Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

Driby, Tumby, and Tattershall.

NORMAN ACTIVITY

The amount of work done by the Normans in England has always astonished me. Not only did they build castles and strongholds, but in every county they set up churches built of stone, and not here and there but literally everywhere. They apportioned and registered the land, measured it and settled the rent, and, though hard task masters, they showed themselves efficient guardians, nor was any title or property too small for the king and his officers to inquire into. Hence, in quite small out-of-the-way places in the county we find monuments in little and almost unknown churches which attest the activity of our Norman forefathers and which, when examined by the aid of documents from the Public Record Office or the abbey or manor rolls, old wills and all the early parchments in which the industrious bookworm revels, often unfold chapters of early history of extraordinary interest, if not for the general public, at least for students and for the local gentry who still haunt the places where once the armed heel of the knight rang and the monastery dispensed the unstinted doles of a period which would have held up both hands in astonishment at the luxury of our poor laws, the excellence of our roads and the enormity of our rates and taxes. Take, for instance, the little village of Driby in the Lincolnshire wolds, a village the early denizens of which my old friend, the late W. C. Massingberd, has taken the trouble to make acquaintance with, and to whose labours I am indebted for what little I know about it. He tells us how even in Saxon times a notable man lived at Driby, one Siward, not perhaps the great Northumbrian Thegn mentioned in Macbeth, but a later Siward who helped Hereward and his fenmen to oppose the Normans at Ely. Whoever he was, he held Scrivelsby and a large acreage in the Wolds. Next we find the great Lincolnshire Baron, Gilbert de Gaunt, succeeding Siward at Driby, holding, as Domesday Book (1086) shows, direct from the king.

THE ABBOT OF KIRKSTEAD

Early in the next century Simon de Driby comes before us; and his son Robert—the eldest son was nearly always alternately Simon or Robert—grants some lands in Tumby to the abbey of Kirkstead. Robert’s father is called sometimes Symon de Tumbi and sometimes Simon de Driby, and it seems that he had obtained disposal of this land in Tumby by a grant from Robert, son of Hugh de Tattershall, just as his forefather had held land in Driby by the grant of Gilbert de Gaunt. On February 25, 1216, a Simon de Driby made his submission to King John at Lincoln, and Ralph de Cromwell, whose descendant of the same name eventually married the heiress of the Simon de Dribys and held the castle of Tattershall, also submitted at Stamford on the 28th and gave his own eldest daughter as a hostage for his good behaviour. The submissive Simon died in 1213, and his son, the inevitable Robert, made an agreement with Hugh, the Abbot of Kirkstead, by which the abbot was allowed to have his big cattle and sheep dogs, mastiffs they were termed, in the warren of Tumby at all times of the year, but no greyhounds or lurchers (leporarios vel alios canes preter mastivos), and if the latter turned riotous and chased game they were to be removed and others put in their place.

Robert’s son Simon obtained by marriage additional lands near Driby, at Tetford, Bag Enderby, Stainsby, and Ashby Puerorum on the wolds, as well as some of the rich marsh land at Wainfleet. Henry III. granted to Robert Tateshalle license to crenelate his house at Tateshall, “quod possit kernelare mansum suum” in 1239; and we may here note that Tattershall Castle in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and half of the fifteenth was a stone building. Just at the close of the reign of Edward I. a Robert de Driby married Joan, one of the three co-heiresses of Robert de Tateshale or Tattershall, the last male representative of the family, and Joan tried to settle the castle and manor of Tattershall on her youngest son, Robert, instead of on the rightful heir. Until the heir was of age Edward had granted them to his wife, Queen Margaret, a sign that the property was valuable. She, moreover, when a widow, had the manor of Tumby for her dower house.

When the third Edward was on the throne one of the parsons who served Driby was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, William Merle by name, who is worthy to be remembered because he was the first Englishman to keep a diary of the weather. He was appointed in 1330, and at that time one Gilbert de Bernak was the parson at Tattershall, whose relative William de Bernak, Kt., married Alice, the daughter of Robert de Driby and Joan Tattershall, and, her three brothers dying without issue, Alice came into possession of the manor of Driby. Their son, Robert de Bernak, presented a man of the same name to Driby in 1347, who died probably of the Black Death, for he presented again two years later. Robert in some way made himself unpopular, and in 1369 we hear of his being spoiled and beaten at Driby, with many of his men grievously wounded, and his reeve and his butler both killed.

In 1374 he founded a chantry in Driby church endowed inter alia with rents from land in Driby and Friskney. His wife is called in his will Katherine de Friskney. This Robert de Bernak was the only one of the name who held the manor of Driby, for his elder brother John appears not to have done so, and to have died in 1346.

MATILDA DE BERNAK

The uncle of these de Bernaks, John de Driby, shortly before his death had granted the castle of Tattershall and the manors of Tattershall and Tumby away from his sister Alice to John de Kirton, who was knighted by Edward II., and summoned to Parliament in the sixteenth year of Edward III., 1343; so none of the de Bernaks ever held Tattershall, and it was through the direct interposition of the king that the descendants in the female line of the Driby and Bernak families got the property back. The way it came into the female line was this: The John de Bernak, eldest son of William de Bernak and Alice de Driby, had married Joan, the daughter of John Marmion of Wintringham, and had two sons and a daughter Matilda, who eventually was his sole heiress. She married Ralph second Baron Cromwell, and the presentation to her uncle, Robert de Bernak’s, chantry at Driby was left to her and to her son Robert Cromwell after her.

