Memorials of the Counties of England

General Editor:
Rev. P. H. Ditchfield, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.S.L., F.R.H.

Memorials of
Old Lincolnshire

Lincoln Cathedral, Evening.

E. R. Taylor pinx. Andre & Sleigh Sc.

Memorials of
Old Lincolnshire

EDITED BY
E. MANSEL SYMPSON, M.A., M.D.
Author of “Lincoln” (Ancient Cities)
Co-Editor of “Lincolnshire Notes and Queries”

With many Illustrations

LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN & SONS, RUSKIN HOUSE
RATHBONE PLACE
1911

[All Rights Reserved]

Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press, Edinburgh

TO THE
RIGHT HONOURABLE
EARL BROWNLOW
LORD-LIEUTENANT OF LINCOLNSHIRE
THIS VOLUME
IS
DEDICATED
BY KIND PERMISSION

PREFACE

Lincolnshire, perhaps, is known most widely as the second largest county in England, as pre-eminent in agriculture and stock-breeding on wold, heath, marsh, and fen, as well to the fore in the manufacture of agricultural and other machinery, as possessing the largest fishing-port in Europe (Grimsby), and as being associated with “The Handicap.”

But, apart from all these, she can boast of very many attractions for the traveller and the antiquary. Flat and low though her shores may be, yet there is a fascination in the great extent of “yellow sands”; and there is a recompense for the level plain of marsh or fen in the vast expanse of sky, where “The incomparable pomp of eve, And the cold glories of the dawn,” are seen at their finest.

And the views are wonderful: from Alkborough, over the junction of the Trent, the Ouse, and the Humber; from Lincoln, over the plateau eastwards to the wolds, or westwards over the valley of the Trent to the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire hills; or eastwards, from the edge of the “high wold,” over the great plain

“That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main.”

The county possesses the birthplaces of Newton, Tennyson, Henry of Bolingbroke, Archbishop Whitgift, and John Wesley. She has produced explorers like Franklin, and heroes of romance and reality like Sir John Bolles (the hero of the Spanish Lady ballad) and Captain John Smith of Willoughby (who was rescued by Pocahontas). St. Botolph, St. Guthlac, and St. Gilbert of Sempringham were all Lincolnshire in origin and life, and the latter founded the only monastic order (that of the Gilbertines) which originated in this country.

The monastic institutions of this county have had to be passed by in this volume. Although there are no vast or splendid remains (if Thornton Abbey gate-house and Crowland be excepted) above ground, still the excavations of the Rev. C. G. Laing at Bardney Abbey have proved how large and beautiful one at least of those buildings was.

The city of Lincoln, again, demanding a volume to itself, has not been dealt with here, save in so far as it appears in Roman times.

The greatest and noblest “memorial” of all is, of course, the mighty Minster, superb in its architecture and in its situation, with its great roll of bishops from St. Hugh and Grosseteste to Christopher Wordsworth and the much beloved, most saintly, Edward King. But this subject could not be treated of piecemeal, and has been deliberately omitted.

But Lincolnshire is particularly rich in splendid and interesting churches, and much will be found in this volume to justify these epithets.

Stamford, Boston, and Grantham all have had full justice done to them, while Tattershall Castle may well serve as a specimen of the best domestic building of the time of King Henry VI., as Doddington does of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth.”

The history of the county has been interesting, and at times very important. The wars of King Stephen, the battle of “Lincoln Fair,” the Lincolnshire rising in 1470, and the second insurrection in 1536 at the suppression of the monasteries, have had to be passed over; but the pre-historic facts, those of the Roman rule, and of the great Civil War will be found.

To the Rev. P. H. Ditchfield, the General Editor of this series, and to the Rev. G. E. Jeans, whose knowledge of Lincolnshire is unequalled, for much kind help and advice; to all my contributors, and to all who have given photographs or illustrations, I desire to tender my most sincere thanks.

E. Mansel Sympson.

Deloraine Court, Lincoln,
November 1910.

Note.—As the County of Lincoln possesses no heraldic bearings, the Lord Bishop has kindly permitted the use of the coat-of-arms of the See of Lincoln to be used on the cover of this volume.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ERRATA

PREHISTORIC LINCOLNSHIRE

By the Rev. Alfred Hunt, M.A.

That part of England which we now know as Lincolnshire passed through great changes in its surface before the advent of mankind.

The rocks which lie beneath the surface soil in this county are all made by deposit, for several thousand feet in thickness, and are what are called stratified rocks. They indicate the fact that in past periods of time Lincolnshire was all under a great sea. Occasionally in the limestone rocks are found small branches or pieces of trees, as well as great quantities of fossils of many kinds. The fact that oak and silver birch twigs are found inside the limestone shows that trees were growing elsewhere when the rocks were being laid down by the action of water in Lincolnshire.

Beneath the limestone are found thick beds of red sandstone, while still deeper down, over 3000 feet below the surface, lie beds of coal in the north-western part of the county—indicating vast changes in the land since what is now coal was first formed.

After the deposit or formation of these thick beds of rock, the land seems to have been raised above the surface of the sea, to be in turn covered with vast sheets of ice, called glaciers.

These glaciers extended all over Lincolnshire and up into North Britain above Aberdeen in the one case, and joined another vast glacier stretching right across what is now called the North Sea to land which is known to-day as Norway.

These glaciers carried on their surface blocks of rock of many kinds, some of an igneous nature, and as the glaciers moved slowly the fragments of rock were carried many miles from their original source. As the ice melted, these blocks of rock fell to the ground, and are now found all over Lincolnshire.

The time when these glaciers of Britain melted away is given by Lord Avebury[1] as about fifty thousand years ago, but they “may have lingered among the mountains, and occupied some of the valleys down to a much more recent period.”

The deepest borings in Lincolnshire have not yet reached the fiery or igneous rocks in situ, except in the Isle of Axholme; therefore those fragments of igneous rocks found on the surface, or in the soil, or in glacial clays, indicate that they have been transported from their original source, which, in certain instances, is as far distant as Norway.

Since the melting of the most recent glacier, other great changes have taken place in the surface of the land, owing to elevations and depressions, and the action of rain, frost, and denudation over wide areas.

A vast forest (now submerged) formerly existed right along the edge of the east coast of Lincolnshire; at specially low tides it is seen exposed at Chapel St. Leonards, Ingoldmells, and other places on the East Coast.

When the Romans came to Britain, and began their conquest or occupation of Lincolnshire, A.D. 50, they found extensive portions in the south-east of the county covered by great meres stretching many miles in extent. In the south-western part of the county were extensive forests; in the north-western part of the county was the island, now called the Isle of Axholme; but during the Roman occupation, and for centuries afterwards, were vast sheets of fresh water, with here and there an island or islet standing out above the surrounding meres. On the eastern side of the county, along the sea-board, the Romans built extensive banks or sea walls.

Prior to the Roman occupation of Lincolnshire, a race or different races of people lived in the land we now know as the county of Lincolnshire; and it is of this period that we write regarding the earliest known races of mankind in the county.

The different races of mankind in the Prehistoric Ages or Periods have been tabulated as—

• 1. The Eolithic Man, or Dawn of the Stone Age.
• 2. The Paleolithic Man, or the Old Stone Age, subdivided by Professor Dawkins as (a) The River Drift Man and (b) Cave Man.[2]
• 3. The Neolithic Man, or New Stone Age.
• 4. The Pygmy Man.
• 5. The Bronze Age, subdivided as Early and Late Bronze Periods.
• 6. The Prehistoric Iron Age.
• 7. The Iron Age of the Roman Period.

We will deal with each of these races separately as they concern Lincolnshire.

The Eolithic Period

Of this period no traces of the work of mankind have been found in the county of Lincolnshire.

It is a period which some experts strongly affirm show traces of the work of man in other more southern parts of Britain; so far as our experience by definite research has extended, we are not satisfied with the evidence offered, and prefer to keep an open mind.

The Paleolithic Period, or Old Stone Age

Many thousands of specimens of man’s work in this period or age have been found in Southern England—that is, as we define it south of a line drawn from the Severn to the Wash—but none of these old rough stone weapons have been found in situ in Lincolnshire. From the facts presented by geology and a careful study of the county, it would appear that, while Paleolithic Man existed in the south of England, north of an imaginary line from the Wash to the Severn no traces of mankind have been found relating to the Paleolithic Period. It is probable that the great glaciers covered what is now known as Lincolnshire and Northern Britain in that period, and formed an inaccessible barrier to the progress of mankind.

The River Drift Period and the Period of Cave Man

In these ages or periods, mankind found a home in the caves of North Yorkshire, at Kirkdale and on both sides of Cresswell Craggs, the boundary line between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Quite recently[3] discoveries have been made at Upper Langwith, also on the borders of the two counties, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, showing unmistakable signs of Cave Man dwellings and handiwork. While these places are not far geographically from Lincolnshire, yet, to be accurate, no trace of Cave Man or River Drift Man has been found in what is now the county of Lincolnshire.[4]

The Neolithic Period

It is in this period we first find traces of mankind in Lincolnshire. Various burial places and many finds of implements show how widely Neolithic Man spread over and occupied the county.

These implements are described as stone axes, spear-heads, lance-heads, arrow-heads, scrapers, gouges, chisels, pot-boilers, knives, borers, graving tools, hammer stones, whetstones, polishers, sink stones, anvil stones. A list of the places where these “finds” have been recorded is as follows:—

• *Alkborough.
• Barlings.
• *Billinghay.
• Branston.
• Brigg.
• Broughton.
• *Burwell.
• *Bully Hill.
• Caythorpe.
• Claxby, near Alford (flint flakes).
• Cold Harbour.
• *Cold Hanworth.
• Crowle.
• Coningsby Warren.
• Coxey Hills, near Louth.
• Doddington.
• Donington-on-Bain.
• Elkington, South.
• Fiskerton.
• Fotherby.
• Friskney.
• Ferriby, South.
• Gonerby.
• Gonerby, Little.
• *Haxey.
• Healing (arrow-head).
• Horncastle.
• Hubbard’s Hills, Louth.
• Irby.
• *Isle of Axholme.
• Keal, West (arrow-heads).
• Kelstern.
• Kirkstead (axe-head).
• Kirton-in-Lindsey.
• *Legbourn.
• *Lincoln.
• *Lynwode.
• *Mablethorpe.
• Maidenwell.
• Manton.
• Messingham.
• Newport, Lincoln.
• Nocton (axe-head).
• Ponton, Great.
• Potterhanworth.
• Reepham.
• *Ruckland.
• *Salmonby.
• Saxilby.
• *Scawby.
• *Scunthorpe (arrow-heads).
• Sleaford.
• Spalding (spear-head).
• Stewton.
• *Stow.
• Tathwell.
• Tetford (arrow-heads).
• Welton, by Lincoln (whetstone).
• Wragby.
• Woodhall.
• *Witham River.

Those marked with an asterisk (*) are to be seen in the County Museum at Lincoln.

Many of these implements are excellent specimens of the art and skill of the Neolithic workers in stone. For the purpose for which they were made, they seem to have served well.

The axe-heads have been (in some cases) made to be used with wood handles formed out of the branches of trees. In the course of ages the handles have perished, but the stone implement remains.

Often people unacquainted with the subject of stone implements ask, “How do these stone implements differ from stone forms of natural shape?” There are several points for students to notice about “Worked Stone Implements.” The points to be noticed with the Old Stone or Paleolithic Implements are as follows:—

• 1. The Flat Top, where the blow was struck to separate the implement from the flint nodule.
• 2. The Bulb of Percussion caused by the blow.
• 3. The Conchoidal Fracture or shell-like flake.
• 4. The Flaking off at the back.
• 5. The Dorsal Ridge or Ridges.
• 6. The Secondary Working, round the edges.
• 7. The Patina or Skin, the result of exposure to the weather.

In the characteristics of the New Stone Implements, or Neolithic Stones, which are found in Lincolnshire, the points to be noticed are—

• 1. The Definite Shaping of the Stone.
• 2. The Worked Edges of the Implement.
• 3. The Piercing or Socketing of the Stone.
• 4. The Patination of the Implement.

The Neolithic Boats

Several boats made out of the trunks of trees have been found in the county—

• Two at Lincoln.
• One at Scotter.
• Two at Castlethorpe, near Brigg.

One of the two boats found at Castlethorpe was an exceptionally fine specimen of the Neolithic boat craft. In length it was 45 feet, and 5½ feet wide inside, made out of an oak tree trunk. Within the boat was found a very fine polished stone axe-head.

The interior of the boat showed that it had probably been charred, and scraped or chopped out with a stone hatchet.

The boat is now transferred from Brigg to the Hull Museum.

Pottery of the Neolithic Period

Very little pottery of this period has been found in the county.

One very good specimen of a jar or vase, broken in pieces, was found by Mr. S. Maudson Grant on the sea-coast, outside the Roman Bank at Ingoldmells.

This specimen is now deposited in the Lincoln Museum.

Neolithic Burial Places

The burial places of early man in Lincolnshire must have been very numerous, judging from the remains we still have surviving to this day. These people were buried in barrows or large mounds of earth, which are called “Tumuli.”

In Lincolnshire the barrows are of two classes, called Long Barrows and Round Barrows.

The Long Barrow is the oldest form of interment, and belonged to the race of people called Dolicho-cephalic, or long-headed people. Sir John Lubbock says: “The Long Barrows are like the Gang-graben of Scandinavia, in which the dead are buried and not burnt.”

It is in the Long Barrows that we find this Neolithic race of people buried their dead in Lincolnshire.

One of the Long Barrows still exists at Swinhope, near Grimsby, and there are others in different parts of the county.

