BARTON-ON-HUMBER
BARTON-ON-HUMBER
Barton-on-Humber had a market and a ferry when Domesday Book was compiled, and was a bigger port than Hull. At the Conquest it was given to the King’s nephew, Gilbert of Ghent, son of Baldwin Earl of Flanders, whose seat was at Folkingham. The ferry is still used, and the Hull cattle boats mostly start from Barton landing-stage, but most of the passenger traffic is from the railway pier at New Holland, four miles to the east. The town is a mile from the waterside. It has two fine churches, of which St. Peter’s is one of the earliest in England; curiously one of the same type of Saxon church is also at a Barton, Earl’s Barton in Northants, and not far from it is another of similar date, at Brixworth, which is held to be the most noteworthy of all the early churches in England. Barnack and Wittering in the same county are also of the same style and of the same antiquity, and at Dover, at Bradford-on-Avon, and at Worth and Sompting in Sussex are others similar. Stow, near Lincoln, Broughton near Brigg, and Hough-on-the-Hill, and the two Lincoln towers and Bracebridge, are of similar age, but these last, like Clee and so many in the neighbourhood of Grimsby, Caistor and Gainsborough, have little but their tower or part of their tower left that can be called Saxon, while at Stow, and some of the churches in the other counties mentioned, there is more to see of the original building.
The last restoration of St. Peter’s, Barton, in 1898, has put the church into good condition and left the old work at the west end much as it was a thousand years ago; probably the church at first was very like what we may still see at Brixworth. The tower outside is divided into panels by strips of stone, which go deep into the walls and project from the rubble masonry, as at Barnack. This has been aptly termed “Stone carpentry,” but cannot really be a continuation in stone of a previously existing method of building with a wooden framework, such as we see in the half-timbered houses of the south of England, because that method of building was later. It is possibly a method imported from Germany; certainly the double light with the mid-wall jamb came from Northern Italy to the Rhenish provinces, and may have come on to England from thence. Hence it has been termed “Teutonic Romanesque.”
The Avon at Barton-on-Humber.
A SAXON CHURCH
ST. PETER’S, BARTON
Of the four stages of the tower the lowest has an arcading of dressed stone, as there is at Bradford-on-Avon, and on the east, south and west sides a round-headed doorway, and on the north a triangular-headed one, with massive “Long-and-Short” work. The next stage exhibits triangular arcading with double lights and a massive baluster and capital under a triangular arch. The third stage has no arcading, but a similar two-light window. The fourth stage is not Saxon but early Norman in style. From the west of the tower projects a sort of annexe, fifteen feet by twelve, of the same width as the tower and cöeval with it, having quoins of “Long-and-Short” work, this is pierced with two small rude lights north and south, and with two circular lights on the west. These circular lights are of extraordinary interest, for they still have in them, across the top of the upper opening and at the bottom of the lower one, a portion of the old original Saxon oak shutter, perforated with round holes to let in light and air, a thing absolutely unique. A chancel, whose foundations have been recently discovered, projected from the tower eastward, and just below the floor, near the north wall, is a curious bricked chamber, which might have been a small tomb.
St. Peter’s, Barton-on-Humber.
ST. MARY’S, BARTON
The tower has four doorways irregularly placed and all differing from each other: it is fitted up for daily morning service, for which it has been used intermittently for over a thousand years; for no doubt the original church consisted simply of the tower and the two chambers east and west of it. At present, from the interior of the spacious Decorated nave, with its added Perpendicular clerestory, when you look up at the west end and see the rude round-headed arches of the first and second stages of the tower, and the double triangular-headed light of the next stage, all of which come within the nave roof, you see at the same time two deep grooves cut in the tower face for the early steep-pitched roof. These start from the double light and finish by cutting through the upright stone strips which run like elongated pilasters up the whole height of the tower on either side. The tower and its annexe is of such absorbing interest that one hardly looks at the rest of the church, or stops to note its beautifully restored rood screen with a new canopy to it, which serves to hide the wide ugly chancel arch. But we shall perhaps be able to make up for this if we go on to St. Mary’s Church, which was the church of the people of Barton, and served by a secular priest, St. Peter’s being an appanage of Bardney Abbey. The churches both stand high, and are quite near one another. St. Mary’s was a Norman building, as the north arcade testifies; the south arcade was rebuilt in the Early English period, to which the massive tower also belongs, the parapet being later. Once the nave and chancel had a continuous roof till the clerestory was added, and were of the same width, and built of brick and stone intermingled and set anyhow. The four-light windows in the chancel are handsome. The north arcade has five round arches, and one, at the west end, pointed. The south arcade has only four arches, but larger and with slenderer columns, consisting of eight light shafts round a central pillar. On the south the chantry chapel extends the whole length of the chancel, and has beside the altar an aumbry and, what is very unusual in such a chapel, sedilia. The aisles are wide and out of proportion to the building in both churches. The east window is white, with one little bit of old glass in it, and on the floor is a full-sized brass of Simon Seman Sheriff of London, in Alderman’s gown. Some Parliamentarian soldiers’ armour is in the vestry of St. Peter’s. There are also two fine oak chests, one hollowed out of a section of a large tree with the outer slab of the tree several inches thick as a lid. A similar, but smaller, chest is in Blawith church vestry, near Coniston Lake, Lancashire.[7]
St. Mary’s, Barton-on-Humber.
INTEREST IN CHURCH HISTORY
In Barton St. Peter’s the Rector has provided a very full account of the history of the church, for which all who visit it must be extremely grateful.
It is very pleasant to find that the number are so decidedly on the increase of clergymen who take an interest in the past history of their churches, and write all they can find out about them, either in their parish magazines or in a separate pamphlet. Some of these, too, take pains with their old registers, and if only the rector, or someone in the parish whom he could trust to do the work with skill, care, and knowledge, would copy the old sixteenth and seventeenth century registers in a clear hand, the parish would be in possession of the most interesting of all local documents in a legible form, and the originals could be safely housed in a dry place, which is by no means the case with all of them at present, and no longer be subjected to the wear and tear of rough handling and the decay from damp which has been so fatal to the earliest pages of most of them.
The printing and placing more frequently in the church of a card, pointing out the salient features and giving what is known of the history of the building, would also be a boon to those visitors who know something of architecture, and would stimulate a taste for it in others, and a respect for old work, the lack of which has been the cause of so much destruction under the specious name of restoration in the earlier half of the past century. Things are much better now than they were two generations ago, but ignorance and want of means may still cause irreparable damage, which, if the above suggestion were universally carried out, would become less and less possible.
CHURCH PATRONAGE
Amongst those who take the greatest interest in their churches I am especially indebted to the Rev. G. G. Walker, Rector of Somerby near Grantham, the Rev. Canon Sutton, of Brant Broughton, the Rev. F. McKenzie, of Great Hale near Sleaford, and the Rev. C. H. Laing, of Bardney, who has done such good work in the excavation of the famous abbey. The writer, too, of letters in The Spilsby and Horncastle Gazette, on town and village life in Lincolnshire, brings together much interesting information. From him I gather that as far back as 668, when Theodore was Archbishop of Canterbury, local provision was made for the village clergy who were then, of course, but few in number. His wise arrangement, that those who built a church should have the right of choosing their pastor, initiated the system of private patronage and thereby encouraged the building and endowing of churches, so that it is not surprising to hear that in Domesday Book—400 years later than Theodore’s time—the county of Lincolnshire had no less than 226 churches. The original patron often gave the right of presentation to an abbey, which was a wise plan, as it ensured to the people a pastor, and to the pastor an adequate means of living, and provided for the building and upkeep of the church, which was often larger than the population of the village warranted either then or since.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NORTH-WEST
Winteringham—Alkborough and “Julian’s Bower”—Burton-Stather—Scunthorpe and Frodingham—Fillingham and Wycliff—Glentworth and Sir Christopher Wray—Laughton—Corringham—Gainsborough—The Old Hall—Lea and Sir Charles Anderson—Knaith and Sir Thomas Sutton—A Group of Early Church Towers—Lincolnshire Roads.
It is quite a surprise to the traveller in the north of the county to find so much that is really pretty in what looks on the map, from the artistic point of view, a trifle “flat and unprofitable,” but really there are few prettier bits of road in the county than that by “the Villages” under the northern Wolds, and there is another little bit of cliff near the mouth of the Trent which affords equally picturesque bits of village scenery combined with fine views over the Trent, Ouse, and Humber.
From South Ferriby a byway runs alongside the water to Winteringham, from whence the Romans must have had a ferry to Brough, whence their great road went on to the north.
In Winteringham church there are some good Norman arches, and a fine effigy of a knight in armour, said to be one of the Marmions. The road hence takes us by innumerable turns to West Halton, where the church is dedicated to St. Etheldreda, who is said to have hidden here from her husband Ecgfrith, when she was fleeing to Ely, at which place she founded the first monastery, in 672, six years before the building of the church at Stow. Murray notes that in the “Liber Eliensis” Halton is called Alftham.
Three miles to the south-east we find the large village of Winterton, just within a mile of the Ermine Street, and it is evident that a good many Romans had villas on the high ground looking towards the Humber, for both here and at Roxby, a mile to the south, good Roman pavements have been found, and another, four miles to the east, at Horkstow. Roxby church shows some pre-Norman stone work at the west end of the north aisle, and a fine series of canopied sedilia in the chancel, with unusually rich and lofty pinnacles. At Winterton a Roman pavement was noticed by De la Pryme in 1699, and another with a figure of Ceres holding a cornucopia was discovered in 1797. The churchyard has an Early English cross, and the tower, which is engaged in the aisles, is of the primitive Romanesque type, with the Saxon belfry windows in the lower stage, and elegant Early English ones above. An early slab is over the west door, the nave has lofty octagonal pillars with bands of tooth ornament. The transepts are unusually wide and have rich Decorated windows. A Holy Family, by Raphael Mengs, forms the altarpiece.
MAZES
From here we go west to Alkborough, and on a grassy headland overlooking the junction of the Trent with the Ouse, we find a saucer-shaped hollow a few feet deep and forty-four feet across, at the bottom of which is a maze cut in the turf by monks 800 years ago. It is almost identical in pattern with one at Wing, near Uppingham, in Rutland, and unlike those “quaint mazes on the wanton green” mentioned in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which “for lack of tread are undistinguishable,” it has been kept cleared out, and a copy of it laid down in the porch, as we find to be done on one of the porch piers at Lucca Cathedral, and in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. These mazes were Christian adaptations of the Egyptian and Greek labyrinths, and were supposed to be allegorical of the mazes and entanglements of sin from which man can only get free if assisted by the guiding hand of Providence, or of Holy Church. Hence in a Christian Basilica in Algeria the words “Sancta Ecclesia” are arranged in a complicated fashion in the centre of the maze. Other mazes used to exist at Appleby, Louth, and Horncastle in Lincolnshire, and at Ripon one of the same pattern, but half as large again as the Alkborough maze, was only ploughed up in 1827. At Asenby in Yorkshire is a similar one still carefully kept clear. That on St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester, is quadrangular and much simpler. At Leigh in Dorset is a “Miz Maze.” Northants, Notts, Wilts, Beds, Cambridge, and Gloucestershire, all had one at least. Comberton in Cambridge has one of precisely the same pattern, and at Hilton, in Huntingdonshire, is one called by the same name as that at Alkborough, “Julian’s bower.” This is thought to be a reminiscence of the intricate ‘Troy’ game described in Virgil, Aen. v., 588-593, as played on horseback by Iulus and his comrades:—
“Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta
Parietibus textum caecis iter, ancipitemque
Mille viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi
Falleret indeprensus et irremeabilis error.
Haud alio Teucrum nati vestigia cursu
Impediunt texuntque fugas et proelia ludo.”
And the fact that a labyrinthine figure cut in the turf near Burgh on the Solway by the Cumberland herdsmen was called “the walls of Troy” somewhat favours the interpretation. But it seems rather a far-fetched origin. Doubtless they served as an innocent recreation for the monks who lived at St. Anne’s chapel hard by, and the idea of such labyrinthine patterns is found in many churches abroad, for they are executed in coloured marbles, both in Rome and in the Early church of St. Vitale at Ravenna. The mazes formed of growing trees, as at Hampton Court, are more difficult to make out, as you cannot see the whole pattern at one time.
