There are three other brick buildings, which always strike me as being worthy to rank along with Tattershall. The first, but following longo intervallo, is the Bishop of Lincoln’s palace at Buckden in Hunts., built by Bishop Hugh of Wells about 1225. Another is the beautiful old Tudor manor-house already alluded to at Barsham, near Walsingham, which Lord Hastings has just advertised for sale (November, 1913). This has more exquisite brick diaper work and mouldings on the outside of both house and gate-house than Tattershall Castle has even in the passages and vaulted rooms on the upper floor inside, and is a miracle of lovely brick building. But it is not nearly so big as Tattershall. The other bit of fine bricklaying which is of the same rather severe character as Tattershall and Magdalen School at Wainfleet, is the gate-house of Esher Place, occupied by Cardinal Wolsey October, 1529, to February, 1530. It belonged to the Bishops of Winchester, and Wolsey then held that see together with York. Waynflete, who was bishop 1447-1486, and finished Tattershall about 1456, a year after the Lord Treasurer Cromwell’s death, had partly re-built Esher Place in his inimitable brickwork, about seventy years before. He used bricks for the lintels and mouldings, and even put in the same sunk spiral handrail, which we have noticed as so clever and remarkable a device in the turret staircase at Tattershall. Waynflete’s arms, the lilies, so familiar to us at Eton and Magdalen, were found by the Rev. F. K. Floyer, F.S.A., only last year (1912), when some plaster was removed, on the keystone of the curiously contrived vaulting over the porch. It is noticeable that Henry Pelham, who bought the house in 1729, has introduced also his family badge, the Pelham buckle, which is cut on the stone capitals of the door. This badge we have spoken of in the chapter on Brocklesby. So we have two Lincolnshire families of note, each of which has left his cognisance on the gateway of the once proud Esher Place, the “Asher House” in that magnificent scene of Act III. in Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII.”
Norfolk. “Hear the king’s pleasure, cardinal; who commands you
To render up the great seal presently
Into our hands: and to confine yourself
To Asher-house, my lord of Winchester’s,
Till you hear farther from his highness.”
Tattershall had a double moat, the outer one reaching to the River Bain. Over both of them the entrance would probably be, as it certainly was over the inner one, protected by a drawbridge and portcullis. This was still to be seen in 1726 at the north-east corner of the quadrangle. All that is now left is this one great pile of the Lord Treasurer’s and one guard-house of the fifteenth century. The original castle was begun 200 years earlier, when Robert, the direct descendant of Hugh Fitz Eudo—founder in 1138 of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstead, who had received the estate from William the Conqueror—obtained leave from Henry III. to build a castle there. We have seen how the castle became the property of Joan who married Sir Robert Driby, whose daughter Alice consigned it at her marriage to Sir W. Bernak, and their daughter Matilda married Lord Cromwell, whose grandson was the High Treasurer to Henry VI. He built the brick castle, but died soon after doing so, leaving his collegiate church to be finished by his executors. The college he had founded was to consist of a warden, a provost, six priests, six lay clerks, and six choristers, and the almshouse was for thirteen poor of either sex. The original building for this still exists, and is of very humble appearance, having, it is said, been put up to serve first as a lodgment for the masons engaged on the castle and church. Of these the latter is singularly well built, as any building supervised by Bishop William of Waynflete was sure to be, and evidently of very good stone; and the two buildings being close together are striking specimens of the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of the period.
THE BRASSES
The Treasurer’s wife, who was sister and coheir of William fifth Baron d’Eyncourt, died a year before her husband. They are buried in the church, and two very fine brasses once marked the spot. He was a K.G., and this shows him with the Garter and Mantle of his Order, but the brass is sadly mutilated now; while her effigy is, sad to say, lost entirely.
Two other fine brasses of this family are in the church. One, of the Treasurer’s niece, Joan Stanhope, who married first Sir Humphrey Bourchier, son of the Earl of Essex, who was made fourth Baron Cromwell in her right in 1469; and secondly, after her first husband had been slain at the battle of Barnet, 1471, Sir Robert Ratcliffe. She died in 1479, and was succeeded in the property by her sister Matilda, who had married Lord Willoughby d’Eresby. Her brass has also been a particularly fine one. She died in 1497, and ten years before this the Tattershall estate had passed to the Crown. The inscription on her brass is filled in by a later and inferior hand, and no mention is made of her two next husbands.