Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

HER GRANDSON LORD HIGH TREASURER

This Ralph Lord Cromwell had been appointed Lord High Treasurer of England under Henry VI. in 1433. He married Margaret, daughter of John fifth and last Baron d’Eyncourt, but had no issue. He it was who replaced the old castle by the splendid brick building which was, and is, the finest in England. He presented to Driby in 1449, and was the founder of the college and the almshouse at Tattershall, for which he obtained leave from the Crown to turn the parish church into a collegiate church in 1439, when he rebuilt it from the ground and endowed it with[26] several manors, Driby being one, so in 1461 and until 1543 the warden of the college of Tattershall was the patron of Driby. The almshouse has still an endowment of £30. He died in 1455, as the brass in Tattershall church records, and his nieces, the daughters of Sir Richard Stanhope, succeeded to his estates, but Driby remained with the warden of Tattershall. The nieces were Joan Lady Cromwell (for her husband Humphrey Bourchier, son of the first Earl of Essex, was summoned to Parliament as Baron Cromwell jure uxoris) and Matilda Lady Willoughby d’Eresby. One of his executors, William of Waynflete, the famous Bishop of Winchester, held the manor of Candlesby in 1477 for the use of this Lady Matilda, and soon afterwards obtained a grant of it to his newly founded college of Magdalen, Oxford, with whom it remains. Matilda Lady de Willoughby presented to Candlesby in 1494, eight years after the bishop’s death. Since then the living has been in the gift of the college.

At the dissolution of the monasteries, in 1545, Driby was granted to the Duke of Suffolk, then it passed to Sir Henry Sidney of Penshurst, who sold it to the Prescotts, a Lancashire family, about 1580, with appurtenances of lands and rents in “Brynkhill, Belchford, Orebye, Grenwyke, Ingolmells, Bagenderbie, Asbie Puerorum, ffulletsbye, West Saltfletby alias Sallaby, Sallaby Allsaints, Golderbye, Tathwell, Thorpe next Waynflet, Sutterbye and Scamlesbye.” There are two small brasses in the church to James Prescott and his wife, who was a Molineux of Lancashire. They died in 1581 and 1583. In 1636 Sir W. Prescott sold the manor of Driby to Sir John Bolles, and in 1715 it was bought by Burrell Massingberd and still goes with the Ormsby estate of that family.

BUILDS TATTERSHALL

THE CASTLE

A few words must be added about Tattershall. The great brick building which rises so magnificently out of the flat is one of the most impressive things in this or any country. I have walked all day partridge shooting on the estate, and however far you went you never seemed able to get away from the immediate presence of the magnificent pile; you only had to look round and it was apparently just at your shoulder all day long. Then if you enter it and go up, for even the first floor is several feet above the level of the quadrangle, you are astonished at the size of the great chambers one above the other, thirty-eight feet by twenty-two, and seventeen feet high; and finally you come on the second, third, and fourth story to the most beautiful brick vaulting and mouldings in the small rooms and galleries running round the big central rooms in the thickness of the walls. The whole is of exquisite workmanship, and finished by very deep and handsome machicolations and battlements. The bricks are apparently Flemish, thinner and of finer quality than the English bricks; similar ones were used in building Halstead Hall, Stixwould. The windows are dressed with stone, these are large and arched, having mullions and the heads filled with stone tracery like church windows. This shows how the nobleman’s castle was changing into the nobleman’s palace or mansion. The building is at one corner of a quadrangle, and is itself a parallelogram, and, including the turret bases, eighty-seven feet long by sixty-nine wide, and 112 feet high to the parapet of the angle turret. The walls, which are built on massive brick vaulting, are immensely thick, being fifteen feet above, and even more on the ground floor. The windows of the basement chambers are close on the water of the moat, for several small chambers were made in the thickness of the walls, in which, too, are the four chimneys. The spiral staircase is in the south-east turret, and has a continuous stone handrail let into the brick wall, very cleverly contrived, and giving a firm and easy grasp. Each turret is octagonal, going up all the way from the ground and being finished with a cone. In each turret is a fireplace—a comfort to the warders, and useful at a pinch for heating the supplies of oil and lead which could be poured down through the machicolations on the heads of a too assiduous foe. From turret to turret, and projecting somewhat over these machicolations, runs a loopholed gallery, and here, too, the vaulting and the rich brick mouldings are better than anything else of the kind in England, with the exception of the smaller but elaborately enriched wall surfaces of Barsham, near Walsingham in Norfolk. There are little rooms in the turrets, on each floor, and the galleries on the second and third are divided into rooms, so that in the whole building there were some forty-eight rooms. The large central rooms would be hung with tapestry, the lowest being used for an entrance-hall, meals being served in the fine banqueting hall adjoining, the second for a hall of audience or withdrawing room, and the third for the state bedroom. The fireplaces are, in the large rooms, of great width, and the restored mantelpieces, the barbarous removal of which lately caused such a stir, show a number of most interesting coats-of-arms of the families who have been connected with Tattershall down to the time of Henry VI. The treasurer’s purse figures alternately with the shields, which bear the arms of the Cromwells, Tattershalls, and d’Eyncourts, of Marmion, Driby, Bernak, and Clifton; and on the second floor one panel represents the combat between Hugh de Neville and a lion. Neville and Clifton were the second and third husbands of Matilda Lady Willoughby, which points to the fact that these mantelpieces were not carved until after the Lord Treasurer’s death, 1455, when Bishop Waynflete was in charge of the work. Sir Thomas Neville was killed at the battle of Wakefield, 1460, and Sir Gervasse Clifton at Tewkesbury in 1471.

Tattershall Church and Castle.

ESHER PLACE

TATTERSHALL CHURCH