ALKBOROUGH
The church at Alkborough was, like Croyland, a bone of contention between the monks of Spalding and Peterborough, each claiming it as a gift from the founder Thorold, in 1052. Tradition says that it was partly rebuilt by the three knights, Brito, Tracy, and Morville, who had taken refuge in this most remote corner of Lincolnshire, where one of them lived, after their murder of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The original Early tower and tower-arch remain, and a fragment of a very early cross is now to be seen by the north pier. One of the bells has this inscription:—
“Jesu for yi Modir sake
Save all ye sauls that me gart make.”
BURTON-STATHER
In the village is a really beautiful old Tudor house of brick, with stone mullions, called Walcot Old Hall, the property of J. Goulton Constable, Esq. The little isolated bit of chalk wold which begins near Walcot is but four miles long, and in the centre of it is perched the village of Burton-Stather. The church stands on the very edge of the cliff, and a steep road leads down to the Staithe, a ferry landing stage, from which the village gets its name. Here, at a turn in the road, close to the village pump, still in universal use by the road side, we stopped to admire the wide and delightful view. The Trent was just below us. Garthorpe, where the other side of the ferry has its landing place, was in front, across the Trent lay the Isle of Axholme, green but featureless, and beyond it the sinuous Ouse, like a great gleaming snake, with the smoke of Goole rising up across the wide plain, and beyond the river, Howden tower; while, on a clear day, Selby Abbey and York Minster can be seen from the churchyard. We leave the village by an avenue of over-arching trees, and cross the Wold obliquely, passing Normanby Hall, the residence of Sir B. D. Sheffield, many of whose ancestors are buried in Burton-Stather church, and leaving the height, descend into a plain filled with smoke from the tall chimneys of the Scunthorpe and Frodingham iron furnaces. To come all at once on this recent industrial centre is a surprise after the bright clear atmosphere and keen air in which we have been revelling all day. But we soon leave the tall chimneys behind and find that the road divides; the left passing over to the “Cliff” at Raventhorpe near Broughton on the Ermine Street, and continuing south past Manton, where the black-headed gull, “Larus Ridibundus,” the commonest of all the gulls on the south coast of England, breeds on land belonging to Sir Sutton Nelthorpe of Scawby, to Kirton in Lindsey, and so by Blyborough, Willoughton, Hemswell, and Harpswell, to Spital-on-the-Street; and thence by Glentworth and Fillingham to Lincoln.
Of these places Blyborough is curiously dedicated to St. Alkmund, a Northumbrian Saint, to whom also is dedicated a church founded in the ninth century by the daughter of Alfred the Great in Shrewsbury. Willoughton once had a preceptory of the Templars, founded in 1170.
Harpswell in its Early Norman, or possibly pre-Norman, tower has a mid-wall shaft carved with chevron ornament, similar to that in the upper of two sets of early double lights on the south side of the tower of Appleton-le-Strey near Malton in Yorkshire. It also possesses a clock which was given in memory of the victory at Culloden, 1746. Moreover it contains several fine monuments; but Glentworth and Fillingham are of more interest than all these. Glentworth, for its very interesting church, and Fillingham, because from 1361 to 1368 it was the home of the great John Wyclif, who held the living as a ‘fellow’ of Balliol College, Oxford.
WYCLIF
Wyclif was made Master of Balliol in 1360, and became rector of Fillingham in the same year. In 1368 he moved to Ludgershall in Bucks, and in 1374 to Lutterworth, where he died on December 31, 1384. He was a consistent opposer of the doctrine of transubstantiation, for which he was condemned by the University of Oxford; and he renounced allegiance to the Pope, who issued no less than five Bulls against him. The Archbishop of Canterbury persecuted him in his latter years, and forty-four years after his death his bones were exhumed and burnt by order of the Synod of Constance, and the ashes cast into the Swift. He made the first complete translation of the Bible into English from the Vulgate, and in this he was assisted by Nicolas of Hereford, who took the Old Testament, Wyclif doing the New. Chaucer, who died in 1400, thus describes him in his Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”:—
A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a poure Persoun of a toun;
But riche he was of holy thought and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk
That Christes gospel trewly wolde preche.
Wide was his parische, and houses fer asonder,
But he ne lefte not for reyne ne thonder,
In sicknesse nor in mischiefe to visite
The ferrest in his parische, muche and lite,
Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.
This noble ensample to his sheep he gaf,
That first he wrought and afterward be taughte.
Out of the Gospel he the wordes caughte
And this figure he added eek thereto,
That if golde ruste, what shal iren do?
A better preest, I trowe, ther nowher non is,
He wayted after no pompe and reverence,
Ne maked him a spiced conscience,
But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taught, but first he folowed it himselve.
SIR CHRISTOPHER WRAY
Glentworth has a typical pre-Norman tower, built of small stones with dressed quoins. It has the two stringcourses, the first being two-thirds of the way up from the ground with only thin slits for lights below it and with the usual mid-wall shaft in the belfry window above it, but with an unusual impost; a slab with a boldly-cut cross on it forms the jamb in the light over the west window, and the south side shows ornamentation similar to that which we noticed at Stow. Besides the tower, the chancel-arch and a narrow priest’s door are all that remains of the Early work. The monument to Sir Christopher Wray, who lived here from 1574 to 1592, is a very fine one. The judge is represented in his robes and hat, with ruff, which his wife also wears, she having a hood and gown with jewelled stomacher. Four daughters are figured kneeling below, while the son kneels above in armour. Marble pillars with Corinthian capitals support the arch over the recess in which the figures lie, and it was once richly coloured and enclosed by a screen of wrought ironwork.
The right hand road from Scunthorpe runs down the centre of the plain half-way between the Cliff and the Trent, through a number of villages. Of these Ashby still maintains a Duck Decoy near the Trent. Bottesford has a fine cruciform church, with a handsome chancel, having narrow deep-set lancet windows of unusual length, ornamented with tooth moulding, a singular arrangement of alternate lancet and circular windows in the clerestory, and stone seats round the Early English arcade pillars, as at Claypole. Messingham, with its stained-glass and oak furniture collected by Archdeacon Bailey from various churches in his Archdeaconry and elsewhere, as also Scotter and Scotton, are but milestones on the way to Northorpe, where are two good doorways, one Norman, and one, in the south porch, Decorated, with fine carved foliage, and the old door still in use. The western bays of the arcade are built into the walls of the Perpendicular tower, which has been inserted between them. A sepulchral brass with inscription to Anthony Moreson, 1648, has been inserted into an old altar slab, shown as such by its five crosses. Thanks to Mrs. Meynell Ingram the church of Laughton, three miles west of Northorpe, was beautifully restored by Bodley and Garner in 1896. Here is a very fine brass of a knight of the Dalison (D’Alençon) family, about 1400, which, like that of Thomas and Johanna Massingberd at Gunby, has been made to serve again by a parsimonious Dalison of a later century.
Roads lead both from Northorpe and Laughton to Corringham. This village is on the great east-and-west highway from Gainsborough to Market-Rasen, and here, too, the fine Transition Norman church has been magnificently restored by Bodley at the sole cost of Miss Beckett, of Somerby Hall. It now has a fine rood-screen, good modern stained-glass windows, and a painting of the adoration of the Magi for a reredos. There is here a brass in memory of Robert and Thomas Broxholme, 1631, placed by their brother and sister, Henry and Mary, who all had “lived together above sixty years and for the most parte of the time in one family in most brotherly concord.” A long rhymed epitaph goes on to say:—
“Though none of them had Husband Child or Wife
They mist no blessings of the married life;
For to the poore they eva were insteed
Of Husband Wife and Parent at their need.”
GAINSBOROUGH
“THE MILL ON THE FLOSS”
From Corringham a turn to the right brings us after four miles to Gainsborough. From this town on the extreme edge of the county four roads and four railway lines radiate, and the Trent runs along the edge of the town with a good wide bridge over it, built in 1790, for which a stiff toll is demanded. It is described by George Eliot in “The Mill on the Floss,” as “St. Oggs,” where the ‘Eagre’ or ‘bore’ is thus poetically referred to. “The broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea; and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.” Constantly overrun by the Danes, the town was eventually looked on as his capital city by Swegen, who, with his son Canute, brought his vessels up the Trent in 1013, and died here, “full King of the Country,” in 1014. In the Civil War it was occupied first by the Royalists and afterwards by the Parliamentarians, and one of Cromwell’s first successful engagements was a cavalry skirmish at Lea, two miles to the south, when he routed and killed General Cavendish, whom he drove “with some of his soldiers into a quagmire,” still called ‘Cavendish bog.’ The place has some large iron works and several seed-crushing mills for oil and oil-cake, and much river traffic is done in large barges. Talking of barges, Gainsborough has the credit of having owned the first steam-packet seen in Lincolnshire waters. This was the ‘Caledonia,’ built at Glasgow, and brought round by the Caledonian Canal, to the astonishment of all the east coast fishermen, in 1815. She was a cargo boat, but she took passengers to Hull, and was a great boon to the villages on the Trent.
North Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough.
South Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough.
THE OLD HALL
River traffic below Gainsborough is somewhat hampered during the time of spring tides by the Eagre, which, when the in-rushing tide overcomes the river current and rides on the surface of the stream, rising in a wave six or seven feet high, rolls on from the mouth of the Trent to Gainsborough, a distance of more than twenty miles. The long street leading to the bridge is so dirty and narrow that you cannot believe as you go down it that you are in the main artery of the town. But when you have crossed the bridge and look back, the long riverside with its wharf and red brick houses, boats, and barges, has a very picturesque and old-world effect. The great sight of the town is the Old Hall, which stands on a grassy plot of some two acres, with a very poor iron railing round it, and a road all round that. In the middle of this rough grass-grown plot in the heart of the town is a charming old baronial hall, rebuilt in the times of Henry VII. and Elizabeth, after its destruction in 1470, and still occupied as a private residence. There was doubtless a building here before the time of the Conquest, and here it would be that Alfred the Great stopped on the occasion of his marriage with Ethelwith, daughter of Ethelred, and here, too, it would be that Swegen died, and his son Canute held his court. The present building is of brick and timber with a fine stone-built oriel on the north side, as the centre of a long frontage, and is of various patterns, having tall chimneys and buttresses on the west, and a brick tower on the north-east, and two wings on the south projecting from a magnificent central hall with much glass and woodwork, and a lantern. The large kitchen with its two huge fireplaces is at the end of this hall. Henry VIII. and Katharine Howard were entertained here by Lord Burgh, whose ancestor rebuilt the hall in Henry VII.’s time, c. 1480; and another of his Queens, Katharine Parr, was often here, being at one time the wife of Lord Burgh’s eldest son.
THE MASTER BUILDER
The wide area round the hall, with its untidy grass and the miserable iron fence, gives a singularly forlorn appearance to a beautiful and uncommon-looking building. It is supposed that the famous master-builder, “Richard de Gaynisburgh,” was born at Gainsborough, with whom, then styled “Richard de Stow,” the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln in 1306 contracted “to attend to and employ other masons under him for the new work,” at the time when the new additional east end or Angel Choir as well as the upper parts of the great tower and the transepts were being built. He contracted “to do the plain work by measure, and the fine carved work and images by the day.” One of the Pilgrim Fathers was a Gainsborough man, and a Congregational Chapel has been built as a memorial to him.
From Gainsborough, going north, we come at once to Thonock Hall, the seat of Sir Hickman Bacon, the premier baronet of England, and Morton is just to the west, where the church has a very good new rood screen and five Morris windows, from designs by Burne-Jones. Between Morton and Thonock is a large Danish camp, called Castle Hills, with a double fosse. On the other side of the town the westernmost road of the county runs south by Lea, Knaith, and Gate Burton to Marton, and thence to Torksey, which in early times was a bigger place than Gainsborough, and so on to Newark, but another road branches off by Torksey to the left, for Saxilby and Lincoln, twelve miles distant.