In a map of Lincolnshire, published about 1570, by Saxton, the position of some of the barrows was indicated. From that map we have compiled the following list, but the list includes both kinds of barrow, long and round—there being no indication on the map to distinguish the one form of barrow from the other:—

• Aukborough, 2.
• Ashby.
• Barkstone.
• Barnetby.
• Barrow, 2.
• Barton.
• Belton.
• Binbrook.
• Bonby.
• Boothby Graffoe.
• Bottesford, 2.
• Blyborough.
• Branston, 3.
• Braceby.
• Burton-upon-Stather, 2.
• Caburn.
• Carlton, North.
• Caythorpe.
• Clixby.
• Coleby.
• Coleby, near West Halton, 4.
• Cranwell.
• Croxby.
• Croxton.
• Cuxwold, 2.
• Dunston, 2.
• Ferriby, 2.
• Fillingham.
• Frodingham, 2.
• Fulbeck.
• Glentworth.
• Grange de Lings, 2.
• Grantham, 2.
• Harmston.
• Hatcliffe, 2.
• Haydour.
• Hemswell, 2.
• Horkstow, 2.
• Howsham.
• Hybaldstow, 2.
• Ingham.
• Kirmond le Mire.
• Limber, 2.
• Londonthorpe, 2.
• Manby.
• Manton, 2.
• Mere Hospital, 2.
• Messingham.
• Metheringham.
• Navenby, 2.
• Nettleham.
• Normanby.
• Normanton.
• Rauceby, 2.
• Redbourne.
• Riby.
• Riseholme.
• Rothwell.
• Ropsley.
• Rowston.
• Saxby.
• Scampton.
• Scawby.
• Scopwick.
• Scotter, 2.
• Scotton, 2.
• Searby.
• Southorp.
• Spridlington.
• Stainton le Vale.
• Thoresway, 2.
• Thornton, 3.
• Ulceby.
• Waddington, 2.
• Walesby.
• Walcot.
• Welby.
• Welton.
• Welton le Wold, 2.
• Willoughton.
• Wootton.
• Worlaby, 3.
• Wrawby.
• Wyham.

The custom of raising a mound over the place where the dead are buried is very ancient, widespread, and continuous to the present day: examples are to be seen in Egypt, India, America, and Britain. In its simple form it is seen in the village churchyard, in its greatest development it is seen in the magnificent pyramids of Egypt.

In the Long Barrows no metal implements are found unless they have been used for what are called “secondary interments.”

The date of these Long Barrows is variously stated; Canon Greenwell says, “probably 1000 B.C., but may be much earlier”; others say they were probably made 3000 B.C. or 5000 years ago. The definite date cannot be given, but only probabilities stated.

It is in this Neolithic Age that the bodies of the dead were placed in a cist or stone box; that is, large stones were placed round the body, and on these upright stones was fixed a covering stone.

One such system of burial was found at Rothwell, near Caistor, and another at Dunholme.

In nearly every case of burial of this kind, which is called Inhumation, the body has been placed facing the sun in a contracted position; that is, with the knees drawn up to the chin and lying on its side. Some specialists think this position indicates the sleeping attitude, others think it points to the fact that as the child entered into life in a contracted position, so the dead body was similarly placed for departure from life, with the possibility of entering into a new life after death.

Frequently by the side of the dead body were placed the weapons that he used when living—axe-heads, arrow-heads, knives, and spear-heads.

Life of the Neolithic People

Naturally we may ask how did these people live? The answer undoubtedly is by hunting, fishing, and fowling. They appear to have had large flocks of sheep, goats, and cattle, and possessed dug-out canoes or boats.

Their dwelling places were probably hut circles, but no remains of these have so far been found in the county of Lincolnshire.

Their care of the dead would lead us to suppose that, by comparison with similar practices in other parts of the world, they believed in a future state or future life.

Who were the Neolithic people?

This question has been asked by many, and the answer given by Professor Boyd Dawkins[5] and others is that they were Iberians, and are represented at the present time by the surviving Basque peoples of the Western Pyrenees, on the borders of Spain and France.

“By a chain of reasoning, purely zoological, we arrive at the important conclusion that the Neolithic inhabitants of the British Isles belong to the same non-Aryan section of mankind as the Basques, and that in ancient times they were spread through Spain as far south as the Pillars of Hercules, and as far to the north-east as Germany and Denmark.”

The Pygmy Race of Man in Lincolnshire

One of the most recent discoveries regarding Prehistoric Man in Lincolnshire is the finding of some thousands of diminutive flint implements at Scunthorpe, Manton Common, and Scotton, in North Lincolnshire. At the suggestion of the writer of this article, Mr. E. E. Brown made a careful search at Scunthorpe in A.D. 1900, and found some thirty or forty specimens.

Since then the Rev. Reginald Gatty, the Rev. Alfred Hunt, and others have found hundreds of specimens at Scunthorpe.

The Pygmy Flints are of various forms and sizes. Similar forms and shapes have been found in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, Sussex, and elsewhere in England. On the Continent similar forms of Pygmy Flints have been found in Belgium, France, and Germany. They have also been found in Egypt, Palestine, North and Central Africa, and in great numbers on the Vindhya Mountains, India.

The bodies or bones of these Pygmy people have been found at Sohâgi Ghât, on the Vindhya Mountains, in Germany, and at Bungay, Suffolk, quite recently, by Mr. H. A. Dutt, of Lowestoft.[6]

The Pygmy Flints all show points characteristic of the work of man:—

• 1. The Bulb of Percussion.
• 2. The Conchoidal Fractures running down the flint.
• 3. The Dorsal Ridges on the back of the flint.
• 4. The Secondary Working along one edge.
• 5. The Patina or Skin, the result of weathering.

Their shapes have been described as—

• Crescent-shaped.
• Triangular or Scalene.
• Arrow-head.
• Round-headed and pointed.
• Chisel-shaped.
• Trapezoid or Rhomboidal.
• Flint knives with serrated edges.

They are figured in the British Museum Handbook to the Stone Age, on p. 110, Fig. 132.

They are beautifully made, and show extraordinary keen sight in those who made them—frequently one side only shows secondary working, and the chipping is so finely done that often twenty and thirty different chips have been made on a fine thin edge of flint in the length of half an inch.

The question has been asked, how may we know Pygmy Flints are the work of mankind? Practically by the same method that we know other flint or stone implements are the handiwork of man. Examine these Pygmy Flints closely, and you will be able to trace—

• 1. The Bulb of Percussion, showing where the blow was struck to separate the flake from the flint nodule.
• 2. The Conchoidal Fracture running down the length of the flint.
• 3. The Dorsal Ridges on the back of the flint.
• 4. The Secondary Working along one edge.
• 5. The Patina or Skin, the result of weathering or exposure.

These distinct characteristics prove these flints are no haphazard flakings from a flint core.

When you can pick up these Pygmy Flints, and show all these peculiarities, you are able to convince reasonable men that they are the work of a race of people, who, with keen vision and clever handiwork, were able to make tools which have outlived their own age and race by many thousands of years.

Similarity in Design

One point of great interest in these widely scattered Pygmy Flints is the great similarity in design. So much is this similarity carried out that, if you place a Scunthorpe specimen beside one found on the Vindhya Hills in India, it is almost impossible to say which is from the one place and which is from the other.

This similarity in design has led many specialists to think that the Pygmy Flints of Scunthorpe are the work of a migrating people, who passed over from India through Asia and Europe to Britain. Amongst those who accept this theory are Dr. Gatty and Vincent A. Smith, M.A., of the Indian Civil Service, one of the greatest specialists we have on this subject.

What was the Use of these Pygmy Flints?

Various conjectures have been made as to the use of these small flint implements. They must have been made for human daily use and need.

Arrow Points are easily accounted for as used in hunting—being, it is supposed, fastened to wood shafts; which is still the practice of Australian savages.

Fishing Hooks is another very natural suggestion for some of the forms; when fixed with sinew or gut, the triangular form makes a specially suitable hook to catch in the throat of fish.

Knives is undoubtedly another use to which some specimens are adapted; the clear cut edge would, even after the lapse of thousands of years, cut flesh of animals at the present time.

Boring Tools, for making holes to sew skins together for clothing purposes, is also a natural theory for other specimens of these Pygmy Flints.

Chisels for scraping and shaping wood handles or hafts of their tools is also another suggestion, which is highly probable from the shape of the flints with a square cutting edge.

Skin Scrapers is still another use for which some specimens of the implements may have been made by these people who lived by the chase; while it is also possible that other shapes were mounted in wood frames and used as saws, sickles, and harpoons, as shown in British Museum Handbook, Fig. 118.

Some of them may have been used for tattooing, as has been suggested, but certainly not a great proportion of the many thousands that have been found.

By what Class of People were these Implements made?

To begin with, these small implements were made by people with keen vision, the minute character of their work being more easily seen and appreciated under a magnifying glass than with the naked eye of an ordinary observer.

They were also clever designers, as the persistent shapes of these implements show. It is not to an ordinary person an easy matter to chip out a piece of flint in the shape of these samples; the same figures or shapes are repeated in hundreds of instances.

Again, they were careful workers, as is seen by the way in which these flint implements are made. To-day men would have to exercise almost the care of a jeweller if they wished to make implements equal in shape and accuracy to those found on the Scunthorpe Floor, made by these Pygmy workers.

They knew how to make a fire, as many fragments of charcoal have been found on the floors of their dwelling places.

As regards their clothing, I am inclined to the idea that they clothed themselves but slightly, and what clothing they had was made of the skins of animals taken in the chase.

Pygmy Sites, Stations, or Dwelling Places

One very interesting feature regarding Pygmy stations, sites, or dwelling places where these Flints are found is their close association with a Peat Floor. Monsieur de Pierpoint says: “He collected some thousands of Pygmy Flints on the high plateaux above the Meuse. Formerly a thick forest covered these mountains, and in that district the small flints are mostly found near springs and away from the east winds.” Both at Scunthorpe and on the hills of the Pennine Range, it is on or in the Peat that these diminutive Flints are discovered. Dr. Colley March found them in a bed of Peat 6 feet deep, in certain cases 10 feet deep, and at an altitude of 1350 feet above sea-level. Dr. Gatty found them at Scunthorpe on the top of the Peat and below the wind-blown sand 200 feet above sea-level.

It was on the Peat that I and my friends, the Rev. R. N. Matthews, of Tetney, in the year 1900, and the Rev. Samuel Wild, of Dunholme, found numerous examples as recently as the spring of 1907. Dr. Gatty found as many as 200 implements on the floor of one habitation. These facts lead me to the belief that the natural conditions or surroundings of Scunthorpe have completely changed since the time of the deposit of these implements.

I believe that the natural conditions at Scunthorpe were very much like the conditions at the Ituri Forest of North Africa at the present day, where we see a Peat deposit in progress; that the Pygmies lived in a warmer atmosphere at Scunthorpe than now exists in England; and that these people lived in communities in small huts, such as may be seen now among these living survivals of Pygmy people. They were in fact Forest Dwellers.

No pottery has been found with the Pygmy Flints in Lincolnshire, but a class of rude hand-made pottery has been found with the Indian Pygmy Flints, and entire skeletons of the Pygmy people have been found both in India and Germany. In India they dwelt in caves and rock shelters, but at Scunthorpe we have no trace of caves or rock shelters; therefore hut circles seem to be the only alternative to fall back upon as their dwelling places in Lincolnshire.

To what Period in the Stone Age must we attribute the Pygmy Race of Mankind?

Here we have a problem that puzzles many at the present time. Mr. Read, of the British Museum, suggests a Neolithic Age or Bronze Period, while Mr. Vincent Smith does not agree with that, but inclines to the belief that they are to be placed at the end of the Paleolithic Age. Dr. Colley March calls it the Early Neolithic Floor of East Lancashire.

One thing is certain, we do not find any smooth or polished stone implements on the Pygmy Floor. Another thing is equally true, we do not find Pygmy Flints associated with Bronze or Copper implements, so that they were not metal workers.

The suggestion has been thrown out that the Pygmies were a weak race who were overcome by Neolithic Man. This may be true, but we have the authority of Herodotus, 2000 years ago, and modern travellers like Dr. Wollaston of 1907, pointing out that the Pygmies were, and are at the present time, rather a fighting race of people. After considering all the evidence obtainable, I am inclined to think that the Pygmy Race must be placed in the Messeolithic or Middle Stone Age.

It is true that at one period “there were giants on the earth in those days,” so also it is true that there were dwarfs on the earth in other days. Was this race the Iberic race?

It is ably argued by Mr. W. J. Knowles, Vice-President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, that Neolithic Man is the descendant of Paleolithic Man.

The question before ethnologists to-day is: How was this transition effected? Was it through a Messeolithic Age?

Because there are no references to the Pygmy Flint Age in the standard books of thirty years ago on Prehistoric Man, such as those of Boyd Dawkins, Canon Greenwell, Sir John Evans and Mr. Mortimer of Driffield, some few people are prepared to question the reality of what are called Pygmy Flints.

To begin with, each of these authors referred to have within the last few years become thorough believers in Pygmy Flints as the product of mankind. This is shown by their speeches at the recent meetings of the British Association at York and elsewhere.

Then let the doubtful person concerning Pygmy Flints turn to recent works on Prehistoric Man, such as Mr. Charles H. Read’s Handbook or Guide to the Stone Age, in the British Museum, published 1902, to Prof. Windle’s book on Remains of Prehistoric Age in England, published 1904, to the articles by Vincent A. Smith, late of India Civil Service, to Dr. Gatty, and other works, he will then, I think, if open to conviction, be ready to admit there is more evidence for a Pygmy race than he anticipated.

Historical Reference to the Pygmy Races of Mankind

If we go back to the ancients, we have the authority of Herodotus, Book II., Chapter 33, page 51, that “the Nasamonians were captured and carried off by the Pygmy Tribe and led across extensive marshes, and finally came to a town where all the men were the height of their conductors and black complexioned under the middle height.”

Homer’s Iliad, Book III., line 9, refers to Pygmy nations.

Aristotle calls them Troglodytal—which would seem to indicate that they were Cave Dwellers in that age. Homer and Aristotle both place them near the sources of the Nile.

Pliny, Book VI., 19, and Philostratus, Vit. Apoll., Tz. III., 47, and others, place them in India, where, in modern days, many thousands of Pygmy Flints have been found.

The representation of Pygmy people is frequently met with on Greek vases and Egyptian pottery.

After two thousand years of literary silence about Pygmy people, modern travellers like Captain Harrison have brought over from the Ituri Forest Pygmy people, and exhibited them in all parts of England.

Small Dark-coloured People under the Middle Height

Major Powell Cotton, in the year 1907, gives his experience of life among the Pygmies of the Congo Forest, and describes them as “small dark-coloured people under the middle height.”

Dr. A. F. R. Wollaston, also in 1907, returned to civilisation through the Congo Forest and the volcanic region of Mfumbiro, and says the tops of the extinct volcanoes are covered with dense bamboo and inhabited by a Pygmy race.

In Central Mexico we have relics of a Pygmy people, the dried head of one being offered in Mr. Steven’s London auction room this year (1907).

The last surviving Aztecs, a very diminutive people, we remember to have seen exhibited in Manchester thirty years ago.

All these instances point to diminutive or Pygmy races of men scattered over the world.

