The tower, one of the finest bits of fourteenth century work in the kingdom, has four stages: first, the west door and window, both richly adorned with ballflower, reminiscent of the then recent work at Salisbury, to which North and South Grantham were attached as prebends. Then comes a stage of two bands of arcading on the western face only, and a band of quatrefoil diaper work all round. In the third stage are twin deep-set double-light windows and then come two very lofty double lights under one crocketed hood mould. Both this stage and the last show a very strong central mullion and the fourth, or belfry stage, has statued niches reaching to the parapet and filling the spandrils on either side of the window head. Inside the parapet at the south-west corner is a curious old stone arch like a sentry-box or bell turret. The magnificent angle buttresses are crowned by pinnacles, from within which rises the spire with three rows of lights and lines of crockets at each angle running up 140 feet above a tower of equal height. It seems at that distance to come to a slender point; but we are told that when it was struck by lightning in 1797 a mill-stone was set on the apex into which the weathercock was mortised. There are ten bells, a larger ring than is possessed by any church in the county but one, viz., Ewerby near Sleaford.
The date 1280 is assigned to the tower and north aisle because the windows of that aisle reproduce in the cusped circles of their head-lights the patterns of windows which had just a few years before been inserted in Salisbury chapter-house, and the west window of the aisle is a reduction to six lights of the great eight-light east window at Lincoln; but neither Lincoln great tower nor Salisbury spire had yet been built, and as they are the only buildings which are admitted to surpass Grantham steeple—the former in richness of detail, the latter in its soaring spire—and as Boston was not built till a hundred years later, nor Louth till 200 years after Boston, it is clear that in 1300 Grantham for height and beauty stood without a rival. Now-a-days, of course, we have both Boston and Louth, and have them in the same county, and though Sir Gilbert Scott puts Grantham as second only to Salisbury among English steeples, and though in the grandeur and interest of its interior as well as in the profuse ornamentation of its exterior Louth cannot compete with it at all, yet there is in the delicate tapering lines of Louth spire and the beautiful way in which it rises from its lofty tower-pinnacles connected with their four pairs of light flying buttresses a satisfying grace and a beauty of proportion which no other church seems to possess; and when we look closely at the somewhat aimless bands of diaper work and arcading in the second stage of Grantham tower and then turn to the harmonious simplicity of the three stages in the Louth tower and the incomparable beauty of the belfry lights with their crocketed hood-mouldings which are carried up in lines ascending like a canopy to the pinnacled parapet, it seems to satisfy the eye and the desire for beauty and symmetry in the fullest possible measure.
The church has not a great number of monuments; that to Richard de Salteby, 1362, is the earliest, and there is, besides the Malham tomb, one of the Harrington family, and a huge erection to Chief Justice Ryder, whose descendants derive their title of Harrowby from a hamlet close by. There are two libraries in the church, one with no less than seventy-four chained books. But a church forms a bad library, and many are gone and some of the best are mutilated, for as Tennyson says in “The Village Wife”:—
“The lasses ’ed teäred out leäves i’ the middle to kindle the fire.”
Only here it was not the lasses but the mediæval verger.
Grantham Church.
The bowl of the font has most interesting carved panels of the Annunciation, the Magi, the Nativity, Circumcision, Baptism, Blessing of Children, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and one other. The oak chancel screen and the parcloses by Scott, the reredos by Bodley, and the rest of the oak fittings by Blomfield, are all very good. The screen takes the place of the old stone screen which is quite gone. There is some excellent modern glass, and for those who understand heraldry, I might mention that in the east window were once many coats of arms of which Marrat gives a list with notes by Gervase Holles, from which I gather that the armorial glass was very fine, and that the arms of “La Warre” are “G. crusily, botony, fitchy, a lion rampant or.” It is pleasant to know this, even if one does not quite understand it.