SIR CHARLES ANDERSON
Lea church stands high, and has a chantry in which is a cross-legged knight, Sir Ranulph Trehampton, 1300, and some good early glass of about 1330. Of Trehampton’s manor-house only the site remains, but the hall, which is full of antiquarian treasures, was the home of that well-known Lincolnshire worthy Sir Charles Anderson, Bart., the county antiquarian, 1804-1891. He was a charming personality. The following story, referring to him, was told me by that delightful teller of good stories, the Very Rev. Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester. At the time when a railway was being cut (between Lincoln and Gainsborough probably, for that passes through Lea), but at all events in a part of the county in which Sir Charles took a great interest, he was visiting the works, when an insinuating Irish navvy stopped and looked at him and then said, “So you’re Sir Charles Anderson, are ye? Sure now there’s scores of Andersons where I come from; there’s one now in Sligo, a saddler. Ach! he’s a good fellow is that; the rale gintleman. He gives without asking.” Then, after a pause, “You’ve a look of ’em.” The Andersons lived in Lincolnshire from the days of Richard II., first at Wrawby then at Flixborough, temp. Henry VII.
Gainsborough Church.
Knaith is noticeable as being the birthplace, in 1532, of Thomas Sutton, the founder of the Charterhouse in London, where he is buried. The church has what is not at all common in English churches, a baldacchino over the altar, but in fact it is not an ordinary church, being just a part of an old Cistercian nunnery, founded by Ralph Evermue, about 1180.
THE CHARTERHOUSE
Thomas Sutton was of Lincoln parents. He served in the army and was made inspector of the King’s Artillery. Having leased some land in the county of Durham, he proceeded to work the coal there, and became very wealthy, in fact the wealthiest commoner in the realm, and with at least £5,000 a year, so that he was able to give Lord Suffolk £13,000 for the house then called Howard House in Middlesex, which had been the original Charterhouse, founded in 1371 by Sir Walter Manney and dissolved in 1535. This was in May, 1611. He wished to do something to benefit the nation, but he left the details to the Crown. He died in December of the same year, but his charity was arranged to support eighty poor folk, and to teach forty boys, being, like Robert Johnson’s foundation at Uppingham, both a hospital and a school. The hospital remains in its old buildings in London, the school was moved in 1872 to Godalming, where it greatly flourishes.
A central road runs through the middle of the flat country, half-way between the Lincoln-and-Gainsborough road and the Ridge. This takes us from Corringham by a string of small villages to Stow, and thence by Sturton to Saxilby, and so back to Lincoln. Of those villages Springthorpe and Heapham both have the early unbuttressed towers, described in Chapters XXII. and XXIII., the former with herring-bone masonry, the latter, like Marton, is unfortunately covered with stucco. In the next village of Upton again we find herring-bone masonry; at Willingham-by-Stow, the base of the tower is early Norman; so that in spite of the ruthless way in which succeeding styles destroyed the work of their predecessors, we have a large group in this neighbourhood of churches whose early Norman or even Saxon work is still visible. At Sturton is a good brick church by Pearson, reminding one of that by Gilbert Scott at Fulney, just outside Spalding.
LINCOLNSHIRE ROADS
A few years ago, when the first motor made its way into Lincolnshire, the road from Gainsborough to Louth was one long stretch of small loose stones. It had never even dreamt of a steam roller, and there were always ruts for the wheels, and as Lincolnshire carriage wheels were set three or four inches wider apart so that they could accommodate themselves to the cart ruts, when we brought a carriage up from Oxfordshire it was found impossible to use it till the axles had been cut and lengthened so that it could run in the ruts. But this was a great improvement on the days my grandmother remembered, when it took four stout horses to draw a carriage at foot’s pace from Ingoldmells to Spilsby (and this was only 100 years ago), or when Sir Charles Anderson saw a small cart-load of corn stuck on the road and thatched down for the winter there, doubtless belonging to a small farmer who had but one horse, which could not draw the load home. Mention is made in this chapter of Scunthorpe. The iron workers there appear to be keen footballers, for I notice that there is now (December, 1913) one family there of eleven brothers between the ages of 18 and 43, ten of them experienced players, who challenge any single family anywhere to play two matches, one at the home of each team. I wonder if any family of eleven stalwart sons will be found to take them on.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ISLE OF AXHOLME
Epworth and the Wesleys—“Warping”—Crowle—St. Oswald—St. Cuthbert.
The Isle of Axholme, or Axeyholm, is, as the name when stripped of its tautology signifies, a freshwater island, for Isle, ey and holm are all English, Anglo-Saxon, or Danish, for “island,” and Ax is Celtic for water. The whole region is full of Celtic names, for it evidently was a refuge for the Celtic inhabitants. Thus we have Haxey, and Crowle (or Cruadh = hard, i.e., terra firma), also Moel (= a round hill), which appears in Melwood. Bounded by the Trent, the Idle, the Torn, and the Don, it fills the north-west corner of the county, and is seventeen miles long and seven wide. The county nowhere touches the Ouse, but ends just beyond Garthorpe and Adlingfleet on the left bank of the Trent, about a mile above the Trent falls. The northern boundary of the county then goes down the middle of the channel of the Humber estuary to the sea. Once a marsh abounding in fish and water-fowl, with only here and there a bit of dry ground, viz., at Haxey, Epworth, Belton and Crowle, it has now a few more villages on Trent side, and two lines of railway, one going south from Goole to Gainsborough, and one crossing from Doncaster by Scunthorpe and Frodingham to Grimsby.
TWO LINCOLNSHIRE MEN
An unfair arrangement was made by Charles I. by which the Dutchman Vermuyden, the famous engineer who afterwards constructed the “Bedford Level,” undertook to drain the land, some of which lies from three to eight feet below high water-mark, he receiving one-third of all the land he rescued, the king one-third, the people and owners only the other third between them. This gave rise to the most savage riots; and the Dutch settlement at Sandtoft, where it is said that the village is still largely Dutch, was the scene of endless skirmishes, sieges, and attacks. A good insight into the lawlessness of the time is obtained from a book called “The M.S.S. in a Red Box,” published by John Lane. The ancestors of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, whose banishment with Bolingbroke in lieu of trial by combat, is described in the opening scenes of Shakespeare’s “Richard II.,” had a castle in Norman times near Owston, between Haxey and East-Ferry on the Trent: so that both the would-be combatants were Lincolnshire men.
Bolingbroke in the play is banished
“till twice five summers have enriched our fields,”
and Mowbray’s sentence is pronounced by the king in these words:—
“Norfolk, for thee remains a heavier doom,
Which I with some unwillingness pronounce:
The fly-slow hours shall not determinate
The dateless limit of thy dear exile.
The hopeless word of never to return
Breathe I against thee, upon pain of life.”
Richard II., I. 3.
Norfolk was banished in 1398, and died in Venice in the following year, and in Act IV., Scene 1 of the play, when Bolingbroke announces that he shall be “repealed”:—
“and, though mine enemy, restored again
to all his lands and signories.”
The Bishop of Carlisle answers:—
“That honourable day shall ne’er be seen.
Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ; in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black Pagans, Turks and Saracens;
And, toil’d with works of war, retired himself
To Italy; and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country’s earth,[8]
And his pure soul unto his Captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.”
THE WESLEY FAMILY
In the church of Belton is a fine effigy of a knight in chain armour, an hour-glass-stand on a pillar near the pulpit, as at Leasingham, and a monument to Sir Richard de Belwood. Temple Belwood, in the centre of the island, was a preceptory of the Knights Templars. Epworth is the chief town, and is famous as the birthplace of John Wesley. His father, Samuel, was the rector of S. Ormsby when he published his heroic poem in ten books on the Life of Christ, which caused him to be hailed by Nahum Tate, the Laureate of the day, as a sun new risen, before whom he and others would naturally and contentedly fade to insignificance.
“E’en we the Tribe who thought ourselves inspired
Like glimmering stars in night’s dull reign admired,
Like stars, a numerous but feeble host,
Are gladly in your morning splendour lost.”
Queen Mary, to whose “Most sacred Majesty” the poem was dedicated, bestowed on him the Crown living of Epworth, to which he was presented in 1696, two years after her death. But, though he owed his living to the Whigs, rather than side with the dissenters, he voted Tory, and was accordingly persecuted with great animosity by high and low, thrown into prison for a debt, his cattle and property damaged, and in 1709 his home burnt down, which made a deep impression on his six-year-old son John, who never forgot being “plucked as a brand from the burning.”
John, the fifteenth child, was the middle brother of three, who all had a first-rate public school and university education, getting scholarships both at school and college: John at Charterhouse, the others under Dr. Busby at Westminster, and all at Christchurch, Oxford, whence John, at the age of seventeen, wrote to his mother “I propose To be busy as long as I live.” Eventually he became a Fellow of Lincoln. The whole family were as clever as could be, and the seven daughters had a first-rate education from their father and mother at home. Mrs. Wesley was a remarkable woman, a Jacobite—which was somewhat disconcerting to her husband, who had written in defence of the Revolution—and a person of strong independence of spirit. Of her daughters, Hetty was the cleverest; and she is the only one who gives no account of the famous “Epworth Ghost,” which is significant, when both her parents and all her sisters wrote a full account of it. Hetty’s poems are of a very high standard of excellence, and it is more than likely that she wrote the verse part—for it is partly in prose dialogue—of “Eupolis’ Hymn to the Creator,” which is far better than anything else attributed to Sam Wesley. He died in 1735, and John, who had been curate to him at Epworth and Wroot (the livings went together), left the neighbourhood; and the place which had been the home of one of Lincolnshire’s most remarkable families for nearly forty years knew them no more. (See [Appendix I.])
JOHN WESLEY
Lincoln, however, saw John Wesley, for he preached in the Castle yard in 1780, as his father had done seventy-five years earlier, when he was spitefully imprisoned for debt. He was preaching at Lincoln again in 1788, and again in July, 1790, in the new Wesleyan Chapel. Eight months later he died. His last sermon was preached at Leatherhead, February 23, 1791, and his last letter was written on the following day to Dr. John Whitehead. He died on March 2, aged 88, having, as he said, during the whole of his life “never once lost a night’s sleep.” A memorial tablet to John and his brother Charles was placed in 1876 in Westminster Abbey. But there is also a fine statue of him as a preacher in gown and bands, showing a strong, rugged and kindly face, and at the base an inscription: “The world is my parish.” This is in front of the City Road Chapel, which he had built in Moorfields, and where he was buried, but not till 10,000 people had filed past to take their last look at the well-known face as he lay in the chapel.
Dean Stanley visiting this once, said that he would give a great deal to preach in the pulpit there, and when, to his query whether the ground was consecrated and by whom, the attendant answered, “Yes; by holding the body of John Wesley,” he rejoined, “A very good answer.”
John Wesley himself had been denied access to Church of England pulpits for fifty years, 1738-1788. Even when he preached at Epworth in 1742, it was from his father’s tombstone; and in most cases his congregations, which were often very large, were gathered together in the open air. We hear of him preaching to a large assemblage in the rain at North Elkington, on April 6, 1759; and also at Scawby, Tealby, Louth, Brigg and Cleethorpes; but in June, 1788, he notes in his diary: “Preached in church at Grimsby, the Vicar reading prayers (a notable change this), not so crowded in the memory of man.” Each president of the Wesleyan Conference sits in Wesley’s chair on his inauguration, and has Wesley’s Bible handed to him to hold, as John Wesley himself holds it in his left hand in the statue.
WARPING
We have alluded to the process of warping which is practised in the isle. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Weorpan (= to turn aside); it indicates the method by which the tide-water from the river, when nearly at its highest, is turned in through sluices upon the flat, low lands, and there retained by artificial banks until a sufficient deposit has been secured, when the more or less clarified water is turned back into the river at low tide, and the process may be continuously repeated for one, two, or three years. The water coming up with the tide is heavily charged with mud washed from the Humber banks, and this silt is deposited to the depth of some feet in places, and has always proved to be of the utmost fertility. The process is a rather difficult and expensive one, costing £10 an acre, but it needs doing only once in fourteen years or so. A wet season is bad for warping, and 1912 was as bad as 1913 was good.
At Crowle is a church of some importance, for in it is a bit of very early Anglian carving, probably of the seventh century. It is part of the stem of a cross, and has been used by the builders of the Norman church as a lintel for their tower arch. On it are represented a man on horseback (such as we see on the Gosforth cross, and on others in Northumbria), some interlacing work and a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Also two figures which I have nowhere seen accurately explained, but explanation is easy, for if you go and examine the great Anglian cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, you will find just such a pair of figures with their names written over them thus: “S. Paulus et S. Antonius panem fregerunt in Deserto.” The figures are so similar that they would seem to have been carved by the same hand, and the cross at Ruthwell can be dated on good evidence as but a year or two later than that at Bewcastle, whose undoubted date is 670.
