he will rais to the enjoyment of the same.
It is curious to find notes on stature and complexion in an epitaph, but it was only lately that I saw a tomb slab in the church of Dorchester-on-Thames, where, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, some of our Lindsey bishops had their Bishop-stool (see Cap. [XII.]), on which it was thought worth while to record, inter alia, that Rebekah Granger who died in 1753 was “respectful to her friends, and chearful and innocent in her deportment”; whilst close by is a somewhat minute description of the nervous idiosyncrasy of Mrs. S. Fletcher, who died in 1799 at the age of 29, ending with “She sank and died a martyr to excessive sensibility.”
The feature of the church is the Norman chancel arch with double moulding. It is especially interesting as showing that the carving of the stones which form the arch was done not by plan but by eye; though the same pattern goes throughout, no two stones are exactly similar, and the pattern is larger or smaller as the mason cut it by guess, and has two zigzags or two and a half accordingly, and therefore the pattern in some places does not properly meet, but the whole effect is all right. The manor was held by the Threckingham family in the fourteenth century, and their arms are in one of the windows. In the feet of fines, Lincoln file 86, we have an agreement between Lambert de Trikingham and Robert, son of Walter le Clerk, of Trikingham, and Hawysia his wife, made at Westminster in the second year of Edward II. (1319). The lady with this charming name seeming to have afterwards married Sir Henry de Wellington, for in the thirty-second year of Edward III. (1359) another settlement is recorded of a dispute about Somerby Manor between Enericus de Welyngton Miles and Hawysia his wife on one side, and John Bluet and Alan Rynsley (one of the sixteen various spellings of Rawnsley) and his wife Margaret on the other, by which Alan and Margaret, for conceding their claims, receive 100 marks of silver. This and much other interesting information is to be found in a paper on The Manor of Somerby, by Gilbert George Walker, rector of the parish.
In the fifteenth century John Bluet held the living, one of whose ancestors was probably the civilian with his feet on a fleece, whose fine recumbent effigy is in Harlaxton church. His daughter married Robert Bawde, whose brass is in the church, and their family were in possession till 1720. A large monument on the north wall commemorates Elizabeth Lady Brownlow, née Freke, whose son John built Belton House. She died in 1684. There is also a brass to Peregrine Bradshaw and his wife, who died in 1669 and 1673.
Dr. William Stukeley, the famous antiquary, who was a Lincolnshire man, born at Holbeach in 1687, was, at one time, rector of Somerby.
Ropsley, two and a half miles to the east, shows some ‘Long and Short’ Saxon work at the north-east angle of the nave. The tower has a Decorated broach spire. At the south porch is the couplet,
“Hac non vade via
Nisi dices Ave Maria.”
BISHOP FOX
The church has also a very notable little stained glass window with an armed figure of Johannes de Welby. In the church a curious broad projection from the east window of the north aisle forms a bridge to the rood loft. In the eyes of a Corpus man, like the writer, Ropsley is sacred as being the birthplace of Bishop Fox, who held successively the sees of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham and Winchester, and founded, or helped to found, the Grantham Grammar School near his old home in 1528, and also, in 1516, the College of Corpus Christi, Oxford.