Fen Skating.
FEN SKATING
The Fen skaters of Lincolnshire have been famous for centuries. In the Peterborough Museum you may see two bone skates made of the shin bones of an ox and a deer ground to a smooth flat surface on one side and pierced at either end with holes, or grooved, for attachment thongs. The regular fen skates, which are only now being ousted by the more convenient modern form were like the Dutch skates of Teniers’ pictures, long, projecting blades twice as long as a man’s foot, turned up high at the end and cut off square at the heel. They were called “Whittlesea runners,” and were supposed to be the best form of skate for pace straight ahead; and no man who lived at Ramsey 100 to 200 years ago or at Peterborough or Croyland was without a pair. The writer has been on Cowbit Wash (pronounced Cubbit), near Spalding, when the great frozen plain was in places black with the crowds of Lincolnshire fenmen, mostly agricultural labourers, all on skates and all thoroughly enjoying themselves, whilst ever and anon a course was cleared, and with a swish of the sounding “pattens” a couple of men came racing down the long lane bordered with spectators with both arms swinging in time to the long vigorous strokes which is the fenman’s style. The most remarkable thing about the gathering was the splendid physique of the crowd. Could they all have been taken and drilled for military service they would have made a regiment of which Peter the Great would have been proud.
The best ice fields for racing purposes are Littleport in Cambridgeshire, and Lingay Fen and Cowbit Wash in Lincolnshire. Before it was drained in 1849, Whittlesea Mere in Huntingdonshire was the great meeting ground, and the Ramsey and Whittlesea men were famous skaters. By dyke or river one could go from Cambridge to Ramsey on skates all the way. The best speed skaters—and speed was the only aim of the fen skater—for many years were the Smarts of Welney, near Littleport. “Turkey” Smart beat Southery, who won the championship in the last match on Whittlesea Mere from Watkinson of Ramsey, and after him “Fish” Smart held the record at Cowbit Wash for a whole generation from 1881 to 1912.
In 1878 and 1879 the frost was long and hard, and the prizes at the great skating match near Ramsey took the form of food and clothing for the frozen-out labourers. The course was down a road which a heavy fall of snow, followed first by a thaw and then by a frost, had made into an ideal skating course.
THE CHAMPIONSHIPS
Whatever year you take you will find that the prize-winners for fen skating come from the same district and the same villages; Welney, Whaplode, Gedney, Cowbit, and Croyland are perpetually recurring names, the last four being all situated in the south-eastern corner of Lincolnshire which abuts on the Wash between the outfall of the Welland and the Nene.
In the severe frost of 1912, which lasted from January 29 to February 5, the thermometer on the night of February 3 going down to zero, Cowbit Wash saw the contest for both the professional and the amateur championship for Lincolnshire. The Lincolnshire professional race on Saturday, February 3, over a course of one mile and a half with one turn in it brought out two Croyland men, H. Slater first and G. Pepper second, F. Ward of Whaplode being third. The winning time was 4 minutes 50 seconds.
On Monday, February 5, W. W. Pridgeon of Whaplode won the Lincolnshire amateur championship over a mile course with a turn and a terrific wind in 3 minutes 40 seconds, two Boston men coming next. On the following day, February 6, the ice from the thaw, though wet, had a beautiful surface, and in the great “one mile straightaway” race open to amateurs and professionals alike, eight men entered, all of whom beat Fish Smart’s record of 3 minutes. F. W. Dix, the British amateur champion winning in 2 minutes 27¼ seconds, with S. Greenhall, the British professional champion, second in 2 minutes 32²⁄₁₅ seconds.
F. W. Dix showed himself to be first-rate at all distances, for besides this mile race, he won the mile and a half on February 2 at Littleport, with five turns in 4 minutes 40 seconds, and next day at the Welsh Harp he secured the prize for 220 yards in 22⅘ seconds. S. Greenhall had won the British professional championship on the previous day at Lingay Fen over a course of one and a half miles, coming in first by 170 yards in 4 minutes 44⅘ seconds.
In all these races the wind was blowing a gale, and those who won the toss, and could run close up under the lee of the line of spectators had a decided advantage, and as a matter of fact they won in every case.
A WORLD’S RECORD
Since this Dix has won in the Swiss skating matches of 1913, and here it may be of interest to add the following, which appeared in The Times of February 3, 1913:—
“SPEED-SKATING.
International Race in Christiania.
(From our Correspondent.)
Christiania, Feb. 1.
“The International Skating Race held here to-day over a course of 10,000 metres was won by the Norwegian skater, Oscar Mathieson. His time was 17 min. 22⁶⁄₁₀ sec., which is a world’s ‘record.’ The Russian, Ipolitow, was second, his time being 17 min. 35⁵⁄₁₀ sec. The previous world’s ‘record’ was 17 min. 36⅗ sec.”
‘Metres’ fairly beat me, but I take it that 10,000 of them would be about six miles.
But anyone who likes to worry it out can postulate that the length of a metre is 39·37079 inches. This was originally adopted as a “Natural unit,” being one ten-millionth of the distance between a pole and the Equator. But, as an error has been found in the measurement of this distance, it is no longer a “Natural unit,” but just the length of a certain rod of platinum kept at Paris, as the yard is the length of a rod kept at Westminster.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FEN CHURCHES—NORTHERN DIVISION
Friskney—Frescoes in the Church—Its Decoys—Wrangle—John Reed’s Epitaph—Leake—Leverton—Benington—Frieston—The Font-Cover—Frieston Shore—Rare Flowers—Fishtoft—Skirbeck—Boston—The Church.
The two centres for “The parts of Holland” are Spalding and Boston. From the latter we go both north and south, from Spalding only eastwards, and in each case we shall pass few residential places of importance, but many exceptionally fine churches.
We will take the district north of Boston first.
Friskney, which is but three and a half miles south of Wainfleet, where we ended our south Lindsey excursion, is really in Lindsey. It stands between the Marsh and the Fen. The road from Wainfleet to Boston bounds the inhabited area of the parish on the east, and another from Burgh, which runs for ten miles without passing a single village till it reaches Wrangle, does the same on the west. Outside of these roads on the west is the great “East Fen,” reclaimed little more than 100 years ago, and on the east is the “Old Marsh,” along which went the Roman Bank, and east of which again is the “New Marsh,” and beyond it the huge stretch of the “Friskney flats,” over which the sea ebbs and flows for a distance of from three to four miles; the haunt of innumerable sea birds, plovers (locally pyewipes), curlew, redshanks, knots, dunlins, stints, etc., as well as duck and geese of many kinds and even, at times, the lordly swan.
FRISKNEY
Thus surrounded, Friskney stands solitary about half way between Wainfleet and Wrangle, and if only the northern boundary of Holland had been made the “Black Dyke” and “Gout” as would have been most natural, Friskney would have been the north-eastern point of Holland, instead of being the south-eastern point of Lindsey. Since their discovery by the late rector, the Rev. H. J. Cheales, the most noticeable thing in the fine Perpendicular church is the series of wall paintings above the arcades of the nave, date 1320, most of them are faint and hard to make out, but there are drawings of them, and an account was published in 1884 and 1905 in the “Archæologia,” vols. 48 and 50. The subjects are the Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, and Ascension, and the Assumption of the Virgin, on the north arcade; on the south are the Offering of Melchizedek, the Gathering of the Manna, the Last Supper, one possibly of Pope Gregory, one of King Æthelred entering Bardney Abbey, and a most curious one of Jews stabbing the Host. There are two Norman arches in the aisle wall, and a beautiful tower arch with steps from the nave down into the tower, the lower part of which is transition Norman, the next stage Early English, and the next Perpendicular; there are six bells in it. The nave is very high, the clerestory, on which the paintings are, having been added early in the fourteenth century. The old roof has been preserved, and the chancel screen and two chantry screens, which are unusually high to match the nave. The rood stairs, as at Wrangle and Leake, are on the south side. The pulpit is dated 1659. The north chantry is entered by a half arch, and there is a squint and a curious low-side window placed oddly on the north side of the chancel arch. Some unusually fine sedilia with diaper work at the back, and a trefoiled aumbry and piscina are in the chancel, which has been nearly ruined by bad restoration with a new roof in 1849. It has large handsome windows and finely canopied niches on each buttress, with ornamentation carved in Ancaster stone. This chancel was the gift of John Mitchell of Friskney in 1566.
