THE PLAGUE-STONE
An inconspicuous little byway starts from near Alford station and runs parallel with the line about a mile northwards to Tothby, where it bends round and loses itself in a network of lanes near South Thoresby. At Tothby, under a weeping ash tree on the lawn in front of the old Manor House farm, is an interesting relic of bygone days. It is a stone about a yard square and half a yard thick, once shaped at the corners and with a socket in it. Evidently it is the base of an old churchyard, wayside, or market cross of pre-reformation times. And it has been put to use later as a plague-stone, having been for that purpose placed on its edge and half buried probably, and a hole seven inches by five, and two and a half inches deep, cut in the upper side. This was to hold vinegar into which the townspeople put the money they gave for the farm produce brought from the country in times of plague.
The great desire was to avoid contact with possibly plague-stricken people. So the country folk brought their poultry, eggs, etc., laid them out at fixed prices near the stone and then retired. Then the town caterer came out and took what was wanted, placing the money in the vinegar, and on his retiring in turn, the vendors came and took their money, which was disinfected by its vinegar bath. The buyers, of course, had to pay honestly or the country folk would cut off the supplies, and they probably appointed one of their number as salesman.
THE PLAGUE-STONE
On the whole the plan is said to have answered well enough, and the stone is an interesting relic of the time. There is one in situ at Winchester, not so big as this, and now built in as part of the basis to the Plague Monument outside the West Gate of the city. It is, I believe, plain to distinguish, being of a darker colour than the rest of the monument; but you cannot now see the hole in it any more. That stone was used in 1666, the year after the great plague in London. The Croft register speaks of 1630 as the plague year, but a plague seems to have visited Partney in 1616; at Louth 754 people died in eight months in 1631. At Alford the plague year was 1630. On the 2nd of July in that year the vicar, opposite the entry of Maria Brown’s burial has written “Incipit pestis” (the plague begins), and between this date and the end of February, 1631, 132 out of a population of about 1,000, died, the average number of burials for Alford being 19 per annum, so that the rate was 100 above normal for the nineteen months; indeed, for the rest of 1631 only eight burials are registered in ten months. July and August were the worst months, six deaths occurring in one family in eleven days. It has been said that the stone was placed on the top of Miles-Cross hill, whence the folk from Spilsby and the villages of the Wolds, when they brought their produce, could look down on the plague-stricken town from a safe distance. But that would be a long pull for the poor Alford people, and it is more likely that it was placed near where the railway now crosses the high road; certainly the Winchester stone was barely 100 yards from the Gate.
We can now go back to Alford and start again on the Louth road. To get to the fine Marsh churches of the east Lindsey district, four miles out we turn off to the right near Withern, and pass two little churches on the border of the district called Strubby and Maltby-le-Marsh. Each of these has, like Huttoft, a remarkable font, but that at Maltby is extraordinarily good—angels at each corner are holding open books, and their wings join and cover the bowl of the font, below an apostle guards each corner of a square base. There is in this church, too, a cross-legged effigy of a knight. In Strubby are some good poppy-head bench ends and a fourteenth century effigy without a head, and on the south wall near the door a curious inscription in old English letters hard to decipher. There is also a small re-painted Jacobean monument with effigies of Alderman W. Bailett, aged ninety-nine, his two wives and nine children.
Mablethorpe Church.
MABLETHORPE
The whole of the region between the Alford-and-Louth road and the coast is a network of roads with dykes on either side, which never go straight to any place, but turn repeatedly at right angles, so that you often have to go right away from the point you are aiming at. That point is always a church steeple standing up with its cluster of trees from the wide extent of surrounding pasture-land. The only direct road in the district is that which runs north-east to Mablethorpe, close on the sea. This is quite a frequented watering-place. Here, as at Trusthorpe and Sutton, the sea has swallowed up the original church, but the present one, half a mile inland, has some sixteenth century tombs and brasses; one notable one of Elizabeth Fitzwilliam, 1522, which represents her with long, flowing hair as in that of Lady Willoughby in Tattershall Church, and Sir Robert Dymoke at Scrivelsby. There is here a seaside open-air school for invalid children.
THEDDLETHORPE
Three miles north is West Theddlethorpe (All Saints), one of the largest and finest of all the Marsh churches. Here, as elsewhere, the green-sand, patched with brick, on which the sea air favours the growth of grey lichen, gives a delightful colour to the tower. The battlemented parapets are of Ancaster stone, and were once surmounted at short intervals by carved pinnacles, and the nave gable, as at Louth, is beautifully pierced and worked, with carved bosses and rosettes set in the lower moulding. There are five two-light clerestory windows on either side, and inside are many good bench ends, both old and new, and a Perpendicular chancel screen with doors, and two chantries, each still keeping its altar slab in position, and having good oak screens ornamented with rich and unusual Renaissance carved open-work panels. In one of these chantries is a shallow recess with a beautiful carved stone canopy which once held a memorial tablet. A list of the vicars from 1241 to 1403 gives first the name of William Le Moyne (the monk), and in 1349 we have Nicholas de Spaigne on the nomination of Edward III. An important little brass of Robert Hayton, 1424, shows, as Mr. Jeans tells us, the latest instance of “Mail Camail.” In the churchyard is a most singular tombstone to Rebecca French, 1862, the stump of a willow carved in stone about four feet high with broken branches and—symbol of decay—a large toadstool growing from the trunk.
Three miles further north, and still close by the sea bank, we come to the church of Saltfleetby-All-Saints. A most provoking habit prevails, possibly with reason, but none the less trying to those who come to see the churches, of keeping the keys of the locked-up church at some distance off, even when there is a cottage close at hand. The church is in a sadly ruinous condition, and the picturesque porch literally falling to bits. On it is a shield bearing a crucifixion. The tower, which leans badly to the north-west, has two Early English lancet lights to the west and double two-light windows above. The gargoyles are very fine, and cut, as usual, in Ancaster stone. In the north aisle are two beautiful three-light windows with square heads and embattled transoms. There are some Norman pillars and capitals, also a good rood screen and a handsome Decorated font set on a reversed later font. This church, like so many in the Marsh, is only half seated, though even so it is too big for the population, as probably it always has been.
Within a mile to the north-east we pass Saltfleetby-St.-Clements, a church which has been moved from a site two fields off, and very carefully rebuilt in 1885, and shows an arcade of five small arches beautifully moulded resting on massive circular columns. It has also a good font on a central shaft with clustered columns round it, and in the vestry, part of a very early cross shaft. Hence we soon reach the sea at Saltfleet on a tidal channel, as the name indicates. Here is a remarkable old manor-house.
The parish church of Saltfleet is at Skidbroke, which stands in the fields a mile inland. In the churchyard is a tall granite cross in memory of Canon Overton of Peterborough. The church is of Ancaster stone which has a much longer life than the green-sand, but the parapets of the nave are of brick now, with stone coping. The belfry of all these churches is approached by rough and massive ladders. In the west of the tower is a good doorway. The chancel is a poor one.
Two miles through the rich meadows brings us to South Somercotes, remarkable as having a spire, but of later date than the tower. Here the chancel is absolutely bare, with painted dado and red tiled floor and no fittings of any kind. It looks something like a G.N.R. waiting-room, without the table. There is a very elegant rood screen, and an exceptionally tall belfry ladder or “stee,” also, as in the two churches just visited, ancient tablets in memory of the family of Freshney. The family still flourishes; and at the Alford foal show, September 1912, a Freshney of South Somercotes carried off several prizes. Unlike Skidbrooke, the church has houses and even shops close to it. We saw here a fell-monger’s trolley drive up with a strange assorted cargo from the station of Saltfleetby-St.-Peters. There were several packages and, sitting amongst them, several people all huddled together. It stopped at the village corner to deliver a long parcel draped in sacking—it was a coffin.
THE GRAINTHORPE BRASS
A few miles north is Grainthorpe, the old roof lately renovated. The whole church well cared for, and in the chancel a mutilated but once very beautiful brass, with a foliated cross, probably in memory of Stephen-le-See, who was the vicar about 1400. The stem is gone, the head shows some very delicate work, and the base stands on a rock in the sea with five various fishes depicted swimming. It was once seven feet high; and, if perfect, would be the most beautiful brass cross extant.
THE HARPHAM TABLET
Three miles north we reach the fine church of Marsh Chapel. This was once a hamlet of Fulstow, four miles to the west on the road to Ludborough. It is Perpendicular from the foundation. Here, as at Grainthorpe, is a rood screen partly coloured, the lower part being new. The church is seated throughout in oak, and evidently used by a large congregation. The capitals of both arcades are battlemented. On the chancel wall is an exquisite little alabaster tablet put up in 1628, representing Sir Walter Harpham, his wife and little daughter—quite a gem of monumental sculpture. The parents died in 1607 and 1617. The lofty tower has a turret staircase with a spirelet—a rare feature in Lincolnshire, though common in Somersetshire—and the church is all built of Ancaster stone.
Going north we reach North Cotes and Tetney lock, where we can see part of the Roman sea bank, though Tetney haven now is almost two miles distant. The Louth river, which is cut straight and turned into the Louth Navigation Canal, runs out here.
The by-road we have been following from the south ends here; but a branch running due west passes to Tetney village and thence joins the Louth and Grimsby highway at Holton-le-Clay.
CHAPTER XXVII
LINCOLNSHIRE FOLKSONG
Dan Gunby and The Ballad of the Swan.
There is no great quantity of native verse in this county, and children’s songs of any antiquity are by no means so common with us as they are in Northumbria, but there is The Lincolnshire Poacher with its refrain, “For ’tis my delight of a shiny night in the season of the year,” the marching tune of the Lincolnshire Regiment; and there is an old quatrain here and there connected with some town, such as that of Boston, and that is all.
It was my luck, however, to know, fifty years ago, a man who wrote genuine ballad verses, some of which I took down from his lips. They have never been printed before, but seem to me to be full of interest, for the man who wrote them was a typical east-coast native, a manifest Dane, as so many of these men are—unusually tall, upright, with long nose and grey eyes, and a most independent, almost proud, bearing. He was a solitary man, and made his living, as his earliest forefathers might have done, by taking fish and wild fowl as best he could; and, for recreation, drinking and singing and playing his beloved fiddle. It seemed as if the runes of his Scandinavian ancestors were in his blood, so ardently did he enjoy music and so strongly, in spite of every difficulty, for he had had little education, did he feel the impulse to put the deeds he admired into verse.
R. L. NETTLESHIP
It is something to be thankful for that, in spite of railways and Board Schools, original characters are still to be found in Lincolnshire. They were more abundant two generations ago, but they are still to be met with, and one of the most remarkable that I have personally known was this typical east-coaster, whose name was Dan Gunby. It was in September, 1874, when I was a house master at Uppingham, under the ever-famous Edward Thring, that my dear friend, R. L. Nettleship, then a fellow of Balliol, came to our house at Halton, and after a day or two there, we passed by Burgh over the marsh to Skegness, eleven miles off.
Southend, Boston.
We were making for the old thatched house by the Roman bank, for this belonged to our family, and here, with one old woman to “do” for us, and with the few supplies we had brought with us and the leg of a Lincolnshire sheep in the larder, we felt we could hold out for a week whilst we read, unmolested by even a passing tradesman. Sundays we spent at Halton, walking up on Saturday and down again on Monday, after which we took off our boots for the rest of the week.
DAN GUNBY
One night about ten o’clock, as we were sitting over our books, a step was heard on the plank bridge, and a loud knock resounded through the house. I went to the door and opened it. It was pitch dark, and from the darkness above my head, for Dan was a tall man, came a voice: “Ah’ve browt ye sum dooks. Ye knaw me, Dan Gunby.” We gratefully welcomed them as a relief from the sheep, and after a talk we agreed to go over and see Dan in his home at Gibraltar Point, where the Somersby Brook, “a rivulet then a river,” runs out into Wainfleet haven. Accordingly, on the 12th of September, 1874, we set off, going along on the flat dyke top for four miles till we came to what seemed the end of the habitable world. Here the level, muddy flat stretched out far into the distant shallow sea, groups of wading shore-birds were visible here and there, and an occasional curlew flew, with his melancholy cry, overhead, or a lonely sea-gull passed us—
“With one waft of the wing.”
We came to a small river channel with steep, slimy banks; just beyond it was an old boat half roofed over, and, sitting on it, was our friend Dan mending a net. We shouted to ask how we were to get to him, and he said, “Cum along o’er, bottoms sound.” We pulled off our boots and got down without much difficulty, but to get up, “Hic labor, hoc opus est.” But Dan shouted encouragement: “Now then, stick your toäs in, and goo it.” We did ‘goo it,’ and soon landed by the old boat, and sitting on it, we asked him if he always slept there, and what he did for a living. He answered “Yees, this is my plaäce, an’ it’s snug, an all. Ye see I hev a bit of a stoäve here.”
“Is that your duck-shout (the name for a sort of canoe for duck shooting) and gun?”
“Yees, ye sees I’m a bit of a gunner, an’ a bit of a fisherman, an’ a bit of a fiddler.”
“And a bit of a poet, too, aren’t you, Dan?”
“Well, I puts things down sometimes in the winter evenings like.”
“About your shooting, isn’t it?”
“Yees, moästlins.”
“And you have got tunes to them?”
“Yees. It’s easy to maäke the tunes up o’ the fiddle, but the words is a straänge hard job oftens.”
“Well now, will you let us hear one of them?”
“To be sewer I will,” and he took his fiddle and sat on the gunwale, while we listened to the following:—
It was in the iambic metre—which befits a ballad—with occasional anapæsts.
THE SWAN
YOUNG JIM HALL
“It’s called The Swan this ’ere un,” he said, and, with a preliminary flourish on the fiddle, he went off.
I should say that we got the words in his own writing afterwards spelt as I give them.
THE SWAN.
Now it Gentel men hall cum lisen to me,
And ile tell you of a spre,
When Sam and Tom Gose in there boats,
Tha never dise a Gre.
Chorus.
For the Halls they are upon the spre,
Tha’ll do the best tha can,
Am when tha goä to seä my boys
Tha meäns to shoot a Swan.
Then a storking down clay-’ole,[14]
And laying as snug as tha can,
For it’ Slap Bang went both the guns
And down come the Swan.
Now Sam and Tom ’as got this Swan,
Tha do not now repent;
Tha will pull up to Fosedyke Brige,
And sell him to Hary Kemp.
Now Sam and Tom they got a shere
Tha dow not see no Feer,
Tha will call too the Public-house,
An git a Galling of Beer.
Sam says to Tom here’s luck my lad,
We will drink hall we can;
And then wele pull down Spalding sett
To loke for another Swan.
There’s young Jim Hall he has a fine gun
Tha say it weighs a ton,
And he will pull down Spalding Set
To have a bit of fun.
Chorus.
For the Halls they are upon the spre,
Tha’ll do the best tha can,
And when tha goä to seä my boys
Tha means to shoot a swan.
And when tha hev got side by side
Tha moastly scheme and plan,
Tha meän to shoot either duck or goose
Or else another swan.
Jim, Bill an Tom was storking
At thousands of geese in a line,
Tha fired three guns before daylight
An killed ninety-nine.
(My eye! they did an’ all.)
The old man larned the boys to shoot
Without any fere or doubt,
And young Jim Hall he was the man
Who made the Gun and Shout.[15]
There’s young Ted Hall he’s fond of life,
His diet is beäf and creäm
He cares nothing about shooting
He’d rayther goä by steäm.
Captain Rice, he’s deäd an gone,
We hope he is at rest,
All his delight was guns and boäts,
And he always did his best.
He was a hearty old cock
As ever sailed on the sea.
He has paid for many a galling of ale
When he was in company.
Chorus.
For the Halls tha are upon the spre,
Tha’ll do the best tha can,
An when tha goä to seä my boys
Tha meäns to shoot a swan.
CAPTAIN RICE
Dan paused for some time after he had finished the ballad, and then said with much feeling in look and voice, “Captain Rice, poor chap, he died after I’d gotten yon lines finished, and I had to alter them, ye knaw. It took me three weeks to get ’em altered.”
The captain was well remembered; he had “paid for many a galling of ale.” But the family that Dan most admired were the Halls, the old man and his three eldest sons—Jim, Bill and Tom. Young Ted he despised; he cared nothing about shooting, he would rather sit in a train!
He tells in two other short ballads of how they hunted the seal on the bar or on the long sand, and there is a poetic touch in the way he makes the seals talk, and in the description of their eyes and teeth.
But “The Swan” is Dan’s great achievement, and is a real good folk song, and has lines with the true ballad ring. “Down come the swan” is a fine expressive line, and “He was a hearty old cock, As ever sailed on the sea” has a ring in it like Sir Patrick Spens.
When Dan came to the astonishing kill of ninety-nine he never failed to make the ejaculation I have given above; the geese were Brent geese and were feeding in a creek or wet furrow. There was a big gun used in the “Gruft holes” or deep channels in the sands going seaward, where the gunner sat waiting for the “flighting” of the ducks. This was called a “raille,” and was fired from the shoulder. The gun which weighed a ton is a poetic exaggeration; but the old duck-shout guns were more than one man would care to lift, and about six to eight feet long. The man lay on a board to sight and fire this miniature cannon or demi-culverin, which was loaded to the muzzle, and the rusty piece of ordnance shot back with the recoil underneath him; had it been made fast to the canoe or duck-shout it would have torn the little boat to bits.