As the literature on this subject is so limited, we venture to name the authorities quoted:—

• Herodotus.
• Pliny.
• Homer.
• Philostratus.
• Aristotle.
• British Museum, Guide to Stone Age, by C. H. Read, Esq.
• Dr. Colley March, of Rochdale.
• W. H. Sutcliffe, Esq., of Littleborough, Lancashire.
• The Rev. Reginald A. Gatty, LL.B., of Hooton Roberts, Doncaster.
• Dr. Sturge, formerly of Nice, now of Mildenhall, Cambridge.
• The late A. C. Carlleyle, Esq., of the Archæological Survey of India.
• M. de Pierpoint, of Brussels.
• M. Thieullen, of Paris.
• Sir John Evans.
• Professor Boyd Dawkins.
• Professor Windle, of Birmingham.
• Major Powell Cotton.
• Dr. A. F. R. Wollaston.
• Vincent A. Smith, Esq., M.A.

The Bronze Age in Lincolnshire

The earliest appearance of bronze in Britain is put down at 2000 B.C.

As we have already stated this period is divided into Early and Late Periods by specialists.

Specimens of both periods have been found in many parts of the county, and so far as we have been able to trace them, we have compiled the following list of places where they have been discovered:—

• Anwick.
• Barton-on-Humber.
• Billinghay.
• Boston, B.M.
• *Branston, B.M.
• Brigg.
• Broughton.
• Burringham.
• Caythorpe.
• Caenby.
• Crosby.
• Crowle.
• Crowland.
• Elsham.
• Fleet.
• Flixborough.
• Fiskerton.
• Gainsborough.
• Halton, West, B.M.
• *Haxey, B.M.
• Horncastle, B.M.
• Kelsey, South.
• Kyme, South.
• Langton.
• Leasingham.
• *Lincoln.
• *Nettleham.
• Newport, Lincoln.
• Owersby, North.
• *Reepham.
• Roxby, B.M.
• Scothorne.
• Scunthorpe, B.M.
• Sleaford.
• Toynton, B.M.
• Washingborough.
• Winghale, B.M.
• Winterton.
• Winteringham.
• Wrawby.
• *Witham River.

Those marked with an asterisk (*) are to be seen in the County Museum at Lincoln. Those marked B.M. are in the British Museum.

The objects found include swords, celts (socketed and unsocketed), arrow-heads, spear-heads, palstaves, adzes, knives, daggers, circular shields, armlets, bracelets, bridle bits, trumpet, horse trappings (probably a peytrel at Caenby).

These show progress in the art of man from rude plane castings to what may be called high art in decoration, as shown in the very elaborate shield from the river Witham, and now in the British Museum, figured in their catalogue to the Early Iron Age on page 90.

It is to this period that we must attribute many of the very fine pieces of pottery belonging to Mr. H. Preston, now deposited at the Lincoln Museum. It consists of cinerary urns, drinking cups, food vessels, incense cups, and other forms of vessels.

The places where this early class of pottery has been found in the county, so far as we have been able to compile it, is as follows:—

• *Billinghay.
• Caythorpe.
• Denton.
• Donnington.
• *Dunston.
• Ferriby, South.
• Heighington.
• Horncastle.
• Kirton in Lindsey.
• Lincoln.
• Manton.
• Normanton.
• *Potterhanworth.
• Scotter.
• Willingham, North.
• Woolsthorpe.

Those marked with an asterisk (*) are to be seen in the County Museum at Lincoln.

All this pottery is made of burnt clay in an open fire.

Clothing of the People in the Bronze Age

In the one instance where a body has been found with clothing at Haxey in the Isle of Axholme, it was that of a woman dressed in skins with sandals on her feet. Cæsar’s statement in Book V., paragraph 147, describes the Celts or Britons as wearing skins on their bodies for clothing, and the parts of the body not covered with skins being painted in order to render themselves more terrible in battle.

Bronze Age Burials

We have already referred to two classes of barrows or burial places. One is described as a long barrow, the other as a round barrow.

It is in this latter class of burial place that the people of the Bronze Age buried their dead.

The round barrows belong to another race of people who existed in Lincolnshire, and are described as Brachy-cephalic or round-headed people.

In these burial places bronze implements have sometimes been found, and occasionally stone implements, showing that the Stone Age overlapped or ran into the Bronze Period.

Incompleteness of the circle in the barrow points to design.

An alphabetical list of the places where in recent times the round barrow existed is as follows:—

• Barrow.
• Bardney.
• Brigg.
• Burgh.
• Burgh-on-Bain.
• Burnham.
• Bully Hills, 6.
• Claxby by Alford.
• Cockerington.
• Cleasham.
• Donington-on-Bain.
• Falkingham.
• Gainsborough.
• Halton, West.
• Haugham.
• Horncastle.
• Ingoldsby.
• Kelstern.
• Langton by Spilsby, 3.
• Revesby.
• Riseholme.
• Spellow Hills.
• Temple Bruer, 2.
• Wainfleet, 2.
• Walcot.
• Well near Alford, 3.
• Welton in the Marsh.
• Wold Newton, 20 urns.

The barrow was considered to be the habitation of the spirits of the dead.

In the Bronze Age often the body was burnt wholly or in parts. Sometimes the ashes were collected and placed in an urn. This burning of the body seems to have been one of their sacred rites of burial. In nearly every case where the body has been burnt, holes seem to have been bored or drilled into the ground underneath the body. Sometimes these were stake holes, but the wood has perished. In these barrows was buried the chief of the clan or tribe.

A plate picture of the different kinds of skulls of the Dolicho-cephalic and the Brachy-cephalic people appears in the British Museum Handbook to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age, page 20.

It is considered very probable that the round-headed people were the conquerors of the long-headed race.

Entrenchments of the Iron Age

It is to this age we must refer the making of the lines of entrenchments in various parts of the county at Honington, Ingoldsby, Kingerby, Hoe Hill, Fulletby, and other places.

The Bronze Age people are generally called Celts, and have been subdivided by Professor Rhys as Goidelic and Brythonic races—the older race being the Goidels and the later race Brythons.

“Both races spoke a language that belonged to the Aryan or Indo-European family, but had certain peculiarities that point to racial divergence.”—C. H. Read.

It is to the Bronze Age Professor Boyd Dawkins would attribute the erection of the great stone circles, such as Stonehenge, Avebury, and other places, but of these stone circles no remnants exist in Lincolnshire.

The Prehistoric Iron Age, 400 B.C.

Traces of the occupation of Lincolnshire in this period are to be found in the pre-Roman smelting furnaces for iron in various parts of the county at Manton and elsewhere.

Certain iron spear-heads, daggers,[7] sheaths,[8] and swords[9] of bronze from the river Witham are also attributed to this period. The art of enamelling the surface of metal appears in the Prehistoric Iron Age, and its chief centre seems to have been the British Isles.

The shield found in the river Witham is put down to this period in the British Museum Handbook, pages 87 to 92. It is one of the most beautiful specimens of inlaid work yet discovered.

“With the introduction of iron a change in the burial customs took place in Britain. Cremation was carried on, but the dead were frequently interred at full length in a stone chamber, or shallow pit, along with various articles used in daily life.”

Doubtless there are many “finds” of stone and bronze and iron implements from Lincolnshire in private collections that are not described in any book or catalogue extant.

It is only by personal knowledge, and by contributing that knowledge to a common centre, that anything like a correct record can be made for the benefit of students and futurity of the Prehistoric Period in Lincolnshire.

With the coming of the Romans, B.C. 55 and 47 A.D., we enter on the Historic Iron Age, which is outside the scope of this article. As regards the Roman occupation of Lincoln, A.D. 50, we have written elsewhere.[10]

THE ROMANS IN LINCOLNSHIRE

By the Rev. E. H. R. Tatham, M.A.

Roman Lincolnshire has no written history. There is not a line in any extant ancient writer describing the progress of a Roman army within its limits. Yet that wonderful people have left indelible marks of their presence in the county, not merely, as elsewhere, in a few fortifications connected by military roads, but in the systematic reclamation of a whole district. The details remaining to us of their conquest of the island apply principally to the south-east, the north, and the north-west. And yet the marshy plain of the Lincolnshire coast must have been then, as it proved in later times, an ideal refuge for native tribes at last driven to bay. Bounded on the east by the sea and on the south by impassable fens—subject in parts to submersion by the sea—the county was only accessible to a southern invader on its south-west side, through the forest which then covered Kesteven. But the Roman conqueror was seldom daunted by natural obstacles; and some further explanation is needed of the fact that, in the earlier stages of the conquest, his efforts seem constantly deflected to the west. Some have fancied that the Romans recognised their most implacable enemies in the Druids, and that these priestly fanatics retreated westward before them until they were finally exterminated by Paulinus in their stronghold of Mona (Anglesey). A simpler hypothesis is that, like the Regni in Sussex and the Brigantes in Yorkshire, the inhabitants of our county at first propitiated the enemy by alliance and by giving hostages for good conduct.

The tribe which, according to Ptolemy (about A.D. 120), then occupied the counties of Lincoln, Leicester, and Nottingham, was the Coritani. If, as some have supposed, this tribe was a branch of the Eceni, it would almost certainly have been involved in the rebellion of Boudicca (A.D. 61). Yet for at least ten years we hear of no further expedition undertaken in this direction. If, on the other hand, the tribe was subject to or allied with its powerful northern neighbour, the Brigantes, it may possibly have been included in the compact which, before the year A.D. 50, was made by that tribe with the invader. Professor Rhys conjectures, rather hesitatingly,[11] that the Coritani may have been a remnant of the pre-Celtic population, and that their submission may have synchronised with the conquest of the warlike tribes of the southern midlands, to whom they had been subject.

Anyhow there is no positive indication that before A.D. 70 the Roman forces had penetrated into the eastern counties beyond the southern shore of the Wash. Some have fancied that the Coritani were subdued by Ostorius (A.D. 50-55), or Paulinus (A.D. 57-62). But the line of advance taken by both generals was to the north-west, along Watling Street, rather than due north; and Ostorius in particular is said to have established a chain of fortified camps—doubtless to secure his communications—from the Nene to the Severn. But when Petilius Cerealis assumed the command in the year A.D. 71, the peace with the Brigantes was broken, and Tacitus represents that the ensuing campaigns, of which he only says that “there were many battles and some not bloodless,” lasted the four years of this command. As his father-in-law, Agricola, was then in command of the Twentieth Legion, Tacitus must have known the facts, and may have reserved a full account of them for his Histories, but the portion of the work which deals with this war has not survived.

We do not know what were the headquarters of the Roman governors from A.D. 61 to 71, but they were almost certainly south of the Wash. An advance, therefore, against the Brigantes of Yorkshire must have brought them along the western branch of Ermine Street to Lincoln, as any good map will show. To the west they had the difficult country of the Peak, to the east the dreaded Fenland, and there is no direct road through Nottinghamshire to York. Starting from Durobrivæ (Castor)—which was perhaps the most easterly fort on the Nene, and as such occupied by the Ninth Legion in A.D. 61—and taking the line of road afterwards laid down, the army would at first bend to the north-west to avoid the immediate neighbourhood of the fens. Along this road, still traceable, and called in parts the “High Dyke,” there are camps at Casterton, Easton, and Ancaster, the last of which subsequently became an important station. At length, after traversing the high ground of the Cliff, the army would appear on the ridge of Canwick, facing the “Lincoln Gap.” On the crest of the opposite hill, from which they were separated by a flooded valley then reached by the tide, lay a strong British “oppidum.” It would be no light matter to take such a position by storm, but taken it was, whether by force or through a timely surrender. When once occupied, this stronghold would be turned into a military earthwork and used as a base of operations against the Brigantes, thus becoming the nucleus of the subsequent city. The advance into Yorkshire, if supported by a fleet, may have been made from the north gate of the camp by the direct line of Ermine Street to Winteringham on the Humber, for the Ouse was then navigable as far as York. But it seems more likely that this was a land expedition, and that the earliest road was that which leaves the main Ermine Street four miles north of Lincoln, and under its present name of Tillbridge Lane points direct to Littleborough on the Notts bank of the Trent. Here a camp would be formed, which developed later into the walled station Segelocum; here also was a ford which could soon be made available for the passage of an army. The banks were sloped away so as to make the descent easy to a raised causeway—paved with stones and held up by strong stakes driven into the bed of the river. This causeway, which was 18 feet wide, existed till 1820, when, owing to the obstruction it caused to navigation in dry seasons, it had to be removed; but part of the paved descent can still be seen on the farther bank. The reason why the road from Lincoln to this ford was not more direct is that it avoided the low land, then subject, as will be shown, to constant flooding from the Trent.

It was perhaps not till the governorship of Agricola (A.D. 78-85), when the country between the Humber and the Tyne was completely subdued, that Lindum became an important fortress. In his Life of Agricola Tacitus names a provokingly small number of places in Britain; but he states that that general, in the second year of his command, “erected garrisons and fortresses among those tribes which had hitherto considered themselves a match for Rome.”[12] His, therefore, may have been the vigilant eye, which first discerned the strategic value of Lindum; but possibly it was Hadrian, or one of his commanders, who elevated it to the rank of a “colony.” This term was applied under the Empire to a settlement of veterans, which was held to form an integral part of Rome, and whose government was a copy in miniature of that of the capital. Each colony had its senate or “curia,” and annually elected two “duumviri,” corresponding to the consuls. A portion of the neighbouring land was assigned to each soldier, and the men were sometimes allowed, for a time at least, to retain their arms. If we may trust the “Ravenna” list of towns, the only “coloniæ” in Britain were Colchester, Lincoln, and Gloucester, and this was perhaps the order of their foundation. These colonies formed in themselves so strong a nucleus of Roman civilisation that they were seldom or never made garrison towns. The three headquarters of the legions—York, Chester, and Caerleon—were not colonies;[13] and there is no trace of a colony among the military stations on Hadrian’s Wall. The small number of these towns in Britain, and their intimate connection with Rome, indicate the great importance of Lindum. Another proof of this is the fact that the Foss Way, which, at least in part, is a work of the second century, seems to have been constructed with the express object of creating easy communication between Lincoln and the thickly-settled district of the south-west. No other town, except London, York, Colchester, and perhaps Cirencester, was connected with so many highways of the first class.