An effigy of a knight of the Freshney family (a local pronunciation of Friskney), of whom we have seen so many monuments in the Marsh churches at Somercoats, Saltfleetby and Skidbrooke, is at the west end, and a restored churchyard cross stands near the south door.
The family of Kyme, who had a manor near Boston and two villages called after them between Sleaford and Dogdyke, held land in Friskney through the thirteenth century and until 1339, when it passed by marriage to Gilbert Umfraville, whose son, the Earl of Angus, married Maud, daughter of Lord Lucy. She afterwards became the second wife of Henry Percy, first Earl of Northumberland, father of the famous “Hotspur,” whose wife, together with her second husband, Baron Camoys, has such a fine monument in Trotton church near Midhurst, Sussex. Hence, in the east window of the north aisle of the church at Friskney are the arms, amongst others, of Northumberland, Lucy, and Umfraville.
The Earl’s grandson, the second Earl of Northumberland, who was killed at the battle of St. Albans fighting for Henry VI., May 22, 1455, possessed no less than fifty-seven manors in Lincolnshire, many of them inherited from the Kymes.
William de Kyme, uncle of Gilbert Umfraville, left a widow Joan who married Nicolas de Cantelupe. He founded a chantry dedicated to St. Nicolas in Lincoln Cathedral, and she, one dedicated to St. Paul.
LOST INDUSTRIES
It is melancholy to hear of old-fashioned employments fading away, but it is the penalty paid by civilisation all the world over. Friskney in particular may be called the home of lost industries. For instance, “Mossberry or Cranberry Fen,” in this parish, was so named from the immense quantity of cranberries which grew on it, and of which the inhabitants made no use until a Westmorland man, knowing their excellence, taught them; and thence, until the drainage of the fens, thousands of pecks were picked and sent into Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire every year, 5s. a peck being paid to the gatherers. After the drainage they became very scarce and fetched up to 50s. a peck.
Similarly, before the enclosure of the fens there were at least ten Duck Decoys in this part of the county, of which five were in Friskney, and they sent to the London market in one season over 31,000 ducks. Eighty years ago there were still two in Friskney and one in Wainfleet St. Mary’s, and I remember one in Friskney which still maintained itself, in the sixties, though each year the wild fowl came to it in diminishing numbers.
Bryant’s large map of 1828 shows a decoy near Cowbit Wash, no less than five near the right bank of the River Glen in the angle formed by the “Horseshoe Drove” and the “Counter Drain,” and two on the left bank of the Glen, all the seven being within a two-mile square, and two more further north in the Dowsby Fen, and four in the Sempringham Fen probably made by the Gilbertines.
THE DECOY
The decoy was a piece of water quite hidden by trees, and only to be approached by a plank across the moat which surrounded it, and with a large tract of marshy uncultivated ground extending all round it, the absence of disturbing noises being an essential, for the birds slept there during the day and only took their flight to the coast at evening for feeding. The method of taking them was as follows. The pond had half-a-dozen arms like a star-fish, but all curving to the right, over which nets were arched on bent rods; and these pipes, leading down each in a different direction and gradually narrowing, ended in a purse of netting. All along the pipes were screens, so set that the ducks could not see the man till they had passed him, and lest they should wind him he always held a bit of burning turf before his mouth. Decoy birds enticed by hemp and other floating seed flung to them over the screens kept swimming up the pipes followed by the wild birds, and a little dog was trained to enter the water and pass in and out of the reed screens. The ducks, being curious, would swim up, and the dog, who was rewarded with little bits of cheese, kept reappearing ahead of them, and so led them on to follow the decoys. At last the man showed himself, and the birds—ducks, teal, and widgeon—rushed up the pipe into the purse and were taken. The decoy was only used in November, December, and January, and it is not in use now at all. But there are still two of the woods left round the ponds at Friskney, each about twelve acres, and the water is there to some extent, but the arms are grown over with weeds and are barely traceable. Indeed it is a hundred years and rather more since the famous old decoy man, George Skelton, lived and worked here with his four sons. His great grandson was the last to follow the occupation, but when the numbers caught came to be only three and four a day, it was clear that the business had “given out.” Absolute quiet and freedom from all the little noises which arise wherever the lowliest and smallest of human habitations exist was necessary, for at least a mile all round the wood, and as cultivation spread this could not be obtained. Nothing is so shy as wild-fowl; and Skelton said that even the smell of a saucepan of burnt milk would scare all the duck away. The mode of taking birds in “flight nets” is still practised on the coast, the nets being stretched on poles at several feet above the ground, and the birds flying into them and getting entangled. Plover are taken in this way, and the smaller birds which fly low in companies along by the edge of the sea, or across the mud flats.
A decoy still exists near Croyland, and another at Ashby west of Brigg, in the lower reaches of the Trent; and formerly there were many in Deeping Fen and other parts of Holland. But wild-fowl were not the only birds the Fenmen had to rely on, and Cooper’s “Tame Villatic Fowl,” and the goose and turkey in particular, are a steady source of income, as the Christmas markets in the Fens testify.
WRANGLE
THE REED EPITAPH
From Friskney we run on about four miles to Wrangle. What the road used to be we may guess from the constable’s accounts for the parish of Friskney, in which the expenses for a journey to Boston are charged for two days and a night “being in the winter time.” The distance is thirteen miles. In the eighteenth century corn was still conveyed to market on the backs of horses tied in strings, head to tail, like the camels in eastern caravans. The name of Wrangle is Weranghe, or Werangle, in Domesday, said to mean the lake or mere of reeds, from “wear,” a lake, and “hangel,” a reed. A friend of mine passing Old Leake station (which was first called “Hobhole drain,” but, at the request of the Wrangle parishioners, because the name deterred visitors, was altered afterwards to Leake-and-Wrangle), observed that this name reminded him of the words of Solomon that the beginning of strife is like the letting out of water.[30] The place used to be a haven on a large sea creek, and furnished to Edward III. for the invasion of France, in 1359, one ship and eight men, Liverpool at that time being assessed at one ship and five men. The church is large, and the rectors have been for over a hundred years members of the family of Canon Wright of Coningsby, a nephew of Sir John Franklin. The outer doorway of the south porch has a beautiful trefoiled arch with tooth moulding, and curious carvings at the angles. Near this is a fine octagonal font with three steps and a raised stone, called a ‘stall,’ for the priest to stand on. This is not uncommon in all these lofty Early English fonts. The tower was once much higher, as is shown by the fine tower arch with its very singular moulding. The tracery in the clerestory windows marks a period of transition, being alternately flowing and Perpendicular. There is a good deal of old glass of the fourteenth century in the north aisle, quite two-thirds of the east window of the aisle being old, with the inscription “Thomas de Weyversty, Abbas de Waltham me fieri fecit.” There is a turret staircase for the rood-loft stair at the junction of the south aisle and chancel, hence the door to the rood loft is on that side. The pulpit is Elizabethan. The Reed family have several monuments here, and it is probable that the three first known parsons of Wrangle—William (1342), John (1378), and Nicolas (1387)—were chaplains to that family. On a large slab in the chancel pavement to “John Reed sum time Marchant of Calys and Margaret his wyfe,” date 1503, are these lines:—
This for man, when ye winde blows
Make the mill grind,
But ever on thyn oune soul
Have thou in mind,
That thou givys with thy hand
Yt thou shalt finde,
And yt thou levys thy executor
Comys far behynde.