Then, at her mother’s death in 1360, she succeeded to her mother’s property in Norfolk, Tumby Manor and Tattershall Manor and Castle reverted to her on the death of John de Kirton in 1367 and Driby Manor with Brynkyl on her uncle, Robert De Bernak’s, death in 1387; so she held Driby, Tumby, and Tattershall, as well as property in Norfolk.

MARRIES RALPH CROMWELL

In 1395 and 1399 we find her husband, Ralph Cromwell, presenting to the chantry of the Holy Trinity in the church at Driby. They were large landholders, for, in addition to the manor of Cromwell and his other lands in Notts., he and his wife held the manor of ‘Kirkeby in Bayne’ with what are called the appurtenances to those various manors, i.e., lands in many parts of the wolds and marsh.

Tattershall Church and the Bain.

Matilda died in 1419. Her son, Ralph Cromwell, was baptised on July 15, 1414, a day memorable for a very high tide on the Lincolnshire coast which inundated all the land about Huttoft. He only lived to be twenty-eight, and was succeeded by his cousin, Ralph third Baron Cromwell, the grandson of Matilda.

HER GRANDSON LORD HIGH TREASURER

This Ralph Lord Cromwell had been appointed Lord High Treasurer of England under Henry VI. in 1433. He married Margaret, daughter of John fifth and last Baron d’Eyncourt, but had no issue. He it was who replaced the old castle by the splendid brick building which was, and is, the finest in England. He presented to Driby in 1449, and was the founder of the college and the almshouse at Tattershall, for which he obtained leave from the Crown to turn the parish church into a collegiate church in 1439, when he rebuilt it from the ground and endowed it with[26] several manors, Driby being one, so in 1461 and until 1543 the warden of the college of Tattershall was the patron of Driby. The almshouse has still an endowment of £30. He died in 1455, as the brass in Tattershall church records, and his nieces, the daughters of Sir Richard Stanhope, succeeded to his estates, but Driby remained with the warden of Tattershall. The nieces were Joan Lady Cromwell (for her husband Humphrey Bourchier, son of the first Earl of Essex, was summoned to Parliament as Baron Cromwell jure uxoris) and Matilda Lady Willoughby d’Eresby. One of his executors, William of Waynflete, the famous Bishop of Winchester, held the manor of Candlesby in 1477 for the use of this Lady Matilda, and soon afterwards obtained a grant of it to his newly founded college of Magdalen, Oxford, with whom it remains. Matilda Lady de Willoughby presented to Candlesby in 1494, eight years after the bishop’s death. Since then the living has been in the gift of the college.

At the dissolution of the monasteries, in 1545, Driby was granted to the Duke of Suffolk, then it passed to Sir Henry Sidney of Penshurst, who sold it to the Prescotts, a Lancashire family, about 1580, with appurtenances of lands and rents in “Brynkhill, Belchford, Orebye, Grenwyke, Ingolmells, Bagenderbie, Asbie Puerorum, ffulletsbye, West Saltfletby alias Sallaby, Sallaby Allsaints, Golderbye, Tathwell, Thorpe next Waynflet, Sutterbye and Scamlesbye.” There are two small brasses in the church to James Prescott and his wife, who was a Molineux of Lancashire. They died in 1581 and 1583. In 1636 Sir W. Prescott sold the manor of Driby to Sir John Bolles, and in 1715 it was bought by Burrell Massingberd and still goes with the Ormsby estate of that family.