ST. OSWALD
The church is dedicated to St. Oswald, not the archbishop of York who died in 992 and was buried at Worcester, but the sainted king of Northumbria who died in battle, slain by Penda, King of Mercia, at Maserfield, A.D. 642. His head, arms and hands were cut off, and set up as trophies, but were afterwards kept as holy relics, the hands at Bamborough, while one arm was for a time at Peterborough. The head was at Bamborough, and later at Lindisfarne in St. Cuthbert’s Cathedral, where the monks placed it in St. Cuthbert’s coffin. He had died in 687, and this coffin, when the Danes pillaged the cathedral, was taken away by the monks to Cumberland and carried by them from place to place in their flight, according to St. Cuthbert’s dying wish; and from 690 to 998, when it finally rested in the cathedral, it was kept in the coffin which is now in Durham Library. For 100 years, 783 to 893, it rested at Chester, and then passed to Ripon, and so to Durham, where it was enshrined and visited by hundreds of pilgrims. The marks of their feet are plain to see still. In 1104 the coffin was opened, and St. Oswald’s head seen in it. In 1542 the shrine being defaced, the body was buried beneath the pavement. In 1826 it was again opened, and some relics then taken out are now in the Cathedral Library—a ring, a cup and patten, the latter about six inches square, of oak with a thin plate of silver over it, and a stole. This was beautifully worked by the nuns at Winchester 1,000 years ago, and intended for Wulfstan, but on his death given by them to King Athelstan, and by him to St. Cuthbert’s followers.
ST. CUTHBERT’S TOMB
The late Dean Kitchin described to me how, in company with a Roman Catholic bishop and a medical man, he had opened what was supposed to be St. Cuthbert’s tomb about the beginning of this century. The old chronicler had related how he was slain in battle, how the body was hastily covered with sand and afterwards taken up, and for fear of desecration was carried about by the monks whithersoever they went, until at last it was laid in a tomb, and a shrine built over it in Durham Cathedral. He also said that the saint suffered from a tumour in the breast, the result of the plague in 661, which latterly had got better. It was known where the shrine was and the reputed tomb was close by. The tomb slab was removed; beneath it were bones enough to form the greater part of one skeleton, and there were two skulls. “What do you think of that?” asked the dean; the bishop at once replied “St. Oswald’s head.” The doctor then said, “This body has never been buried.” “How do you make that out?” “Because the skin has not decayed but dried on to the limbs as you see, as if it had been dried in sand,” just as tradition said. “Also,” he said, “there is a hole in the breast here which has partly filled up, evidence probably of a tumour or abscess which was healing,” again just what the chronicler stated. One of the skulls showed a cut right through the bone, like the cut of axe or sword, again corroborating the story of the death of St. Oswald in battle. The whole account seemed to me to be most interesting, and certainly it would be difficult to obtain more conclusive proof of the veracity in every detail of the old chronicler.
CHAPTER XIX
THE NORTH-EAST OF THE COUNTY
Thornton Curtis—Barrow—The Hull-to-Holland Ferry—Goxhill—Thornton Abbey—Immingham—The New Docks—Stallingborough—The Ayscough Tombs—Great Cotes—Grimsby—The Docks—The Church, Cleethorpes—Legend of Havelock the Dane.
We will now return to the north-east of the county.
From Brocklesby a good road runs north by Ulceby, with its ridiculously thin, tall spire, and Wootton, to Thornton Curtis and Barrow-on-Humber.
THORNTON CURTIS
Thornton Curtis is a place to be visited, because it possesses one of the seven black marble Tournai fonts like those at Lincoln and Winchester. This stands in a wide open space at the west end of the church, mounted on a square three-stepped pedestal. The four corner shafts, like those at Ipswich, are of lighter colour than the central pillar and the top. The latter has suffered several fractures owing to its having been more than once moved, and the base is much worn as if it had been exposed to the weather. The sides are sculptured with griffins and monsters, and on the top at each corner is a bird. Of the church the groined porch has been renewed, but the doorway is old and good, and part of the ancient oak door remains with the original fine hinges, and a design in iron round the head of the door. On the floor near the south-west corner of the church is a sepulchral stone slab with a half effigy of a lady in deep relief showing at the head end. There is a fine wide Early English tower arch, and the handsome arches of the nave are borne on clustered pillars, which are all alike on the north side, but of different patterns on the south side, and with excellent boldly cut foliage capitals, the western capital and respond being especially fine. The north aisle is very wide, and the church unusually roomy. The pine roof and the oak seats were all new about thirty years ago. The light and graceful rood screen is also new, and has deep buttress-like returns on the western side, as at Grimoldby. The chancel has late twelfth century lancets, one with a Norman arch, the others pointed, showing the transition period; once the church was all Norman, but it was extended westwards early in the thirteenth century. There are two charming piscinas of the same period, with Norman pilasters and round-headed arches, but the western one has had a later pointed arch, apparently put on in more recent times.
In the north aisle wall there are three arched niches for tombs, and on the north side of the chancel outside is a wide Norman arch with a flat buttress curiously carried up from above the centre of the archway, as in the Jews’ House at Lincoln. Near the south porch is a mural tablet carved in oak, with old English lettering, which reads thus:—
In the yer yat all the stalles
In thys chyrch was mayd
Thomas Kyrkbe Jho Shreb
byn Hew Roston Jho Smyth
Kyrk Masters in the yer of
Our Lorde God MCCCCCXXXII.
In the churchyard is half of the shaft of a cross, octagonal, with rosettes carved at intervals on the four smaller sides. Like the font, it is mounted on a broad, square three-stepped pedestal.
At Barrow, two miles further north, there was once a monastery, founded in the seventh century by St. Ceadda, or Chad, on land given by Wulfhere King of Mercia. This is an interesting corner of the county. New Holland, where the steam ferry from Hull lands you, is but three miles to the north, and near Barrow Haven station, between the ferry pier and Barton, is a remarkable ancient Danish or British earthwork called “The Castles”—a large tumulus-topped mound with a wide fosse, and with other mounds and ditches grouped round it, which, when occupied, were surrounded by marshes and only approachable by a channel from the Humber. The claim that this is the site of the great battle of Brunanburh in 937 cannot be looked upon as more than the merest conjecture. Both Barton and Barrow have been claimed for it; and “Barrow Castles” might or might not have had some connection with the great battle, which certainly is referred to as near the Humber in Robert de Brunne’s chronicle, as follows:—
“He brought the King Anlaf up the Humber
With seven hundred ships and fifteen, so great was the number.
Athelstan here saw all the great host,
He and Edward his brother hurried to the coast.
At Brunnisburgh on Humber they gave them assault,
From Morning to Evening lasted the battle,
At the last to their ships the King gave them chase
All fled away, that was of God’s grace.”
THE HULL FERRY
The Great Northern Railway runs south from Holland pier to Ulceby, and then splits right and left to Brigg and Grimsby; and here let me warn anyone who thinks to bring a motor over by the ferry to or from Hull. The sloping stage at New Holland is fairly easy, though the boats’ moveable gangway is not provided with an inclined approach board, the simplest thing in the world, but each car or truck has to bump on and off it with a four-inch rise, and an extra man or two are required to lift the wheels of each loaded truck on or off—a childishly stupid arrangement which reflects no credit on the brains of the officers of the Central Railway, who own the ferry service; but on the Hull side matters are much worse, and I don’t think that any method of loading or unloading even in a remote Asiatic port can be so barbaric and out-of-date as that which the Central Railway provides for its long-suffering customers. To get a motor on board from Hull is both difficult and dangerous; after threading an intricate maze of close-set pillars a car has to go down a very steep and slippery gangway, and when at the bottom has to turn at right angles with no room to back, and across a moveable gangway so narrow that the side railing has to be taken off and a loose plank added to take the wheels; then, whilst the car hangs over the water on the slippery slope, several men lift the front part round to the left and then, with a great effort, drag the back wheels round to the right, and after filling up a yawning gap between the slope and the gang-plank by putting a piece of board of some kind, but with no fit, to prevent the wheel from dropping through or the car going headlong into the sea, the machine is got on to the deck; and then all sorts of heavy goods on hand-barrows are brought on, four men having to hang on to each down the slippery planks, and these are piled all round the motor, and all are taken off on the other side with incredible exertions before the motor has a chance to move. The crossing itself takes but twenty minutes, but the whole process of getting on, crossing and getting off, occupied us two hours, and a really big car would never have been able to get over at all. No one at the Hull Corporation pier seems to know anything about the use of a crane for loading purposes, and it is evident that passenger traffic with any form of vehicle is not to receive any encouragement from this anything but up-to-date railway company. Why do not the Hull Corporation insist on something very much better? The parallelogram between the railway and Humber, when it turns south opposite Hull, has a belt of marsh along the river side, and because it was in old times so inaccessible, it contains some fine monastic buildings.
Great Goxhill Priory.
GOXHILL
THORNTON ABBEY
Two miles west of Barrow is Goxhill. Here there is a fine church tower, with a delicate parapet, and a mile south is the so-called “Priory,” which was probably only a memorial chapel served by a hermit in the pay of the De Spenser family. Murray gives this entry from the bishop’s registers for 1368: “Thomas De Tykhill, hermit, clerk, presented by Philip Despenser to the chapel of St. Andrew in the parish of Goxhill, on the death of Thomas, the last hermit.” It is now a picturesque ruin of two stories, the lower one vaulted and with three large Decorated windows at the sides, and a large double round-headed one at the end, all now blocked, the building being used for a barn. Two miles from this, and near Thornton Abbey Station, is all that is left of Thornton Abbey. A fine gateway, second only to that at Battle Abbey, and two sides of a beautiful octagonal chapter-house, with very rich arcading beneath the lovely three-light windows. Founded in 1139, for a prior and twelve Augustinian canons, it became an abbey in 1149, and in 1517 a “mitred” abbey, the only one in the county except Croyland. And these two are now the most notable of all the monastic remains in Lincolnshire. One of its abbots was said to have been walled up alive, and Bishop Tanner, in his MS. account of the abbey, now in the Bodleian, says of Abbot Walter Multon, 1443: “He died, but by what death I know not. He hath no obit, as other Abbots have, and the place of his burial hath not been found,” and Stukeley, 1687-1765, says that on taking down a wall in his time a skeleton was found in a sitting posture, with a table and a lamp, but I am glad to think that though the tradition is not infrequent,—probably as an echo from the days of the Roman Vestal Virgins—there is no positive evidence of anyone ever being immured alive; though an inconvenient dead body was doubtless got rid of at times in that way.
THE ABBEY GATE
The principal remaining part of the abbey is the fine grey stone gateway, a beautiful arch flanked by octagon turrets, with a passage through them, and then other arches on each side, and beyond these two corner towers. Above the central archway there are two rows of statues in niches with canopies. The Virgin being crowned by the Holy Trinity is flanked by full-length statues of St. Antony and St. Augustine. Other figures are above these, but not easy to make out. Inside the gateway are guard rooms, and a winding staircase leading to the large refectory hall. An oriel in this contained an altar, as the piscina and a squint from an adjoining chamber testify. The approach over the ditch up to the gateway is by a curious range of massive brickwork, with coved recesses and battlements, all along on each side. The ruin is owned by Lord Yarborough, and is kept locked, but an attendant is always on the spot, as both the abbey and Brocklesby Park are favourite objects for excursions from Hull, Grimsby, and Cleethorpes.
Thornton Abbey Gateway.
THE CHAPTER HOUSE
The abbey was a very magnificent one, occupying 100 acres. Henry VIII. was so well entertained there in 1541 that when he had suppressed the abbey he bestowed the greater part of the land on a new foundation in the same building, a college of the Holy Trinity; but a few years later, either in 1547 or 1553, that in turn was dissolved, and the land granted to the pitifully subservient Bishop Henry Holbeche. Inside the gateway is a large square, on the east side of which stood the chapter-house, a handsome octagonal building, of which two sides remain, as does also a fragment of the beautiful south transept, and, still further south, the abbot’s lodging, now in use as a farmhouse. The church was 235 feet long and sixty-two feet wide, the transepts being double of that. The architecture was mainly of the best Decorated period. There are many slabs with incised crosses still to be seen, one of Robert Girdyk, 1363.
Remains of Chapter House, Thornton Abbey.