Do thou for thy selfe while ye have space.
To pray Jesu of mercy and grace,
In heaven to have a place.
Sir John Reade, the great-grandson of John and Margaret, who died in 1626, is described as “eques aureus vereque Xianus eirenarcha prudens,” etc., the last substantive meaning Justice of the Peace.
There is an old Bede-house founded 1555, which we shall pass now on our way to Leake, and we may perhaps trace the old sea-bank just behind it. There was once one also at Benington, a few miles further on, called “Benington Bede.” But before leaving so much that is old we may delight our eyes, if we are lucky enough to find Mr. Barker (the vicar) or his wife in the church, with a sight of some most exquisite modern church embroidery in the form of an altar cloth, lately made by the ladies of the rectory.
Leake Church.
LEAKE
Leake, little more than a mile from Wrangle, has a most massive Perpendicular tower which was fifty-seven years building and never completed; here, too, there was a seaway to the coast. The south aisle of the church and the nave have been restored, but the north aisle is still in a ruinous condition, and reflects little credit on the patrons who are, or were, the governors of Oakham and Uppingham schools. There is a magnificent clerestory of six windows with carved and canopied niches between each window, giving a very rich effect; and, as at Wrangle, there is an octagonal rood turret and spirelet at the south-east of the nave. The wavy parapet of the nave gable reminds one of the similar work round the eastern chapel at Peterborough Cathedral, and the tall nave pillars resemble those at Boston. Only a very little Norman work remains from an earlier church. A knight in alabaster, a good Jacobean pulpit, and a remarkable old alms-box made out of a solid oak stem are in the church, and round the churchyard is a moat with a very large lych-gate on the bridge across it. A mile and a half east of this are the remains of an old stone building of early date, called the Moat House.
Two of the Conington family were vicars here in the seventeenth century, and a Thomas Arnold was curate in 1794.
LEVERTON
Leverton is but two miles from Leake, and Benington only one mile further. The churches in this district have no pinnacles. Leverton was thatched until 1884, when the present clerestory was built. The chancel has some beautiful canopied sedilia, which are spoken of by Marrat in his “History of Lincolnshire” as “three stone stalls of most exquisite workmanship, to describe the beauties of which the pen seems not to possess an adequate power.” At the back of one of these is an aumbrey, or locker. The windows are square-headed, the font is tall and handsome, but the greatest charm of the building is the sacristy or Lady chapel to the south of the chancel—a perfect gem of architecture, the carved stone work of which is rich and tasteful. Crucifixes surmount both gables of this, and also that at the chancel end, this profusion being a consequence of the church being dedicated to St. Helena. Whether she was the daughter of a Bithynian innkeeper or a British princess, she was the wife of Constantius Chlorus and mother of Constantine the Great; and the legend is that, being admonished in a dream to search for the Cross of Christ, she journeyed to Jerusalem, and, employing men to dig at Golgotha, found three crosses, and having applied each of them to a dead person, one of the crosses raised the dead to life, so she knew that that was the one she was searching for. The church of North Ormsby is also dedicated to her. At Leverton the rood-loft steps exist on the south of the chancel arch, and the churchwarden’s book, which begins in 1535, gives the bill for putting up the rood loft and also for taking it down. At the beginning of last century Mrs. A. Skeath, of Boston, made a new sea-bank three miles long, which effectually reclaimed from the sea 390 acres for this parish.
The village of Benington has a fine church with a good porch and a turret stairway to the north-east of the nave. The roof retains its old timbers with carved angels. In the chancel are the springers for a stone roof. The pillars of the nave have a very wide circular base, and in the Early English chancel are sedilia with aumbries and piscina, and also an arched recess which may have been used for an Easter sepulchre. The tall red sandstone font is singularly fine, both bowl and pedestal being richly carved with figures under canopies.
Leverton Windmill.
The practice of putting inscriptions into rhyme is exemplified in the windows of these churches.
BENINGTON
Benington has a Latin couplet:—
Ad loca Stellata
Duc me Katherina beata
Leverton one in Norman French:—
Pour l’amour de Jhesu Christ
Priez par luy q moy fatre fist.
(Pray for him who caused me to be made.)
BUTTERWICK AND FRIESTON
FRIESTON SHORE
A lane here leads eastwards to Benington-Sea-End, which is close on the Roman bank. And, as the main road to Boston is devoid of interest, we will bend to the left hand, and pass through Butterwick to Frieston and so to the shore. An old register records in rhyme the planting of the fine sycamore tree in Butterwick churchyard, in 1653. The name Butterwick occurs in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and is derived probably from the Dane Buthar, as are Buttermere in Cumberland, and Butterlip-How in Grasmere. At Frieston, which, like Friskney and Firsby, is said to indicate a colony of Frieslanders, the present church is the nave of a fine old priory church of the twelfth century founded by Alan de Creon for Benedictines and attached as a cell to Croyland, where his brother was abbot. It had a central tower adjoining the east of the present building; the west piers of this tower are visible outside. Inside there are six Norman and three pointed arches, the latter leading to a massive western tower with a stone figure in a niche dating from the fifteenth century. The south aisle is now all of brick, the Norman stone corbelling being replaced above the eight large three light clerestory windows. The most remarkable thing in the church is the beautiful carved wood font-cover, at least twelve feet high, and surmounted by a figure of the Virgin. This is similar, but superior, to that at Fosdyke, but in no way equal to the beautiful and richly carved example ten feet in height at Ufford church in Suffolk. The font itself has carved panels and two kneeling-steps for priest and sponsor. The churchyard is an extremely large one. The sea once came close up to Frieston, the coast bending round to Fishtoft and towards Skirbeck; at the present time the Frieston shore is two and a half miles off. The road runs close up to the sea-bank. A long old-fashioned hostelry, with a range of stables telling of days gone by, stands under the shelter of the bank, on mounting which you find a bench on a level with the bedroom windows of the inn, whence you look out towards the sea, which forms a shining line in the far distance, for it is over two miles to ‘Boston deeps,’ far over a singular stretch of foreshore channelled with a network of deep clefts by which the retreating tide drains seaward through the glistening mud. The first part of this desolate shore is green with sea-grasses, visited daily by the salt water, and along the fringe of it there are here many rather uncommon flowers growing just below high-water mark, such as the yellow variety of the sea aster (Aster tripolium var. discoideus), and the rare Suæda fruticosa; and in the ditches leading inland the handsome marsh-mallow (Althæa officinalis) flourishes, as it does on Romney Marsh, near Rye. At high water all looks quite different; and a sunrise over the lagoon-like shallow water gives a picture of colour which is not easily forgotten.
Frieston Priory Church.
From Frieston shore one gets by a circuitous three-mile route to Fishtoft. Here once was a Norman church. The present one has two rood screens; one, at the west end, having been purchased from Frieston, which, however, retained its two aisle screens. There is a good small figure of St. Guthlac, the patron saint, over the west window of the tower, much like that at Frieston. On a tombstone in the churchyard is the following:—
Interred here lies Anne the wife
Of Bryon Johnson during life
The 25ᵗʰ day of November
In 68 he lost this member.
He only survived her two months, and the next inscription is:—
Now Bryon is laid down by Anne
’Till God does raise them up again.
This rhyme might do for Norfolk or Devonshire, but is not Lincolnshire.