BUILDS TATTERSHALL

THE CASTLE

A few words must be added about Tattershall. The great brick building which rises so magnificently out of the flat is one of the most impressive things in this or any country. I have walked all day partridge shooting on the estate, and however far you went you never seemed able to get away from the immediate presence of the magnificent pile; you only had to look round and it was apparently just at your shoulder all day long. Then if you enter it and go up, for even the first floor is several feet above the level of the quadrangle, you are astonished at the size of the great chambers one above the other, thirty-eight feet by twenty-two, and seventeen feet high; and finally you come on the second, third, and fourth story to the most beautiful brick vaulting and mouldings in the small rooms and galleries running round the big central rooms in the thickness of the walls. The whole is of exquisite workmanship, and finished by very deep and handsome machicolations and battlements. The bricks are apparently Flemish, thinner and of finer quality than the English bricks; similar ones were used in building Halstead Hall, Stixwould. The windows are dressed with stone, these are large and arched, having mullions and the heads filled with stone tracery like church windows. This shows how the nobleman’s castle was changing into the nobleman’s palace or mansion. The building is at one corner of a quadrangle, and is itself a parallelogram, and, including the turret bases, eighty-seven feet long by sixty-nine wide, and 112 feet high to the parapet of the angle turret. The walls, which are built on massive brick vaulting, are immensely thick, being fifteen feet above, and even more on the ground floor. The windows of the basement chambers are close on the water of the moat, for several small chambers were made in the thickness of the walls, in which, too, are the four chimneys. The spiral staircase is in the south-east turret, and has a continuous stone handrail let into the brick wall, very cleverly contrived, and giving a firm and easy grasp. Each turret is octagonal, going up all the way from the ground and being finished with a cone. In each turret is a fireplace—a comfort to the warders, and useful at a pinch for heating the supplies of oil and lead which could be poured down through the machicolations on the heads of a too assiduous foe. From turret to turret, and projecting somewhat over these machicolations, runs a loopholed gallery, and here, too, the vaulting and the rich brick mouldings are better than anything else of the kind in England, with the exception of the smaller but elaborately enriched wall surfaces of Barsham, near Walsingham in Norfolk. There are little rooms in the turrets, on each floor, and the galleries on the second and third are divided into rooms, so that in the whole building there were some forty-eight rooms. The large central rooms would be hung with tapestry, the lowest being used for an entrance-hall, meals being served in the fine banqueting hall adjoining, the second for a hall of audience or withdrawing room, and the third for the state bedroom. The fireplaces are, in the large rooms, of great width, and the restored mantelpieces, the barbarous removal of which lately caused such a stir, show a number of most interesting coats-of-arms of the families who have been connected with Tattershall down to the time of Henry VI. The treasurer’s purse figures alternately with the shields, which bear the arms of the Cromwells, Tattershalls, and d’Eyncourts, of Marmion, Driby, Bernak, and Clifton; and on the second floor one panel represents the combat between Hugh de Neville and a lion. Neville and Clifton were the second and third husbands of Matilda Lady Willoughby, which points to the fact that these mantelpieces were not carved until after the Lord Treasurer’s death, 1455, when Bishop Waynflete was in charge of the work. Sir Thomas Neville was killed at the battle of Wakefield, 1460, and Sir Gervasse Clifton at Tewkesbury in 1471.

Tattershall Church and Castle.

ESHER PLACE

TATTERSHALL CHURCH

There are three other brick buildings, which always strike me as being worthy to rank along with Tattershall. The first, but following longo intervallo, is the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Buckden in Hunts., built by Bishop Hugh of Wells about 1225. Another is the beautiful old Tudor manor-house already alluded to at Barsham, near Walsingham, which Lord Hastings has just advertised for sale (November, 1913). This has more exquisite brick diaper work and mouldings on the outside of both house and gate-house than Tattershall Castle has even in the passages and vaulted rooms on the upper floor inside, and is a miracle of lovely brick building. But it is not nearly so big as Tattershall. The other bit of fine bricklaying which is of the same rather severe character as Tattershall and Magdalen School at Wainfleet, is the gate-house of Esher Place, occupied by Cardinal Wolsey October, 1529, to February, 1530. It belonged to the Bishops of Winchester, and Wolsey then held that see together with York. Waynflete, who was bishop 1447-1486, and finished Tattershall about 1456, a year after the Lord Treasurer Cromwell’s death, had partly re-built Esher Place in his inimitable brickwork, about seventy years before. He used bricks for the lintels and mouldings, and even put in the same sunk spiral handrail, which we have noticed as so clever and remarkable a device in the turret staircase at Tattershall. Waynflete’s arms, the lilies, so familiar to us at Eton and Magdalen, were found by the Rev. F. K. Floyer, F.S.A., only last year (1912), when some plaster was removed, on the keystone of the curiously contrived vaulting over the porch. It is noticeable that Henry Pelham, who bought the house in 1729, has introduced also his family badge, the Pelham buckle, which is cut on the stone capitals of the door. This badge we have spoken of in the chapter on Brocklesby. So we have two Lincolnshire families of note, each of which has left his cognisance on the gateway of the once proud Esher Place, the “Asher House” in that magnificent scene of Act III. in Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII.”

Norfolk. “Hear the king’s pleasure, cardinal; who commands you

To render up the great seal presently

Into our hands: and to confine yourself

To Asher-house, my lord of Winchester’s,

Till you hear farther from his highness.”

Tattershall had a double moat, the outer one reaching to the River Bain. Over both of them the entrance would probably be, as it certainly was over the inner one, protected by a drawbridge and portcullis. This was still to be seen in 1726 at the north-east corner of the quadrangle. All that is now left is this one great pile of the Lord Treasurer’s and one guard-house of the fifteenth century. The original castle was begun 200 years earlier, when Robert, the direct descendant of Hugh Fitz Eudo—founder in 1138 of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstead, who had received the estate from William the Conqueror—obtained leave from Henry III. to build a castle there. We have seen how the castle became the property of Joan who married Sir Robert Driby, whose daughter Alice consigned it at her marriage to Sir W. Bernak, and their daughter Matilda married Lord Cromwell, whose grandson was the High Treasurer to Henry VI. He built the brick castle, but died soon after doing so, leaving his collegiate church to be finished by his executors. The college he had founded was to consist of a warden, a provost, six priests, six lay clerks, and six choristers, and the almshouse was for thirteen poor of either sex. The original building for this still exists, and is of very humble appearance, having, it is said, been put up to serve first as a lodgment for the masons engaged on the castle and church. Of these the latter is singularly well built, as any building supervised by Bishop William of Waynflete was sure to be, and evidently of very good stone; and the two buildings being close together are striking specimens of the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of the period.