THE SEALS
The ballads of the seals are as follows:—
SEALS ON THE BAR.
1.
There is two seäls upon the bar,
Tha lay like lumps of lead.
When tha see Sam and Tom coming
Tha begins to shaäke their head.
Chorus.
For the Halls tha are upon the look out
Tha love to see a seäl,
An when tha git well in my boys
He’s bound to taäste a meäl.
2.
The owd seäl said unto his wife,
Yon’s sumthing coming sudden,
We must soon muster out o’ this
Or we shall get plum-pudden.
Chorus.
For the Halls they are upon the look out
Tha love to see a seäl,
An when they git well in my boys
He’s bound to taäste a meäl.
SEÄLS ON THE LONG SAND.
1.
Bill and Jim was shoving down the North
And keepin close to the land,
Jim says to Bill, we’ll pull across,
Right ower to the Long Sand.[16]
Chorus, after each verse.
For the Halls tha are upon the look out,
Tha love to see a seäl,
An when tha git well in my boys,
He’s bound to taäste a meäl.
2.
And when tha hed got ower
Tha hed a cheerful feel.
Bill says to Jim “What greät heäd’s yon?”
It must be a monstrous seäl.
3.
For his eyes like fire they did shine
An his teeth was long an white,
Then slap bang went boäth the guns,
An he wished ’em boäth good-night.
4.
Well done, my lad! We’ve hit ’im hard,
He’ll niver git ashore,
For I knaw his head will ake to-day
And ’twill be very sore.
Chorus.
For the Halls tha are upon the look out,
Tha love to see a seäl,
An when tha git well in my boys
He’s bound to taäste a meäl.
Seals are more common on this coast than one would think. Only this autumn, 1913, great complaints have been made by the fishermen of the destruction of soles, etc., in the ‘Wash’ by the increased number of these unwelcome visitors.
NORTH COUNTRY HUMOUR
NATURE’S POETS
Dan Gunby, in spite of his fiddling and attendance at all the dances in the neighbourhood, was not of a jovial nature. His life was hard and his outlook on it was always serious, and any humour which he had was of the dry order, which is so frequent in the northern counties. Terse remarks with a touch of humour, sly or grim, he doubtless showed at times, but a real hearty laugh he would seldom allow himself. We find this same almost unconscious habit of saying a biting thing in a sly way frequent in the counties north of Lincolnshire, as for instance, when in Westmorland a man meeting a friend says, “I hear Jock has gotten marriet” and the rejoinder, which expresses so much in so few words, both about the man in question and the subject of matrimony generally, is “Ah’m gled o’ that, ah niver liked Jock.” Another time, a man meets a ‘pal’ and for a bit of news says, “We’m gotten a chain for oor Mayor,” and the answer, “Han yo? We let yon beggar of ourn go loose” is far more funny than was ever intended. But Gunby and his likes, of whom there are more in the regions of the hills and fells than elsewhere, have not only the seriousness of those who live solitary and have leisure to do a deal o’ thinking, but dwelling apart in places where they can commune with Nature and the stars they get the poetic touch from their surroundings. The mountain shepherd goes up on to the heights and spends long hours with his dog and sheep. He marks the great clouds move by, and listens to the voice of the streams. He knows “the silence that is in the starry sky;” the great constellations are his companions; he sees the rising moon, and the splendours of the dawn and sunset. Those sights which fill us with such delight and wonder when beheld now and then in a lifetime, are before his eyes repeatedly. Now he watches the storm near at hand in all its fury, the thunder echoing round him from crag to crag; soon the clouds roll off and disclose the brilliant arch of the rainbow across the glistening valley, each perfect in its different way. At one time he must be out on the slopes sparkling with snow, at another his heart gladdens at the approach of spring, and he feels himself one with it all. And so the changing seasons of the year cannot fail to touch him more than most men, and what the heart feels the lips will strive to utter. In the same way Dan Gunby used to watch the wide sunsets across the marsh, and see the floods of golden light on the shore, and the ebbing and flowing of the far-spread tide about his anchored cabin. He saw, at one time, the ripples crested with gold by the sun’s last rays, at another the red orb rising from the sea on a clear morning; or, in the mist which closed him in, he listened to the cries of the sea-birds sweeping by invisible. At times, when the wind was up and the tide high, he heard the roar of the waves dashed on the sand; or, upon a calm night, he looked out on a gently moving water led by the changing moon. There were always some voices of the night, and usually some visions both at eve and morn; and with his observant eye and ear, and his leisure to reflect, while Nature was his one companion, how could he fail to be in some sort a poet?
I lately heard of a shepherd or crofter who was quite a case in point; but as he was not a Lincolnshire native but lived in the Scotch Lowlands, I put the account of him and his poetry, which, by the help of a Scotch lady, I have succeeded in collecting, small in quantity but some of it very good, I think, in quality, into an appendix at the end of the volume.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE MARSH CHURCHES IN SOUTH LINDSEY
Alford—Markby—Hogsthorpe—Addlethorpe—Ingoldmells—Winthorpe—Skegness—The Bond Epitaph—Croft—The Parish Books—Burgh-le-Marsh—Palmer Epitaph—Bratoft—The Armada—Gunby—The Massingberd Brasses.
Starting from Alford, a little town with several low thatched houses in the main street, and a delightful old thatched ivy-clad manor, we will first look into the church which stands on a mound in the centre of the town, to see the very fine rood screen. Before reaching the south porch with its sacristy or priests’ room above, and its good old door, we pass an excellent square-headed window. Inside, the bold foliage carving on the capitals at once arrests the eye. The pillars, as in most of these churches, are lofty, slender and octagonal. The steps to the rood loft remain, and a squint to the altar in the north aisle chapel. On the other side is a carved Jacobean pulpit of great beauty, east of which is a low-side window, and east of that again a tomb with recumbent alabaster figures of Sir Robert Christopher and his wife, date 1668, in perfect condition.
From Alford a road goes north to Louth, branching to the right three miles out, to run to Mablethorpe, the favourite seaside resort of the Tennysons when living at Somersby. But we will follow the road to Bilsby, where Professor Barnard keeps his unapproachable collection of Early English water-colours. From here we can reach Markby, a curious thatched chapel standing inside a moat, and now disused. Then we can look in at Huttoft to see the extremely fine font which resembles that at Covenham St. Mary, and Low Toynton, near Horncastle; after which, passing by Mumby, we will make for the first of the typical Marsh churches at Hogsthorpe.
Markby vicarage goes with Hannah-cum-Hagnaby rectory. Once there was an Austin or Black Friars priory at Markby, and at Hagnaby—a hamlet in Hannah or Hannay—an abbey of Premonstratensian or White Canons, which was founded in 1175 by Herbert de Orreby and dedicated to St. Thomas the Martyr.
Markby Church.
The registers at Markby are among the earliest in the kingdom, beginning in 1558, those in Hannay dating from 1559. The first year of their institution was 1838.
THE HUTTOFT FONT
The Huttoft font is of the fourteenth century, and is four feet eight inches high, so it needs a step like those at Wrangle, Benington, and Frieston, and that at Skendleby. On the bowl are represented the Holy Trinity, the Virgin and Child, the Virgin holding a bunch of lilies, and the Child an apple. On six of the panels are the Apostles in pairs, as at Covenham St. Mary. The under part has angel figures all round supporting the bowl. The shaft has eight panels with figures of popes, bishops, and holy women, and at the base are symbols of the four evangelists. The string-courses show three different roofs to the nave.
HOGSTHORPE
Hogsthorpe, like most of the churches in the neighbourhood, is built of the soft local green-sand, which is found near the edge of the marsh where the Wolds die away into the level. The tower shows patches of brickwork which give a warm and picturesque appearance. The south porch is here, as is the rule, built of a harder stone, and is handsome and interesting. A pair of oblong stones of no great size are built in on either side above the arch with an inscription in old English letters, beginning, oddly enough, both in this church and in one at Winthorpe a few miles off, with the right hand stone and finishing on the left. The words are, “Orate pro animabus Fratrum et Sororum Guilde Sᶜᵗᵃᵉ Mariæ hujus Ecclesiæ quorum expensis et sumptibus fabricata est haec porticus.” The church has had its roof renewed in pine wood. It also has the worst coloured window glass I have ever seen, an error of local piety.[17] The registers begin in 1558.
ADDLETHORPE
From here the road, with countless right-angled turns, runs between the reedy dykes to the Perpendicular church of Addlethorpe (St. Nicolas). Here the south porch is unusually good, with figures of angels on the buttresses and beautiful foliage work carved on the parapet. On the apex is a well-cut crucifix and, as at Somersby, on the back is a small figure of the Virgin and Child. A large holy-water stoup stands just within the door. There is a window in the porch, also a niche and a slab with the following inscription:—
The Cryst that suffered
Grette pangs and hard
hafe mercy on the sowle
of John Godard
That thys porche made
and many oder thynges dede
There-for Jsu Cryst
Qwyte hym hys mede.
Over the buttresses of the north aisle are gargoyles holding scrolls; one has on it “Of Gods saying comes no ill,” another—
God : for : ihs : m’̅c̅y : bryng : he̅ : to : blys :
Yᵗ : ha̅ : p̅d̅ : to : ys :
Cut with a knife on the western pilaster of the porch is—
“January 1686
Praise God.”
The glory of this church is its wealth of old wood work, in which it is not surpassed by any in the county, though its neighbour, Winthorpe, runs it hard.
Addlethorpe and Ingoldmells.
The chancel here, as at the older Decorated church of Ingoldmells, which is within half a mile, has been pulled down, and the rood screen acts as a reredos. There are two extremely good parclose screens, and old benches with carved ends throughout the church. Another fine oak screen goes across the tower arch, inscribed, “Orate pro animabus Johannis Dudeck Senior et uxor̅ ejus.” The noble roof is the original one. The pulley-block for lowering the rood light is still visible on the easternmost tie-beam but one, as it is also at Winthorpe and Grimoldby. A new rafter at the west end has painted on it, “Struck by fireball June 27, 1850.”
The Boston wool trade is alluded to in the epitaph “Hic jacet Ricardus Ward qdm. Mr̅ctor Stapali Calais MCCCCXXXIII.”
A slab in the north aisle to Thomas Ely, 1783, has a singular inscription on it:—
“Plain in his form but rich he was in mind,
Religious, quiet, honest, meek and kind.”
Evidently a real good fellow though he was plain.
CHURCHWARDEN’S ACCOUNTS
The following extracts from the churchwarden’s accounts between the years 1540 and 1580 are curious.
| Itm payde to the Scolemʳ (Schoolmaster) of Allforde for wryting of Thoms Jacson Wylle | iiijᵈ | |
| Itm payde unto Thoms Wryghte for dressynge the crosse | ijᵈ | |
| Itm payde for a horsse skyne for bellstryngs | ijˢ | iᵈ |
| Itm payde to the players | iiijᵈ | |
| Itm reseuyd (received) for ye Sepuller lyghte gatheryd in ye cherche | iiˢ | iᵈ |
| Itm reseuyd for ye wyttworde[18] of Rycharde Grene | xijᵈ | |
| Itm Receuyd of Anthony Orby for his wyffs yereday [19] | xijᵈ | |
| Itm payde un to Wyllm Craycrofte for the rente of ye Kyrke platte | ijˢ | vᵈ |
| Itm payde for washing the corporaxys[20] | iiijᵈ | |
| Itm payd for a ynglyghe sultʳ [an English psalter] | xxᵈ | |
| Receuyd of Thomas Thorye for o̅n̅ thrughestone | iijˢ | iiijᵈ |
| Itm payde for the Sepulcre | xˢ | |
| Itm for a paire of Sensors | xˢ | iiijᵈ |
| Receuyd of John Curtus for his Wyff lying in ye churche | viˢ | viijᵈ |
| Receuyd[21] of ye said John for o̅n̅ thrughstone | xxᵈ | |
| It Recd for ye sowll of John Dodyke | xiiiˢ | |
| It Recd for ye sowll of Syr Gregory Wylk | viᵈ | |
| Impmus [In primis] payd for certeffyenge of ye Rodloffe | xijˢ | |
| Itm payd for dyssygerenge [query dressing] of ye Rod loffte | iijˢ | iiijᵈ |
| It given to ye men of mumbye chappelle for carryinge of ye lytle belle to Lincolne | xijᵈ | |
| It Layde oute for a lytle booke of prayer for Wednesdays and frydayes | iijᵈ |
The church has six bells.
From the account of the charities left in Addlethorpe we find that in 1554 a gift of land was sold for £4 an acre, but in 1653 an acre situated in Steeping let for 15s.
INGOLDMELLS
The adjoining parish with its mellifluous name of Ingoldmells, (pronounced Ingomells), has had its suffix derived from the Norse melr, said to mean the curious long grass of the sandhills. It might perhaps be more correctly considered as the same suffix which we have on the Norse-settled Cumbrian coast at Eskmeals, or Meols, where it is said to mean a sandy hill or dune, a name which would well fit in with the locality here. Thus the whole name would mean the sand-dunes of Ingulf, a Norse invader of the ninth century. A farmer we met at Winthorpe, next parish to Ingoldmells, alluded to these sandhills when he said, “It is a sträange thing, wi’ all yon sand nobbut häfe a mile off, that we cant hav nowt but this mucky owd cläy hereabouts: not fit for owt.” But the Romans found the clay very useful for making their great embankment along the coast.
Ingoldmells church, though good, is not so fine as Addlethorpe; but it has a very interesting little brass, dated 1520, to “William Palmer wyth ye stylt,” a very rare instance of an infirmity being alluded to on a brass. The brass shows a crutched stick at his side. The porch has a quatrefoil opening on either side, and a niche; and a curious apse-like line of stones in the brick paving goes round all but the east side of the fine front. Round the base of the churchyard cross is a later inscription cut in 1600, J. O. Clerk. “Christus solus mihi salus,” and figures run round three sides of the base, beginning on the north 1, 2, 3; and on the east 4, 5, 6; none on the south, but on the west 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, at the corner 10; and again on the north, 11, 12. Doubtless it was a form of sundial, the cross shaft throwing its shadow in the direction of the figures. Of the four bells one has fallen and lies on the belfry floor. One has on it, according to Oldfield, “Wainfleet and the Wapentake of Candleshoe, 1829,” “Catarina vocata sum rosa pulsata mundi” (I am called Catherine, the beaten rose of the world); and on another is the rhyme—
“John Barns churchwarden being then alive
Caused us to be cast 1705:”
At Partney a bell has the same Catarina legend, but with dulcata (= sweet) instead of pulsata. S and C are often interchanged, and I think the ‘p’ is really a ‘d’ upside down on the Ingoldmells bell, especially as the bell is of about the same date and was also cast by the same man—Penn of Peterborough. I must admit, however, that pulsata on a bell with a clapper has something to be said for it; still, dulcata (sweet) is the obviously proper epithet for rose.
The Roman Bank at Winthorpe.
THE SEA BANKS
RICH OAK CARVING
From this church the road runs to the sea bank near Chapel, and gets quite close to it. You can walk up the sandy path amongst the tall sand-grass and the grey-leaved buckthorn, set with sharp thorns and a profusion of lovely orange berries, till from the top you look over to the long brown sands and the gleaming shore, where a retiring tide is tumbling the cream-coloured breakers of a brown sea. Returning to the road we go for some distance along the old Roman bank, which we leave before reaching Skegness in order to get to Winthorpe (St. Mary). This Decorated church was restored in 1881 by the untiring energy of “Annie Walls of Boothby,” but not so as to spoil its old woodwork, which is remarkably fine. In the body of the church all the seats have their old carved fifteenth century bench ends, and in the chancel are four elaborately carved stall-ends. In one of these, amidst a mass of foliage, St. Hubert is represented kneeling, as in Albert Dürer’s picture, before a stag who has a crucifix between his antlers, from which the Devil, who appears just behind him, in human shape but horned, is turning away. The poppyhead above this panel is exquisitely carved with oak leaves and acorns, and little birds, with manikins climbing after them. The old roof, with the rood-light pulley-block visible on one of the tie-beams, still remains, and the rood screen, too, though its doors have been foolishly transferred to another screen at the west end, and ought to be put back in their place; and at the end of each aisle, as at Addlethorpe, are good parclose screens. Within one of these, the roof of the north aisle has a painted pattern on the rafters and good carved bosses once painted and gilt.
The seventeen steps to the rood loft are all there, also an aumbrey; and we are told that one of the chantries was founded and endowed by Walter De Friskney, 1316, and dedicated to St. James.
In the south wall of the tower is a singular fireplace, originally used for baking the wafers.
In the north chantry is an altar slab with three consecration crosses on it, and a sepulchral slab to “Ricardus Arglys (Argles?), Presbyter, De Bynington” (near Boston) who died on the 20th of November, 1497; and there are, in the nave, brasses to Richard Barowe with his wife Batarick and their three children, 1505, and to Robert Palmer, 1515, doubtless a relative of “W. Palmer with ye stylt” in Ingoldmells.