BOSTON STUMP
And now two miles more bring us to Skirbeck on the outskirts of Boston. The only interesting feature of the church here is in the columns of the nave, which have four cylinders round a massive centre pillar, all four quite detached except at the bases and capitals, which last are richly carved. We shall find exactly similar ones at Weston, near Spalding. We now follow the curving line of the Haven with its grassy banks right into Boston. The splendid parish church, the sight of whose tower is a never-failing source of delight and inspiration, stands with its east end in the market-place, and its tall tower close on the bank of the river. It has no transepts as the Great Yarmouth church has, but, apart from its unapproachable steeple, it is longer and higher and greater in cubic contents than any parish church in the kingdom. The tower, 288 feet, is taller than Lincoln tower or Grantham spire, and is only exceeded in height by Louth spire, which is 300 feet. The view of it from across the river is one of the most entirely satisfying sights in the world.[31] The extreme height is so well proportioned, and each stage leads up so beautifully to the next, that one is never tired of gazing on it. Add to this that it is visible to all the dwellers in the Marsh and Fen for twenty miles round and from the distant Wolds, and again far out to sea, and is as familiar to all as their own shadow, and you can guess at the affection which stirs the hearts of all Lincolnshire men when they think or speak of the ‘Owd Stump,’ a curious title for a beloved object, but so slightly does it decrease in size as it soars upwards from basement to lantern, that in the distance it looks more like a thick mast or the headless stem of a gigantic tree than a church steeple.
Boston Church from the N.E.
THE BUILDING OF THE CHURCH
THE INTERIOR
There was once here a church of the type of Sibsey, said to date from 1150, of which but little has been discovered. The present building was begun in 1309, when the digging for the foundation of the tower began “on ye Monday after Palm Sunday in the 3ʳᵈ yr of Ed. II.” They went down thirty feet to a bed of stone five feet below the level of the river bed, overlying “a spring of sand,” under which again was a bed of clay of unknown thickness. The excavation was a very big job, and the “first stone” was not laid till the feast of St. John the Baptist (Midsummer Day) by Dame Margaret Tilney, and she and Sir John Truesdale, then parson of Boston, and Richard Stevenson, a Boston merchant, each laid £5 on the stone “which was all ye gifts given at that time” towards the expense which, we are told, was, for the whole tower, under £500 of the money of those days. Leland, Vol. VIII., 204, says: “Mawde Tilney who layed the first stone of the goodly steeple of the paroche chirch of Boston lyith buried under it.” The work of building up the tower was interrupted for fifty years, and the body of the church was taken in hand, the present tower arch serving as a west window. Then the tower began to rise, but it was finished without the lantern. In the middle of the fifteenth century the chancel was lengthened by two bays, and the parapets and pinnacles added to the aisles. The parapet at the east end of the north aisle is very curious and elaborate, being pierced with tracery of nearly the same design as that on the flying buttresses of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster. There were several statues round the building on tall pedestals rising from the lowest coping of the buttresses to about the height of the nave parapets; one is conspicuous still at the south-east corner of the tower and above the south porch. The tower has three stages, arranged as in Louth church, and then the lantern above. In the first stage a very large west window rises above the west doorway, and similar ones on the north and south of the tower, and all the surface is enriched with panelling both on tower and buttresses. The next stage is lighted by a pair of windows of great height, finely canopied and divided by a transom, on each side of the tower; this forms the ringing chamber, and a gallery runs round it in the thickness of the wall communicating with the two staircases. On the door of one of these is a remarkable handle, a ring formed by two bronze lizards depending from a lion’s mouth. The clustered shafts and springers of the stone vault were built at the beginning, but the handsome groined roof with its enormous central boss 156 feet from the ground was not completed until 1852. The next story has large single-arched windows of a decidedly plain type. These are the only things one can possibly find fault with, but probably when the tower had no lantern the intention was to exhibit the light from this story, the bells being hung below and rung from the ground. Eventually the eight bells were hung in the third story, and the lantern, by far the finest in England, was added, which gives so queenly an effect to the tall tower. Before this was done four very high pinnacles finished the building, subsequently arches were turned diagonally over the angles of the tower so as to make the base of the octagonal lantern. The roof of the tower and the gutters round it are of stone and curiously contrived. The lantern has eight windows like those in the second stage of the tower, but each one pane longer, and the corners are supported by flying buttresses springing in pairs from each tower pinnacle. The whole is crowned with a lofty parapet with pierced tracery and eight pinnacles with an ornamented gable between each pair of pinnacles. Inside was a lantern lighted at night for a sea mark. The church of All Saints, York, has a very similar one, and there the hook for the lantern pulley is still to be seen.
BOSTON, U.S.A.
Inside, one is struck by the ample size and height of the church and its vast proportions. The choir has five windows on each side. But the nave is spoilt by a false wooden roof which cuts off half of the clerestory windows. It is a pity this is not removed and the old open timber roof replaced. In the chancel are sixty-four stalls of good carved work, and the old and curiously designed miserere seats, often showing humorous subjects as at Lincoln, are of exceptional interest. Of the once numerous brasses most are gone, but two very fine ones are on either side the altar: one to Walter Peascod, merchant, 1390, and one to a priest in a cope, c. 1400; an incised slab of 1340 is at the west of the north aisle. The Conington tablet in memory of John Conington, Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford, on the south wall of the chancel is to be noticed, and the Bolles monument in the south aisle, and, near the south porch, the chapel which was restored by the Bostonians of the United States as a recognition of their Lincolnshire origin. Close to this is a curious epitaph painted on a wooden panel, which reads as follows:—
My corps with Kings and Monarchs sleeps in bedd,
My soul with sight of Christ in heaven is fedd,
This lumpe that lampe shall meet, and shine more bright
Than Phœbus when he streams his clearest light,
Omnes sic ibant sic imus ibitis ibunt.
Rich. Smith obiit
Anno salutis 1626.
Boston Stump.
CHAPTER XXXVII
ST. BOTOLPH’S TOWN
The River Witham—Drayton’s Polyolbion—The Steeple at Boston—Monastic Houses—Merchants’ Guilds—Dykes and Sluices—The Fens reclaimed—Great Floods—High Tides—The Hussey and Kyme Towers—John Fox—Hallam and Conington—Jean Ingelow—Lincolnshire Stories.
A not unapt parallel has been drawn between Boston and Venice for, like the Campanile, Boston steeple is a sort of Queen of the Waters, and before the draining of the Fens she often looked down on a waste of waters which stretched in all directions.
Leland, who wrote in the reign of Henry VIII., in Vol. VII. of his Itinerary, speaks of “the great Steple of Boston,” and describes the town thus: “Bosstolpstoune stondeth harde on the river Lindis (Witham). The greate and chifiest parte of the toune is on the este side of the ryver, where is a faire market place, and a crosse with a square toure. Al the buildings of this side of the toune is fayre, and Marchuntes duelle yn it; and a staple of wulle is used there. There is a bridg of wood to cum over Lindis, into this parte of the toune, and a pile of stone set yn the myddle of the ryver. The streame of yt is sumtymes as swifte as it were an arrow. On the West side of Lindis is one long strete, on the same side is the White Freies. The mayne sea ys VI miles of Boston. Dyverse good shipps and other vessells ryde there.”
THE RIVER WITHAM
Michael Drayton, who wrote in Elizabeth’s reign, was quite enthusiastic about the merits of the Witham, which runs out at Boston, and makes her speak in her own person thus:—
From Witham, mine own town, first water’d with my source,
As to the Eastern sea I hasten on my course,
Who sees so pleasant plains or is of fairer seen?
Whose swains in shepherd’s gray and girls in Lincoln green,
Whilst some the ring of bells, and some the bagpipes play,
Dance many a merry round, and many a hydegy.[32]
I envy, any brook should in my pleasure share,
Yet for my dainty pikes, I am without compare.
No land floods can me force to over proud a height;
Nor am I in my course too crooked or too streight;
My depths fall by descents, too long nor yet too broad,
My fords with pebbles, clear as orient pearls, are strow’d,
My gentle winding banks with sundry flowers are dress’d,
My higher rising heaths hold distance with my breast.
