and South Grantham South Gonerby and Braceby. Later, about 1225, vicars were appointed, but there was no vicarage, and the work was mainly done by the chaplain and the chantry priests. In 1713 the dual vicars were merged in one, and since 1870 the presentation has been in the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln.

THE CHANTRIES

We have spoken often of chantries. A chantry was a chapel endowed with revenues for priests to perform Mass therein for the souls of the donors or others. Hence we have in Shakespeare—

“Five hundred poor I have, in yearly pay,

Who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up

Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built

Three Chantries where the sad and solemn priests

Sing still for Richard’s soul.”

Henry V. iv. i.

CHAPTER VII
ROADS FROM GRANTHAM

Syston Hall—Belton—Harlaxton—Denton—Belvoir Castle—Allington—Sedgebrook—Barrowby—Gonerby-hill—Stubton—Hough-on-the-Hill—Gelston—Claypole.

The main South Lincolnshire roads run up from Stamford to Boston, to Sleaford and to Grantham; here of the six spokes of the wheel of which Grantham is the hub, three going westwards soon leave the county. That which goes east runs a very uneventful course for twelve miles till, having crossed the Bourne and Sleaford road, it comes to Threckingham, and in another six or seven miles to Donington where it divides and, after passing many most remarkable churches, reaches Boston either by Swineshead or by Gosberton, Algarkirk and Kirton, which will be described in the route from Spalding. The Great Road north and south from Grantham is full of interest, and passes through village after village, and on both the northern and western sides the neighbourhood of Grantham is extremely hilly and well wooded, and contains several fine country seats. Belvoir Castle (Duke of Rutland), Denton (Sir C. G. Welby), Harlaxton (T. S. Pearson Gregory, Esq.), Belton (Earl Brownlow), and Syston (Sir John Thorold).

BELTON AND BARKSTON

Syston Hall, Sir John Thorold’s place, looks down upon Barkstone. It is grandly placed, and the house, which was built in the eighteenth century, contains a fine library. The greatest treasure of this, however, the famed Mazarin Bible, was sold in 1884 for £3,200. A mile to the south lies Belton. Here the church is filled with monuments of the Cust and Brownlow families, and the font has eight carved panels with very unusual subjects—a man pulling two bells, a monk reading, a priest with both hands up, a deacon robed, a monster rampant with a double tail, a man with a drawn sword, a naked babe and a rope, a man with a large bird above him, and a tree; also among the monuments is one of Sir John Brownlow, 1754, and one dated 1768 of Sir John Cust, the “Speaker.” In this a singularly graceful female figure is holding the “Journals of the House of Commons.” The monument of his son, the first Baron Brownlow, 1807, is by Westmacott. The family have added a north transept for use as a mortuary chapel. Here, amongst others, are monuments of the first Earl Brownlow, 1853, by Marochetti, and of his two wives with a figure emblematic of Religion, by Canova. The village is always kept in beautiful order; adjoining it is the large park with fine avenues and three lakes in it. The house, built in the shape of the letter H, was finished from Sir Christopher Wren’s designs in 1689, and the park enclosed and planted in the following year by Sir John, the third Baronet Brownlow, who entertained William III. there in 1695. His nephew, Sir John, who was created Viscount Tyrconnel in 1718, formed the library and laid out the gardens. In 1778 James Wyatt was employed to make improvements. He removed Wren’s cupola, made a new entrance on the south side, and raised the height of the drawing-room to twenty-two feet. All the rooms in the house are remarkably high, and the big dining-room is adorned with enormous pictures by Hondekoeter.

Wonderful carvings by Grinling Gibbons are in several rooms, and also in the chapel, which is panelled with cedar wood.

ON THE WITHAM

Barkston is near the stream of the Witham, and is thence called Barkston-in-the-Willows; and ten miles off, on the county boundary near Newark, is Barnby-in-the-Willows, also on the Witham, which has arrived there from Barkston by a somewhat circuitous route.

Barkston Church is worth seeing by anyone who wishes to see how a complete rood-loft staircase was arranged, the steep twelve-inch risers showing how the builders got the maximum of utility out of the minimum of space. The last three steps below appear to have been cut off to let the pulpit steps in. There is a similar arrangement at Somerby, where the steps also are very high. A very good modern rood screen and canopy, somewhat on the pattern of the Sleaford one, has been put up by the rector, the Rev. E. Clements. There are two squints, on either side of the chancel arch, one through the rood staircase. The church has a nave and a south aisle, and the plain round transition Norman pillars are exactly like those at Great Hale, but are only about one-half the height. The arches are round ones, with nail head ornament, and from the bases of these pillars it is clear that the floor once sloped upwards continuously from west to east, as at Colsterworth and Horkstow. The chancel arch is made lofty by being set on the stone basement of the rood screen. The transitional tower has a beautiful Early English window in the west front, and the Decorated south aisle has a richly panelled parapet; but the Perpendicular porch is not so well executed, and cuts rudely into two pretty little aisle windows, and a niche over the door. It has over it this rhyming inscription carved in stone.

Withamside Boston.

Me Thomam Pacy post mundi flebile funus

Jungas veraci vite tu trinus et unus

Dñe Deus vere Thome Pacy miserere.

And under the capital of one of the doorway pillars is the line, rather difficult to construe, but in beautiful lettering:—

Lex et natura XRS simul omnia cura.

The severe three-light east window has good glass by Kempe. The spire, a very good one, is later than the tower, and built of squared stones, different in colour from the small stones of the tower. Two half figures incised in bold relief on fourteenth century slabs, are built into the north wall, opposite the south door.

HONINGTON AND CAYTHORPE

Keeping along the Lincoln road the next place we reach is Honington. The Early English tower of the church is entered by a very early pointed arch, the nave being of massive Norman work with an unusually large corbel table. There are the remains of a stone screen, and a canopied aumbry in the chancel was perhaps used as an Easter sepulchre. The chantry chapel has monuments of the Hussey family, and one of W. Smith, 1550, in gown and doublet. An early slab, with part of the effigy of a priest on it, has been used over again to commemorate John Hussey and his wife, he being described on it as “A professor of the Ghospell,” 1587. To the south-east of the village is what was once an important British fort with a triple ditch, used later by the Romans whose camp at Causennæ on the “High Dyke” was but four miles to the east. Less than two miles brings us to Carlton Scroop, with a late Norman tower and Early English arcade, also some good old glass and a Jacobean pulpit. The remains of a rood screen and the rood loft steps are still there.

A mile further on is one of the many Normantons, with Early English nave, decorated tower, fine west window, and Perpendicular clerestory.

FULBECK AND LEADENHAM

Two miles on we come to Caythorpe, which is built on a very singular plan, for it has a double nave with a buttress between the two west windows to take the thrust of the arches which are in a line with the ridge of the roof. This forms the remarkable feature of the church interior. There are short transepts, and the tower rises above the four open arches. Over one of these there is a painting of the Last Judgment. There are fine buttresses outside with figures of the Annunciation and the Coronation of the Virgin, and one of our Lord on the porch. The windows are large. The spire is lofty but unpleasing, as it has a marked “entasis” or set in, such as is seen in many Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire spires, which hence are often termed sugar-loafed. Before its re-building, in 1859, after it had been struck by lightning, the entasis was still more marked than it is now. The singularly thin, ugly needle-like spire of Glinton, just over the southern border of the county near Deeping, has a slight set in which does not improve its appearance. A mile to the north the road passes through the very pretty village of Fulbeck. The dip of the road, the charming old houses, grey and red, the handsome church tower with its picturesque pinnacles, and the ancestral beauty of the fine trees, make a really lovely picture. Fine iron gates lead to the Hall, the home of the Fanes, an honoured name in Lincolnshire. Many of the name rest in the churchyard, and their monuments fill the dark church, which has a good Norman font. The tampering with old walls and old buildings is always productive of mischief, and, as at Bath Abbey, when, to add to its appearance, flying buttresses were put up all along the nave, the weight began to crush in the nave walls, and the only remedy was to put on, at great expense, a stone groined roof, which is the real raison d’être of flying buttresses, so here at Fulbeck, when they pulled down the chancel and built it up again with the walls further out, the consequence was that the east wall of the nave, missing its accustomed support, began to lean out eastwards.

Another mile and a half brings us to Leadenham, where the east and west road from Sleaford to Newark crosses the Great North road. The fine tall spire is seen from all the country round, for it stands half way up the cliff. But this and the rest of the road to Lincoln is described in Chapter [XIII.]

HARLAXTON AND DENTON

If you go out of Grantham by the south-west, you should stop at a very pretty little village to the south of the Grantham and Melton road, from which a loop descends to an old gateway, all that is left of the old Harlaxton Manor, a pretty Tudor building now pulled down, the stone balustrades in front of it having been removed by Mr. Pearson Gregory to his large house a mile off, built on the ridge of the park by Salvin in 1845. The Flemish family of De Ligne lived in the old Hall in Jacobean times, and their predecessors are probably represented by the fine but mutilated alabaster recumbent effigies now in the northern, or Trinity, chapel of the church. In the north-east angle of this chapel is a very graceful canopied recess on a bracket, much like those at Sedgebrook, about five miles off on the border of the county.

The north aisle and nave are older than the tower and south aisle; and a curious staircase ascends at the east of the south aisle wall, from which a gangway crossed to the rood loft.

There are many aumbries in various parts of the church, and a tall, Decorated font, with grotesque faces in some panels, and in others sacred subjects oddly treated, such as our Lord crowned and holding a Chalice. In the south aisle is an old oak post alms-box resembling one at Halton Holgate.

A doorway leads out from the south side of the east end, an entrance probably to an eastern chapel. The two doorways, one on each side of the altar, at Spalding may have led to the same, or possibly to a vestry, as in Magdalen Chapel, Oxford.

The spire has a staircase, passing curiously from one of the pinnacles. A very massive broken stone coffin, removed from a garden, lies in the south chapel. The fine row of limes, and the ivy-grown walls of old Harlaxton Manor, add to the beauty of this quiet little village, and a group of half-timbered brick buildings, said to be sixteenth century, though looking more modern, which are near the church, are a picturesque feature.

