We have seen the connection of the church with the civic life of the town; and it is to the church and its history that we now turn. In 1085 it formed part of the royal manor, and the right of presentation to it belonged then and for some time after to the King. The parish of Grantham was then probably conterminous with the soke. The churches at Houghton, which corresponds to the modern parish of Spittlegate, Londonthorpe, and in the outlying member of the soke at Braceby, were regarded as chapels of Grantham from early times. The extent of the mediæval parish is fairly represented by the report of Henry VIII.’s commissioners in 1535-6. They found the vicar of the northern mediety of Grantham holding as part of his charge North Gonerby and Londonthorpe; while South Gonerby and Braceby were in charge of the vicar of the southern mediety. Belton and Sapperton, also members of the soke, formed independent parishes from an early date: one can scarcely doubt that the alienation of property there to religious houses was followed quickly by the alienation of the townships from their mother church and the building of churches of their own, to which their new lords presented.[64] In 1091 the lands and endowments of the Church of Grantham were granted to St. Osmund, who gave them to his new cathedral at Old Sarum. The presentation still remained with the Crown. If we may trust the shaky memories of the jurors of 1275, with whose statements the justices apparently were satisfied, the Empress Maud granted the advowson and right of presentation to the Church of Sarum.[65] From that time it became a prebendal church of the Cathedral of Sarum, divided into medieties, whose rectors, the prebendaries of North and South Grantham, impropriated the endowments already granted, and claimed some jurisdiction within their prebends. The church was probably served by chaplains, until Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln, whose energy in providing regular incumbents and stipends for the impropriated benefices of his diocese, has a memorial in the priceless rolls of institutions and charters belonging to his episcopate, and in his book of ordinations of vicarages, arranged for the presentation and institution of regularly paid vicars. The first vicar of North Grantham was instituted on September 23, 1223; the first vicar of South Grantham about two years later.[66] It is not at all unlikely that many of these vicars were careless about residence, and that their duties were often delegated to the chantry priests, whose number grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: we know that, in the seventeenth century, the care of the parish was left often, if not habitually, to one of the two incumbents. But each of the two prebendaries in Salisbury presented his own nominee on a vacancy in his particular vicarage till 1713, when, on the voidance of the vicarage of North Grantham by death, Mr. John Harrison, the south vicar, was instituted also to the other mediety. There are still prebendaries of North and South Grantham in Salisbury, who presented to the vicarage until 1870; but their connection with the prebendal church is now severed save in name, and, while the impropriation has passed into other hands, the vicar is collated by the Bishop of Lincoln.
On its first connection with the Cathedral of Sarum the church was much smaller than it is now. As we stand beneath the tower and look along the nave, we shall see that the second pillar east of the tower in both arcades is a pier composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on either side; and, coming nearer, we shall see that the western respond is much later in character than the eastern. Across the space between these composite piers, covering their site, and extending a little farther to north and south, came the west front of the twelfth-century church, possibly even that of the church mentioned in 1085.[67] It had no aisles; its side walls stood a little outside the line of the present arcades, where their foundations still exist. Of its connection with the chancel we can say nothing, but high up in the north wall of the chancel there is “herring-bone” masonry; there is “Norman” tooling on the stones in the wall below the east window, and in the south wall it is possible that some of the masonry is of the same date. If the chancel was originally of its present length, it was as long as the nave—a most unusual proportion in Norman times; but the nave may have extended farther east, or there may have been a tower between nave and chancel. If so, the tower was possibly built either as a continuation upward of the eastern parts of the nave walls, or straight from the ground without transepts. The imposing provisions for a rood-screen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries removed all possible traces of the earlier arrangement.
About 1180, or a few years later, aisles were added to the nave. To this work belong the two eastern responds already mentioned, and the three beautiful clustered columns on either side between them and the chancel-screen. These columns are of that type, in which the shafts, although approaching the detachment and individual emphasis of each member which are the great features of early Gothic art, have not yet wholly broken away from their absorption by the main mass of stonework. That mass, however, has acquired grace and slenderness without losing strength; the pier, adequate to the weight it has to bear, has taken the place of the shafted mass of wall, the bearing power of which was out of proportion to its real function. The carving of the capitals, too, marks the Transitional character of the work. The respond of the north arcade has a carved capital of distinctly late Norman character. As we go eastward, this conventional arabesque sculpture disappears, and foliage, at first here and there, then altogether, takes its place.[68] The carving of the capitals of the south arcade was evidently begun after the north arcade was completed, and only one of them was finished. These piers were connected by semicircular arches, the lower voussoirs of which were in some cases retained as springing-points for the pointed arches which we see at present. These later arches, with their acute points, led to the blocking of the round-headed clerestory windows, the openings of one or two of which may be traced in the wall above. This new arcade was not built, as was so common, by taking the old church walls gradually to pieces and building piers and arches in specially made gaps and breaches; but the older walls seem to have been taken down, and the arcades built, as has been noted, slightly within their line. The east responds of the arcade are gone altogether, owing to the later widening of the eastern bay; and of the aisles which were now added to the church it is difficult to premise anything but this, that they were in all likelihood about half as broad as the present aisles, if as much, and were covered by lean-to roofs, abutting on the nave walls below the clerestory. The earlier chancel, and, if there was one, the central tower (a little to the east of centre), were probably left unaltered.