Thus to her proper song the burthen still she bare;
Yet for my dainty pikes I am without compare.
By this to Lincoln town, upon whose lofty scite
Whilst wistly Wytham looks with wonderful delight,
Enamour’d of the state and beauty of the place
That her of all the rest especially doth grace,
Leaving her former course, in which she first set forth,
Which seem’d to have been directly to the North,
She runs her silver front into the muddy fen
Which lies into the east, in the deep journey when
Clear Bane, a pretty brook, from Lindsey, coming down
Delicious Wytham leads to lively Botulph’s town,
Where proudly she puts in, among the great resort
That there appearance make, in Neptune’s Wat’ry Court.
Polyolbion. Song 25.
SKIRBECK
We have no definite information of what Boston was in Roman times, but as the Witham was the river on which their colony at Lincoln stood, it is more than probable that they had a station at Boston to defend the river-mouth, and whatever they may have called it, it is certain that it has got its name of Boston or Botolph’s town from an English saint who is said to have founded a monastery here in 654, which was destroyed by the Danes in 870. St. Botolph was buried in his monastery in 680, and his remains moved in 870, part to Ely and part to Thorney Abbey. The name as a town does not appear in Domesday Book, though “Skirbec” does, and Skirbeck covered all the ground that Boston does, and almost surrounded it. As the old distich declares—
Though Boston be a proud town
Skirbeck compasseth it around.
BOSTON PORT
This name for pride or conceit, whether deserved or not, seems to have stuck to Boston, for a rhyme of later day runs thus:—
Boston Boston Boston!
Thou hast nought to boast on
But a grand sluice, and a high steeple,
And a proud conceited ignorant people,
And a coast which souls get lost on.
And certainly Boston once had some reason to be proud, for though the town was quite an infant till the beginning of the twelfth century, in 1113 “Fergus, a brazier of St. Botolph’s town” was able, according to Ingulphus in his “Chronicles of Croyland Abbey,” “to give 2 Skillets (Skilletas) which supplied the loss of their bells and tower.” The gift, whatever it was (probably small bells), must have been of considerable value to Croyland, which had been burnt down in 1091, and argues much prosperity among Boston tradespeople. Indeed, the town and its trade rose with such rapidity during the next hundred years that when, in the reign of King John, a tax or tythe of a fifteenth was levied on merchants’ goods, Boston’s contribution was £780, being second only to the £836 of London. For the next two centuries it was a commercial port of the first rank, and merchants from Flanders and most of the great Continental towns had houses there.
Custom House Quay, Boston.
When in 1304 Edward I. granted his wife Queen Margaret the castle and manor of Tattershall to hold till the heir was of age, he added to it the manor of St. Botolph and the duties levied on the weighing of the wool there. This was set down as worth £12 a year. A wool sack was very large—one sees them now at Winchester, each large enough to fill the whole bed of a Hampshire waggon—but at 6s. 8d. a sack the duties must have been often worth more than £12, for there was no other staple in the county but at Lincoln, and that was afterwards, under Edward III. in 1370, transferred to Boston, and whether at Boston or Lincoln, when weighed and sealed by the mayor of the staple, it was from Boston that it was all exported.
THE STAPLE
When a staple of wool, leather, lead, etc., was established at any town or port it was directed that the commodities should be brought thither from all the neighbourhood and weighed, marked and sealed. Then they could be delivered to any other port, where they were again checked. In 1353, during the long reign of Edward III., the staple was appointed to be held in Newcastle, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Exeter and Bristol. Of these, York and Lincoln sent all the produce when weighed to Hull and Boston, Norwich to Yarmouth, Westminster to London Port, Canterbury to Sandwich, and Winchester (by water or road) to Southampton. In 1370 some of the inland towns—York, Lincoln and Norwich—were deprived of their staple, and Hull and Queensborough were added to the list; and, though Nottingham, Leicester and Derby petitioned to have the staple at Lincoln, which was much more convenient to them, the answer they got was that it should continue at St. Botolph’s during the king’s pleasure.
South Square, Boston.
In Henry VIII.’s time, when the king passed through Lincolnshire after “the pilgrimage of grace” and the chief towns made submission and paid a fine, Boston paid £50, while Stamford and Lincoln paid £20 and £40 respectively.
FRIARIES AND GUILDS
In 1288 a church of the Dominican or Black Friars which had been recently built was burnt down, and a few years later a friary was re-established, which was one of the many Lincolnshire religious houses granted by Henry VIII. to Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk. In 1301, under Edward I., a Carmelite, or White Friars, monastic house and priory was founded; and in the next reign, 1307, an Augustinian, or “Austin,” friary; and only a few years later, under Edward III., a Franciscan, or Grey Friars, friary was established. All these three were granted by Henry at the dissolution to the mayor and burgesses of Boston. He also granted the town their charter under the great Seal of England, to make amends for the losses they sustained by the destruction of the religious houses. It is a document with fifty-seven clauses, making the town a free borough with a market on Wednesday and Saturday, and two fairs annually of three days each, to which are added two “marts” for horses and cattle. The ground where the grammar school stands is still called the Mart-yard, and there you may still see the beautiful iron gate which was once part of a screen in the church, and is a very notable piece of good seventeenth-century work.
The charter also gave the corporation, among other things, “power to assess the inhabitants, as well unfree as free, with a tax for making a safeguard and defence of the borough and church there against the violence of the waters and rage of the sea.”
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were no less than fifteen guilds in the town, six of them with charters. The hall of St. Mary’s guild still exists, the names of St. George’s Lane and Corpus Christi Lane is all that is left of the others, but the old names indicate the localities.
THE WINE-CELLARS
In 1360 we have mention on the corporation records of William de Spayne, one of a family of merchants of repute, after whom Spayne’s Place and what is now Spain Lane were named. William was an alderman of the Corpus Christi Guild, and sheriff of the county in 1378. Spain Lane had a row of great cellars, some of which were rented by the abbeys, and a quantity of wine was shipped from Bordeaux to Boston. King John of France had 140 tuns at one time, the carriage of which to Boston, and some part of it to the place of his detention at Somerton Castle (see Chap. [XIII.]), cost close upon £500. This large supply was sent to him from France, partly for his own consumption and partly to be sold in order to bring in money to keep up his royal state, and when we read of the silk curtains and tapestries, the French furniture for dining-hall and bedrooms which displaced the benches and trestles of an English castle, the horse trappings and stable fittings, and the enormous amount of stores and confectionery used at Somerton, we realise that his daily expenditure must have been a very large one. The cellars which stowed these large cargoes of wine were in Spain (or Spayne) Lane, and most of them were, in 1590, in accordance with Boston’s usual suicidal custom, destroyed, though the corporation still held two in 1640 which had once belonged to Kirkstead Abbey.
Spain Lane, Boston.
THE SILTING OF THE RIVER
In the sixteenth century several trade companies—cordwainers, glovers, etc.—received charters. In this century Queen Elizabeth gave the mayor and burgesses a “Charter of Admiralty” over the whole of the “Norman Deeps” to enable them to repair and maintain the sea marks, and to levy tolls on all ships entering the port. But trade was then declining owing to the silting up of the river. This, in 1569, when the town was made a Staple town, had been in good order, and navigable for seagoing ships of some size, the tide water running up two miles inland as far as Dockdyke (now Dogdyke), and then a large trade was done in wool and woollen goods between Boston and Flanders. Hence it was that when, in the reign of Henry VII., a council was held to discuss the two great needs of the town, viz., the restraining the sea water from flooding the land, and the delivery of the inland waters speedily to the sea, it was to Flanders that the Boston men turned for an engineer, one Mahave Hall, who built them a dam and sluice in the year 1500. This is called the Old Sluice, and was effectual for a time. But in Queen Elizabeth’s reign the river below Boston was getting so silted up again that the waters of South Holland were brought by means of two “gowts” (go outs), or “clows,” one into the Witham above Boston at Langrick, and one below into the harbour at Skirbeck, to scour out the channel. The Kesteven men, from a sense of being robbed of their waters, opposed, but their objections were over-ruled by the chief justices. In 1568-9 the “Maud Foster” drain was cut and named after the owner, who gave easement over her land on very favourable terms.
