increase of clergymen who take an interest in the past history of their
churches, and write all they can find out about them, either in their
parish magazines or in a separate pamphlet. Some of these, too, take
pains with their old registers, and if only the rector, or someone
in the parish whom he could trust to do the work with skill, care,
and knowledge, would copy the old sixteenth and seventeenth century
registers in a clear hand, the parish would be in possession of the most
interesting of all local documents in a legible form, and the originals
could be safely housed in a dry place, which is by no means the case with
all of them at present, and no longer be subjected to the wear and tear
of rough handling and the decay from damp which has been so fatal to the
earliest pages of most of them.
The printing and placing more frequently in the church of a card,
pointing out the salient features and giving what is known of the
history of the building, would also be a boon to those visitors who know
something of architecture, and would stimulate a taste for it in others,
and a respect for old work, the lack of which has been the cause of so
much destruction under the specious name of restoration in the earlier
half of the past century. Things are much better now than they were
two generations ago, but ignorance and want of means may still cause
irreparable damage, which, if the above suggestion were universally
carried out, would become less and less possible.
[Sidenote: CHURCH PATRONAGE]
Amongst those who take the greatest interest in their churches I am
especially indebted to the Rev. G. G. Walker, Rector of Somerby near
Grantham, the Rev. Canon Sutton, of Brant Broughton, the Rev. F.
McKenzie, of Great Hale near Sleaford, and the Rev. C. H. Laing, of
Bardney, who has done such good work in the excavation of the famous
abbey. The writer, too, of letters in _The Spilsby and Horncastle
Gazette_, on town and village life in Lincolnshire, brings together much
interesting information. From him I gather that as far back as 668,
when Theodore was Archbishop of Canterbury, local provision was made
for the village clergy who were then, of course, but few in number. His
wise arrangement, that those who built a church should have the right
of choosing their pastor, initiated the system of private patronage
and thereby encouraged the building and endowing of churches, so that
it is not surprising to hear that in Domesday Book—400 years later than
Theodore’s time—the county of Lincolnshire had no less than 226 churches.
The original patron often gave the right of presentation to an abbey,
which was a wise plan, as it ensured to the people a pastor, and to the
pastor an adequate means of living, and provided for the building and
upkeep of the church, which was often larger than the population of the
village warranted either then or since.
CHAPTER XVII
THE NORTH-WEST
Winteringham—Alkborough and “Julian’s
Bower”—Burton-Stather—Scunthorpe and Frodingham—Fillingham
and Wycliff—Glentworth and Sir Christopher
Wray—Laughton—Corringham—Gainsborough—The Old Hall—Lea and Sir
Charles Anderson—Knaith and Sir Thomas Sutton—A Group of Early
Church Towers—Lincolnshire Roads.
It is quite a surprise to the traveller in the north of the county to
find so much that is really pretty in what looks on the map, from the
artistic point of view, a trifle “flat and unprofitable,” but really
there are few prettier bits of road in the county than that by “the
Villages” under the northern Wolds, and there is another little bit of
cliff near the mouth of the Trent which affords equally picturesque bits
of village scenery combined with fine views over the Trent, Ouse, and
Humber.
From _South Ferriby_ a byway runs alongside the water to _Winteringham_,
from whence the Romans must have had a ferry to _Brough_, whence their
great road went on to the north.
In _Winteringham_ church there are some good Norman arches, and a fine
effigy of a knight in armour, said to be one of the Marmions. The road
hence takes us by innumerable turns to _West Halton_, where the church
is dedicated to St. Etheldreda, who is said to have hidden here from her
husband Ecgfrith, when she was fleeing to Ely, at which place she founded
the first monastery, in 672, six years before the building of the church
at Stow. Murray notes that in the “Liber Eliensis” Halton is called
Alftham.
Three miles to the south-east we find the large village of _Winterton_,
just within a mile of the Ermine Street, and it is evident that a good
many Romans had villas on the high ground looking towards the Humber,
for both here and at _Roxby_, a mile to the south, good Roman pavements
have been found, and another, four miles to the east, at Horkstow.
Roxby church shows some pre-Norman stone work at the west end of the
north aisle, and a fine series of canopied sedilia in the chancel, with
unusually rich and lofty pinnacles. At _Winterton_ a Roman pavement
was noticed by De la Pryme in 1699, and another with a figure of Ceres
holding a cornucopia was discovered in 1797. The churchyard has an
Early English cross, and the tower, which is engaged in the aisles, is
of the primitive Romanesque type, with the Saxon belfry windows in the
lower stage, and elegant Early English ones above. An early slab is
over the west door, the nave has lofty octagonal pillars with bands of
tooth ornament. The transepts are unusually wide and have rich Decorated
windows. A Holy Family, by Raphael Mengs, forms the altarpiece.
[Sidenote: MAZES]
From here we go west to _Alkborough_, and on a grassy headland
overlooking the junction of the Trent with the Ouse, we find a
saucer-shaped hollow a few feet deep and forty-four feet across, at
the bottom of which is a maze cut in the turf by monks 800 years ago.
It is almost identical in pattern with one at Wing, near Uppingham,
in Rutland, and unlike those “quaint mazes on the wanton green”
mentioned in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which “for lack of tread are
undistinguishable,” it has been kept cleared out, and a copy of it laid
down in the porch, as we find to be done on one of the porch piers at
Lucca Cathedral, and in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. These mazes
were Christian adaptations of the Egyptian and Greek labyrinths, and
were supposed to be allegorical of the mazes and entanglements of sin
from which man can only get free if assisted by the guiding hand of
Providence, or of Holy Church. Hence in a Christian Basilica in Algeria
the words “Sancta Ecclesia” are arranged in a complicated fashion in
the centre of the maze. Other mazes used to exist at Appleby, Louth,
and Horncastle in Lincolnshire, and at Ripon one of the same pattern,
but half as large again as the Alkborough maze, was only ploughed up
in 1827. At Asenby in Yorkshire is a similar one still carefully kept
clear. That on St. Catherine’s Hill, Winchester, is quadrangular and much
simpler. At Leigh in Dorset is a “Miz Maze.” Northants, Notts, Wilts,
Beds, Cambridge, and Gloucestershire, all had one at least. _Comberton_
in Cambridge has one of precisely the same pattern, and at _Hilton_, in
Huntingdonshire, is one called by the same name as that at Alkborough,
“Julian’s bower.” This is thought to be a reminiscence of the intricate
‘Troy’ game described in Virgil, _Aen._ v., 588-593, as played on
horseback by Iulus and his comrades:—
“Ut quondam Creta fertur Labyrinthus in alta
Parietibus textum caecis iter, ancipitemque
Mille viis habuisse dolum, qua signa sequendi
Falleret indeprensus et irremeabilis error.
Haud alio Teucrum nati vestigia cursu
Impediunt texuntque fugas et proelia ludo.”
And the fact that a labyrinthine figure cut in the turf near Burgh on
the Solway by the Cumberland herdsmen was called “the walls of Troy”
somewhat favours the interpretation. But it seems rather a far-fetched
origin. Doubtless they served as an innocent recreation for the monks who
lived at St. Anne’s chapel hard by, and the idea of such labyrinthine
patterns is found in many churches abroad, for they are executed in
coloured marbles, both in Rome and in the Early church of St. Vitale at
Ravenna. The mazes formed of growing trees, as at Hampton Court, are more
difficult to make out, as you cannot see the whole pattern at one time.
[Sidenote: ALKBOROUGH]
The church at _Alkborough_ was, like Croyland, a bone of contention
between the monks of Spalding and Peterborough, each claiming it as a
gift from the founder Thorold, in 1052. Tradition says that it was partly
rebuilt by the three knights, Brito, Tracy, and Morville, who had taken
refuge in this most remote corner of Lincolnshire, where one of them
lived, after their murder of Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The original
Early tower and tower-arch remain, and a fragment of a very early
cross is now to be seen by the north pier. One of the bells has this
inscription:—
“Jesu for yi Modir sake
Save all ye sauls that me gart make.”
[Sidenote: BURTON-STATHER]
In the village is a really beautiful old Tudor house of brick, with stone
mullions, called Walcot Old Hall, the property of J. Goulton Constable,
Esq. The little isolated bit of chalk wold which begins near Walcot is
but four miles long, and in the centre of it is perched the village
of _Burton-Stather_. The church stands on the very edge of the cliff,
and a steep road leads down to the Staithe, a ferry landing stage, from
which the village gets its name. Here, at a turn in the road, close to
the village pump, still in universal use by the road side, we stopped
to admire the wide and delightful view. The Trent was just below us.
_Garthorpe_, where the other side of the ferry has its landing place,
was in front, across the Trent lay the _Isle of Axholme_, green but
featureless, and beyond it the sinuous Ouse, like a great gleaming snake,
with the smoke of Goole rising up across the wide plain, and beyond the
river, Howden tower; while, on a clear day, Selby Abbey and York Minster
can be seen from the churchyard. We leave the village by an avenue of
over-arching trees, and cross the Wold obliquely, passing Normanby
Hall, the residence of Sir B. D. Sheffield, many of whose ancestors are
buried in Burton-Stather church, and leaving the height, descend into a
plain filled with smoke from the tall chimneys of the _Scunthorpe_ and
_Frodingham_ iron furnaces. To come all at once on this recent industrial
centre is a surprise after the bright clear atmosphere and keen air
in which we have been revelling all day. But we soon leave the tall
chimneys behind and find that the road divides; the left passing over
to the “Cliff” at _Raventhorpe_ near _Broughton_ on the Ermine Street,
and continuing south past _Manton_, where the black-headed gull, “_Larus
Ridibundus_,” the commonest of all the gulls on the south coast of
England, breeds on land belonging to Sir Sutton Nelthorpe of Scawby, to
_Kirton in Lindsey_, and so by _Blyborough_, _Willoughton_, _Hemswell_,
and _Harpswell_, to _Spital-on-the-Street_; and thence by _Glentworth_
and _Fillingham_ to Lincoln.
Of these places _Blyborough_ is curiously dedicated to St. Alkmund,
a Northumbrian Saint, to whom also is dedicated a church founded in
the ninth century by the daughter of Alfred the Great in Shrewsbury.
_Willoughton_ once had a preceptory of the Templars, founded in 1170.
_Harpswell_ in its Early Norman, or possibly pre-Norman, tower has a
mid-wall shaft carved with chevron ornament, similar to that in the upper
of two sets of early double lights on the south side of the tower of
Appleton-le-Strey near Malton in Yorkshire. It also possesses a clock
which was given in memory of the victory at Culloden, 1746. Moreover it
contains several fine monuments; but _Glentworth_ and _Fillingham_ are
of more interest than all these. _Glentworth_, for its very interesting
church, and _Fillingham_, because from 1361 to 1368 it was the home of
the great John Wyclif, who held the living as a ‘fellow’ of Balliol
College, Oxford.
[Sidenote: WYCLIF]
Wyclif was made Master of Balliol in 1360, and became rector of
Fillingham in the same year. In 1368 he moved to Ludgershall in Bucks,
and in 1374 to Lutterworth, where he died on December 31, 1384. He was a
consistent opposer of the doctrine of transubstantiation, for which he
was condemned by the University of Oxford; and he renounced allegiance to
the Pope, who issued no less than five Bulls against him. The Archbishop
of Canterbury persecuted him in his latter years, and forty-four years
after his death his bones were exhumed and burnt by order of the Synod of
Constance, and the ashes cast into the Swift. He made the first complete
translation of the Bible into English from the Vulgate, and in this he
was assisted by Nicolas of Hereford, who took the Old Testament, Wyclif
doing the New. Chaucer, who died in 1400, thus describes him in his
Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales”:—
A good man was ther of religioun,
And was a poure Persoun of a toun;
But riche he was of holy thought and werk.
He was also a lerned man, a clerk
That Christes gospel trewly wolde preche.