BELVOIR CASTLE

Denton Manor, the seat of Sir C. G. E. Welby, Bart., is just beyond Harlaxton, and there one might once have seen a fine old manor house, now replaced by a large modern hall of fine proportions; the work is by Sir A. W. Blomfield, good in design and detail, and containing a notable collection both of furniture and pictures. St. Christopher’s Well, a chalybeate spring, is in the park, and in the restored church are a good recumbent effigy of John Blyth, 1602, and a figure of Richard Welby, 1713, with angels carefully planting a crown on his wig. After this the road passes into Leicestershire, so we turn to the right and in less than four miles, halfway between the Melton road and the Nottingham road, and more in Leicestershire than in Lincolnshire, we come to Belvoir Castle. The mound on which it stands is over the border and is not a natural height, but was thrown up on a spur of the wold as early as the eleventh century by Robert de Todeni, who thence became known as Robert de Belvedeir. Certainly the pile is grandly placed, and has a sort of Windsor Castle appearance from all the country round. It has been in possession of the Manners family now for four hundred years. The celebrated Marquis of Granby, a name well known in all the neighbourhood as a public-house sign, was son of the third Duke. He was “Col. of the Leicester Blues” in 1745, and General and Commander-in-Chief of the British contingent at Minden, where the English and German forces, under the Duke of Brunswick, defeated the French in 1759, and he distinguished himself in battle in each of the three following years. The castle, destroyed by order of Parliament in the civil wars, was rebuilt in 1668, and again in 1801, but a fire having destroyed part of it in 1816 it was restored at the worst of all architectural periods, so that at a near view it does not fulfil the expectation raised by its grand appearance when seen from a distance. As at Windsor there is a very fine “Guard Room,” and many large rooms hung with tapestry or pictures, and a picture gallery of unusual excellence. The Duchess’s garden in spring is one of the finest horticultural sights in the kingdom. The greater part of the castle is most liberally thrown open daily to the public.

Returning from Belvoir we can pass by Barrowby to join the Nottingham and Grantham road, which leaves the county at Sedgebrook, on either side of which are seen the churches of Muston and East and West Allington, where Crabbe, the poet, was rector 1789-1814. West Allington church stands in Mr. Welby’s park, and close by, a salt well is marked on the map. At Sedgebrook is a farm house which was built as a manor-house by Sir John Markham in the sixteenth century, when he was Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. He it was who received the soubriquet of “The upright Judge,” on the occasion of his being turned out of office by Edward IV., because of his scrupulous fairness at the trial of Sir Thomas Coke, Lord Mayor of London.

From Sedgebrook to Barrowby is three miles of level ground, and then the road rises 150 feet to the village, which commands a splendid view over the vale of Belvoir. Leaving this you descend a couple of miles to Grantham.

GONERBY HILL

At the outskirts of the town the road meets two others, one the northern or Lincoln road, and the other the north-western or Newark road. This is the Great North Road, and it starts by climbing the famous Gonerby Hill, the terror and effectual trial ground of motors in their earliest days, and described by “mine host” in The Heart of Midlothian as “a murder to post-horses.” The hill once gained affords a fine view eastwards, Foston and Long Bennington (which has a large church with a handsome porch, a good churchyard cross, and a mutilated market cross), are the only villages, till the road crosses the county boundary near Claypole, and runs on about four miles to Newark, distant fifteen miles from Grantham. Long Bennington is a mile north-east of Normanton Lodge, where Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire touch.

Stubton, a couple of miles to the east, has a fine group of yew trees growing round the tomb of Sir George Heron, one of the family from Cressy Hall, Gosberton, I suppose, who built the hall now occupied by G. Neville, Esq.

Between Stubton and the Grantham-and-Lincoln road are many winding lanes, by a judicious use of which you may escape the fate that overtook us of landing after a steep and rather rough climb from Barkstone at two farms one after the other, beyond which the road did not even try to go. If you have better luck you will reach the out-of-the-way parish church of Hough-on-the-Hill.

HOUGH-ON-THE-HILL

This, the last resting-place of King John, when on his journey to Newark where he died, has a church whose tower is singularly interesting, being akin to St. Peter’s at Barton-on Humber, and the two very old churches in Lincoln, and one at Broughton, near Brigg, and we may add, perhaps, the tower at Great Hale.

The work of all these towers is pre-Norman, and it is not unlikely that the church, when first built, consisted of only a tower and two apses. At Hough, as at Broughton, we have attached to the west face of the tower a Saxon circular turret staircase, built in the rudest way and coped with a sloping top of squared masonry, of apparently Norman work. The tower has several very small lights, 12 to 15 inches high, and of various shapes, while the west side of the south porch is pierced with a light which only measures 8 inches by 4, but is framed with dressed stone on both the wall-surfaces. The two lower stages of the square tower, to whose west face the round staircase-tower clings, are all of the same rough stone-work, with wide mortar joints, but with two square edged thick string-courses of dressed stone, projecting 6 inches or more. The upper stage is of much later date. The Early English nave, chancel, and aisles are very high, and are no less than 20 feet wide, mercifully (for it was proposed to abolish them and substitute a pine roof) they still retain their old Perpendicular roofs with the chancel and nave timbers enriched with carving. The sedilia are of the rudest possible construction.

Hough-on-the-Hill.

A SAXON TOWER

The staircase turret has two oblong Saxon windows, like those at Barnack, about four feet by one, in the west face, three small round lights on the north, and four on the south, one square and one diamond-shaped and two circular. The turret is of the same date as the tower, but appears to have been built on after the tower was finished; and it almost obscures the two little west windows of the tower, one on each side of it, and near the top. A round-headed doorway leads from the tower to the turret, inside which the good stone steps lead up to a triangular-headed door into the tower, where now is the belfry floor, from which another similar doorway leads into the nave. Close to the top of the old Saxon tower walls are very massive stone corbels for supporting the roof. The Newel post of the old tower is a magnificent one, being eighteen inches thick. This, where the upper stage was added, is continued, but with only half that thickness.

There was once a porch with a higher pitched roof, as shown by the gable roof-mould against the aisle. On the stone benches are three of the solitaire-board devices, with eight hollows connected by lines all set in an oblong, the same that you see often in cloisters and on the stone benches at Windsor, where monks or chorister boys passed the time playing with marbles. It is a truly primitive and world-wide amusement. The natives of Madagascar have precisely the same pattern marked out on boards, seated round which, and with pebbles which they move like chessmen, they delight themselves, both young and old, in gambling.

The church used to go with the Head-Mastership of Grantham Grammar School, seven miles off, and some of the Headmasters were buried here; one, Rev. Joseph Hall, is described as “Vicar of Ancaster and Hough-on-the-Hill, Headmaster of Grantham Grammar School, and Rector of Snelland, and Domestic Chaplain to Lord Fitzwilliam”—he died in 1814.

THE WAPENTAKE

It stands on a high knoll, whence the churchyard, which is set round with yew-trees, slopes steeply to the south. The Wapentake of Loveden takes its name from a neighbouring round-topped hill, and the old tower of Hough-on-the-Hill may well have been the original meeting-place; just as Barnack was, where the triangular-headed seat for the chief man is built into the tower wall. The term “Wapentake” means the taking hold of the chief’s weapon by the assembled warriors, or of the warriors’ weapons by the chief, as a sign that they swear fealty to him, and then the name was applied to the district over which a particular chief held rule. The native chiefs of India, when they come to a Durbar, present their swords to the King or his representative in a similar manner, for him to touch.

Just south of Hough is the hamlet of Gelston, where, on a triangular green, is all that is left of a wayside cross, a rare thing in this county. Only about two feet of the old shaft is left and the massive base block standing on a thick slab with chamfered corners. This is mounted on three steps and is a very picturesque object.

There are some two dozen Wapentakes within the county, some with odd names, e.g., Longoboby; of these, eight end like Elloe in oe, which, I take it, means water.

CLAYPOLE

From Hough-on-the-Hill the byway to the Grantham and Newark road, with villages at every second milestone, runs through Brandon, where a small chapel contains a Norman door with a tympanum and a rather unusual moulding, very like one we shall see in the old church at Stow, and then through Stubton, to Claypole, close to the county boundary. The beautiful crocketed spire of this fine church is a landmark seen for miles; as usual, it is Perpendicular, and on an Early English tower, which is plastered over with cement outside and engaged between the aisles inside. It is a cruciform building, and in the Early English south transept are three beautiful sedilia, not at all common in such a position. The flat coloured ceiling of the nave is old, though, since the restoration by C. Hodgson Fowler in 1892, the high pitch of the roof over it has been reverted to, both on chancel and nave. The nave is large with four wide bays, supported on clustered pillars, the capitals being all different and all ornamented with singularly bold foliated carving of great beauty. The chancel arch exhibits brackets for the rood beam. The large clerestory windows were probably in the nave before the aisles were added. Another set of sedilia in the chancel are of the Decorated period, and most of the windows have flowing tracery. On the north side of the chancel is a Sacristy, containing an altar slab in situ with its five dedication crosses. The porch has a very deep niche over it, for a statue, and there is another niche at the east end of the nave; the fine Perpendicular parapet leading to it being, like the rest of the church, embattled. The screen is a good Perpendicular one, and the desk of the well-carved pulpit was once part of it, this now is oddly supported by the long stem of a processional cross. The font, which is hexagonal, is of the Decorated period.

One of the most unusual features in the church is to be found in the stone seats which surround the bases of the pillars in the south arcade. This is to be seen also at Bottesford and at Caistor.

A short distance to the south-west of the church there was, until quite recently, a charming old stone bridge, over a small stream, but this has now, I regret to say, been superseded by one of those iron girder structures, so dear to the heart of the highway surveyor.

In the church the hook for the “Lenten Veil” still remains at the end of the sedilia, and a staple over the vestry-door opposite.

In pre-reformation days there was a regular “office” or service for the Easter sepulchre, in which the priests acted the parts of the three kings, the angel, and the risen Lord, at which time a line was stretched across the chancel to support the “Lenten Veil” which served as a stage-curtain.