In the map to the first volume of the “History of Lincolnshire,” published by Saunders in 1834, the Langrick Gowt (or gote) finds no place; but the “Holland Dyke” is probably meant for it. The Skirbeck dyke is marked very big and called “The South Forty-foot,” which, along with the North Forty-foot and Hobhole drains, and others of large size, aided by powerful steam pumps, have made the Fens into a vast agricultural garden.
THE GRAND SLUICE
But the Elizabethan expedient was only successful for a time, and in 1751 a small sloop of forty to fifty tons and drawing about six feet of water could only get up to Boston on a spring tide. To remedy this and also to keep the floods down, which, when the cutfall was choked, extended in wet seasons west of the town as far as eye could see, an Act of Parliament was passed to empower Boston to cut the Witham channel straight and set to work on a new sluice. This “Grand Sluice,” designed by Langley Edwardes, had its foundation carried down twenty feet, on to a bed of stiff clay. Here, just as, near the old Skirbeck sluice, where Hammond beck enters the haven, at a depth of sixteen feet sound gravel and soil was met with, in which trees had grown; and at Skirbeck it is said that a smith’s forge, with all its tools, horseshoes, etc., complete, was found at that depth below the surface, showing how much silt had been deposited within no great number of years. The foundation stone of the present Grand sluice was laid by Charles Amcotts, then Member of Parliament and Mayor of Boston, in 1764, and opened two years later in the presence of a concourse of some ten thousand people. He died in 1777, and the Amcotts family in the male line died with him. In Jacobean times much good embankment work under Dutch engineers had been begun, and had met with fierce opposition from the Fen men, and the same spirit was still in existence a hundred and fifty years later, for when, in 1767, an Act was passed for the enclosure of Holland, the works gave rise to the most determined and fierce riots which were carried to the most unscrupulous length of murder, cattle maiming, and destruction of valuable property, and lasted from 1770 to 1773. But at length common sense prevailed, and a very large and fertile tract of land to the south-east of Boston was acquired, which helped again to raise the fortunes of the town to prosperity. Following on this in 1802 a still larger area was reclaimed on the other side of Boston in the East, West, and Wildmore Fens. But, as in all low-lying lands near the coast which are below the level of high-water mark, constant look-out has to be kept even now, both to prevent the irruption of the sea and the flooding of the land from storm-water not getting away quickly enough.
GREAT FLOODS
The Louth Abbey “Chronicle,” a most interesting document, extending from 1066 to the death of Henry IV., 1413, records disastrous floods in the Marsh in 1253 and 1315, and a bad outbreak of cattle plague in 1321. From other sources we have notice of a great flood at Boston in 1285; another in ‘Holland,’ 1467; and again at Boston in 1571 a violent tempest, with rain, wind, and high tide combining, did enormous damage. Sixty vessels were wrecked between Newcastle and Boston, many thousands of sheep and cattle were drowned in the Marsh, the village of Mumby-Chapel was washed into the sea and only three cottages and the steeple of the church left standing. One “Maister Pelham had eleven hundred sheep drowned there.” At the same time “a shippe” was driven against a house in the village, and the men, saving themselves by clambering out on to the roof, were just in time to save a poor woman in the cottage from the death by drowning which overtook her husband and child. So sudden and violent was the rise of the flood that at Wansford on the Nene three arches of the bridge were washed away, and “Maister Smith at the Swanne there hadde his house, being three stories high, overflowed into the third storie,” while the walls of the stable were broken down, and the horses tied to the manger were all drowned.
At the same time the water reached half way up Bourne church tower. This shows the tremendous extent of the flood, for those two places are forty-four miles apart. This is the “High tide on the Lincolnshire Coast” sung by our Lincolnshire poetess, Jean Ingelow. She speaks of the Boston bells giving the alarm by ringing the tune called “The Brides of Mavis Enderby.”
The old Mayor climbed the belfry tower,
The ringers ran by two by three;
‘Pull if ye never pulled before,
Good ringers, pull your best,’ quoth he.
Play uppe play uppe, O Boston bells;
Ply all your changes, all your swells,
Play uppe “The Brides of Enderby.”
This tune, which Miss Ingelow only imagined, was subsequently composed, and is now well known at Boston, for, besides the ring of eight bells, the tower has a set of carillons like those at Antwerp. They were set up in 1867, thirty-six in number, by Van Aerschodt, of Louvain, but not proving to be a success, were changed in 1897 for something less complex, and now can be heard at 9 a.m., and every third hour of the day playing “The Brides of Mavis Enderby.”
AND HIGH TIDES
A violent gale is recorded on February 16, 1735, which did much damage, and in 1763-4 there was a great flood, not owing to any high tide but simply, as in 1912, from continued heavy rains, and we are told that the flood lasted for many weeks. Just lately, in 1912, this was aggravated by the bursting of a dyke in the Bedford level which flooded miles of fenland. In August, 1913, the land was parched by drought, but in 1912 it was a melancholy sight to see, in August, on both sides of the railway between Huntingdon and Spalding the corn sheaves standing up out of the water, and the farm buildings entirely surrounded, while the rain continued to fall daily. Even after three weeks of fine weather in September, though the drenched sheaves had been got away, water still covered the fields, stretching sometimes as far as eye could see. In 1779, when the reclamation of the Holland ‘Fens’ had been carried out, many vessels are said to have been driven by a violent gale nearly two miles inland on the ‘Marsh.’ This was long spoken of as “The New Year’s Gale.”
Exceptionally high tides, each four inches higher than its predecessor, in the streets of Boston are recorded for October 19, 1801, November 30, 1807, and November 10, 1810. This last accompanied by a storm of wind and rain. On this occasion the water was all over the streets of Boston and flowed up the nave of the church as far as the chancel step, being nearly a yard deep at the west end. Since then high-water marks were cut on the base of the tower showing how deep the nave was flooded in 1883 and 1896. In 1813 another high tide caused the sea-bank assessment to rise to 13s. 8d. an acre, the normal rate then, as it is now, for the drainage tax in the east fen, amounting to 3s. an acre. Even that seems to be pretty stiff, £15 a year on a hundred acre farm! Of course it is an absolute necessity, and has been recognised from the earliest times. We know that in the reign of Edward I. an assessment was levied on all who had land to keep the drains in repair. This was as long ago as 1298.
PICTURESQUE BOSTON
THE GUILDHALL
The great feature of Boston is the wonderful church tower. But the town is from many points very picturesque. The deep-cut channel of the tidal river goes right through it. Passing close up against the western side of the great steeple, it goes with houses almost overhanging its eastern bank down to the bridge, a structure of no beauty. After this it runs alongside the street. From the windows you look across and see the masts of the small sea-going craft tied up to the bank, which, with all the old weed-grown timbers of landing-stage and jetty, the natural accompaniments of a tidal river, make quaint and effective pictures. In another street the boys in their old-fashioned blue coats and brass buttons let you into the secret of Boston’s many educational charities. One is in Wormgate (or Withamsgate), one in White Friars Lane, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and another in Shodfriars Lane. The very names of the streets in Boston are full of history, and the recently-restored “Shod Friars Hall,” to the south-east of the Market Place, helps, with its abundant timbers and carved gables, to take one right back to the fourteenth century, though the name was only recently bestowed on this particular building.
The Haven, Boston.
The Guildhall, Boston.
