Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

Not many years ago I talked with a small farmer in Hampshire, whose wages as a labourer used to be ten and sixpence a week, when a pair of boots cost eighteen shillings; but then, he said, they did wear well. The family lived, year in year out, on hot water with barley in it and a sprinkling of salt. And yet, incredible as it may seem, he and his wife had brought up a family of ten. There was some grit in those people.

MARKET RASEN

From Middle Rasen it is little more than a mile to Market Rasen. Men still living there can recall the Shrove Tuesday football, when the whole male population of the village, aided by friends from outside, spent some strenuous hours in trying to get the ball into Middle Rasen. The windows were boarded up all along the road, and the struggle of hundreds of rough fellows was more concerned in pushing their opponents into the beck by the roadside than in keeping on the ball.

The town has an unusual number of schools in it. The De Aston School, founded 1401 at Spital, was set up here in 1862 as a middle-class school, and has been most successful; and the church school and still larger Wesleyan school between them can accommodate nearly 400 children.

From Market Rasen three miles of low country brings us to North Willingham. The Hall, the home of Mr. Wright, was for over a hundred years the residence of the family of Boucherett, whose former mansion stood a couple of miles to the west. The present house with its pretty bit of water faces the road. In the village we may see a blacksmith who, at the age of ninety, can still shoe a horse. We are now twelve miles from Louth; a road to the left goes to Tealby and Bayons Manor, and to the right by Sixhills to Hainton; and here, instead of going right on up the sweep of the hill, we will make the round by Tealby and come back to the high road at Ludford Parva.

BAYONS MANOR

Tealby is quite an ideal village, with beautiful trees, a fine and well-placed church, a stream and bridges and picturesque cottages. One road leads from it up the steep “Bully hill,” a 300 feet rise, another road takes us to Bayons Manor, the seat of the Tennyson d’Eyncourt family. Originally there was an old eleventh or twelfth century fortified dwelling about a hundred yards up the hill, traces of which may still be seen in bank or dyke. This was replaced about the sixteenth century by a fairly large house, at one time thatched; part of this remains as the nucleus of the present castellated mansion built in the romantic era of the Waverley novels and completed with drawbridge and barbican in the middle of the last century by Charles Tennyson, M.P., uncle of the poet, who, after the death of his father, George Tennyson, took the name of d’Eyncourt. His grandson, E. Tennyson d’Eyncourt, now lives there. The house has a fine open-roofed hall, and is replete with interesting mementoes of the Tennysons as well as of the ancient family of d’Eyncourt. The site is good, with a charming garden sloping to the park, in which is a fine piece of water. The name Bayons is derived from its first Norman possessor, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. He was half-brother to William the Conqueror on the mother’s side, and he was so exalted a personage that he was called “Totius Angliae Vice-dominus, sub rege.” Thus he was on occasions the king’s representative, and seems to have had as much land in Lincolnshire and elsewhere granted to him by William, as Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk had under Henry VIII., for we hear that he held seventy-six manors in the county and 463 in other parts.

It is interesting to know that Bulwer Lytton in 1848, when he was trying to recover his seat for Lincoln, wrote his historical romance “Harold” here, making good use of his friend Mr. Tennyson d’Eyncourt’s fine collection of early English chronicles.

A little north of Tealby is the temporarily disused church of Walesby, where once Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” was rector, before he went to Segrave in Leicestershire. It is hoped that this church may soon be in use again.

One of the many roads across the Wolds from Rasen to Grimsby passes through Walesby to Stainton-le-Vale and Thorganby, another goes through Tealby, Kirmond-le-Mire, and Binbrook, once a market town, and near to Swinhope, the ancestral seat of the Alingtons. Both roads after this unite and pass by East Ravendale, Brigsley, Waltham and Scartho.