CHAPTER VIII
SLEAFORD

Ewerby—Howell—Use of a Stone Coffin—Heckington—Great Hale—Outer Staircase to Tower—Helpringham—Billinghay—North and South Kyme—Kyme Castle—Ancaster—Honington—Cranwell.

SLEAFORD CHURCH

Six roads go out of Sleaford, and five railways. Lincoln, Boston, Bourne and Grantham have both a road and a railway to Sleaford, Spalding has only a railway direct, and Horncastle and Newark only a road. At no towns but Louth and Lincoln do so many routes converge, though Caistor, Grantham and Boston come very near. The southern or Bourne road we have traced from Bourne, so we will now take the eastern roads to Boston and Horncastle. But first to say something of Sleaford itself. The Conqueror bestowed the manor on Remigius, first Bishop of Lincoln. About 1130 Bishop Alexander built the castle, together with that at Newark, which alone in part survives. These castles were seized by Stephen, and here King John, having left Swineshead Abbey, stayed a night before his last journey by Hough-on-the-hill to Newark, where he died 1216. Henry VIII., with Katherine Howard, held a council here on his way from Grimsthorpe to Lincoln, 1541, dining next day at Temple-Bruer, which he gave in the same year to the Duke of Suffolk. He had here in 1538 ordered the execution of Lord Hussey. Murray’s guide-book tells us that Richard de Haldingham, 1314, who made the famous and curious “Mappa Mundi,” now kept in Hereford Cathedral, was born at Holdingham close by. The church is one of four in this neighbourhood dedicated to St. Denis. The lower stage of the tower dates from 1180. The spire, a very early one, built about 1220, being struck by lightning, was taken down and put up again by C. Kirk in 1884. It is only 144 feet in height. As at Grantham and Ewerby the tower is engaged in the aisles; its lower stage dates from 1180. The nave has eight three-light clerestory windows, with tall pinnacles rising from the parapet. The aisles have a richly carved parapet, without pinnacles; but the beauty and extreme richness of the western ends of the aisles, where they engage with the massive tower, surmounted as they are by turrets, bellcots and pinnacles, and niches, some still containing their statues, is not surpassed in any church in England.

The doorway, which is in the west end of the north aisle, cuts into the fine window above, and opens upon the baptistery.

THE NORTH TRANSEPT

The nave and aisles are all very lofty; and the grand proportions of the church give one the feeling of being in a cathedral. There is an outer north aisle, now screened off by a good modern oak screen, and fitted with an organ and an altar with modern painted reredos depicting the Crucifixion. The tracery of the big window is good, but that in the north transept (there is no south transept) is one of the finest six-light windows to be seen, and is filled with first-rate modern glass by Ward and Hughes. The supporting arch at the west of the north aisle has an inverted arch, as at Wells, to support the tower. At the end of the south aisle, a tall half-arch acts as a buttress to the other side of the tower arch. The chancel was once a magnificent one, but was rebuilt and curtailed at a bad period.

The fine monuments on each side of the chancel arch—one having two alabaster recumbent figures, much blocked by the pulpit, are all of the Carre family; and a curious carved and inscribed coffin lid, showing just the face, and then, lower down, the praying hands of a man, apparently a layman, with long hair, is set up in the transept against the chancel pier. At Hartington in Derbyshire is one showing the bust and praying hands together, and then, lower down, the feet. An old iron chest is in the south aisle, and the church has a very perfect set of consecration crosses both inside and out.

The rood screen is especially fine, in fact, the finest in the country, having still its ancient canopy projecting about six feet, with very graceful carving on the heads of the panels below it. Two staircases in the chancel piers still remain, opening on to the rood loft on either side.

The west end of the church overlooks the market, where there is always a gay scene on Mondays—stalls and cheap-jacks and crowds of market folk making it almost Oriental in life and colour.

The street runs along the south side of the church, across which is seen the excellent but not beautiful Sleaford almshouse.

North Transept, St. Denis’s Church, Sleaford.

EWERBY

Eastwards on the Swineshead road, and within half-a-dozen miles of Sleaford, is a cluster of especially good churches—Ewerby, Asgarby, Heckington, Howell, Great Hale and Helpringham. Four of these six have fine spires, and are seen from a long distance in this flat country. Ewerby is just on the edge of Haverholme Priory Park, and the building rooks who have chosen the trees at the village end of the park for their colony, gave, when we visited it, pleasant notification of the coming spring.

The tower is at the west end, engaged in the two aisles, and, adjoining the churchyard, a little green with remains of the old village cross leaves room for the fine pile of building to be seen and admired. The roof line of nave and chancel is continuous, and the broach spire, a singularly fine one, perhaps the best in England, is 174 feet high. It is probably the work of the same master builder who planned and built Heckington and Sleaford. The tower has a splendid ring of ten bells (Grantham alone has as many) for the completion of which, as for much else, Ewerby is indebted to the Earls of Winchelsea.

Internally, the walls are mostly built of very small stones, like those in a roadside wall. In the tower are good Decorated windows, in the lower of which, on the western face, is a stained glass window. This was struck by lightning in 1909, and all the faces of the figures were cut right out, the rest of the glass being intact. A lightning-conductor is now installed, but the faces are not yet filled in.

There is a most beautiful little window at the west end of the north aisle. Under the tower are three finely proportioned arches, and a stone groined roof. The ten bells are rung from the ground. The nave pillars are clustered, each erected on an earlier transition-Norman base; and the base of the font is also Norman. The porch is unusual in having a triangular string-course outside the hood-moulding. Besides the Market Cross, there are parts of two others, in the church and churchyard. There is a grand old recumbent warrior, probably Sir Richard Anses, with fourteenth century chain mail and helmet, and gorget, but the most interesting thing of all is a pre-Norman tomb-cover on the floor of the north aisle, with a rude cross on it, and a pattern of knot-work all over the rest of the slab. This is covered by a mat, but it certainly ought to have a rail round it for permanent protection, for it is one of the most remarkable stones in the county. An old oak chest with carved front is in the vestry. The whole church is well-cared-for, but at present only seated with chairs.

HOWELL PORCH

From Ewerby, two miles bring us to Howell, a small church with neither spire nor tower, but a double bell-gable at the west end of the nave; the porch is Norman, and a large pre-Norman stone coffin slab has been placed in it. The transition pillars have huge mill-stone shaped bases; and there is only a nave and north aisle. On the floor of the aisle is a half figure of a mother with a small figure of her daughter, both deeply cut on a fourteenth century stone slab. It is curious to come on a monument to “Sir Charles Dymok of Howell, 2nd son to Sir Edward Dymok of Scrielsby”—whose daughter married Sir John Langton. The tomb, with coloured figures of the knight and his lady kneeling at an altar, was put up about 1610 by his nephew, another Sir Edward Dymok.

There is a broken churchyard cross, the base inscribed to John Spencer, rector, 1448. The church is dedicated to St. Oswald. Ivy is growing inside the nave, having forced its way right through the wall—a good illustration of the mischief that ivy can do.

The mention of the stone coffin in Howell church porch calls to mind a similar case in a Cumberland church, where the sexton, pointing it out to a visitor, said: “Ah think thet a varra good thing; minds ’em o’ their latter end, ye knaw; an’ its varra useful for umberellas.”

Heckington is a town-like village on the main road, and its splendid church, which faces you at the end of the street, as at Louth, is one of the wonders of Lincolnshire. It is entirely in the Decorated style, with lofty spire and four very high pinnacles. It owes its magnificence to the fact that the great abbey at Bardney, which had a chantry here, obtained a royal licence in 1345 to appropriate the church. Certainly it is the most perfect example of a Decorated church in the kingdom.

The nave is remarkably high and wide, and the building of it, as in the case of Wilfrid’s great church at Hexham, apparently took thirty-five years. The dimensions are 150 feet by eighty-five, and the masonry, owing probably to the leisurely way in which it was built, is remarkably good throughout. The statue niches have a few of their figures still. The porch, with its waved parapet richly carved, with a figure of our Lord above, still has its original roof. On either side are double buttresses, each with its canopied niche; and the nave ends with handsome turrets. The transept windows are very fine, and the seven-light east window, a most superb one, is only surpassed in its dimensions and beautiful tracery by those at Selby and Carlisle. It is filled with good glass by Ward and Hughes, put up in memory of Mr. Little, by his wife, 1897.

Heckington Church

HECKINGTON

A massive timber gallery crosses the west end, above the tower arch, giving access to the belfry above the groined roof of the tower. The clock struck while we were in the church, and gave evidence of at least one of the peal being of unusual magnificence of tone.

THE EASTER SEPULCHRE

On the south side of the chancel is one window beneath which is a canopied credence table; and west of this, three tall and richly carved sedilia with figures of our Lord and the Virgin Mary and Saints Barbara, Katherine and Margaret; but the gem of the building is the Easter sepulchre on the north side, where there are no windows. This is only surpassed by one at Hawton, near Newark. Below are the Roman guards asleep, in fourteenth century armour. On each side of the recess for the sacred elements, which once had a door to it, are two figures of women and a guardian angel, and above them, the risen Christ between two flying angels. This is a truly beautiful thing, enshrined in a worthy building.

Outside is a broken churchyard cross, and the slender chancel buttresses are seen to have each a niche for a figure. The magnificent great “Dos-D’Âne” coping-stones on the churchyard wall, both here and at Great Hale, are a pleasure to see.

There was a church at Heckington before the Conquest, and a second was built about 1100. The income of this, as well as of that of Hale Magna, was given in 1208 by Simon de Gant and his wife Alice to support the church of St. Lazarus outside the walls of Jerusalem, and this endowment was confirmed by King John. The rector of Hale Magna in his parish magazine points out that the enormous amount of land which was constantly passing to the churches and monasteries in the Middle Ages became a distinct danger, and that an Act was passed to prevent it, called the Statute of Mortmain, under which licence had to be obtained from the Crown.

