The other brother, Thomas Adams Franklin, raised the Spilsby and Burgh battalion of volunteer infantry in 1801. Major Booth followed his good example and raised a company at Wainfleet to resist the invasion by Napoleon, and the men of the companies presented each of them with a handsome silver cup. Five Franklin sisters married and settled in the neighbourhood; and Catharine, the daughter of Sir Willingham, married Drummond, the son of the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, vicar of Spilsby. Thus quite a clan was created, insomuch that forty cousins have been counted at one Spilsby ball. Drummond succeeded his father as rector of Halton, and very appropriately preached the last sermon in the old church at Spilsby at the closing service previous to its restoration, speaking from the pulpit which his father had occupied from 1813 to 1825. His sermon, a very fine one, called “The Last Time,” was from 1 St. John ii. 18, and was delivered on Trinity Sunday, 1878.
LINCOLNSHIRE STORIES
The time to visit Spilsby is on market day, when, round the butter cross, besides eggs, butter and poultry, pottery is displayed “on the stones,” stalls are set up where one may buy plants and clothes, and things hard to digest like “bull’s eyes,” as well as boots and braces, and near “the Statue” at the other end, are farm requisites, sacks, tools, and the delightful-smelling tarred twine, as well as all sorts of old iron, chains, bolts, hinges, etc., which it seems to be worth someone’s while to carry from market to market. It is here that the humours of the petty auctioneer are to be heard, and the broad Doric of the Lincolnshire peasant. In the pig market below the church hill you may hear a man trying to sell some pigs, and to the objection that they are “Stränge an’ small,” he replies, “Mebbe just now; but I tell ye them pigs ’ull be greät ’uns,” then, in a pause, comes the voice from a little old woman who is looking on without the least idea of buying, “It ’ull be a straänge long while fust,” and in a burst of laughter the chance of selling that lot is snuffed out, or, as they say at the Westmorland dog trials, “blown off.”
MORE STORIES
There is an unconscious humour about the older Lincolnshire peasants which makes it very amusing to be about among them, whether in market, field or home. My father never returned from visiting his parish without some rich instance of dialect or some humorous speech that he had heard. Finding a woman flushed with anger outside her cottage once, and asking her what was amiss, he was told “It’s them Hell-cats.” “Who do you call by such a name?” “Them Johnsons yonder.” “Why? What have they been doing?” “They’ve been calling me.” “That’s very wrong; what have they been calling you?” “They’ve bin calling me Skinny.” At another time a woman, in the most cutting tones, alluding to her next-door neighbours who had an afflicted child, said, “We may-be poor, and Wanty [her husband] says we are poor, destitutely poor, and there’s no disgraäce in being poor, but our Mary-Ann doant hev fits.” Another time, when my sister was recommending a book from the lending library describing a voyage round the world, and called “Chasing the Sun,” a little old woman looked at the title and said, “Naäy, I weänt ha’ that: I doänt howd wi sich doings. Chaäsing the Sun indeed; the A’mighty will soon let ’em know if they gets a chevying him.” In the same village I got into conversation one autumn day with a small freeholder whose cow had been ill, and asked him how he had cured her, he said, “I got haafe a pound o’ sulphur and mixed it wi’ warm watter and bottled it into her. Eh! it’s a fine thing I reckon is sulphur for owt that’s badly, cow or pig or the missis or anythink.” Then, with a serious look he went on, “There’s a straänge thing happened wi’ beans, Mr. Rownsley.” “What’s that?” “Why, the beans is turned i’ the swad” (= pod). “No!” “Yees they hev.” “How do you mean?” “Why they used to be black ends uppermost and now they’r ’tother waay on.” “Well, that’s just how they always have been.” “Naay they warn’t. It was ’81 they turned.” They do lie with the attachment of each bean to the pod, just the way you would not expect, and having noticed this he was convinced that up to then they had really lain the way he had always supposed they did, so difficult is it to separate fact from imagination. The similes used by a Lincolnshire native are often quite Homeric, as when an old fellow, who was cutting his crop of beans, the haulm of which is notoriously tough, resting on his scythe said, “I’d rayther plow wi two dogs nor haulm beans.” Then they have often a quiet, slow way of saying things, which is in itself humorous. I remember a labourer who was very deaf, but he had been much annoyed by the mother of a man whose place he had succeeded to. He was working alongside of his master and apropos of nothing but his own thoughts, he said, “Scriptur saäys we should forgive one another; but I doänt knoä. If yon owd ’ooman fell i’ the dyke I doänt think I should pull her out. I mowt tell some ’un on her, but I doänt think I should pull her out howiver.” There is some kindliness in that, though in quantity it is rather like the Irishman’s news: “I’ve come to tell you that I have nothing to tell you, and there’s some news in that.” But the Lincolnshire native is a trifle stern; even the mother’s hand is more apt to be punitive than caressing. “I’ll leather you well when I gets you home, my lad,” I have heard a mother say to a very small boy, and I have heard tell of a mother who, when informed that her little girl had fallen down the well, angrily exclaimed, “Drat the children, they’re allus i’ mischief; and now she’s bin and drownded hersen I suppose.”
In Westmorland it is the husband who will take too much at market on whom the vials of the wrath of the missis are outpoured, and they generally know how to “sarve” him. One good lady, on being asked “However did you get him ower t’wall, Betty?” replied “I didna get him ower at a’—I just threshed him through th’ hog-hole” (the hole in the wall for the sheep, or hoggetts, to pass through).
Speaking of tippling, there is no more delightful story than this from Westmorland, of a mouse which had fallen into a beer vat and was swimming round in despair, when a cat looked over, and the mouse cried out, “If ye’ll git me oot o’ this ye may hev me.” The cat let down her tail and the mouse climbed up, and shaking herself on the edge of the vat, jumped off and went down her hole, and on being reproached by the cat as not being a mouse of her word, answered, “Eh! but ivry body knaws folks will say owt when they’re i’ drink.”
OLD BOLINGBROKE
There are several pretty little bits of country near Spilsby, but the most interesting of the by-ways leads off from the Horncastle road at Mavis Enderby, and, going down a steep hill, brings us to Old Bolingbroke, a picturesque village with a labyrinth of lanes circling about the mounded ruins of the castle, where, in 1366, Henry IV. “of Bolingbroke” was born. It was built in 1140 by William de Romara, first Earl of Lincoln, and was, till 1643, when Winceby battle took place, a moated square of embattled walls, with a round tower at each corner. Here Chaucer used to visit John of Gaunt and the Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, on whose death, in 1369, he wrote his “Book of the Duchess.” The castle, after the Civil Wars, sank into decay, and the gate-house, the last of the masonry, fell in 1815. The road onwards comes out opposite Hagnaby Priory. William de Romara, who three years later founded Revesby Abbey, had for his wife the second Lady Lucia, the heiress of the Saxon Thorolds, an honoured name among Lincolnshire families. She brought him, among other possessions, the manor of Bolingbroke. Her second husband was the Norman noble, Ranulph, afterwards earl of Chester. The Thorolds were descended from Turold, brother of the Lady Godiva. There apparently were two Lady Lucias, whose histories are rather mixed up by the ancient chroniclers. The earlier of the two was, it seems, the sister of the Saxon nobles, Edwin and Morcar, and of King Harold’s queen Ealdgyth. Her hand was bestowed by the conqueror upon his nephew, Ivo de Taillebois (= Underwood), who became, according to Ingulphus and others, a monster of cruelty, and died in 1114.
HARRINGTON