East Halton lies east of the abbey, whence the road runs through North and South Killingholme, at the corner of which is a picturesque old brick manor-house of the Tudor period, with linen-pattern oak panelling and grotesque heads over the doors inside, and outside a remarkably fine chimney-stack and some fine old yew trees. The church has a very large Norman tower-arch, an interesting old roof and the remains of a delicately carved rood-screen. From here we go to Habrough and Immingham, where some curious paintings of the Apostles are set between the clerestory windows.
IMMINGHAM DOCK
Immingham village is more than two miles from the haven, and here the most enormous works have long been in progress. Indeed, at Immingham a new port has sprung up in the last five years, and to this the Great Central Railway, who so utterly neglect the convenience of passengers with vehicles at the Hull ferry, have given the most enlightened attention, and by using the latest inventions and all the most advanced methods and laying out their docks in a large and forward-looking way to cover an enormous area, have created a dock which can compete successfully with any provincial port in England.
A deep-water channel leads to the lock gates on the north side of what is the deepest dock on the east coast, with forty-five acres of water over thirty feet deep. It runs east and west, and it is about half a mile long. A quay 1,250 feet long, projects into the western half of this, leaving room for vessels to load or unload on either side of it, direct from or into the railway trucks. A timber-quay occupies the north-west side of the dock, and the grain elevator is at the east end, while all along the whole of the south side runs the coaling quay. There are at least twenty-seven cranes able to lift two, three, five, ten, and one even fifty tons on the various quays, and on the coaling-quay eight hoists, on to which the trucks are lifted and the coal shot into the vessels, after which the truck returns to the yard by gravitation automatically. Each of these hoists can deal with 700 tons of coal an hour, and as each hoist has eight sidings allotted to it there are 320 waggons ready for each. One of these hoists is moveable so that two holds of a vessel can be worked simultaneously. The means for quick and easy handling of the trucks, full and empty, by hydraulic power, and light for the whole dock also is supplied from a gigantic installation in the power-house, near the north-west corner of the dock; and this quick handling is essential, for the many miles of sidings can hold 11,600 waggons, carrying 116,000 tons of coal or more, besides finding room for empties. The coal is brought from Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts, and Lincolnshire, and not far short of 3,000,000 tons of coal will be now sent out of England from this port alone.[9] It seems to the writer that to send away at this tremendous rate from all our big coaling ports the article on which all our industries virtually depend is a folly which no words are too strong to condemn. With coal England has the means of supplying all her own wants for many generations, but it is not inexhaustible, and when it is gone, where will England be? Will anything that may be found ever take its place? And, unless we are able to reassure ourselves on this point, is this not just a case in which a wise State would step in and prohibit export, and not allow the nation to cut its own throat like a pig swimming? Large store sheds are now (1914) being built for wool to be landed direct from Australia. Thus Immingham will compete with Liverpool, where I have seen bales so tightly packed that when you knock with your knuckles on the clean-cut end of one it resounds like a board.
STALLINGBOROUGH
Going on south from Immingham village we come, after three miles, to Stallingborough.
THE AYSCOUGH TOMBS
The old church having fallen, the present brick parallelogram, with tower and campanile, was built in 1780. Inside, though destitute of any touch of church architecture, it is beautifully clean, and if you penetrate up to the very end you will be rewarded by seeing what the organ absolutely obscures till you reach the altar rail—a really wonderful alabaster tomb of the Ayscoughe, Ayscugh, or Askew family, at the north-east corner, inside the chancel rail. Above is part of a bust of Francis, the father, who lived at South Kelsey, near Caister, and who so basely, in terror for himself, betrayed his sister Anne’s hiding-place, which resulted in her being first tortured and then burnt at Smithfield in 1546, her crime being that she had read the Bible to poor folk in Lincoln Minster. The whole story is too horrible to dwell upon. This cowardly brother is portrayed half length, in a recess, leaning his head on his left hand and holding in his right a spear. From this it will be seen that this is no ordinary sepulchral monument, but a work of art. Below him his son, Edward of Kelsey, 1612, lies supine in plate armour and a ruff, with bare head pillowed on a cushion, while on a raised platform, just behind him, his wife Esther, daughter of Thomas Grantham, Esq., leans on her right elbow; she, too, in a ruff with hair done high and with a tight bodice and much-pleated skirt. The faces look like portraits, and Sir Edward has a singularly feeble, but not unpleasant, face, with small, low forehead. On the wall at his wife’s feet is a painted coat of arms on a lozenge, with nineteen quarterings, and a real helmet is placed on the tomb slab below it. The slab is a very massive one, and below it is an inscription in gold letters on a black ground in Latin, which is from Psalm CXXVIII. “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house, thy children like the olive branches round about thy table, lo thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord”; and beneath this, on the side of the tomb, are the kneeling effigies of six sons and six daughters. The whole thing—both the effigies and the inscription—is similar to the Tyrwhit tomb at Bigby. Above the mural monument of the father is the Ayscoughe crest, a little grey ass coughing, and under his half-effigy is a later inscription, which doubtless refers to his son, and not to himself, the poor, unhappy cause of his sister’s dreadful sufferings. It runs thus:—
Clarus imaginibus proavum, sed mentis honestae
Clarior exemplis, integritate, fide.
Una tibi conjux uni quae juncta beatas
Fecerat et noctes et sine lite dies.
Praemissi non amissi.
And a thing called on the monument an “Anigram,” which is past the understanding of ordinary men, is also part of the inscription. The extraordinary state of preservation of the whole group is a marvel.
Other inscriptions and brasses are in the church, though partly hidden by the organ and the altar, one to the second wife of Anne’s father, Sir William, along with others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the churchyard is the stem of a cross.
Four miles further south the fine broad fifteenth-century tower of Great Cotes of rich yellow stone, attracts anyone who is passing from Goxhill to Grimsby, and it is a church which well repays a visit.
GREAT COTES
In the churchyard, after passing under a yew-tree arch, you see a magnificent walnut on a small green mound. There is no porch. You enter by a small, deeply moulded doorway at the north-west end of the north aisle. The pillars of the arcades are clusters of four rather thick shafts, some with unusually large round capitals, but others various in shape, and all of a bluish grey stone. There are four bays, three big and one a small one next the tower at the west end. There is a flat ceiling, both in nave and chancel, which cuts off the top of the Early English tower arch; hence the nave and aisles are covered, as at Swaton, near Helpringham, by one low, broad slate roof, reminding one of that at Grasmere. The chancel arch, if it can be called an arch at all, is the meanest I ever saw, and only equalled by the miserable, and apparently wooden, tracery of the east window. The chancel, which is nearly as long as the nave, is built of rough stones and has Decorated windows. On the floor is a curious brass of local workmanship probably, to Isabella, wife of Roger Barnadiston, c. 1420, and the artist seems to have handed on his craft, for the attraction of the church is a singular seventeenth century brass before the altar, to Sir Thomas Barnadiston, Kt. of Mikkylcotes, and his wife Dame Elizabeth, and their eight sons and seven daughters. The children kneel behind their kneeling parents, who are, however, on a larger scale, and have scrolls proceeding from their mouths. Above them is a picture of the Saviour, with nimbus, rising from a rectangular tomb of disproportionately small dimensions, while Roman soldiers are sleeping around. A defaced inscription runs all round the edge of the brass, and in the centre is the inscription in old lettering: “In the worschypp of the Resurrectio of o̅r Lord and the blessed sepulcur pray for the souls of Sir Thos Barnadiston Kt. and Dame Elizabeth his wife
and of yʳ charite say a pʳ noster ave and cred
and ye schall have a C days of p~don to yoʳ med”
GRIMSBY
Another six miles brings us to the outskirts of Grimsby, the birthplace, in 1530, of John Whitgift, Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury. This is not at all an imposing or handsome town, but the length of the timber docks, and the size and varied life in the great fish docks, the pontoons which project into the river and are crowded with fishing boats, discharging tons of fish and taking in quantities of ice, are a wonderful sight. 165,510 tons of fish were dealt with in 1902—it is probably 170,000 now; and 300 tons of ice a day is made close by. The old church is a fine cruciform building, with a pair of ugly turrets at the end of nave, chancel, and transepts. Inside it is fine and spacious, and in effect cathedral-like. The transepts have doorways and two rows of three-light windows with tooth moulding round the upper lights and the gables. A corbel table with carved heads runs all round the church.
The south transept Early-English porch had eight shafts on either side, in most cases only the capitals now remain. The south aisle porch is good, but less rich. The tower arches are supported on octagonal pillars, which run into and form part of the transept walls. They are decorated by mouldings running up the whole length. The nave has six bays, and tall, slender clustered columns and plain capitals, with deeply moulded arches. Dreadful to relate, the columns and capitals are all painted grey.
There is a unique arrangement of combined triforium and clerestory, the small clerestory windows being inserted in the triforium into the taller central arches of the groups of three, which all have slender clustered shafts. This triforium goes round both nave, chancel and transepts, a very well carved modern oak pulpit rests on a marble base with surrounding shafts. The lectern is an eagle of the more artistic form, with one leg advanced and head turned sideways and looking upwards. I wonder that this is not more common, for I see it is figured in the A. and N. Stores catalogue. The sedilia rises in steps, as at Temple Bruer. A raised tomb carries the effigy of Sir Thomas Haslerton, brought from St. Leonard’s nunnery; he is in chain armour with helmet. A chapel in the north aisle has a squint looking to the high altar. This chapel is entered by a beautiful double arch from the transept, with Early capital to the mid pillar. The proportions of the whole church are pleasing, and its size is very striking. The tower has an arcaded parapet, and on each side two windows set in a recess under a big arch, between them a buttress runs up from the apex of a broad and deep gable-coping, which goes down each side of the tower, forming the hood-mould into which the gables of the nave transepts and chancel fit. All the doors, curiously enough, are painted green outside. There is in the churchyard a pillar with clustered shafts and carved capital, the base of which rests on a panelled block, which looks like an old font. Many bits from the old church, which was restored throughout in 1885, are ranged on the low wall of the churchyard walk, some of which look worthy of a better place.
The line from the docks runs along by the shore to Cleethorpes, where the Humber begins to merge into the sea. The wide, firm sands and the rippling shallow wavelets of the brown seawater are the delight of thousands of children; the air is fresh, food and drink are plentiful, and all things conspire to make a trippers’ paradise, while the Dolphin Hotel, which, like the others, looks out on the sea, is no bad place for a short sojourn in the off season.
THE CORPORATION SEALS
The corporation had in old times two seals, one the common seal, and one the mayor’s seal; the latter showed a boar charged by a dog and a huntsman winding his horn, an allusion to an ancient privilege of the mayor and burgesses of hunting in the adjacent woods of Bradley Manor. The common seal bore a gigantic figure of a man with drawn sword and round shield, and the name ‘Gryem,’ the reputed founder of the town; on his right a youth crowned, and the name ‘Habloc,’ and on his left a female figure with a diadem and the legend “Goldeburgh,” the name of the princess he is said to have married.
These two interesting and distinctive old seals have, sad to say, been discarded for one bearing the arms of the corporation, just like what any mushroom town might adopt.
The figures on the old seal alluded to the tradition embodied in the old Anglo-Danish ballad of Havelock the Dane, which was borrowed from a French romance of the twelfth century, called “Le lai de Aveloc,” which in turn was probably taken from an Anglo-Saxon original. It tells how Havelock, son of the Danish King Birkabeen, was treacherously put to sea and saved by one Grim, a Lincolnshire fisherman, who brought up the waif as his own. He grew to be of huge stature and strength and of great beauty, and, from serving as a scullion in the king’s kitchen, he became betrothed to the king’s daughter; and his royal descent being discovered, the Danish king rewarded Grim with a sum of money with which he built a village on the coast and called it Grim’s town or Grimsby.
CHAPTER XX
CAISTOR
The Roman Castrum—The Church and the Hundon Tombs—Rothwell and the Caistor Groups of Early Church Towers, “Riby,” “Wold,” “Cliff” and “Top”—Pelham Pillar—Grasby and the Tennyson-Turners—Barnetby—Bigby—The Tyrwhit Tombs—Brocklesby—The Mausoleum—The Pelham Buckle.