THE BRASSES

The Treasurer’s wife, who was sister and coheir of William fifth Baron d’Eyncourt, died a year before her husband. They are buried in the church, and two very fine brasses once marked the spot. He was a K.G., and this shows him with the Garter and Mantle of his Order, but the brass is sadly mutilated now; while her effigy is, sad to say, lost entirely.

Two other fine brasses of this family are in the church. One, of the Treasurer’s niece, Joan Stanhope, who married first Sir Humphrey Bourchier, son of the Earl of Essex, who was made fourth Baron Cromwell in her right in 1469; and secondly, after her first husband had been slain at the battle of Barnet, 1471, Sir Robert Ratcliffe. She died in 1479, and was succeeded in the property by her sister Matilda, who had married Lord Willoughby d’Eresby. Her brass has also been a particularly fine one. She died in 1497, and ten years before this the Tattershall estate had passed to the Crown. The inscription on her brass is filled in by a later and inferior hand, and no mention is made of her two next husbands.

THE WINDOWS

There is a very fine brass also of one of the last provosts or wardens of the college, probable date between 1510 and 1520. In 1487 Henry VIII. granted the manor to his mother, Margaret Countess of Richmond, and, the Duke of Richmond having no issue, Henry VIII., in 1520, granted it with many other manors in the neighbourhood to Charles Duke of Suffolk. This grant was confirmed by Edward VI. on his accession in 1547, but the duke and his two sons having died, he granted it, in 1551, to Edward Lord Clinton, afterwards Earl of Lincoln. The Clintons held it till 1692, when it passed, through a cousin Bridget, to the Fortescue family under whom both church and castle have suffered severely. Amongst other vandalisms, Lord Exeter, when living at Revesby, was allowed to remove the fine stained glass windows to his church of St. Martin’s in Stamford, in 1757. He paid £24 2s. 6d. to his steward for white glass to be put in in their stead, but the glass was not put in, and for eighty years the church was open to the wind and rain. The removal at all was a disgraceful business, and no wonder the Tattershall folk threatened to kill the glazier who was employed to take the windows out.

Tattershall Church.

The castle is now (1912) the property of Lord Curzon, who is putting it into repair. The story of its sale quite recently to a speculator, and the ruthless tearing out by his creditors of the fine historic mantelpieces is one which reflects little credit on any concerned in it. They are now replaced.

THE KEEP RESTORED

But “All’s well that ends well,” and Lincolnshire may congratulate herself that the finest old brick building in the country is in such good hands, and that the needed restoration is being carried out so admirably. It was no easy task to find oak trees to supply the beams which carry the floors, as each had to be twenty-four feet long and eighteen inches square.[27] The floors are now in, and the roof, which had been off for 250 years, reinstated. In the inner ward the ground plan of the kitchen has been laid bare; this was close outside the south-east angle of the keep and connected with it by a covered passage leading from the staircase turret. The turrets and parapets are repaired, and the floors and roof being again in place and the moat refilled with water, though not what one would call a comfortable residence, it will be a most interesting place to visit, and never again, we trust, be likely to fall into the neglect which it has suffered for the last two hundred years. Enough pottery and metal has been found to form the nucleus of a collection which will be preserved for visitors to see. But no collection will ever be half as interesting as the sight of this magnificent brick building itself, and the close examination of all its structural details.

Scrivelsby Stocks.

CHAPTER XXXIV
BARDNEY ABBEY

The Excavations—The Title “Dominus”—Barlings—Stainfield—Tupholme—Stixwould—Kirkstead Abbey—Kirkstead Chapel—Woodhall Spa—Tower-on-the-Moor—Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk.

The fens were always a difficulty to the various conquerors of England, and, probably owing to the security which they gave, they, from the earliest times, attracted the monastic bodies. Hence we find on the eastern edge of the Branston, Nocton, and Blankney fens, and just off the left bank of the Witham river when it turns to the south, an extraordinary number of abbeys. For Kirkstead, Stixwould, Tupholme and Bardney, with Stainfield and Barlings just a mile or two north of the river valley, are all within a ten mile drive. Of these, Kirkstead was Cistercian, and Stixwould and Stainfield were nunneries. They were all most ruthlessly and utterly destroyed by Thomas Cromwell at the dissolution, so it is only the history of them that we can speak about.

Kirkstead Chapel.

Stixwould and Kirkstead were originally as much in the fen as Bardney; but since the “Dales Head Dyke” was cut parallel with the Witham and about a mile to the west from “Metheringham Delph” to “Billinghay Skirth,” the land between it and the river is known as the “Dales.”