The inscription on the former is “Richard Barowe sumtyme marchant of the stapyll of Calys, and Batarick his wyfe, the which Richard decissyd the XX day of Apryle the yere of owre Lord A.MCCCCC and fyve, on whose soullys Ihu̅ have mercy Amen for charitie.”
The Barrows were an old and notable family, one of them was Master of the Rolls and Keeper of the Great Seal, 1485. They were long settled at Winthorpe, and in 1670 Isaac Barrow was Bishop of St. Asaph, and his nephew was well known to history as the Master of Trinity, 1672-1677, and a celebrated divine.
WINTHORPE
One of Robert Palmer’s descendants, Elizabeth of Winthorpe, married George Sharpe, who was Archbishop of York in 1676, so Winthorpe furnished a bishop and an archbishop’s wife in the same decade.
William Palmer was apparently part donor of the south porch of Winthorpe, which is very like those at Addlethorpe and Hogsthorpe, having a gabled and crocketed parapet carved with graceful flowing foliage; and on the two stones, lettered in Early English as at Hogsthorpe, are the lines:—
Robert Lungnay and Wyll’ P
alm’: thay payd for thys
God in hys mercy
bryng them to his blys.
Over the east gable of the nave is a sanctus bell-cot, and in the tower are four good bells, three of which are thus inscribed:—
1. 1604 I sweetly tolling do men call
to taste of meat that feeds the soul.
2. Jesus be our speed.
3. Antonius monet ut Campana bene sonet.
In the west of the south aisle is the well-carved head of the churchyard cross, of which, as usual, only half of the shaft remains. On the head is a crucifixion, and on the other side the Virgin and Child. This head was found in 1910 a mile and a quarter from the church. It closely resembles that still standing intact at Somersby.
Opposite, in the west end of the north aisle, are two bases of columns belonging to a former church of the thirteenth century, which church is first mentioned in the donation of it by William de Kyme to the abbey of Bardney, 1256.
The registers of the church begin in 1551.
From the foregoing it will be seen how extremely interesting these Marsh churches are, and these four are not the only ones in this part of the Marsh, Croft and Burgh being both within three or four miles of Winthorpe. Theddlethorpe, north of these, is a finer building, as is Burgh-le-Marsh; but I doubt if any other church has such a wealth of old carved woodwork as Addlethorpe or Winthorpe. There is, cut on the south-east angle of Winthorpe tower, a deep horizontal line with the letters “H.W. 1837.” This indicates the level of high-water mark on the other side of the sea bank, and as the mark on the tower is eight feet nine inches from the ground, though the 1837 tide was an exceptionally high one, it gives some idea of what this part of the Marsh must at times have been in the days before the Romans made their great embankment. A plan for improving the drainage of the land at Winthorpe was made as early as 1367, and a rate was exacted of 1s. an acre.
SKEGNESS HOUSE
Skegness, now, next to Cleethorpes, the best known and most frequented by excursion “trippers” of all the east coast places, used to be fifty years ago only a little settlement of fishermen who lived in cabins built on the strip of ground between the road and the ditches on each side. A lifeboat shed and an old sea-boat set up on its gunwale for a shelter, with a seat in it, and a flagstaff close by, used chiefly for signalling to a collier to come in, were on the sea bank. Behind it was an hotel, and one thatched house just inside the Roman bank, built by Mr. Edward Walls about 1780. This was cleverly contrived so that not an inch of space was wasted anywhere. It was only one room thick, so that from the same room you could see the sun rise over the sea and set over the Marsh. It was here that Tennyson saw those “wide-winged sunsets of the misty marsh” that he speaks of in “The Last Tournament,” and took delight in their marvellous colouring.
The house rose up from the level behind and below the bank, and the back door was on the ground floor, with a porch and hinged leaves to shut out the terrific wind from N. and E. or N. and W. as required, but on the sea front, access was obtained by a removable plank bridge from the bank top which landed you on the first floor. Here was the summer home of all our family—a children’s paradise—when you ran straight out bare-foot on to the sandy bank and so across the beautiful hard sands and through the salt-water creeks down to the sea. This at high water was close at hand with tumbling waves and seething waters, but at low tide, far as eye could reach was nothing but sand, with the fisherman’s pony and cart, and his donkey and boy at the other end of the shrimp net, moving slowly like specks in the distance along the edge of the far-retreating sea.
This enchanting desolation is now the trippers’ play ground, with stalls and donkeys and swings and sham niggers and a pier and lines of shops. It must be admitted that it has all its old health-giving breezes, and also a fine garden and a cricket field and golf links of the very best. A new line from Lincoln has just been opened (July 1st, 1913), which runs through Coningsby, New Bolingbroke and Stickney, to join the old loop line between Eastville and Steeping, and for a shilling fare will bring thousands from Lincoln, Sheffield and Retford, to have a happy day of nine hours at what the natives call “Skegsnest.”
We have seen that the Romans had a bank all along this coast to keep out the sea, and besides their five roads from Lincoln, one of which went to Horncastle, they had a road from Horncastle to Wainfleet; and a road, part of which we have noticed, from Ulceby to Burgh and Skegness. Skegness lies midway between Ingoldmells, which is the most easterly point of the county, and Gibraltar Point, from which the coast sweeps inland and forms the northern shore of the Wash. Across, on the further side of this, was the Roman camp at Brancaster (Branodunum), and here at Skegness there seems to have been a Roman fort which has now been swallowed up by the sea.
OLD POTTERIES
Near Ingoldmells, about fifty years ago, the sea, at low water, laid bare some Roman potteries, so called, from which the Rev. Edward Elmhirst got several specimens of what were called “thumb bricks.” These were just bits of clay the size of sausages, but twice as thick, some as much as two and a half inches thick and four inches high, which had been squeezed in the hand, the impress of the fingers and thumb being plainly visible; the extremities, being more than the hand could take, were rather bigger than the middle. They were flat enough at each end to stand, and had doubtless been used to place the pottery on when being burnt in the kiln.
It is more than probable that these potteries were pre-Roman. They are about a quarter of a mile south of the Ingoldmells outfall drain, and half way between high and low-water mark. They are only exposed now and then, and appear to be circular kilns about fifteen feet in diameter, with walls two feet thick, and now only a foot high. The reason of their existence is found in a bed of dark clay which underlies all this coast.
The only pot found has been a rough, hand-made jar with rolled edge and marks of the stick or bone with which the outside had been scraped and trimmed. Now, doubtless the Romans used the wheel. Moreover, these kilns are far outside the Roman bank, and not likely, therefore, to be for Roman use. Tree roots are found in the walls and inside the circle of the kilns, of the same sort as those of which at one time a perfect forest existed, the stumps of which are sometimes visible at low tide. At the time the Romans made their sea bank the sea must have come right over this forest, so that we may perhaps say that those thumb-bricks bear the impress of the fingers of the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and are therefore of extraordinary interest.
On the eastern side of South Lindsey the running out of the roads, from Burgh and Wainfleet, to the coast always seemed to point to the existence of some Roman terminus near Skegness. Some years after he had noted this as probable, the Rev. E. H. R. Tatham, who has made a study of Roman roads in Lincolnshire, discovered that in the court rolls of the manor of Ingoldmells, the mention is made of a piece of land called indifferently in a document dated 1345, “Chesterland,” or “Castelland”; and again in 1422, four acres of land in “Chesterland” are mentioned as being surrendered by one William Skalflete (Court Rolls, p. 248), this land is never mentioned again, and the presumption is that it was swallowed by the sea. And in 1540 Leland mentions a statement made to him, that Skegness once had a haven town with a “castle,” but that these had been “clene consumed and eaten up with the se.”
ROMAN CASTRUM
These terms “Chester” and “caster” point to a Roman fort or “castrum,” and the fact that the names “Chesterland” and “Castelland” exist in medieval documents dealing with the land in the immediate neighbourhood seems to go a long way towards confirming Mr. Tatham’s conjecture of the existence of a Roman fort near Skegness, over which the sea has now encroached.
AN EARLY BRASS
CROFT
From Skegness we will now turn inland, and after about four miles reach Croft (All Saints) by a road which keeps turning at right angles and only by slow degrees brings a traveller perceptibly nearer to the clump of big, shady trees which hide the church, parsonage and school. Large trees grow in all parts of the forlorn churchyard, and the church when opened has a musty, charnel-house smell, but one soon forgets that in amazement at the fine and spacious fourteenth century nave and clerestory, its grand tower and its large and lofty fifteenth century Perpendicular chancel and aisles. The wide ten-foot passage up the nave between the old poppy-head seats fitly corresponds to the large open space round the font, which rises from an octagonal stone platform as big as that of a market cross. There is a quantity of old woodwork besides the seats. A good rood-screen—though like all the others, minus its coved top and rood-loft—shows traces yet of its ancient colouring; birds and beasts of various kinds are carved both as crockets above and also in relief on the panels below, and two good chantry screens fill the eastern ends of the aisles. A very fine Jacobean pulpit and tester was put up by Dr. Worship, the vicar from 1599 to 1625, in memory of his wife Agnes, whom he describes in a brass on her tomb, dated 1615, as “a woman matchless both for wisdom and godlyness.” The two greatest treasures in brass are the extremely fine eagle lectern, its base supported by three small lions, which was found in the moat of the old Hall, the seat of the Browne family, flung there probably for safety and then forgotten; and a notable half-effigy, head and arms only, of a knight in banded mail, with a tunic over the hauberk, and hands joined in prayer. The legend round him is in Norman French, but his name is lost; the date is said to be 1300, so that this is, next to that at Buslingthorpe, the earliest brass in the county.
The Browne family are perpetuated in the chancel, where on the north wall are two similar monuments of kneeling figures facing each other, both erected about 1630. The first is to Valentine Browne, a man with a very aquiline nose, and his wife Elizabeth (Monson), with effigies in relief of their fifteen children. He is described as “Treasurer and Vittleter of Barwick, and Dyed Treasurer of Ireland.” Barwick is “The March town of Berwick-on-Tweed.” The tomb was erected c. 1600 by his second son John who lived at Croft, and whose effigy is on the other tomb along with his wife Cicely (Kirkman), of whom we are told “she lived with him but 20 weeks and dye without issue ætatis 21 Ano Domini 1614,” just a year before Agnes Worship, the vicar’s wife. Another monument, a marble slab eighteen inches square, has this inscription:—
“Here lyeth Willyam Bonde Gentleman, whoe dyed An̅o Dom̅ 1559 leaving two sonnes, Nicolas Docter in Divinitie, and George Docter in physicke, the elder sonne, who dyed the ____ et etatis ____ and here is buryed. THE which in remembrance of his most kynd father haith erected this lytle moniment”
Bondus eram Doctor Medicus nunc vermibus esca,
Corpus terra tegit, spiritus astra petit,
Ardua scrutando, cura, morbis, senioque
Vita Molesta fuit: Mors mihi grata quies.
The guide-books say that this was erected by Nicolas, D.D., who afterwards became president of Magdalen College, Oxford. But clearly it was by George the M.D., and he left spaces for his own death date, which were never filled; perhaps he is not buried at Croft, but he must have been near his end when he wrote the Latin lines which are all about himself, and may be thus translated—
I was Bond a Physician, now I am food for worms,
The earth covers my body, my spirit seeks the stars,
From difficult studies, anxiety, diseases and old age
Life was a burden; death is a welcome rest to me.
There is a note in the church accounts to the effect that the old bell was (re-)cast at Peterborough by Henry Penn in 1706 and inscribed “prepare to die.”
This church is, for spaciousness and for the amount of good old woodwork, and for its monuments, one of the very best. As we leave it we notice carved on the door, “God save the King 1633.”
I believe that Bishop Hugh-de-Wells who was appointed Bishop of Lincoln in 1209, but who, mistrusting King John, did not take up the work of his See till 1218, when John was dead, was a native of Croft.
The parish books of Croft show “The dues and duties belonginge and appertaininge unto the office of the clarkes of Crofte. A.D. 1626.”
He collected the Easter gratuities of the neighbours in the parish; he got twenty shillings a year for looking after the clock, “to be paid by the churchwards.”
“For skowringe and furbishinge the eagle or ‘brazen lectorie’ 2/6 by the yeare. Sixpence for ‘evry marriadge,’ fourpence ‘for the passinge bell ringeinge for every inhabitant &c. that are deceased.”
And “Item the privilege of makeinge the graves for the deceased before any other yf he will take the paines and canne doe yt.”
THE PARISH CLERK
Evidently the clerks were old men and not always capable of wielding the spade and pick; and now comes an entry which lets one into the secret of why the registers were often so ill-kept. Instead of the entries being made by the parson at the time, the clerk put them down “from time to time,” and they were copied from his notes once a year. Under this system, of course, there were both mistakes and omissions, often for many months and even years together.
This is the entry:—
“Itm for the Register keepinge from tyme to tyme of all Christnings Marriadges and burialles from Ladyday to Ladyday until they be ingrossed: two shillings and sixpence a year.”
Possibly “from tyme to tyme” may mean on each occasion, but it sounds precarious.
His fixed salary, besides fees, was, in 1773, thirty shillings and two strikes (—4 bushels) of corn out of the two quarters (—sixteen bushels) which was given from the glebe every Easter to the poor by the parson.
The Sexton’s wages at the same date were given thus:—
| as Sexton | 2. | 10. | 0. |
| for dogs wipping | 0. | 7. | 6. |
| Dressing church round | 0. | 2. | 0. |
| For oyle | 0. | 2. | 4. |
| For ringing the bell at 8 and 4 | 1. | 0. | 0. |
| 04. | 01. | 10. |
The “Parish Clerk” in Lincolnshire was, as a rule, a rougher-looking individual than he appears in Gainsborough’s splendid picture in the National Gallery, but he was generally an original character, both in word and deed. I heard of one in Ireland who announced, “There will be no sarmon this afternoon as the Bishop has been providentially prevented from praching,” and many a quaint saying is recorded of those Lincolnshire clerks of the last century. Boys were their special aversion. In the old days at Spilsby the clerk kept a stick, and during the sermon would go down to the west end of the building, and the sound of his weapon on the boys’ heads quite waked up the slumberers in the seats nearer the pulpit. One hears of a clerk putting a stop to what he considered an unnecessary afternoon service and saying to the clergyman, “We ha’en’t no call to hev sarvice just for you and me, sir.” “Oh, but I thought I saw some people coming in.” “Just a parcel of boys, sir; but I soon started they.” But it is not the clerks only who show an intelligent interest in the parson and the services, though from generations of somewhat slovenly performance, the churchgoers had difficulty at first in appreciating the high-church ritual which here and there they saw for the first time. One kindly old woman on seeing in one of the Fen churches some unexpected genuflexions and bows, said afterwards, “I was sorry for poor Mr. C., he was that bad of his inside that he couldn’t howd hissen up.” And another I knew of who, when asked how they got on with the new ritualistic clergyman, and whether he hadn’t introduced some new methods, replied, “Oh, yis, he antics a bit; but we looves him soä we antics along wi’ him.”
BURGH-LE-MARSH
From Croft we turn north to Burgh-le-Marsh (SS. Peter and Paul) whose fine lofty tower, with its grand peal of eight bells, stands on the extreme edge of the Wold and overlooks the marsh, and, like “Boston Stump,” is visible far out to sea, The exterior is very fine, and the church, like Croft, has retained its chancel, so ruthlessly destroyed in the case of Addlethorpe and Ingoldmells. The nave is wide and lofty, but the pillars poor. It is all Perpendicular, and has much interesting screen work which has been a good deal pulled about, even as late as 1865, the year in which similar destruction was wrought at Ingoldmells. The rood screen now stands across the tower arch, and the chancel screen is a patchwork. There are two porches, north and south, the latter of brick, a good pulpit and a canopied font-cover which opens with double doors, dated 1623. On the north aisle wall is a plain brass plate with the following dialogue in Latin hexameters:—
Quis jacet hic? Leonardus Palmerus Generosus.
Quae conjux dilecta fuit? Catherina. Quis haeres?
Christopherus (cui nupta Anna est). Quis filius alter?
Robertus. Gnatae quot erant? Tres, Elizabetha
Ac Maria, ac Helena. An superant? Superant. Ubi mens est
Defuncti? Rogitas. Dubio procul astra petivit.
obiit Die Martis octavo
Anno Domi 1610.
ætatis suæ 70.
Who lies here? Leonard Palmer, Gentleman.
Who was his beloved wife? Catherine. Who his heir?
Christopher (whose wife was Anna). Who was his second son?
Robert. How many daughters were there? Three, Elizabeth
and Mary and Helen. Are they living? Yes. Where is the spirit
of the departed? You ask. Doubtless it has sought the stars.
He died Mar. 8, 1610, aged 70.