Consequently we find that in the fourth year of Edward II. (1310) inquisition was taken on a certain Sunday before Ranulph de Ry, Sheriff of Lincoln, at Ancaster “to inquire whether or not it be to the damage of the King or others if the King permit Wm. son of Wm. le Clerk of St. Botolph (Boston) to grant a messuage and 50 acres of land in Hekyngton and Hale to a certain chaplain and his successors to celebrate Divine service every day in the parish church of Hekyngton for the health of the souls of the said Wm. his father, mother and heirs, &c., for ever,” etc. The jury found that it would not be to the damage or prejudice of the king to allow the grant. They also reported that Henry de Beaumont was the “Mesne,” or middle, tenant between the king and William Clerk of Boston for twenty-eight acres, and between the king and Ralph de Howell for the other twenty-two acres, he holding from the king “by the service of a third part of a pound of pepper,” and subletting to the others, for so many marks a year. The land apparently being valued at about 1s. 8d. an acre. From other sources we find that land thereabouts varied in value from 4d. to 8s. an acre yearly rent.

In 1345 when the abbot and abbey of Bardney by royal licence received the churches and endowments of Hale and Heckington for their own use, the abbot became rector and appointed a vicar to administer each parish. The name of the abbot was Roger De Barrowe, whose tomb was found by the excavators at Bardney in 1909.

The building of the present beautiful church was completed by Richard de Potesgrave, the vicar, in 1380. He doubtless received help from Edward III., to whom he acted as chaplain. That he was an important person in the reigns of both Edward II. and III. is shown by the former king making over to him the confiscated property of the Colepeppers who had refused to deliver Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, to Queen Isabella, wife of Edward II., in 1321; while he was selected by Edward III. to superintend the removal of the body of Edward II. from Berkeley Castle to Gloucester. His mutilated effigy is under the north window of the chancel, and in a little box above it with a glass front is now preserved the small chalice which he used in his lifetime.

CHURCHWARDENS’ BOOKS

The churchwardens’ account book at Heckington begins in 1567, and in 1580 and 1583 and 1590 “VIˢ VIIIᵈ” is entered as the burial fee of members of the Cawdron family, whose later monuments are at Hale.

WHIPPING FOR TRAMPS

Another entry which constantly occurs in the sixteenth century is “for Whypping dogges out of Church,” and in the seventeenth century not “dogges” only but vagrants are treated to the lash, e.g.:—

“April 21, 1685. John Coulson then whipped for a vagrant rogue and sent to Redford.

“Antho. Berridge (Vicar).”

And in 1686:—

“Memorand. that John Herrin and Katherine Herrin and one child, and Jonas Hay and wife and two children, and Barbary Peay and Eliz. Nutall were openly whipped, at Heckington, the 28th day of May, 1686—and had a passe then made to convey them from Constable to Constable to Newark, in Nottinghamshire, and Will Stagg was at the same time whipped and sent to Conton in Nottinghamshire.”

A good, sound method of dealing with “Vagrom men,” but for the women and children one wonders the parson or churchwardens were not ashamed to make the entry.

Great Hale.

The book also shows the accounts of the “Dike-reeve” (an important officer) for what in another place is called “the farre fenne.”

HALE MAGNA

We have already spoken of Great Hale or Hale Magna. It is very near Heckington, and was once a large church. Long before the abbey of Bardney appropriated it, in 1345, it had both a rector and a vicar, the two being consolidated in 1296. In 1346 the vicarage was endowed, and on the dissolution the rectorial tithes were granted, in 1543, to Westminster Abbey; but within four years they reverted to the Crown by exchange, and in 1607 were sold by James I., and eventually bought by Robert Cawdron, whose family were for many years lay rectors. Robert probably found the chancel in a bad state, and rather than go to the expense of restoring it, pulled it down and built up the chancel arch, and so it remains. But the great interest of the building lies at the west end. Here the tower arch is a round one, but the tower into which the Normans inserted it is Saxon, probably dating from about 950. It is built of small stones, and the line of the roof gable is still traceable against it outside. It has also a curious and complete staircase of the tenth century in a remarkably perfect condition, though the steps are much worn. The outer walls of this are built of the same small thin stones as are used in the tower, in the upper stage of which are deeply splayed windows with a baluster division of the usual Saxon type.

The nave pillars are Early English and slender for their height, for they are unusually tall, recalling the lofty pillars in some of the churches in Rome. The arches are pointed. Among the monuments are those of Robert Cawdron, and his three wives, 1605, and of another Robert, 1652, father of twenty children, while a large slab with the indent of a brass to some priest has been appropriated to commemorate a third of the same name.

The Cawdron arms are on a seventeenth century chalice. The old registers, which are now well cared for, are on paper, and have suffered sadly from damp and rough handling. The first volume begins in 1568, the second in 1658, and the list of vicars is complete from 1561. To antiquarians I consider that this is one of the most interesting of Lincolnshire churches. Two miles west is Burton Pedwardine, with fine Pedwardine and Horsman tombs, and a pretty little square grille for exhibiting relics. The central tower fell in 1862.

HELPRINGHAM

The road which runs south from Heckington to Billingborough and so on by Rippingale to Bourne, passes by Hale Magna to Helpringham. Here is another very fine church, with a lofty crocketed spire, starting from four bold pinnacles with flying buttresses. The tower is engaged in the aisles, as at Ewerby and Sleaford, and as at Ewerby it opens into nave and aisles by three grand arches. The great height of the tower arch into the nave here and at Boston and Sleaford was in order to let in light to the church from the great west window. The main body of the building is Decorated and has fine windows; the chancel with triplet window is Early English. The font, Early English transition, the rood screen is of good Perpendicular design, and the effect of the whole building is very satisfying, especially from the exterior. It is curious that the lord of the manors of Helpringham and Scredington, who since the sixteenth century has been the Lord Willoughby De Broke, was in the fourteenth century the Lord Willoughby D’Eresby.

Helpringham.

SWATON

South of Helpringham, and situated half-way between that and Horbling, and just to the north of the Sleaford-and-Boston road is Swaton with a beautiful cruciform church in the earliest Decorated style; indeed, looking at the lancet windows in the chancel, one might fairly call it transitional Early English. The simple two-light geometrical window at the east end with the mullions delicately enriched outside and in, form a marked contrast to the rich but heavy Decorated work of the four-light west window. At the east end the window is subordinated to the whole design. At the west end the windows are the predominant feature of the building, and nowhere can this period of architecture be better studied. The roof spans both nave and aisles, as at Great Cotes, near Grimsby, so though the nave is big and high it has no clerestory. The tower arches are very low. The font is a very good one of the period, with diaper work and ball-flower.

We have dwelt at some length on Sleaford and its immediate neighbourhood, and not without cause, for there are few places in England or elsewhere in which so many quite first-rate churches are gathered within less than a six-mile square. They are all near the road from Sleaford to Boston, on which, after leaving Heckington, nothing noticeable is met with for seven miles, till Swineshead is reached, and nothing after that till Boston.

The north-eastern road from Sleaford to Horncastle passes over a flat and dull country to Billinghay and Tattershall, and thence by the interesting little churches of Haltham and Roughton (pronounced Rooton) to Horncastle. The road near Billinghay runs by the side of the Old Carr Dyke, which is a picturesque feature in a very Dutch-looking landscape.

KYME TOWER AND PRIORY

SOUTH KYME

This road crosses the Dyke near North Kyme, where there is a small Roman camp. The Normans have left their mark in the name of “Vacherie House” and Bœuferie Bridge, close to which is “Decoy House,” and two miles to the south is the isolated village of South Kyme. Here is the keep of a thirteenth century castle, which is nearly eighty feet high, a square tower with small loophole windows. The lower room vaulted and showing the arms of the Umfraville family, to whom the property passed in the fifteenth century from the Kymes by marriage, and soon afterwards to the Talboys family, and, in 1530, to Sir Edward Dymoke of Scrivelsby, whose descendants resided there till 1700. The castle was pulled down about 1725, after which the Duke of Newcastle bought the estate and sold it twenty years later to Mr. Abraham Hume. The existing tower communicated from the first floor with the rest of the castle. The upper floors are now gone.

Close by was a priory for Austin canons, founded by Philip de Kyme in the reign of Henry II., but all that now remains of it is in the south aisle of the church, which, once a splendid cruciform building, has been cut down to one aisle and a fine porch; over this is represented the Coronation of the Virgin. A bit of very early carved stonework has been let into the wall, and a brass inscription from the tomb of Lord Talboys 1530.

South Kyme.

The western road from Sleaford has no interesting features, till at about the fifth milestone it comes to Ancaster, the old Roman ‘Causennæ’; here it crosses the Ermine Street, which is a fine wide road, but fallen in many parts into disuse. The Ancaster stone quarries lie two miles to the south of the village in Wilsford heath on high ground; the Romans preferred a high ridge for their great “Streets,” but at Ancaster the Ermine Street descends 100 feet, and from thence, after crossing it, our route takes us by a very pretty and wooded route to Honington, on the Great North Road.

South Kyme Church.

We will now go back to Sleaford and trace out the course of its other western road to Newark, leaving the north or Lincoln Road to be described from Lincoln.

HOUR-GLASS STANDS

This road starts in a northerly direction, but splits off at Holdingham before reaching Leasingham, of which Bishop Trollope of Nottingham, who did so much for archæology in our county, was rector for fifty years. The church has a fine transition tower with curiously constructed belfry windows and a broach spire. Two finely carved angels adorn the porch, and the font, of which the bowl seems to have been copied from an earlier one, though only the stem and base remain, exhibits very varied subjects, among them The Resurrection, Last Judgment, The Temptation, The Entry into Jerusalem, Herodias and Salome, and the Marriage of the Virgin. Fixed to one of the pillars is the old hourglass stand, of which other specimens, but usually fixed to the pulpit, are at Bracebridge near Lincoln, Sapperton near Folkingham, Hameringham near Horncastle, and Belton in the Isle of Axholme.