CAISTOR
Caistor is the centre from which roads radiate in all directions, so much so that if you describe a circle from Caistor as your centre at the distance of Swallow it will cut across seventeen roads, and if you shorten the distance to a two-mile radius, it will still cross eleven, though not more than four or five of them will separately enter the old Roman town. For the town has grown round a Roman “Castrum,” and the church is actually planted in the centre of the walled camp. A portion of the solidly grouted core of their wall shows on the southern boundary of the churchyard, and bits of it still exist to the east and west just beyond the churchyard boundary, and also a little further from the church on the north. Even the well which the Roman soldiers used, one of many springs coming out of the chalk, for Caistor is on the slope of the Wold, is still in use to the south-east of the church, and was included within the walls of the “Castrum.”
Dr. Fraser of Caistor, who takes a keen interest in the subject, kindly showed me a plan on which such portions of the wall as have been laid bare, in some half-a-dozen spots, were marked. He lives in a house belonging to the Tennyson family, the poet’s uncle and his brother Charles having both tenanted it. The place has a long history. It was a hill fort of the early Britons, then it was occupied by the Romans till late in the fourth century, and, after their departure, it was a stronghold of the Angles, who called it, according to Bede, Tunna-Ceaster or Thong-caster, which might refer to its being placed on a projecting tongue of the Wold, just as Hyrn-Ceaster or Horncastle is so named, because it is on a horn or peninsular, formed by the river. In 829 Ecgberht, King of Wessex, defeated the Mercians in a battle here, and offered a portion of the spoil to the church, if a stone dug up about 150 years ago with part of an inscription apparently to that effect can be trusted. Earl Morcar, who had land near Stamford, was lord of the manor in Norman times, and the Conqueror gave the church to Remigius for his proposed Cathedral.
For the present church inside the Roman camp goes back to probably pre-Norman times. The tower has a Norman doorway, and has also a very early round arch, absolutely plain, leading from the tower to the nave, and it shows in its successive stages Norman, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular work. The lower part of the tower has angle buttresses and two string-courses, and, except the battlements, which are of hard whitish stone, the whole building is, like all the churches in the north-east of the county, made of a rich yellow sandy ironstone with fossils in it. This gives a beautiful tone of colour and also, from its friable nature, an appearance of immense antiquity. The north porch has good ball-flower decoration, but is not so good as the Early English south door with its tooth ornaments; here the old door with its original hinges is still in use. The octagonal pillars stand on a wide square base two feet high with a top, a foot wide, forming a stone seat round the pillar, as at Claypole and Bottesford. The nave arcade of four bays is Early English with nail-head ornament. Since Butterfield removed the flat ceiling and put a red roof with green tie-beams and covered the chancel arch and walls with the painted patterns which he loved, the seats, like the porch doors at Grimsby, have all been green! This, to my mind, always gives a garden woodwork atmosphere. In the north aisle is a side altar, and near it are the interesting tombs of the Hundon family, while in the south aisle, behind the organ, is a fine marble monument with a kneeling figure in armour of Sir Edward Maddison, of Unthank Hall, Durham, and of Fonaby, who died in his 100th year, A.D. 1553. His second wife was Ann Roper, sister-in-law to Margaret Roper, who was the daughter of Sir Thomas More, and who—
“clasped in her last trance
Her murdered father’s head.”
THE HUNDON TOMBS
The Hundon tombs have recumbent stone effigies under recessed arches in the North wall, one being of Sir W. de Hundon cross-legged, with shield, and clad in chain-mail from head to foot. He fought in the last crusade, 1270. Another, in a recess massively cusped, is of Sir John de Hundon, High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1343, and Lady Hundon his wife, in a wimple and the dress of the period. Sir John is in plate armour, with chain hauberk, and girt with both sword and dagger, and both wear ruffs. She has a cushion at her head, and a lion at her feet. He lies on a plaited straw mattress rolled at each end, and wears a very rich sword-belt and huge spurs, but no helmet.
PRE-NORMAN TOWERS
The singular cluster of very early church towers near Caistor are similar to those near Gainsborough, and to another group just south of Grimsby (see Chapter [XXIII.]). South of Caistor is Rothwell, which we hoped to reach in a couple of miles from Cabourn, but could only find a bridle road, unless we were prepared to go two miles east to Swallow, or two miles west to Caistor, and then make a further round of three miles from either place. The church, which keeps the register of marriages taken in Cromwell’s time before Theophilus Harneis, Esq., J.P., after publication of banns “on three succeeding Lord’s Days, at the close of the morning exercise, and no opposition alleged to the contrary,” has two very massive Norman arches, the western bays with cable moulding. The tower is of the unbuttressed kind, and exhibits some more unmistakable “Long-and-Short” work than is at all common in the Saxon-built towers of Lincolnshire churches, built, that is to say, if not by Saxon hands, at least in the Saxon style, and in the earliest Norman days. The village is in a depression between two spurs of the Wold, and a road from it, which is the eastern one of three, all running south along the Wold, leads to Binbrook. The middle road is the “High Dyke,” the Roman road from Caistor to Horncastle, and has no villages on it. The western one goes by Normanby le Wold, Walesby, and Tealby, and joins the Louth-and-Rasen road at North-Willingham. From this road you get a fine view over the flats in the centre of the county, as indeed you do if you go by the main road from Caistor to Rasen. This takes you through Nettleton, where there is another of these early towers, but not so remarkably old-looking a specimen as some. A buttress against the south wall of the tower is noticeable, being carefully devised by the mediæval builders so as not to block the little window. Usselby, three miles north of Rasen, lies hidden behind “The Hall,” and is the tiniest church in the county. It has a nave and chancel of stone, and a bell-turret, and hideous brick-headed windows. At Claxby, close by, some fine fossils have been found. The eastern main road to Grimsby has most to show us, for on it we pass Cabourn and Swallow, both of which have towers like Rothwell, as also has Cuxwold, which is half-way between Swallow and Rothwell. All these unbuttressed towers are built of the same yellow sandy stone, and generally have the same two-light belfry window with a midwall jamb. Cabourn was the only church we found locked, and we could not see why, and as the absence of the rector’s key keeps people from seeing the inside, so the presence of his garden fence, which runs right up to the tower on both sides, keeps them from seeing the west end outside—a horrid arrangement, not unlike that at Rowston. The tower has a pointed tiled roof, like a pigeon cote, a very small blocked low-side window is at the south-west end of the chancel, and the bowl of a Norman font with cable moulding, found under the floor of the church, has been placed on the top of the old plain cylinder which did duty as a font till lately. The view from Cabourn hill, which drops down to Caistor, is a magnificent one. To the north the lofty Pelham Pillar, a tribute to a family distinguished as early as the reign of Edward III., stands up out of the oak woods, a landmark for many a mile.
Swallow has no jamb to its belfry window. But it has a very good Norman door, and round-headed windows. The south aisle arches have been built up. During the recent restoration two piscinas, Norman and Early English, were found, the former with a deep square bowl set on a pillar. The next church has the singular name of Irby-on-Humber, though the Humber is eight miles distant. Here we find Norman arcades of two arches with massive central pillars, thicker on the north side than the south, and Early English tower and chancel arches. An incised slab on the floor has figures of John and Elianora Malet, of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries. In the south aisle there is a blocked doorway to the rood loft, and a piscina. The east window is of three lancets. All the woodwork in the church is new and everything in beautiful order. Laceby Church, two miles further on, has a Transition tower, and an Early English arcade with one Norman arch in the middle. There are some blow-wells in the parish, as at Tetney. John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, was formerly rector here.
LINCOLN LONGWOOLS
A mile to the left as we go from Irby to Laceby, lies the fine and well-wooded park of Riby Grove, the seat of Captain Pretyman, M.P. The Royalists won a battle here in 1645, in which Colonel Harrison, the Parliamentary leader, was slain. He was buried at Stallingborough. Riby of late years has been famous for the flocks and herds of the late Mr. Henry Dudding, which at their dispersal in July, 1913, realised in a two days’ sale 16,644 guineas. Over 1,800 Lincolnshire long-wool sheep were sold, the highest price being 600 guineas for the champion ram at the Bristol and Nottingham shows, who has gone to South America, in company with another stud ram who made eighty guineas, and several more of the best animals. But though the ram lambs made double figures, as the best had been secured before the sale the prices on the whole were not high, the sheep on the first day averaging just over £4 9s. Among the shorthorns 160 guineas was the highest price; this was given for a heifer whose destination was Germany. It is owing to men like Mr. Dudding that Lincolnshire farming and Lincolnshire flock and stock breeding has so great a name.
About five miles further, we come to the suburbs of Grimsby, and the road runs on past Clee to Cleethorpes.
It is curious how different localities, though in the same neighbourhood, have their own special and different terms for the same thing, thus: alongside the ridge north of Lincoln, each village has its bit of “Cliff,” and from Elsham to the Humber each has its bit of “Wold,” while on the continuation of the Wold near Caistor from Barnetby to Burgh-on-Bain the same thing is called neither “Cliff” nor “Wold,” but “top”; and we have Somerby, Owmby, Grasby, Audleby, Fornaby, Rothwell, Orby, Binbrook, Girsby and Burgh “top,” etc. There is an Owmby “Cliff” as well as an Owmby “top,” but the words sufficiently indicate the position of the villages—one (near Fillingham) on the Ermine Street, and one (near Grasby) north of Caistor.
THE PELHAM PILLAR
There is no view, I think, in the county so wide all round as that from the top of the Pelham Pillar. It stands on one of the highest points of the Wold, from whence the ground falls on three sides. In front are the woods of Brocklesby and the mausoleum, with the Humber and Hull in the distance; on the right Grimsby, the Spurn Point, and the grand spire of Patrington in Holderness, and on the left the wide mid-Lincolnshire plain as far as “the Cliff.” Of the Wold villages between Caistor and Barnetby, where the Wold stops for a couple of miles and lets the railway and the Brigg-to-Brocklesby road through on the level, none affords a better view than Grasby. But the whole of this road is one not to be missed. As we pass along it we first reach Clixby, which shows, or rather hides, a tiny church in a thick clump of trees by the road side, where is a churchyard cross, restored after the model of Somersby. The little stone church has been once very dilapidated, and is now renewed with a double bell-turret in brick—no wonder it hides itself in the trees. There is also a remarkable modern graveyard cross of dark stone, of a very early primitive shape, such as is seen on some of the incised grave stones of Northumbria. North of Clixby is Grasby. This church was the home for over forty years of the poet’s brother Charles Tennyson-Turner, the author, with Alfred, of the “Poems by Two Brothers,” and afterwards of many sonnets written at Grasby. It would be difficult to surpass the charm of one called ‘Letty’s Globe’:
LETTY’S GLOBE.
When Letty had scarce passed her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a coloured sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peeped
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap’d
And laugh’d and prattled in her world-wide bliss,
But when we turned her sweet unlearned eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry,
‘Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!’
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER
A white marble tablet of chaste design on the wall of the nave shows a couple of sprays of bay or laurel beneath the Christian monogram, bending to right and left over the inscription, on the left to “Charles Tennyson Turner, Vicar and Patron of Grasby, who died April 25, 1879.
True poet surely to be found
When truth is found again.”
and on the right to “Louisa his wife, died May 20, 1879.
More than conquerors through him that loved us.
They rest with Charlotte Tennyson in the cemetery at Cheltenham.” Charlotte was his brother Horatio’s first wife; his wife Louisa was the sister of Lady Tennyson, the two brothers having married two Miss Sellwoods, nieces of Sir John Franklin. Tennyson’s grandfather had married Mary Turner of Caistor, and Charles succeeded his uncle Sam Turner.
The church, with its low broached spire, has a nave and a north aisle, but has little of the old left in it, except the south doorway and some Early English clustered pillars, and a curious plain font set on four little square legs mounted on steps. The church was rebuilt, and the schools and vicarage built de novo by the Tennyson-Turners, for until his time the vicar had lived at Caistor. Under the east window outside is a stone let into the wall with three dedication crosses on it.
We must follow this Caistor and Brigg highway along the edge of the Wold to Bigby, where it turns to the left, and only a byway runs north to Barnetby le Wold which looks down on Melton Ross, so named from the Ros family to whom Belvoir came by marriage with a d’Albini heiress in the thirteenth century. Sir Thomas Manners—Lord Ros—was created Earl of Rutland in the sixteenth century.
