Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

To the Lincolnshire folk, his dialect poems, written in the dialect which was current in his youth at Spilsby and in the country about it (and still used there, I am glad to say, though not so universally or so markedly as of yore), give genuine pleasure, and are full of humour and of character, and it is a tribute to his accurate ear and memory that, after an absence of some twenty-seven years, he should have got the Lincolnshire so correct. He did it all right, but for fear he might have forgotten and got wrong, he asked a friend to look at it and criticise; unfortunately the friend lived in the north of the county and knew not the dialect of “Spilsbyshire,” so he altered it all to that which was spoken about Brigg, which is more like Yorkshire, and it had to be put back again. But some of the northern dialect has stuck, and in “The Northern Farmer Old Style” the ‘o’ is seen in ‘moind,’ ‘doy,’ ‘almoighty,’ etc., where the Spilsby sound would be better rendered by using an ‘a.’ This ‘o’ is never found in any of his subsequent dialect poems, and in a note to the text in the “Northern Cobbler” the poet points out that the proper sound is given by ‘ai.’

FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS

One sign of the remarkable way in which our Lincolnshire poet has made himself the poet of the English-speaking race is the extraordinary number of familiar quotations which he has given us. For the last fifty years in book and newspaper, in speech and sermon, some line or some phrase of his has constantly occurred which the user felt certain that his hearer or readers would recognise, until our literature has become tessellated with Tennysonian expressions, and they have always given that satisfaction which results from feeling that in using his words we have said the thing we wished to say in a form which could not be improved upon. In this respect of “daily popularity and application,” I think Shakespeare alone excels him, though Pope and Wordsworth may run him close.

Little Steeping.

CHAPTER XXXII
ROADS FROM SPILSBY

Road to Louth—Partney—Dr. Johnson—His letter on Death of Peregrine Langton—Dalby—Langton and Saucethorpe—View from Keal Hill with Boston Stump—“Stickfoot Stickknee and Stickneck”—The Hundleby Miracle—Raithby—Mavis Enderby—Lusby—Hameringham—The Hourglass Stand—Winceby—Horncastle—The Horse Fair—The Sleaford Road—Hagnaby—East Kirkby—Miningsby—Revesby Abbey—Moorby—Wood Enderby—Haltham—Tumby Wood—Coningsby—Tattershall—Billinghay—Haverholme Priory.

The four roads from Spilsby go north to Louth, and south to Boston, each sixteen miles; east to Wainfleet, eight miles; and west to Horncastle, ten miles. The Wainfleet one we have already described and two-thirds of that from Louth. The remaining third, starting from Spilsby, only goes through two villages—Partney and Dalby. Partney lies low in the valley of Tennyson’s “Cold rivulet,” and those who have driven across the flat meadows between the village and the mill after sundown know how piercingly cold it always seems.

The place has a very long history. Bede, who died in 725, writing twelve hundred years ago and speaking of the Christianising of Northumbria by Paulinus, who was consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and his visit to the province of Lindissi, i.e., “the parts of Lindsey” and Lincoln in particular, says that the Abbot of Peartaney (= Partney, near Spilsby, which was a cell of Bardney) spoke to him once of a man called Deda, who was afterwards, in 730, Abbot of Bardney and a very truthful man, “presbyter veracissimus,” and said that Deda told him that he had talked with an aged man who had been baptised by Bishop Paulinus in the presence of King Ædwin, in the middle of the day, and with him a multitude of people, in the River Treenta, near a city called in the language of the Angles, Tiovulfingaceaster; this was in 627. Many have taken the place to be Torksey, though that in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle is Turcesig. Green suggested it was at the ford of Farndon beyond Newark, but it was far more likely to be at Littleborough Ferry, two miles north of Torksey, where the Roman road (“Till bridge Lane”) from Lincoln crossed the river. But certainly Torksey is the nearest point of the river to Lincoln, and the Fossdyke went to it, as well as a road, so that communication was easy and inexpensive, and on the whole I should be inclined to say that Torksey was the place of baptism.