But the Newark road holds westwards, and, leaving the tower of Cranwell, with its interesting “Long and Short” work, to the right, climbs to the high ground and crosses the Ermine Street by Caythorpe Heath to Leadenham, eight miles. Here it drops from “the Cliff” to the great plain, drained by the Wytham and Brant rivers, and at Beckingham on the Witham reaches the county boundary. The Witham only acts as the boundary for two miles and then turns to the right and makes for Lincoln. Half way between this and the lofty spire of Leadenham the road passes between Stragglethorpe and Brant-Broughton (pronounced Bruton), which is described later.

CHAPTER IX
LINCOLN, THE CATHEDRAL AND MINSTER-YARD

The city of Lincoln was a place of some repute when Julius Cæsar landed B.C. 55. The Witham was then called the Lindis, and the province Lindisse. The Britons called the town Lindcoit, so the name the Romans gave it, about A.D. 100, “Lindum Colonia,” was partly Roman and partly British. The Roman walled town was on the top of the hill about a quarter of a mile square, with a gate in the middle of each wall. Of their four roads, the street which passed out north and south was the Via Herminia or Ermine Street. The east road went to “Banovallum”—Horncastle (or the Bain)—and “Vannona”—Wainfleet—and the west to “Segelocum”—Littleborough. The Roman milestone marking XIV miles to Segelocum is now in the cathedral cloisters.

ROMAN ARCH

This walled space included the sites of both cathedral and castle, and was thickly covered with houses in Danish and Saxon times. We hear of 166 being cleared away by the Conqueror to make his castle. The Romans themselves extended their wall southward as far as the stone-bow in order to accommodate their growing colony. Their northern gate yet exists. It is known as “Newport Gate,” and is of surpassing interest, as, with the exception of one at Colchester, there is not another Roman gateway in the kingdom. Only last October the foundations of an extremely fine gateway were uncovered at Colchester, the Roman “Camelodunum”; apparently indicating the fact that there were two chariot gates as well as two side entrances for foot passengers. The Newport Gate is sixteen feet wide, and twenty-two feet high, with a rude round arch of large stones without a key, the masonry on either side having stones some of which are six feet long. On each side of the main gate was a doorway seven feet wide for foot passengers. A fifth Roman road is the “Foss Way,” which came from Newark and joined the Ermine Street at the bottom of Canwick Hill, a mile south of Lincoln.

Newport Arch, Lincoln.

From the junction of these two roads a raised causeway, following the line of the present High Street, ran over the marshy ground to the gate of the walled town. This causeway, bearing in places the tracks of Roman wheels, is several feet below the present level, and even on the top of the hill several feet of debris have accumulated over the Roman pavements which were found in the last century where the castle now stands. Doubtless, as years went on, many villas would be planted outside the walls of the Roman city, but we know little of the history of the colony, except that it was always a place of considerable importance.

BISHOP REMIGIUS

To come to post-Roman times, Bede, who died in 785, tells us that Paulinus, who had been consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and had baptised King Ædwin and a large number of people at York in the church which stood on the site afterwards occupied by the Minster, came to Lincoln, and, after baptising numbers of people in the Trent, as he had previously done in the Swale near Richmond in Yorkshire, built a stone church in Lincoln, or caused his convert Blaeca, the Reeve of the city, to build it, in which he consecrated Honorius Archbishop of Canterbury. Bede saw the walls of this church which may well have stood where the present church of St. Paul does. William the Conqueror in 1066 built the Norman castle on the hill to keep the town, which had spread along the banks of the Witham, in order. It was about this time that Remigius, a monk of Fécamp, in Normandy, who had been made by William, Bishop of Dorchester-on-Thames in 1067, as a reward for his active help with a ship and a body of armed fighting men, got leave, after much opposition from the Archbishop of York, to build a cathedral at Lincoln on the hill near the castle. So, next after the Romans (and perhaps the Britons were there before them), it is to him that we owe the choice of this magnificent site for the cathedral. Remigius began his great work in 1075, of which the central portion of the west front, with its plain rude masonry and its round-headed tall recesses on either side of the middle door, and its interrupted band of bas-reliefs over the low Norman arches to right and left of the tall recesses, is still in situ. The sixteen stone bas-reliefs are subjects partly monkish, but mostly Scriptural, concerning Adam, Noah, Samuel, and Jesus Christ. They are genuine Norman sculptures, and they are at the same level as Welbourn’s twelve English kings under the big central window, but these are of the fourteenth century.

The church of Remigius ended in an apse, of which the foundations are now under the stalls about the middle of the choir. It probably had two towers at the west end, and possibly a central tower as well. The church of St. Mary Magdalene was swept away to clear the site, and a chapel at the north west end of the new building allotted to the parishioners in compensation. Like the Taj at Agra it was seventeen years in building, and its great founder died, May 4, 1092, a few months before its completion. This was in the reign of Rufus, a reign notable for the building of the great Westminster Hall.

Gateway of Lincoln Castle.

LINCOLN CASTLE

BISHOP ALEXANDER

The wide joints of the masonry, and the square shape of the stones, and the rude capitals of the pilasters are distinctive of Remigius’ work. Bloet succeeded Remigius, and during his thirty years he did much for the cathedral staff, but not very much to the fabric. His successor, Bishop Alexander, 1123, was a famous builder, and besides the castles of Sleaford, Newark and Banbury, the first two of which Stephen forced him to give to the Crown, he built the later Norman part of the west front, raising its gables and putting in three doors and the interlaced arcading above the arches of Remigius. He also vaulted the whole nave with stone, after a disastrous fire in 1141. There had been a previous fire just before Alexander was consecrated Bishop in 1123, of which Giraldus Cambrensis, writing about 1200, says that the roof falling on it “broke the stone with which the body of Remigius was covered into two equal parts.” This richly carved and thus fractured stone you may see to-day, where it is placed close to the north-west arch of the nave and north aisle. Bishop Alexander’s work is richer than that of Remigius, and the shafts and capitals of his west doors are beautifully carved. In these, according to Norman custom, hunters are aiming at the birds and beasts in the foliage. This is best seen in the north-west doorway. King Stephen came to Lincoln in 1141, the year of the fire, and it was there that, after a fierce fight which raged round the castle and cathedral, he was taken prisoner and sent to Bristol, but in the following year terms were arranged between him and the Empress Maud, and he was crowned at Christmas in Lincoln cathedral. After that date Bishop Alexander carried forward his work on the cathedral without intermission till his death in 1047, putting in the central western gable and the two gables over the arcading, vaulting the whole west front with stone, and adding the little north and south gables against the towers and the Norman stages of the towers, of which the northern tower was a little the highest, but looked less high because the south tower had its angles carried up higher than the walls of the square.

Bishop Alexander, like St. Hugh, died of a fever, which he caught at Auxerre in France, where he had been to meet the Pope. Those French towns seem to have been pretty pestilential at all times. Bishop Chesney succeeded him, and either he or Bishop Bloet began the episcopal palace. He assisted at the Coronation of Henry II. in Lincoln, and founded St. Catharine’s Priory. He died in 1166, and, after the lapse of six years, Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II. by Fair Rosamund, held the See for nine years, but was never consecrated. In 1182 he resigned, and was afterwards made Archbishop of York. He gave many gifts to the cathedral, and notably two “great and sonorous bells,” the putative parents of “Great Tom.” Walter de Constantiis followed him, but was in the very next year translated to Rouen, 1184, and again the See was vacant for the space of two years.

ST. HUGH

In 1185 an earthquake did great damage, and in the following year Hugh of Avalon, the famous St. Hugh of Lincoln, was appointed Bishop by Henry II. He widened the west end by putting a wing to each side of the work of Remigius, and put a gable over the central arch, and began his great work of making a new and larger cathedral with double transepts and a choir 100 feet longer and a nave ten feet wider than that of Remigius, starting at the east and building the present ritual choir and both the eastern and western transepts. In this his work was of a totally new character, with pointed arches, and “is famous as being the earliest existing work of pure English Gothic.” But Early English work, so says Murray, was already being done at Wells in 1174, twelve years earlier, and it was there that the Gothic vaulting and pointed arch was first seen in England. From the great transept to the angel choir is all his design, and it bears no trace of Norman French influence in any particular. The name of Hugh’s architect is Geoffrey de Noiers, his work is more remarkable for lightness than for strength, and in about fifty years Hugh’s tower fell, setting thereby a bad example which has been followed so frequently that Bishop Creighton’s first question on visiting a new church used generally to be, “When did your tower fall?”

BISHOP GROSTESTE

Hugh of Avalon died in London in 1200, and William de Blois (1201) and Hugh of Wells (1209) went on with the building. The latter particularly kept to Hugh of Avalon’s plan of intercalating marble shafts with those of stone. Other characteristics of St. Hugh’s work are the double arcading in the transept and the little pigeon-hole recesses between the arcade arches, a trefoil ornament on the pillar belts and on the buttresses, and the deep-cut base mouldings. He put in the fine Early English round window in the north transept called the “Dean’s eye,” which has plate tracery. The five lancet lights, something after the “Five Sisters” window at York, were a later addition. The end of his work is easily distinguishable in the east wall of the great transept. He also built the Galilee porch, which was both a porch and an ecclesiastical court, and the Chapter house, with its ten pairs of lancet windows, its arcading and clustered pillars and beautiful central pillar to support the roof groining. He was succeeded, in 1235, by the famous Robert Grosteste, a really great man and a fine scholar, who had studied both at Oxford and Paris. He opposed the Pope, who wished to put his nephew into a canonry, declaring him to be unfit for the post, and stoutly championed the right of the English Church to be ruled by English and not Italian prelates. In his time the central tower fell, and he it was who built up in its place the first stage at least of the magnificent tower we have now. He also added the richly arcaded upper portion of the great west front, and its flanking turrets crowned by the figures of the Swineherd of Stow with his horn, on the north, and Bishop Hugh on the south. Henry Lexington, Dean of Lincoln, succeeded him as Bishop in 1254, and during his short episcopate of four years Henry III. issued a royal letter for removing the Roman city wall further east to enable the Dean and Chapter to lengthen the cathedral for the Shrine of St. Hugh after his canonisation. Then began the building of the ‘Angel Choir,’ which “for the excellence of its sculpture, the richness of its mouldings and the beauty of its windows, is not surpassed by anything in the Kingdom” (Sir C. Anderson). Its height was limited by the pitch of the vaulting of Hugh’s Ritual Choir, just as the height of Grosteste’s tower arches had been. The Angel Choir was finished by Lexington’s successor Richard of Gravesend, 1258-1279, and inaugurated in the following year with magnificent ceremony under Bishop Oliver Sutton, Edward I. and Queen Eleanor both being present with their children to see the removal of St. Hugh’s body from its first resting-place before the altar of the Chapel of St. John the Baptist in the north-east transept, where it had been placed in 1200 when King John himself acted as one of the pall bearers, to its new and beautiful gold shrine in the Angel Choir behind the high altar.