Wide was his parische, and houses fer asonder,
But he ne lefte not for reyne ne thonder,
In sicknesse nor in mischiefe to visite
The ferrest in his parische, muche and lite,
Upon his feet, and in his hand a staf.
This noble ensample to his sheep he gaf,
That first he wrought and afterward be taughte.
Out of the Gospel he the wordes caughte
And this figure he added eek thereto,
That if golde ruste, what shal iren do?
A better preest, I trowe, ther nowher non is,
He wayted after no pompe and reverence,
Ne maked him a spiced conscience,
But Christes lore, and his apostles twelve,
He taught, but first he folowed it himselve.
[Sidenote: SIR CHRISTOPHER WRAY]
_Glentworth_ has a typical pre-Norman tower, built of small stones with
dressed quoins. It has the two stringcourses, the first being two-thirds
of the way up from the ground with only thin slits for lights below it
and with the usual mid-wall shaft in the belfry window above it, but with
an unusual impost; a slab with a boldly-cut cross on it forms the jamb in
the light over the west window, and the south side shows ornamentation
similar to that which we noticed at Stow. Besides the tower, the
chancel-arch and a narrow priest’s door are all that remains of the Early
work. The monument to Sir Christopher Wray, who lived here from 1574 to
1592, is a very fine one. The judge is represented in his robes and hat,
with ruff, which his wife also wears, she having a hood and gown with
jewelled stomacher. Four daughters are figured kneeling below, while
the son kneels above in armour. Marble pillars with Corinthian capitals
support the arch over the recess in which the figures lie, and it was
once richly coloured and enclosed by a screen of wrought ironwork.
The right hand road from Scunthorpe runs down the centre of the
plain half-way between the Cliff and the Trent, through a number of
villages. Of these _Ashby_ still maintains a Duck Decoy near the Trent.
_Bottesford_ has a fine cruciform church, with a handsome chancel,
having narrow deep-set lancet windows of unusual length, ornamented with
tooth moulding, a singular arrangement of alternate lancet and circular
windows in the clerestory, and stone seats round the Early English arcade
pillars, as at Claypole. _Messingham_, with its stained-glass and oak
furniture collected by Archdeacon Bailey from various churches in his
Archdeaconry and elsewhere, as also _Scotter_ and _Scotton_, are but
milestones on the way to _Northorpe_, where are two good doorways, one
Norman, and one, in the south porch, Decorated, with fine carved foliage,
and the old door still in use. The western bays of the arcade are built
into the walls of the Perpendicular tower, which has been inserted
between them. A sepulchral brass with inscription to Anthony Moreson,
1648, has been inserted into an old altar slab, shown as such by its five
crosses. Thanks to Mrs. Meynell Ingram the church of _Laughton_, three
miles west of Northorpe, was beautifully restored by Bodley and Garner in
1896. Here is a very fine brass of a knight of the Dalison (D’Alençon)
family, about 1400, which, like that of Thomas and Johanna Massingberd at
Gunby, has been made to serve again by a parsimonious Dalison of a later
century.
Roads lead both from _Northorpe_ and _Laughton_ to _Corringham_. This
village is on the great east-and-west highway from Gainsborough to
Market-Rasen, and here, too, the fine Transition Norman church has been
magnificently restored by Bodley at the sole cost of Miss Beckett, of
Somerby Hall. It now has a fine rood-screen, good modern stained-glass
windows, and a painting of the adoration of the Magi for a reredos. There
is here a brass in memory of Robert and Thomas Broxholme, 1631, placed
by their brother and sister, Henry and Mary, who all had “lived together
above sixty years and for the most parte of the time in one family in
most brotherly concord.” A long rhymed epitaph goes on to say:—
“Though none of them had Husband Child or Wife
They mist no blessings of the married life;
For to the poore they eva were insteed
Of Husband Wife and Parent at their need.”
[Sidenote: GAINSBOROUGH]
[Sidenote: “THE MILL ON THE FLOSS”]
From _Corringham_ a turn to the right brings us after four miles to
_Gainsborough_. From this town on the extreme edge of the county four
roads and four railway lines radiate, and the Trent runs along the edge
of the town with a good wide bridge over it, built in 1790, for which a
stiff toll is demanded. It is described by George Eliot in “The Mill on
the Floss,” as “St. Oggs,” where the ‘Eagre’ or ‘bore’ is thus poetically
referred to. “The broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks
to the sea; and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage
with an impetuous embrace.” Constantly overrun by the Danes, the town
was eventually looked on as his capital city by Swegen, who, with his
son Canute, brought his vessels up the Trent in 1013, and died here,
“full King of the Country,” in 1014. In the Civil War it was occupied
first by the Royalists and afterwards by the Parliamentarians, and one of
Cromwell’s first successful engagements was a cavalry skirmish at _Lea_,
two miles to the south, when he routed and killed General Cavendish,
whom he drove “with some of his soldiers into a quagmire,” still called
‘Cavendish bog.’ The place has some large iron works and several
seed-crushing mills for oil and oil-cake, and much river traffic is done
in large barges. Talking of barges, Gainsborough has the credit of having
owned the first steam-packet seen in Lincolnshire waters. This was the
‘Caledonia,’ built at Glasgow, and brought round by the Caledonian Canal,
to the astonishment of all the east coast fishermen, in 1815. She was a
cargo boat, but she took passengers to Hull, and was a great boon to the
villages on the Trent.
[Illustration: _North Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough._]
[Illustration: _South Side, Old Hall, Gainsborough._]
[Sidenote: THE OLD HALL]
River traffic below Gainsborough is somewhat hampered during the time
of spring tides by the Eagre, which, when the in-rushing tide overcomes
the river current and rides on the surface of the stream, rising in a
wave six or seven feet high, rolls on from the mouth of the Trent to
Gainsborough, a distance of more than twenty miles. The long street
leading to the bridge is so dirty and narrow that you cannot believe as
you go down it that you are in the main artery of the town. But when
you have crossed the bridge and look back, the long riverside with its
wharf and red brick houses, boats, and barges, has a very picturesque
and old-world effect. The great sight of the town is the Old Hall,
which stands on a grassy plot of some two acres, with a very poor iron
railing round it, and a road all round that. In the middle of this rough
grass-grown plot in the heart of the town is a charming old baronial
hall, rebuilt in the times of Henry VII. and Elizabeth, after its
destruction in 1470, and still occupied as a private residence. There was
doubtless a building here before the time of the Conquest, and here it
would be that Alfred the Great stopped on the occasion of his marriage
with Ethelwith, daughter of Ethelred, and here, too, it would be that
Swegen died, and his son Canute held his court. The present building is
of brick and timber with a fine stone-built oriel on the north side, as
the centre of a long frontage, and is of various patterns, having tall
chimneys and buttresses on the west, and a brick tower on the north-east,
and two wings on the south projecting from a magnificent central hall
with much glass and woodwork, and a lantern. The large kitchen with its
two huge fireplaces is at the end of this hall. Henry VIII. and Katharine
Howard were entertained here by Lord Burgh, whose ancestor rebuilt
the hall in Henry VII.’s time, _c._ 1480; and another of his Queens,
Katharine Parr, was often here, being at one time the wife of Lord
Burgh’s eldest son.
[Sidenote: THE MASTER BUILDER]
The wide area round the hall, with its untidy grass and the miserable
iron fence, gives a singularly forlorn appearance to a beautiful and
uncommon-looking building. It is supposed that the famous master-builder,
“Richard de Gaynisburgh,” was born at Gainsborough, with whom, then
styled “Richard de Stow,” the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln in 1306
contracted “to attend to and employ other masons under him for the new
work,” at the time when the new additional east end or Angel Choir
as well as the upper parts of the great tower and the transepts were
being built. He contracted “to do the plain work by measure, and the
fine carved work and images by the day.” One of the Pilgrim Fathers was
a Gainsborough man, and a Congregational Chapel has been built as a
memorial to him.
From Gainsborough, going north, we come at once to _Thonock_ Hall, the
seat of Sir Hickman Bacon, the premier baronet of England, and _Morton_
is just to the west, where the church has a very good new rood screen
and five Morris windows, from designs by Burne-Jones. Between Morton
and Thonock is a large Danish camp, called Castle Hills, with a double
fosse. On the other side of the town the westernmost road of the county
runs south by _Lea_, _Knaith_, and _Gate Burton_ to _Marton_, and thence
to _Torksey_, which in early times was a bigger place than Gainsborough,
and so on to _Newark_, but another road branches off by _Torksey_ to the
left, for _Saxilby_ and Lincoln, twelve miles distant.
[Sidenote: SIR CHARLES ANDERSON]
_Lea_ church stands high, and has a chantry in which is a cross-legged
knight, Sir Ranulph Trehampton, 1300, and some good early glass of
about 1330. Of Trehampton’s manor-house only the site remains, but the
hall, which is full of antiquarian treasures, was the home of that
well-known Lincolnshire worthy Sir Charles Anderson, Bart., the county
antiquarian, 1804-1891. He was a charming personality. The following
story, referring to him, was told me by that delightful teller of good
stories, the Very Rev. Reynolds Hole, Dean of Rochester. At the time when
a railway was being cut (between Lincoln and Gainsborough probably, for
that passes through Lea), but at all events in a part of the county in
which Sir Charles took a great interest, he was visiting the works, when
an insinuating Irish navvy stopped and looked at him and then said, “So
you’re Sir Charles Anderson, are ye? Sure now there’s scores of Andersons
where I come from; there’s one now in Sligo, a saddler. Ach! he’s a good
fellow is that; the rale gintleman. He gives without asking.” Then, after
a pause, “You’ve a look of ’em.” The Andersons lived in Lincolnshire from
the days of Richard II., first at Wrawby then at Flixborough, temp. Henry
VII.
[Illustration: _Gainsborough Church._]
_Knaith_ is noticeable as being the birthplace, in 1532, of Thomas
Sutton, the founder of the Charterhouse in London, where he is buried.
The church has what is not at all common in English churches, a
baldacchino over the altar, but in fact it is not an ordinary church,
being just a part of an old Cistercian nunnery, founded by Ralph Evermue,
about 1180.
[Sidenote: THE CHARTERHOUSE]
Thomas Sutton was of Lincoln parents. He served in the army and was
made inspector of the King’s Artillery. Having leased some land in the
county of Durham, he proceeded to work the coal there, and became very
wealthy, in fact the wealthiest commoner in the realm, and with at least
£5,000 a year, so that he was able to give Lord Suffolk £13,000 for the
house then called Howard House in Middlesex, which had been the original
Charterhouse, founded in 1371 by Sir Walter Manney and dissolved in 1535.
This was in May, 1611. He wished to do something to benefit the nation,
but he left the details to the Crown. He died in December of the same
year, but his charity was arranged to support eighty poor folk, and to
teach forty boys, being, like Robert Johnson’s foundation at Uppingham,
both a hospital and a school. The hospital remains in its old buildings
in London, the school was moved in 1872 to Godalming, where it greatly
flourishes.
A central road runs through the middle of the flat country, half-way
between the Lincoln-and-Gainsborough road and the Ridge. This takes us
from _Corringham_ by a string of small villages to _Stow_, and thence
by _Sturton_ to _Saxilby_, and so back to Lincoln. Of those villages
_Springthorpe_ and _Heapham_ both have the early unbuttressed towers,
described in Chapters XXII. and XXIII., the former with herring-bone
masonry, the latter, like Marton, is unfortunately covered with stucco.
In the next village of _Upton_ again we find herring-bone masonry; at
_Willingham-by-Stow_, the base of the tower is early Norman; so that
in spite of the ruthless way in which succeeding styles destroyed the
work of their predecessors, we have a large group in this neighbourhood
of churches whose early Norman or even Saxon work is still visible. At
_Sturton_ is a good brick church by Pearson, reminding one of that by
Gilbert Scott at Fulney, just outside Spalding.
