Spalding Church from the S.E.
THE “HOLE IN THE WALL”
The east end wall is not rectangular, but the south chancel wall runs out two feet further east than the north wall, as it does also in the church of Coulsdon, near Reigate, in Surrey. The reason of this is that it is built on the foundation of an older chapel. The flat Norman buttresses are still to be seen outside the east end. The tower leans to the east, and when examined it was found to have been built flat on the surface of the ground with no foundation whatever. It seems incredible, but the intelligent verger was positive about it. The spire has beautiful canopied openings in three tiers, the lower ones having two lights and being unusually graceful. Standing inside the south porch and near the tower, and looking up the church, you get a most picturesque effect, for the church has so many aisles that you can see no less than twenty-three different arches. The north porch is handsome, and had three canopied niches over both the outer and the inner doorway, and a vaulted roof supporting a room over the entrance. A five-light window over the chancel arch is curious. There is a rood-loft and a staircase leading to it, and going on up to the roof. The Perpendicular west window is very large and has seven lights. This dates from the fifteenth century, when the nave was lengthened and the pillars of the nave considerably heightened and the old caps used again, and what had previously been an “early Decorated” church with only a nave and transepts, had Perpendicular aisles added. The large south-east chapel which, until 1874 was used as a school, was founded in 1311. An erect life-size marble figure commemorates Elizabeth Johnson, 1843. There are no other important monuments. The tower has eight bells and a Sanctus bell-cot at the east end of the nave. There are stone steps to enable people to get over the brick churchyard wall, as there are also at Kirton and Friskney. Some stone coffin-lids curiously out of place are let into one of the boundary walls of the churchyard. Close by is the White Horse, a picturesque old thatched and gabled inn. There is another inn here called “The Hole in the Wall.” I wonder if this title is derived from Shakespeare’s play, “The tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe,” who, says the story, “did talk through the chink of a wall,” or does it refer to some breach in the sea wall? To come from fancy to fact, the real name seems to have been Holy Trinity Wall, the house having been built up against a wall of that church which, with half a score of others in Spalding, has been dismantled and utterly swept away. Another puzzling sign I passed lately was “The New Found out.” The writer of an article in The Times of April 8, on the fire at Little Chesterford, thinks the sign of one of the burnt public-houses, “The Bushel and Strike,” a very singular one, not knowing that the strike, like the bushel, is a measure of corn.
St. Paul’s, Fulney, to the north of the town, is a handsome new brick-and-stone church, by Sir Gilbert Scott, who also restored the old church and removed every sort of hideous inside fitting, where galleries all round the nave came within four feet of the heads of the worshippers in the box pews. At that time £11,000 was spent on the restoration. This was in 1866, in which year the vicar, the Rev. William Moore, died, and he and his wife are buried in the nave; his parents, who had done so much for the church, are buried at Weston.
About two miles from Fulney is Wykeham chapel,[33] built in 1310 and attached to a country residence of the priors of Spalding; it is now only a ruin.
N. Side, Spalding Church.
PAINTED PILLARS
PINCHBECK