Dextra viri, nullo constringi frigore, nullo
Dissolvi fervore potest, sed semper eodem
Immutata statu persistit, mortua vivit.”
In which the monk, as usual, made a “false quantity.” In 870 Hingvar and Hubba, the Danes, in spite of its fancied security, utterly destroyed the abbey and put some 300 monks to death. They also destroyed Peterborough, Croyland, Ely, Huntingdon, Winchester, and other fine and wealthy monastic houses in the same barbarous manner. Bardney after this lay desolate for 200 years; after which, Gilbert De Gaunt, on whom the Conqueror had bestowed much land in mid-Lincolnshire, with the aid of the famous Bishop Remigius of Lincoln, restored it, and endowed it with revenues from at least a dozen different villages, amongst them Willingham, Southrey, Partney, Steeping, Firsby, Skendleby, Willoughby, Lusby, Winceby, Hagworthingham, Folkingham, and Heckington. This would be about 1080. In 1406 we read of Henry IV., our Lincolnshire king, spending a Saturday-to-Monday there, riding from Horncastle with his two sons and three captive earls of the Scots, Douglas, Fyfe, and Orkney, and a goodly company. The Bishop of Lincoln “with 24 horses” and the “venerable Lord Willoughby” came to do homage in the afternoon. The abbey stood on slightly rising ground, with a moat and deep ditch lined with brick, as at Tattershall, and enclosing twenty-four acres. It was half a mile from the present church. On the east side of the abbey is a large barrow on which was once a handsome cross in memory of King Æthelred, who is supposed to have been buried there, and it is quite possible that he was. The name of a field close by “Coney garth” is no doubt a corruption of Koenig Garth, which is much the same as the “King’s Mead fields” near Bath Abbey, immortalised in Sheridan’s “Rivals,” as the place of meeting between Captain Absolute and Bob Acres, and where Sir Lucius O’Trigger inhumanly asks Acres “In case of accident ... would you choose to be pickled and sent home? or would it be the same to you to lie here in the Abbey? I’m told there is very snug lying in the Abbey.”
BARDNEY ABBEY
The site of the abbey when excavations were begun in 1909 was apparently a grass field with a moat; but since then the whole of the great monastic church has been laid bare to the floor pavement, which was about four and a half feet below the surface. The Norman bases of the eight chancel columns and twenty pillars of the nave are now visible, and also of the four large piers which supported the tower arches; these must have been very beautiful, each nave pillar having round a solid core a cluster of twelve, and the tower piers of sixteen, columns. All down the church, which is 254 feet long and over sixty-one feet wide, tombs were found in situ, with inscriptions, the earliest being that of Johanna, wife of John Browne of Bardney, merchant, 1334, and the handsomest that of Richard Horncastel, abbot, 1508, which measures eight feet by four, is seven inches thick, and weighs three tons. This had been already moved, and it is now fixed against the south wall of Bardney church. Adjoining the south side of the nave is the cloister; and the chapter-house, parlour, dormitory, dining-hall, cellar, kitchen, well and guest-house are all contiguous. A little way off are the infirmary-hall and chapel, with three fireplaces and some tile paving. Not much statuary was found, but various carved heads and iron tools, pottery, etc., one headless figure three feet high of St. Laurence and, most interesting of all, the reverse of the abbey seal which was in use in 1348, showing St. Peter and St. Paul beneath a canopy and the half figure of an abbot with crozier below. We know that the obverse had on it a figure of St. Oswald, but that has not yet been found. It is made of bronze or latten.
The huge extent of the buildings and the beauty of the column bases and the plan of this, the earliest of English monasteries, with its moat enclosing the whole twenty-five acres, and its king’s tumulus, make a visit to the site very interesting, and the vicar, Rev. C. E. Laing, has worked hard with his four men each year since 1909, and with the help of kind friends has managed to purchase three acres, but is greatly hampered by want of funds, which at present only reach one quarter of the sum required.
THE TITLE “DOMINUS”
Mr. Laing has published a little shilling guide to the excavations at Bardney, with photographs, which explain the work very clearly and show the tombs with their inscriptions. From this it will be noticed that Abbot Horncastel is called on his tomb “Dompnus,” i.e., Dominus, and Thomas Clark, rector of Partney, has this title “Dns.,” and also Thomas Goldburgh, soldier, has the same. This is the same name as that on the old Grimsby Corporation seal of the princess, who is said to have married Havelock the Dane (see Chap. [XIX.]). Dominus is a difficult title to translate, for if we call it ‘Sir,’ as the old registers often do, it is misleading, as it has no knightly significance, and it probably meant no more than “The Rev.,” or in the case of a soldier “Esq.” or “Gent.” It certainly does not imply here that the owners of the title belonged to “the lower order of clergy,” and yet that is the recognised meaning of it in many old church registers, e.g., in the list of rectors, vicars, and chantry priests of Heckington, taken from the episcopal records at Lincoln. Some of the vicars and most of the chantry priests are called “Sir,” and this generally implies a non-graduate. So also in the chapter on the clergy with the list of rectors and curates given in Miss Armitt’s interesting book, “The Church of Grasmere” (published 1912), pp. 57-60 and p. 81, we find that the tythe-taking rector is termed “Master,” and bears the suffix “Clerk”; while “Sir” is reserved for the curate, his deputy, who has not graduated at either university. This view is upheld in Dr. Cox’s “Parish Registers of England,” p. 251. The Grasmere book speaks of “Magister George Plumpton,” who was son of Sir William Plumpton, of Plumpton, Knight, and rector of Grasmere, 1438-9. In 1554 Gabriel Croft is called rector, and his three curates for the outlying hamlets are put down as—
“Dns. William Jackson, called in his will ‘late Curate of Grasmer.’”