[Sidenote: LINCOLNSHIRE ROADS]
A few years ago, when the first motor made its way into Lincolnshire,
the road from Gainsborough to Louth was one long stretch of small loose
stones. It had never even dreamt of a steam roller, and there were always
ruts for the wheels, and as Lincolnshire carriage wheels were set three
or four inches wider apart so that they could accommodate themselves to
the cart ruts, when we brought a carriage up from Oxfordshire it was
found impossible to use it till the axles had been cut and lengthened so
that it could run in the ruts. But this was a great improvement on the
days my grandmother remembered, when it took four stout horses to draw a
carriage at foot’s pace from Ingoldmells to Spilsby (and this was only
100 years ago), or when Sir Charles Anderson saw a small cart-load of
corn stuck on the road and thatched down for the winter there, doubtless
belonging to a small farmer who had but one horse, which could not draw
the load home. Mention is made in this chapter of Scunthorpe. The iron
workers there appear to be keen footballers, for I notice that there is
now (December, 1913) one family there of eleven brothers between the ages
of 18 and 43, ten of them experienced players, who challenge any single
family anywhere to play two matches, one at the home of each team. I
wonder if any family of eleven stalwart sons will be found to take them
on.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE ISLE OF AXHOLME
Epworth and the Wesleys—“Warping”—Crowle—St. Oswald—St.
Cuthbert.
The _Isle of Axholme_, or Axeyholm, is, as the name when stripped of its
tautology signifies, a freshwater island, for _Isle_, _ey_ and _holm_ are
all English, Anglo-Saxon, or Danish, for “island,” and _Ax_ is Celtic for
water. The whole region is full of Celtic names, for it evidently was a
refuge for the Celtic inhabitants. Thus we have Haxey, and Crowle (or
_Cruadh_ = hard, _i.e._, _terra firma_), also _Moel_ (= a round hill),
which appears in Melwood. Bounded by the Trent, the Idle, the Torn, and
the Don, it fills the north-west corner of the county, and is seventeen
miles long and seven wide. The county nowhere touches the Ouse, but ends
just beyond _Garthorpe_ and _Adlingfleet_ on the left bank of the Trent,
about a mile above the Trent falls. The northern boundary of the county
then goes down the middle of the channel of the Humber estuary to the
sea. Once a marsh abounding in fish and water-fowl, with only here and
there a bit of dry ground, viz., at _Haxey_, _Epworth_, _Belton_ and
_Crowle_, it has now a few more villages on Trent side, and two lines of
railway, one going south from Goole to Gainsborough, and one crossing
from Doncaster by Scunthorpe and Frodingham to Grimsby.
[Sidenote: TWO LINCOLNSHIRE MEN]
An unfair arrangement was made by Charles I. by which the Dutchman
Vermuyden, the famous engineer who afterwards constructed the “Bedford
Level,” undertook to drain the land, some of which lies from three to
eight feet below high water-mark, he receiving one-third of all the land
he rescued, the king one-third, the people and owners only the other
third between them. This gave rise to the most savage riots; and the
Dutch settlement at _Sandtoft_, where it is said that the village is
still largely Dutch, was the scene of endless skirmishes, sieges, and
attacks. A good insight into the lawlessness of the time is obtained
from a book called “The M.S.S. in a Red Box,” published by John Lane.
The ancestors of Thomas Mowbray Duke of Norfolk, whose banishment with
Bolingbroke in lieu of trial by combat, is described in the opening
scenes of Shakespeare’s “Richard II.,” had a castle in Norman times near
_Owston_, between Haxey and East-Ferry on the Trent: so that both the
would-be combatants were Lincolnshire men.
Bolingbroke in the play is banished
“till twice five summers have enriched our fields,”
and Mowbray’s sentence is pronounced by the king in these words:—
“Norfolk, for thee remains a heavier doom,
Which I with some unwillingness pronounce:
The fly-slow hours shall not determinate
The dateless limit of thy dear exile.
The hopeless word of never to return
Breathe I against thee, upon pain of life.”
_Richard II._, I. 3.
Norfolk was banished in 1398, and died in Venice in the following year,
and in Act IV., Scene 1 of the play, when Bolingbroke announces that he
shall be “repealed”:—
“and, though mine enemy, restored again
to all his lands and signories.”
The Bishop of Carlisle answers:—
“That honourable day shall ne’er be seen.
Many a time hath banished Norfolk fought
For Jesu Christ; in glorious Christian field,
Streaming the ensign of the Christian cross
Against black Pagans, Turks and Saracens;
And, toil’d with works of war, retired himself
To Italy; and there at Venice gave
His body to that pleasant country’s earth,[8]
And his pure soul unto his Captain Christ,
Under whose colours he had fought so long.”
[Sidenote: THE WESLEY FAMILY]
In the church of _Belton_ is a fine effigy of a knight in chain armour,
an hour-glass-stand on a pillar near the pulpit, as at Leasingham, and a
monument to Sir Richard de Belwood. _Temple Belwood_, in the centre of
the island, was a preceptory of the Knights Templars. _Epworth_ is the
chief town, and is famous as the birthplace of John Wesley. His father,
Samuel, was the rector of S. Ormsby when he published his heroic poem in
ten books on the Life of Christ, which caused him to be hailed by Nahum
Tate, the Laureate of the day, as a sun new risen, before whom he and
others would naturally and contentedly fade to insignificance.
“E’en we the Tribe who thought ourselves inspired
Like glimmering stars in night’s dull reign admired,
Like stars, a numerous but feeble host,
Are gladly in your morning splendour lost.”
Queen Mary, to whose “Most sacred Majesty” the poem was dedicated,
bestowed on him the Crown living of Epworth, to which he was presented
in 1696, two years after her death. But, though he owed his living to
the Whigs, rather than side with the dissenters, he voted Tory, and was
accordingly persecuted with great animosity by high and low, thrown into
prison for a debt, his cattle and property damaged, and in 1709 his home
burnt down, which made a deep impression on his six-year-old son John,
who never forgot being “plucked as a brand from the burning.”
John, the fifteenth child, was the middle brother of three, who all had a
first-rate public school and university education, getting scholarships
both at school and college: John at Charterhouse, the others under Dr.
Busby at Westminster, and all at Christchurch, Oxford, whence John, at
the age of seventeen, wrote to his mother “I propose To be busy as long
as I live.” Eventually he became a Fellow of Lincoln. The whole family
were as clever as could be, and the seven daughters had a first-rate
education from their father and mother at home. Mrs. Wesley was a
remarkable woman, a Jacobite—which was somewhat disconcerting to her
husband, who had written in defence of the Revolution—and a person of
strong independence of spirit. Of her daughters, Hetty was the cleverest;
and she is the only one who gives no account of the famous “Epworth
Ghost,” which is significant, when both her parents and all her sisters
wrote a full account of it. Hetty’s poems are of a very high standard of
excellence, and it is more than likely that she wrote the verse part—for
it is partly in prose dialogue—of “Eupolis’ Hymn to the Creator,” which
is far better than anything else attributed to Sam Wesley. He died in
1735, and John, who had been curate to him at Epworth and _Wroot_ (the
livings went together), left the neighbourhood; and the place which had
been the home of one of Lincolnshire’s most remarkable families for
nearly forty years knew them no more. (_See_ Appendix I.)
[Sidenote: JOHN WESLEY]
Lincoln, however, saw John Wesley, for he preached in the Castle yard
in 1780, as his father had done seventy-five years earlier, when he was
spitefully imprisoned for debt. He was preaching at Lincoln again in
1788, and again in July, 1790, in the new Wesleyan Chapel. Eight months
later he died. His last sermon was preached at Leatherhead, February 23,
1791, and his last letter was written on the following day to Dr. John
Whitehead. He died on March 2, aged 88, having, as he said, during the
whole of his life “never once lost a night’s sleep.” A memorial tablet
to John and his brother Charles was placed in 1876 in Westminster Abbey.
But there is also a fine statue of him as a preacher in gown and bands,
showing a strong, rugged and kindly face, and at the base an inscription:
“The world is my parish.” This is in front of the City Road Chapel, which
he had built in Moorfields, and where he was buried, but not till 10,000
people had filed past to take their last look at the well-known face as
he lay in the chapel.
Dean Stanley visiting this once, said that he would give a great deal to
preach in the pulpit there, and when, to his query whether the ground was
consecrated and by whom, the attendant answered, “Yes; by holding the
body of John Wesley,” he rejoined, “A very good answer.”
John Wesley himself had been denied access to Church of England pulpits
for fifty years, 1738-1788. Even when he preached at Epworth in 1742, it
was from his father’s tombstone; and in most cases his congregations,
which were often very large, were gathered together in the open air.
We hear of him preaching to a large assemblage in the rain at North
Elkington, on April 6, 1759; and also at Scawby, Tealby, Louth, Brigg
and Cleethorpes; but in June, 1788, he notes in his diary: “Preached in
church at Grimsby, the Vicar reading prayers (a notable change this),
not so crowded in the memory of man.” Each president of the Wesleyan
Conference sits in Wesley’s chair on his inauguration, and has Wesley’s
Bible handed to him to hold, as John Wesley himself holds it in his left
hand in the statue.
[Sidenote: WARPING]
We have alluded to the process of _warping_ which is practised in the
isle. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon _Weorpan_ (= to turn
aside); it indicates the method by which the tide-water from the river,
when nearly at its highest, is turned in through sluices upon the flat,
low lands, and there retained by artificial banks until a sufficient
deposit has been secured, when the more or less clarified water is turned
back into the river at low tide, and the process may be continuously
repeated for one, two, or three years. The water coming up with the
tide is heavily charged with mud washed from the Humber banks, and this
silt is deposited to the depth of some feet in places, and has always
proved to be of the utmost fertility. The process is a rather difficult
and expensive one, costing £10 an acre, but it needs doing only once in
fourteen years or so. A wet season is bad for warping, and 1912 was as
bad as 1913 was good.
At _Crowle_ is a church of some importance, for in it is a bit of very
early Anglian carving, probably of the seventh century. It is part of
the stem of a cross, and has been used by the builders of the Norman
church as a lintel for their tower arch. On it are represented a man
on horseback (such as we see on the Gosforth cross, and on others in
Northumbria), some interlacing work and a serpent with its tail in its
mouth. Also two figures which I have nowhere seen accurately explained,
but explanation is easy, for if you go and examine the great Anglian
cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, you will find just such a pair
of figures with their names written over them thus: “S. Paulus et S.
Antonius panem fregerunt in Deserto.” The figures are so similar that
they would seem to have been carved by the same hand, and the cross at
Ruthwell can be dated on good evidence as but a year or two later than
that at Bewcastle, whose undoubted date is 670.
[Sidenote: ST. OSWALD]
The church is dedicated to _St. Oswald_, not the archbishop of York
who died in 992 and was buried at Worcester, but the sainted king of
Northumbria who died in battle, slain by Penda, King of Mercia, at
Maserfield, A.D. 642. His head, arms and hands were cut off, and set
up as trophies, but were afterwards kept as holy relics, the hands at
Bamborough, while one arm was for a time at Peterborough. The head was at
Bamborough, and later at Lindisfarne in St. Cuthbert’s Cathedral, where
the monks placed it in St. Cuthbert’s coffin. He had died in 687, and
this coffin, when the Danes pillaged the cathedral, was taken away by
the monks to Cumberland and carried by them from place to place in their
flight, according to St. Cuthbert’s dying wish; and from 690 to 998, when
it finally rested in the cathedral, it was kept in the coffin which is
now in Durham Library. For 100 years, 783 to 893, it rested at Chester,
and then passed to Ripon, and so to Durham, where it was enshrined and
visited by hundreds of pilgrims. The marks of their feet are plain to
see still. In 1104 the coffin was opened, and St. Oswald’s head seen in
it. In 1542 the shrine being defaced, the body was buried beneath the
pavement. In 1826 it was again opened, and some relics then taken out are
now in the Cathedral Library—a ring, a cup and patten, the latter about
six inches square, of oak with a thin plate of silver over it, and a
stole. This was beautifully worked by the nuns at Winchester 1,000 years
ago, and intended for Wulfstan, but on his death given by them to King
Athelstan, and by him to St. Cuthbert’s followers.