THE TYRWHIT TOMBS
Barnetby Church has a most ancient appearance; it stands high in a field by itself, the village lying below. A long, high wall of brick and stone, grey with lichen, a low tower and a flat roof and windows irregularly placed, make up a building of undoubted antiquity. Inside, and lately recovered from the coal-hole, is a Norman lead font, thirty-two inches across. This is unique in Lincolnshire, though twenty-eight others are known in other counties, the best being that at Dorchester-on-Thames. From Barnetby we must retrace our steps for a couple of miles to see Bigby, which is well placed on the edge of the Wold. The church has corbels all round, as at Grantham, under a parapet of later build and of a lighter-coloured and harder stone. The old thick tower is of the yellow stone, with a good two-light window to the west. The porch is of oak with panelled sides. The nave has an Early English arcade of three bays, with slender octagonal pillars. The tower arch is low, the chancel arch lofty. Here we find two fonts, not superimposed, as at Cabourn, but one in each aisle. One is low and formed of grey marble, the other has an old carved stone bowl of nine panels on a new pedestal. This number of sides is unique. Near it is placed an incised slab showing the figure of a lady of the Skipwyth family, 1374, and another lady of the same name has a recumbent effigy in the chancel, c. 1400. The nave and chancel roof are one,[10] and in the chancel are some more interesting monuments. On the floor a brass of Elizabeth Tyrwhit, wife of William Skipwyth of Ormsby, c. 1520. On the north side a large altar tomb with alabaster effigies of Sir Robert Tyrwhit of Kettelbie, 1581, and his wife. He is on a plaited mattress rolled at each end for his head and feet, and below his feet a wild man or “Wode-howse” on all fours and covered with hair. Two of these support the feet of Ralph Lord Treasurer Cromwell in the fine brass at Tattershall, and the Willoughby chapel at Spilsby shows one. His wife lies nearest the wall, with a lion at her feet and a cushion for her head; both wear ruffs, and he is in armour, but without helmet. In many respects the monument resembles the tomb of Sir John and Lady Hundon at Caistor, but is still more like the Ayscoughe tomb at Stallingborough.
On the two ends and front of the tomb are figures of their children, twenty-two in number, two or three infants in cradles, the rest all kneeling, and above them is the old metrical version of the 128th Psalm, running round three sides of the tomb. The front or middle portion bears the following lines:—
Like fruitful vine on thy house side
So doth thy wife spring out.
Thy children stand like Oliveplantes
Thy table round about.
Thus art thou blest that fearest God,
And he shall let thee see
The promiesed Hierusalem and his felicitie.
Inside the chancel rails is a mural monument with life-size figures of a man and his wife kneeling, but the lady’s head is gone. The man is Robert Tyrwhit, who made a runaway match with Lady Bridget Manners, maid of honour to Queen Elizabeth, who was highly incensed at it, and doubtless used language appropriate to the occasion. At the back of the sedilia two or three little brasses have been inserted, one to Edward Nayler, rector 1632, with wife and seven children. He is described as “a painefull minister of God’s word.”
From Bigby four miles brings us to Brigg, passing near Kettleby, the home of the Tyrwhits, who kept up a blood feud with the Ros family till the beginning of the seventeenth century—not a very neighbourly proceeding—and as they only lived four miles apart their combats and murders were perpetual.
BROCKLESBY
The road which runs north from Caistor goes along the top of the Wold as far as “Pelham’s Pillar,” where the real High Wold stops. It is then 460 feet above sea level. Caistor itself, on the western slope, is only 150 feet up, but the High Wold keeps rising south of Caistor till it attains its highest point between Normanby-le-Wold and Stainton-le-Vale, at about 525 feet. From “Pelham’s Pillar” the road forks into three, and runs down into the flat at Riby, Brocklesby, and Kirmington, where there is a church with a bright green spire sheathed with copper. Brocklesby, Lord Yarborough’s seat, has a deer park more than two miles long. It is entered on the west side through a well-designed classical arch, erected by the tenantry in memory of the third lord. Extensive drives through the woods planted by the first lord, who married Miss Aufrere of Chelsea, and was created Baron Yarborough in 1794, reach as far as the “Pelham Pillar,” some six miles from Brocklesby. On the pillar it is recorded that twelve and a half million trees were planted. The planter, who rivals “Planter John,” he who laid out the many miles of avenue at Boughton near Kettering, was an Anderson, whose grandmother was sister of Charles, the last of the Pelhams, hence the family name now is Anderson-Pelham.
The Welland, near Fulney, Spalding.
THE KOH-I-NOOR
The mausoleum on the south side, designed by Wyatt in 1794 in memory of Sophia, first Countess of Yarborough, is in the classical style, with a flat dome rising from a circular balustrade supported on twelve fluted Doric columns. It stands on an ancient barrow, in it is a monument by Nollekens, of the Countess. The house, part of which was rebuilt after a fire in 1898, has the appearance of a brick and stone Queen Anne mansion. In it are some of the exquisite wood carvings by Wallis of Louth, some of whose work was admired in the first “Great Exhibition” of 1851, attracting almost as much attention as the Koh-i-noor Diamond, then in its rough form, as worn by “Akbar the Great,” by Nadir Shah, and by “The Lion of the Punjab,” Runjeet Sing. It is now in the crown of the Queen of England, and, being re-cut, is much smaller, but far more brilliant. In addition to a fine hall and staircase there is a picture gallery built in 1807 to take the paintings and sculptures which had been collected by Mr. John Aufrere of Chelsea, father-in-law of the first Lord Yarborough. The gem of this collection is the antique bust of Niobe, purchased in Rome by Nollekens the sculptor, who has himself contributed a fine bust of the first earl’s wife. In a conservatory are portions of another once famous collection of antiques, tombs, altars, and statues, made by Sir Richard Worsley and kept as a kind of classical museum till 1855 at Appuldurcombe in the Isle of Wight.
THE PELHAM BUCKLE
Religious houses abounded here. Thornton Abbey is only five miles off, and here, outside the park to the north-west, is Newsham Abbey, 1143, perhaps the earliest Premonstratensian house in England. On the east was the Cistercian nunnery of Colham, and just at the south of the park, in the village of Limber, was an alien priory belonging to the Cistercian house of Aulnay in Normandy. Newsham abbey, which was worth twice what the other two were, became part of the spoil which was absorbed by Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk. The gardens have some fine cedars, and the church with its curious tower and small spire is in the garden grounds. There are some Pelham monuments in it of the sixteenth and seventeenth century: one to Sir John and one to Sir William and Lady Pelham and their seventeen children. At her feet is the head of a king and the Pelham “Buckle,” commemorating the seizure by a Pelham of King John of France, at the battle of Poictiers.
Thornton Abbey Gateway.
CHAPTER XXI
LOUTH AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
Louth Church—“The Weder-Coke”—The Pilgrimage of Grace—Letter read in Lincoln Chapter-House from Henry VIII—“The Lyttel Clause”—The Blue Stone—Turner’s Horse-fair—The Louth Spire—Louth Park Abbey—Kiddington—Roads from Louth—Cawthorpe and Haugham—Dr. Trought’s Jump—Well Vale—Starlings.
LOUTH
Louth spire is one of the sights of Lincolnshire; it is a few feet higher than Grantham, which it much resembles, and in beauty of proportions and elegance of design one feels, as one looks at it, that it has really no rival, for Moulton, near Spalding, though on the same lines, is so much smaller.
The way in which it bursts upon the view as the traveller approaches it from Kenwick, which lies to the southward, is a thing impossible to forget. Taking the place of originally a small Norman, and later a thirteenth century building, the present church of St. James dates from the fifteenth century. Louth once had two, if not three, other small churches, dedicated to St. John, St. Mary, and St. Herefrid; but no certain traces of these remain, and only the north and south doorways of the thirteenth century church are now visible. Excavations made at the last restoration in 1867 revealed the pillar bases of this church and some fragments of eleventh century moulding of the earlier one. The present building has nothing of interest inside—it is only the shell from which the living tenant has long been absent. Once its long aisles were filled with rich chapels, and the chancel arch was furnished with a rood-loft and screen, and the church was unusually rich in altars, vessels, vestments, and books, of which only the inventory remains. In the vestry an oak cupboard has medallions carved in the panels of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York; and that is all. The steeple, with its large belfry windows, was doubtless built for its clock and bells; there were at first but three, which in 1726 were increased to a full peal of eight, but the clock and its chime was there as early as 1500. The spire was not completed till 1815; the weathercock was fixed then, but no lightning-rod until 1844 after the spire had been struck and damaged three times, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in the eighteenth it escaped.
The first of the Louth churchwardens’ books has an ill-written entry of the year 1515-16, the time of the second (or thirteenth century) church, which tells us that one Thomas Taylor, a draper, bought a copper basin in York and had it made at Lincoln into a “Wedercoke” for the church. This is very interesting, for the basin had been part of the spoil taken from the King of Scots at Flodden.
THE KING’S LETTER
Twenty years later the vicar of Louth was hanged with others, at Tyburn, for his part in the Lincolnshire rebellion, when 20,000 men took up arms in defence of the pillaged monasteries. Concerning this rebellion, there is a graphic account of the receipt of Henry VIIIth’s letter in response to the people’s petition, which was read in the chapter-house at Lincoln, on October 10, 1556. Moyne tells how, when they thought to have read the letter secretly among themselves in the chapter-house, a mob burst in and insisted on hearing it: “And therefore,” he goes on to say, “I redd the Kynges letter openly and by cause there was a lyttyl clause therein that we feared wolde styr the Commons I did leave that clause unredd, which was persayved by a Chanon beying the parson of Snelland, and he sayde there openly that the letter was falsely redd be cause whereof I was like to be slayn.” Eventually they got out by the south door to the Chancellor’s house, while the men waited to murder them at the great West door, “And when the Commons persayved that wee were gone from theym another way, they departed to ther lodgings in a gret furye, determynyng to kill us the morowe after onles wee wolde go forwards with theym.”
Bridge Street, Louth.
The “lyttyl clause” referred to as likely to “styr the Commons,” was wisely omitted, for it is that in which the king expresses his amazement at the presumption of the “rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience, to take upon them to rule their prince whom they were bound to obey and serve.”
This rebellion, which was called the Pilgrimage of Grace, brought disaster on many Lincolnshire families. Over sixty of all conditions were put to death for it in Louth alone, and others at Alford, Spilsby and Boston, and at all the monasteries, and the vicars of Cockerington, Louth, Croft, Biscathorpe, Donington and Snelland and some others, as well as John Lord Hussey at Sleaford, suffered for their religion and were canonized as martyrs by the Pope. A list of more than one hundred victims is given in “Notes and Queries,” III., 84.
The town has a museum of some interest, and outside of it may be seen a large boulder of some foreign stone, probably brought by an icefloe from Denmark or Norway. This used to stand at a street corner in the town, but was afterwards removed to the inn-yard at the back, and painted blue, and was known for many years as the blue stone. Speaking of stone, we have a record that a good deal of the stone for building the church spire in the sixteenth century was landed at Dogdyke, and drawn thence on wheels or carried on pack horses on flag pavements across the fen. The stone is of good quality and adapted for carving.
There is notably good openwork on the east gable of the church, much resembling that at Grimoldby and Theddlethorpe-in-the-Marsh, a few miles to the east of Louth. Turner’s picture of the horse fair at Louth shows the spire, which was no doubt the motive of the picture, and until one has seen it, both from a distance and from the street of Louth itself, one can have no notion how beautiful a thing a well-proportioned spire can be, one is never tired of looking at it.
An old statue of Edward VI. over a doorway in the Westgate indicates the grammar school where Alfred and Charles Tennyson spent a few uncomfortable years. The school seal shows a boy being birched, with the motto “Qui parcit virgam odit filium,” and date 1552. Among other pupils were Governor Eyre, one of the victims of British sentimentality, and Hobart Pasha. Thomas of Louth gave a clock to Lincoln Minster in 1324, and William de Lindsey, Bishop of Ely, 1290, who has there a beautiful monument, was also a Louth native.
Hubbards Mill, Louth.