BRATOFT
At Burgh the straight road from Skegness to Gunby turns to the left to pass through Bratoft. This church with picturesque ivy-clad tower has a good font, a chancel and parclose screens, and the rood-loft doorway. It has been well restored in memory of C. Massingberd, Squire of Gunby, and contains a very curious painting on wood which now hangs in the tower; it was once over the chancel arch, and by its irregular shape it is clear that it was originally made to fit elsewhere. It is signed Robert Stephenson. The Armada is shown as a red dragon, between four points of land marked England, Scotland, Ireland and France with the following lines:—
Spaine’s proud Armado with great strength and power
Great Britain’s state came gapeing to devour,
This dragon’s guts, like Pharoa’s scattered hoast
Lay splitt and drowned upon the Irish coast.
For of eight score save too ships sent from Spaine
But twenty-five scarce sound returned again non Nobis Domine.
Bratoft Hall, the residence of the Bratofts and Massingberds, was built in a square moated enclosure of two acres, which stood in a deer park of two hundred acres. It was taken down in 1698, and the Hall at Gunby built about the same time. The bridge over the moat of two brick arches was standing in 1830 intact.
GUNBY
The twisting byeways lead from here back into the Skegness, Burgh, and Spilsby road. The Hall at Gunby[22] is a fine brick mansion, the home of the Massingberds. A pretty little church stands in the park, in which are two very valuable brasses of the Massingberd family, one dated 1405, of a knight, Sir Thomas, in camail and pointed Bascinet, and his lady Johanna, in a tight dress and mantle. The other of William Lodyngton, Judge of the Court of Common Pleas, in his judicial robes, 1419. The Massingberd brass has had its incised inscription beaten out, and, with a new inscription in raised letters, has been made to serve for another Thomas and Johanna Massingberd in 1552, the figures, costumed as in 1400, serving for their parsimonious descendants of 150 years later. A precisely similar case of appropriation by two Dallisons with dates 1400 and 1546 and 1549, may be seen in Laughton church near Gainsborough; and again on a stone slab of the Watson family in Lyddington, Rutland. About 1800 Elizabeth Massingberd, sole heiress of Gunby, married her neighbour, Peregrine Langton, son of Bennet Langton, the friend of Dr. Johnson, who on marriage took the name of Massingberd. Their grandson was the Algernon Massingberd, born 1828, who left England in 1852, and since June, 1855, was never again heard of. In 1862 his uncle, Charles Langton Massingberd, took possession of the estate.
From Gunby various small by-roads lead literally in all directions; you can take your choice of eight within half a mile of the park gates, and Burgh station, on the Boston and Grimsby line, is only just outside the boundary.
CHAPTER XXIX
CHURCHES IN SOUTH LINDSEY
Spilsby to Wainfleet—Little Steeping—Tomas-de-Reding—Monksthorpe—The Baptists—Thomas Grantham—Firsby—Thorpe—Churchwarden’s Book—The “Dyxonary”—Wainfleet—William of Waynflete—Halton Holgate—Sire Walter Bec—Village Carpentry.
The record of the churches in the marsh land of the South Lindsey division would not be complete without some mention of Wainfleet. The Somersby brook, which, winding “with many a curve” through Partney and Halton, becomes at last “the Steeping river,” is thence cut into a straight canal as far as Wainfleet, and then, resuming its proper river-character, goes out through the flats at Wainfleet Haven, near that positive end of the world, “Gibraltar Point.”
Little Steeping has just undergone a most satisfactory restoration in memory of its once rector, Bishop Steere, who succeeded Bishop Tozer of Burgh-le-Marsh as the third missionary bishop in Central Africa, and there did a great work as a missionary, and also built the first Central African cathedral in what had previously been the greatest slave market of the world—Zanzibar. The restorers have had a most interesting find this year (1912), for the chancel step, when taken up, proved to be the back of a fine recumbent effigy of a fourteenth century rector. Doubtless the monument was taken from the arched recess in the north wall of the chancel and thus hidden to save it from destruction in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The masons who fitted it into its new bed had no scruple in knocking off the inscribed moulding on one side, and a bit of the carved stone got broken off and was found in the rectory garden.
LITTLE STEEPING
The figure represents a robed priest, with feet curiously clothed in what look like socks. The face is good and in excellent preservation. The work was probably local, for the ear is of enormous size. The mutilated inscription read originally: “Tomas de Reding priez qe Dieu pour sa grace de sa alme eyt merci.” The letters in italics are missing. Thomas de Reding was presented to Little Steeping in 1328. There is a very good font, and the south porch outer arch is remarkable for the very unusual depth of its hollowed moulding on both of the outer porch pilasters. The canopied work over the head of the inner doorway is good, but quite of a different character, and the wide projection of the north arcade capitals is noticeable. A stone on the outer wall marked “1638 W P & R G” gives the date of a destructive restoration, when tomb slabs were cut up for window-sills and some ruthless patchwork put in on the north side of both aisle and chancel. A good rood screen with canopy has been put in, old work being used where possible, and a new churchyard cross erected on the old base, with figures of St. Andrew and the Crucifixion, under a canopy like that at Somersby. The octagonal font in rich yellow stone has figures difficult to make out, and a small niche over the north-east pier of the nave arcade is to be noted; probably it contained some relic or image. The stone brackets for the rood loft remain, but there is no trace left of the staircase. The seats and pulpit of dark stained deal are interesting, as they were all made by Bishop Steere himself. The tower is patched with the old two-inch bricks, which always look well, and with some of the larger modern kind, which seldom do.
Our best way now is to return to the Spilsby-and-Firsby road at Great Steeping, which will take us past Irby to Thorpe-St.-Peter and Wainfleet.
THE BAPTISTS
The hamlet of Monksthorpe in Great Steeping parish indicates by its name the fact that Bardney Abbey had an estate here. No trace now remains of the manor built by Robert de Waynflete, when he retired in 1317 from the abbey and had the proceeds of the estates in Steeping and Firsby and two cells in Partney and Skendleby assigned to him for the maintenance and clothing of himself and family. But part of the moat is visible, and one may see here in a chapel enclosure a baptist’s pool bricked and railed round on three sides with one end open and sloping to the water, for the Baptists walked into the pool and did not believe in the efficacy of infant baptism. This was doubtless one of the places which was ministered to by the famous leader of the “General Baptist Church” who suffered such shameful and repeated persecution in the days of Cromwell and Charles II., Thomas Grantham, for he was a native of Halton, where the name still exists, and throughout a long life showed himself a man of a truly religious and eminently courageous heart, of whom his native village may well be proud. He died in 1692, aged seventy-eight, at Norwich, and was buried inside the church of St. Stephen, as a memorial to him set up therein states, “to prevent the indecencies threatened to his corpse,” such as, we read on a tombstone in Croft churchyard, had been perpetrated on the body of his friend and fellow-Baptist, Robert Shalders, whose body was disinterred on the very day of his funeral by inhabitants of Croft, and dragged on a sledge and left at his own gates. Doubtless the clergyman was privy to this, so hot was the feeling for religious persecution in those days, and took credit to himself for it, for in the parish book of Croft we may read as follows:—
“Dec 20th, 1663. These persons here underwritten, viz. Roger Faune, Gent., Robert Shalders, Anne Montgomerie, Cicilie Barker, Alice Egger, were excommunicated in the parish church of Croft the day and year above written,
| “per me R. Clarke | Curate Ibid | |
| Philip Neave | ⎫ | Churchwardens.” |
| John Wells | ⎭ |
THORPE
CHURCHWARDEN’S BOOK
Two miles east of Steeping a good road to the right goes to Firsby, where is a small church built by Mr. G. E. Street to show how an entirely satisfactory building adapted to the needs of quite a small parish could be put up at a very small cost. The whole church cost under £1,000, and was built in less than six months, and opened November 5, 1857. In Thorpe we find a graceful font, a well-carved Perpendicular screen and a good Jacobean pulpit. The place belonged after the Conquest to the Kyme family. The Thorpe churchwardens’ book commences in 1545, and in 1546 contains such items as these about the rood light and the light in the Easter Sepulchre:
“Anᵒ regᵒ regˢ Hen. VIII, xxxvij.
“By thys dothe ytt appr what Symon Wylly̅son & Roger Hopster hath payᵈ & layd for the cherche cocernyng the rode lyght & ye Sepulture lyght in ye xxxvj yere of ye rene off ower Soffera̅t lorde king He̅r̅y ye viij.
| fyrst payd by yᵉ hands off yᵉ forsayd Rogʳ for one powd waxe makyng and a half agenst lent | j½d | |
| Item payd to Gu̅rwycke Wyffe for brede and ale to ye waxe makyng for yᵉ supulture lyght | xiiijd | |
| Item payd for j powde waxe maykyng for the rode lyght aga̅s̅t estʳ | jd | |
| Item payd to yᵉ clark for kepping off yᵉ sepulture lyght | ijd.” |
In the reign of Edward VI the churchwardens seem to have had a jumble sale of all the odds and ends in the church, which they called the “offalment” or rubbish.
“Anᵒ Reg E. VIᵗⁱ Vᵗᵒ.
“Howffulment in the church soulde & delyvered by ye hands of John Greene & Robert Emme cherche masters.”
Amongst the various items of metal and woodwork, vestments, chests, books, &c., we have:—
| “Item off John Wolbe yᵉ elder for an Albe and an old pantyd cloth | iiijˢ | |
| Item to John Wolbe all yᵉ boks in yᵉ cherche | ijˢ | iiijᵈ |
| Item sowlde to Wᵐ Keele ij altar clothes, a robe | vˢ | |
| Item sowlde to Sir John Westmels curate, ij robes | iiijˢ | |
| Item Sowlde Wᵐ Sawer ij corporaxs[23] wᵗ otre ofelment | iijˢ | vijiᵈ” |
They were probably restoring their church, for we have two years later:—
| “Itᵐ pᵈ for a wayn and iiij beasts for sand to the cherche | viijᵈ” |
This was in the first and second year of Queen Mary, and they were then busy putting back what they had sold in Edward’s reign, making side altars, etc., hence we find:—
Other interesting items are—
| “Itᵐ payd to yᵉ players off ca̅dylmesse day | viijᵈ | |
| Itᵐ payd in yᵉ same year to yᵉ players whytche playd off yᵉ Sonday next after Sant Mathyes day | vjᵈ” |
One might make quite an amusing “story of a dictionary” from the various entries in the Thorpe churchwardens’ book about an Elliott’s Dictionary which, in the middle of the sixteenth century the vicar bequeathed to his successors in perpetuo. It is described as “one boke called a dyxonary,” and evidently exercised both vicar and wardens a good deal until one vicar bethought him of the device of “delivering” it to the parish to be kept along with various volumes of homilies, and expositions and the paraphrases of Erasmus.
But it is time to leave Thorpe; and two miles will bring us to Wainfleet which, as its name declares, though now a couple of miles from the sea, was once a haven for sea-going ships, for “Fleet” means a navigable creek. This little place gave its name in the fifteenth century to a great man, William of Wainfleet, or Waynflete, Headmaster of Winchester, and first headmaster and Provost of Eton, successor to Cardinal Beaufort as Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VI. He was a great builder, for he possibly planned, and certainly completed, Tattershall Castle, built Tattershall church, and founded Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1457, the first college to admit commoners, a wise and far-seeing innovation of Waynflete’s; and in his native town erected in 1484 the Magdalen College School, a fine brick building seventy-six feet by twenty-six with its gateway flanked by polygonal towers recalling the entrance to Eton College. In the south tower is a remarkable staircase, and in the north a bell.
WAINFLEET
His adoption of St. Mary Magdalen as the patron of his school at Wainfleet and his college at Oxford may have originated in his having been appointed by Cardinal Beaufort to the mastership and chantry of St. Mary Magdalen hospital on Magdalen Down outside Winchester.
The bishop lived to the reign of Richard III., and died in 1486. He erected a monument to his father, Richard Patten. The son is called either Patten or Barbour, for he bore both names indifferently, though he soon discarded them both for the name of his birthplace, as was commonly done from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; his brother also taking the name of Waynflete. This monument was in the original church of All Saints, for the second church of St. Thomas had long been destroyed. But All Saints’ church, built cruciform and with a light wooden spire on account of the soft nature of the soil on which it stood, was destined to the same fate, for the foolish inhabitants having, in 1718, put a heavy brick tower to it, with five bells in it, the weight brought a great part of the building to ruin. Subsequently it was pulled down, and the present church was set up at some distance from the old site in 1820, when the inhabitants added vandalism to their folly and wantonly demolished this fine tomb. The broken bits were collected and placed in the Magdalen School, and later were, by the intervention of the rector of Halton Holgate, Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, obtained for the President and Fellows of the Bishop’s College at Oxford, and are now on the north side of the altar in the College Chapel. The figure has its feet resting on a bank of flowers and its head on a cushion and pillow supported by his two sons, John the Monk and William the Bishop. The face of the latter resembles the father, but is not so broad or so old as that of John. It is to be noted that Lincolnshire has produced two Bishops of Winchester, each of them the founder of a college at Oxford—Bishop Fox and Bishop Waynflete.
The town is older than Boston and existed in Roman days, possibly under the name of Vannona, and apparently a Roman road ran from Doncaster to Wainfleet, passing through Horncastle and Lusby. Certainly “Salters road,” which crosses the East Fen, was a Roman road, and the Romans made a good deal of salt from the sea-water in the immediate neighbourhood of Wainfleet. In the charter rolls of Bardney Abbey (temp. Henry III.) we read that Matthew, son of Milo de Wenflet, paid annually “to God, Saint Oswald and the Monks of Bardney 4 shillings and eighteen sextaires of salt by the old measure” for the land he held in the village of Friskney.
Later we find that (temp. Edward II.) Hugh le Despencer held lands in Wainfleet in 1327, and we know that a Robert le Despencer did so in Burgh in the time of Edward I. In the reign of Edward III. Wainfleet furnished two ships and forty seamen for the invasion of Brittany.
Wainfleet St. Mary’s lies one and a half miles to the south. The church is a massive structure with five arches on the north and four on the south of the nave.
We have now completed the round of the Marsh churches, and in so doing, on leaving Gunby, we struck into the Spilsby and Wainfleet road, just where the Somersby brook, there called the Halton river, is crossed by an iron bridge. This we did not cross, but keeping always to the left bank we followed the stream to Wainfleet. We must now go back and cross this iron bridge, and trace the road thence for four miles and a half to Spilsby. This will take us on to the Wold. We shall only pass one village, but this is one of infinite charm.
HALTON HOLGATE
THE HOLLOW-GATE BRIDGE
Halton Holgate stands on the very edge of the Wold, where the green-sand terminates, and looks far across the Fen to Boston. The name of the village is always properly pronounced by the natives Halton Hollygate, i.e., hollow gate or way; for the descending road has been cut through the green-sand rock, and where the cutting is deepest a pretty timber footbridge is thrown over it, leading from the rectory to the churchyard. The garden lawn has, or had, two fine old mulberry trees. These were once more common—for in the reign of James I. an order went out for the planting of mulberry trees in all rectory gardens with a view to the encouragement of the silk trade by the breeding and feeding of silkworms, whose favourite diet is the mulberry leaf. From the garden, “Boston stump” is visible eighteen miles to the south. The church is a particularly handsome one with massive well-proportioned tower, and large belfry windows, eight three-light clerestory windows on either side and a fine south porch of Ancaster stone. The rest is built of the beautifully tinted local green-sand, with quoins of harder Clipsham stone. Inside it is spacious, with lofty octagonal pillars. It is seated throughout with oak, and has several good old oak poppy-heads and some large modern ones copied from Winthorpe and carved by a Halton carpenter. Here it is worth notice that for the last hundred years Halton has never been without wood-workers of unusual talent.
Bridge over the Hollow-Gate.
HALTON CHURCH
South of the chancel two tall blocked arcades, leading to a Lady chapel long pulled down, were opened by the Rev. T. Sale, rector in 1894, who had reseated the chancel and filled the east window with good stained glass. The chapel, which now holds the organ, was rebuilt in memory of the two previous rectors, Rev. T. H. Rawnsley (1825-1861) and R. D. B. Rawnsley (1861-1882), and their wives Sophia Walls and Catharine Franklin. The fine effigy of a Crusader, called Henry de Halton, had been buried for safety and forgotten, like that of the priest at Little Steeping, and the sepulchral slab with Lombardic lettering, of Sir Walter Bec, of the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, is the oldest monument in the neighbourhood. The inscription is: “Sire Walter Bec jist ici de ki alme Dieu ait merci.” There is a fine peal of six bells, and a “tingtang,” a thing very common in Lincolnshire, and reminiscent of the pre-Reformation Sanctus bell.
We have so often seen, owing to the negligence of church authorities, damp church walls, and wet streaming down from gutter or stack-pipe, which is blocked with growing grass or sparrows’ nests, to the great detriment of the building, that it is pleasant to record the useful activity of the Halton churchwardens, of whom one has carved, and the other put together, a fine oak screen, with the names and dates of all the known rectors, churchwardens and clerks of the parish.
Halton Church.
In the north wall of the chancel is a priest’s door, which has always been in constant use. It is a beautiful bit of Perpendicular work with an exceptionally good hood-moulding and lovely carving of waved foliage in the spandrels. These north side doors are sometimes called “Devils’ doors,” as they were not only to let the priest in but also to let the Devil out, being left open at baptisms to let him fly out when the infant renounces the Devil and all his works, and becomes the child of grace. The idea that the north was the Devil’s side had possibly something to do with the repugnance, hardly yet quite overcome, to a burial on that side of the churchyard.
