The Haven, Boston.
The Guildhall, Boston.
But alas, not only all the monastic buildings, but nearly all the domestic buildings which once made Boston like a medieval Dutch town are gone, though the fifteenth-century brick Guildhall remains. The citizens seem to have had a fatal mania for pulling down all that was most worth preserving of their old buildings. Gone, too, is much else which Bostonians might well have preserved. Such, for instance, as “the prodigious clock bell which could be heard many miles round, and was knocked to pieces in the year 1710.” It is but a few years ago that some of the Boston Corporation plate was sold in London for immense prices, and when astonished people asked how it came to the hammer they heard a miserable tale how the fine collection of civic plate, and it was unusually fine, had been sold in 1837 for £600, nothing approaching to its value, by the corporation itself, for the purpose of liquidating some civic debt. But any sin Boston may commit, such as the crude colouring of the interior of the much-renovated Guildhall, and painting and graining of the deal panels only last year, will be forgiven, so long as they have their uniquely glorious church tower to plead for them.
Lord Hussey’s tower and the Kyme tower are ruins, built about the end of the fifteenth century, and at the end of the eighteenth century a big house was still standing which may have been Lord Hussey’s. The brick tower stands near the school fields, not far from the Public Gardens, which are a credit to Boston, and have some first-rate salt-water baths close by, which belong to the corporation.
The Kyme tower is also called the Rochford tower, that family having held it before the Kymes. It is a massive tower, also of brick, as may be seen from the illustration. It stands about two miles outside the town to the east.
FAMOUS BOSTONIANS
Of celebrated folk born in Boston we have, to begin with, John Fox, author of the “Book of Martyrs,” who was born there in 1517. He was sent to Brasenose, Oxford, and worked very hard, but was expelled as a heretic when he forsook the Roman Catholic religion. The Warwickshire family of Sir Thomas Lucie, a name made famous by Shakespeare, gave him shelter and employment as a tutor; and later he tutored the children of the Earl of Surrey who, in the reign of Queen Mary, helped him to escape from Bishop Gardiner’s deadly clutches. Like so many who suffered persecution for their religion, he made his home at Basle till Elizabeth’s accession allowed of his return. He then spent eleven years on his “Acts and Monuments,” and died in 1587.
At about this time the plague raged at Boston, 1585, and broke out again in 1603. Boston and Frampton had, as the Registers show, suffered an unusual mortality in 1568-9. The water was not good, and as late as 1783 a boring to a depth of 478 feet was made in a vain search for a better supply. The town was at that time supplied from the west fen through wooden pipes.