The existing remains of Lindum, though unfortunately much defaced by continuous occupation, fully corroborate this view. In the third and fourth centuries it was a kind of twin-city—the original “colonia,” about 37 acres in extent, occupying the brow of the hill, while the lower town, a sort of “annex” to the first, descended its slopes to the banks of the Witham. The original town must have been of great strength. Its northern and southern walls were about a quarter of a mile in length, and were each pierced by a gate—probably a double gate—through which the Ermine Street passed and bisected the city. The eastern and western walls were a little shorter—about 420 yards—and each had a gate in the centre, also probably double, with guard-rooms on each side of the central space. The walls were 10 feet thick and over 20 feet in height. Though obviously repaired at various times, it is likely that they were erected at the foundation of the colony, as the recent destruction of the unwalled Camulodunum would be a stern warning to the first colonists. A few fragments exist, none in a perfect state; but the inner face of the northern (now strangely called “Newport”) gate is still entire, though half buried in the soil, and is a unique monument of Roman rule in Britain. It consists of a central arch about 16 feet wide, which had two posterns, of which the eastern, though built over, still remains; the other was destroyed about a century ago. The gate was formerly supposed to have been single; but it stands 20 feet back from the neighbouring fragments of the wall; and an old engraving, here reproduced,[14] shows the remains of two arches on its northern side. Such double gates are a frequent feature in the stations on Hadrian’s Wall. The south and east gates were still standing at the end of the seventeenth century, at least in part. But the former, which was near the brink of Steep Hill, was pulled down soon after, though its eastern postern can still be seen within a house; while the latter, which stood just east of the Deanery, was only demolished in 1763. The western gate was accidentally discovered in 1836, buried beneath the high mound of the Castle. The arch was uncovered, and found to be of the same age as Newport; but it collapsed a few days later from the weight of the superincumbent earth, though fortunately not till the sketch of it here shown had been taken. From this it appears to have been exposed nearly as low as Newport without discovering posterns, which may have been absent from this gate, because no military road passed through it. Yet there were signs of a return wall, which indicate that the gate was double. The western wall followed the line of the Castle rampart and beyond it to the waterworks reservoir; the eastern passed under the chapter-house and the eastern transepts of the Minster.

The Forum was in the north-western quarter of the town, for the bases (and part of the shafts) of nineteen fine columns were found between 1878 and 1897 in Bailgate, standing in a line north and south, and fronting the course of Ermine Street. Of these five are double and one triple, and the space of 16 feet between two of the double columns—the sixth and seventh from the south—doubtless represents the street between the east and west gates; it is exactly in the line, and the side pavements were found much worn by the foot traffic. The building on the south side of this entrance to the Forum is thought to have been a temple; that on the north was probably a basilica, and a part of its northern wall—now called the Mint Wall—is still standing some 25 feet above-ground. It is 70 feet long and 3½ feet thick, and is formed of stone and of six courses of triple bonding tiles, with intervals of 5 feet between the upper courses. This building is supposed, from the red tint of the columns and the charred remains found at their base, to have been destroyed by fire. Along the centre of the city, parallel with Ermine Street, has been found a large main sewer, with branches running into it from right and left. The city was supplied with water by underground pipes from two springs—one on the hill outside the western wall, the other three-quarters of a mile away, on the Nettleham Road. From the latter the water was conducted, by pipes cemented together, into a neatly bricked well, called the Blind Well, which once existed a few yards north of the Assembly Rooms, but has now been filled up.

But the most interesting discovery in this quarter was that of the milestone dedicated to the Emperor Victorinus (one of the Thirty Tyrants), which was unearthed in 1879, and is now to be seen in the Lincoln Museum. It was found probably on its original site, where the cross street entered the Forum from Ermine Street. Victorinus held the supreme power in Gaul for little more than a year, so that the erection of this stone can be placed with certainty in A.D. 266-7.[15] This discovery confirms the reading “Segelocum” in the Antonine Itinerary, and also the distance there given. Some have thought that Carausius, the “Menapian admiral,” who seized the reins of power in Britain twenty years later under Diocletian, resided for some time in Lincoln. For this there is not much evidence. His coins, of which there are 300 known types, are common not in Lincolnshire only, but in all parts of England; and he is more likely to have established himself in London or near the south coast. But it is possible that the northern wall of Lindum, in which some of his coins have been found, was repaired in his time or a little later. Less than half a mile north of Newport Arch are to be seen remains of an earthen rampart, with a fosse on the northern side extending about 350 yards east and west, and with entrenchments running from the corners at right angles towards the city. Stukeley imagined that these were the defences of the British “oppidum”; but their shape and the practical certainty that the Britons would choose the edge of the hill leave little doubt that they are Roman outworks, possibly enclosing a northern suburb.

But the natural direction for the enlargement of the city would be the southern slope of the hill towards the river; and at some period—perhaps in the third or fourth century—the eastern and western walls were prolonged until they met a transverse wall, 50 yards from the river, at about the centre of which is the mediæval gate called the “Stone-bow.” Leaving the south-east corner of the original wall at the Cantilupe Chantry, the prolonged east wall descended the hill between the Vicar’s Court and the Bishop’s Palace (where part of it still exists), through the Temple Gardens, with the “Were Dyke” as its fosse, to the junction of Silver Street and Broadgate, where was a gateway, called Clasket Gate. Thence it was continued to a bastion, once called the Tower Garth, on the south side of St. Swithin’s Square. From this point the southern wall, which was lately uncovered in several places, extended to the “Stone-bow” and along Guildhall Street and Newland to its south-west corner at the (so-called) “Lucy” Tower, whence it ascended Motherby Hill to the western end of the original south wall at the corner of the Castle. This later town would be nearly double the size of the original colony, and the whole twin-city must have covered an area as large as that of Roman Colchester (108 acres). The walling of the lower city points to a sense of insecurity, but whether this arose from native disaffection or from a fear of foreign invasion there is no evidence to show. It probably contained no official buildings, and few important remains have come to light within it, but a hypocaust was found in 1782 near the top of High Street.

Space would fail us in enumerating the many lesser articles of interest discovered in Lincoln. Seven tessellated pavements have been found, all in the upper city; a perfect Roman altar, with inscription, came to light in 1884 on the site of St. Swithin’s Tower; and at least six sepulchral slabs have been unearthed, three of which were in memory of soldiers of the Ninth (Spanish) Legion—perhaps an indication that to this legion, which is not mentioned after Trajan’s reign, lands were assigned at the foundation of the colony. Traces of interments have been found bordering the roads on the north, east, and south of the city; those beyond the east gate seem to be the most numerous, and in one case the remains were enclosed in a large burial-chamber. In the immediate neighbourhood of the city were villas of some size. At Canwick Church there is a tessellated pavement, two feet below the floor-level, extending the whole length of the nave; and at Greetwell, a mile and a half to the east, a substantial residence was discovered, with many rooms and corridors, and with pavements of artistic design.

In the three centuries between Ptolemy, who first mentions the city, and the abandonment of Britain by Rome, Lindum is named but once—in the Antonine Itinerary. But it seems likely that Adelfius, one of the three British prelates at the Council of Arles, was its bishop in 314.[16]

With regard to the roads radiating from Lindum, it will be convenient to deal first with those to the north. From Newport Gate, Ermine Street continues to the Humber for thirty miles in a direct line—absolutely straight, indeed, for five-sixths of the distance. Mr. Codrington assumes without reason that this road was earlier than that already mentioned, which crossed the Trent and passed by way of Doncaster and Castleford to York.[17] Present appearances certainly justify his view, for the latter road now seems merely a branch of the former. But this may not always have been the case. Originally the first four miles may have been nearer the edge of the high ground through Burton and North Carlton into Tillbridge Lane; but when the direct Ermine Street was constructed this portion would not be repaired, and therefore would be completely disused, as the increase in distance by the new road would be trifling. It is a curious fact that the only section of Ermine Street between London and the Humber included in the Antonine Itinerary is that between Lincoln and Godmanchester; the route from Lincoln to York in two Iters (V. and VIII.) is by the Doncaster road, which is longer than Ermine Street by several miles if York were the objective, but which rather points directly to Isurium—supposed by some to have been the Brigantian capital.[18] The presumption should surely be that the shorter route, which involved the crossing of a broad estuary, would be a later construction of more settled times. In the parish of Scampton, adjoining the Doncaster road, and about a mile and a half north-west of the point where it branches from Ermine Street, was discovered in 1795 a large Roman villa, with forty rooms and thirteen tessellated pavements—one of a very beautiful design. The whole building covered a space 70 yards square, and included two courtyards, thus differing somewhat in plan from the great villas of the south-west.

Ermine Street from Lincoln to the Humber is one of the finest of Roman highways—clearly traceable to-day for almost the whole distance. In a stretch of thirty miles there must have been a middle station, which was certainly in Hibaldstow; but since remains have been found here on both sides of the great “Way,” its exact site is uncertain. At the farm of Gainsthorpe, about 200 yards to the west, is a remarkable cluster of ruined habitations, which has never been properly explored: excavation here, and in a large camp a little to the north on the east side of Ermine Street, promises to yield fruitful results. From this point there would naturally be a by-road to Caistor, ten miles due east across the Ancholme valley, but no traces of it are on record. A pavement has been found in Hibaldstow, and two more at Storton in Scawby—the next parish to the north. The line of the road passes through Broughton, three miles west of Brigg, where various remains have been discovered; and the country round it, as it approaches the Humber, abounded in rural residences of the better class. At Roxby, a mile and a half to the west, a good pavement was found in 1709; and about forty years later, three more of very superior design were discovered below the Cliff House in Winterton, one of which had a bust of Ceres in the centre. A fourth near the same spot, with a figure of Apollo, was unearthed in 1797; and in a garden at Horkstow, more than three miles east of this site, was found a pavement with three compartments, in which are depicted the Fates, Orpheus playing the lyre to the animals, and a chariot race. Among the remains found at Winterton are many coins, spear-heads, a brass eagle, and a potter’s kiln; while another kiln was found at Santon in Appleby, a few miles to the south. This district—as also the chalk ridges of the Eastern Wolds—seems to have been favourable for the manufacture of the coarse grey and stone-coloured pottery, so common on Roman sites in the county. The Ermine Street ended at a promontory overlooking the Humber in the parish of Winteringham, below which was an ancient haven called Flashmire, now silted up. This point is a little east of the Roman “station” of Brough on the opposite shore, so that boats could make the crossing of under two miles with the inflowing tide. In the dry summer of 1826, when the water was low, a paved causeway or jetty—like that leading to the Trent at Littleborough—was exposed on both the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire banks. Stukeley says that, when the “station” at Winteringham was ploughed up in 1700, extensive remains were found—as of stone foundations, pavements, and streets made of gravel and sea-sand. About four miles south-west of this point, and half-way to the Roman Camp at Barton, lies South Ferriby. Here is an ancient well-spring, near which at various times interesting articles have been found—some, perhaps, votive offerings to the local goddess of the spring. These objects, now principally in the Hull Museum, include cinerary urns of all kinds, fireplaces, coins, and a remarkable collection of bronze fibulæ—many harp-shaped (two with the Gaulish maker’s name, “Aucissa”) and others flat, with the disc in the shape of a fish or sandal. From Winteringham there may have been a branch-way to Barton—seven miles to the east. At Alkborough, about four miles westward, there is a strong camp, about one hundred yards square, overlooking the junction of the Trent and the Humber. Its Roman origin is disputed, and the area has never been carefully excavated.

Returning once more to Lincoln, we find at least one road leaving the east gate of the city, which is nearly identical with the present Wragby road. This was in line with the Foss Way, but was of much less importance. At Claybridge, about seven miles from Lincoln, a by-way branches off south-eastwards to the fort at Horncastle; while another, called Horncastle Lane, which is probably Roman, bends westward to the junction of Ermine Street and Tillbridge Lane. The main way continues north-eastward through Ludford and Ludborough to the coast, where it ends at some remains of saltworks in the parish of Grainthorpe. Its easterly part used to be known as “Salters’ Lane,” and it crosses the “High Street” from Horncastle to Caistor at Ludford. It is possible that this route and a branch-way from Ermine Street were the only roads from Lincoln to Caistor; at least no traces of a road, or even of Roman remains, are known to me on the direct line between the east gate and Caistor.

No road of any importance seems to have left Lincoln by the west gate; and the reason for this is to be found in the physical features of the neighbourhood at the time of the Roman occupation. The part of Lincolnshire north of the Witham is still called “Lindsey”—a name which indicates by its final syllable that, when it was given, the district was practically surrounded by water. On all sides but the south it is so to this day—viz. by the sea on the east, by the Humber on the north, and by the Trent on the west. In the Roman period—and indeed for many centuries after—the Witham was tidal as far as the narrow “Gap” between Lincoln and the opposite high land of Kesteven. Geologists tell us that this “Gap,” now intersected by the Witham, was in pre-glacial ages scooped out by the Trent, the course of which from Newark was then north-east instead of north; and that after that river had been “captured” by the Humber (i.e. diverted into its present bed by the opening of a longitudinal valley from the north) it would always tend to revert to its original course in time of flood. The result of this constant flooding was the formation of a large mere, extending from the western end of the Gap as far north as Brampton, beyond which the east bank of the Trent was too high for the water to escape. The first syllable of Lindum no doubt represents the Celtic word, which was applied to this large sheet of water. Faint remains of it can still be seen in the small pool of Brayford—just below the south gate of the lower city. The flood-water came through five openings in a low range of sandhills between Spaldford and Brampton; and the first work of the Roman engineers was to build banks across these openings, and so shut out the water of the Trent. The southernmost opening at Spaldford—the most dangerous because the highest up the valley—was closed by a bank from 12 to 15 feet high and a mile and a half in length.

Through the marsh which was left when the water disappeared the Romans constructed a navigable canal, now called the Fossdyke, between the Witham and the Trent. Its original course at the western end was, according to Stukeley, more direct than at present—joining the Trent not, as now, at Torksey, but about two miles farther south. From its bed was dredged up in 1774 a small bronze statue of Mars, with a Latin inscription. At Lincoln itself the Sincil Dyke, a drain of the “Slaker” type—to ease off the water in time of flood—was constructed connecting the upper and lower ends of the loop which is made by the Witham in order to pass through the Gap. These operations certainly took place at a very early period of the Roman occupation of Lincoln. For until they were made effective, it would be impossible to lay the line of the Foss Way between Lincoln and Leicester; and we know from a milestone discovered on that road three miles north of Leicester, and dedicated to Hadrian in A.D. 120 (when he was in Britain), that the eastern part of the Foss Way—doubtless the earliest made in order to connect Lincoln with Watling Street—was being laid down in the first quarter of the second century. In the valley below Lincoln, Ermine Street and the Foss Way, which were united for the crossing, traversed the marshes of the Gap on a pile-foundation.