[Sidenote: ST. CUTHBERT’S TOMB]
The late Dean Kitchin described to me how, in company with a Roman
Catholic bishop and a medical man, he had opened what was supposed to
be St. Cuthbert’s tomb about the beginning of this century. The old
chronicler had related how he was slain in battle, how the body was
hastily covered with sand and afterwards taken up, and for fear of
desecration was carried about by the monks whithersoever they went, until
at last it was laid in a tomb, and a shrine built over it in Durham
Cathedral. He also said that the saint suffered from a tumour in the
breast, the result of the plague in 661, which latterly had got better.
It was known where the shrine was and the reputed tomb was close by. The
tomb slab was removed; beneath it were bones enough to form the greater
part of one skeleton, and there were two skulls. “What do you think of
that?” asked the dean; the bishop at once replied “St. Oswald’s head.”
The doctor then said, “This body has never been buried.” “How do you make
that out?” “Because the skin has not decayed but dried on to the limbs
as you see, as if it had been dried in sand,” just as tradition said.
“Also,” he said, “there is a hole in the breast here which has partly
filled up, evidence probably of a tumour or abscess which was healing,”
again just what the chronicler stated. One of the skulls showed a cut
right through the bone, like the cut of axe or sword, again corroborating
the story of the death of St. Oswald in battle. The whole account seemed
to me to be most interesting, and certainly it would be difficult to
obtain more conclusive proof of the veracity in every detail of the old
chronicler.
CHAPTER XIX
THE NORTH-EAST OF THE COUNTY
Thornton Curtis—Barrow—The Hull-to-Holland
Ferry—Goxhill—Thornton Abbey—Immingham—The New
Docks—Stallingborough—The Ayscough Tombs—Great
Cotes—Grimsby—The Docks—The Church, Cleethorpes—Legend of
Havelock the Dane.
We will now return to the north-east of the county.
From _Brocklesby_ a good road runs north by _Ulceby_, with its
ridiculously thin, tall spire, and _Wootton_, to _Thornton Curtis_ and
_Barrow-on-Humber_.
[Sidenote: THORNTON CURTIS]
_Thornton Curtis_ is a place to be visited, because it possesses one
of the seven black marble Tournai fonts like those at Lincoln and
Winchester. This stands in a wide open space at the west end of the
church, mounted on a square three-stepped pedestal. The four corner
shafts, like those at Ipswich, are of lighter colour than the central
pillar and the top. The latter has suffered several fractures owing to
its having been more than once moved, and the base is much worn as if it
had been exposed to the weather. The sides are sculptured with griffins
and monsters, and on the top at each corner is a bird. Of the church
the groined porch has been renewed, but the doorway is old and good,
and part of the ancient oak door remains with the original fine hinges,
and a design in iron round the head of the door. On the floor near the
south-west corner of the church is a sepulchral stone slab with a half
effigy of a lady in deep relief showing at the head end. There is a fine
wide Early English tower arch, and the handsome arches of the nave are
borne on clustered pillars, which are all alike on the north side, but
of different patterns on the south side, and with excellent boldly cut
foliage capitals, the western capital and respond being especially fine.
The north aisle is very wide, and the church unusually roomy. The pine
roof and the oak seats were all new about thirty years ago. The light
and graceful rood screen is also new, and has deep buttress-like returns
on the western side, as at Grimoldby. The chancel has late twelfth
century lancets, one with a Norman arch, the others pointed, showing the
transition period; once the church was all Norman, but it was extended
westwards early in the thirteenth century. There are two charming
piscinas of the same period, with Norman pilasters and round-headed
arches, but the western one has had a later pointed arch, apparently put
on in more recent times.
In the north aisle wall there are three arched niches for tombs, and on
the north side of the chancel outside is a wide Norman arch with a flat
buttress curiously carried up from above the centre of the archway, as in
the Jews’ House at Lincoln. Near the south porch is a mural tablet carved
in oak, with old English lettering, which reads thus:—
In the yer yat all the stalles
In thys chyrch was mayd
Thomas Kyrkbe Jho Shreb
byn Hew Roston Jho Smyth
Kyrk Masters in the yer of
Our Lorde God MCCCCCXXXII.
In the churchyard is half of the shaft of a cross, octagonal, with
rosettes carved at intervals on the four smaller sides. Like the font, it
is mounted on a broad, square three-stepped pedestal.
At _Barrow_, two miles further north, there was once a monastery,
founded in the seventh century by St. Ceadda, or Chad, on land given by
Wulfhere King of Mercia. This is an interesting corner of the county. New
Holland, where the steam ferry from Hull lands you, is but three miles
to the north, and near _Barrow Haven_ station, between the ferry pier
and Barton, is a remarkable ancient Danish or British earthwork called
“The Castles”—a large tumulus-topped mound with a wide fosse, and with
other mounds and ditches grouped round it, which, when occupied, were
surrounded by marshes and only approachable by a channel from the Humber.
The claim that this is the site of the great battle of Brunanburh in 937
cannot be looked upon as more than the merest conjecture. Both _Barton_
and _Barrow_ have been claimed for it; and “Barrow Castles” might or
might not have had some connection with the great battle, which certainly
is referred to as near the Humber in Robert de Brunne’s chronicle, as
follows:—
“He brought the King Anlaf up the Humber
With seven hundred ships and fifteen, so great was the number.
Athelstan here saw all the great host,
He and Edward his brother hurried to the coast.
At Brunnisburgh on Humber they gave them assault,
From Morning to Evening lasted the battle,
At the last to their ships the King gave them chase
All fled away, that was of God’s grace.”
[Sidenote: THE HULL FERRY]
The Great Northern Railway runs south from Holland pier to Ulceby, and
then splits right and left to Brigg and Grimsby; and here let me warn
anyone who thinks to bring a motor over by the ferry to or from Hull. The
sloping stage at New Holland is fairly easy, though the boats’ moveable
gangway is not provided with an inclined approach board, the simplest
thing in the world, but each car or truck has to bump on and off it
with a four-inch rise, and an extra man or two are required to lift the
wheels of each loaded truck on or off—a childishly stupid arrangement
which reflects no credit on the brains of the officers of the Central
Railway, who own the ferry service; but on the Hull side matters are much
worse, and I don’t think that any method of loading or unloading even in
a remote Asiatic port can be so barbaric and out-of-date as that which
the Central Railway provides for its long-suffering customers. To get a
motor on board from Hull is both difficult and dangerous; after threading
an intricate maze of close-set pillars a car has to go down a very steep
and slippery gangway, and when at the bottom has to turn at right angles
with no room to back, and across a moveable gangway so narrow that the
side railing has to be taken off and a loose plank added to take the
wheels; then, whilst the car hangs over the water on the slippery slope,
several men lift the front part round to the left and then, with a great
effort, drag the back wheels round to the right, and after filling up a
yawning gap between the slope and the gang-plank by putting a piece of
board of some kind, but with no fit, to prevent the wheel from dropping
through or the car going headlong into the sea, the machine is got on to
the deck; and then all sorts of heavy goods on hand-barrows are brought
on, four men having to hang on to each down the slippery planks, and
these are piled all round the motor, and all are taken off on the other
side with incredible exertions before the motor has a chance to move.
The crossing itself takes but twenty minutes, but the whole process of
getting on, crossing and getting off, occupied us two hours, and a really
big car would never have been able to get over at all. No one at the
Hull Corporation pier seems to know anything about the use of a crane
for loading purposes, and it is evident that passenger traffic with any
form of vehicle is not to receive any encouragement from this anything
but up-to-date railway company. Why do not the Hull Corporation insist on
something very much better? The parallelogram between the railway and
Humber, when it turns south opposite Hull, has a belt of marsh along the
river side, and because it was in old times so inaccessible, it contains
some fine monastic buildings.
[Illustration: _Great Goxhill Priory._]
[Sidenote: GOXHILL]
[Sidenote: THORNTON ABBEY]
Two miles west of Barrow is _Goxhill_. Here there is a fine church tower,
with a delicate parapet, and a mile south is the so-called “Priory,”
which was probably only a memorial chapel served by a hermit in the pay
of the De Spenser family. Murray gives this entry from the bishop’s
registers for 1368: “Thomas De Tykhill, hermit, clerk, presented by
Philip Despenser to the chapel of St. Andrew in the parish of Goxhill, on
the death of Thomas, the last hermit.” It is now a picturesque ruin of
two stories, the lower one vaulted and with three large Decorated windows
at the sides, and a large double round-headed one at the end, all now
blocked, the building being used for a barn. Two miles from this, and
near Thornton Abbey Station, is all that is left of _Thornton Abbey_.
A fine gateway, second only to that at Battle Abbey, and two sides of
a beautiful octagonal chapter-house, with very rich arcading beneath
the lovely three-light windows. Founded in 1139, for a prior and twelve
Augustinian canons, it became an abbey in 1149, and in 1517 a “mitred”
abbey, the only one in the county except Croyland. And these two are now
the most notable of all the monastic remains in Lincolnshire. One of
its abbots was said to have been walled up alive, and Bishop Tanner, in
his MS. account of the abbey, now in the Bodleian, says of Abbot Walter
Multon, 1443: “He died, but by what death I know not. He hath no obit,
as other Abbots have, and the place of his burial hath not been found,”
and Stukeley, 1687-1765, says that on taking down a wall in his time a
skeleton was found in a sitting posture, with a table and a lamp, but I
am glad to think that though the tradition is not infrequent,—probably as
an echo from the days of the Roman Vestal Virgins—there is no positive
evidence of anyone ever being immured alive; though an inconvenient dead
body was doubtless got rid of at times in that way.
[Sidenote: THE ABBEY GATE]
The principal remaining part of the abbey is the fine grey stone gateway,
a beautiful arch flanked by octagon turrets, with a passage through
them, and then other arches on each side, and beyond these two corner
towers. Above the central archway there are two rows of statues in
niches with canopies. The Virgin being crowned by the Holy Trinity is
flanked by full-length statues of St. Antony and St. Augustine. Other
figures are above these, but not easy to make out. Inside the gateway
are guard rooms, and a winding staircase leading to the large refectory
hall. An oriel in this contained an altar, as the piscina and a squint
from an adjoining chamber testify. The approach over the ditch up to
the gateway is by a curious range of massive brickwork, with coved
recesses and battlements, all along on each side. The ruin is owned by
Lord Yarborough, and is kept locked, but an attendant is always on the
spot, as both the abbey and Brocklesby Park are favourite objects for
excursions from Hull, Grimsby, and Cleethorpes.
[Illustration: _Thornton Abbey Gateway._]
[Sidenote: THE CHAPTER HOUSE]
The abbey was a very magnificent one, occupying 100 acres. Henry VIII.
was so well entertained there in 1541 that when he had suppressed the
abbey he bestowed the greater part of the land on a new foundation in the
same building, a college of the Holy Trinity; but a few years later,
either in 1547 or 1553, that in turn was dissolved, and the land granted
to the pitifully subservient Bishop Henry Holbeche. Inside the gateway
is a large square, on the east side of which stood the chapter-house,
a handsome octagonal building, of which two sides remain, as does also
a fragment of the beautiful south transept, and, still further south,
the abbot’s lodging, now in use as a farmhouse. The church was 235 feet
long and sixty-two feet wide, the transepts being double of that. The
architecture was mainly of the best Decorated period. There are many
slabs with incised crosses still to be seen, one of Robert Girdyk, 1363.
