Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

ALKBOROUGH

The church at Alkborough was, like Croyland, a bone of contention between the monks of Spalding and Peterborough, each claiming it as a gift from the founder Thorold, in 1052. Tradition says that it was partly rebuilt by the three knights, Brito, Tracy, and Morville, who had taken refuge in this most remote corner of Lincolnshire, where one of them lived, after their murder of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The original Early tower and tower-arch remain, and a fragment of a very early cross is now to be seen by the north pier. One of the bells has this inscription:—

“Jesu for yi Modir sake

Save all ye sauls that me gart make.”

BURTON-STATHER

In the village is a really beautiful old Tudor house of brick, with stone mullions, called Walcot Old Hall, the property of J. Goulton Constable, Esq. The little isolated bit of chalk wold which begins near Walcot is but four miles long, and in the centre of it is perched the village of Burton-Stather. The church stands on the very edge of the cliff, and a steep road leads down to the Staithe, a ferry landing stage, from which the village gets its name. Here, at a turn in the road, close to the village pump, still in universal use by the road side, we stopped to admire the wide and delightful view. The Trent was just below us. Garthorpe, where the other side of the ferry has its landing place, was in front, across the Trent lay the Isle of Axholme, green but featureless, and beyond it the sinuous Ouse, like a great gleaming snake, with the smoke of Goole rising up across the wide plain, and beyond the river, Howden tower; while, on a clear day, Selby Abbey and York Minster can be seen from the churchyard. We leave the village by an avenue of over-arching trees, and cross the Wold obliquely, passing Normanby Hall, the residence of Sir B. D. Sheffield, many of whose ancestors are buried in Burton-Stather church, and leaving the height, descend into a plain filled with smoke from the tall chimneys of the Scunthorpe and Frodingham iron furnaces. To come all at once on this recent industrial centre is a surprise after the bright clear atmosphere and keen air in which we have been revelling all day. But we soon leave the tall chimneys behind and find that the road divides; the left passing over to the “Cliff” at Raventhorpe near Broughton on the Ermine Street, and continuing south past Manton, where the black-headed gull, “Larus Ridibundus,” the commonest of all the gulls on the south coast of England, breeds on land belonging to Sir Sutton Nelthorpe of Scawby, to Kirton in Lindsey, and so by Blyborough, Willoughton, Hemswell, and Harpswell, to Spital-on-the-Street; and thence by Glentworth and Fillingham to Lincoln.

Of these places Blyborough is curiously dedicated to St. Alkmund, a Northumbrian Saint, to whom also is dedicated a church founded in the ninth century by the daughter of Alfred the Great in Shrewsbury. Willoughton once had a preceptory of the Templars, founded in 1170.

Harpswell in its Early Norman, or possibly pre-Norman, tower has a mid-wall shaft carved with chevron ornament, similar to that in the upper of two sets of early double lights on the south side of the tower of Appleton-le-Strey near Malton in Yorkshire. It also possesses a clock which was given in memory of the victory at Culloden, 1746. Moreover it contains several fine monuments; but Glentworth and Fillingham are of more interest than all these. Glentworth, for its very interesting church, and Fillingham, because from 1361 to 1368 it was the home of the great John Wyclif, who held the living as a ‘fellow’ of Balliol College, Oxford.

WYCLIF

Wyclif was made Master of Balliol in 1360, and became rector of Fillingham in the same year. In 1368 he moved to Ludgershall in Bucks, and in 1374 to Lutterworth, where he died on December 31, 1384. He was a consistent opposer of the doctrine of transubstantiation, for which he was condemned by the University of Oxford; and he renounced allegiance to the Pope, who issued no less than five Bulls against him. The Archbishop of Canterbury persecuted him in his latter years, and forty-four years after his death his bones were exhumed and burnt by order of the Synod of Constance, and the ashes cast into the Swift. He made the first complete translation of the Bible into English from the Vulgate, and in this he was assisted by Nicolas of Hereford, who took the Old Testament, Wyclif doing the New. Chaucer, who died in 1400, thus describes him in his Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”:—