But the chief anxiety of a Roman general, who would secure the submission or tranquillity of this part of Britain, must have been the condition of the Fen district along the lower reaches of the Witham, and beyond it to the south. If the Coritani had to be subdued by force of arms, as we have supposed, their subjugation must have been a long business. Moreover, the Romans were experienced agriculturists, and must have guessed the value of the rich fenland east and south-east of their colony. On that side there was doubtless an even larger mere than on the west—caused partly by the flood-water which had overflowed the Gap, partly by streams from the high land of Kesteven; and this sheet of water must have risen considerably in height during the spring-tides. In this mere for many miles the stream of the Witham must have been barely discernible. Below it the district of Holland was a vast morass, liable to inundation both by the sea and by the rivers—then of much larger volume than now—which fell into the Wash. It is not likely that this district was largely settled by the natives before the Romans came, and the British antiquities found are few; but it was a natural refuge for the disaffected—as was shown later during the Danish and Norman invasions. Herodian says[19] of the campaign in Scotland in 209 that the Emperor Severus made passage for his troops over the fens, where, “from the frequent overflowing of the ocean, the inhabitants will swim and walk, though up to their middle in water.”

The engineering skill needed to cope with this situation was very great; and if proof be required that the Romans exercised it, the answer is sufficient that neither before nor for a thousand years after this period was there a central organisation strong enough to carry out such operations. The work had to be of two kinds—draining, to carry off the flood-water and void the rainfall coming from the high land, and embanking, to shut out the sea. In the former the Romans acted upon sound principles, which were often neglected in after times. They used the natural rivers as arterial drains, and led the subsidiary drains into them. History records that they executed similar works in other parts of the Empire. The Pontine marshes and the Lombard valley of the Po were drained under the Republic. The Emperors Claudius and Hadrian began and completed a canal between the Fucine Lake and the Liris. In the Low Countries, Drusus, in 12 B.C., drew a channel connecting Lake Flevo (Zuyder Zee) and the Rhine; and in A.D. 47 Corbulo made a canal, twenty-three miles in length, between the Rhine and the Meuse. Eleven years later a project for uniting the Saone and the Moselle, and thus completing a waterway from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, was only not attempted from fear of the jealousy of Nero. If a full account was ever written of the Roman settlement of Britain, the operations now to be described must have filled a large place in it.

The present channel of the Witham from Lincoln to Boston is much too straight to have ever been the course of a natural stream. From Chapel Hill just below Dogdyke, where there was a tidal creek, the river was canalised to Boston as late as 1761; but there is no record in historical times of such an operation in the twenty miles from Lincoln to Dogdyke. In order to drain the lower mere described above, a channel was cut along the high land for that distance, and the upper waters of the river directed into it. In very early (perhaps in Roman) times there was another branch of the Witham due east from Dogdyke through the upper fen to Wainfleet, where it received the Steeping, and thence into the sea near Gibraltar Point. Very probably it was the draining of the district near Lincoln which hastened the silting up of this ancient channel. But at no time can it have been, as some have fancied,[20] the principal outfall of the river, for it is much farther from the sea, and could not have been tidal, like the other, for the whole distance.

The most remarkable monument of Roman engineering in the Fens is the catchwater drain called the Cardyke (Brit. “fen-dyke”), which leaves the Witham at Washingborough about three miles from Lincoln, and then for eighteen miles takes a southerly course parallel to that river at distances varying from two to five miles from it. The primary object may have been to intercept the water of the numerous streams coming from the Kesteven uplands; but it was doubtless intended to be navigable, as its width at the water-level was 50 feet, and at its bottom 30 feet. On both sides was a raised bank, flattened at the top to serve the purpose of a road, and still in some places crowned with a modern road. In the parish of Heckington, nine miles due west of Boston, it makes a sharp turn to the south-west, and then skirts the western border of the Fen for over thirty miles, till, after a course of fifty-six miles, it joins the river Nene, half a mile south-east of Peterborough, and about five miles below the Roman town of Durobrivæ (Castor). In some parts the Cardyke has been obliterated, and in many it is now a mere ditch; but its whole course can be exactly traced, and for a few miles it is still used as a drain. The last eight miles are beyond the borders of our county; but within those borders Roman remains have been found in at least ten parishes through which it passes. No vestiges can be found of the seven forts alleged by Stukeley to have been raised along its course, but there is a camp at North Kyme, within a short distance. Even with the aid of forced labour—partly, perhaps, imported from the Continent—such a work must have taken many years to construct; and it may have been in progress during a great part of the century between Trajan and Severus (A.D. 100-210). Its long course, parallel to the canalised channel of the Witham, suggests that its northern portion was first undertaken to assist in draining the mere south-east of Lincoln. But when this object was accomplished, and the immense work was taken in hand of embanking the shores of the Wash, the canal would gradually be extended southward in order to provide an inland waterway past Lincoln, by the Fossdyke, the Trent, and the Ouse, to the northern capital at York. This measure could hardly have been contemplated until the Holland Fen was sufficiently dry to admit of causeways being made across it into Lindsey on the north and Norfolk on the east.

The seabanks in Holland and East Lindsey, which are now called the “Roman Banks,” extend by a most circuitous route for about a hundred and fifty miles from Wisbech nearly to Grimsby. Tradition ascribes them to the Romans; and as their bases are deeply buried in silt, they are evidently of pre-Norman origin. Mr. Skertchly has estimated that at least eleven million tons of material must have been used in their construction. His collaborator, Mr. Miller,[21] suggests that this stupendous work may have been partly executed before the Roman invasion. But as this idea rests upon two very uncertain conjectures—(1) that the Coritani were Germans from the Low Countries with a knowledge of embanking, and (2) that they may have learnt engineering from the Greek colonies in Gaul, it may be dismissed as improbable. The tribal natives, whatever their state of civilisation, could hardly do more than provide a core of clay, upon which the banks of blown sand could gradually form. It has been well pointed out that the Roman Banks are not works of such a kind as could be carried out in portions, and spread over a number of years.[22] “The enclosure of a large tract covered by the spring-tides is a work that requires great vigour, and must be carried on continuously, or the earth put into the bank during one set of tides will be washed away again.” That is to say, it is a work which would require a strong, and even despotic, central authority. In the fen south of Boston there is a succession of about twenty tumuli, called the Fen Mounds, which are all within about three miles of the ancient banks, and some of which are called “toot” (or “look-out”) hills. They have been supposed to be British,[23] but only one of this southern series is crowned with a circular entrenchment, and it seems much more likely that they were raised to protect the bankmakers from a surprise attack.

The Romans do not seem to have reaped much fruit from their labours, except perhaps in the complete pacification of the district. Holland affords but few traces of their settlement, except in pottery and coins found along the line of the banks, as at Holbeach, Fleet, Heckington, and Swineshead. There was an important oblong camp on the Witham at Redstone Gowt, about a furlong south of Boston, where remains have been found. Its importance was due to the two circumstances that here was a ferry in connection with the road called the Saltway into the Midlands, and that at this point a canal, now called the Old Hammond Beck, took over some of the Witham water due west round the end of Bicker Haven to Swineshead, and thence, taking a sharp curve, after a southerly course of thirteen miles, fell into the river Glen at Pinchbeck. This canal was here parallel to the Cardyke at distances of from four to six miles. It could not have been made until the seabank had been thrown up all round Bicker Haven to keep out the tides. The course of these banks show the enormous amount of land near the Wash—about 64,000 acres—that has since been gained by accretion. The Wash, called by Ptolemy “Metaris Æstuarium,” was a bay with an entrance some two miles narrower than at present, into which fell the waters of four tidal rivers—the Ouse, the Nene, the Welland, and the Witham. The Seabank, starting from Wisbech on the Nene estuary, proceeds north for about ten miles, and then curves round west to the Welland estuary below Spalding. But about eight miles farther south is another westerly bank, parallel to the first, from Cowbit to Tydd St. Mary. This bank, called “Ravenbank,” was probably used as a road from Ermine Street into Norfolk, and south of it, between the Welland and the Nene, are three entrenchments, a few miles apart, where Roman remains have been found. About Spalding, where the Westlode—an ancient drain now filled up—fell into the Welland, the Seabank turns north to Surfleet, and then, running west, north, and east to encircle Bicker Haven, reaches the Witham at Redstone Gowt. From this point it can be traced north to Wainfleet, and thence, with intervals, to beyond the entrance to the Humber opposite Spurn Point. Its character varies considerably in different places. Between Boston and Skegness it often appears too broad to be artificial; but in general it is only a few yards wide, at an elevation of from 10 to 20 feet, and is frequently used as a modern road.

Some of these banks were doubtless used also by the Romans as roads, not for wheeled vehicles, but for pack horses in connection with the salt industry. The Romans were well acquainted with the manufacture of salt by evaporating sea water in pans or reservoirs prepared for the purpose. The flat coasts of Lincolnshire are especially favourable to this industry. Remains of such pans can still be detected on Bicker Haven, which is many miles from the present sea-shore; but the principal saltworks appear to have been at Wainfleet St. Mary, just outside the Roman Bank. If Ptolemy’s “Salinæ” is to be placed in Lincolnshire, as some suppose, no spot is so likely as Wainfleet. There was an ancient road into the Fen called the Saltway, or Bridge End Causeway, which crossed the Cardyke between Swaton and Bridge End. It is found on both sides of Bicker Haven, which must have been crossed by a ferry, and thence it points north-east through Frampton and Wyberton to Redstone Gowt and the Seabank beyond the Witham. If this be a Roman way—and remains found along its course in Kesteven seem to prove the fact—it probably belonged to the late Roman period, after the seabanks round the Wash had been completed. But the Wainfleet saltworks may have been developed much earlier, and the salt conveyed by road through Lindsey to Horncastle and Lincoln. Oysters were another commodity that could be procured from the Boston Deeps, though they were not of so fine a quality as those from the Richborough beds, which delighted the epicures of Rome.

One immediate result of the draining and embanking of the Fens would be the more complete occupation of the forest or heath district of Kesteven. That district was intersected by two branches of Ermine Street, which both start from Castor, and may have united at Lincoln. The eastern branch, which enters the county at West Deeping and runs along the high land parallel to the Cardyke for over twenty miles, is the shorter in actual distance; but it was not the main route, and the branch-ways from it across the Fen indicate that it was the later in date. South of Bourn, where was a camp close to the Cardyke, it is known in parts as Langdyke, High Street, and King Street; between Bourn and Sleaford it is generally called Mareham Lane. There was a by-way from it at Morton, which has been traced to the western branch at Great Ponton; and at Threckingham it is crossed from the east by the Saltway just mentioned. On each side of the latter way, about four miles west of Threckingham, tessellated pavements have been found at Haceby and Aisby; and after crossing the western branch at Cold Harbour,[24] near Grantham, the Saltway passes south-west into Leicestershire. At a ford near Sleaford, where coins and much pottery indicate that there was some kind of station, the eastern branch is within six miles of the western at Ancaster; and there was doubtless a cross-road between them, as interments have been found at Rauceby and coins at Bully Wells.

Ancaster, on the western branch of the Ermine Street, is one of those sites which, from a military camp on a main southern route, rose to be a small town, with a population probably engaged in agriculture. It is now generally identified with Causennæ, the station next to Lincoln in the fifth Iter of the Itinerary; but its distance from the colony is only fourteen miles instead of the twenty-six there given. No traces of walls are now visible above-ground, and even Leland, nearly four hundred years ago, spoke doubtfully as to their existence; but since his time their foundations have been met with on the north and west sides. The boundaries of the station, which was nearly square, and was surrounded by a fosse 50 feet wide and 10 feet deep, can still be distinctly seen; and it was defended at the corners by circular towers, the outlines of which on the north-west and south-east are well defined. The area enclosed is about six acres; and the course of Ermine Street, which intersects it, is near the western boundary. This suggests that the town was extended, before the erection of its walls, up the slope towards the east. Its position, on much lower ground than the heights around, was probably chosen partly to provide shelter from the bleak winds of the heath, partly for the sake of two springs which are close to its northern and southern limits. From a description of the place in 1579, it appears that pavements and “arches” had then been discovered within it; but a large part of the area, called the “Castle Close,” has long been under grass. It needs no practised eye to detect that there are foundations beneath the uneven turf, and systematic excavation might yield discoveries of much interest. An immense quantity of coins were found in Stukeley’s time not only within the area but about the surrounding hills. But the most remarkable object—unearthed in the churchyard in 1831—was a small sculptured group of the three Deæ Matres, seated in a sella carved upon a plinth, with a column and a little incense altar on the base in front of them. Statues of these “Protecting Mothers”—who were provincial rather than Roman deities—have been found at the Wall stations of Chester and Birdoswald; there, however, the figures are separate, and not ranged in a single sella. The cemetery of Causennæ seems to have been just outside the southern gate, while north of the village has been found a potter’s kiln and a small milliary with an inscription to Constantine the Great. The latter was not on its original site, and its base had been broken off.[25] On a high hill in Honington, about two miles south-west of Ancaster, is a small British camp, with a triple vallum almost circular, enclosing about an acre and a quarter. This was doubtless occupied by the Romans, for two urns full of coins have been found within it. There was probably a cross-road west of Ancaster, communicating with the Foss Way at East Bridgford (Margidunum) in Nottinghamshire. Coins and pottery have been found at Foston and Allington along the direct line; and the Sewstern grass lane, locally supposed to be Roman, joins it from the south-east.

The eastern branch of Ermine Street can be traced for about four miles north of Sleaford, but its subsequent course is unknown. At or near Sleaford it threw off a branch-way, which passes through Ewerby and North Kyme (where it crosses the Cardyke), and points towards Tattershall and Horncastle. At North Kyme, where two bronze leaf-shaped swords have been found, is a small camp with a double vallum, and two more are on record in Tattershall Park. These entrenchments are in a position to protect the draining operations in the upper fen. Nine miles to the north is Horncastle (in mediæval documents always written Horncastre), which was a castellum, or walled fort, built in the angle (Saxon “Hyrn”) formed by two streams, the Bane and the Waring. The Celtic name of the chief stream is responsible for its identification with the “Banovallum” of the anonymous Ravennas. A few detached portions of the wall can still be seen, showing its area to have been about four and a half acres, with its longer sides (about 200 yards in length) on the north and south. The masonry is rude, but probably only the core remains, the facing-stones having been removed for building purposes in later ages. The only remains known to have been found are coins, pottery, and some leaden coffins outside the walls. This fort may have been built in the first century if coins are any indication of date, for among a large number, covering the whole Roman period, about ten belong to that century. If so, it may have been purely military in origin—built in order to overawe the natives of the Southern Wolds, and so serving the same object as Caistor among those of the north.