[Illustration: _Remains of Chapter House, Thornton Abbey._]
_East Halton_ lies east of the abbey, whence the road runs through
_North_ and _South Killingholme_, at the corner of which is a picturesque
old brick manor-house of the Tudor period, with linen-pattern oak
panelling and grotesque heads over the doors inside, and outside a
remarkably fine chimney-stack and some fine old yew trees. The church has
a very large Norman tower-arch, an interesting old roof and the remains
of a delicately carved rood-screen. From here we go to _Habrough_ and
_Immingham_, where some curious paintings of the Apostles are set between
the clerestory windows.
[Sidenote: IMMINGHAM DOCK]
_Immingham_ village is more than two miles from the haven, and here the
most enormous works have long been in progress. Indeed, at _Immingham_
a new port has sprung up in the last five years, and to this the Great
Central Railway, who so utterly neglect the convenience of passengers
with vehicles at the Hull ferry, have given the most enlightened
attention, and by using the latest inventions and all the most advanced
methods and laying out their docks in a large and forward-looking
way to cover an enormous area, have created a dock which can compete
successfully with any provincial port in England.
A deep-water channel leads to the lock gates on the north side of what
is the deepest dock on the east coast, with forty-five acres of water
over thirty feet deep. It runs east and west, and it is about half a
mile long. A quay 1,250 feet long, projects into the western half of
this, leaving room for vessels to load or unload on either side of it,
direct from or into the railway trucks. A timber-quay occupies the
north-west side of the dock, and the grain elevator is at the east end,
while all along the whole of the south side runs the coaling quay. There
are at least twenty-seven cranes able to lift two, three, five, ten,
and one even fifty tons on the various quays, and on the coaling-quay
eight hoists, on to which the trucks are lifted and the coal shot into
the vessels, after which the truck returns to the yard by gravitation
automatically. Each of these hoists can deal with 700 tons of coal an
hour, and as each hoist has eight sidings allotted to it there are 320
waggons ready for each. One of these hoists is moveable so that two
holds of a vessel can be worked simultaneously. The means for quick and
easy handling of the trucks, full and empty, by hydraulic power, and
light for the whole dock also is supplied from a gigantic installation
in the power-house, near the north-west corner of the dock; and this
quick handling is essential, for the many miles of sidings can hold
11,600 waggons, carrying 116,000 tons of coal or more, besides finding
room for empties. The coal is brought from Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts,
and Lincolnshire, and not far short of 3,000,000 tons of coal will be
now sent out of England from this port alone.[9] It seems to the writer
that to send away at this tremendous rate from all our big coaling
ports the article on which all our industries virtually depend is a
folly which no words are too strong to condemn. With coal England has
the means of supplying all her own wants for many generations, but it
is not inexhaustible, and when it is gone, where will England be? Will
anything that may be found ever take its place? And, unless we are able
to reassure ourselves on this point, is this not just a case in which a
wise State would step in and prohibit export, and not allow the nation to
cut its own throat like a pig swimming? Large store sheds are now (1914)
being built for wool to be landed direct from Australia. Thus Immingham
will compete with Liverpool, where I have seen bales so tightly packed
that when you knock with your knuckles on the clean-cut end of one it
resounds like a board.
[Sidenote: STALLINGBOROUGH]
Going on south from Immingham village we come, after three miles, to
_Stallingborough_.
[Sidenote: THE AYSCOUGH TOMBS]
The old church having fallen, the present brick parallelogram, with tower
and campanile, was built in 1780. Inside, though destitute of any touch
of church architecture, it is beautifully clean, and if you penetrate up
to the very end you will be rewarded by seeing what the organ absolutely
obscures till you reach the altar rail—a really wonderful alabaster tomb
of the Ayscoughe, Ayscugh, or Askew family, at the north-east corner,
inside the chancel rail. Above is part of a bust of Francis, the father,
who lived at South Kelsey, near Caister, and who so basely, in terror
for himself, betrayed his sister Anne’s hiding-place, which resulted
in her being first tortured and then burnt at Smithfield in 1546, her
crime being that she had read the Bible to poor folk in Lincoln Minster.
The whole story is too horrible to dwell upon. This cowardly brother is
portrayed half length, in a recess, leaning his head on his left hand
and holding in his right a spear. From this it will be seen that this is
no ordinary sepulchral monument, but a work of art. Below him his son,
Edward of Kelsey, 1612, lies supine in plate armour and a ruff, with bare
head pillowed on a cushion, while on a raised platform, just behind him,
his wife Esther, daughter of Thomas Grantham, Esq., leans on her right
elbow; she, too, in a ruff with hair done high and with a tight bodice
and much-pleated skirt. The faces look like portraits, and Sir Edward has
a singularly feeble, but not unpleasant, face, with small, low forehead.
On the wall at his wife’s feet is a painted coat of arms on a lozenge,
with nineteen quarterings, and a real helmet is placed on the tomb slab
below it. The slab is a very massive one, and below it is an inscription
in gold letters on a black ground in Latin, which is from Psalm CXXVIII.
“Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house,
thy children like the olive branches round about thy table, lo thus shall
the man be blessed that feareth the Lord”; and beneath this, on the side
of the tomb, are the kneeling effigies of six sons and six daughters.
The whole thing—both the effigies and the inscription—is similar to the
Tyrwhit tomb at _Bigby_. Above the mural monument of the father is the
Ayscoughe crest, a little grey ass coughing, and under his half-effigy
is a later inscription, which doubtless refers to his son, and not to
himself, the poor, unhappy cause of his sister’s dreadful sufferings. It
runs thus:—
Clarus imaginibus proavum, sed mentis honestae
Clarior exemplis, integritate, fide.
Una tibi conjux uni quae juncta beatas
Fecerat et noctes et sine lite dies.
Praemissi non amissi.
And a thing called on the monument an “Anigram,” which is past the
understanding of ordinary men, is also part of the inscription. The
extraordinary state of preservation of the whole group is a marvel.
Other inscriptions and brasses are in the church, though partly hidden
by the organ and the altar, one to the second wife of Anne’s father, Sir
William, along with others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In
the churchyard is the stem of a cross.
Four miles further south the fine broad fifteenth-century tower of _Great
Cotes_ of rich yellow stone, attracts anyone who is passing from Goxhill
to Grimsby, and it is a church which well repays a visit.
[Sidenote: GREAT COTES]
In the churchyard, after passing under a yew-tree arch, you see a
magnificent walnut on a small green mound. There is no porch. You enter
by a small, deeply moulded doorway at the north-west end of the north
aisle. The pillars of the arcades are clusters of four rather thick
shafts, some with unusually large round capitals, but others various
in shape, and all of a bluish grey stone. There are four bays, three
big and one a small one next the tower at the west end. There is a flat
ceiling, both in nave and chancel, which cuts off the top of the Early
English tower arch; hence the nave and aisles are covered, as at Swaton,
near Helpringham, by one low, broad slate roof, reminding one of that at
Grasmere. The chancel arch, if it can be called an arch at all, is the
meanest I ever saw, and only equalled by the miserable, and apparently
wooden, tracery of the east window. The chancel, which is nearly as long
as the nave, is built of rough stones and has Decorated windows. On the
floor is a curious brass of local workmanship probably, to Isabella,
wife of Roger Barnadiston, _c._ 1420, and the artist seems to have
handed on his craft, for the attraction of the church is a singular
seventeenth century brass before the altar, to Sir Thomas Barnadiston,
Kt. of Mikkylcotes, and his wife Dame Elizabeth, and their eight sons and
seven daughters. The children kneel behind their kneeling parents, who
are, however, on a larger scale, and have scrolls proceeding from their
mouths. Above them is a picture of the Saviour, with nimbus, rising from
a rectangular tomb of disproportionately small dimensions, while Roman
soldiers are sleeping around. A defaced inscription runs all round the
edge of the brass, and in the centre is the inscription in old lettering:
“In the worschypp of the Resurrectio of o̅r Lord and the blessed sepulcur
pray for the souls of Sir Thos Barnadiston Kt. and Dame Elizabeth his wife
and of yʳ charite say a pʳ noster ave and cred
and ye schall have a C days of p~don to yoʳ med”
[Sidenote: GRIMSBY]
Another six miles brings us to the outskirts of _Grimsby_, the
birthplace, in 1530, of John Whitgift, Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop of
Canterbury. This is not at all an imposing or handsome town, but the
length of the timber docks, and the size and varied life in the great
fish docks, the pontoons which project into the river and are crowded
with fishing boats, discharging tons of fish and taking in quantities
of ice, are a wonderful sight. 165,510 tons of fish were dealt with in
1902—it is probably 170,000 now; and 300 tons of ice a day is made close
by. The old church is a fine cruciform building, with a pair of ugly
turrets at the end of nave, chancel, and transepts. Inside it is fine
and spacious, and in effect cathedral-like. The transepts have doorways
and two rows of three-light windows with tooth moulding round the upper
lights and the gables. A corbel table with carved heads runs all round
the church.
The south transept Early-English porch had eight shafts on either side,
in most cases only the capitals now remain. The south aisle porch is
good, but less rich. The tower arches are supported on octagonal pillars,
which run into and form part of the transept walls. They are decorated by
mouldings running up the whole length. The nave has six bays, and tall,
slender clustered columns and plain capitals, with deeply moulded arches.
Dreadful to relate, the columns and capitals are all painted grey.
There is a unique arrangement of combined triforium and clerestory,
the small clerestory windows being inserted in the triforium into the
taller central arches of the groups of three, which all have slender
clustered shafts. This triforium goes round both nave, chancel and
transepts, a very well carved modern oak pulpit rests on a marble base
with surrounding shafts. The lectern is an eagle of the more artistic
form, with one leg advanced and head turned sideways and looking upwards.
I wonder that this is not more common, for I see it is figured in the A.
and N. Stores catalogue. The sedilia rises in steps, as at Temple Bruer.
A raised tomb carries the effigy of Sir Thomas Haslerton, brought from
St. Leonard’s nunnery; he is in chain armour with helmet. A chapel in
the north aisle has a squint looking to the high altar. This chapel is
entered by a beautiful double arch from the transept, with Early capital
to the mid pillar. The proportions of the whole church are pleasing,
and its size is very striking. The tower has an arcaded parapet, and on
each side two windows set in a recess under a big arch, between them a
buttress runs up from the apex of a broad and deep gable-coping, which
goes down each side of the tower, forming the hood-mould into which the
gables of the nave transepts and chancel fit. All the doors, curiously
enough, are painted green outside. There is in the churchyard a pillar
with clustered shafts and carved capital, the base of which rests on a
panelled block, which looks like an old font. Many bits from the old
church, which was restored throughout in 1885, are ranged on the low wall
of the churchyard walk, some of which look worthy of a better place.
The line from the docks runs along by the shore to _Cleethorpes_, where
the Humber begins to merge into the sea. The wide, firm sands and the
rippling shallow wavelets of the brown seawater are the delight of
thousands of children; the air is fresh, food and drink are plentiful,
and all things conspire to make a trippers’ paradise, while the Dolphin
Hotel, which, like the others, looks out on the sea, is no bad place for
a short sojourn in the off season.
[Sidenote: THE CORPORATION SEALS]
The corporation had in old times two seals, one the common seal, and
one the mayor’s seal; the latter showed a boar charged by a dog and a
huntsman winding his horn, an allusion to an ancient privilege of the
mayor and burgesses of hunting in the adjacent woods of Bradley Manor.
The common seal bore a gigantic figure of a man with drawn sword and
round shield, and the name ‘Gryem,’ the reputed founder of the town;
on his right a youth crowned, and the name ‘Habloc,’ and on his left a
female figure with a diadem and the legend “Goldeburgh,” the name of the
princess he is said to have married.
These two interesting and distinctive old seals have, sad to say, been
discarded for one bearing the arms of the corporation, just like what any
mushroom town might adopt.