JOHN DE WELBOURN

The whole cost of the consecration ceremony was borne by Thomas Bek, son of Baron d’Eresby, who was on the same day himself consecrated Bishop of St. David’s, his brother Antony being Bishop of Durham, and Patriarch of Jerusalem. Bishop Sutton, in 1295, built the cloisters and began the charming little “Vicar’s court.” He died in 1300, his successor was Bishop John of Dalderby, the same who had a miracle-working shrine of pure silver in the south transept, and whom the people chose to call St. John of Dalderby, just as they did in the case of Bishop Grosteste, though the Pope had refused canonisation in each case. He finished the great tower, which, with its beautiful arcaded tower stage, its splendid double lights and canopies above, and its delicate lace-like parapet, seems to me to be quite the most satisfying piece of architecture that this or any other county has to show. It is finished with tall pinnacles of wood covered with lead. The exquisite stone rood-screen and the beautiful arches in the aisles were put in at the same time, the work on the screen being, as Sir C. Anderson remarks, very like the work on the Eleanor’s Cross at Geddington. He died in 1320, and the lovely tracery of the circular window in the south transept, called “The Bishop’s eye,” was inserted about 1350 above his tomb.

John de Welbourn, the munificent treasurer, who died in 1380, gave the eleven statues of kings beneath the window at the west end, which begin with William the Conqueror and end with Edward III., in whose reign they were set up. Among other benefactions Welbourn gave the beautifully carved choir stalls, and he also vaulted the towers. These were all, at one time, finished by leaded spires. Those of the western tower being 100 feet high, and that on the great central or rood tower soaring up to a height of 525 feet. This was blown down in 1547, and the western spires were removed in 1807-08, a mob of excited citizens having prevented their removal in 1727, but eighty years later the matter made no great stir, and though their removal may by some be regretted, I think it is a matter of pure congratulation that the splendid central tower, whose pinnacles attain an altitude of 265 feet, should have remained as it is. The delicate lace-like parapet was added in 1775. It is not very likely that anyone should propose to raise those spires again, but dreadful things do happen; and quite lately one of our most eminent architects prepared a design for putting a spire on the central tower at Peterborough. Think of that! and ask yourself, is there any stability in things human?

Apart from its commanding situation, the whole pile is very magnificent, and, viewed as a whole, outside, it has nothing to touch it, though the west front is not to compare in beauty with that of Peterborough. Inside, York is larger and grander, and Ely surpasses both in effect. But if we take both the situation and the outside view and the inside effect together, Lincoln stands first and Durham second.

GREAT TOM

THE CENTRAL TOWER

I was once at an Archæological society’s meeting in Durham when Dean Lake addressed us from the pulpit, and he began by saying: “We are now met in what by universal consent is considered the finest church in England but one; need I say that that one is Lincoln?” The chuckle of delight which this remark elicited from my neighbour, Precentor Venables, was a thing I shall never forget. We will now take a look at the building, and begin first with the outside, and, starting at the west, walk slowly along the south side of the close. If we begin near the Exchequer Gate we see the west front with its fine combination of the massive work of Remigius, the fine Norman doors of Alexander (with the English kings over the central door), the rich arcading of Grosteste along the top and at the two sides, and the flanking turrets with spirelets surmounted by the statues of St. Hugh and the Stow Swineherd. We look up to the gable over the centre flanked by the two great towers on either side of it. Norman below, Gothic above, with their very long Perpendicular double lights, octagonal angle buttresses and lofty pinnacles. The northern tower once held the big bell “Great Tom,” and the southern (“St. Hugh’s”) has still its peal of eight. Lincoln had a big bell in Elizabeth’s reign, which was re-cast in that of James I., and christened “Great Tom of Lincoln,” 1610. This second great bell being cracked in 1828, was re-cast in 1855, and the Dean and chapter of the time actually took down the beautiful peal of six, called the “Lady Bells,” which had been hung in Bishop Dalderby’s great central tower about 1311 and gave that tower its name of the “Lady Bell Steeple,” and had them melted down to add to the weight of “Great Tom,” thus depriving the minster, by this act of vandalism, of its second ring of bells. The third, or new, “Great Tom,” now hangs alone in the central tower. It weighs five tons eight hundredweight, and is only surpassed in size in England by those at St. Paul’s, at Exeter Cathedral, and Christ Church, Oxford. It is six feet high, six feet ten inches in diameter, and twenty-one and a half feet round the rim, and the hammer, which strikes the hours, weighs two hundredweight.

The Rood Tower and South Transept, Lincoln.

THE SOUTH SIDE

From the west front we should walk along the south side, passing first the consistory court with its three lancet windows, and high pitched gable, where is the little figure of “the devil looking over Lincoln.” This forms a small western transept, and has a corresponding transept on the north side, containing the ringers’ chapel and that of St. Mary Magdalene.

THE EAST END

Going on we get a view of the clerestory windows in the nave, above which is the parapet relieved by canopied niches, once filled with figures. The flying nave buttresses now come into view, and next we reach, at the south-western corner of the great transept, the beautifully built and highly ornamented “Galilee Porch,” which was meant for the bishop’s entrance from his palace into the cathedral. The room over it is now the muniment room. From this point we get a striking view of the western towers with the southern turret of the west front. The buttresses of the transept run up to the top of the clerestory, and end in tall pinnacles with statue-niches and crockets. The transept gable has a delicately pierced parapet and lofty pinnacles. Above is a five-light Decorated window, and below this a broad stone frieze, and then the large round window, “The Bishop’s Eye,” with its unspeakably lovely tracery, a marvel of lace-work in stone; below this comes a row of pointed arcading. The eastern transept is the next feature, with another fine high-pitched gable. Here the work of St. Hugh ends. The apsidal chapels of St. Paul and St. Peter are at the east side of this transept, and then, along the south side of the Angel Choir, the chapels of Bishops Longland and Russell, with the splendid south-east porch between them. This, from its position, is unique in English churches, and was probably designed for the state entrance of the bishop after the presbytery had been added, in place of the Galilee porch entrance. It has a deeply recessed arch, with four canopied niches holding fine figures. The doorway has two trefoil headed arches, divided by a central shaft with a canopied niche above it, once containing the figures of the Virgin and Child. Above this, and in the tympanum, is represented the Last Judgment. The buttresses of the Angel Choir are beautifully and harmoniously enriched with canopy and crocket, and the upper windows are perfect in design and execution. Apart from its splendid position, it is this exquisite finish to the beautifully designed building that makes Lincoln Cathedral so “facile princeps” among English cathedrals. At the south-east buttress are finely conceived figures of Edward I. trampling on a Saracen, and his Queen Eleanor; and another figure possibly represents his second queen, Margaret. Coming round to the east we look with delighted eyes on what has been called “the finest example of Geometrical Decorated Architecture to be found in the kingdom.” The window is not so fine as that at Carlisle, and no east end competes with that at York, but York is Perpendicular, and Lincoln is Geometrical. Here we have not only a grand window, fifty-seven feet high, but another great five-light window above it, and over that a beautiful figure of the Virgin and Child, and all finished by a much enriched gable surmounted by a cross. The two windows, one above the other, seem not to be quite harmonious, in fact, one does not want the upper window, nor perhaps the windows in the aisle gables, but the buttresses and their finials are so extraordinarily good that they make the east end an extremely beautiful whole. Close to the north-east angle is a little stone well cover, and the chapter-house, with its off-standing buttress-piers and conical roof, comes into view at the north. The north side is like the south, but has near it the cloisters, which are reached by a short passage from the north-east transept. From the north-east corner of these cloisters you get an extremely good view of the cathedral and all its three towers. Steps from this corner lead up to the cathedral library. The north side of the cloisters of Bishop Oliver Sutton, unable to bear the thrust of the timber-vaulted ceiling, fell, and was replaced in 1674 by the present inharmonious pillars and ugly arches designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

We must now look inside the cathedral, and if we enter the north-east transept from the cloisters we shall pass over a large stone inscribed “Elizabeth Penrose, 1837.” This is the resting-place of “Mrs. Markham,” once the authority on English history in every schoolroom, and deservedly so. She took her nom de plume from the little village of East Markham, Notts., in which she lived for many years.

THE INTERIOR

Passing through the north-east transept, with its stained glass windows by Canon Sutton, and its curious “Dean’s Chapel,” once the minster dispensary, and turning eastwards, we enter the north aisle of the Angel Choir and find the chapel of Bishop Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College, Oxford. In this the effigy of the bishop is on the south side, and there is a window to the memory of Sir Charles Anderson, of Lea, and a reredos with a painting of the Annunciation, lately put up in memory of Arthur Roland Maddison, minor canon and librarian, who died April 24, 1912, and is buried in his parish churchyard at Burton, by Lincoln. He is a great loss, for he was a charming personality, and, having been for many years a painstaking student of heraldry, he was always an accurate writer on matters of genealogy, and on the relationships and wills of the leading Lincolnshire families, subjects of which he had a special and unique knowledge. Bishop Fleming was not the only Bishop of Lincoln who founded a college at Oxford, as William Smith, founder of Brasenose, Cardinal Wolsey, founder of Christchurch, and William of Wykeham, founder of New College, were all once bishops here. Opposite to the Fleming chapel is the Russell chapel, just east of the south porch and between these lies the Retro Choir, which contained once the rich shrine of St. Hugh, its site now marked, next to Bishop Fuller’s tomb, by a black marble memorial. Here is the beautiful monument to the reverend Bishop Christopher Wordsworth. This is a very perfect piece of work, with a rich, but not heavy, canopy, designed by Bodley and executed by M. Guillemin, who carved the figures in the reredos of St. Paul’s. This rises over a recumbent figure of the bishop in robes and mitre. The face is undoubtedly an excellent likeness.

