Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

One might make quite an amusing “story of a dictionary” from the various entries in the Thorpe churchwardens’ book about an Elliott’s Dictionary which, in the middle of the sixteenth century the vicar bequeathed to his successors in perpetuo. It is described as “one boke called a dyxonary,” and evidently exercised both vicar and wardens a good deal until one vicar bethought him of the device of “delivering” it to the parish to be kept along with various volumes of homilies, and expositions and the paraphrases of Erasmus.

But it is time to leave Thorpe; and two miles will bring us to Wainfleet which, as its name declares, though now a couple of miles from the sea, was once a haven for sea-going ships, for “Fleet” means a navigable creek. This little place gave its name in the fifteenth century to a great man, William of Wainfleet, or Waynflete, Headmaster of Winchester, and first headmaster and Provost of Eton, successor to Cardinal Beaufort as Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VI. He was a great builder, for he possibly planned, and certainly completed, Tattershall Castle, built Tattershall church, and founded Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1457, the first college to admit commoners, a wise and far-seeing innovation of Waynflete’s; and in his native town erected in 1484 the Magdalen College School, a fine brick building seventy-six feet by twenty-six with its gateway flanked by polygonal towers recalling the entrance to Eton College. In the south tower is a remarkable staircase, and in the north a bell.

WAINFLEET

His adoption of St. Mary Magdalen as the patron of his school at Wainfleet and his college at Oxford may have originated in his having been appointed by Cardinal Beaufort to the mastership and chantry of St. Mary Magdalen hospital on Magdalen Down outside Winchester.

The bishop lived to the reign of Richard III., and died in 1486. He erected a monument to his father, Richard Patten. The son is called either Patten or Barbour, for he bore both names indifferently, though he soon discarded them both for the name of his birthplace, as was commonly done from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; his brother also taking the name of Waynflete. This monument was in the original church of All Saints, for the second church of St. Thomas had long been destroyed. But All Saints’ church, built cruciform and with a light wooden spire on account of the soft nature of the soil on which it stood, was destined to the same fate, for the foolish inhabitants having, in 1718, put a heavy brick tower to it, with five bells in it, the weight brought a great part of the building to ruin. Subsequently it was pulled down, and the present church was set up at some distance from the old site in 1820, when the inhabitants added vandalism to their folly and wantonly demolished this fine tomb. The broken bits were collected and placed in the Magdalen School, and later were, by the intervention of the rector of Halton Holgate, Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, obtained for the President and Fellows of the Bishop’s College at Oxford, and are now on the north side of the altar in the College Chapel. The figure has its feet resting on a bank of flowers and its head on a cushion and pillow supported by his two sons, John the Monk and William the Bishop. The face of the latter resembles the father, but is not so broad or so old as that of John. It is to be noted that Lincolnshire has produced two Bishops of Winchester, each of them the founder of a college at Oxford—Bishop Fox and Bishop Waynflete.

The town is older than Boston and existed in Roman days, possibly under the name of Vannona, and apparently a Roman road ran from Doncaster to Wainfleet, passing through Horncastle and Lusby. Certainly “Salters road,” which crosses the East Fen, was a Roman road, and the Romans made a good deal of salt from the sea-water in the immediate neighbourhood of Wainfleet. In the charter rolls of Bardney Abbey (temp. Henry III.) we read that Matthew, son of Milo de Wenflet, paid annually “to God, Saint Oswald and the Monks of Bardney 4 shillings and eighteen sextaires of salt by the old measure” for the land he held in the village of Friskney.

Later we find that (temp. Edward II.) Hugh le Despencer held lands in Wainfleet in 1327, and we know that a Robert le Despencer did so in Burgh in the time of Edward I. In the reign of Edward III. Wainfleet furnished two ships and forty seamen for the invasion of Brittany.

Wainfleet St. Mary’s lies one and a half miles to the south. The church is a massive structure with five arches on the north and four on the south of the nave.

We have now completed the round of the Marsh churches, and in so doing, on leaving Gunby, we struck into the Spilsby and Wainfleet road, just where the Somersby brook, there called the Halton river, is crossed by an iron bridge. This we did not cross, but keeping always to the left bank we followed the stream to Wainfleet. We must now go back and cross this iron bridge, and trace the road thence for four miles and a half to Spilsby. This will take us on to the Wold. We shall only pass one village, but this is one of infinite charm.

HALTON HOLGATE