The figures on the old seal alluded to the tradition embodied in the
old Anglo-Danish ballad of Havelock the Dane, which was borrowed from a
French romance of the twelfth century, called “Le lai de Aveloc,” which
in turn was probably taken from an Anglo-Saxon original. It tells how
Havelock, son of the Danish King Birkabeen, was treacherously put to
sea and saved by one Grim, a Lincolnshire fisherman, who brought up the
waif as his own. He grew to be of huge stature and strength and of great
beauty, and, from serving as a scullion in the king’s kitchen, he became
betrothed to the king’s daughter; and his royal descent being discovered,
the Danish king rewarded Grim with a sum of money with which he built a
village on the coast and called it Grim’s town or Grimsby.
CHAPTER XX
CAISTOR
The Roman Castrum—The Church and the Hundon Tombs—Rothwell
and the Caistor Groups of Early Church Towers, “Riby,”
“Wold,” “Cliff” and “Top”—Pelham Pillar—Grasby and
the Tennyson-Turners—Barnetby—Bigby—The Tyrwhit
Tombs—Brocklesby—The Mausoleum—The Pelham Buckle.
[Sidenote: CAISTOR]
_Caistor_ is the centre from which roads radiate in all directions, so
much so that if you describe a circle from Caistor as your centre at the
distance of _Swallow_ it will cut across seventeen roads, and if you
shorten the distance to a two-mile radius, it will still cross eleven,
though not more than four or five of them will separately enter the old
Roman town. For the town has grown round a Roman “Castrum,” and the
church is actually planted in the centre of the walled camp. A portion
of the solidly grouted core of their wall shows on the southern boundary
of the churchyard, and bits of it still exist to the east and west just
beyond the churchyard boundary, and also a little further from the church
on the north. Even the well which the Roman soldiers used, one of many
springs coming out of the chalk, for Caistor is on the slope of the Wold,
is still in use to the south-east of the church, and was included within
the walls of the “Castrum.”
Dr. Fraser of Caistor, who takes a keen interest in the subject, kindly
showed me a plan on which such portions of the wall as have been laid
bare, in some half-a-dozen spots, were marked. He lives in a house
belonging to the Tennyson family, the poet’s uncle and his brother
Charles having both tenanted it. The place has a long history. It was
a hill fort of the early Britons, then it was occupied by the Romans
till late in the fourth century, and, after their departure, it was a
stronghold of the Angles, who called it, according to Bede, Tunna-Ceaster
or Thong-caster, which might refer to its being placed on a projecting
tongue of the Wold, just as Hyrn-Ceaster or Horncastle is so named,
because it is on a horn or peninsular, formed by the river. In 829
Ecgberht, King of Wessex, defeated the Mercians in a battle here, and
offered a portion of the spoil to the church, if a stone dug up about 150
years ago with part of an inscription apparently to that effect can be
trusted. Earl Morcar, who had land near Stamford, was lord of the manor
in Norman times, and the Conqueror gave the church to Remigius for his
proposed Cathedral.
For the present church inside the Roman camp goes back to probably
pre-Norman times. The tower has a Norman doorway, and has also a very
early round arch, absolutely plain, leading from the tower to the nave,
and it shows in its successive stages Norman, Early English, Decorated,
and Perpendicular work. The lower part of the tower has angle buttresses
and two string-courses, and, except the battlements, which are of hard
whitish stone, the whole building is, like all the churches in the
north-east of the county, made of a rich yellow sandy ironstone with
fossils in it. This gives a beautiful tone of colour and also, from its
friable nature, an appearance of immense antiquity. The north porch has
good ball-flower decoration, but is not so good as the Early English
south door with its tooth ornaments; here the old door with its original
hinges is still in use. The octagonal pillars stand on a wide square base
two feet high with a top, a foot wide, forming a stone seat round the
pillar, as at Claypole and Bottesford. The nave arcade of four bays is
Early English with nail-head ornament. Since Butterfield removed the flat
ceiling and put a red roof with green tie-beams and covered the chancel
arch and walls with the painted patterns which he loved, the seats, like
the porch doors at Grimsby, have all been green! This, to my mind, always
gives a garden woodwork atmosphere. In the north aisle is a side altar,
and near it are the interesting tombs of the Hundon family, while in the
south aisle, behind the organ, is a fine marble monument with a kneeling
figure in armour of Sir Edward Maddison, of Unthank Hall, Durham, and
of Fonaby, who died in his 100th year, A.D. 1553. His second wife was
Ann Roper, sister-in-law to Margaret Roper, who was the daughter of Sir
Thomas More, and who—
“clasped in her last trance
Her murdered father’s head.”
[Sidenote: THE HUNDON TOMBS]
The Hundon tombs have recumbent stone effigies under recessed arches
in the North wall, one being of Sir W. de Hundon cross-legged, with
shield, and clad in chain-mail from head to foot. He fought in the last
crusade, 1270. Another, in a recess massively cusped, is of Sir John de
Hundon, High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1343, and Lady Hundon his wife,
in a wimple and the dress of the period. Sir John is in plate armour,
with chain hauberk, and girt with both sword and dagger, and both wear
ruffs. She has a cushion at her head, and a lion at her feet. He lies
on a plaited straw mattress rolled at each end, and wears a very rich
sword-belt and huge spurs, but no helmet.
[Sidenote: PRE-NORMAN TOWERS]
The singular cluster of very early church towers near Caistor are similar
to those near Gainsborough, and to another group just south of Grimsby
(_see_ Chapter XXIII.). South of Caistor is _Rothwell_, which we hoped
to reach in a couple of miles from Cabourn, but could only find a bridle
road, unless we were prepared to go two miles east to Swallow, or two
miles west to Caistor, and then make a further round of three miles
from either place. The church, which keeps the register of marriages
taken in Cromwell’s time before Theophilus Harneis, Esq., J.P., after
publication of banns “on three succeeding Lord’s Days, at the close of
the morning exercise, and no opposition alleged to the contrary,” has two
very massive Norman arches, the western bays with cable moulding. The
tower is of the unbuttressed kind, and exhibits some more unmistakable
“Long-and-Short” work than is at all common in the Saxon-built towers of
Lincolnshire churches, built, that is to say, if not by Saxon hands, at
least in the Saxon style, and in the earliest Norman days. The village is
in a depression between two spurs of the Wold, and a road from it, which
is the eastern one of three, all running south along the Wold, leads
to Binbrook. The middle road is the “High Dyke,” the Roman road from
Caistor to Horncastle, and has no villages on it. The western one goes by
_Normanby le Wold_, Walesby, and Tealby, and joins the Louth-and-Rasen
road at North-Willingham. From this road you get a fine view over the
flats in the centre of the county, as indeed you do if you go by the main
road from Caistor to Rasen. This takes you through _Nettleton_, where
there is another of these early towers, but not so remarkably old-looking
a specimen as some. A buttress against the south wall of the tower is
noticeable, being carefully devised by the mediæval builders so as not
to block the little window. _Usselby_, three miles north of Rasen, lies
hidden behind “The Hall,” and is the tiniest church in the county. It has
a nave and chancel of stone, and a bell-turret, and hideous brick-headed
windows. At _Claxby_, close by, some fine fossils have been found. The
eastern main road to Grimsby has most to show us, for on it we pass
_Cabourn_ and _Swallow_, both of which have towers like Rothwell, as
also has _Cuxwold_, which is half-way between Swallow and Rothwell. All
these unbuttressed towers are built of the same yellow sandy stone, and
generally have the same two-light belfry window with a midwall jamb.
_Cabourn_ was the only church we found locked, and we could not see why,
and as the absence of the rector’s key keeps people from seeing the
inside, so the presence of his garden fence, which runs right up to the
tower on both sides, keeps them from seeing the west end outside—a horrid
arrangement, not unlike that at Rowston. The tower has a pointed tiled
roof, like a pigeon cote, a very small blocked low-side window is at the
south-west end of the chancel, and the bowl of a Norman font with cable
moulding, found under the floor of the church, has been placed on the top
of the old plain cylinder which did duty as a font till lately. The view
from Cabourn hill, which drops down to Caistor, is a magnificent one. To
the north the lofty Pelham Pillar, a tribute to a family distinguished
as early as the reign of Edward III., stands up out of the oak woods, a
landmark for many a mile.
_Swallow_ has no jamb to its belfry window. But it has a very good Norman
door, and round-headed windows. The south aisle arches have been built
up. During the recent restoration two piscinas, Norman and Early English,
were found, the former with a deep square bowl set on a pillar. The next
church has the singular name of _Irby-on-Humber_, though the Humber is
eight miles distant. Here we find Norman arcades of two arches with
massive central pillars, thicker on the north side than the south, and
Early English tower and chancel arches. An incised slab on the floor
has figures of John and Elianora Malet, of the late fourteenth or early
fifteenth centuries. In the south aisle there is a blocked doorway to
the rood loft, and a piscina. The east window is of three lancets. All
the woodwork in the church is new and everything in beautiful order.
_Laceby_ Church, two miles further on, has a Transition tower, and an
Early English arcade with one Norman arch in the middle. There are some
blow-wells in the parish, as at _Tetney_. John Whitgift, Archbishop of
Canterbury, at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, was formerly rector here.
[Sidenote: LINCOLN LONGWOOLS]
A mile to the left as we go from Irby to Laceby, lies the fine and
well-wooded park of Riby Grove, the seat of Captain Pretyman, M.P. The
Royalists won a battle here in 1645, in which Colonel Harrison, the
Parliamentary leader, was slain. He was buried at Stallingborough. Riby
of late years has been famous for the flocks and herds of the late Mr.
Henry Dudding, which at their dispersal in July, 1913, realised in a two
days’ sale 16,644 guineas. Over 1,800 Lincolnshire long-wool sheep were
sold, the highest price being 600 guineas for the champion ram at the
Bristol and Nottingham shows, who has gone to South America, in company
with another stud ram who made eighty guineas, and several more of the
best animals. But though the ram lambs made double figures, as the
best had been secured before the sale the prices on the whole were not
high, the sheep on the first day averaging just over £4 9_s._ Among the
shorthorns 160 guineas was the highest price; this was given for a heifer
whose destination was Germany. It is owing to men like Mr. Dudding that
Lincolnshire farming and Lincolnshire flock and stock breeding has so
great a name.
About five miles further, we come to the suburbs of Grimsby, and the road
runs on past _Clee_ to _Cleethorpes_.
It is curious how different localities, though in the same neighbourhood,
have their own special and different terms for the same thing, thus:
alongside the ridge north of Lincoln, each village has its bit of
“Cliff,” and from Elsham to the Humber each has its bit of “Wold,”
while on the continuation of the Wold near Caistor from Barnetby to
Burgh-on-Bain the same thing is called neither “Cliff” nor “Wold,” but
“top”; and we have Somerby, Owmby, Grasby, Audleby, Fornaby, Rothwell,
Orby, Binbrook, Girsby and Burgh “top,” etc. There is an Owmby “Cliff” as
well as an Owmby “top,” but the words sufficiently indicate the position
of the villages—one (near Fillingham) on the Ermine Street, and one (near
Grasby) north of Caistor.
