Memorials of Old Lincolnshire

by Unknown

THE TOWN AND CHURCH OF GRANTHAM

By A. Hamilton Thompson, M.A.

Grantham is still, and long has been, a name familiar to travellers between the north and south of England. Only a few miles west of the old Roman road from London to York, it lies directly in the course of the more modern road, and for more than fifty years has been one of the principal halting-places on a great railway system. The traveller from the south, who has left the Fenland behind him some ten miles north of Peterborough, and has for another ten miles or so ascended the valley of a stream whose waters eventually find their way into the Welland near the Wash, passes through a short tunnel, and rapidly descends into the Witham valley. On his left hand the Witham winds through pleasant meadows, with the noble tower of Great Ponton Church on its farther bank. The stream passes under the railway near the ford by which the traveller approached Grantham during the greater part of its history, leaving the Roman road not far west of Somerby for the by-road known as the Saltway. The smoke of engineering works begins to fill the air; and the tower of Spittlegate Church, close to the line, and, farther away, the rather attenuated tower and cupola of the Town Hall, promise little historical or architectural interest. But if he looks a little beyond his immediate surroundings he will see that beyond this industrial and modern suburb there lies a more inviting town, with a huge tower and spire and the body of a great church mounting high above its red-tiled roofs, with a pretty background of tree-crowned ridge, with the parks of Belton and Syston closing the view to the north-east, and to the north-west the line of the North Road as it cuts its way up Gonerby Hill.

Grantham is sometimes said to take its name from the river, one name of which, as of the Cam at Cambridge, may have been the Grant. The Witham, which rises across the border of Rutland some miles to the south, and flows northward from Grantham, approaching the Trent near Newark, and turning aside to take its own course to the sea by Lincoln and Boston, widened into a small lake or marsh as it drew near to Grantham. The first settlement of Grantham must have been dictated by the sight of a potentially fertile valley. It grew up, so far as we know, neither round an abbey nor beneath a castle, but as a community of agriculturists. The church, which grew to such proportions in its midst, grew probably with the prosperity of the town; while of the castle, which stood on the east side of the town, between it and the river, we know nothing but the name. Grantham was not one of those fortified river towns, like Stamford and Nottingham, which played a part in the campaigns of Edward the Elder and his sister. And its first definite appearance in history is the entry in Domesday Book, where it is numbered with the King’s possessions. It had belonged to Edith, Queen of Edward the Confessor; and included within it there was a right of jurisdiction, granted by a nun named Ælswith to Peterborough Abbey, and now held by Colegrim. The Queen had a hall in the demesne, and the church and its property are mentioned. The history of the manor and soke of Grantham is somewhat complicated, and a full account of it is beyond the scope of this article.[45] When Edward I.’s commissioners visited the town in 1275, to inquire by what warrant lands were held there and privileges exercised, the jurors gave an account of the descent of the lordship, which indicates that the Norman kings, like their successors, treated the manor and soke as grants to be held in dower by their wives or daughters.[46] They said that Maud “regina et heres Anglie”—obviously Henry I.’s daughter, the Empress—enfeoffed William de Tancarville, hereditary chamberlain of the duchy of Normandy, of Grantham and the whole soke, to be held of her in chief, apparently by service of ten knights’ fees, as he sub-enfeoffed this number of knights. The chamberlain’s grandson, Ralph, took part in the rebellion of Normandy against John, and forfeited the possession. John then gave the town with the soke to William, Earl of Warenne, on whose death in 1240 his widow, Maud, a daughter of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was allowed to remain in seisin. At her death, however, in 1249, Henry III. resumed the property, claiming that the Earl had held it only while the King was pleased to suffer him; and in 1254, when Prince Edward married Eleanor of Castile, it was granted to him, the claims of John, the then Earl Warenne, being overlooked.[47] Edward, however, a few years later gave the town and soke to the Earl, to be held of him by the service of four knights. The grant was confirmed by a royal charter, in which Henry III. laid stress on the principle that the manor was inalienable from the crown. The lordship and manor seem to have been in different hands from the later part of the reign of Henry II. to this period; but under Prince Edward and Earl John they seem to have been reunited.[48]

