Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

From Corringham a turn to the right brings us after four miles to Gainsborough. From this town on the extreme edge of the county four roads and four railway lines radiate, and the Trent runs along the edge of the town with a good wide bridge over it, built in 1790, for which a stiff toll is demanded. It is described by George Eliot in “The Mill on the Floss,” as “St. Oggs,” where the ‘Eagre’ or ‘bore’ is thus poetically referred to. “The broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea; and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace.” Constantly overrun by the Danes, the town was eventually looked on as his capital city by Swegen, who, with his son Canute, brought his vessels up the Trent in 1013, and died here, “full King of the Country,” in 1014. In the Civil War it was occupied first by the Royalists and afterwards by the Parliamentarians, and one of Cromwell’s first successful engagements was a cavalry skirmish at Lea, two miles to the south, when he routed and killed General Cavendish, whom he drove “with some of his soldiers into a quagmire,” still called ‘Cavendish bog.’ The place has some large iron works and several seed-crushing mills for oil and oil-cake, and much river traffic is done in large barges. Talking of barges, Gainsborough has the credit of having owned the first steam-packet seen in Lincolnshire waters. This was the ‘Caledonia,’ built at Glasgow, and brought round by the Caledonian Canal, to the astonishment of all the east coast fishermen, in 1815. She was a cargo boat, but she took passengers to Hull, and was a great boon to the villages on the Trent.

North Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough.

South Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough.

THE OLD HALL

River traffic below Gainsborough is somewhat hampered during the time of spring tides by the Eagre, which, when the in-rushing tide overcomes the river current and rides on the surface of the stream, rising in a wave six or seven feet high, rolls on from the mouth of the Trent to Gainsborough, a distance of more than twenty miles. The long street leading to the bridge is so dirty and narrow that you cannot believe as you go down it that you are in the main artery of the town. But when you have crossed the bridge and look back, the long riverside with its wharf and red brick houses, boats, and barges, has a very picturesque and old-world effect. The great sight of the town is the Old Hall, which stands on a grassy plot of some two acres, with a very poor iron railing round it, and a road all round that. In the middle of this rough grass-grown plot in the heart of the town is a charming old baronial hall, rebuilt in the times of Henry VII. and Elizabeth, after its destruction in 1470, and still occupied as a private residence. There was doubtless a building here before the time of the Conquest, and here it would be that Alfred the Great stopped on the occasion of his marriage with Ethelwith, daughter of Ethelred, and here, too, it would be that Swegen died, and his son Canute held his court. The present building is of brick and timber with a fine stone-built oriel on the north side, as the centre of a long frontage, and is of various patterns, having tall chimneys and buttresses on the west, and a brick tower on the north-east, and two wings on the south projecting from a magnificent central hall with much glass and woodwork, and a lantern. The large kitchen with its two huge fireplaces is at the end of this hall. Henry VIII. and Katharine Howard were entertained here by Lord Burgh, whose ancestor rebuilt the hall in Henry VII.’s time, c. 1480; and another of his Queens, Katharine Parr, was often here, being at one time the wife of Lord Burgh’s eldest son.

THE MASTER BUILDER

The wide area round the hall, with its untidy grass and the miserable iron fence, gives a singularly forlorn appearance to a beautiful and uncommon-looking building. It is supposed that the famous master-builder, “Richard de Gaynisburgh,” was born at Gainsborough, with whom, then styled “Richard de Stow,” the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln in 1306 contracted “to attend to and employ other masons under him for the new work,” at the time when the new additional east end or Angel Choir as well as the upper parts of the great tower and the transepts were being built. He contracted “to do the plain work by measure, and the fine carved work and images by the day.” One of the Pilgrim Fathers was a Gainsborough man, and a Congregational Chapel has been built as a memorial to him.

From Gainsborough, going north, we come at once to Thonock Hall, the seat of Sir Hickman Bacon, the premier baronet of England, and Morton is just to the west, where the church has a very good new rood screen and five Morris windows, from designs by Burne-Jones. Between Morton and Thonock is a large Danish camp, called Castle Hills, with a double fosse. On the other side of the town the westernmost road of the county runs south by Lea, Knaith, and Gate Burton to Marton, and thence to Torksey, which in early times was a bigger place than Gainsborough, and so on to Newark, but another road branches off by Torksey to the left, for Saxilby and Lincoln, twelve miles distant.