[Sidenote: THE PELHAM PILLAR]
There is no view, I think, in the county so wide all round as that from
the top of the Pelham Pillar. It stands on one of the highest points of
the Wold, from whence the ground falls on three sides. In front are the
woods of Brocklesby and the mausoleum, with the Humber and Hull in the
distance; on the right Grimsby, the Spurn Point, and the grand spire of
Patrington in Holderness, and on the left the wide mid-Lincolnshire plain
as far as “the Cliff.” Of the Wold villages between Caistor and Barnetby,
where the Wold stops for a couple of miles and lets the railway and the
Brigg-to-Brocklesby road through on the level, none affords a better
view than Grasby. But the whole of this road is one not to be missed. As
we pass along it we first reach _Clixby_, which shows, or rather hides,
a tiny church in a thick clump of trees by the road side, where is a
churchyard cross, restored after the model of Somersby. The little stone
church has been once very dilapidated, and is now renewed with a double
bell-turret in brick—no wonder it hides itself in the trees. There is
also a remarkable modern graveyard cross of dark stone, of a very early
primitive shape, such as is seen on some of the incised grave stones of
Northumbria. North of _Clixby_ is _Grasby_. This church was the home
for over forty years of the poet’s brother Charles Tennyson-Turner, the
author, with Alfred, of the “Poems by Two Brothers,” and afterwards of
many sonnets written at Grasby. It would be difficult to surpass the
charm of one called ‘Letty’s Globe’:
LETTY’S GLOBE.
When Letty had scarce passed her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a coloured sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.
She patted all the world; old empires peeped
Between her baby fingers; her soft hand
Was welcome at all frontiers. How she leap’d
And laugh’d and prattled in her world-wide bliss,
But when we turned her sweet unlearned eye
On our own isle, she raised a joyous cry,
‘Oh! yes, I see it, Letty’s home is there!’
And while she hid all England with a kiss,
Bright over Europe fell her golden hair.
[Sidenote: CHARLES TENNYSON TURNER]
A white marble tablet of chaste design on the wall of the nave shows a
couple of sprays of bay or laurel beneath the Christian monogram, bending
to right and left over the inscription, on the left to “Charles Tennyson
Turner, Vicar and Patron of Grasby, who died April 25, 1879.
True poet surely to be found
When truth is found again.”
and on the right to “Louisa his wife, died May 20, 1879.
More than conquerors through him that loved us.
They rest with Charlotte Tennyson in the cemetery at Cheltenham.”
Charlotte was his brother Horatio’s first wife; his wife Louisa was
the sister of Lady Tennyson, the two brothers having married two Miss
Sellwoods, nieces of Sir John Franklin. Tennyson’s grandfather had
married Mary Turner of Caistor, and Charles succeeded his uncle Sam
Turner.
The church, with its low broached spire, has a nave and a north aisle,
but has little of the old left in it, except the south doorway and some
Early English clustered pillars, and a curious plain font set on four
little square legs mounted on steps. The church was rebuilt, and the
schools and vicarage built _de novo_ by the Tennyson-Turners, for until
his time the vicar had lived at Caistor. Under the east window outside is
a stone let into the wall with three dedication crosses on it.
We must follow this Caistor and Brigg highway along the edge of the Wold
to Bigby, where it turns to the left, and only a byway runs north to
_Barnetby le Wold_ which looks down on _Melton Ross_, so named from the
Ros family to whom Belvoir came by marriage with a d’Albini heiress in
the thirteenth century. Sir Thomas Manners—Lord Ros—was created Earl of
Rutland in the sixteenth century.
[Sidenote: THE TYRWHIT TOMBS]
_Barnetby_ Church has a most ancient appearance; it stands high in
a field by itself, the village lying below. A long, high wall of
brick and stone, grey with lichen, a low tower and a flat roof and
windows irregularly placed, make up a building of undoubted antiquity.
Inside, and lately recovered from the coal-hole, is a Norman lead
font, thirty-two inches across. This is unique in Lincolnshire, though
twenty-eight others are known in other counties, the best being that
at Dorchester-on-Thames. From Barnetby we must retrace our steps for a
couple of miles to see _Bigby_, which is well placed on the edge of the
Wold. The church has corbels all round, as at Grantham, under a parapet
of later build and of a lighter-coloured and harder stone. The old thick
tower is of the yellow stone, with a good two-light window to the west.
The porch is of oak with panelled sides. The nave has an Early English
arcade of three bays, with slender octagonal pillars. The tower arch is
low, the chancel arch lofty. Here we find two fonts, not superimposed,
as at Cabourn, but one in each aisle. One is low and formed of grey
marble, the other has an old carved stone bowl of _nine_ panels on a new
pedestal. This number of sides is unique. Near it is placed an incised
slab showing the figure of a lady of the Skipwyth family, 1374, and
another lady of the same name has a recumbent effigy in the chancel, _c._
1400. The nave and chancel roof are one,[10] and in the chancel are some
more interesting monuments. On the floor a brass of Elizabeth Tyrwhit,
wife of William Skipwyth of Ormsby, _c._ 1520. On the north side a large
altar tomb with alabaster effigies of Sir Robert Tyrwhit of Kettelbie,
1581, and his wife. He is on a plaited mattress rolled at each end for
his head and feet, and below his feet a wild man or “Wode-howse” on all
fours and covered with hair. Two of these support the feet of Ralph Lord
Treasurer Cromwell in the fine brass at Tattershall, and the Willoughby
chapel at Spilsby shows one. His wife lies nearest the wall, with a lion
at her feet and a cushion for her head; both wear ruffs, and he is in
armour, but without helmet. In many respects the monument resembles the
tomb of Sir John and Lady Hundon at Caistor, but is still more like the
Ayscoughe tomb at Stallingborough.
On the two ends and front of the tomb are figures of their children,
twenty-two in number, two or three infants in cradles, the rest all
kneeling, and above them is the old metrical version of the 128th Psalm,
running round three sides of the tomb. The front or middle portion bears
the following lines:—
Like fruitful vine on thy house side
So doth thy wife spring out.
Thy children stand like Oliveplantes
Thy table round about.
Thus art thou blest that fearest God,
And he shall let thee see
The promiesed Hierusalem and his felicitie.
Inside the chancel rails is a mural monument with life-size figures of a
man and his wife kneeling, but the lady’s head is gone. The man is Robert
Tyrwhit, who made a runaway match with Lady Bridget Manners, maid of
honour to Queen Elizabeth, who was highly incensed at it, and doubtless
used language appropriate to the occasion. At the back of the sedilia two
or three little brasses have been inserted, one to Edward Nayler, rector
1632, with wife and seven children. He is described as “a painefull
minister of God’s word.”
From Bigby four miles brings us to Brigg, passing near _Kettleby_, the
home of the Tyrwhits, who kept up a blood feud with the Ros family
till the beginning of the seventeenth century—not a very neighbourly
proceeding—and as they only lived four miles apart their combats and
murders were perpetual.
[Sidenote: BROCKLESBY]
The road which runs north from Caistor goes along the top of the Wold
as far as “Pelham’s Pillar,” where the real High Wold stops. It is then
460 feet above sea level. Caistor itself, on the western slope, is only
150 feet up, but the High Wold keeps rising south of Caistor till it
attains its highest point between Normanby-le-Wold and Stainton-le-Vale,
at about 525 feet. From “Pelham’s Pillar” the road forks into three,
and runs down into the flat at _Riby_, _Brocklesby_, and _Kirmington_,
where there is a church with a bright green spire sheathed with copper.
_Brocklesby_, Lord Yarborough’s seat, has a deer park more than two miles
long. It is entered on the west side through a well-designed classical
arch, erected by the tenantry in memory of the third lord. Extensive
drives through the woods planted by the first lord, who married Miss
Aufrere of Chelsea, and was created Baron Yarborough in 1794, reach as
far as the “Pelham Pillar,” some six miles from Brocklesby. On the pillar
it is recorded that twelve and a half million trees were planted. The
planter, who rivals “Planter John,” he who laid out the many miles of
avenue at Boughton near Kettering, was an Anderson, whose grandmother was
sister of Charles, the last of the Pelhams, hence the family name now is
Anderson-Pelham.
[Illustration: _The Welland, near Fulney, Spalding._]
[Sidenote: THE KOH-I-NOOR]
The mausoleum on the south side, designed by Wyatt in 1794 in memory of
Sophia, first Countess of Yarborough, is in the classical style, with a
flat dome rising from a circular balustrade supported on twelve fluted
Doric columns. It stands on an ancient barrow, in it is a monument by
Nollekens, of the Countess. The house, part of which was rebuilt after a
fire in 1898, has the appearance of a brick and stone Queen Anne mansion.
In it are some of the exquisite wood carvings by Wallis of Louth, some
of whose work was admired in the first “Great Exhibition” of 1851,
attracting almost as much attention as the Koh-i-noor Diamond, then in
its rough form, as worn by “Akbar the Great,” by Nadir Shah, and by “The
Lion of the Punjab,” Runjeet Sing. It is now in the crown of the Queen of
England, and, being re-cut, is much smaller, but far more brilliant. In
addition to a fine hall and staircase there is a picture gallery built in
1807 to take the paintings and sculptures which had been collected by Mr.
John Aufrere of Chelsea, father-in-law of the first Lord Yarborough. The
gem of this collection is the antique bust of Niobe, purchased in Rome by
Nollekens the sculptor, who has himself contributed a fine bust of the
first earl’s wife. In a conservatory are portions of another once famous
collection of antiques, tombs, altars, and statues, made by Sir Richard
Worsley and kept as a kind of classical museum till 1855 at Appuldurcombe
in the Isle of Wight.
[Sidenote: THE PELHAM BUCKLE]
Religious houses abounded here. Thornton Abbey is only five miles off,
and here, outside the park to the north-west, is Newsham Abbey, 1143,
perhaps the earliest Premonstratensian house in England. On the east was
the Cistercian nunnery of Colham, and just at the south of the park, in
the village of Limber, was an alien priory belonging to the Cistercian
house of Aulnay in Normandy. Newsham abbey, which was worth twice what
the other two were, became part of the spoil which was absorbed by
Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk. The gardens have some fine cedars,
and the church with its curious tower and small spire is in the garden
grounds. There are some Pelham monuments in it of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century: one to Sir John and one to Sir William and Lady
Pelham and their seventeen children. At her feet is the head of a king
and the Pelham “Buckle,” commemorating the seizure by a Pelham of King
John of France, at the battle of Poictiers.
[Illustration: _Thornton Abbey Gateway._]
CHAPTER XXI
LOUTH AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD
Louth Church—“The Weder-Coke”—The Pilgrimage of Grace—Letter
read in Lincoln Chapter-House from Henry VIII—“The Lyttel
Clause”—The Blue Stone—Turner’s Horse-fair—The Louth
Spire—Louth Park Abbey—Kiddington—Roads from Louth—Cawthorpe
and Haugham—Dr. Trought’s Jump—Well Vale—Starlings.
[Sidenote: LOUTH]
Louth spire is one of the sights of Lincolnshire; it is a few feet higher
than Grantham, which it much resembles, and in beauty of proportions and
elegance of design one feels, as one looks at it, that it has really no
rival, for Moulton, near Spalding, though on the same lines, is so much
smaller.
The way in which it bursts upon the view as the traveller approaches
it from Kenwick, which lies to the southward, is a thing impossible
to forget. Taking the place of originally a small Norman, and later a
thirteenth century building, the present church of St. James dates from
the fifteenth century. Louth once had two, if not three, other small
churches, dedicated to St. John, St. Mary, and St. Herefrid; but no
certain traces of these remain, and only the north and south doorways
of the thirteenth century church are now visible. Excavations made at
the last restoration in 1867 revealed the pillar bases of this church
and some fragments of eleventh century moulding of the earlier one. The
present building has nothing of interest inside—it is only the shell
from which the living tenant has long been absent. Once its long aisles
were filled with rich chapels, and the chancel arch was furnished with
a rood-loft and screen, and the church was unusually rich in altars,
vessels, vestments, and books, of which only the inventory remains. In
the vestry an oak cupboard has medallions carved in the panels of Henry
VII. and Elizabeth of York; and that is all. The steeple, with its large
belfry windows, was doubtless built for its clock and bells; there were
at first but three, which in 1726 were increased to a full peal of eight,
but the clock and its chime was there as early as 1500. The spire was not
completed till 1815; the weathercock was fixed then, but no lightning-rod
until 1844 after the spire had been struck and damaged three times, in
the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in the eighteenth it
escaped.