LOUTH PARK ABBEY
Louth Park Abbey, about a mile and a half to the east of the town, was built on a site belonging to the Bishops of Lincoln, and was given to the Cistercian colony from Fountains Abbey, who found Haverholme too damp for comfort, by Bishop Alexander in 1139. The Cistercians built themselves a large church, 256 feet long and sixty-one feet in width, with transepts which more than doubled this; parts of these and the chancel, also a portion of the west front and one nave pillar, are all that is left of it, but the ground plan has been excavated, which shows that there were no fewer than ten bays to the nave, and massive circular piers. There was a cloister on the south, surrounded by monastic buildings, and east of these a chapter-house with groined roof springing from six pillars. A very large gateway stood at the south-west, and outside was a double moat to which the water from St. Helen’s Spring was conducted by what is still known as “the Monk’s Dyke.” It flourished greatly at the beginning of the fourteenth century, having then sixty-six monks and 150 lay brethren. The Louth Park Abbey Chronicle, though very valuable, is not exactly contemporaneous with the things it mentions, for it was all written by a scribe in the fifteenth century. It covers the years from 1066 to the death of Henry IV. in 1413.
Near the abbey, but on the other side of the canal, is Keddington, where the arch of the organ chamber is made of carved stones, no doubt brought from the abbey. The church, which is built of chalk and greensand, is older than any in the immediate neighbourhood, and has a Norman south door. It has a remarkable lancet window on the south side, in the upper part of which is a carved dragon, and has also what is very rare, a wooden mediæval eagle lectern.
ROADS FROM LOUTH
Half-a-dozen main roads radiate from Louth, one might call it eight, for two of the half-dozen divide, one within a mile, and one at a distance of two miles from the town. They go, one north to Grimsby, twenty miles of level road along the marsh, and one west to Market Rasen, by the Ludfords and North Willingham, fifteen and a half miles. One mile out, this road divides and goes west and then south to Wragby by South Willingham, sixteen and a half miles. Both of these roads, as well as that which runs south-west to Horncastle, fourteen and a half miles, cross the Wolds and are distinctly hilly, rising and falling nearly four hundred feet. The fifth road, which goes due south to Spilsby, sixteen miles, though seldom as much as 250 feet higher than Louth, which stands about seventy-five feet above sea level, affords fine views, and is a very pleasant road to travel. But all these highways must be dealt with in detail later. The sixth road from Louth runs south-east to Alford, and keeps on the level of the marsh, and the seventh and eighth roads run eastwards across the marsh to the sea, one branching off the Alford road at Kenwick and avoiding all villages, comes to the coast at Saltfleet; the other, starting out from Louth by Keddington and Alvingham, loses itself in many small and endlessly twisting roads which connect the various villages and reaches the sea eventually at Donna Nook and Saltfleet, places five miles apart, with no passage to the sea between them—nothing but mud flats, samphire beds and sea birds. There is a charm about “the waste enormous marsh,” and also about the high and windy Wolds, which never palls, but before we journey along either of the highways from Louth I should like to introduce one of those byways which form the chief delight of people who love the country.
SOME BYWAYS
We will leave Louth, then, by the Spilsby road, and when we reach the second milestone, 147 miles from London, turn and look at the beautiful spire of Louth Church rising from a group of elms in the middle distance of a wide panorama. From our height of 300 feet we look across the whole marsh to the sea, ten miles to the east, and far on beyond Louth we look northwards towards Grimsby and the Humber, the perpetually shifting lights and shades caused by the great cumulus clouds in these fine level views, the many farmsteads and occasional church towers—
“The crowded farms and lessening towers”
of our own Lincolnshire poet—all combine to make a very satisfactory picture to which the wonderfully wide extent which lies unrolled before us, lends enchantment; and always the eye reverts to rest with delight on that perfect spire standing so high above the trees by the banks of the river Lud.
At length we turn and pursue our way, but soon quit the Spilsby road and go down the hill to the left, past the entrance to Kenwick Hall, till we reach the Alford road, and, turning to the right, come to the pretty little village of Cawthorpe.
DR. TROUGHT’S JUMP
This is not a bad centre for country walks. You can walk on a raised footpath all along the side of the curious water-lane, and if you go out in the opposite direction the road to Haugham takes you through two miles of as pretty a road as you could desire; it is called “Haugham Pastures,” but it is really a road through a wood, without hedges, reminding one of the New Forest or the “Dukeries.” On the right, going from Cawthorpe, the trees extend some distance with oak and fern and all that makes the beauty of an English wood; on the other side it is only a belt of trees through which at intervals a grassy tract curves off from the road and leads to the fields; and as we passed in September we could see the corn-laden waggons moving up towards us or the teams going afield among the sheaves. No county could supply a prettier series of pictures of simple pastoral beauty than this byway through “Haugham Pastures.” A deep lane near the little brick-built manor-house is noticeable as the site of a famous jump. The roadway is about fifteen feet wide, with steep sides and a low hedge, the top of which is nine or ten feet above the roadway. Over these Dr. Trought of Louth, on a famed hunter, once jumped for a wager, flying from field to field, a distance of some twenty feet.
The Lud at Louth.
One of the charming peculiarities of Cawthorpe is that here the “Long Eau” stream runs between hedge-banks over a level sand and gravel bed and forms a water street, which extends for about a furlong. There is a similar thing at Swaby, six miles to the south, where the “Great Eau” runs along a street or road through the village. At Cawthorpe the water is always running and usually about six inches deep. The village lies in a hollow with curiously twisting little roads in it, and is very picturesque with its farms and trees and quaint little brick manor-house standing near the church at the three cross ways.
A BEAUTIFUL ROAD
Rising from the hollow, the small byway runs with here and there beautiful trees and often on the right a tall hedge or narrow strip of plantation, reminding one of the roadside “shaws” in Hampshire, while on the left there is always a view down over cornfields and beyond the tops of the Tothill oak woods right across the fertile belt of the marsh to the shining line of the distant sea. With many a twist the byway runs on through Muckton village to Belleau, where it crosses the above-mentioned Swaby or Calceby beck and looks down on the picturesque church, standing in the grassy meadows, and on the brick turret and groined archways of the old Manor-house, and so on to South Thoresby, where the broken ground and the fine trees tell of an old mansion which stood there till last century; and past Rigsby, till it meets the Spilsby and Alford highway just below Miles-cross-Hill, whence it runs on through the avenue of elms to Well. And all the way, as it has run along the top of the eastern escarpment of the Wold, it has afforded us an outlook over a wide expanse of the marsh such as none of the other roads on the high wolds can equal. True, the Lincoln cliff road gives a finer view and runs further, but I don’t think there is any prettier ten-mile stretch in the county than this ‘Middle road’ from Well to Louth.
At the entrance gate of Well Vale Hall the road divides, either route ending at Alford. Well Vale, a fine sporting estate and also a famous stronghold for foxes, the residence of Mr. Walter H. Rawnsley, is, I venture to think, the prettiest spot in the county. For a mile or more a grassy track descends from the top of Miles-Cross-Hill through a wooded valley where fine beeches stretch out their long arms, and pines and larch crown the chalky turf-clad sides, till the mouth of the Vale opens out into a park, whose rolling slopes are studded with handsome trees, and as you near the mansion, the front of which looks out across its brilliant flower-beds and quaint pinnacled gateway upon the little church flanked by branching elms on the summit of a grassy hill, you see a fine sheet of water fed by a copious chalk stream which passes the house and is then conducted to a still larger lake on the garden side, stretching with a double curve from the giant cedars on the lawn to a vanishing point, of which glimpses only are caught through the stems of the Scotch firs and oaks in the distance. The history of Well goes back to Roman times, and has been told fully by the Rev. E. H. R. Tatham, Rector of the neighbouring parish of Claxby, where the site of a Roman camp is still visible, another being at Willoughby, two miles off eastwards in the levels, where the marsh begins.
HISTORY OF WELL
The name was derived in Saxon times from the strong spring which wells out from the chalk and feeds the lakes on either side the house. The names Burwell and Belleau in the immediate neighbourhood are of similar origin, though the latter is a Norman name. At the time of the Conquest Well and Belleau were both bestowed on Gilbert de Gaunt, the Conqueror’s nephew, and were let by him to one Ragener, whose family took the addition “de Welle” and lived here for four centuries. In the thirteenth century we hear of a church at Well, and William de Welle (the third of the name) in 1283 obtained a licence for a market and fair at Alford. His son Adam was summoned to Parliament as a baron in 1299. In the fifteenth century the name was changed from Welle to Welles, and Leo Lord Welles fell at Towton in 1461. The title was now combined with that of Willoughby d’Eresby, and Leo’s son, Richard, who took it jure uxoris, he having married the Willoughby heiress, was the Lord Welles who was so basely put to death in 1470 by Edward IV. for complicity in the Lincolnshire rebellion, together with his son-in-law, T. Dymoke, and his son Robert. See Chap. [XXXIII.]
Leo, who fell at Towton, had married for his second wife, Margaret Duchess of Somerset, and her son John joined Henry VII., and after the battle of Bosworth the king restored to him the Welles estate which had been forfeited after Robert’s execution, made him a viscount, and gave him the hand of Cicely, daughter of Edward IV. and sister to his own queen, in marriage. It is interesting to read in Mr. Tatham’s paper that “This lady carried the heir-apparent, Prince Arthur, at his baptism at Winchester in 1486.” She subsequently married one of the Kyme family of Kyme Tower near Boston. John Viscount Welles died in 1499, and the male line of the Welles became extinct, but the Willoughby line went on, for Cicely, the sister of the unfortunate Richard Welles, had married Sir R. Willoughby, and her grandson William succeeded to that title as the ninth Lord Willoughby. He was the father of Catharine Duchess of Suffolk and subsequently wife of Richard Bertie, whose monument occupies so large a space in the Willoughby chapel at Spilsby. The Welles estate remained with the Willoughbys (who in 1626 were created Earls of Lindsey) till 1650, when the extortionate fines levied on Royalist families by the Parliament made it necessary for Belleau and Welle to be sold. Belleau went to Sir H. Vane, and Well to W. Wolley, who sold it about 1700 to Anthony Weltden, a man who had a romantic career in the early days of the Hon. East India Company. From him Well passed to James Bateman, one of whose sons became Lord Bateman. Another, James, succeeded to the estate and built the present house about 1725, a wing of which was pulled down about 1845. This James married Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Chaplin of Tathwell, who also came to live and die at Well. Bateman’s daughter and heiress married a Dashwood in 1744—probably it was he who planted the Vale (he died in 1825)—and in 1838 the estate was purchased by Mr. Christopher Nisbet Hamilton, whose daughter, Mrs. Hamilton Ogilvy, has just sold it to Mr. Walter H. Rawnsley.
WELL VALE
The following lines were written on the gate at the top of Well Vale by a traveller taking his yearly tramp from Horncastle for a dip in the sea at Mablethorpe, a good twenty miles.
Some say “All’s well that ends well,”
But here Well begins well.
They say too “Truth is in a well,”
But here there is in truth a Well.
Welcome then Well! since I well come along to her,
For well I’ve known Well and the charms that belong to her
Passing well to the view looks the Vale of fair Well,
And I, passing Well too, must bid her farewell
’Till again I’m this way; or perhaps for aye.
Farewell then (or ‘vale’) to fair Well Vale.
Farewell! Fair Well!
This is more than a mere assemblage of puns—there is some poetry in the old fellow, and the penultimate line has an added pathos from the fact that only a few months later the poet bid his final farewell to life, on November 10, in the same year, at the age of seventy-six.
THE STARLINGS
Speaking of Well Vale, I think I have seen and heard more starlings collected together in a young larch plantation there than I ever came across at once elsewhere. The only multitude of birds at all comparable to it was the army of cranes I have seen covering half a mile or more of sandbank in the Nile, near Komombos, while clouds of them kept dropping from the sky. They have black wings and white bodies, so that aloft they looked black, but standing on the sandbank as close as they could pack they looked all white.
But to return to our starlings. It is a very curious thing this massing of countless thousands of these birds amongst the osiers[11] in the fenny parts of the county, or in some of the plantations in the Wolds. If you take your stand about sunset near one of these, when the wood pigeons, after much noisy flapping of their wings, have settled down to rest, a loud whirring noise will make you look up to see the sky darkened by a cloud of these birds, which will be only the advance portion of the multitudes that will quickly be converging from all sides to their roosting quarters. They have been feeding in many places, often at a considerable distance; but each night they assemble, and for a quarter of an hour or more the noise of their chattering and fluttering as each successive flight comes in will be indescribable. If a disturbing noise is made, myriads will rise with one loud rush, but nothing will prevent their return and, when the noise and movement has at length subsided, the trees will be black with their living load, which will sleep till sunrise, and then again disperse for the day in quest of food, returning every night for several weeks, till the call of spring scatters them for good.