THE CHOIR

The view from here of the perfect Geometrical Gothic east window, with its eight lights, is very striking; beneath it are the three chapels of St. Catherine, St. Mary, and St. Nicholas, and on either side of it are two monuments, those on the south side to Wymbish, prior of Nocton, and Sir Nicolas de Cantelupe; and on the north side to Bishop Henry Burghersh, Chancellor of Edward III., 1340, and his father, Robert. On each tomb are canopied niches, each holding two figures, among which are Edward III. and his four sons—the Black Prince, Lionel Duke of Clarence, John of Gaunt, and Edmund of Langley. Adjoining the chapel of St. Catherine, which was founded by the Burghersh family, is a fine effigy of Bartholomew Lord Burghersh, who fought at Crécy, in full armour with his head resting on a helmet. A fine monument of Queen Eleanor once stood beneath the great window where her heart was buried before the great procession to London began. The effigy was of copper gilt, but, having been destroyed, it has been recently replaced by a generous Lincoln citizen from drawings which were in existence and from a comparison with her monument in Westminster Abbey. A stone at the west of St. Catherine’s chapel shows a deep indentation worn by the scrape of the foot of each person who bowed at the shrine. A similar one is to be seen at St. Cuthbert’s shrine, Durham.

In the east windows of both the choir aisles is some good Early English glass.

THE PRESBYTERY

We will now turn westwards, past the south porch, and come to the south-east transept; here the line of the old Roman wall and ditch runs right through the cathedral, the apsidal chapels of the eastern transepts and the whole of the presbytery, as well as the chapter-house, lying all outside it. Two apsidal chapels in this transept are dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul. It was in St. Peter’s that sub-dean Bramfield was murdered by a sub-deacon, September 25, 1205, who paid the penalty immediately at the hands of the sub-dean’s servants. The exquisite white marble tomb and recumbent figure of John Kaye, bishop 1827 to 1853, by Westmacott, is in this chapel. Opposite to these apsidal chapels are the canons’ and choristers’ vestries; under the former is a crypt; the latter has the monks’ lavatory, and a fireplace for the baking of the sacramental wafers by the sacristan. Passing along the south choir-aisle we reach the shrine of little St. Hugh, and here the work all around us, in choir, aisles, and transepts, is that of the great St. Hugh. The whole of the centre of the cathedral, with its double transept and the choir between them, being his; and we must notice in two of the transept chapels his peculiar work in the double capitals above slender pillars of alternate stone and marble, and projecting figures of saints and angels low down in each spandrel. We now enter the choir, and pause to admire the magnificent work and all its beauty. On either side are the sixty-two beautiful and richly carved canopied stalls. They are only excelled, perhaps, by those at Winchester. The carving of the Miserere seats is much like that at Boston, where humorous scenes are introduced. The fox in a monk’s cowl, the goose, and the monkey being the chief animals represented. Here, on a poppy-head in the precentor’s seat, a baboon is seen stealing the butter churned by two monkeys; he is caught and hanged, and on the Miserere he is being carried forth for burial. A finely carved oak pulpit, designed by Gilbert Scott, is at the north-east end of the stalls. The brass eagle is a seventeenth century copy of an earlier one. We notice overhead the stone vaulting, springing from Purbeck shafts; notice, too, the beauty of the mouldings and carved capitals, and the groups of arches forming the triforium with clerestory window above, which, however, only show between the ribs of the vaulting; and, then, the length of it! For now, by taking in two from the Angel Choir, the chancel has seven bays. It is a very striking view as you look eastwards, but it has the defect of a rather plain, low vaulting, and west of it the nave, which is a generation later, is more splendidly arranged, while east of it the Angel Choir, which is nearly half a century later than the nave, admittedly surpasses all the rest in delicacy and beauty. The choir vaulting being low, caused both nave and presbytery to be lower than they would otherwise have been, so that it has been said that when the tower fell it was a pity the chancel did not fall with it, all would then have been built with loftier roofs and with more perfect symmetry.

If we pass down the Ritual Choir eastwards, we enter the presbytery, and at once see the origin of the name “Angel Choir” in the thirty figures of angels in the spandrels. It was built to accommodate the enormous number of pilgrims who flocked to St. Hugh’s shrine, and is, according to G. A. Freeman, “one of the loveliest of human works; the proportion of the side elevation and the beauty of the details being simply perfect,” and it would seem to be uncontested that all throughout, whether in its piers, its triforium, its aisles, or its carved detail, it shows a delicacy and finish never surpassed in the whole history of Gothic architecture. One of its large clerestory windows was filled, in 1900, with excellent glass by H. Holiday, to mark the seven-hundredth anniversary of St. Hugh’s death.

The angels sculptured in stone, and mostly carrying scrolls, fill the triforium spandrels in groups of three, five groups on either side. They are probably not all by the master’s hand. The Virgin and Child in the south-west bay and the angel with drawn sword in the north-west seem finer than the rest. The stone inscribed in Lombardic letters “Cantate Hic,” marks the place for chanting the Litany; this is chanted by two lay clerks. There are nine of these, one being vestry clerk; also four choristers in black gowns with white facings (a reminiscence of the earliest dress for the Lincoln choir, and a unique costume in England), eight Burghersh choristers or “Chanters” (lineal descendants of the Burghersh chantry of St. Catherine with its separate band of choristers), and some supernumerary boys and men. There are four canons residentiary, viz., the sub-dean, chancellor, precentor, and Archdeacon of Lincoln, and fifty-three prebendaries.

In the first bay of the north side of the Angel Choir is a remarkable monument, part of which once served for an Easter sepulchre. This, like those of Navenby and Heckington of the same date, is richly carved with oak and vine and fig-tree foliage, and shows the Roman soldiers sleeping. Opposite, on the south side, are the tombs of Katharine Swynford of Ketilthorpe, Duchess of Lancaster, Chaucer’s sister-in-law, whose marriage to John of Gaunt took place in the minster in 1396. Like so many of the monuments, these are sadly mutilated, and are not now quite in their original position.

It is on one of the pillars of the east bay, the second from the east end, that the curious grotesque, familiar to all as the “Lincoln Imp,” is perched.

THE NAVE

If we now turn westwards we shall come to the fine stone organ screen, and pass through to the tower, whose predecessor fell through faultiness of construction, and was rebuilt by Grosteste as far as the nave roof, and we shall look down the nave, which is forty-two feet wide, each aisle being another twenty feet in width. The planning and execution of the nave we owe to the two Bishops Hugh. Its great length (524 feet with the choir and presbytery) makes the whole building, when viewed from the west, look lower than it is, for it is really eighty-two feet high. Looking west this is not felt so much, and there is a feeling of great dignity which the best Early English work always gives. The piers may seem lacking in massive strength, but they vary in pattern, those to the east being the most elaborate, and so gain in interest. One curious thing about the nave, though not discernible to the uninitiated, is that the axis, which is continuous from the east end for the first five of the seven bays, here diverges somewhat to the north, and so runs into the centre of the Norman west front. The two western bays are five and a quarter feet less in span than the others. Probably the architect, as he brought the nave down westwards with that light-hearted disregard of a previous style of architecture which characterised the medieval builder and his predecessors of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, intended to sweep away all the old Norman work at the west end and carry the line straight on with equal-sized arches, but funds failed and he had to join up the new with the old as best he could; and we have cause to be thankful for this, since it has preserved for us the original and most interesting work of Remigius.

THE TRANSEPTS

Before we leave our place beneath the tower, we must look at the two great transepts. These have piers, triforium and clerestory similar to those in the choir, and each has three chapels along the eastern wall; these, from north to south, are dedicated to St. Nicholas, St. Denis, St. Thomas; and in the south transept to St. Edward, St. John and St. Giles. Of these, St. Edward’s is called the chanters’ chapel, and it has four little figures of singers carved in stone, two on each side of the door. This was fitted up for use and opened in August, 1913, for a choristers’ chapel, the tombstone of Precentor Smith, 1717, being introduced for an altar. Everybody is attracted by the rose windows. That to the north has beneath it five lancet windows, something like those at York, filled with white silvery glass, but the rose above has still its original Early English stained glass, and is a notable example of the work of the period. A central quatrefoil has four trefoils outside it and sixteen circles round, all filled with tall bold figures and strongly coloured. It is best seen from the triforium. Below is the dean’s door, with a lancet window on either side, and over it a clock with a canopy, given in 1324 by Thomas of Louth. This canopy was carried off by the robber archdeacon, Dr. Bailey, and used as a pulpit-top in his church at Messingham, but was restored by the aid of Bishop Trollope.

The south transept, where Bishop John of Dalderby was buried, contains what no one sees without a feeling of delight, and wonder that such lovely work could ever have been executed in stone,—the great rose window with its twin ovals and its leaf-like reticulations, which attract the eye more than the medley of good old glass with which it is filled, but which gives it a beautiful richness of effect. Below this are four lancets with similar glass.

THE FONT

The aisles of the nave are vaulted, the groins springing from the nave pillars on the inner, and from groups of five shafts on the outer side. Behind these runs a beautiful wall arcade on detached shafts, continuous in the north aisle, but only repeated in portions of the south aisle, with bosses of foliage at the spring of the arches. In the aisle at the second bay from the west is the grand old Norman font, resembling that at Winchester. There is another at Thornton Curtis in the north-east of the county. Neither of the Lincolnshire specimens are so elaborately carved as that at Winchester, which is filled with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, but all are of the same massive type, with dragons, etc., carved on the sides of a great block of black basalt resting on a round base of the same, with four detached corner pillars leading down to a square black base. These early basalt fonts, of which Hampshire has four, Lincolnshire two, the other being at Ipswich, Dean Kitchin conclusively proved to have all come from Tournai, in Belgium, and to date from the middle of the twelfth century, a time coinciding with the episcopacy of Bishops Alexander and De Chesney at Lincoln, and Henry de Blois at Winchester. The one at St. Mary Bourne is the biggest, and has only clusters of grapes on it and doves. The other two are at East Meon and at St. Michael’s, Southampton, and have monsters carved on them like the Lincolnshire specimens.