Earl John died in 1304, and the lordship escheated to the Crown. It was then granted to Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, who held it till his death in 1324.[49] Edward II. then granted it, or part of it—for here again there seems to have been a temporary divorcement of the lordship from the manor—to John, Earl Warenne, the younger.[50] But he first took care to preclude John from claiming it as his hereditary right by requiring him to quit-claim it to the Crown: this done, he allowed the grant. In 1338, shortly before John’s death, Edward III. gave the reversion of part of the tenement to William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton,[51] after whose death (1360) his son Humphrey was allowed to hold it. In 1363, the castle and town were granted to Edmund of Langley.[52] The manor was possibly retained by the young Earl of Northampton, and the grant of castle and town seems not to have included the soke. In 1399, the manor reverted to the Crown, by the attainder of its holder, the Earl of Northumberland, and was granted to Edmund of Langley. The soke also, on the death of Sir Robert Byron, passed into Edmund’s hands.[53] Edmund died in 1402; and castle and town, with manor and soke, were granted to his son Edward, Duke of York, who died at Agincourt. In 1420 they were given in dower to Katharine of France on her marriage. Edward IV., in 1461, granted the lordship with the manor to his mother Cicely, Duchess of York: his grant included the inn called “le George.”[54] On her death, the manor with its appurtenances was settled on her granddaughter, Elizabeth of York; and from that time till the time of William III., save for an alienation to private owners during the Commonwealth, it was regarded as Crown property, and held in dower by the Queen-Consort for the time being. The Earls of Rutland were stewards of the manor. William III., in 1696, alienated it to the first Earl of Portland, and since then it has remained in private hands, though not in the same family.

Other proprietors also held property, and had certain forms of jurisdiction in the town. The traveller who entered it from the south in the year 1300, after crossing the Salters’ Ford and passing the leper hospital which about this time began to give its name to the suburb of Spittlegate, might have seen, on the wide space outside the town, near the modern Town Hall, the cross which within the last few years the King of England had built to mark the southward progress of his wife’s funeral procession.[55] On his right hand, on and near the modern St. Peter’s Hill, were the lands of the abbey of Peterborough, which had been granted to it by Ælswith before the Conquest, and by Colegrim afterwards, and had been confirmed to it by royal charter.[56] On this land probably stood the Church of St. Peter, of which too little is known to justify definite statement.[57] Near the church he would see the opening of Castlegate, east of which lay the Castle, the visible symbol of the royal lordship. He would keep straight on along the higher ground. Passing along High Street, he might already see here and there a handsome house of Ancaster stone, such as he certainly would see in forty or fifty years’ time. It is doubtful whether the inn, afterwards known as the “George,” was built yet: it is probable that the little guild chapel which stood on the same side of the street till late in the eighteenth century belonged to a later period. Farther on, on the opposite side, stood the “Angel Inn,” on the property of the Knights Templars of Temple Bruer. Within the next decade the Order of the Temple would be no more; and their property here, as elsewhere, would—at any rate, it seems likely—be granted to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem in England. The gateway of the “Angel,” as we know it to-day, was not built till more than half a century later: the rest of the street front is of a still later date. Opposite the “Angel” was the opening, afterwards known as Coal Hill, leading to the market-place—if, indeed, the market-place was divided from the High Street then as now. On the west side of the market-place was the house of the Grey Friars, on the property known later as the Grange, and for some time, in accordance with the modern genius for confounding monks with friars, as Cistercian Place. It is possible that the Franciscans, who appeared in Grantham about 1290, may have come from the house of their order at Bury St. Edmunds, and that the Benedictine abbey of Bury may have allowed them to settle on the property which it had received in frankalmoin from William de Tancarville, and had been allowed to retain after the forfeiture of the Tancarville estates.[58] In 1318 Richard Kellawe, Bishop of Durham, allowed the Friars to convey water to their house from springs on his land at Gonerby; and the conduit, built in 1579, which is to be seen on the west side of the market-place, is the successor of the conduit of the Friars. But it is probable that already, in 1300, the chief of the four ancient wells from which Grantham took its supply was in the centre of the market: it may already have been roofed over, and the dyers may already have begun to spread their goods on market-days beneath the projecting eaves of the roof. At the “Angel” the traveller would be sure to find wool-merchants travelling from fair to fair, or the King’s buyers come to transact business with the rising wool-merchants of the town.[59] North of the “Angel,” the High Street was continued, under the name of Watergate, down the slope of the hill which led to the watering-place at the bridge over the Mowbeck, the little stream which, flowing down the Harlaxton valley, met the Witham below the town. Our traveller would leave this on his left: a narrow lane, now Vine Street, used till 1705 merely as a foot-path to the church, would take him to the head of Swinegate, the road along which the town swine were driven daily to spend the day on Manthorpe Moor. Here possibly markets had been held till within the last quarter of a century; and here, till 1645, stood the old Apple Cross, the High Cross of Grantham. But the space had been encroached upon by the westward extension of the church;[60] so that Grantham lost that magnificent combination of church and market-square which is the unrivalled distinction of its neighbour Newark. What the town had lost, however, the church had gained in architectural beauty; and in the year 1300 the west front, much as we now see it, had been finished, and the scaffolding was probably being removed from a spire which at that time was unsurpassed in England. The spire of the mother church of Salisbury was not to be completed for many years: the spire of Newark was not taken in hand till the second quarter of the century. More than a century later, Grantham spire would be surpassed in height and grace of proportion by the great lantern-tower at Boston: two hundred years later, the spire of Louth would challenge both. But in beauty of detail, whatever may be their advantages in design, neither Louth nor Boston can compare with Grantham; and in this respect the one steeple in England which has ever surpassed it is the “Broad” Tower of Lincoln. Yet even this was not yet completed for another ten or eleven years, so that for the moment the spire of Grantham stood without an equal.