LOCAL WORKMANSHIP
An avenue of elms, planted by the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley about 1830, starting from the “Church Wongs,”[24] leads past the tower at the west to the Hollow-gate road, close to where a pit was dug by the roadside to get the sandstone for repairing the tower; and to-day, as we pass along to Spilsby, we shall see a wall of sandstone rock exposed on the right of the road, and a lot of blocks cut out and hardening in the air preparatory for use at Little Steeping, and we shall naturally be reminded of the words of Isaiah, “Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.”
We have said that the restoration of Halton Holgate church was carried out by the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley about 1845, and it is remarkable that it was done so extremely well; for at that particular time the art of architectural restoration was almost at its lowest. As far as they went there were no mistakes made by the restorers at Halton, and the carved work for the seats was copied from the best models to be seen in any Lincolnshire church, and executed under the eye of the rector and his son, Drummond Rawnsley, by a Halton carpenter. That is just as it should be, and just as it used to be, but it is not often possible of attainment now.
Jesus College chapel at Cambridge underwent a much needed restoration at the same bad period, i.e., in 1849, and here too, by the genius of the architect, excellent work was done, some good old carving being preserved and very cleverly matched with new work well executed, and by a very curious coincidence, the shape of some of the poppy-heads and the plan of the panel carving is almost identical with that which was executed at Halton, after the Winthorpe pattern.
CHAPTER XXX
SPILSBY AND ITS BYWAYS
Spilsby Market-town—The Churches and Willoughby Chapel—The Franklins—The Talk of the Market—Lincolnshire Stories and Others—Byways—Old Bolingbroke—Harrington Church—The Copledike Tombs—The Hall—Bag-Enderby—Remarkable Font—Somersby—The Churchyard Cross—The Brook—Ashby Puerorum.
SPILSBY CHURCH
Spilsby is the head of a petty-sessional division in the parts of Lindsey. The name is thought by some to be a corruption of Spellows-by, to which the name of Spellows hill in the neighbourhood gives some colour. The old gaol, built in 1825, had a really good classic portico with four fluted columns and massive pediment. Most of the buildings behind this imposing entrance were pulled down after fifty years, and all that it leads to now is the Sessions House and police station. The long market-place is interrupted in one place by a block of shops, and in another by a mean-looking Corn Exchange; but at one end of it still stands an elegant, restored market cross, and at the other a bronze statue by Noble of Sir John Franklin, the most famous of Spilsby’s sons, the discoverer of the “North West Passage.” His hand rests on an anchor, and on the pedestal are the words: “They forged the last link with their lives.” Just beyond the town a fine elm-tree avenue leads to Eresby, the seat whence the Willoughby family take their title. In Domesday Book, 1086, Spilsby and Eresby are said to belong to the Bishop of Durham. His tenant Pinco, or one of his sons, the Fitz Pincos, acquired it; and about 1166 a Pinco heiress married Walter Bec, whose grandson has a sepulchral slab in Halton church, c. 1243. In 1295 a John, the son of Walter, was created Baron Bec of Eresby, the younger brothers being Antony, Bishop of Durham, and Thomas, who was consecrated Bishop of St. David’s at Lincoln in 1280. Lord Bec died in 1302, in which year Sir William of Willoughby (near Alford), who had married his daughter and heiress Alice, obtained a charter for a market at Spilsby every Monday. Their son Robert was the first Baron Willoughby De Eresby, who died in 1316. His son John fought at Crécy 1346, and in 1348 founded the College of the Holy Trinity at Spilsby, and the chantry which, when he and his successors in the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries with their huge altar tombs filled up the chancel of the old church, even blocking up the entire chancel arch with the stone screen of the Bertie monument, became eventually the chancel of the parish church. For the old church consisted of a nave and chancel into which the west door opened direct; it had probably a narrow north aisle, and certainly a large south aisle was added with the Trinity chapel at the east end of it. This aisle and chapel are now the nave and chancel of the church, which was restored in Ancaster stone in 1879, and a new south aisle added, the tower alone remaining of green-sand with lofty hard-stone pinnacles. In this the bells have just been re-hung, in December, 1913. John, second Baron Willoughby (1348), also the third (1372), who fought at Poictiers, and the fourth, with his second wife, Lady Neville, at his side (1380), have huge altar tombs with effigies in armour; he died 1389. A brass commemorates his third wife (1391), and another fine one, said to be Lincolnshire work, the fifth baron and his first wife (1410). Both these ladies being of the family of Lord Zouch. The gap between the fifth and the tenth Lord Willoughby is accounted for thus:—
WILLOUGHBY D’ERESBY
The sixth Lord was created Earl of Vendome and Beaumont and died 1451. His second wife was Maud Stanhope, co-heiress of Lord Cromwell of Tattershall. The seventh and eighth, best known by their other title of Lord Welles, were both put to death for heading the Lincolnshire rebellion against Edward IV., the father by an act of bad faith on the king’s part, who had taken him, together with Dymoke the Champion, out of the Sanctuary in Westminster; and the son because, in revenge, joining Sir Thomas de la Launde, he had fought the Yorkists and been defeated at the battle of Loose-coatfield near Stamford, 1470. The ninth lord was William, who was descended from a younger son of the fifth Baron Willoughby, since Richard Hastings, whom Joan, the sister and heiress of the eighth Lord Welles, had married, left no issue. There is a monument in Ashby church near Spilsby, though in a very fragmentary condition, to William and also to Joan and Richard Hastings. William married Katherine of Aragon’s maid-of-honour, Lady Mary Salines, for his second wife, and by a will, dated Eresby 1526, desired to be buried and have a monument erected to himself and his wife at Spilsby, but this was never done. The stone screen with its supporting figures of a hermit, a crowned Saracen, and a wild man, erect, set up in 1580, is in memory of his daughter and heiress, Katherine Duchess of Suffolk, and her second husband, Richard Bertie, her first husband being that Charles Brandon who obtained so huge a share of the estates confiscated by Henry VIII. in Lincolnshire. They lived at Grimsthorpe, on the west side of the county, which the king had given to Katherine’s parents; and thenceforth that became the chief seat of the Willoughby family, and the series of monuments is continued in Edenham church. But there is one more monument, in what is now called the Willoughby chapel at Spilsby. This is to a son of the duchess, Peregrine Bertie, tenth Baron Willoughby; he died at Berwick in 1601, and was buried at Spilsby as directed in his will; his daughter, Lady Watson, died in 1610, and, as she wished to be buried near her father, Sir Lewis Watson of Rockingham erected a monument to both father and daughter, the latter reclining on her elbow, with the baby, which caused her death, in a little square cot at her feet. Peregrine was so named because he was born abroad, his parents having fled from the Marian persecutions. His wife was the Lady Mary Vere who brought the office of chamberlain into the Willoughby family. It was claimed by her son Robert, the eleventh baron, who in 1630 was made Earl of Lindsey, and thus the barony became merged in the earldom, the fourth earl being subsequently created Duke of Ancaster.
Eresby Manor was burnt down in 1769, and only the moat and garden wall and, at the end of the avenue, one tall brick-and-stone gate-pillar surmounted by a stone vase remain. At the suppression of the college and chantries the Grammar School was founded on the site of the college, just to the north of the church, Robert Latham being the first master, in 1550.
At the south-west end of the church are three tablets to three remarkable brothers born in Spilsby towards the end of the eighteenth century.
THE FRANKLINS
Major James Franklin, who made the first military survey of India, and contributed a paper to the Geological Society in 1828, died in 1834. Sir Willingham Franklin who, after a distinguished career at Westminster and Oxford, died, with wife and daughter, of cholera, 1824, at Madras, where he was judge of the Supreme Court. And Sir John Franklin, the famous Arctic navigator, who fought at Trafalgar and Copenhagen, and died in the Arctic regions on June 11, 1847, before the historic disaster had overtaken the crews of the Erebus and Terror. His statue stands in his native town, and also in Hobart Town, where he lived for a time as Governor of Tasmania, and is one of the two statues in London which were set up by the nation. On his monument in Westminster Abbey are the beautiful lines by his friend and neighbour, and relative by marriage, Alfred Tennyson.
Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou,
Heroic sailor-soul,
Art passing on thy happier Voyage now
Towards no earthly pole.
The other brother, Thomas Adams Franklin, raised the Spilsby and Burgh battalion of volunteer infantry in 1801. Major Booth followed his good example and raised a company at Wainfleet to resist the invasion by Napoleon, and the men of the companies presented each of them with a handsome silver cup. Five Franklin sisters married and settled in the neighbourhood; and Catharine, the daughter of Sir Willingham, married Drummond, the son of the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, vicar of Spilsby. Thus quite a clan was created, insomuch that forty cousins have been counted at one Spilsby ball. Drummond succeeded his father as rector of Halton, and very appropriately preached the last sermon in the old church at Spilsby at the closing service previous to its restoration, speaking from the pulpit which his father had occupied from 1813 to 1825. His sermon, a very fine one, called “The Last Time,” was from 1 St. John ii. 18, and was delivered on Trinity Sunday, 1878.
LINCOLNSHIRE STORIES
The time to visit Spilsby is on market day, when, round the butter cross, besides eggs, butter and poultry, pottery is displayed “on the stones,” stalls are set up where one may buy plants and clothes, and things hard to digest like “bull’s eyes,” as well as boots and braces, and near “the Statue” at the other end, are farm requisites, sacks, tools, and the delightful-smelling tarred twine, as well as all sorts of old iron, chains, bolts, hinges, etc., which it seems to be worth someone’s while to carry from market to market. It is here that the humours of the petty auctioneer are to be heard, and the broad Doric of the Lincolnshire peasant. In the pig market below the church hill you may hear a man trying to sell some pigs, and to the objection that they are “Stränge an’ small,” he replies, “Mebbe just now; but I tell ye them pigs ’ull be greät ’uns,” then, in a pause, comes the voice from a little old woman who is looking on without the least idea of buying, “It ’ull be a straänge long while fust,” and in a burst of laughter the chance of selling that lot is snuffed out, or, as they say at the Westmorland dog trials, “blown off.”
MORE STORIES
There is an unconscious humour about the older Lincolnshire peasants which makes it very amusing to be about among them, whether in market, field or home. My father never returned from visiting his parish without some rich instance of dialect or some humorous speech that he had heard. Finding a woman flushed with anger outside her cottage once, and asking her what was amiss, he was told “It’s them Hell-cats.” “Who do you call by such a name?” “Them Johnsons yonder.” “Why? What have they been doing?” “They’ve been calling me.” “That’s very wrong; what have they been calling you?” “They’ve bin calling me Skinny.” At another time a woman, in the most cutting tones, alluding to her next-door neighbours who had an afflicted child, said, “We may-be poor, and Wanty [her husband] says we are poor, destitutely poor, and there’s no disgraäce in being poor, but our Mary-Ann doant hev fits.” Another time, when my sister was recommending a book from the lending library describing a voyage round the world, and called “Chasing the Sun,” a little old woman looked at the title and said, “Naäy, I weänt ha’ that: I doänt howd wi sich doings. Chaäsing the Sun indeed; the A’mighty will soon let ’em know if they gets a chevying him.” In the same village I got into conversation one autumn day with a small freeholder whose cow had been ill, and asked him how he had cured her, he said, “I got haafe a pound o’ sulphur and mixed it wi’ warm watter and bottled it into her. Eh! it’s a fine thing I reckon is sulphur for owt that’s badly, cow or pig or the missis or anythink.” Then, with a serious look he went on, “There’s a straänge thing happened wi’ beans, Mr. Rownsley.” “What’s that?” “Why, the beans is turned i’ the swad” (= pod). “No!” “Yees they hev.” “How do you mean?” “Why they used to be black ends uppermost and now they’r ’tother waay on.” “Well, that’s just how they always have been.” “Naay they warn’t. It was ’81 they turned.” They do lie with the attachment of each bean to the pod, just the way you would not expect, and having noticed this he was convinced that up to then they had really lain the way he had always supposed they did, so difficult is it to separate fact from imagination. The similes used by a Lincolnshire native are often quite Homeric, as when an old fellow, who was cutting his crop of beans, the haulm of which is notoriously tough, resting on his scythe said, “I’d rayther plow wi two dogs nor haulm beans.” Then they have often a quiet, slow way of saying things, which is in itself humorous. I remember a labourer who was very deaf, but he had been much annoyed by the mother of a man whose place he had succeeded to. He was working alongside of his master and apropos of nothing but his own thoughts, he said, “Scriptur saäys we should forgive one another; but I doänt knoä. If yon owd ’ooman fell i’ the dyke I doänt think I should pull her out. I mowt tell some ’un on her, but I doänt think I should pull her out howiver.” There is some kindliness in that, though in quantity it is rather like the Irishman’s news: “I’ve come to tell you that I have nothing to tell you, and there’s some news in that.” But the Lincolnshire native is a trifle stern; even the mother’s hand is more apt to be punitive than caressing. “I’ll leather you well when I gets you home, my lad,” I have heard a mother say to a very small boy, and I have heard tell of a mother who, when informed that her little girl had fallen down the well, angrily exclaimed, “Drat the children, they’re allus i’ mischief; and now she’s bin and drownded hersen I suppose.”
In Westmorland it is the husband who will take too much at market on whom the vials of the wrath of the missis are outpoured, and they generally know how to “sarve” him. One good lady, on being asked “However did you get him ower t’wall, Betty?” replied “I didna get him ower at a’—I just threshed him through th’ hog-hole” (the hole in the wall for the sheep, or hoggetts, to pass through).
Speaking of tippling, there is no more delightful story than this from Westmorland, of a mouse which had fallen into a beer vat and was swimming round in despair, when a cat looked over, and the mouse cried out, “If ye’ll git me oot o’ this ye may hev me.” The cat let down her tail and the mouse climbed up, and shaking herself on the edge of the vat, jumped off and went down her hole, and on being reproached by the cat as not being a mouse of her word, answered, “Eh! but ivry body knaws folks will say owt when they’re i’ drink.”
OLD BOLINGBROKE
There are several pretty little bits of country near Spilsby, but the most interesting of the by-ways leads off from the Horncastle road at Mavis Enderby, and, going down a steep hill, brings us to Old Bolingbroke, a picturesque village with a labyrinth of lanes circling about the mounded ruins of the castle, where, in 1366, Henry IV. “of Bolingbroke” was born. It was built in 1140 by William de Romara, first Earl of Lincoln, and was, till 1643, when Winceby battle took place, a moated square of embattled walls, with a round tower at each corner. Here Chaucer used to visit John of Gaunt and the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, on whose death, in 1369, he wrote his “Book of the Duchess.” The castle, after the Civil Wars, sank into decay, and the gate-house, the last of the masonry, fell in 1815. The road onwards comes out opposite Hagnaby Priory. William de Romara, who three years later founded Revesby Abbey, had for his wife the second Lady Lucia, the heiress of the Saxon Thorolds, an honoured name among Lincolnshire families. She brought him, among other possessions, the manor of Bolingbroke. Her second husband was the Norman noble, Ranulph, afterwards earl of Chester. The Thorolds were descended from Turold, brother of the Lady Godiva. There apparently were two Lady Lucias, whose histories are rather mixed up by the ancient chroniclers. The earlier of the two was, it seems, the sister of the Saxon nobles, Edwin and Morcar, and of King Harold’s queen Ealdgyth. Her hand was bestowed by the conqueror upon his nephew, Ivo de Taillebois (= Underwood), who became, according to Ingulphus and others, a monster of cruelty, and died in 1114.
HARRINGTON
There are several by-ways to the north-west of Spilsby, which all converge on Harrington. Here the church contains several monuments of interest. At the east end of the nave, a knight in chain armour with crossed legs and shield is said to be Sir John Harrington (circa 1300); and against the chancel wall, but formerly on the pavement, is the brass of Margaret Copledike (1480). Her husband’s effigy is missing. Under the tower window is the monument to Sir John Copledike (1557), and in the chancel south wall a canopied tomb with a brass of Sir John Copledike (1585). Opposite is a Jacobean monument, which testifies to the illiteracy of the age with regard to spelling, to Francis Kopaldyk, his wife and two children (1599). In the time of Henry III. it was spelt Cuppeldick. A Perpendicular font with the Copledike arms stands against the tower arch.
Close to the church is Harrington Hall, with its fine old brick front and projecting porch. Hanging over the doorway is a large dial with the Amcotts arms, a curiously shaped indicator, and the date 1681. On either side of the porch which runs up the whole height of the house, are twelve windows, under deep, projecting, corbelled eaves. Inside is an old oak-panelled room, most richly carved. The house is the property of the Ingilby family, and at present the residence of E. P. Rawnsley, Esq., who has been for many years Master of the Southwold Hunt.
Somersby is but two miles off, and we may without hesitation turn our thoughts to the terraced garden of this delightful old hall when we read in Tennyson’s “Maud”:—
“Birds in the high Hall-garden
When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
They were crying and calling.”