But alas, not only all the monastic buildings, but nearly all the domestic buildings which once made Boston like a medieval Dutch town are gone, though the fifteenth-century brick Guildhall remains. The citizens seem to have had a fatal mania for pulling down all that was most worth preserving of their old buildings. Gone, too, is much else which Bostonians might well have preserved. Such, for instance, as “the prodigious clock bell which could be heard many miles round, and was knocked to pieces in the year 1710.” It is but a few years ago that some of the Boston Corporation plate was sold in London for immense prices, and when astonished people asked how it came to the hammer they heard a miserable tale how the fine collection of civic plate, and it was unusually fine, had been sold in 1837 for £600, nothing approaching to its value, by the corporation itself, for the purpose of liquidating some civic debt. But any sin Boston may commit, such as the crude colouring of the interior of the much-renovated Guildhall, and painting and graining of the deal panels only last year, will be forgiven, so long as they have their uniquely glorious church tower to plead for them.
Lord Hussey’s tower and the Kyme tower are ruins, built about the end of the fifteenth century, and at the end of the eighteenth century a big house was still standing which may have been Lord Hussey’s. The brick tower stands near the school fields, not far from the Public Gardens, which are a credit to Boston, and have some first-rate salt-water baths close by, which belong to the corporation.
The Kyme tower is also called the Rochford tower, that family having held it before the Kymes. It is a massive tower, also of brick, as may be seen from the illustration. It stands about two miles outside the town to the east.
FAMOUS BOSTONIANS
Of celebrated folk born in Boston we have, to begin with, John Fox, author of the “Book of Martyrs,” who was born there in 1517. He was sent to Brasenose, Oxford, and worked very hard, but was expelled as a heretic when he forsook the Roman Catholic religion. The Warwickshire family of Sir Thomas Lucie, a name made famous by Shakespeare, gave him shelter and employment as a tutor; and later he tutored the children of the Earl of Surrey who, in the reign of Queen Mary, helped him to escape from Bishop Gardiner’s deadly clutches. Like so many who suffered persecution for their religion, he made his home at Basle till Elizabeth’s accession allowed of his return. He then spent eleven years on his “Acts and Monuments,” and died in 1587.
At about this time the plague raged at Boston, 1585, and broke out again in 1603. Boston and Frampton had, as the Registers show, suffered an unusual mortality in 1568-9. The water was not good, and as late as 1783 a boring to a depth of 478 feet was made in a vain search for a better supply. The town was at that time supplied from the west fen through wooden pipes.
Hussey’s Tower, Boston.
CROMWELL AT BOSTON
Hallam, the historian, and Professor John Conington, whose monuments are in the church, were both of Boston families, as was also Jean Ingelow; and the statue near the church preserves the memory of John Ingram, Member of Parliament for the town, and founder of the Illustrated London News. Saunders tells us that Oliver Cromwell lay at Boston the night before he fought the battle of Winceby, near Horncastle, October 10, 1643. He must have been up betimes, for a crow couldn’t make the distance less than sixteen miles, and fen roads at that time were a caution.
“MY OWD SON”
Boston is a great centre for the fen farmers, and, as at Peterborough, you may see and hear in the market much that is original. It was at Peterborough that the “converted” sailor made his famous petition when asked to do a bit of praying in the open: “O Lord! bless this people! bless their fathers and mothers! and bless the children! O Lord bless this place! make it prosperous, send thy blessing upon it and make it—make it, O Lord! a sea-poort-town!” Boston having the Marsh farmers as well as the Fen-men meeting in her market, preserves a more racy dialect. I was once in the Boston Station waiting-room as it was getting dusk on a winter evening; three people of the sea-faring class were there—a tall, elderly man standing up, his son asleep on the floor, and the son’s wife sitting and apparently not much concerned with anything. The father, seeing me look at the sleeper, said “He’ll be all right after a bit. My owd son yon is. He’s a bit droonk now, but he’s my owd son. A strange good hand in a boat he is, I tell ye. They was out lass Friday i’ the Noorth Sea and it cam on a gale o’ wind, they puts abowt you knooa, an’ runs for poort. The seäs was monstrous high, they was, and the gale was a rum un, an’ the booat she was gaff-hallyards under. The tother men ‘She’s gooing!’ they says, ‘She’s gooing!’ But my owd son he hed the tiller. ‘She’s all right,’ he säys, and mind ye she was gaff-hallyards under, but ‘She’s all right,’ he säys, and he brings her right in. Aye he’s a rare un wi’ a booat is my owd son, noan to touch him. He’s a bit droonk now, but he’s my owd son.”
On another occasion at Boston I heard one farmer greet another with “Well, Mr. Smith, how’s pigs?” a very common inquiry, for in Lincolnshire pigs fill a large space on the agricultural horizon. Witness the reply of an aged farmer, probably a little unmanned by market-day potations, to a vegetarian who, with a cruelty hardly to be suspected in the votary of so mild a diet, had attacked him with “How will you feel at the day of Judgment when confronted by a whole row of oxen whose flesh you have eaten?” “’Taint the beasts I’d be scared on; it’s the pigs; I’ve yetten a vast o’ pigs.”
CHAPTER XXXVIII
SPALDING AND THE CHURCHES NORTH OF IT
Potato Trade—Bulb-growing—The Welland—Ayscough Fee Hall—The Gentleman’s Society—The Church—Pinchbeck—Heraldic Tombs—The Custs—Surfleet—Leaning Tower—Gosberton—Churchyard Sheep—Cressy Hall—Quadring—Donington—Hemp and Flax—Swineshead—Bicker—Sutterton—Algarkirk.
Three main roads enter the town of Spalding, the last town on the Welland before it runs out into Fosdyke Wash. They come from the north, south, and east. The west has none, being one huge fen which, till comparatively recent times, admitted of locomotion only by boat. The southern road comes from Peterborough and enters the county by the bridge over the Welland at Market Deeping, a pleasant-looking little town with wide market-like streets and its four-armed signpost pointing to Peterborough and Spalding ten miles, and Bourne and Stamford seven miles.
THE WELLAND
From Deeping to Spalding the road is a typical fen road—three little inns and a few farm cottages and the occasional line of white smoke on the perfectly straight Peterborough and Boston railway is all there is to see save the crops or the long potato graves which are mostly by the road side.
The Welland at Cowbit Road, Spalding.
The Welland at High Street, Spalding.
BULB-GROWING
The potato trade is a very large one. Every cart or waggon we passed at Easter-time on the roads between Deeping and Kirton-in-Holland was loaded with sacks of potatoes, and all the farm hands were busy uncovering the pits and sorting the tubers. Donington and Kirton seemed to be the centres of the trade, Kirton being the home of the man who is known as the potato king, and has many thousands of acres of fenland used for this crop alone. Spalding itself is the centre of the daffodil market, and quantities of bulbs are grown here and annually exported to Holland, it is said, to find their way back to England in the autumn as Dutch bulbs. I do not vouch for the truth of this, but certainly the business, which has been for years a speciality of Holland, where the lie of the land and the soil are much the same as in the South Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire Fens, is now a large and lucrative industry here, and is each year expanding. The Channel and Scilly Islands and Cornwall can, of course, owing to their climate, get their narcissus into bloom earlier, but the conditions of soil are better in the Fens. Still, a liberal supply of manure is needed to insure fine blooms, and sixty or seventy tons to the acre is none too much, a crop of mustard or potatoes being taken off after its application before planting the bulbs. Hyacinths are still left to Holland, in one part of which, at Hillegom, near Haarlem, the soil has just that amount of sand and lime which that particular bulb demands. Tulips, however, are grown in England with great success; crocuses are seldom planted as they make such a small return on the outlay. For this outlay is very considerable, nine or ten women are needed to each plough for planting, which alone costs 45s. an acre, and then there is the constant weeding and cleaning of the ground, the picking, bunching and packing, which needs many hands at once; also there is the heavy cost of the bulbs themselves for planting, Narcissus poeticus will cost £50 an acre of 400,000 bulbs, but 270,000 of Golden Spur will cost £300 and fill the same space; others will cost prices halfway between these two. Tulips want more room, and at 180,000 to the acre some will cost as much as £500. Growers like to advertise big bulbs, but the harder and smaller English-grown bulb will often give as fine a bloom as the larger imported article. The whole industry is comparatively new, and a very pleasant one for the many women who are employed.