ST. OSWALD

A ROYAL ABBOT

By far the oldest and the biggest and most interesting of the group was the great Benedictine Abbey of Bardney. This was founded not later than the seventh century. Some of the chronicles say by Æthelred, son of Penda, the pagan king of Mercia; but it may have been by his brother Wulfhere, who reigned before him. Æthelred’s Queen Osfrida, niece of the sainted Oswald, the Northumbrian king who had defeated Cædwalla at Hevenfield in 635 and was himself killed in battle by Penda at Maserfield in 642—had before her marriage brought the relics of her uncle in 672 to Bardney, where they became the centre of attraction for pilgrims, and St. Oswald’s name as patron was added to those of St. Peter and St. Paul to whom the abbey was dedicated. Osfrida herself having been murdered by the Danes in 697, was buried here, and Æthelred, who in 701 founded Evesham Abbey, following the example of half-a-dozen Anglian and Saxon kings, gave up his throne after a reign of thirty years and entered Bardney as a monk in 704. In the quaint words of the chronicle he “was shorn a religious,” i.e., adopted the tonsure, and died twelve years later, after ruling for four years as Abbot of Bardney. One of the frescoes in Friskney church represents him resigning his crown to become a monk. St. Oswald’s arm, which had been preserved in St. Peter’s church at Bamborough, and which never withered, was afterwards transferred to Peterborough Abbey, according to Gunton, a little before the Conquest. A monk of the period wrote the following lines about it:—

“Nullo verme perit, nulla putredine tabet

Dextra viri, nullo constringi frigore, nullo

Dissolvi fervore potest, sed semper eodem

Immutata statu persistit, mortua vivit.”

In which the monk, as usual, made a “false quantity.” In 870 Hingvar and Hubba, the Danes, in spite of its fancied security, utterly destroyed the abbey and put some 300 monks to death. They also destroyed Peterborough, Croyland, Ely, Huntingdon, Winchester, and other fine and wealthy monastic houses in the same barbarous manner. Bardney after this lay desolate for 200 years; after which, Gilbert De Gaunt, on whom the Conqueror had bestowed much land in mid-Lincolnshire, with the aid of the famous Bishop Remigius of Lincoln, restored it, and endowed it with revenues from at least a dozen different villages, amongst them Willingham, Southrey, Partney, Steeping, Firsby, Skendleby, Willoughby, Lusby, Winceby, Hagworthingham, Folkingham, and Heckington. This would be about 1080. In 1406 we read of Henry IV., our Lincolnshire king, spending a Saturday-to-Monday there, riding from Horncastle with his two sons and three captive earls of the Scots, Douglas, Fyfe, and Orkney, and a goodly company. The Bishop of Lincoln “with 24 horses” and the “venerable Lord Willoughby” came to do homage in the afternoon. The abbey stood on slightly rising ground, with a moat and deep ditch lined with brick, as at Tattershall, and enclosing twenty-four acres. It was half a mile from the present church. On the east side of the abbey is a large barrow on which was once a handsome cross in memory of King Æthelred, who is supposed to have been buried there, and it is quite possible that he was. The name of a field close by “Coney garth” is no doubt a corruption of Koenig Garth, which is much the same as the “King’s Mead fields” near Bath Abbey, immortalised in Sheridan’s “Rivals,” as the place of meeting between Captain Absolute and Bob Acres, and where Sir Lucius O’Trigger inhumanly asks Acres “In case of accident ... would you choose to be pickled and sent home? or would it be the same to you to lie here in the Abbey? I’m told there is very snug lying in the Abbey.”

BARDNEY ABBEY

The site of the abbey when excavations were begun in 1909 was apparently a grass field with a moat; but since then the whole of the great monastic church has been laid bare to the floor pavement, which was about four and a half feet below the surface. The Norman bases of the eight chancel columns and twenty pillars of the nave are now visible, and also of the four large piers which supported the tower arches; these must have been very beautiful, each nave pillar having round a solid core a cluster of twelve, and the tower piers of sixteen, columns. All down the church, which is 254 feet long and over sixty-one feet wide, tombs were found in situ, with inscriptions, the earliest being that of Johanna, wife of John Browne of Bardney, merchant, 1334, and the handsomest that of Richard Horncastel, abbot, 1508, which measures eight feet by four, is seven inches thick, and weighs three tons. This had been already moved, and it is now fixed against the south wall of Bardney church. Adjoining the south side of the nave is the cloister; and the chapter-house, parlour, dormitory, dining-hall, cellar, kitchen, well and guest-house are all contiguous. A little way off are the infirmary-hall and chapel, with three fireplaces and some tile paving. Not much statuary was found, but various carved heads and iron tools, pottery, etc., one headless figure three feet high of St. Laurence and, most interesting of all, the reverse of the abbey seal which was in use in 1348, showing St. Peter and St. Paul beneath a canopy and the half figure of an abbot with crozier below. We know that the obverse had on it a figure of St. Oswald, but that has not yet been found. It is made of bronze or latten.

The huge extent of the buildings and the beauty of the column bases and the plan of this, the earliest of English monasteries, with its moat enclosing the whole twenty-five acres, and its king’s tumulus, make a visit to the site very interesting, and the vicar, Rev. C. E. Laing, has worked hard with his four men each year since 1909, and with the help of kind friends has managed to purchase three acres, but is greatly hampered by want of funds, which at present only reach one quarter of the sum required.