The poet loved to tell how, when he was reading this and paused to ask, “Do you know what birds those were?” a lady, clasping her hands, said, “Oh, Mr. Tennyson, was it the nightingale?” though in reading it he had carefully given the harsh caw of the rooks.
BAG ENDERBY
To get from here to Somersby you pass through Bag Enderby, where there is a fine church, now in a very ruinous state. The very interesting old font, which stands on two broken Enderby tombstones, has some unusual devices carved on it, such as David with a viol, and the Virgin with the dead Christ. One, the most remarkable of all, is a running hart turning back its head to lick off with its long tongue some leaves from the tree of life growing from its back. This symbolism is purely Scandinavian; and that it could be used on a Christian font shows how thoroughly the two peoples and their two religions were commingling.[25] The large number of villages about here ending in “by”—Danish for hamlet—is sufficient evidence of the number of settlers from over the North Sea who had taken up their abode in this part of the county.
Somersby Church.
The green-sand, which underlies the chalk, and of which almost all the churches are built, crops out by the roadside in fine masses both here and at Somersby and Salmonby, as it does too at Raithby, Halton, Keal, all in the immediate neighbourhood of the chalk wolds. Inside the church, slabs on the floor of the chancel retain their brass inscriptions to Thomas and Agnes Enderby (1390), and Albinus de Enderby, builder of the tower (1407); and on the wall is a monument to John and Andrew Gedney (1533 and 1591). The latter represented in armour and with his wife and family of two sons and two daughters. The wife, whose name is spelt first Dorithe, then Dorathe, “died the 7th of June 1591 and Andrew ____” the blank being left unfilled.
The knives and scourges of Crowland Abbey (see Chap. [XLI.]) are seen in the old glass. The custom of giving little knives to all comers at Crowland on St. Bartholomew’s Day was abolished by Abbot John de Wisbeche in the reign of Edward IV. In the tower is a fine peal of disused bells.
SOMERSBY CROSS
Dr. Tennyson held this living with Somersby. This is a smaller building, but it retains in the churchyard a remarkable and perfect cross, a tall, slender shaft with pedimented tabernacle, under which are figures, as on the gable cross at Addlethorpe and on the head of the broken churchyard cross at Winthorpe—the Crucifixion is on one side and the Virgin and Child on the other.
From Somersby there are two roads to Horncastle—each passes over the brook immortalised in “In Memoriam” and in the lovely little lyric, “Flow down cold rivulet to the sea,” and branching to the left, one passes through Salmonby, where Bishop William of Waynflete is said to have been rector. This is doubtful, but probably he was presented to the vicarage of Skendleby by the Prior of Bardney in 1430. The other and prettier road goes by Ashby Puerorum and Greetham, and both run out into the Spilsby and Horncastle road near High Toynton. Ashby Puerorum (or Boys’ Ashby) gets its name from an estate here bequeathed to support the Lincoln Minster choir boys. At this place, and again close by Somersby, the hollows in the Wold which this road passes through are among the prettiest bits of Lincolnshire.
CHAPTER XXXI
SOMERSBY AND THE TENNYSONS
Tennyson’s Poetry descriptive of his home—Bronze Bust of the Poet—Dedication Festival—A Long-lived Family—Dialect poems.
This little quiet village, tucked away in a fold of the hills, with the eastern ridge of the Wolds at its back and the broad meadow valley stretching away in front of it and disappearing eastwards in the direction of the sea, had no history till now. It was only in 1808 that Dr. George Clayton Tennyson came to Somersby as rector of Somersby and Bag Enderby, incumbent of Beniworth and Vicar of Great Grimsby. He came as a disappointed man, for his father, not approving, it is said, of his marriage with Miss ffytche of Louth (a reason most unreasonable if it was so) had disinherited him in favour of his younger brother Charles, who became accordingly Charles Tennyson d’Eyncourt of Bayons Manor near Tealby.
Dr. Tennyson’s eldest son George was born in the parsonage at Tealby, in 1806, but died an infant. Frederick was born at Louth in 1807, and the other ten children at Somersby. Of these, the first two were Charles (1808) and Alfred (1809).
They were a family of poets; their father wrote good verse, and their grandmother, once Mary Turner of Caister, always claimed that Alfred got all his poetry through her. Her husband George was a member of Parliament and lived in the old house at Bayons Manor.
THE TENNYSONS
From the fourteenth century the Tennysons, like their neighbours the Rawnsleys, had lived in Yorkshire; but Dr. Tennyson’s great-grandfather, Ralph, had come south of the Humber about 1700 to Barton and Wrawby near Brigg, and each succeeding generation moved south again. Thus, Michael, who married Elizabeth Clayton, lived at Lincoln, and was the father of George, the first Tennyson occupant of Bayons Manor. He had four children: George Clayton, the poet’s father; Charles, who took the name of Tennyson d’Eyncourt; Elizabeth, the “Aunt Russell” that the poet and his brothers and sisters were so fond of; and Mary, the wife of John Bourne of Dalby, of whom, though she lived so near to them, the Somersby children were content to see very little, for she was a rigid Calvinist, and once said to her nephew, “Alfred, when I look at you I think of the words of Holy Scripture, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.’” At Somersby, then, the poet and all the children after Frederick were born in this order: Charles, Alfred, Mary, Emilia, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, Matilda, Cecilia, Horatio. They were a singularly fine family, tall and handsome, taking after their father in stature (he was six feet two inches) and after their mother (a small and gentle person, whose good looks had secured her no less than twenty-five offers of marriage) in their dark eyes and Spanish colouring. She was idolised by her eight tall sons and her three handsome daughters, of whom Mary, who became Mrs. Ker, was a wonderfully beautiful woman. Frederick, who outlived all his brothers, dying at the age of ninety-one after publishing a volume of poems in his ninetieth year, alone of the family had fair hair and blue eyes. Matilda is alive still at the age of ninety-eight.
DR. KEATE AND WELLINGTON
The three elder sons all went to the Grammar School at Louth in 1813, when Alfred was but seven. Frederick went thence to Eton in 1817, and to St. John’s, Cambridge, in 1826; Charles and Alfred stayed at Louth till 1820, and they left it with pleasure for home teaching. Few could have been better qualified to teach than the Doctor. He had a good library and he was a classical scholar; could read Hebrew and was not without a knowledge of mathematics, natural science and modern languages; also he was a rigid disciplinarian, and, like all good schoolmasters, was held in considerable awe by his pupils. I should like to have heard him had anyone in his day outlined to him as the method of the future the Montessori system. This power of terrifying a whole class and causing each one of a set of ordinarily plucky English lads to feel for the space of half an hour that his heart was either in his mouth or in his shoes, would be incredible, were it not that there are so many English gentlemen now living who have experience of it. How well I remember the terrible, if irrational, state of funk which the whole of any class below the upper sixth was always in, when going up for their weekly lesson to that really most genial of men, Edward Thring, and it was the same elsewhere, and given the same sort of circumstances, the grown-up man could feel as frightened as the boy; witness this delightful story of the Iron Duke. No one could call him a coward, but on his return from Waterloo he went down on the fourth of June to Eton, and first told some one in his club that he meant to confess to Keate that he was the boy who had painted the Founder’s Statue or some such iniquity, the perpetrator of which Keate had been unable to discover. His friend extracted a promise that after his interview he would come and report at the club. He came, and being questioned by a group of deeply interested old Etonians, he said, “Well, it was all different, not at all like what I expected. I seized the opportunity when Keate came to speak with me by the window and said, “You remember the Founder’s Statue being defaced, sir?” “Certainly. Do you know anything about it?” he said sharply. “No, sir.” “You don’t mean to say you said that?” “Certainly I do, and what is more, every one of you would, in the circumstances, have said just the same,” and then and there they all admitted it; so difficult is it to shake off the feelings of earlier days. And yet he was not naturally terrible, and I who write this, never having been under him, have, as a small boy, spoken to Keate without a shadow of fear.
This reminds me of a remark of Gladstone’s, who was giving us some delightful reminiscences of his days at Eton, and, speaking enthusiastically of Alfred Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Hallam, when on my saying that I had spoken with Keate, he turned half round in his chair and said, “Well, if you say you have seen Keate I must believe you, but I should not have thought it possible.” He had forgotten for the moment that Keate, after retiring from Eton, lived thirteen years at Hartley Westpall (near Strathfieldsaye), where my father was curate.
To return to Somersby. We read in the memoir of the poet an amusing account, by Arthur Tennyson, of how the Doctor’s approach when they were skylarking would make the boys scatter.
EARLY VOLUMES
In 1828 Charles and Alfred went up to Trinity, Cambridge. Frederick was already a University prize-winner, having got the gold medal for the Greek ode, and Charles subsequently got the Bell Scholarship, and Alfred the English Verse prize. The boys’ first poetical venture was the volume “Poems by Two Brothers,” published in 1826 by Jackson of Louth, who gave them £20, more than half to be taken out in books. To this volume Frederick contributed four pieces, the rest were by Charles and Alfred. The latter used very properly to speak with impatience of it in later years as his “early rot.” And it is quite remarkable how comparatively superior is the work done by Alfred as a boy of fourteen, and how little one can trace in the two brothers’ volume of that lyrical ability which in 1830 produced Mariana and The Arabian Nights, The Merman, The Dying Swan and the Ode to Memory. The majority of these poems were written at Cambridge, but there is much reference to Somersby in at least two of them, and the song, “A Spirit haunts the year’s last hours,” was, we know, written in the garden there with its border of hollyhocks and tiger-lilies. In the Ode to Memory he invokes her to arise and come, not from vineyards, waterfalls, or purple cliffs, but to
“Come from the Woods that belt the grey hill side,
The seven elms, the poplars four
That stand beside my father’s door,
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand.
...
O! hither lead thy feet!
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds,
Upon the ridgèd wolds.”
This is reminiscent of Somersby.
Then again, Memory calls up the pictures of “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea” at Mablethorpe, and the view over “the waste enormous marsh.”
In 1831 Dr. Tennyson died, aged fifty-two, and his sons left Cambridge. His widow lived on for thirty-four years, dying at the age of eighty-four, in 1865. They stayed on in the Somersby home till 1837, and a new volume came out in 1832, with a whole array of poems of rare merit, showing how much the poet’s mind had matured in that last year at Cambridge. This volume, like the Louth volume, is dated for the year after that in which it was really published. It carried Alfred to the front rank at once, for in it was The Lady of Shalott, The Palace of Art, The Miller’s Daughter, Œnone, The May Queen, New Year’s Eve, The Lotus Eaters, A Dream of Fair Women, and the Lines to James Spedding, on the death of his brother Edward. Only think of all these wonderful poems in a thin book of 162 pages written before he was twenty-three.
THE LINCOLNSHIRE COAST
To Mablethorpe and Skegness on the Lincolnshire coast we find frequent allusions in many poems, e.g., he speaks in The Last Tournament of “the wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh,” and when the Red Knight in drunken passion, trying to strike the King overbalances himself, he falls—
“As the crest of some slow arching wave,
Heard in dead night along that table shore,
Drops flat, and after, the great waters break
Whitening for half-a-league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing.”
A most accurate picture of that flat Lincolnshire coast with its “league-long rollers,” and hard, wet sands shining in the moonlight. In another place he speaks of “The long low dune and lazy-plunging sea.”
In his volume of 1832 there are many pictures drawn from this familiar coast, e.g., in The Lotus Eaters, The Palace of Art, The Dream of Fair Women; and in his 1842 volumes he speaks of
“Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts.”
A relative of mine was once reading this poem to the family of one of those Marsh farmers who had known “Mr. Alfred” when a youth, and who lived in the remotest part of that coast near the sandy dunes and far-spread flats between Skegness and “Gibraltar Point”; but she had not got far when at the line—
“Here about the beach I wandered, nourishing a youth sublime,
With the fairy tales of science——”
she was stopped by the farmer’s wife. “Don’t you believe him, Miss, there’s nothing hereabouts to nourish onybody, ’cepting it be an owd rabbit, and it ain’t oftens you can get howd of them.”
IN MEMORIAM
In Memoriam has many cantos descriptive of Somersby, both of the happy summer evenings on the lawn, when Mary
“brought the harp and flung
A ballad to the bright’ning moon,”
or of the walks about home with Arthur Hallam—
by “Gray old grange or lonely fold,
Or low morass and whispering reed,
Or simple stile from mead to mead,
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold.”
Or the winter nights when
“The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.”
And nothing could be more full of tender feeling than this farewell to the old home in Canto CI., beginning—
“Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,
The tender blossom flutter down,
Unloved, that beech will gather brown,
This maple burn itself away.”
And in Canto CII.—
“We leave the well-beloved place
Where first we gazed upon the sky;
The roofs that heard our earliest cry
Will shelter one of stranger race.
We go, but ere we go from home
As down the garden walks I move,
Two spirits of a diverse love
Contend for loving masterdom.
One whispers ‘here thy boyhood sung
Long since its matin song, and heard
The low love-language of the bird
In native hazels tassel-hung.’
The other answers, ‘yea, but here
Thy feet have strayed in after hours
With thy lost friend among the bowers,
And this hath made them trebly dear.’
These two have striven half the day,
And each prefers his separate claim,
Poor rivals in a loving game,
That will not yield each other way.
I turn to go: my feet are set
To leave the pleasant fields and farms;
They mix in one another’s arms
To one pure image of regret.”
ARTHUR HALLAM
Other sections speak of Arthur Hallam, and as each Christmas comes round, or each birthday of his friend, the poet’s feelings are voiced in such a way that, if we read it with care, the poem gives us a good deal of the author’s own life history.
Arthur Hallam died on September 15, 1833, at Vienna, and his remains were brought home at the end of the year and interred at Clevedon in Somersetshire on January 4, 1834.
“The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken’d heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore
And in the hearing of the wave.”
Immediately after his death Tennyson had turned to work as the one solace in his overwhelming grief, although, but for those dependent on his aid, such as his sister Emily who was betrothed to Hallam, he said that he himself would have gladly died. He wrote the fine classic poem Ulysses, in which he voiced the need he felt of going forward and braving the struggle of life, and then, before it had reached England, he wrote the first section of In Memoriam No. 9 addressed to the ship with its sad burden.
“Fair ship that from the Italian shore
Sailest the placid ocean plains
With my lost Arthur’s loved remains,
Spread thy full wings and waft him o’er.”
At some later time, possibly many years later, for In Memoriam was sixteen years in the making, he added section 10—“I hear the noise about thy keel”—which carries on the subject, and also alludes to Somersby church
“where the kneeling hamlet drains
The chalice of the grapes of God.”
For the time he wrote no more sections, but busied himself with The Two Voices, only towards the end of 1834 he wrote section 30, which he afterwards prefaced by sections 28 and 29, all describing the sad first Christmas of 1833, the first since Arthur’s death. In 28 he hears the bells of four village steeples near Somersby rising and sinking on the wind. He had more than once wished that he might never hear the Christmas bells again, but the sound of church bells had always touched him from boyhood, just as the words “far, far away” which always set him dreaming. In section 29 he bids his sisters, after decorating the church, make one more wreath for old sake’s sake, to hang within the house.
Then section 30 tells how they wove it.
“With trembling fingers did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;”
After this we hear how they made a “vain pretence”
“Of gladness with an awful sense
Of one mute Shadow watching all.”
They attempt the usual Christmas games, but they have no heart for them, and all pause and listen to the wind in the tree-tops and the rain beating on the window panes. Afterwards they sit in a circle and think of Arthur, they try to sing, but the carols only bring tears to their eyes, for only last year he, too, was singing with them. After this Alfred sits alone and watches for the dawn which rises, bringing light and hope.
LEAVING SOMERSBY
Section 104 brings us to another Christmas. Four years have elapsed since that last described. The Tennysons have left Somersby, with what regret they did so is beautifully told in the four sections immediately preceding this. And now, listening as of old for the Christmas bells, he hears not “four voices of four hamlets round,” but only
“A single peal of bells below,
That wakens at this hour of rest
A single murmur in the breast,
That these are not the bells I know.”
The following section continues the subject. They are living at High Beech in Essex “within the stranger’s land.” He thinks of the old home and garden and his father’s grave. The flowers will bloom as usual, but there, too, are strangers,
“And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills.”
The change of place
“Has broke the bond of dying use.”
They put up no Christmas evergreens, they attempt no games and no charades. His sister Mary does not touch the harp and they indulge in no dancing, though it was a pastime of which they were extremely fond. But as of old Alfred looks out into the night and sees the stars rise, “The rising worlds by yonder wood,” and receives comfort. All this points to the sad year 1837, when they left the well-beloved place of his birth. And now in section 106 we have a New Year’s hymn of a very different character. It has a jubilant sound, and was certainly written some years after its predecessors. In 1837 he was in no mood to say “Ring happy bells across the snow.” But there is no allusion in this splendid hymn to Arthur Hallam at all, and in the following section they keep Arthur’s birthday, not any more in sadness, but
“We keep the day, with festal cheer,
With books and music, surely we
Will drink to him, whate’er he be
And sing the songs he loved to hear.”
But to return to Somersby.
Tennyson’s Home, Somersby.
