Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

And now two miles more bring us to Skirbeck on the outskirts of Boston. The only interesting feature of the church here is in the columns of the nave, which have four cylinders round a massive centre pillar, all four quite detached except at the bases and capitals, which last are richly carved. We shall find exactly similar ones at Weston, near Spalding. We now follow the curving line of the Haven with its grassy banks right into Boston. The splendid parish church, the sight of whose tower is a never-failing source of delight and inspiration, stands with its east end in the market-place, and its tall tower close on the bank of the river. It has no transepts as the Great Yarmouth church has, but, apart from its unapproachable steeple, it is longer and higher and greater in cubic contents than any parish church in the kingdom. The tower, 288 feet, is taller than Lincoln tower or Grantham spire, and is only exceeded in height by Louth spire, which is 300 feet. The view of it from across the river is one of the most entirely satisfying sights in the world.[31] The extreme height is so well proportioned, and each stage leads up so beautifully to the next, that one is never tired of gazing on it. Add to this that it is visible to all the dwellers in the Marsh and Fen for twenty miles round and from the distant Wolds, and again far out to sea, and is as familiar to all as their own shadow, and you can guess at the affection which stirs the hearts of all Lincolnshire men when they think or speak of the ‘Owd Stump,’ a curious title for a beloved object, but so slightly does it decrease in size as it soars upwards from basement to lantern, that in the distance it looks more like a thick mast or the headless stem of a gigantic tree than a church steeple.

Boston Church from the N.E.

THE BUILDING OF THE CHURCH

THE INTERIOR

There was once here a church of the type of Sibsey, said to date from 1150, of which but little has been discovered. The present building was begun in 1309, when the digging for the foundation of the tower began “on ye Monday after Palm Sunday in the 3ʳᵈ yr of Ed. II.” They went down thirty feet to a bed of stone five feet below the level of the river bed, overlying “a spring of sand,” under which again was a bed of clay of unknown thickness. The excavation was a very big job, and the “first stone” was not laid till the feast of St. John the Baptist (Midsummer Day) by Dame Margaret Tilney, and she and Sir John Truesdale, then parson of Boston, and Richard Stevenson, a Boston merchant, each laid £5 on the stone “which was all ye gifts given at that time” towards the expense which, we are told, was, for the whole tower, under £500 of the money of those days. Leland, Vol. VIII., 204, says: “Mawde Tilney who layed the first stone of the goodly steeple of the paroche chirch of Boston lyith buried under it.” The work of building up the tower was interrupted for fifty years, and the body of the church was taken in hand, the present tower arch serving as a west window. Then the tower began to rise, but it was finished without the lantern. In the middle of the fifteenth century the chancel was lengthened by two bays, and the parapets and pinnacles added to the aisles. The parapet at the east end of the north aisle is very curious and elaborate, being pierced with tracery of nearly the same design as that on the flying buttresses of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster. There were several statues round the building on tall pedestals rising from the lowest coping of the buttresses to about the height of the nave parapets; one is conspicuous still at the south-east corner of the tower and above the south porch. The tower has three stages, arranged as in Louth church, and then the lantern above. In the first stage a very large west window rises above the west doorway, and similar ones on the north and south of the tower, and all the surface is enriched with panelling both on tower and buttresses. The next stage is lighted by a pair of windows of great height, finely canopied and divided by a transom, on each side of the tower; this forms the ringing chamber, and a gallery runs round it in the thickness of the wall communicating with the two staircases. On the door of one of these is a remarkable handle, a ring formed by two bronze lizards depending from a lion’s mouth. The clustered shafts and springers of the stone vault were built at the beginning, but the handsome groined roof with its enormous central boss 156 feet from the ground was not completed until 1852. The next story has large single-arched windows of a decidedly plain type. These are the only things one can possibly find fault with, but probably when the tower had no lantern the intention was to exhibit the light from this story, the bells being hung below and rung from the ground. Eventually the eight bells were hung in the third story, and the lantern, by far the finest in England, was added, which gives so queenly an effect to the tall tower. Before this was done four very high pinnacles finished the building, subsequently arches were turned diagonally over the angles of the tower so as to make the base of the octagonal lantern. The roof of the tower and the gutters round it are of stone and curiously contrived. The lantern has eight windows like those in the second stage of the tower, but each one pane longer, and the corners are supported by flying buttresses springing in pairs from each tower pinnacle. The whole is crowned with a lofty parapet with pierced tracery and eight pinnacles with an ornamented gable between each pair of pinnacles. Inside was a lantern lighted at night for a sea mark. The church of All Saints, York, has a very similar one, and there the hook for the lantern pulley is still to be seen.

BOSTON, U.S.A.

Inside, one is struck by the ample size and height of the church and its vast proportions. The choir has five windows on each side. But the nave is spoilt by a false wooden roof which cuts off half of the clerestory windows. It is a pity this is not removed and the old open timber roof replaced. In the chancel are sixty-four stalls of good carved work, and the old and curiously designed miserere seats, often showing humorous subjects as at Lincoln, are of exceptional interest. Of the once numerous brasses most are gone, but two very fine ones are on either side the altar: one to Walter Peascod, merchant, 1390, and one to a priest in a cope, c. 1400; an incised slab of 1340 is at the west of the north aisle. The Conington tablet in memory of John Conington, Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford, on the south wall of the chancel is to be noticed, and the Bolles monument in the south aisle, and, near the south porch, the chapel which was restored by the Bostonians of the United States as a recognition of their Lincolnshire origin. Close to this is a curious epitaph painted on a wooden panel, which reads as follows:—