Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

Fox endowed his school with the revenue of two chantries, which before the dissolution belonged to the church of St. Peter. This church is gone, but doubtless it stood on St. Peter’s Hill on lands which had been granted by Æslwith, before the Conquest, to the abbey of Peterborough. Close by now is a good bronze statue of Sir Isaac Newton, and once there was an Eleanor cross, which, with those at Lincoln and Stamford, were destroyed by the fanatical soldiery in 1645.

ST. WULFRAM’S

We now come to the great feature of the town, its magnificent church dedicated to St. Wulfram, Archbishop of Sens, 680. We might almost call this the third church, for the first has entirely disappeared though its foundations remain beneath the floor of the eastern part of the nave, and the second has been so enlarged and added to, that it is now practically a different building; the tower, built at the end of the thirteenth century, belongs entirely to number three.

The ground plan is singularly simple, one long parallelogram nearly 200 feet long and eighty feet wide, with no transepts, its only projections being the north and south porches and the “Hall” chapel used as a vestry.

THE INTERIOR

The second, or Norman, church, ended two bays east of the present tower, as is plain to see from the second pillar from the tower being, as is the case in Peterborough Cathedral, composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on either side, the western respond being of much later character than the eastern. If the chancel was originally as it is now, it must have been as long as the nave, but the nave then perhaps included two of the chancel bays. At present the lengthening of the nave westward and the adding of the tower has made the nave twice the length of the chancel. At first the church had just a nave and a chancel, but, about 1180, aisles were added to the nave; to do this the nave walls were taken down and the eastern responds made, which we have just spoken of, and the beautiful clustered columns of the arcades, three on each side, set up. The aisles were narrow and probably covered by a lean-to roof. The arches springing from these columns would be round-headed, the pointed arches we see now being the work of a century later, when much wider north and south aisles were built; that on the north being on a particularly grand and massive scale. The westernmost bay on either side was made nearly twice the width of the others so as to correspond with the breadth of the tower, because one of the features of the church is that the two aisles run out westwards and align with the tower, and as the chapels on either side run out in the same way eastwards, as far as the chancel, we get the parallelogram above mentioned. As you enter the west door you are at once struck by the great size of the tower piers, and next you will notice the beauty of the tower arch, with its mouldings five deep. There is no chancel arch, and the church has one long roof from end to end. The aisles are very wide, and the pillars tall and slender, so that you are able to see over the whole body of the church as if it were one big hall. Curiously, the west window of the south aisle is not in the centre of the wall, and looks very awkward. Below it is a bookcase lined with old books. There are two arched recesses for tombs in the south wall, and there is a monument between two of the south arcade pillars, where a black marble top to an altar tomb is inscribed to Francis Malham de Elslacke, 1660. The east end of the north aisle is used as a morning chapel. A tall gilt reredos much blocks the chancel east window. When I last visited the church the north and south doorways being wide open gave the church plenty of wholesome fresh air, so different from the well-known Sabbath “frowst” which, in the days of high pews, and when a church was only opened on Sunday, never departed from the building.

THE TOWER

The north porch is very large, and has a passage-way east and west right through; it was built with the north aisle about 1280, and was extended and a room built over it about 1325, when the head of the north doorway was much mutilated to let the floor in, at the same time a Lady chapel was constructed on the south side of the chancel, and with a double vaulted crypt, entered from outside, and also from the chancel, by a beautiful staircase with richly carved doorway. The rood screen was also built now, on which was an altar served by the chaplain daily at 5 a.m. “after the first stroke of the bell which is called Daybelle.” It is said that this bell is still rung daily from Lady Day to Michaelmas, but whether at 5 o’clock deponent sayeth not. The Lincoln daybell rang at 6. To reach this rood loft there is an octagon turret with a staircase on the south side at the junction of the nave and chancel. The south porch has also a staircase to the upper chamber, and the north porch has two turreted staircases, probably for the ingress and egress of pilgrims to the sacred relics kept there. Besides this there were at least five chantries attached to the church; the latest of these were the fifteenth century Corpus Christi chapel along the north side of the chancel, and the contiguous “Hall” chapel which dates from the fifteenth century. There is a good corbel table all along the aisles outside, and the west front is very fine and striking.

But the great glory of the building is the steeple. We have seen that the nave runs up to the large eastern piers of the tower, and the aisles run on past each side of it as far as the western piers, and so with the tower form a magnificent western façade, examples of which might even then have been seen at Newark, which was begun before Grantham, and at Tickhill near Doncaster.

LINCOLNSHIRE SPIRES