But towards the end of the third century, when the Pax Romana had long been established, there arose a new enemy—the Saxon sea-rovers—against whom new measures had to be taken. The first British fleet, which was formed under the leadership of Carausius, had such success against them that its commander seized the supreme power, and for a time maintained the independence of the island. But after the continental Empire resumed its sway in A.D. 296, this fleet was allowed to melt away; and a new land organisation was established, described in the Notitia Imperii, which split up the military command into three divisions, and placed them under the Prætorian Præfect of Gaul. By this arrangement, which may have originated in Constantine’s jealousy of his subordinates, the military force was chiefly massed in the two districts most exposed to invasion—the northern province, under the Duke of the Britains, whose headquarters were at York, and the south-eastern littoral, under the Count of the Saxon Shore. The central and western parts of the island, being much less exposed to danger, were defended only by a few squadrons of cavalry under the Count of the Britains, who had no legion under his command. It has generally been assumed that the northern province was bounded on the south by the Humber.[26] But if the “Saxon Shore” ended, as seems likely, at the eastern side of the Wash, such a division would result in leaving a long stretch of Lincolnshire Marsh, the flat shores of which were peculiarly exposed to invasion, outside the control of both the commanders, who had to defend the east coast. This district would thus be the “Achilles’ heel” of the whole system. Personally I am convinced that the northern province extended to the Wash, and that its southern boundary, which perhaps was ill-defined, was, roughly, the river Nene and Watling Street from High Cross (Venonæ) to Chester. It was essential for security that both banks of the Humber should be under one command; and it is hardly conceivable that Lincoln and York, whose connection by road and water was so intimate, were in different provinces. But though there was apparently no walled fortress on the hilly shore between the Tyne and the Humber, the exposed coast of Lindsey would naturally need some defence of the kind; and direct communication would, of course, be established between the northern province and the forces on the Saxon Shore.

Such communication, I believe, already existed before the Notitia system was set up. The Peddar’s Way, “one of the best preserved Roman roads in East Anglia,”[27] can be traced to-day for 45 miles from the borders of Suffolk (starting no doubt from Colchester) to Holme-on-Sea, at the eastern headland of the Wash. This spot is four miles west of Brancaster, the northernmost fort on the Saxon Shore, and the presumption therefore is that it was laid down before that fort was built. Pointing from the opposite promontory of the Wash (which would have to be crossed by a boat journey of perhaps ten miles) an undoubted Roman road passes by Burgh into the Wolds, and communicates directly through Caistor with the Humber, and by branch-ways with Lincoln and York. The town of Wainfleet (All Saints), some six miles west of this promontory, is often said to have been the Roman haven for the Lindsey coast; but it is singularly poor in Roman remains, and its supposed name of “Vainona” is an invention of the eighteenth century. The road just mentioned is difficult to follow in the Marsh east of Burgh, but there are signs of it outside the Roman Bank west and south of Skegness. Here, according to tradition related by Leland, stood a walled haven town “with a castle,” which was destroyed by the sea not long before his time; and the shifting sandbanks of “The Knock” now covering it must have been the promontory which gave to Skegness its name. Mediæval documents mention the site of this “castle,” but are silent as to its owner; we may therefore infer that it was the ruins of a Roman castellum, which in other instances, both in our county and elsewhere, is called a “castle.” Such a conjecture is incapable of absolute proof; but as Peddar’s Way ends in no walled fort, there would naturally be one on the opposite coast. The coincidence is at least curious that the two Notitia forts of Branodunum (Brancaster) and Præsidium (which has been placed in our county) were both garrisoned by a body of Dalmatian cavalry, whose native shores were marshy tracts indented by deep bays.

Just beyond Burgh—where coins are found, though the station must have been small—the Lindsey road takes to the Wolds, and traverses the high ridge overlooking the Marsh, its straight course for five miles (two only on a modern road) being unmistakable. Coins and pottery have been found in the adjacent parishes of Welton, Willoughby, Well, and Claxby, in the last-named parish chiefly in a well-marked camp overhanging a stream, which here issues from the chalk. At the highest point in the district, where this “way” separates the parishes of Ulceby and Dexthorpe, there was some kind of station or “mansio,” roofed with flanged tiles, in a field where the plough annually turns up many coins and other remains. From South Ormsby the road follows the Blue Stone Heath Road (probably British in origin) along a winding ridge and through a camp, now scarcely traceable, below which, in Worlaby, have been found the walls of a building containing Samian pottery and a quantity of charred corn. Either here or at Ulceby a branch-way may have left this road direct for Horncastle and Tillbridge Lane; its course is not certain, but cinerary urns have been found at Ashby Puerorum, about half-way. At Ludford the main “via” crosses Salters’ Lane from Lincoln, and becomes merged in the “High Street” from Horncastle for nine miles to Caistor, and beyond it for fifteen miles, by Yarborough Camp, to Barton or South Ferriby.[28] Near this road have been found tessellated pavements at Walesby, Claxby, and Bigby. At Barton there are remains of an earthwork called the “Castle Dike,” but much of it has been washed away by the Humber. Another road, long known as Barton “Street,” leaves the first about a mile south of this camp, and passes through or near to Louth; its subsequent course is uncertain, but there are various camps in the Marsh district which may have been connected by it.

Caistor, which stands on a tongue or spur half a mile west of “High Street,” is a very interesting spot. Its position is one of great strength, and suggests a British origin, as it has all the characteristics of a “promontory fortress.” It was surrounded by a wall, strengthened at intervals by turrets or bastions, one of which remains in ruins on the south side of the churchyard; there is also a considerable fragment of the western wall in the garden of Grove Cottage. The exact area of the station is difficult to estimate, as the north and east walls have disappeared; but it was perhaps ten or twelve acres. There are two fine springs issuing from the rock on the south side of the fortress. In the churchyard, which is entirely within the area, Roman coins and pottery are constantly found, but stone foundations seem absent, and the fine ornamental ware is scarce. In early records the site is often termed Than—or Thwang—Castre, probably from the tongue of land on which it stands, and from this name Geoffrey of Monmouth ascribes its building[29] to Hengist, according to the legend by which that mythical chieftain encompassed an area granted him with “thongs” of ox-hide. The same story is told of other “Tong Castles” in Shropshire and Kent, and seems borrowed from Virgil’s account of the foundation of Carthage.

The occupation of our county by the Romans appears to have been more thorough than is sometimes supposed. Only in the north-west corner—the Isle of Axholme—which was then marshy and exposed to the Trent floods, are traces of their presence wanting. Much more doubtless remains to be discovered, for Eastern Lindsey is still comparatively unexplored. The district seems to have been, as now, largely agricultural; and the finding of over twenty villa sites in Kesteven and Lindsey indicates that the wealthier class of landowners resided on their estates. This circumstance points to a long period of peace, which may have lasted more than a century—from about A.D. 170. During that time the road system would be completed, and the industries of potters and saltworkers, so characteristic of our county, gradually developed. But a time came when the Pictish and Saxon marauders must have made great havoc in a district which had a long sea-front, and was but slightly protected by walled towns. In the year 368 these two sources of trouble united to overwhelm the province like an invading flood. The northern tribes broke across the Wall of Hadrian, and in concert with the sea-rovers, who had defeated and slain the Count of the Saxon Shore, advanced their plundering hosts to the very gates of London. By a series of victories, Theodosius, the ablest of the imperial generals, gave the province a short breathing-space. But the weight of taxation imposed by an over-centralised government was gradually crushing the provincials; and discontent gave an opening for the revolt of various usurpers in the last days of the Roman rule. When the legions were finally withdrawn in A.D. 410, the country districts became unsafe. Traces of fire in the ruined villas of Scampton, Worlaby, and other places betray the work of a ruthless, uncivilised foe. The owners may have escaped to the towns, or even, if wealthy, have reached the Continent. But their industry was doomed, and many miles of cultivated land must have passed back into mere prairie. The banks and drains were neglected, and much of the fenland, so laboriously won, returned to its former flooded state. If we could recover the story of one large town, such as Lincoln, in the fifth and sixth centuries, many a dark problem would be solved. In the absence of such records, the withdrawal of the Roman legions and officials is like the ringing down of a thick curtain upon the drama of British history in the ancient world.

SAXON CHURCHES IN LINCOLNSHIRE

By A. Hamilton Thompson, M.A.

Lincolnshire is more rich than any other English county in churches which, if few are indisputably of a date earlier than the Norman conquest, retain traces of an architecture whose character at any rate is of a distinctly pre-Norman type. The county has nothing to show, it is true, of that early work, associated with the first century of Saxon and Anglian Christianity, which gives so unique an interest to the church architecture of certain districts in Kent and Northumbria. The neighbouring shire of Northampton possesses in Brixworth a monument whose importance overshadows that of Stow, and in Barnack and Earl’s Barton buildings which are, in point of detail, a match for Barton-on-Humber; while many who might hesitate to grant the pre-Conquest origin of Bracebridge, could hardly deny it to the Northamptonshire church of Wittering. The missionary visit of St. Paulinus has left but one trace, in the dedication to St. “Paul” of a church in Lincoln, of the connection of Lindsey with the religious life of Northumbria. That distinction on which Lincolnshire has prided itself, the possession of a Saxon cathedral at Stow, not hidden away in the foundations of a later building, but still in use as a parish church, begins to lose its value as the historical evidence on which it depends is more carefully examined. With the exception of Stow and St. Peter’s at Barton, the Saxon monuments of Lincolnshire are humble and unpretentious in character, without any very definitely architectural features; and he would be a bold man who should assert positively, on the little evidence which we have to show for their date, that they were built in days of Saxon rule. Equally bold was the assertion of Professor Freeman with regard to the two towers in the southern suburb of Lincoln, that native workmen built them while the Minster was rising in the style of the conquerors on the hill above.[30] Such positiveness is rebuked by the discovery that this picturesque statement was founded on evidence referring to churches in a different part of the city.[31] Avoiding either extreme, we may say, in our present state of knowledge, that most of the so-called Saxon churches of Lincolnshire represent a late state of Saxon art, open to Norman influence, but preserving a distinctly national tradition. Some of these monuments are undoubtedly later than the Conquest: of others, and perhaps of the majority, it may be said that, though a post-Conquest date is possible, yet the character of the work is of a kind that might be expected rather before the Conquest than after, and belongs at any rate to a type of art prior to the general spread of Norman influence. Thus the epithet “Saxon” may fairly be given to such buildings, even though, in point of date, they may belong to the Norman period.

St. Peter’s Church, Barton-on-Humber.

Of the pre-Norman date of the lowest stages of the tower and of the western forebuilding of St. Peter’s at Barton-on-Humber there can be no doubt, as we shall presently see. And at Barton the chief point of interest comes into view, in which these churches are of most importance to the architectural student. At the end of the tenth century, a date which may perhaps be claimed without extravagance for the Barton church, the parish church plan in England was a matter of experiment. The basilican plan with aisles had never been popular beyond a few larger churches: Lincolnshire does not furnish us with a single instance of the nave with aisles or of the apsidal sanctuary, which, with certain modifications, are features of some Saxon plans. The simple plan of aisleless nave and rectangular chancel, which had been adopted probably in most Saxon churches, had been complicated by the introduction of the tower into the scheme. The tower was for the present the uncertain factor whose place in the plan the Lincolnshire builders, and those of other counties with them, were trying to determine; and it is the position of the tower which gives Lincolnshire Saxon ground-plans their peculiar importance. We may be doubtful about the place of towers like Earl’s Barton and Barnack in the plan: they may have been merely western appendages to churches which have now been entirely replaced by later buildings, or they may have been the church itself, with its walls raised into a lofty tower, at once a place for bells and a look-out in time of danger. There can be no such doubt at Barton-on-Humber. In our own day the tower and its western annexe stand at the west end of a large late Gothic church; but, at a restoration in 1898, the foundations of an eastern annexe, very similar in size and shape to the western, were discovered, showing beyond all doubt that the tower formed the main body of the church, standing between a chancel and what may have been a baptistery—rooms for the altar and the font—of almost equal size. The tower was broader than its adjunct: two entrances remain, one on the north, the other on the south, opposite each other, and towards the western end of either wall. Mr. Hodgson Fowler, who discovered the foundations of the chancel, also discovered other foundations, presumably of Saxon date, to the east of the tower, which seem to suggest that a larger building with an elongated plan was in contemplation, but was superseded by a compact plan which found itself centralised in the space allotted to the tower.[32]

A somewhat similar plan occurs at Broughton, a village some four miles west of Brigg, and close to the line of Roman road which led from Lincoln to the Humber. Here the fabric has none of those distinctively Saxon features which are found at Barton; it is almost certainly a work of later date. The eastern wall of the tower, as at Barton, has been absorbed in the breadth of an aisled nave of a later period; but the eastern quoins are still visible, continuing to the ground, and indicating that the tower was once broader than the portion of the building east of it. That this eastern building, moreover, was small, and that the bulk of the congregation occupied the space west of it, is suggested by the fact that, as in many later chancel arches, decorative treatment—too rude here to be taken very seriously as architectural membering, in spite of its efforts—is confined to the western face of the arch by which the chancel was approached from the tower-space. Here, then, we have once more the tower-space forming the main area for worship, with a small chancel to the east. At Broughton, however, instead of the corresponding western annexe which we find at Barton, there is a large three-quarter-circular projection, containing a newel staircase which leads to the belfry stage of the tower; and, instead of the two doorways at Barton, there is only one, this time in the south wall. The western projection at Broughton is often ridiculously called a western apse. It is, and always was, a turret for a staircase. Three other such turrets exist. One, at Brixworth in Northamptonshire, was added in front of an earlier western doorway, when the original porch of the basilican church was heightened into a tower. Another, at Brigstock in the same county, forms an integral part of a western tower with strongly Saxon features; its staircase was always of wood, as may have been originally the case at Broughton.[33] The third instance is in Lincolnshire, at Hough-on-the-Hill, seven or eight miles north of Grantham. Here the stair turret is part of a western tower of more than probably pre-Conquest date, and of proportions as ample as those of Earl’s Barton; and one is tempted to discover a parallel to Broughton, and another quasi-parallel to Barton-on-Humber. But the face which the tower presents to the church behind it is singularly blank; and it remains to be seen whether there lie hid, beneath the plaster, quoins, like those at Broughton, to indicate the existence of a chancel whose foundations may still be buried beneath the western floor of the nave.