A DISTRIBUTING CENTRE
The town is a very old one, and the Welland going through it with trees along its banks and the shipping close to the roadway gives it rather a Dutch appearance. It is noteworthy as being the centre from which we shall be able to see more fine churches, all within easy distance, than we can in any other part of the county or kingdom. As early as 860 the fisheries of the Welland, together with a wooden chapel of St. Mary here, which became the site afterwards of the priory, were given by Earl Alfgar to Croyland. Ivo Taillebois, the Conqueror’s nephew, with his wife Lucia the first, lived here in the castle in some magnificence as Lord of Holland. They were both buried in the priory church, founded by Lady Godiva’s brother, Thorold of Bokenhale, and over possession of which Spalding and Croyland had frequent disputes. One of the priors subsequently built Wykeham chapel. The Kings Edward I. and II. stayed at the priory, and from Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt and Chaucer were not infrequent visitors. The building was on the south side of the Market-place, and a shop there with a vaulted roof to one of its rooms had probably some connection with it. At the dissolution it was valued at £878, a very large sum, and next only to Croyland, which was by far the richest house in the county and valued at £1,100 or £1,200. Thornton Abbey was only set at £730.
The river is navigable for small sea-going vessels, and many large barges may generally be found tied up along its course through the town, discharging oil cake and cotton cake, and taking in cargoes of potatoes, both being transhipped at Fosdyke from or into coasting steamers running between Hull and London.
But water carriage though cheap is limited in that it only goes between two points, whereas Spalding is the meeting-place of at least three railways, making six exits for Spalding goods to come and go to and from all the main big towns in Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire or Norfolk, as well as to all those in our own county. Thus there are twice as many ways out of Spalding by rail as there are by road.
Ayscough Fee Hall Gardens, Spalding.
AYSCOUGH FEE HALL
The Welland, carefully banked by the Romans, is now bridged for one railway after another, and runs with a street on either side of it and rows of trees along it right through the town. On your right as you enter from the south you see across the river, looking over the top of a picturesque old brick wall, the well-clipped masses of ancient yew trees which form the shaded walks in the pretty grounds of Ayscough Fee Hall. The house, built in 1429, but terribly modernised, is now used as a museum, and the grounds form a public garden for the town. Murray tells us that Maurice Johnson once lived in it, who helped to found the Society of Antiquaries in 1717, and founded in 1710 the “Gentleman’s Society of Spalding,” which still flourishes. Among its many distinguished members it numbered Newton, Bentley, Pope, Gay, Addison, Stukeley, and Sir Hans Sloane, and Captain Perry, engineer to the Czar, Peter the Great, who was engaged in the drainage of Deeping Fen.
SPALDING CHURCH
Close to it is the fine old church, the body of which is as wide as it is long owing to its having double aisles on either side of the nave. It was founded to take the place of an earlier one which was falling to ruins, in the market-place. It dates from 1284, and was once cruciform in plan, with a tower at the north-west corner of the nave. The transepts, which now do not project beyond the double north and south aisles, had each two narrow transept aisles, but the western ones have been thrown into the aisles of the nave. The inner nave aisles are the same length as the nave, but the outer ones only go as far west as the north and south porches, the tower filling up the angle beyond the south porch. The chancel is so large that it was used by Bishop Fleming (1420-30) for episcopal ordinations.
Spalding Church from the S.E.
THE “HOLE IN THE WALL”
The east end wall is not rectangular, but the south chancel wall runs out two feet further east than the north wall, as it does also in the church of Coulsdon, near Reigate, in Surrey. The reason of this is that it is built on the foundation of an older chapel. The flat Norman buttresses are still to be seen outside the east end. The tower leans to the east, and when examined it was found to have been built flat on the surface of the ground with no foundation whatever. It seems incredible, but the intelligent verger was positive about it. The spire has beautiful canopied openings in three tiers, the lower ones having two lights and being unusually graceful. Standing inside the south porch and near the tower, and looking up the church, you get a most picturesque effect, for the church has so many aisles that you can see no less than twenty-three different arches. The north porch is handsome, and had three canopied niches over both the outer and the inner doorway, and a vaulted roof supporting a room over the entrance. A five-light window over the chancel arch is curious. There is a rood-loft and a staircase leading to it, and going on up to the roof. The Perpendicular west window is very large and has seven lights. This dates from the fifteenth century, when the nave was lengthened and the pillars of the nave considerably heightened and the old caps used again, and what had previously been an “early Decorated” church with only a nave and transepts, had Perpendicular aisles added. The large south-east chapel which, until 1874 was used as a school, was founded in 1311. An erect life-size marble figure commemorates Elizabeth Johnson, 1843. There are no other important monuments. The tower has eight bells and a Sanctus bell-cot at the east end of the nave. There are stone steps to enable people to get over the brick churchyard wall, as there are also at Kirton and Friskney. Some stone coffin-lids curiously out of place are let into one of the boundary walls of the churchyard. Close by is the White Horse, a picturesque old thatched and gabled inn. There is another inn here called “The Hole in the Wall.” I wonder if this title is derived from Shakespeare’s play, “The tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe,” who, says the story, “did talk through the chink of a wall,” or does it refer to some breach in the sea wall? To come from fancy to fact, the real name seems to have been Holy Trinity Wall, the house having been built up against a wall of that church which, with half a score of others in Spalding, has been dismantled and utterly swept away. Another puzzling sign I passed lately was “The New Found out.” The writer of an article in The Times of April 8, on the fire at Little Chesterford, thinks the sign of one of the burnt public-houses, “The Bushel and Strike,” a very singular one, not knowing that the strike, like the bushel, is a measure of corn.
St. Paul’s, Fulney, to the north of the town, is a handsome new brick-and-stone church, by Sir Gilbert Scott, who also restored the old church and removed every sort of hideous inside fitting, where galleries all round the nave came within four feet of the heads of the worshippers in the box pews. At that time £11,000 was spent on the restoration. This was in 1866, in which year the vicar, the Rev. William Moore, died, and he and his wife are buried in the nave; his parents, who had done so much for the church, are buried at Weston.
About two miles from Fulney is Wykeham chapel,[33] built in 1310 and attached to a country residence of the priors of Spalding; it is now only a ruin.
N. Side, Spalding Church.
PAINTED PILLARS
PINCHBECK
Going out of Spalding northwards, three miles bring us to Pinchbeck, which was an important village in Saxon times, and attached to Croyland Abbey, where a fine tower with six bells leans to the north-west. It is approached by a lime avenue. There are two rows of diaper carved work round the base of the tower, and large canopied niches on either side of the west door. The old roof on the north aisle is good, the pillars of the nave are spoilt by a hideous coat of purple paint. A delightful old brass weathercock is preserved in the church, and over the south porch is a dial. The high narrow tower-arch is a pleasure to look on. The altar tomb of Sir Thomas Pinchbeck (1500) has heraldic shields all round it, but is quite outdone by a brass of Margaret Lambert, a very ugly one, but adorned with twenty-seven heraldic coats of arms of her husband and fifteen of her own. The ten fine Perpendicular clerestory windows of three lights give the church a handsome appearance, and show the large wooden angels in the roof, who used to hold shields bearing the achievements of the house of “Pynchebek.”
Pinchbeck.