THE TITLE “DOMINUS”

Mr. Laing has published a little shilling guide to the excavations at Bardney, with photographs, which explain the work very clearly and show the tombs with their inscriptions. From this it will be noticed that Abbot Horncastel is called on his tomb “Dompnus,” i.e., Dominus, and Thomas Clark, rector of Partney, has this title “Dns.,” and also Thomas Goldburgh, soldier, has the same. This is the same name as that on the old Grimsby Corporation seal of the princess, who is said to have married Havelock the Dane (see Chap. [XIX.]). Dominus is a difficult title to translate, for if we call it ‘Sir,’ as the old registers often do, it is misleading, as it has no knightly significance, and it probably meant no more than “The Rev.,” or in the case of a soldier “Esq.” or “Gent.” It certainly does not imply here that the owners of the title belonged to “the lower order of clergy,” and yet that is the recognised meaning of it in many old church registers, e.g., in the list of rectors, vicars, and chantry priests of Heckington, taken from the episcopal records at Lincoln. Some of the vicars and most of the chantry priests are called “Sir,” and this generally implies a non-graduate. So also in the chapter on the clergy with the list of rectors and curates given in Miss Armitt’s interesting book, “The Church of Grasmere” (published 1912), pp. 57-60 and p. 81, we find that the tythe-taking rector is termed “Master,” and bears the suffix “Clerk”; while “Sir” is reserved for the curate, his deputy, who has not graduated at either university. This view is upheld in Dr. Cox’s “Parish Registers of England,” p. 251. The Grasmere book speaks of “Magister George Plumpton,” who was son of Sir William Plumpton, of Plumpton, Knight, and rector of Grasmere, 1438-9. In 1554 Gabriel Croft is called rector, and his three curates for the outlying hamlets are put down as—

“Dns. William Jackson, called in his will ‘late Curate of Grasmer.’”

“Dns. John Hunter.

“Dns. Hugo Walters.”

This entry is followed by—

“Sirre Thomas Benson curate” who witnesses a will in 1563; and in 1569 we have “Master John Benson Rector.” In 1645 we have a “Mr. Benson” doing the duty as rector during the Commonwealth, and in 1646 we have “Sir Christopher Rawling,” who had probably served as curate for some years, as he is, at his child’s baptism in 1641, styled “Clericus.” Clearly this word “Sir” is here the translation of the Latin “Dominus,” and the previous entries bear out the statement that the prefix ‘Sir’ here betokens the lower order of clergy who had not graduated at either university. But that this was not a plan universally followed is made quite clear from the monuments at Bardney, where we find a rector and an abbot and a soldier all called “Dominus.” Perhaps in neither of these cases is it necessary to translate the word by ‘Sir,’ why not leave it at “Dominus”? From a letter in The Times, May, 1913, I gather that this word “Dominus” is responsible for the title “Lord Mayor.” The words “Dominus Major” are first found among the City of London Records for 1486, in an order issued for the destruction of unlawful nets and coal sacks of insufficient size. The words only meant “Sir Mayor,” but in course of time they came to be translated “The Lord The Mayor,” which easily passed into “The Lord Mayor,” a title which did not come into general use till 1535.

BARLINGS ABBEY

Barlings Abbey stood a mile west of the Benedictine nunnery of Stainfield, which was founded by Henry Percy in the twelfth century. The abbey was founded about the same time by Ralph de Hoya for Premonstratensian canons. This term is derived from the “Premonstratum” Abbey in Picardy, i.e., built in a place “pointed out” by the Blessed Virgin to be the headquarters of the Order. This was in 1120, and the Order first came to England in 1140. At the dissolution they seem to have had thirty-five houses here, Tupholme Abbey being one of them. The canons lived according to the rule of St. Augustine, and wore a white robe. In the revolt against the suppression of the smaller houses, known as “the Lincolnshire Rebellion,” or “the Pilgrimage of Grace,” in 1537, the prior of Barlings, Dr. Matthew Makkerell, a D.D. of Cambridge, took a prominent part, and under the name of Captain Cobbler, for he took that disguise, he led 20,000 men. They were dispersed by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and the prior was hanged at his own gate.

The abbey is sometimes called Oxeney, because the founders removed the canons from Barling Grange to a place called Oxeney in another part of the village, but the name followed them and Oxeney became Barlings.

Barlings and Stainfield are both near Bardney to the north, and Tupholme and Stixwould just as near on the south. Tupholme, like Barlings, has a Premonstratensian house, founded 1160. A wall of the refectory with lancet window, and a beautiful stone pulpit for the reader during meals is all that is left. It is close to the road from Horncastle to Bardney.

Remains of Kirkstead Abbey Church.

KIRKSTEAD ABBEY

Stixwould is three miles to the south, and was, like Stainfield, a nunnery. It was founded by Lucia the first, the wife of Ivo Taillebois. Nothing is left of it; but in the parish church are some stone coffins, a good parclose screen, used as a reredos, and a remarkable font, whose panels, bearing emblems of the Evangelists and of the first four months of the year, are divided by richly carved pinnacles with figures of lions and flowers. Near by is Halstead Hall (“Hawstead”), a fifteenth century moated house of the Welby family, from which Lincoln, Boston, and Heckington are all visible.