At Barton and Broughton, and possibly at Hough, we are face to face with a small compact plan—at Barton definitely centralised in the tower-space, at Broughton without the same centralisation, but with the main body of the church still gathered beneath the tower. In these cases, when we speak of the tower and the tower-space, we must regard the tower simply as an upward continuation of the body of the church. The congregation has not found shelter on the ground-floor of a tower: the tower is the upper storey or storeys of their church. However, in the two further instances of towers not western which Lincolnshire affords us, the tower-space must probably be regarded as a feature in the plan distinct from the main body of the building; it is not a church on which a tower has risen, but a space which is there because a tower forms a definite part of the design. Waith Church, a few miles south of Grimsby, is for the most part a modern Gothic building, with an entirely modern plan.[34] But between the chancel and nave, and flanked by a south transept, rises a tower of a type very familiar to travellers in Lincolnshire, but here alone seen in a central position. Its position must always, however, have been between eastern and western out-buildings; for its eastern and western walls are pierced by low arches of equal height and width, very different in proportion from the ordinary western doorway and tower arch. There seems to have been no entrance in either of the side walls. In all probability, then, we have here, not a definitely centralised plan, but a tower-space intervening between a nave and chancel. Of the relative dimensions of these to the tower-space it is impossible to speak: we have no remains to guide us. Again, this tower may have been simply an elevation of the eastern portions of the nave walls, as in those cases to which the term “axial” has been given; or, as in some Norman churches, it may have projected north and south of the adjacent nave and chancel. In the last case, we should have the ground-plan of Barton-on-Humber, with its centralised character probably destroyed by the elongation of its western annexe. The nave and the tower-space become independent divisions of the plan.

St. Mary’s Church, Stow, looking East.

The Saxon church of Stow survives only in part; and to assert that the present fabric, which is largely of the later part of the eleventh and the earlier part of the twelfth century, is a rebuilding of the older church on its original scale, would be to assert what we do not know. However, the church was planned on a scale somewhat more imposing than was usual in Saxon times; and enough of the older work is left in the transepts to assure us that they, at any rate, covered their present site from the date of its foundation. Their length and general proportions postulate a nave to match; and we may assume, without much doubt, that the present Norman nave rose upon Saxon foundations. The chancel may have been enlarged to its present dimensions by Norman builders; this is, at least, more likely than that the Saxon chancel was equally spacious. The visitor to Stow about the time of the Conquest would have seen nave, chancel, and transepts, as indeed the visitor to-day may see them, grouped round a central tower, which rose straight from the ground in their midst, independent of their buttressing aid. The quoins of the tower go down to the ground; the arches which connect the tower-space and the adjacent arms of the building are, as it were, piercings in the tower walls rather than the actual substructure on which the tower walls rested.[35] The tower-space at Stow is thus in some measure a central area, the focus of the plan; and a vivid imagination might conjure up in this instance the Barton-on-Humber plan reproduced on a larger scale, and converted into a Greek cross by the addition of transepts. But it is more probable that here, as at Waith, the tower-space is shifted slightly to one side of the centre of the plan, and, while keeping much of its dignity in the general scheme, is no longer the main body of the building.

In most English churches the most convenient plan from the earliest times has been the oblong nave and practically square chancel, divided by an arch which, to our modern ideas, has sometimes been inconveniently narrow, but without the intervening tower-space, which became in so many later churches an obstruction to the unity of worship in chancel and nave. We have seen Lincolnshire builders experimenting with that new-found addition to the plan, the tower, packing their nave into its ground-floor, trying what can be done with a central area, abandoning—we speak of probabilities—the complete symmetry of the centralised plan, and finally wedging the tower in between the arms of the building, as an effective focus for the church as seen in elevation. The difficulties, the inconvenience, the uncertain conditions, of centralised or quasi-centralised planning, are now in most cases abandoned: the builders frankly remove their tower-space to the west end of their plan. Upon it rises a bell-tower, which may on occasion be used as a look-out tower in time of disturbance, or even—though this seems very doubtful—as a place of refuge for the inhabitants of the township. In most instances the tower-space will be entered by a western doorway, and will be the porch of the church, just as, at Brixworth or at Monkwearmouth, in other counties, the original porch has become the substructure of the tower. The porch will lead into the nave of the church, oblong and aisleless; and, in the east wall of the nave, an arch will give access to a small rectangular chancel. This is the normal Lincolnshire, and indeed the normal English plan; and this plan powerfully affects the architecture of the Norman and Gothic periods of English art. The centralised plan may survive in beautiful forms, and will always be the more interesting, owing to its greater capacity for variation; but the western tower of the Saxon period, and the elongated plan associated with it, will be the standard of planning congenial to the larger number of English masons.

It is unnecessary to particularise between the various churches of Saxon origin in Lincolnshire which have western towers. There are many, and the number may be stated rather variously. The present writer, excluding Hough and Broughton, which, as we have seen, may be treated more suitably with centralised plans, counts some thirty towers in part or wholly of the distinctively Saxon type.[36] Some of these, as he already has said, evidently were built at a date later than the Conquest. Of no one of them would he courageously assert, on the mere evidence of plan and details, that it was built actually and beyond doubt before the Conquest. But that they were built by the hands of Saxon workmen, and that they represent a definitely Saxon tradition, are hypotheses which, if they do not offer themselves to a very clear proof, may at any rate be enunciated as highly probable.

The consideration of the dimensions of these towers on plan may be left to the discussion of their relative dates, with which this chapter will conclude. Having noted variations of plan, we must now look at architectural details. Of those peculiarities of technique which are most readily recognised as Saxon, St. Peter’s, at Barton-on-Humber, is a nearly unique example in Lincolnshire, and its value is still higher, in that the upper stage of the tower presents features of a rather different kind, more typical of Lincolnshire, but less specially and exclusively Saxon than those of the lower stages. The tower is divided by two string-courses into three stages, the middle stage low and squat, the lowest stage much the tallest of the three, and subdivided into two parts, an upper and lower, by external decorative arcading. This subdivided stage represents the body of the church; the middle stage probably represents the original bell-chamber; and both these stages, together with the small western annexe, have definite “long-and-short” quoining. The “short” stones, as usual, back into the rubble-work, of which the tower is built; but their protruding faces are cut away flush with the rubble, and are hidden beneath the plaster which covers the whole surface of the tower. The decorative arcading, however, already alluded to, is formed by irregular strips of dressed stone projecting from the surface, the heads of which, formed by small horizontal impost-blocks, are connected in the lower stage by semicircular strips. On the crown of each of these rude arches rests the foot of one of the upright strips of the upper stage, which are connected similarly by strips of triangular form, the apices of which touch the under side of the string-course between the lower and the middle stage. The surface of the lower stage is thus cut up into two series of tall arcaded panels. The bottom part of one of the lower panels is pierced on the north and south sides of the tower by a doorway with rounded head. The upright, dividing two of the upper panels on each of these sides, is partly cut away to make room for a double window-opening with rounded heads, the opening being divided by a small piece of wall faced, at the level of the outer wall, with a baluster-shaft. These windows lighted the body of the church, the inner roof of which came at this point. The middle stage keeps the “long-and-short” quoining, but the strip-work has here given place to an unpanelled plastered surface, broken only by a double window-opening, similar in construction to that in the stage below, but with triangular instead of semicircular heads. Like the middle stage of the tower, the western annexe of the church has no strip-work on its walls, but has “long-and-short” work at its angles. It is lighted by a semicircular-headed opening in each of the north and south walls, and in the west wall by two circular openings set one above the other. All these openings are splayed outwards as well as inwards. The eastern wall of the tower can be seen from the inside of the present church, with its “long-and-short” quoining perfect to the ground, and with breaks in the masonry where the eastern annexe originally joined it. The arch which pierces it on the ground-floor—the chancel arch of the Saxon church—is very plainly treated with dressed jambs, impost-blocks, and voussoirs, but without any moulding. In the wall above is a single opening of considerable width, with rounded head, rather massive jamb-stones, and thin, flat impost-blocks. Above this comes the double opening of the belfry stage, which would have stood clear of the roof of the Saxon chancel.[37]

Turning from these features of the original church walls, its western annexe, and its belfry stage, to the uppermost stage of the tower, we are met by a striking difference. We already have seen the strip-work of the lowest stage disappear. Here the “long-and-short” work is gone as well, and the quoining is of small oblong stones set on one another at right angles, so that each of the adjacent faces of the wall is in bond with every other of the quoins. The window-openings are still double, and have rounded heads, but they are taller than those below, and are divided, not by slabs of wall with baluster facings, but by slender rounded shafts set in the middle of the thickness of the wall, with heads corbelled out so as to form rude capitals, and to support through-stone impost-blocks, corresponding to those at the head of the jambs on either side. Of the absence of splay, inner or outer, to the openings we can say nothing; the double splay has occurred only in the western annexe. But the disappearance of “long-and-short” work, that most unmistakable of purely Saxon details, and the introduction of a new type of double opening, are significant of a change of style which has come over the Saxon building art since the church and tower began to rise.

Thus, at Barton-on-Humber, we have two different types of Saxon work—that very peculiar form, with its tendency to panel decoration with strip-framing, which produces its highest decorative effect at Earl’s Barton, side by side with a more staid, less fantastic manner of building, which is without architectural ambition, uses decoration very sparingly, but can achieve very pleasant effects of proportion within its modest limits. This second style, as it may be called, is emphatically the style favoured by Lincolnshire builders. Of the first style, Barton-on-Humber is the only really conspicuous example in the county.[38] Strip-work decorations, not uncommon in the Saxon work of the South Midlands and South of England, of Mercia and Wessex, is quite the exception within the belt of Danish influence. It appears here and there as a kind of frame to arches and their jambs, or to the heads of window-openings. The best examples of its use in this connection anywhere in England are to be found in the jambs of the noble tower arches at Stow, where a semicircular shaft is carried down the face of the wall close to the angle of the jambs, and is accompanied by a flat strip of stone at a few inches distance. Both shaft and strip are finished off by rough corbels a little above the floor level.[39] But Stow is an exceptional church. As a rule, we find the strip-frame retained purely as a flat hood-mould to doorways and windows, without a trace of that individuality of style which distinguishes it at Stow, and preserving a still more distant kinship to the work at Barton.

“Long-and-short” work pursues a more hardy existence. Quoining was necessary, and the “long-and-short” method was at once serviceable and fairly ornamental. So, while strip-work, a merely decorative arrangement of pilasters without constructive use, went its way, “long-and-short” quoining remained. We come across it chiefly at the angles of naves, which in several cases have been left almost untouched, when aisles of a later date have been added. St. Mary-le-Wigford and St. Peter-at-Gowts at Lincoln are cases in point. Bracebridge is an excellent example, for here all four angles of the nave can be traced. Cranwell, near Sleaford, and Ropsley, near Grantham, are other unmistakable instances. But here we must beware. The critic is too common who, assuming that a piece of wall is Saxon in character, immediately jumps to the conclusion that its quoining must be “long-and-short.” If the quoins are not arranged in a regular series of pieces alternately vertical and horizontal, then the work is not “long-and-short” work. If one or two stones thus arranged occur in the middle of irregular or of the common “small-stone” quoining, we are not justified in speaking of the fabric as showing “long-and-short” work. If the quoining shows a merely rough general resemblance to the “long-and-short” arrangement, it is not “long-and-short” work, but work of a quite haphazard type.

This brings us to one of the leading features which distinguish the towers so characteristic of Saxon work in Lincolnshire. We may study their angles to our heart’s content, and discover “long-and-short” work with the eye of faith, but we shall actually see it in only one instance, and there in the jambs of a western doorway of the tower, rather than in the quoining of the tower itself. In this instance, at Rothwell, near Caistor, the south-west quoining of the adjacent church has been left standing, like a small rectangular buttress, against the junction of the twelfth century nave and south aisle. It is formed of irregular stones, but such “long-and-short” work as there is, is confined to the tower. This is an exception. At the Lincoln churches and Bracebridge, where we have noticed “long-and-short” quoining at the nave angles, the quoining of the tower is of small stones; and this is universally the case. If we go northwards, by Marton, Heapham, Springthorpe, Corringham, Harpswell, and Glentworth, to Winterton and Alkborough; if we cross the Ancholme to Worlaby, and then go by Barton-on-Humber to Clee, Scartho, Holton-le-Clay, Waith, and Laceby; if we traverse the Wolds by Swallow, Cuxwold, Rothwell, and Cabourn to Caistor and Nettleton, and, descending by way of Hainton to Lincoln, make our way along the South Cliff to Branston, Harmston, and Coleby; if we go as far south as Boothby Pagnell, Little Bytham, and Thurlby-by-Bourn, and finish our journey in the midst of the parts of Holland at Great Hale, the only genuine piece of “long-and-short” work we shall have found in a western tower is that at Rothwell. It is true that this journey will have included more than one doubtful member of the family, and some of its genuine members which have lost, under the hand of the restorer, most of their appearance of age; but its result will be the establishment of the general rule that the Saxon tower-builder in Lincolnshire did not avail himself of the “long-and-short” method of quoining.

It will hardly need this journey to be convinced of his preference for the double window-opening, divided by the mid-wall shaft. This declares itself patently in the well-known towers at Lincoln; and all the towers mentioned above still have, or probably have had, such windows. Sometimes, as at Nettleton or Coleby, the belfry stage has been entirely renewed in the later Gothic period. Sometimes, as at Winterton or Alkborough, the tower has simply been heightened, and the Saxon belfry stage has become an intermediate storey. Sometimes, as at Cuxwold, the top of the tower has been lopped off altogether, or, as at Swallow, has been replaced by a modern stage in a rather incongruous style. In every case the original existence of the “mid-wall shaft” window cannot be reasonably doubted. The form of such openings as remain is very much the same. Its main outlines have been seen in the uppermost stage of the tower at Barton: two adjacent openings, with dressed jambs and voussoirs flush with the general surface of the wall, with rounded arches springing from through-stone impost-blocks, and received at their meeting by another such block, which rests on the mid-wall shaft itself. These openings pierce the wall without any splay. They have no strip-framing, and seldom, if ever, any attempt at hood-moulding. Although, as has been hinted, some beauty of form may be claimed for them, they are as simply constructed a type of arched opening as could well be devised. Their proportions are sometimes rather elegant; and, when they are set round a small upper stage, divided by a projecting string-course or off-set from the unbuttressed and sometimes slightly tapering length of the lower stage, their effect is always striking.

The architectural value of these towers, so simple in their principles of construction, so insignificant in their height, is less than their historical interest. Saxon builders had little architectural knowledge or skill; and buildings like Stow impress us more by their height and mass of wall than by any very striking architectural feature. The work at Barton-on-Humber is curious and interesting building: it is not architecture. In the Lincolnshire towers, a step is taken in the right direction by the avoidance of merely decorative surface-ornament. The tower asks for judgment on its own merits. Where it is divided by offsets into two or three stages, the result is satisfactory; although, if the belfry stage is of much the same area as the stage below, the tower looks top-heavy. This certainly is the case of St. Mary-le-Wigford. At St. Peter-at-Gowts, a small upper stage is set firmly and squarely upon a long and tapering lower one; and there is no finer tower in the whole series. The third type, where there is no off-set—the much-restored tower of Springthorpe is now, if it was not always, in this state—is merely insignificant.

