Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

THE TOURNAYS

The Tournays of Caenby are one of the genuine old county families, having held land in it certainly since 1328. John Tournay, in the sixteenth century, married a Talboys co-heiress, and was brother-in-law to Sir Christopher Willoughby and Sir Edward Dymoke.

The manor of Caenby-cum-Glentham, given in the thirteenth century to Barlings Abbey, and at the dissolution, along with so many other things, bestowed by Henry VIII. on Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was purchased by Edward Tournay in 1675, but he had inherited another manor in Caenby, or Cavenby through a long line of ancestors from the family of Thornton, of whom one Gilbert de Thornton was Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, 1289-1295. The present representative of the Tournays, or Tornys, who, to suit both spellings, have a tower for a crest and a chevron between three Bulls for their coat of arms, is Sir Arthur Middleton of Belsay Castle, Northumberland, who parted with the property at Caenby in 1871.

Three miles beyond Glentham we reach “Bishops’ Bridge” inn. Here a fourteenth century bridge crosses the stream at the junction of the River Rase with the Ancholme. Thence, after several turns, the road reaches West Rasen, where there is a most picturesque and interesting Pack Horse Bridge of the same date, with three ribbed arches, placed at right angles to the present road. The church has heavy embattled turrets and some curious carved figures in the chancel.

THE ‘GOOD OLD DAYS’

Going south from here, a roundabout road takes you to Buslingthorpe, passing by the two oddly-named villages of Toft-next-Newton and Newton-by-Toft, each apparently, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, leaning for support on the other. Two miles to the west, on the Normanby road, is Gibbet-posthouse. The name Gibbet-post or Gibbet-hill is not uncommon, but I doubt if a single post remains. Eighty years ago some still held their ghastly record. My uncle, Edward Rawnsley, who was born in 1815, told me once that he had passed one with a skeleton hanging in chains, as he rode from Bourne to Wisbech. The Melton Ross gallows was renewed in 1830.

Only two miles east of West Rasen we reach Middle Rasen, which has an interesting church. It once had two, one on each side of the stream; the existing one, which belonged to Tupholme Abbey, has a very fine Norman south door and Norman piers to the chancel arch, and a deeply moulded Early English arcade, on which is a singular beaded moulding. There is also a low-side window and a beautiful Perpendicular rood screen, also a fourteenth-century effigy of a priest with vestments and chalice. In the churchyard is the font of the other church.

In the days of toll-bars there were two at Middle Rasen; usually they were let to the highest bidder, and the man who took the main road gate in the year 1845 is still living, at the age of eighty-nine, in 1912. A toll-bar keeper in the days before railways, when all the corn went to market by road, had little rest at night, as waggons full or empty passed through at all hours. In his early days food was dear—tea eight shillings a pound—and wages were low, and bread and water and barley-chaff dumpling were the common fare. He is now a rate-collector and, of course, can read and write, but he never went to school, and at eight years of age he began to earn a little by “scaring crows.” At fifteen he was mowing and using the flail at his native village of Legbourne. In a field, near where the station now is, he remembers a man mowing wheat for six days on bread and water, and the crop yielded six quarters to the acre. A woman of ninety-three, now living in the Wolds, remembers when flour was 4s. 6d. a stone, and a loaf cost 11½d. instead of 2½d. They mixed rye with wheat flour and baked at home; and a labourer who earned enough to buy a stone of flour a day thought he could live well.

Only the other day I heard of a labouring family living just between the Wold and the Marsh, seven sons of a retired Crimean soldier. The clergyman used to make them a present at the christening if he might choose the name, and he gave them grand historic names for them to live up to, e.g., Washington and Wellington, and the plan certainly answered, for they all took to the land and by steadiness, hard work and good sense raised themselves first to a foreman’s position and then to that of small occupiers, with the result that the family now farms three or four hundred acres between them. Yet they, as children, had had a hard struggle, and never knew either luxury or comfort. Their cottage had but two rooms, and half the family having gone to bed with the sun, habitually got up when night was but half over and came and sat round the fire whilst the other half went to bed. The conditions of life have improved since then, but the men of to-day can’t have more of the right stuff in them.

Another instance of the same kind which goes to prove that no walk of life is without its chances, if only the man is strenuous and sober and gifted with good sense, is that of a family in the Louth neighbourhood, three grandsons of a labouring man, who in two generations have raised themselves to such purpose that they now farm between them some 10,000 acres. Of course the great factors in such successful careers are steadiness and industry, and that shrewd good sense which is so characteristic of the best Lincolnshire natives.