KIRKSTEAD CHAPEL

Kirkstead is three miles further south, and here is one of the most beautiful little thirteenth-century buildings in the county. It is near the ruin of the abbey, of which only a gaunt fragment remains. This chapel of St. Leonard is a real gem of Early English architecture. It is an oblong chamber with vaulted roof adorned with tooth and nail-head ornament, springing from bosses low down in the wall. The wall is arcaded all round, and the capitals exquisitely carved. Bishop Trollope speaks of the western door as “one of the most lovely doorways imaginable, its jambs being first enriched by an inner pair of pillars having caps from which spring vigorously and yet most delicately carved foliage, and then, after a little interval, two more pairs of similar pillars carrying a beautifully moulded arch, one member of which is worked with the tooth moulding. Above this lovely doorway, in which still hangs the cöeval delicately ironed oak door, is an arcade of similar work, in the centre of which is a pointed oval window of beautiful design. The inside is still more beautiful than without.”

Inside, part of a rood screen with lancet arcading is earlier than anything of the kind in England, except the plain Norman screen in the room above the altar in Compton Church, Surrey. A mutilated effigy of a knight with a cylindrical saucepan-shaped helmet and a hauberk of banded mail, shows a rare instance of thirteenth-century armour. It is thought to be Robert, second Lord of Tattershall, who died about 1212.

The ruinous state of this lovely little building, which was used for public worship until Bishop Wordsworth prohibited it, as the building was unsafe, has long been a crying scandal; the owner always refusing to allow it to be made safe by others, and doing nothing to prevent its imminent downfall himself. The present Act of 1913 has, it is devoutly hoped, come in time to enable proper and prompt measures to be taken to put it into a sound condition.[28]

Quite near to Kirkstead is the newest Lincolnshire watering-place—Woodhall Spa.

WOODHALL SPA

A deep boring for coal in 1811 found no coal but struck a spring or flow of water, which is more highly charged with iodine and bromine than any known spa. This has been utilised, and a fine range of baths, on the principle of those at Bath, has been set up, though the water, unlike that at Bath, or at Acqui near Genoa, does not gush out boiling hot, but has to be pumped up 400 feet and then heated. All the various kinds of baths and appliances for the treatment of rheumatism, etc., are now installed, and quite a town has arisen on what was not long ago a desolate moor. The air is fine, the soil dry and sandy, the heather is beautiful around the place, and the Scotch fir woods and the picturesque “Tower-on-the-Moor”—a watch-tower or part of a hunting-lodge built by the Cromwells of Tattershall—add a charm to the landscape, though the “greate ponde or lake brickid about,” mentioned by Leland, is gone.

Kirkstead Chapel.

CHARLES BRANDON DUKE OF SUFFOLK

The Duke of Suffolk, to whom his sovereign gave so many Lincolnshire manors, was son of Sir W. Brandon, the king’s standard-bearer who fell at Bosworth field. Henry VIII. had a great liking for him and made him Master of the Horse, a viscount, and afterwards a duke. Like his royal master, he was the husband of several wives, the third of four being Mary Queen of France, widow of Louis XII. and second sister of Henry VIII. He resembled the king, too, in being a big man; indeed he was remarkable for his bodily strength and feats of arms, and was victor in several tournaments. The pains he took to quell the Lincolnshire Rebellion greatly pleased the king, who showered rewards on him with lavish hands. He is said to have somewhat resembled him, his countenance being bluff and his beard white and cut like the king’s. He was good-tempered and fortunate in never giving offence. Hence, on his portrait at Woburn Abbey he is said to have been “Gratiose withe Henry VIII. Voide of Despyte, moste fortunate to the end, never in displeasure with his Kynge.”

CHAPTER XXXV
THE FENS

Brothertoft or Goosetoft—In Holland Fen—John Taylor’s Poem—Fen Skating.

Primitive peoples have been always rather prone to establishing themselves on swampy ground, probably because they felt secure from attack in such places. They passed in their coracles easily from one little island of dry ground to another and found plenty of employment in taking fish and waterfowl, in cutting grass for fodder or hay, reeds for thatch and bedding, willows to make their wattled huts, and peat for fuel, all of which were close at hand and free to everyone. It was not such a bad life after all.

THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN

The earliest inhabitants of the Lincolnshire fens came from the mouths of the Meuse, Rhine, and Scheldt, so they lived by choice in low land and knew how to make the most of the situation. They clung for habitation to the islands of higher ground, and the names of many villages in the low part of the county, though no longer surrounded by water, bear witness by their termination to their insular origin, e.g., Bardney, Gedney, Friskney, Stickney, Sibsey, ey, as in the word ‘eyot’ (pronounced ait, e.g., Chiswick Eyot), meaning island. In time the knots of houses grew to village settlements, and raised causeways were made from one to another, which served also as banks to keep out the sea at high tides. And we know that they did this effectually; hence we find the churches mostly placed for safety on that side of the causeway bank which is furthest from the sea. You will see this to be the case as you go along the road from Boston to Wainfleet, where the churches are all west of the road, or from Spalding to Long Sutton, where they are all south of the road, and this explains how the Lincolnshire name for a high road is “ramper,” i.e., rampart. There are other sea banks which were thrown up purposely to keep out the sea, not necessarily as roads. These are very large and important works, fifty miles in length and at a varying distance from the sea, girdling the land with but little intermission from Norfolk to the Humber. Such large undertakings could only have been carried out by the Romans.

