Going out of Spalding northwards, three miles bring us to Pinchbeck, which was an important village in Saxon times, and attached to Croyland Abbey, where a fine tower with six bells leans to the north-west. It is approached by a lime avenue. There are two rows of diaper carved work round the base of the tower, and large canopied niches on either side of the west door. The old roof on the north aisle is good, the pillars of the nave are spoilt by a hideous coat of purple paint. A delightful old brass weathercock is preserved in the church, and over the south porch is a dial. The high narrow tower-arch is a pleasure to look on. The altar tomb of Sir Thomas Pinchbeck (1500) has heraldic shields all round it, but is quite outdone by a brass of Margaret Lambert, a very ugly one, but adorned with twenty-seven heraldic coats of arms of her husband and fifteen of her own. The ten fine Perpendicular clerestory windows of three lights give the church a handsome appearance, and show the large wooden angels in the roof, who used to hold shields bearing the achievements of the house of “Pynchebek.”
Pinchbeck.
The Custs.
THE CUST FAMILY
There is another name connected with this place, for one of the oldest Lincolnshire families is that of the Custs, or Costes, who have held land in Pinchbeck and near Bicker Haven for fourteen generations: though the first known mention of the name is not in the fens but at Navenby, where one Osbert Coste had held land in King John’s reign.
The neighbourhood of Croyland Abbey, of Spalding Priory, and of Boston Haven, with its large wool trade, made “Holland” a district of considerable importance, and led some of the more enterprising mercantile families to settle in the neighbourhood.
The same causes occasioned the building of the fine fen churches, which still remain, though the great houses have disappeared. Custs settled in Gosberton and Boston as well as at Pinchbeck. At the latter place, what is now the River Glen was in the fifteenth century called the “Bourne Ee,” or Eau, and the road by it was the “Ee Gate.” Here Robert Cust in 1479 lived in “The Great House at Croswithand,” in which was a large hall open to the roof and strewed with rushes, with hangings in it to partition off sleeping places for the guests or the sons of the house, the daughters sharing the parlour with their parents. Robert is called a “Flaxman,” that being the crop by which men began to make their fortunes in Pinchbeck Fen. He continually added small holdings to his modest property as opportunity arose, and his son Hugh, succeeding in 1492, did the same; buying two acres from “Thomas Sykylbrys Franklin” for 50s. and one and a half from Robert Sparowe for £5, and so on. Hugh is styled in 1494 “flax chapman,” in 1500 he had advanced to “Yeoman.” He then had three farms of sixty-nine acres, and by economy and industry he not only lived, but lived comfortably, and had money to buy fresh land, though his will shows that things were on a small scale still, so that individual mention is made of his “black colt with two white feet behind.” After the death of his two sons, Hugh’s grandson Richard succeeded in 1554, and married the juvenile widow, Milicent Slefurth née Beele, who brought him the lands of R. Pereson, the wealthy vicar of Quadring, with a house at Moneybridge on the Glen, which she left eventually to her second son, Richard. His grandson Samuel took to the legal profession, and, disdaining the parts of Holland after life in London, left the house there to his brother Joshua, who was the last Cust to live at Pinchbeck. The family were by this time wealthy, and had a good deal of land round Boston and elsewhere. Samuel’s son, Richard, married in 1641 Beatrice Pury, and had a son called Pury, whence spring the Purey Custs. The Pury family then lived at Kirton, near Boston. He left the law for a soldier’s life, and was “captain of a Trained Band in the Wapentake of Skirbeck in the parts of Holland.” He succeeded his father in 1663 and lived, after the Restoration, at Stamford. In 1677, by interest and the payment of £1,000, he obtained a baronetcy. His son, Sir Pury Cust, who had been knighted by William III. in 1690, after the battle of the Boyne, in which he commanded a troop of horse under the Duke of Schomberg, died in 1698, two years before his father. His wife, Ursula, the heiress of the Woodcock family of Newtimber, had died at the age of twenty-four in 1683. Her monument is in St. George’s church, Stamford. She traced back her family to Joan, “the fair maid of Kent,” through Joan’s second husband, John Lord Holland, if we are to take it that she was really married first, and not simply engaged when a girl to Lord Salisbury. At all events, her last husband was the Black Prince, by whom she was mother of Richard II. Her father was Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the sixth son of Edward I.
In 1768 Sir John Cust was Speaker of the House of Commons. The present head of the Cust family is the Earl of Brownlow.