THE OLD HOME
The quaint house with its narrow passages and many tiny rooms, the brothers’ own particular little western attic with its small window from which they could see the ‘golden globes’ in the dewy grass which had “dropped in the silent autumn night,” the dining-room and its tall gothic windows with carved heads and graceful gables, the low grey tower patched with brick, just across the road, (for the “noble tall towered churches” spoken of in The Memoir are not in this part of the county,) and the pre-Reformation (not “Norman”) cross near the porch, all these may still be seen much as they were one hundred years ago.
THE CHURCH RE-OPENED
True, the church has been lately put in good repair, and a fine bronze bust of the poet placed in the chancel. This was unveiled, and the church re-opened on Sunday, April 6, 1911, being the fulfilment of the plan projected on the occasion of the centenary celebration two years previously. On that Sunday the little church was more than filled with neighbours and relatives who listened to sermons from the Bishop of Lincoln and the Rev. Canon Rawnsley. Next day was Bank Holiday, and in a field near the rectory hundreds of Lincolnshire folk of every kind—farmers, tradespeople, gentry, holiday makers—assembled to do honour to their own Lincolnshire poet, and for a couple of hours listened intently to speeches about him and laughed with a will at the humours of the “Northern Farmer” read in their own native dialect, just as the poet intended; whilst the relatives of the poet and those who were familiar with his works looked with glad interest upon a scene of rural beauty which brought to the mind the descriptions in The Lady of Shalott, seeing on the slopes before them the promise of crops soon to “clothe the wold and meet the sky,” while far away to the left stretched the valley which pointed to Horncastle, the home of the poet’s bride, and on the right was the churchyard where the stern “owd Doctor” rests, and the church where for five and twenty years he ministered. The whole was a remarkable assemblage and a remarkable tribute, and the setting was a picture of quiet English rural life, one which the poet himself must often have actually looked out upon, and such as he has himself beautifully described in The Palace of Art:—
“And one an English home—gray twilight pour’d
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep—all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace.”
A LONG-LIVED FAMILY
The spirit of the poet seemed still to be a haunting presence in the place, and as then, so now and for all time his works speak to us. But three-quarters of a century have passed since a Tennyson has had his home in Somersby. They left in 1837, and though Mary went back at times to see the “beloved place,” Alfred never set eyes on it again. Charles married in that year Louisa Sellwood, whose mother was a sister of Sir John Franklin, and thirteen years later Alfred married her sister Emily. They left Somersby; but Lincolnshire still kept possession of Charles, who took the name of Turner in addition to his own, and ministered happily at Grasby near Caistor, being both vicar and patron of the living; and he and his wife both died there in the spring of 1879, at the comparatively early age, for a Tennyson, of seventy-one, for the family have been a remarkably long-lived one.
| The Mother | died in 1865, | aged | 84 |
| Charles | ” ” 1879 | ” | 71 |
| Mary | ” ” 1884 | ” | 74 |
| Emilia | ” ” 1889 | ” | 78 |
| Alfred | died on October 6, 1892 | ” | 83 |
| Emily Lady Tennyson | died in 1896 | ” | 83 |
| Frederick | ” ” 1898 | ” | 91 |
| Arthur | died in June, 1899 | ” | 85 |
| Horatio | died in October, 1899 | ” | 80 |
| Cecilia | died in 1909 | ” | 92 |
Matilda, who was born before Cecilia and Horatio, still survives. I went to see her in the summer of 1913. I found her well and full of early memories. She was a girl in the schoolroom when she first saw Arthur Hallam, an event of which she had a vivid recollection. I said, “I suppose you get out every fine day for a drive.” “Oh,” she said, “I go out for a walk every day and take the dog.” I thought that rather wonderful at her age. “Yes, I am ninety-seven,” she said, “and I mean to live to be 105.” I told her how Queen Victoria, who was always looking forward to reunion with the dear departed—but ever a ceaseless worker—used to say, “my dear, you should always act as if you were going to live for ever.”
THE MASTER’S OPINION
Alfred, who succeeded Wordsworth as Poet Laureate in 1850, was raised to the Upper House in 1884. He is buried in Westminster Abbey side by side with his great contemporary, Robert Browning, and on his grave was laid a wreath of bay-leaves from a tree derived from the bay which flourishes over Virgil’s tomb near Naples, and on the wreath were Tennyson’s own magnificent lines, written at the request of the Mantuans for the nineteenth centenary of their poet’s death (1881).
“I salute thee, Mantovano,
I that loved thee since my day began,
Wielder of the stateliest measure
Ever moulded by the lips of man.”
THE POET’S RANGE OF KNOWLEDGE
The recent appearance (October, 1913) of a notable volume of Tennyson’s poems, introduced by a Memoir and concluding with the poet’s own notes, may well serve as the text for some remarks on his poems generally. The volume bound in green cloth is priced at 10s. 6d. The Memoir is somewhat abbreviated from the two interesting volumes published by his son in 1897, which appeared again as the first four volumes of Messrs. Macmillan’s fine twelve-volume edition of 1898. There are, however, a few additions, notably a letter from the Master of Trinity, Cambridge, telling how he once, years ago, asked Dr. Thompson, the Master, whether he could say, not from later evidence, but from his recollection of what he thought at the time, which of the two friends had the greater intellect, Hallam or Tennyson. “Oh, Tennyson,” he said at once, with strong emphasis, as if the matter was not open to doubt. This is very high praise indeed, for Gladstone said that Hallam was far ahead of anyone at Eton in his day, and Monckton Milnes thought him the only man at Cambridge to whom he “bowed in conscious inferiority in all things.” The Notes first appeared in the very pleasant “Annotated Edition” edited also by Hallam Lord Tennyson within the last five years. The present generation can never know the delight of getting each of those little green volumes which came out between ’32 and ’55, and sequels to which kept following till ’92. But for general purposes it is far more convenient to have a one-volume edition, such as we have had for some time now. This new edition, however, with its Memoir, gives us what, as the years go by, is more and more valuable, enabling us to read the poet in his verses and to know what manner of man he was, and how his environment affected him at the different stages of his life. The Notes add an interest, and though it is seldom that in any but the In Memoriam Cantos any explanation is needed to poems that are so clear and so easily intelligible, one gains information and finds oneself here and there let into the author’s secrets, which is always pleasant. The book runs to over a thousand pages, and is so beautifully bound that it lies open at any page you choose. There is an interesting appendix to the Notes, giving the music to “The Silent Voices,” composed by Lady Tennyson and arranged for four voices by Dr. Bridge for Lord Tennyson’s funeral at the Abbey, October 12, 1892. Also a previously unpublished poem of his later years, entitled “Reticence.” She is called the half-sister of Silence, and is thus beautifully described:—
“Not like Silence shall she stand,
Finger-lipt, but with right hand
Moving toward her lip, and there
Hovering, thoughtful, poised in air.”
Then comes a facsimile of the poet’s MS. of “Crossing the Bar,” finally, besides the usual index of first lines, the book ends with an index to In Memoriam, and, what we have always wanted, an index to the songs.
Undoubtedly in the future this new edition will be the Tennyson for the library shelf, and a very complete and compact volume it is. Personally, I like the little old green volumes, but if I were now recommending an edition not in one volume, I would say, “Have the Eversley or Annotated Edition in nine volumes, which exactly reproduces the page and type of those old original volumes with the added advantage of the Notes.” It is hardly to be expected that the spell with which Tennyson bound all English-speaking people for three generations should not in a measure be relaxed, but though we have a fuller chorus of singers than ever before, and an unusually appreciative public, the attempt so constantly made to decry Tennyson has no effect on those who have for years found in him a charm which no poet has surpassed, and, indeed, it will be long before a poet arises who has, as Sir Norman Lockyer observes, “such a wide range of knowledge and so unceasing an interest in the causes of things and the working out of Nature’s laws, combined with such accuracy of observation and exquisite felicity of language.” Let me give one more criticism, and this time by a noted scholar, Mr. A. Sidgwick, who speaks of his “inborn instinct for the subtle power of language and for musical sound; that feeling for beauty in phrase and thought, and that perfection of form which, taken all together, we call poetry.” That perfection was the result of labour as well as of instinct. He had an ear which never played him false, hence he was a master of melody and metre, and he was never in a hurry to publish until he had got each line and each word right. “I think it wisest,” he wrote to one of his American admirers, “for a man to do his work in the world as quietly and as well as he can, without much heeding the praise or dispraise.” He was a lover of the classics, and in addressing Virgil on the nineteenth centenary of his death, as quoted above, he himself alludes to this. Without being what we call a great scholar, in his classic poems he is hard to beat, while in his translations of Homer he certainly has no equal. Then in his experiments in classic metres, whether in the “Metre of Catullus” or in the Alcaics in praise of Milton, his perfect accuracy is best understood if we turn to the similar experiments by living poets, who never go far without a blunder, at least none that I have ever read do.
THE DIALECT POEMS
To the Lincolnshire folk, his dialect poems, written in the dialect which was current in his youth at Spilsby and in the country about it (and still used there, I am glad to say, though not so universally or so markedly as of yore), give genuine pleasure, and are full of humour and of character, and it is a tribute to his accurate ear and memory that, after an absence of some twenty-seven years, he should have got the Lincolnshire so correct. He did it all right, but for fear he might have forgotten and got wrong, he asked a friend to look at it and criticise; unfortunately the friend lived in the north of the county and knew not the dialect of “Spilsbyshire,” so he altered it all to that which was spoken about Brigg, which is more like Yorkshire, and it had to be put back again. But some of the northern dialect has stuck, and in “The Northern Farmer Old Style” the ‘o’ is seen in ‘moind,’ ‘doy,’ ‘almoighty,’ etc., where the Spilsby sound would be better rendered by using an ‘a.’ This ‘o’ is never found in any of his subsequent dialect poems, and in a note to the text in the “Northern Cobbler” the poet points out that the proper sound is given by ‘ai.’
FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS
One sign of the remarkable way in which our Lincolnshire poet has made himself the poet of the English-speaking race is the extraordinary number of familiar quotations which he has given us. For the last fifty years in book and newspaper, in speech and sermon, some line or some phrase of his has constantly occurred which the user felt certain that his hearer or readers would recognise, until our literature has become tessellated with Tennysonian expressions, and they have always given that satisfaction which results from feeling that in using his words we have said the thing we wished to say in a form which could not be improved upon. In this respect of “daily popularity and application,” I think Shakespeare alone excels him, though Pope and Wordsworth may run him close.
Little Steeping.
CHAPTER XXXII
ROADS FROM SPILSBY
Road to Louth—Partney—Dr. Johnson—His letter on Death of Peregrine Langton—Dalby—Langton and Saucethorpe—View from Keal Hill with Boston Stump—“Stickfoot Stickknee and Stickneck”—The Hundleby Miracle—Raithby—Mavis Enderby—Lusby—Hameringham—The Hourglass Stand—Winceby—Horncastle—The Horse Fair—The Sleaford Road—Hagnaby—East Kirkby—Miningsby—Revesby Abbey—Moorby—Wood Enderby—Haltham—Tumby Wood—Coningsby—Tattershall—Billinghay—Haverholme Priory.
The four roads from Spilsby go north to Louth, and south to Boston, each sixteen miles; east to Wainfleet, eight miles; and west to Horncastle, ten miles. The Wainfleet one we have already described and two-thirds of that from Louth. The remaining third, starting from Spilsby, only goes through two villages—Partney and Dalby. Partney lies low in the valley of Tennyson’s “Cold rivulet,” and those who have driven across the flat meadows between the village and the mill after sundown know how piercingly cold it always seems.
The place has a very long history. Bede, who died in 725, writing twelve hundred years ago and speaking of the Christianising of Northumbria by Paulinus, who was consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and his visit to the province of Lindissi, i.e., “the parts of Lindsey” and Lincoln in particular, says that the Abbot of Peartaney (= Partney, near Spilsby, which was a cell of Bardney) spoke to him once of a man called Deda, who was afterwards, in 730, Abbot of Bardney and a very truthful man, “presbyter veracissimus,” and said that Deda told him that he had talked with an aged man who had been baptised by Bishop Paulinus in the presence of King Ædwin, in the middle of the day, and with him a multitude of people, in the River Treenta, near a city called in the language of the Angles, Tiovulfingaceaster; this was in 627. Many have taken the place to be Torksey, though that in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle is Turcesig. Green suggested it was at the ford of Farndon beyond Newark, but it was far more likely to be at Littleborough Ferry, two miles north of Torksey, where the Roman road (“Till bridge Lane”) from Lincoln crossed the river. But certainly Torksey is the nearest point of the river to Lincoln, and the Fossdyke went to it, as well as a road, so that communication was easy and inexpensive, and on the whole I should be inclined to say that Torksey was the place of baptism.
PARTNEY
But to return to Partney. In addition to its being a ‘cell’ of Bardney Abbey, we know there was a very fine hospital at Partney, dedicated to St. Mary Magdalene, before 1138, and among the tombs recently uncovered at Bardney is one of Thomas Clark, rector of Partney, 1505. It appears to have been a market town when Domesday Book was compiled, at a time when Spilsby was of no account; but the Black Death in 1349 or the plague in 1631, when Louth registered 500 deaths in two months, and in the Alford neighbourhood Willoughby also suffered, severely decimated the place, and tradition has it that some clothing dug up eighty years after burial caused a fresh and violent outbreak. Whenever it happened, for no records exist, the consequence was that the glory of Partney as the next market town to Bolingbroke departed, and Spilsby grew as Partney dwindled. Of course the healthy situation of Spilsby had much to do with it. Yet Partney still retains the two sheep fairs on August 1 for fat lambs and September 19 for sheep, and they are the biggest sheep fairs in the neighbourhood. Two other fairs take place, on August 25 and at Michaelmas, and it is noticeable that three of the four are held on the eve of the festivals of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalen. In 1437 we find that Matilda, wife of Thomas Chaucer, the eldest son of the poet, had a share of an eighteenth part of the Partney market tolls. Fine brasses to her and her husband exist in Ewelme church, near Oxford. On fair days sheep are penned all along the streets and in adjoining fields, and “Beast” on the second day are standing for half a mile down the Scremby road.
The church is dedicated to St. Nicolas, the most popular of all church patrons, who was Bishop of Myra in Lycia in the fourth century. As patron of fishermen he has many sea coast churches, and he is also the peculiar saint of children, who know him by his Dutch name of Santa Klaus. One of the oldest oaks in England is in the churchyard. The chiming church clock, put in in 1869, is a monument to the skill of a clever amateur, Sidney Maddison, Esq., who fitted it with “Dennison’s three-legged escapement,” which was then a new and ingenious invention of the late Lord Grimthorpe.
DR. JOHNSON
In 1764 Dr. Johnson walked over from Langton with his friend, Bennet Langton, to see Bennet’s Uncle Peregrine. He died two years later aged eighty-four, and the doctor wrote to his friend: “In supposing that I should be more than commonly affected by the death of Peregrine Langton you were not mistaken: he was one of those I loved at once by instinct and by reason. I have seldom indulged more hope of anything than of being able to improve our acquaintance to friendship. Many a time have I placed myself again at Langton, and imagined the pleasure with which I should walk to Partney in a summer morning, but this is no longer possible. We must now endeavour to preserve what is left us, his example of piety and economy. I hope you make what enquiries you can and write down what is told you. The little things which distinguish domestic character are soon forgotten: if you delay to enquire you will have no information: if you neglect to write, information will be in vain. His art of life certainly deserves to be known and studied. He lived in plenty and elegance upon an income which to many would appear indigent, and to most, scanty. How he lived, therefore, every man has an interest in knowing. His death I hope was peaceful: it was surely happy.”
After Partney the road goes up the hill to Dalby. Here the old house where Tennyson’s aunt, Mrs. Bourne, lived, was burnt down in 1841, and the thatched barn-like church swept away in 1862. The charm of the present house lies in its beautiful garden.
Having got on to the chalk wold a fine view opens over the wide vale to the left as far as the next ridge, which stretches from Spilsby to Hagworthingham. About a mile further on, a road goes sharply down to the left into Langton, and across a watersplash to Colonel Swan’s residence at Sausthorpe, where again we find cross-roads near the pretty little church built by Gilbert Scott, with a crocketed spire, the only spire in the neighbourhood. The roads lead back to Partney, on to Raithby over the stream, to Horncastle and to Harrington, all by-ways. But to return to our Spilsby and Louth highway. From the turn to Langton we keep rising and see some tumuli on our left, and then another left turn to Brinkhill, where, from a steep and curiously scarped hillside, roads descend right and left to Ormsby and Harrington; but we will keep on the highway for another mile till we find that the Louth road by Haugh goes off to the left, and the Roman road to Burgh to the right, and the way straight forward comes to Well Vale and Milecross hill, and so drops into Alford. The rest of the road to Louth we have described in the Louth chapter.
KEAL HILL
The other roads from Spilsby are, south to Boston and west to Horncastle. The Boston road is noticeable for the wonderful view of the fen, with the “Stump” standing far up into the sky, which you get from Keal Hill, where the green-sand ends and the road drops into a plain which is without a hill or even a rise for the next fifty or sixty miles. After Keal the road passes by Stickford, Stickney and Sibsey—the last having a very handsome transition Norman tower, and a ring of eight bells—and comes into Boston by Wide Bargate. The road is uninteresting throughout, and so monotonous that a story is told of someone driving in a coach in years gone by, when roads were deep and miry, who put his head out and asked the name of each place they came to. “What is this?” “Stickford, sir.” “And this?” “Stickney, sir.” “Stick-foot! Stick-knee! we shall come to Stick-neck next; you had better turn back.”