This bank, when made, had to be watched; for both in the earliest ages, and also in Jacobean times when the fens were drained, all embanking and draining works were violently opposed by the fen-men who lived by fishing and fowling, and had no desire to see the land brought into cultivation.

The Romans were great colonisers; they made good roads through the country wherever they went to stay, and in Lincolnshire they began the existing system of “Catchwater” drains which has been the means of converting a marshy waste into the finest agricultural land in the kingdom. The Roman Carr (or fen) dyke joined the Witham with the Welland, so making a navigable waterway from Lincoln in the centre to Market Deeping in the extreme south of the county; and by catching the water from the hills to the west it prevented the overflowing streams from flooding the low-lying lands, and discharged them into the sea.

Rennie, at the beginning of last century, used the same method in the east fen; but modern engineers have this advantage over the Romans that they are able by pumping stations to raise the water which lies below the level of the sea to a higher level from which it can run off by natural gravitation. Still the Romans did wonderfully, and when they had to leave England, after 400 years of beneficent occupation, England lost its best friends, for, not only was he a great road and dyke builder but, as the child’s “Very First History Book” says,

“If he just chose, there could be no man

Nicer and kinder than a Roman.”

The Romans themselves were quite aware of the beneficial nature of their rule, as far as their colonies were concerned, and were proud of it. Who can fail to see this feeling if he reads the charming lines on Rome which Claudian wrote, about 400 A.D., when the Romans were still in Britain.

“Hæc est in gremium victos quae sola recepit,

Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit

Matris non Dominae ritu, civesque vocavit

Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.”

Alone her captives to her heart she pressed,

Gave to the human race one common name,

And—mother more than sovereign—fondly called

Each son though far away her citizen.

W. F. R.

THE SAXONS

The whole country soon became a prey to the freebooters who crossed the North Sea in search of plunder. Of these, the Saxons under Cedric besieged Lincoln about 497 and, the Angles from the Elbe joining with them, made a strong settlement there which became the capital of Mercia and received a Saxon king. To these invaders, who came as plunderers but remained as colonists, we also owe much. In east Lincolnshire they certainly fostered agriculture, and like the Romans made salt-pans for getting the salt from sea water by evaporation.

Darlow’s Yard, Sleaford.

THE DANES

THE NORMANS

The Saxons dominated the country for about the same time as the Romans, and were then themselves ousted with much cruelty and bloodshed by the Danes or Norsemen. But during their time Christianity had been introduced at the instance of Pope Gregory I., who sent Augustine and forty monks to Britain at the end of the sixth century to convert the Anglo-Saxons, and as Bertha, wife of Æthelbert, King of Kent, was a Christian, he met with considerable success, and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. He was followed early in the seventh century by Paulinus, who came from York and built the first stone church at Lincoln. When, a hundred and fifty years later, the Danes made their appearance they found in several places monasteries and cathedrals or churches which they ruthlessly pillaged and destroyed; and they too, having come for plunder, remained as indwellers, settling in the eastern counties, not only near the coast but far inland, just as the Norsemen settled and introduced industrial arts on the west coast in Cumberland. Dane and Saxon struggled long and fiercely, the Danes being beaten in Alfred’s great battle at Ethandune in Wilts, 878, but only to return in Edmund’s reign and defeat the Saxons at Assandun in Essex under King Canute, 1016, after which, by agreement, they divided the country with Edmund Ironsides, and withdrew from Wessex, the region south-west of Watling Street, but the whole country north-eastwards from the Tees to the Thames was given over to them and called the Danelagh, or country under Dane law. Thus Lincoln became a Danish burgh, and in the next year, on Edmund’s death, Canute became sole King of England. None of the Fenmen of Lincolnshire had been subdued till in 1013 Swegen, King of Denmark, invaded the county in force and pillaged and burnt St. Botolph’s town (Boston), and they appear to have maintained their independence all through the Norman times. For the dynasty of Danish kings did not last long, and both they and the kings of the restored Saxon line were effaced by the Norman invaders who, like all their predecessors, found the Fenmen a hard nut to crack. Hereward, who was not son of Leofric, but a Lincolnshire man, had many a fight for liberty, and held the Isle of Ely against the repeated attacks of the Normans, and, when at last the Fenmen were beaten, they still maintained a sort of independence, and instead of becoming Normans in manners and language they are said to have kept their own methods and their own speech, so that there may well be some truth in the boast that the ordinary speech of the East Lincolnshire men of “the Fens” and “the Marsh” is the purest English in the land.