It is very pleasant to find that the number are so decidedly on the increase of clergymen who take an interest in the past history of their churches, and write all they can find out about them, either in their parish magazines or in a separate pamphlet. Some of these, too, take pains with their old registers, and if only the rector, or someone in the parish whom he could trust to do the work with skill, care, and knowledge, would copy the old sixteenth and seventeenth century registers in a clear hand, the parish would be in possession of the most interesting of all local documents in a legible form, and the originals could be safely housed in a dry place, which is by no means the case with all of them at present, and no longer be subjected to the wear and tear of rough handling and the decay from damp which has been so fatal to the earliest pages of most of them.
The printing and placing more frequently in the church of a card, pointing out the salient features and giving what is known of the history of the building, would also be a boon to those visitors who know something of architecture, and would stimulate a taste for it in others, and a respect for old work, the lack of which has been the cause of so much destruction under the specious name of restoration in the earlier half of the past century. Things are much better now than they were two generations ago, but ignorance and want of means may still cause irreparable damage, which, if the above suggestion were universally carried out, would become less and less possible.
CHURCH PATRONAGE
Amongst those who take the greatest interest in their churches I am especially indebted to the Rev. G. G. Walker, Rector of Somerby near Grantham, the Rev. Canon Sutton, of Brant Broughton, the Rev. F. McKenzie, of Great Hale near Sleaford, and the Rev. C. H. Laing, of Bardney, who has done such good work in the excavation of the famous abbey. The writer, too, of letters in The Spilsby and Horncastle Gazette, on town and village life in Lincolnshire, brings together much interesting information. From him I gather that as far back as 668, when Theodore was Archbishop of Canterbury, local provision was made for the village clergy who were then, of course, but few in number. His wise arrangement, that those who built a church should have the right of choosing their pastor, initiated the system of private patronage and thereby encouraged the building and endowing of churches, so that it is not surprising to hear that in Domesday Book—400 years later than Theodore’s time—the county of Lincolnshire had no less than 226 churches. The original patron often gave the right of presentation to an abbey, which was a wise plan, as it ensured to the people a pastor, and to the pastor an adequate means of living, and provided for the building and upkeep of the church, which was often larger than the population of the village warranted either then or since.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NORTH-WEST
Winteringham—Alkborough and “Julian’s Bower”—Burton-Stather—Scunthorpe and Frodingham—Fillingham and Wycliff—Glentworth and Sir Christopher Wray—Laughton—Corringham—Gainsborough—The Old Hall—Lea and Sir Charles Anderson—Knaith and Sir Thomas Sutton—A Group of Early Church Towers—Lincolnshire Roads.
It is quite a surprise to the traveller in the north of the county to find so much that is really pretty in what looks on the map, from the artistic point of view, a trifle “flat and unprofitable,” but really there are few prettier bits of road in the county than that by “the Villages” under the northern Wolds, and there is another little bit of cliff near the mouth of the Trent which affords equally picturesque bits of village scenery combined with fine views over the Trent, Ouse, and Humber.
From South Ferriby a byway runs alongside the water to Winteringham, from whence the Romans must have had a ferry to Brough, whence their great road went on to the north.
In Winteringham church there are some good Norman arches, and a fine effigy of a knight in armour, said to be one of the Marmions. The road hence takes us by innumerable turns to West Halton, where the church is dedicated to St. Etheldreda, who is said to have hidden here from her husband Ecgfrith, when she was fleeing to Ely, at which place she founded the first monastery, in 672, six years before the building of the church at Stow. Murray notes that in the “Liber Eliensis” Halton is called Alftham.