Of brasses, in which the cathedral before the Reformation was specially rich, having two hundred, only one now remains, that of Bishop Russell, 1494, which is now in the cathedral library; but in a record made in 1641 by Sir W. Dugdale and Robert Sanderson, afterwards Bishop, is the following most charming little inscription to John Marshall, Canon of the cathedral, 1446, beneath the figure of a rose:—

“Ut rosa pallescit ubi solem sentit abesse

Sic homo vanescit; nunc est, nunc desinit esse.”

which may be Englished

“As the rose loses colour not kissed by the sun,

So man fades and passes; now here, and now gone.”

The ascent of the towers gives magnificent views; from the central tower one may see “Boston Stump” on one hand, and on the other Newark spire. The big bell, too, has its attractions, but the greatest curiosity is the elastic stone beam, a very flat arch connecting the two western towers, made of twenty-three stones with coarse mortar joints, which only rises sixteen inches, and vibrates when jumped on. Its purpose is not clear, possibly to gauge the settlement of the towers. The north end now is thirteen inches lower than the south. A gallery in the thickness of the wall between the great west window and the Cinquefoil above it, allows a wonderful view of the whole length of the cathedral. It is called Sir Joseph Banks’ view.

THE BISHOP’S PALACE

THE CHANCERY

Within the Close, as we passed along looking at the cathedral, we had our backs to the canons’ houses. First comes the precentory and the sub-deanery near the Exchequer Gate, next the Cantilupe Chantry, with a figure of the Saviour in a niche in the gable end, and a curious square oriel window, and then the entrance to the Bishop’s palace opposite the Galilee porch. The old palace, begun about 1150 or possibly earlier, was a splendid building; the ruins of it are in the palace grounds. Through a gateway or vaulted porch, where is now the secretary’s office, you descend to the site of the magnificent hall, eighty-eight feet by fifty-eight, built by St. Hugh, for, like Vicars Court, with its steep flight of steps and its charming old houses, it is built on the slope of the hill. Succeeding bishops added to the pile in which Henry VI. and Henry VIII. were royally lodged and entertained, and the charges which cost Queen Katharine Howard her life took their origin from her meetings here and afterwards at Gainsborough with her relative Thomas Culpepper. The palace was despoiled in the days of the Commonwealth, and little but ruins now remain, but a part of it has been restored and utilised as a chapel by the late Bishop King, perhaps the most universally beloved of Lincoln’s many bishops. Buckden and Nettleham and Riseholme have supplied a residence for successive bishops, and now the bishop is again lodged close to his cathedral. But, in the grandiloquent language of a work entitled ‘The Antiquarian and Topographical Cabinet, containing a series of elegant views of the most interesting objects of curiosity in Great Britain, 1809,’ “The place where once the costly banquet stood arrayed in all the ostentatious luxury of Ecclesiastic greatness has now its mouldering walls covered with trees.” The same authority, speaking of Thornton Abbey, has this precious reflection, which is too good to lose: “Here in sweet retirement the mind may indulge in meditating upon the instability of sublunary greatness, and contemplate, with secret emotion, the wrecks of ostentatious grandeur.” The Chancery, built by Antony Bek, 1316, faces the east end of the minster yard; it is distinguished outside by an entrance arch and an oriel window. Inside, there are some very interesting old doorways, and a charming little chapel, with a wooden screen of c. 1490, the time of Bishop Russell, and two embattled towers on the old minster yard wall in the garden, of the early fourteenth century. The deanery is a modern building on the north side of the minster.

Pottergate, Lincoln.

It was in the chapter house, probably, that Edward I. held his great Parliament in 1301, which secured the Confirmation of Magna Charta. Edward II. and Edward III. also each held a parliament here, and since their time certainly seven kings of England have visited Lincoln.

MINSTER OR CATHEDRAL?

The cathedral precincts of Lincoln are called the “Minster Yard,” and the church is called the Minster, though Lincoln was a cathedral from the first; the term Minster being only properly applied to the church of a monastery, such as York, Canterbury, Peterborough, Ripon, and Southwell; of these, Canterbury is not often called a Minster, but York is always. Lincoln was never attached to a monastery.

CHAPTER X
PAULINUS AND HUGH OF LINCOLN

Pope Gregory and St. Augustine—Calumnies against the Jews—The Three “St. Hugh’s.”

Perhaps here it may be well to say something of the life of Paulinus, the first Christian missionary in Lincoln. And in doing so I must acknowledge the debt I owe to Sir Henry Howorth’s most interesting book, “The Birth of the English Church.”

PAULINUS BISHOP OF YORK

When Pope Gregory, having been struck by the sight of some fair-haired Anglian boys being sold as slaves in the Roman Forum, had determined to send a Mission to preach the Gospel in their land, he chose the prior of his own monastery of St. Andrew’s, which was on the site where now stands the church of San Gregorio on the Cælian Hill in Rome. The name of the prior was Augustine. With his companion monks, he set out, apparently in the spring of 596. They went from Ostia by sea to Gaul, but lingered in that country for above a year, and landed on the Isle of Thanet in April 597. He was well received by Æthelbert King of Kent and his wife Bertha, daughter of Charibert King of Paris. She was a Christian, and had brought her Christian chaplain with her. This made Augustine’s mission comparatively easy. Quarters were given him in Canterbury, and he began to build a monastery and was allowed to make use of the little church dedicated to St. Martin, where the Queen’s chaplain had officiated. Having then sent to the Pope for more missionaries, he received instructions from Gregory to establish a Metropolitan See in London and other Bishoprics in York and elsewhere. At the same time several recruits were sent to him among whom Bede particularises Mellitus, Justus, Paulinus, and Rufinianus. The first three became respectively Bishops of London, Rochester, and York, and Rufinianus Abbot of St. Augustine’s monastery at Canterbury. By the Pope’s command all these bishops were to be subject to Augustine during his life, and he was to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. Augustine died in the same year as St. Gregory, A.D. 604. A few years later, about 616, Mellitus and Justus both withdrew for a year to Gaul, but were recalled by King Eadbald, Justus to Rochester and Mellitus to become Archbishop of Canterbury after Laurence, a priest whom Augustine himself had selected to succeed him in 604, and who died in 619. To this post Justus succeeded in 624, and, as Archbishop, consecrated Romanus to the See of Rochester. Shortly after this Paulinus was consecrated Bishop of York by Justus in 625, and he accompanied Æthelbert’s daughter Æthelberga to the Court of Ædwin King of Deira, who ruled from the Forth to the Thames and who had sought her hand, promising that she should be free to worship as she liked and that if on inquiry he found her religion better than his own he would also become a Christian. He discussed the matter with Paulinus, and after many months’ delay summoned a Witenagemote and asked each counsellor what he thought of the new teaching, which at present had no hold except in Kent. Coifi, the Chief Priest of the old religion, was the first to speak; he said he had not got any good from his own religion though none had served the gods more faithfully—so if the new doctrine held out better hopes he would advise the king to adopt it without further delay. Coifi was followed by another of the king’s Ealdormen. His speech was a very remarkable one, and is accurately rendered by the poet Wordsworth in his Sonnet called Persuasion, which runs thus:—

“Man’s life is like a sparrow, mighty King!

That—while at banquet with your Chiefs you sit

Housed near a blazing fire—is seen to flit

Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering,

Here did it enter; there, on hasty wing,

Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold;

But whence it came we know not, nor behold

Whither it goes. Even such that transient thing,

The human Soul; not utterly unknown

While in the Body lodged, her warm abode;

But from what world she came, what use or weal

On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown;

This mystery if the Stranger can reveal,

His be a welcome cordially bestowed!”

THE FIRST ENGLISH BISHOP

After this the king gave Paulinus permission to preach the Gospel openly, and he himself renounced idolatry, and in April 627, with a large number of his people, he was baptized at York in the little church which was the first to be built on the site of York Minster. After this Paulinus baptized in the river Swale, and later he came to the province of “Lindissi,” and spent some time in Lincoln, converting Blaecca the “Reeve” of the city, and baptizing in the presence of the king a great number of people in the Trent either at Littleborough or Torksey.

He appears to have spent some time in Lincoln, and to have come back to it after 633, for early in 635 he consecrated Honorius the successor to Justus, and fifth Archbishop of Canterbury. The ceremony taking place probably in the little “church of stone” that he had built, possibly where St. Paul’s Church now stands. It was probably thatched with reeds, for eighty years later Bede speaks of it as being unroofed. If St. Paul’s church really was originally the church of Paulinus, it helps to remove the stigma that though Paulinus preached and baptised with effect, unlike Wilfrith, he founded nothing.

In 633 King Ædwin and both his sons were killed after a great battle against Penda King of Mercia and Coedwalla King of the Britons, at Haethfelth near Doncaster, and Christianity in Northumbria came to an abrupt end; though, when Paulinus left, to escort the widowed queen back to Kent, his faithful deacon James remained behind him, whose memorial we probably have in the inscribed cross shaft with its unusual interlaced pattern at Hawkswell near Catterick. To York Paulinus never returned; but on the death of Romanus, who had been sent by Archbishop Justus on a mission to the Pope but was drowned in the Bay of Genoa, he took charge of the See of Rochester, and there he remained till his death on October 10, 644, after he had been Bishop at York for eight and at Rochester for eleven years. Archbishop Honorius, who was consecrated just a year before the death of a Pope of the same name, ordained Ithamar to succeed Paulinus. He was a native of Kent and the first Englishman to be made a bishop. After the death of Paulinus in 644, more than four centuries passed before Remigius began to build the cathedral in 1075, which was altered and amplified so remarkably about 100 years later by Hugh of Lincoln.