The charter also gave the corporation, among other things, “power to assess the inhabitants, as well unfree as free, with a tax for making a safeguard and defence of the borough and church there against the violence of the waters and rage of the sea.”
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were no less than fifteen guilds in the town, six of them with charters. The hall of St. Mary’s guild still exists, the names of St. George’s Lane and Corpus Christi Lane is all that is left of the others, but the old names indicate the localities.
THE WINE-CELLARS
In 1360 we have mention on the corporation records of William de Spayne, one of a family of merchants of repute, after whom Spayne’s Place and what is now Spain Lane were named. William was an alderman of the Corpus Christi Guild, and sheriff of the county in 1378. Spain Lane had a row of great cellars, some of which were rented by the abbeys, and a quantity of wine was shipped from Bordeaux to Boston. King John of France had 140 tuns at one time, the carriage of which to Boston, and some part of it to the place of his detention at Somerton Castle (see Chap. [XIII.]), cost close upon £500. This large supply was sent to him from France, partly for his own consumption and partly to be sold in order to bring in money to keep up his royal state, and when we read of the silk curtains and tapestries, the French furniture for dining-hall and bedrooms which displaced the benches and trestles of an English castle, the horse trappings and stable fittings, and the enormous amount of stores and confectionery used at Somerton, we realise that his daily expenditure must have been a very large one. The cellars which stowed these large cargoes of wine were in Spain (or Spayne) Lane, and most of them were, in 1590, in accordance with Boston’s usual suicidal custom, destroyed, though the corporation still held two in 1640 which had once belonged to Kirkstead Abbey.
Spain Lane, Boston.
THE SILTING OF THE RIVER
In the sixteenth century several trade companies—cordwainers, glovers, etc.—received charters. In this century Queen Elizabeth gave the mayor and burgesses a “Charter of Admiralty” over the whole of the “Norman Deeps” to enable them to repair and maintain the sea marks, and to levy tolls on all ships entering the port. But trade was then declining owing to the silting up of the river. This, in 1569, when the town was made a Staple town, had been in good order, and navigable for seagoing ships of some size, the tide water running up two miles inland as far as Dockdyke (now Dogdyke), and then a large trade was done in wool and woollen goods between Boston and Flanders. Hence it was that when, in the reign of Henry VII., a council was held to discuss the two great needs of the town, viz., the restraining the sea water from flooding the land, and the delivery of the inland waters speedily to the sea, it was to Flanders that the Boston men turned for an engineer, one Mahave Hall, who built them a dam and sluice in the year 1500. This is called the Old Sluice, and was effectual for a time. But in Queen Elizabeth’s reign the river below Boston was getting so silted up again that the waters of South Holland were brought by means of two “gowts” (go outs), or “clows,” one into the Witham above Boston at Langrick, and one below into the harbour at Skirbeck, to scour out the channel. The Kesteven men, from a sense of being robbed of their waters, opposed, but their objections were over-ruled by the chief justices. In 1568-9 the “Maud Foster” drain was cut and named after the owner, who gave easement over her land on very favourable terms.
In the map to the first volume of the “History of Lincolnshire,” published by Saunders in 1834, the Langrick Gowt (or gote) finds no place; but the “Holland Dyke” is probably meant for it. The Skirbeck dyke is marked very big and called “The South Forty-foot,” which, along with the North Forty-foot and Hobhole drains, and others of large size, aided by powerful steam pumps, have made the Fens into a vast agricultural garden.