In this state the church remained until the last quarter of the thirteenth century, a building handsome and interesting, but not specially remarkable for size, and without any peculiar or unique feature. Its western doorway may have opened straight upon what was then, it appears, the market-place of the town. The commercial prosperity of the place, its trade in wool, were growing; and we are justified in supposing that the merchants of the town took their part in the great extension of their parish church. This extension was no mere result of the fact that Grantham was a lordship belonging to the Crown; nor, we may be sure, did the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury undertake the gratuitous task of enlarging to nearly double its size a church which represented to them a portion of their income, and would certainly never occur to them in the light of a cherished possession demanding expensive care. But to the men of the town it was a cherished possession; and the greater part of the cost was doubtless supplied by merchants, the fathers and kinsfolk of the Haryngtons and Saltebys who founded chantries in the next century within its walls. But the mother church at Salisbury helped to supply at any rate some of the ideas to which the townsmen’s money-gifts gave shape. Her chapter-house was finished somewhere between 1270 and 1280, and the cusped circles in the heads of the windows of the north aisle at Grantham, the shafted mullions with plainly moulded caps and bases, are accurate reminiscences of its simple and beautiful geometrical tracery. Lincoln, too, where, in 1280, the great eastern chapel—the so-called “Angel Quire,” built to contain St. Hugh’s shrine—had been consecrated, supplied its share: the west window of the north aisle at Grantham is an ingenious adaptation to six lights, with a slight improvement, of the eight-light east window at Lincoln. These, however, are merely details by which the work at Grantham may be assigned to the year 1280 or a little later. The design of the masons included a western extension of the church, accompanied by a widening of the aisles, and, with this, the building of a western tower.
In setting out their plan, they remembered what had been done at Newark some fifty years before. There a western tower had been begun, standing free of the aisles on three sides; but, as the work advanced, the builders had determined to bring their aisles westward flush with the west wall of the tower, and had pierced arches, as an afterthought, in its north and south walls. The work at Newark was temporarily stopped, and, when it went on again, Grantham led the way with one splendid effort. The Grantham builders apparently began work with their north aisle. It was on a vast scale, and spaced with so little regard to the spacing of the columns of the nave that the north doorway, instead of opening against an interval between columns, has a column and part of an interval opposite it.[69] The earlier north aisle was totally enclosed by this new work, which not merely stretched three bays to the westward—the third of these bays, which roughly corresponds to the internal space occupied by the tower and its piers, being nearly as wide as the other two together—but also was extended a bay eastward, so that it encroached on the chancel wall, or, it may be, on the space hitherto occupied by the tower. From the walls of the aisle the builders probably passed to the lower courses of the tower piers, the arches from the tower into the new aisles, and the western doorway,[70] and then joined the tower piers to the west angles of the older nave by two arches on each side, with intermediate columns whose form was evidently suggested by that of the earlier columns east of them. If this hint was taken from the older work, the imitation did not extend to the rounded arches. The new arches were sharply pointed, and, to give uniformity to the connected work, new pointed arches were built up in place of the old rounded ones. This obviously was done by removing just as much of the upper wall of the nave as was necessary, and blocking the clerestory. No clerestory seems to have formed part of the new design. As part of this task, the chancel was connected by an arch with the eastern part of the new aisle, and the old west front and north aisle walls were removed.
PLAN OF GRANTHAM CHURCH.
We need not dwell on the beauty of this work, which touches exactly the Transition from the first to the second period of English Gothic, on the north doorway, with its array of mouldings and shafts, on the details of the windows, the grotesque carvings of the eaves, the boldness and cleanness of the outlines of buttresses and base-courses. The next work was the completion of the steeple, and this was done well, but apparently with some rapidity, about the year 1300. There is, perhaps, a slight indecision of design in the small stages of arcading and “smocking” above the west window; and the west window itself, with its mullions crossing in the head, is more effective from the point of view of its parade of “ball-flower” than from that of design; but there can be no question as to the beauty of the twin two-light windows above the “smocking” stage, or to the character which the belfry-lights, with their strongly defined central mullion, their crocketed triangular hoods, and the statued niches in the spandrils they form with the parapet, give to the tower.[71] Nor can there be anything but admiration for the great angle-buttresses, rising from their niched lower stages by a series of sloping offsets into four tall crocketed pinnacles round the base of the spire; nor for the method by which the diagonal sides of the spire, which rises from within a plain parapet, are connected by broaches with the pinnacled angles of the tower: nor for the crocketing, plain in detail but elaborate in effect, and the three ranges of lights of the spire itself. The top was rebuilt in 1664, probably a few feet lower than it had been. It was struck by lightning in 1797, and repaired rather timorously.[72]