Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

It is often said that the Saxon architecture was the development in stone of the building which had previously been done in timber and wattle, and thus in Barnack, and Barton, and at Stow, but nowhere else in Lincolnshire, parallel strips of stone run up the tower at intervals of a couple of feet, as if representing the upright timbers. This theory, perhaps, will not bear pressing; still, though the arch over a window is often triangular, made by leaning two slabs one against another, not unfrequently a square-ended stone projects from the top of a rounded arch, which seems to be a reminiscence in stone of the end of a wooden beam. This may be seen at Barnack on the south side of the tower. The towers have no buttresses, and though the stones between the upright strips are small and rubbley, the stones at the angles of the tower are fairly large and squared. When these are long-shaped, but set alternately perpendicular and horizontal, this is called “Long-and-Short” work, and is definitely “Saxon,” even though built by Norman hands. The herring-bone work, as seen at Marton, is Romanesque and a sign of Norman builders. They also copied the Romans in facing a rubble core with dressed stone, whereas the Saxons only used dressed stones at the angles.

Ancient Saxon Ornament found in 1826 in cleaning out the Witham, near the village of Fiskerton, four miles east of Lincoln.

SAXON ORNAMENTS

The enormous activity of the Norman builders in every part of the kingdom has thrown previous architectural efforts into the shade; but the Normans found in England a by no means barbarous people. Anglo-Saxon or Anglian art had exhibited developments in many directions, in metal work and jewellery, in illumination of MSS., in needlework, in stone-carving, as well as in architecture; and when Augustine landed in 597 it was not to a nation of barbarous savages, but to people quite equal in many ways to those he had lived among in Italy or conversed with in Gaul, that he had to preach the tenets of Christianity. As proof of this we can point to the beautiful carved stonework of the Anglians of Northumbria on the great crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell, and the cross of Bishop Acca of Hexham, now in the Durham library, all of the seventh century; and to the Lindisfarne Gospels of St. Wilfred’s time which was only some fifty years later; whilst to show the continuity of Anglo-Saxon art we have the St. Cuthbert stole in the Durham Cathedral library, a triumph of needlework by the nuns of Winchester in the days of Athelstan; and, besides the celebrated Alfred Jewel, a silver trefoil brooch[12] found at Kirkoswald in Cumberland, which, for purity of design, richness of ornamentation and beauty of execution, it would be difficult to match in any age or country, and the cloak chain, found at Fiskerton, described in Chapter [XIV.]; all these are quite first-rate in their different lines, and should make us speak with respect of our Saxon ancestors.

Having already noted the Gainsborough group (Chap. [XVII.]) and the Caistor group (Chap. [XX.]), we will now make our way towards a third group of pre-Norman towers to be seen on the Louth and Grimsby road.

NORMAN DWELLINGS

In Norman times strongholds and churches were built all over the country, and doubtless many domestic houses which did not aspire to be more than ordinary dwelling-places. It is curious how almost entirely these have vanished; one at Boothby Pagnell and three in Lincoln are among the very few left. In Lincoln ‘The Jews’ House,’ ‘Aaron’s House,’ and ‘John of Gaunt’s Stables’ or ‘St. Mary’s Guild’ go back to the beginning of the twelfth century. They none of them would satisfy our modern notions of comfort, but neither do the much later houses, such as the mediæval merchant’s house called “Strangers’ Hall,” in Norwich, which is so interesting and so obviously uncomfortable. When King John of France was confined at Somerby Castle in the fourteenth century he had to import furniture from France to take the place of the benches and trestles which was all that the castle boasted, and to hang draperies and tapestries on the bare walls; and though some of these were supplied him by his captor, comfortable furniture seems to have been not even dreamt of at that time in England.

ROOD-SCREENS

For the churches the Normans did surprisingly well, as far as the building and stonework went, but the beautiful woodwork, which is the glory of our Lincolnshire marsh churches, is mostly the work of the men of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. We see this mediæval workmanship sometimes in the bench ends and stalls and miserere seats, but most notably in such of the rood screens as have escaped the successive onslaughts made on them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whilst the shameful neglect of the eighteenth and the shocking ignorance of both clergy and laity in that and the first part of the nineteenth century, have swept away much that was historically of the utmost interest, and which the better informed and more responsible guardians of the churches to-day would have preserved and treasured. This mediæval woodwork is found most frequently in the more remote parts of the country. The best rood loft I have ever seen is in a little church in Wales, near Towyn, and some of the finest rood screens with canopies are in the churches of Devon; of these, Mr. Hubert Congreve, in his paper contributed to the Worcester Archæological Society, notes that at Stoke-in-Teignhead there is one of the fourteenth century, carved in the reign of Richard II. From this the loft has been removed, and it was generally the case that when this was taken away as idolatrous, the screen itself was not objected to.