Sibsey.
WESLEY’S CHAPEL
LUSBY
The Horncastle road from Spilsby goes out along the green-sand by Hundleby, from the tower of which I remember a man falling to the ground and receiving no hurt at all, the nearest approach to a miracle any one need wish to experience. Much of the money for the re-building of the church was raised by the untiring industry and beautiful needlework of Mrs. Ed. Rawnsley of Raithby; for Raithby, with its pretty broken ground and ornamental water and its beautifully kept church filled with good modern glass, was for half a century the home of the Rev. Edward Rawnsley. The old stable adjoins the churchyard, and by an anomalous arrangement the loft over the stable is fitted up as a Wesleyan chapel, the use of it for that purpose having been granted in perpetuo to John Wesley by his friends, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Carr Brackenbury. The road goes on straight from here by Hagworthingham or turns to the left to Mavis Enderby, and so strikes a parallel route, both of them unite at the top of the hill which runs down by High Toynton into Horncastle. The name Mavis was originally Malbyse, a name more characteristic than complimentary, for it means evil beast. The word byse, or bys, exists in Bison, and the name of the unpleasant one is found again in the village of Acaster Malbis, near York. There is nothing of special interest on the “Hag” road, but the Mavis Enderby road leads us to Lusby and Winceby; of these Lusby has a most interesting little church, thoroughly well restored, with a good deal of Norman work and some unmistakable Saxon work in it. There are two blocked doorways on the north-west, one with Norman zigzag moulding in green-sand showing how durable a material it is when properly laid and not exposed to wet. Some singular arcading of a very early type is seen on the west of the walls on either side of the round-headed chancel arch, which is not in the centre of the wall. It has been renewed in green-sand of various colours. This work may have been Saxon, for there was a church here when Domesday Book was written, and there is certainly a definite bit of “Long and Short” work on the right hand side of the blocked south doorway, and a fragment of a Saxon stone inside, closely resembling the Miningsby Stone, but it is difficult to speak with certainty, as the early Normans made use of Saxon ornamentation. Outside there are two courses of big basement stones running on both sides of the nave—one bevelled and set back a little. Inside is a low-side window, two or three aumbreys, two arched recesses for tombs, a niche near the chancel arch, and a very good stone head of a queen projecting from the south-east window in the nave. There is also a remarkable little “Keyhole” window high up in the north wall of the chancel. The masonry is rough and amorphous, but very solid. The old rood-screen of three arches is very handsome. Under the Communion table is a sepulchral slab with an inscription in old lettering, mostly obliterated, from which the brass tablet has been removed and put up on the wall. It is singular, being a dialogue between a deceased wife and her husband:—
[She] My fleshe in hope doth rest and slepe
In earth here to remain;
My spirit to Christ I give to kepe
Till I do rise againe.
[He] And I with you in hope agre
Though I yet here abide;
In full purpose if Goddes will be
To ly doune by your side.
Going on two miles along the Roman road to Horncastle we come to Hameringham. Here, as at Lusby, there is no tower, but a little slated bell-turret. Two large arches and one beautiful little pointed arch at the west end on small octagonal pillars divide the nave from the aisle. The western pillar is of the local green-sand, and dates from the thirteenth century. The other pillar is of whitish stone, and the small eastern respond is of the same. These date from the fourteenth century, and have boldly foliaged capitals. Close together on the abacus are two distinct marks of bullets which must have come in through the aisle window. There is a good fifteenth century font, and on the Jacobean pulpit is the original hour-glass stand, and with an old church hour-glass in it. These stands are still to be seen at Bracebridge, Leasingham, Sapperton and Belton in the Isle of Axholme. The traces of a blocked priest’s door are visible on the north side. Oddly enough the dressings of the porch, etc., are of red sandstone from Dumfries. It is a good hard stone, but there is much to be said for always, if possible, using the stone of the country.
WINCEBY FIGHT
HORNCASTLE
The next village is Winceby, where “Slash Lane” commemorates the place of Cromwell’s cavalry-battle in 1643. In the south chapel of Horncastle church, some four miles on, we shall see a goodly array of scythes on long straight handles, which are said to have been used with deadly effect in this fight. This church has five three-light clerestory windows on each side of the nave, but in the chancel, six on the south and only five on the north side, the eastmost one being larger than the rest. There is an outside belfry staircase with a cone to it built against the middle of the south wall of the tower. Inside, the pilasters of the tower arch die away into the arch moulding without capitals. The brass in the north wall, to Lionel Dymoke, is remarkable (date 1519); and in the north chapel a tomb to Sir Ingram Hopton “who paid his debt to Nature and duty to his King and Country in the attempt of seizing the arch rebel in the bloody skirmish near Winceby, October 6, 1643.” This should be October 11. The arch rebel was Cromwell, who was unhorsed and nearly taken prisoner by Sir Ingram. He afterwards slept at Horncastle in a house in West Street. This battle secured Lindsey and the Wolds for Cromwell, Boston and the Fens were never Royalist. The River Bain, which rises in Kelston near the Louth and Rasen road, gave its name to the Roman station of Banovallum. It flows through Gayton-le-Wold, Biscathorpe, Donington-on-Bain and Goulceby to Horncastle, and out by Coningsby and Tattershall to the River Witham, and it makes a peninsula at Horncastle, whence the name of Hyrn-ceaster, = the camp at the horn or bend. Portions of a Roman wall still exist near the market-place, and at the south-west corner of the churchyard. The manor was sold in 1230 to the Bishop of Carlisle for the use of the see; it served as a refuge when border invasions made the diocese of Carlisle undesirable as a peaceful home, and during the fourteenth century was the usual episcopal residence.
The celebrated horse fair is not what it used to be. Lincoln fair is more accessible, and is now the more important of the two. But it still affords two or three days of wild excitement, with horses tearing about the streets. At one time the fair lasted three weeks. August was a thirsty month, and the number of beer-houses had to be increased pro. tem. to meet the need of both buyers and sellers; so five-shilling licenses were issued called bush or bough licenses, a bush being hung out for a sign, a custom once common in England and still prevalent on the Continent. Hence, the proverb, “Good wine needs no bush,” i.e., no advertisement. The Hon. Edward Stanhope of Revesby, who was Minister for War in 1868, has a statue in the market-place, near the house in which the Sellwoods lived, two of whom, Louisa and Emily, married Charles and Alfred Tennyson.
Leaving the market-place for the Lincoln road you pass what is an unusual feature in a town—an elm tree overhanging the street, and having in it several rooks’ nests. It is near the “Fighting Cocks” inn. There is a similar tree loaded with nests in the town of Staines.
When the river was used for navigation there was a high arched bridge with a towing-path under it, and the bridge, though now flat, is still called “the bow bridge.”
At that time the church was filled with box pews and lofts, and the front row of pews in the lofts were sold to different families by auction and would fetch as much as £80, the second row reaching £40. But though there were ardent churchgoers in the town, the villages around were very indifferently served, having in quite a dozen instances in that one neighbourhood no parsonage house and consequently no resident parson.
It is interesting to know that a good deal of the carving in the church was done less than fifty years ago by a carpentry class of young men who took lessons for the purpose from a clever carver called Thomas Scrivener.
But we have one other road to speak of, which is the way from Spilsby to Sleaford.
The Boston road from Spilsby, after it reaches the edge of the green-sand, where it suddenly breaks down at West Keal into the level fen, divides at the foot of the hill, and the right-hand road goes westwards by Hagnaby, East Kirkby, Revesby, Coningsby, Tattershall and Billinghay to Sleaford. This is all a level road. Hagnaby Priory, two miles from West Keal, is the residence of Mrs. Pocklington Coltman. The house is modern, in fact, there never was a priory here, but near Alford there was once an abbey of Hagnaby, so the name is suggestive of Priors.
EAST KIRKBY
Another two miles brings us to East Kirkby; the turn to the right takes us to the church which, having been entrusted to the capable hands of Mr. W. D. Caröe, is a model of what church restoration should be. He has put square-headed clerestory windows in the chancel with good effect. The tower has a beautiful two-light early Decorated window. The piers of the nave are remarkably slender. There is a good font, and the early Perpendicular rood screen is a very graceful one. In the north wall of the chancel is a two-light low-side window and a curious recess, possibly an Easter Sepulchre. It is covered with diaper work, and with wild geranium, oak leaves and acorns excellently carved in stone, and below this, some half-figures of the three Maries, each holding a heart-shaped casket, of spices perhaps for embalming. A basin projecting from the front is thought to have been a receptacle for the Easter offerings. A similar basin, as Mr. Jeans in Murray’s Guide points out, is attached to the tomb of Edward II. at Gloucester. A little further on is the tiny church of Miningsby, only to be approached by footpaths over grass fields. It has in it a pre-Norman slab of very uncommon character with figure-of-eight intertwined knot work and a herring-bone border. A fragment with similar figure-of-eight work is in Mavis Enderby church, on a coped stone which has been cut to make a door-step, and a smaller bit like it is in Lusby church—probably all the work of the same Saxon mason. In a house near the church is a stone with the initials “L. G., 1544,” which must refer to the Goodrich family; for East Kirkby was the birthplace of Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, 1534, Lord Chancellor, 1550, and coadjutor in the first Communion Office with Cranmer.
REVESBY
The next place on the Spilsby and Sleaford road is Revesby Abbey (Hon. R. Stanhope), a fine deer park with a modern house, built by J. Banks-Stanhope, Esq., 1848. The previous house had been the residence of the great naturalist, Sir Joseph Banks, P.R.S., who died in 1820, and took part with Rennie in devising and carrying out the drainage of the East Fen. The abbey, founded in 1143 by W. de Romara, Earl of Lincoln, was colonised from Rievaulx, and was itself the parent of Cleeve Abbey in Somerset. The abbey was a quarter of a mile south-east of the present church, in which are preserved the few fragments now extant of a building which was once 120 feet long and sixty feet wide. The Hon. Edward Stanhope in 1870 discovered the tombs and bodies of the founder and his two sons. The founder, who had become a monk, had requested to be buried “before the high Altar,” and his tomb was inscribed, “Hic jacet in tumba Wiellielmus de Romare, comes Lincolniae, Fundator istius Monasterii Sancti Laurentii de Reivisbye.” The site of his re-burial is marked by a granite stone. Among the abbey deeds is one by which the Lady Lucia’s second husband, Ranulph Earl of Chester, gives to the abbey “his servant Roger son of Thorewood of Sibsey with all his property and chatells.” I don’t suppose that Roger found the abbey folk bad to work for; they certainly did much for the good of the neighbourhood, notably in keeping up the roads and bridges, which was one of the recognised duties of religious houses; but all this came to an end when in 1539, like so many other Lincolnshire estates, it was granted by Henry VIII. to his brother-in-law the Duke of Suffolk. The Duke died in 1545, and was buried at Windsor; his two sons both died in one day, July 16, 1551, in the Bishop of Lincoln’s house at Buckden.
The road past the park gates is very wide, with broad grass borders on either side, and a fine row of wych elms bordering the park, at each end of which are some model farm buildings of the best Lincolnshire kind; and, to take us more than a thousand years back, we have two large tumuli quite close to the road. There were three, but one, after being examined by Sir Joseph Banks in 1780, was levelled in 1892; later the existing two were explored and one was found to contain a clay sarcophagus, which possibly once contained the remains of a British king.
MOORBY
Just past the tumuli is the inn, at the four cross-roads. That to the left runs absolutely straight for eleven miles to Boston; to the right is the Horncastle road through Moorby and Scrivelsby, with the barn-like church of Wilksby in a grass field behind Moorby. Both these churches have good fonts; that at Moorby is the later of the two, having two crowned and two mitred heads at the four corners, and with very remarkable figures of the Virgin and Child learning, with open book and scourge; the sun and moon being depicted on either side looking on complacently, evidently they had never heard of the Montessori system, also there are six kneeling figures and two angels watching the dead body of the donor. A stone in the vestry, about fourteen inches by eight, exhibits two women and a man vigorously dancing hand in hand to the bagpipes, all in fifteenth century head-dresses and costumes. Moorby is in the gift of the Bishop of Manchester, it having been assigned presumably by Carlisle when the new see was carved out of parts of older ones. How Carlisle came to have patronage here may be briefly told. On St. George’s Day, April 23—a day memorable as the birth and death day of Shakespeare, and the death day of Wordsworth—in the year 1292, John-de-Halton, who may well have come of the family who gave the name to Halton Holgate near Spilsby, being then Canon of Carlisle, was elected bishop. Within a month, a fire having destroyed the cathedral and all the town, he set to work and rebuilt the cathedral, and encouraged others to rebuild the town; and by the year 1297 Robert Bruce swore fealty to the king in his presence in the newly risen pile. He was a man of mark, and was mediator between Edward I. and John of Balliol in the claim to the Scottish throne. He planned Rose Castle, the palace of the Bishops of Carlisle. In 1307 he received at his cathedral, from the sick king’s hands, the horse-litter which had brought him to the north; and within a few days saw the king, who had bravely mounted his charger at the cathedral door, borne back a dead man on the shoulders of his knights from Burgh Marsh (pronounced Berg) on the Solway shore. In 1318 he was driven from his diocese by Robert the Bruce, and came to the manor of Horncastle, which, as mentioned above, had belonged to the see since 1230, and got the Pope to attach the living of Horncastle and with it that of Moorby and probably some others to his see as a means of support for him whilst in exile and poverty, and up to the middle of last century Horncastle so remained, whilst Moorby is now in the gift of the Bishop of Manchester. John de Halton died in the year 1324.
Coningsby.
WOOD ENDERBY AND HALTHAM
CONINGSBY
If we went west from Moorby we should pass by Wood Enderby, the only church in this neighbourhood with a spire, as Sausthorpe is in the Spilsby neighbourhood, and should reach Haltham on the road from Horncastle to Coningsby. Here the small church with its old oak seats has an early Norman doorway with a quaintly carved tympanum. Going north from Moorby we should pass Scrivelsby, but this must have a chapter to itself, so we will get back to the main road at Revesby and go through Mareham-le-fen to Coningsby, passing Tumby Wood, the home of the wild lily-of-the-valley and the rare little smilacina or Maianthemum bifolium, which also grows near Horncastle. Across the entrance to Coningsby, the Great Northern Railway Company have just built a new line from Lincoln to Skegness, by which tens of thousands of “trippers” will be taken for a shilling and turned out to enjoy the sea shore and the splendid expanse of hard sand. Skegness, once a delightful solitude, is now disfigured by all that appertains to those who cater for the hungry multitudes.
Tattershall and Coningsby.
HAVERHOLME PRIORY
From the bridge over the Bain at the other end of Coningsby village a pretty picture of water and willows is crowned by the view of Tattershall church and castle, both of which are described later. Coningsby church, built, like Tattershall, all of Ancaster stone, has a singular tower which stands on tall arches and allows free passage under it from three sides. In the west of this tower is a large circular window. Passing through Tattershall village with its open space and market cross, near which three roads meet, and where the Horncastle canal unites the Bain and Witham, we cross the Lincoln and Boston railway, and also the River Witham which, from the next station of Dogdyke, was cut straight by Rennie, and runs like a great dyke to Langrick, and then with only two bends to Boston. At Dogdyke is a bit of undrained swamp, the home of several good bog-plants, such as the bladderwort, water-violet, meadow-rue (Ophelia’s “Herb o’ Grace”) and the bog-stitchwort. The road on to Sleaford, across the fen for fourteen miles, is quite uninteresting, except for the very Dutch appearance of the village of Billinghay on the banks of a large drain called the Billinghay Skirth, near which, at North Kyme, we pass alongside the old Roman Carr Dyke, and, crossing it, arrive at Anwick, which has a pretty church with broach spire and good Early English doorway. Here, on our left, on the River Slea, is Haverholme Priory (Countess of Winchelsea), founded 1137 by Bishop Alexander, who afterwards moved the rheumatic Monks to Louth Park, and gave the priory to his chaplain Gilbert, founder of the order of Gilbertines, who had also a priory at Alvingham near Louth. There is nothing left of the priory, in which it is said that Archbishop Thomas à Becket once took refuge from Henry II. Four more miles bring us to Sleaford, whose spire has long been visible across the flats.
Tattershall Church.
CHAPTER XXXIII
SCRIVELSBY, DRIBY, TUMBY AND TATTERSHALL
The Hereditary Grand Champion of England—History of the Dymokes—Siward the Saxon—Simon de Dryby—The Abbot of Kirkstead—Robert de Tateshalle—John and William de Bernac—Ralph, Baron Cromwell builds the brick Castle and founds the College and Almshouses at Tattershall—The Carved Mantelpieces—Bishop Waynflete’s brick buildings—Esher Place—Tattershall Church—Stained Glass Windows—The Brasses—The Castle safe at last.