The treatment of openings in these towers, other than the mid-wall shaft windows, is open to few variations. Western doorways are low and narrow: large stones are used in the jambs; and, though the heads are arched, the actual opening is covered by a flat lintel. The roughest of these openings is in the tower at Winterton, where the head of the doorway is formed by a huge stone, cut with a segmental curve on its under side to give the effect of an arch. Flat rectangular hood-mouldings of small projection sometimes follow the curve of the doorway arch and meet the extreme edge of the impost-block. At Clee, one of the best towers of the group, such a hood-moulding bounds a doorway head of two orders of voussoirs, the lower slightly recessed beneath the upper; but such refinements are rare. A similar recessing of a lower band of voussoirs occurs in the tower arches at Clee and Scartho, but in no case is it accompanied by any attempt at moulding the arch or recessing the jambs to match. An edge-roll was worked very tentatively at Nettleton along part of an unmoulded tower-arch, but was abandoned when about half completed. An ambitious and unique attempt at recessing, in the chancel arch at Broughton (now the arch from the tower into the nave), remains as a monument of the failure of the Saxon mason in his search for means of architectural expression. Both orders of the arch spring from an undivided impost-block, and the shafts, which should bear, and are intended to correspond to, the inner order, are stranded on either side of the back of the opening, with their heads left bare and their function denied them. As a rule, in doorways and tower arches, the mason was content with a plain unmoulded arch, springing from projecting impost-blocks on the top of jambs, the dressings of which are simply the quoins of a rubble wall. He varied the proportions of his tower arches, giving them great height, breadth, and dignity at St. Peter-at-Gowts, building them tall and narrow at Clee, Scartho, and Holton-le-Clay, or with rather less elevation and rather more breadth at Rothwell and Cabourn, frequently allowing them, as at Cuxwold or Alkborough, to remain low and rather broad in proportion. These variations of the tower arch constitute one of the most interesting features of this type of building: they introduce an element of individual design, and the loftier form of arch often produces by its mere size an effect which is not due to any obvious architectural virtue.

The lesser windows of the towers are usually small and narrow, with an inner splay. Their outer openings are often flanked by very large dressed stones: their rounded heads are seldom arched—there is a good arched window head in the south wall of the tower at Coleby—but are more often cut in the under side of a lintel; and sometimes this cut, exceeding a semicircle, produces the “key-hole” form of opening. At Rothwell there is in each wall of the tower, below the “mid-wall” windows, a small rectangular opening with a wide inner splay: a somewhat similar opening pierces the wall above the west door at Nettleton.

In the masonry of these towers two striking features are apparent. One is the disappearance of that “through-stone” treatment of dressed masonry, which is an undoubted characteristic of early Saxon work. A little doorway in the west wall of the north transept at Stow has voussoirs and jamb-stones, each of which faces the whole thickness of the wall. But the jambs below the tower arches are faced with double or triple, not single stones. And while it is rare to find a tower arch or doorway of this style formed of a core of rubble between facings of dressed stone, yet there are few in which the facing stones do not become less closely set together, and wide rubble fillings do not take the place of neat and close jointing. The other feature is the appearance of “herring-bone” masonry. This may be seen in some profusion at Broughton, and in a striking and unusual form at Marton; and, although it is not general, it occurs in other places.

Modifications in the tower plan are almost confined to an increase of dimensions which, in some members of the group—notably Caistor—is rather remarkable. One tower alone—Great Hale—introduces a newel staircase into an angle of the fabric; and this is almost absurdly unsuited to the probable size of those who had to climb it. We have seen that, at Hough and Broughton, nearly circular excrescences were formed to hold stairs on the west side of the towers. As a rule, we may believe that the upper floors of the towers were approached by ladders. It may be noted that in Lincolnshire there are very few of those openings above the tower arch, which are often quoted to prove the use of the tower as a place of habitation, and probably led to a landing and wooden stair communicating with the interior of the church. There are such, as at St. Peter-at-Gowts, Winterton, and Broughton; but they are exceptional, and the probable plan of Broughton makes it possible that, as at Barton-on-Humber, the opening was merely a piercing in the wall between nave and chancel.

But if there is little variation in plan, there is, as has been noted, even in the simplest towers, some degree of variation in detail. There are cases, moreover, in which the tendency to variation takes the direction of increased ornamental treatment. Instances are quite common in which the heads of the mid-wall shafts, bulging to support their impost-blocks, have been carved into the form of capitals—plain cubical or cushion-blocks, as at Winterton or Clee; rough suggestions of classical volutes and foliage, as at Glentworth or Scartho; varied forms of fruit and leafage, as at Bracebridge; or delicate and cleverly cut relief work, as at St. Peter-at-Gowts. And these capitals are not the only features which show the tendency. At Alkborough ornamental material has been transferred from some deserted Roman villa in the neighbourhood: a cornice from an entablature has been cut up, used as imposts, and turned upside down to form plinths for the jambs of the tower arch. But at Branston, south of Lincoln, the builders have not borrowed ornament. Like the masons at Broughton with their abortive recessed arch, they have tried to copy what they have heard of, what some of them at any rate have seen, and have covered the lower part of the west wall of their tower with arcaded panelling, with rounded arches and cushion capitals. This, and the central doorway with shafting and rudely foliated capitals, have been inspired from a source quite distinct from that which brought into being the strip-work panelling of Barton-on-Humber.

We are at once impelled to ask what this source is. And this question brings us to the consideration of two final questions, which are complementary to one another. What influences from the Christian architecture of other countries were felt by Lincolnshire masons? Is there any element of progress to be traced in the Saxon buildings of the county? In short, to combine the two questions into one, can any chronological sequence be traced in these buildings, by comparing them with the work of Romanesque builders in other countries?

We already have allowed the term “Saxon” to them, on the understanding that a pre-Conquest date is not implied thereby, but merely the fact that their style is different from that of buildings to which we give the term “Norman.” It may also be premised that, in considering their relative date, we have to deal cautiously and tentatively with a series of probabilities. We must also put legend aside. A hardy tradition, resting on no authentic basis, but engraved on a brass tablet within the church, points to certain traces of fire in the church of Stow as evidence of its burning by the Danes in 870. If this were true, and if the lower walls of the tower, as they exist to-day, were the tower walls of the Saxon cathedral of Sidnaceaster, we should be able to point to a church of the ninth century, if not earlier, which would probably have supplied an architectural standard to the diocese. However, we have nothing but the size of the church and an unfounded, if time-honoured, assumption to give it claim to cathedral rank. The very name of Sidnaceaster was probably invented in post-Conquest times, by some one who misread the signature of one of the bishops of Lindsey to the decrees of a Saxon council.[40] And, finally, the authentic history of the church of Stow does not begin till about the year 1040, when Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester, with the powerful assistance of Earl Leofric and his wife Godiva, set a band of religious men on the site hallowed by memories of the miraculous sojourn of St. Etheldreda on her flight from York to Ely. All that lies behind 1040 in connection with this church is pure romance. When Bishop Rémi later in the century restored St. Mary’s Minster at Stow, what he probably did was to complete Eadnoth’s ambitious beginnings, on a worthy scale, out of reverence for St. Etheldreda, and not out of sentimental feeling for an old cathedral church which he had superseded for all time by his new church at Lincoln. If a small archdeaconry in the Norman diocese of Lincoln, corresponding to the original district of Lindsey, took its name from Stow, we must not consider this as admitting the old cathedral dignity of Stow. The size of Eadnoth’s and Rémi’s church made it the most prominent building in the archdeaconry: no more convenient or suitable name could be supplied to the district.[41]

1040, then, is a recognised date to which we can refer the earliest work at Stow. We know, too, that a church was founded at Alkborough in 1052, and the work in the western tower there, with its triangular-headed belfry windows, may be claimed for that date or not long after. These are practically the only two pieces of dated evidence on which we can rely, for we have already seen that the evidence as to Coleswegen’s churches at Lincoln does not apply to existing buildings.[42] Stow, as we have seen, retains strip-framing to the tower jambs on a large scale: “long-and-short” work occurs in the north transept doorway and in the jambs of a window opening in the south transept: through-stone masonry is used in the north transept doorway, but abandoned in the tower arch jambs. Alkborough has none of these characteristics. We are thus at liberty to assume a gradual cessation of purely Saxon technique between 1040 and 1052.

Further, at Barton-on-Humber, although we have no documentary evidence to guide us, it is obvious that the tower is of two styles. The uppermost stage forms an addition to the original design in a somewhat more simple style. An interval of date between the stages is certain: the length of that interval would be hard to ascertain. But the fantastic strip-panelling and “long-and-short” work of the lower stages of the tower belong to the height of a fashion in architecture which is seen gradually disappearing at Stow. The strip-framing and “long-and-short” work at Stow are of a different and less purely decorative type: we are not surprised when in the upper stage of the tower at Barton, or in the tower at Alkborough, they disappear altogether. So far, then, this statement of progress is justifiable. The lower stages of the tower at Barton are obviously earlier than the upper stage. The upper stage has affinities of detail with the tower at Alkborough, and clearly belongs to much the same or a slightly later period. The tower at Alkborough is at least twelve years later than the only trustworthy date for the early work at Stow. And, as we have just seen, the work at Stow, in its selection and treatment of elements which had been used at Barton in careless profusion, is probably later in date than the earlier portion of Barton. With Barton may be grouped, from the character of its “long-and-short” quoining and the window-openings of its stair turret, the interesting tower at Hough-on-the-Hill. With Stow we may group, at any rate provisionally, those fabrics which have “long-and-short” quoining of a substantial type, flush with the surface of the wall, instead of projecting in rather thin strips beyond it—this will include, as we have noticed, some naves of churches. With Alkborough and the upper stage at Barton can be combined church towers generally, Hough alone excepted, and work of a partly Saxon character, like that at Stragglethorpe, not far from Hough. The “long-and-short” work in Rothwell tower is so small in quantity that it can hardly be treated as an exception to the third group.

Professor Baldwin Brown, in his valuable monograph on Saxon ecclesiastical architecture, has provided strong arguments for the influence of Teutonic Romanesque architecture on our Saxon builders.[43] It has long been the fashion to suppose that the decorative detail at Barton-on-Humber and other kindred churches is an imitation of timber construction in stone; the rudeness of treatment makes the supposition excusable. But we can hardly grant that Saxon builders could have imitated a system of construction which was not at any rate general till a much later date; and it is much more likely that the work at Barton is copied roughly and clumsily from a type of decorative work which, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, was common in the Rhenish provinces and in the districts of Northern Italy architecturally related to them. It is unquestionable that the double opening with mid-wall shaft found its origin in the same provinces. Northern Italy doubtless exercised its influence on Germany; Germany, in turn, influenced the Saxon masons. In three other cases at least German influence is more than probable. It is certainly responsible for the double-splayed window-opening; it probably affected the simple type of capital which was developed into the cushion capital of later days; the unfaced rubble masonry and thin walling of Saxon churches are found commonly in early Romanesque German churches, and are the antithesis of the faced rubble and thick walling of Normandy and the Romanesque buildings of France; while the position of the western tower in the Saxon plan is a further German feature.

On the details of English intercourse with Germany it is unnecessary to dwell. There is plenty of evidence to show that a close connection existed between the two countries, which cannot but have had influence on the progress of art in England. That progress must have been practically at a standstill during the long epoch of Danish invasion. The date at which we may most reasonably expect an architectural revival to be general is that period, the last thirty to forty years of the tenth century, when so many monasteries were rebuilt or newly founded, and the monastic life re-established. This revival was strongly influenced by the monasteries of the Netherlands, which lay in the direct current of architectural progress between Germany proper and England. To this date at earliest, then, may be assigned the earliest parts of the church at Barton-on-Humber, and possibly the tower at Hough. We cannot go further back without deserting probability. At the same time, if we limit this work to the latter half of the tenth century on the one hand, we are not precluded from allowing that it may be later. Barton-on-Humber lay in the very path of the Danish invaders who established their power in England between 1002 and 1014. The base of operations of the heathen Swegen was at Gainsborough; there he died, and there he was said, though wrongly, to have been buried. The older parts of the church at Barton show no sign of the ruin which we might expect to have thus befallen them. Perhaps the church was left roofless by Swegen, but restored and completed, with the upper stage added to the tower, towards the middle or after the middle of the eleventh century. But it is also equally probable that the whole lower structure may be a rebuilding under the Christian Canute of a church ruined by his father; and that, after an intermediate stage in which the church may have taken the form shown by Professor Baldwin Brown, the tower was heightened by a storey.

The oldest Saxon fabrics in Lincolnshire need not, therefore, be earlier than the eleventh century. It will be noticed that of these Barton gives us a centralised plan, while Hough presents a plan which certainly is not in keeping with that of the usual western tower. The head of the second group, Stow, is another experiment in “central” planning. The remaining anomalies of plan, Broughton and Waith, belong, in the matter of technique, to the third group, in which the western tower predominates overwhelmingly. The German features of the third group already have been described. But they are less marked than those of earlier groups, and the buildings are open to influences, especially decorative influences, of quite another kind.

Towers like those of St. Mary-le-Wigford and St. Peter-at-Gowts, or of Bracebridge, may be regarded, on the strength of their different quoining and their lack of any bond with the fabric behind, as final additions to churches which, in point of date, we have provisionally classified with Stow. Not infrequently, the tower and church were built together without afterthought, as at Winterton, where the ends of the nave walls still remain in bond with the tower, enclosed within the spacious church of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. If we attempt to classify these towers chronologically, however, we may try several standards. The relative height and width of the tower arch affords no criterion; this seems to be varied at the fancy of local masons. Again, rude attempts at moulding, like that at Nettleton, tell us nothing; the moulded tower arch at Corringham is so out of keeping with the tower itself that it can hardly be part of the original design; the wide arch at Harmston is clearly a reconstruction achieved comparatively late in the twelfth century. But the absence of through-stone masonry, the approach to the system of rubble core and dressed facing, indicate a growing assimilation to “Norman” methods. The tower at Waith has a facing of rough ashlar, which is found in no other Lincolnshire tower of the type. Another tell-tale sign is the appearance of herring-bone work, which Norman builders used freely in the walling of their earlier castles, and builders of the pre-Conquest period certainly used little, if at all. The “herring-bone” masonry of the tower at Marton is identical in style with that in the curtain-wall of Tamworth Castle.