The space by the Apple Cross was then, we may suppose, less impeded by houses than at present; and south and south-east of the churchyard were the outer works of the Castle, whose memory was long preserved in Castle Dyke, the lower part of Castlegate. But of the Castle itself, as has been said, little is known.[61] Only once in its history, and then apparently when the Castle existed no longer, was Grantham prominent as a military centre. The Kings of England, its nominal lords, must all have passed through Grantham in their progresses. Edward I. was often there.[62] Edward IV. came through the town at the head of the procession which brought the body of his father from Pontefract Priory to the College of Fotheringhay. Charles I. was there at least three times, on his way to Scotland in 1633, and again in 1640 and 1641. On none of these occasions do we hear of the Castle. And when, on the 19th of October 1483, Richard III. sealed the death-warrant of the Duke of Buckingham here, causing the Great Seal to be brought for that purpose post-haste from London, he did it, not in the Castle, but “in a chamber called the King’s Chamber in the Angel Inn”—the chamber whose outer wall, and at any rate one window, may be seen above the gateway of the “Angel.” The Castle may have risen in Norman times, possibly on the site of Queen Edith’s hall, the face of which, however, would have been completely altered by the new Norman earthworks. But, if this were so, the most that we hear of it is a casual mention here and there, and its survival in one or two local names.

Angel Hotel, Grantham.

The visit of Richard III. to Grantham was marked by his grant of a charter to the Corporation of the town, which exempted them from the authority of the Sheriff of Lincolnshire in the execution and return of writs, making the Alderman and his twelve Comburgesses magistrates within the town and soke, and giving them a prison in the town. A charter had been granted to the Alderman and Burgesses by Richard II. in 1377; and Richard III.’s charter was probably an extension of the privileges granted by a charter of Edward IV. in 1463. From 1463 Grantham dates its existence as a corporate borough, the recognition of its Merchant Guild, and the right of sending two burgesses to Parliament. Its Alderman was elected by the Comburgesses annually in the church, the Corpus Christi chapel of the chancel being used, as time went on, for that purpose.[63] Probably the members of Parliament were at first elected in the church: their election later on took place in the Grammar School, until in 1765 Corpus Christi College at Oxford, as trustee of the foundation, objected to the damage done on these occasions. It was then decided to transfer parliamentary elections to the church or the Guildhall. Grantham lost one of its members in 1832, but still returns one. James II. converted the Alderman into a Mayor by a charter of 1685. In April 1688, however, a Quo warranto summons was served on the Mayor; and in the following November the Corporation, taking advantage of the banished King’s proclamation which restored such bodies to their ancient rights, reverted to their old state. Their later constitution included an Alderman, twelve senior and twelve junior Comburgesses. For these the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 substituted a Mayor, four Aldermen, and twelve Councillors.