I must here mention two very singular brasses to be found in the county. I do not know of any instance of bodily infirmity commemorated except in the curious brass of William Palmer, 1520, at Ingoldmells. He has beside him a “stilt” or crutch, and in the inscription he is called, “William Palmer wyth yᵉ stylt.”
The brass at Edenham is—or rather was, for it is now taken into the church for safety—quite startling, being formerly on the west face of the tower, forty feet from the ground. It is of an archbishop, and when the Lincolnshire Architectural Society went to Edenham in 1888, and the brass was there described by Bishop Trollope, I remember that much amusement was caused by the episcopal figure looking so much like a rough portrait of the good bishop himself. It may, however, be taken as certain that this is not a sepulchral brass, but part of a representation of the giver of the tower, c. 1500, since the rivets of another brass, the donor kneeling, can be detected on the other side of the west window lower down. It must then be of a saint, and so may be assumed to be St. Thomas of Canterbury. It is, however, well worth mention here.
Lastly, I turn to the inscriptions. There are many rather curious ones dotted about the county, but they are mostly too long to be worth transcribing in full. I will give, therefore, two only, from Wrangle and Lusby.
At Wrangle, on the tomb of John Reed, a merchant of the Staple of Calais, and his wife, is a marginal inscription running round a large slab, which has been broken in parts, but was copied by Marratt. The introduction of the verse part is curiously abrupt, and seems to need some link. It runs: “They for man when yᵉ [winde blows make the mill grin]de. and ev. on thy own soule have thou ”
John Lyndewode and his wife Alice (1419) in Lynwood Church.
In the tiny church of Lusby, close to the battlefield of Winceby, there is a small brass plate on a slab which bears, as far as I can make it out, the date 1555. It has a pretty little inscription in verse as a dialogue between a wife and a husband. It runs:
“My flesh in hope doth rest and slepe
In earth here to remayne.