The first of the Louth churchwardens’ books has an ill-written entry of
the year 1515-16, the time of the second (or thirteenth century) church,
which tells us that one Thomas Taylor, a draper, bought a copper basin in
York and had it made at Lincoln into a “Wedercoke” for the church. This
is very interesting, for the basin had been part of the spoil taken from
the King of Scots at Flodden.
[Sidenote: THE KING’S LETTER]
Twenty years later the vicar of Louth was hanged with others, at Tyburn,
for his part in the Lincolnshire rebellion, when 20,000 men took up arms
in defence of the pillaged monasteries. Concerning this rebellion, there
is a graphic account of the receipt of Henry VIIIth’s letter in response
to the people’s petition, which was read in the chapter-house at Lincoln,
on October 10, 1556. Moyne tells how, when they thought to have read the
letter secretly among themselves in the chapter-house, a mob burst in
and insisted on hearing it: “And therefore,” he goes on to say, “I redd
the Kynges letter openly and by cause there was a lyttyl clause therein
that we feared wolde styr the Commons I did leave that clause unredd,
which was persayved by a Chanon beying the parson of Snelland, and he
sayde there openly that the letter was falsely redd be cause whereof I
was like to be slayn.” Eventually they got out by the south door to the
Chancellor’s house, while the men waited to murder them at the great
West door, “And when the Commons persayved that wee were gone from theym
another way, they departed to ther lodgings in a gret furye, determynyng
to kill us the morowe after onles wee wolde go forwards with theym.”
[Illustration: _Bridge Street, Louth._]
The “lyttyl clause” referred to as likely to “styr the Commons,” was
wisely omitted, for it is that in which the king expresses his amazement
at the presumption of the “rude commons of one shire, and that one of
the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience,
to take upon them to rule their prince whom they were bound to obey and
serve.”
This rebellion, which was called the Pilgrimage of Grace, brought
disaster on many Lincolnshire families. Over sixty of all conditions
were put to death for it in Louth alone, and others at Alford, Spilsby
and Boston, and at all the monasteries, and the vicars of Cockerington,
Louth, Croft, Biscathorpe, Donington and Snelland and some others, as
well as John Lord Hussey at Sleaford, suffered for their religion and
were canonized as martyrs by the Pope. A list of more than one hundred
victims is given in “Notes and Queries,” III., 84.
The town has a museum of some interest, and outside of it may be seen a
large boulder of some foreign stone, probably brought by an icefloe from
Denmark or Norway. This used to stand at a street corner in the town, but
was afterwards removed to the inn-yard at the back, and painted blue, and
was known for many years as the blue stone. Speaking of stone, we have a
record that a good deal of the stone for building the church spire in the
sixteenth century was landed at Dogdyke, and drawn thence on wheels or
carried on pack horses on flag pavements across the fen. The stone is of
good quality and adapted for carving.
There is notably good openwork on the east gable of the church, much
resembling that at Grimoldby and Theddlethorpe-in-the-Marsh, a few miles
to the east of Louth. Turner’s picture of the horse fair at Louth shows
the spire, which was no doubt the motive of the picture, and until one
has seen it, both from a distance and from the street of Louth itself,
one can have no notion how beautiful a thing a well-proportioned spire
can be, one is never tired of looking at it.
An old statue of Edward VI. over a doorway in the Westgate indicates
the grammar school where Alfred and Charles Tennyson spent a few
uncomfortable years. The school seal shows a boy being birched, with the
motto “Qui parcit virgam odit filium,” and date 1552. Among other pupils
were Governor Eyre, one of the victims of British sentimentality, and
Hobart Pasha. Thomas of Louth gave a clock to Lincoln Minster in 1324,
and William de Lindsey, Bishop of Ely, 1290, who has there a beautiful
monument, was also a Louth native.
[Illustration: _Hubbards Mill, Louth._]
[Sidenote: LOUTH PARK ABBEY]
Louth Park Abbey, about a mile and a half to the east of the town, was
built on a site belonging to the Bishops of Lincoln, and was given to the
Cistercian colony from Fountains Abbey, who found Haverholme too damp for
comfort, by Bishop Alexander in 1139. The Cistercians built themselves a
large church, 256 feet long and sixty-one feet in width, with transepts
which more than doubled this; parts of these and the chancel, also a
portion of the west front and one nave pillar, are all that is left
of it, but the ground plan has been excavated, which shows that there
were no fewer than ten bays to the nave, and massive circular piers.
There was a cloister on the south, surrounded by monastic buildings,
and east of these a chapter-house with groined roof springing from six
pillars. A very large gateway stood at the south-west, and outside was a
double moat to which the water from St. Helen’s Spring was conducted by
what is still known as “the Monk’s Dyke.” It flourished greatly at the
beginning of the fourteenth century, having then sixty-six monks and 150
lay brethren. The Louth Park Abbey Chronicle, though very valuable, is
not exactly contemporaneous with the things it mentions, for it was all
written by a scribe in the fifteenth century. It covers the years from
1066 to the death of Henry IV. in 1413.
Near the abbey, but on the other side of the canal, is _Keddington_,
where the arch of the organ chamber is made of carved stones, no
doubt brought from the abbey. The church, which is built of chalk and
greensand, is older than any in the immediate neighbourhood, and has a
Norman south door. It has a remarkable lancet window on the south side,
in the upper part of which is a carved dragon, and has also what is very
rare, a wooden mediæval eagle lectern.
[Sidenote: ROADS FROM LOUTH]
Half-a-dozen main roads radiate from Louth, one might call it eight, for
two of the half-dozen divide, one within a mile, and one at a distance of
two miles from the town. They go, one north to Grimsby, twenty miles of
level road along the marsh, and one west to Market Rasen, by the Ludfords
and North Willingham, fifteen and a half miles. One mile out, this road
divides and goes west and then south to Wragby by South Willingham,
sixteen and a half miles. Both of these roads, as well as that which runs
south-west to Horncastle, fourteen and a half miles, cross the Wolds and
are distinctly hilly, rising and falling nearly four hundred feet. The
fifth road, which goes due south to Spilsby, sixteen miles, though seldom
as much as 250 feet higher than Louth, which stands about seventy-five
feet above sea level, affords fine views, and is a very pleasant road
to travel. But all these highways must be dealt with in detail later.
The sixth road from Louth runs south-east to Alford, and keeps on the
level of the marsh, and the seventh and eighth roads run eastwards across
the marsh to the sea, one branching off the Alford road at Kenwick and
avoiding all villages, comes to the coast at Saltfleet; the other,
starting out from Louth by Keddington and Alvingham, loses itself in many
small and endlessly twisting roads which connect the various villages and
reaches the sea eventually at Donna Nook and Saltfleet, places five miles
apart, with no passage to the sea between them—nothing but mud flats,
samphire beds and sea birds. There is a charm about “the waste enormous
marsh,” and also about the high and windy Wolds, which never palls, but
before we journey along either of the highways from Louth I should like
to introduce one of those byways which form the chief delight of people
who love the country.
[Sidenote: SOME BYWAYS]
We will leave Louth, then, by the Spilsby road, and when we reach the
second milestone, 147 miles from London, turn and look at the beautiful
spire of Louth Church rising from a group of elms in the middle distance
of a wide panorama. From our height of 300 feet we look across the whole
marsh to the sea, ten miles to the east, and far on beyond Louth we look
northwards towards Grimsby and the Humber, the perpetually shifting
lights and shades caused by the great cumulus clouds in these fine level
views, the many farmsteads and occasional church towers—
“The crowded farms and lessening towers”
of our own Lincolnshire poet—all combine to make a very satisfactory
picture to which the wonderfully wide extent which lies unrolled before
us, lends enchantment; and always the eye reverts to rest with delight on
that perfect spire standing so high above the trees by the banks of the
river Lud.
At length we turn and pursue our way, but soon quit the Spilsby road and
go down the hill to the left, past the entrance to Kenwick Hall, till
we reach the Alford road, and, turning to the right, come to the pretty
little village of _Cawthorpe_.
[Sidenote: DR. TROUGHT’S JUMP]
This is not a bad centre for country walks. You can walk on a raised
footpath all along the side of the curious water-lane, and if you go out
in the opposite direction the road to _Haugham_ takes you through two
miles of as pretty a road as you could desire; it is called “Haugham
Pastures,” but it is really a road through a wood, without hedges,
reminding one of the New Forest or the “Dukeries.” On the right, going
from Cawthorpe, the trees extend some distance with oak and fern and all
that makes the beauty of an English wood; on the other side it is only a
belt of trees through which at intervals a grassy tract curves off from
the road and leads to the fields; and as we passed in September we could
see the corn-laden waggons moving up towards us or the teams going afield
among the sheaves. No county could supply a prettier series of pictures
of simple pastoral beauty than this byway through “Haugham Pastures.” A
deep lane near the little brick-built manor-house is noticeable as the
site of a famous jump. The roadway is about fifteen feet wide, with steep
sides and a low hedge, the top of which is nine or ten feet above the
roadway. Over these Dr. Trought of Louth, on a famed hunter, once jumped
for a wager, flying from field to field, a distance of some twenty feet.
[Illustration: _The Lud at Louth._]
One of the charming peculiarities of Cawthorpe is that here the “Long
Eau” stream runs between hedge-banks over a level sand and gravel bed
and forms a water street, which extends for about a furlong. There is a
similar thing at Swaby, six miles to the south, where the “Great Eau”
runs along a street or road through the village. At Cawthorpe the water
is always running and usually about six inches deep. The village lies
in a hollow with curiously twisting little roads in it, and is very
picturesque with its farms and trees and quaint little brick manor-house
standing near the church at the three cross ways.
[Sidenote: A BEAUTIFUL ROAD]
Rising from the hollow, the small byway runs with here and there
beautiful trees and often on the right a tall hedge or narrow strip of
plantation, reminding one of the roadside “shaws” in Hampshire, while
on the left there is always a view down over cornfields and beyond the
tops of the Tothill oak woods right across the fertile belt of the marsh
to the shining line of the distant sea. With many a twist the byway
runs on through _Muckton_ village to _Belleau_, where it crosses the
above-mentioned Swaby or Calceby beck and looks down on the picturesque
church, standing in the grassy meadows, and on the brick turret and
groined archways of the old Manor-house, and so on to _South Thoresby_,
where the broken ground and the fine trees tell of an old mansion which
stood there till last century; and past _Rigsby_, till it meets the
Spilsby and Alford highway just below Miles-cross-Hill, whence it runs
on through the avenue of elms to _Well_. And all the way, as it has run
along the top of the eastern escarpment of the Wold, it has afforded us
an outlook over a wide expanse of the marsh such as none of the other
roads on the high wolds can equal. True, the Lincoln cliff road gives
a finer view and runs further, but I don’t think there is any prettier
ten-mile stretch in the county than this ‘Middle road’ from Well to Louth.
At the entrance gate of Well Vale Hall the road divides, either route
ending at Alford. _Well Vale_, a fine sporting estate and also a famous
stronghold for foxes, the residence of Mr. Walter H. Rawnsley, is, I
venture to think, the prettiest spot in the county. For a mile or more a
grassy track descends from the top of Miles-Cross-Hill through a wooded
valley where fine beeches stretch out their long arms, and pines and
larch crown the chalky turf-clad sides, till the mouth of the Vale opens
out into a park, whose rolling slopes are studded with handsome trees,
and as you near the mansion, the front of which looks out across its
brilliant flower-beds and quaint pinnacled gateway upon the little church
flanked by branching elms on the summit of a grassy hill, you see a fine
sheet of water fed by a copious chalk stream which passes the house and
is then conducted to a still larger lake on the garden side, stretching
with a double curve from the giant cedars on the lawn to a vanishing
point, of which glimpses only are caught through the stems of the Scotch
firs and oaks in the distance. The history of Well goes back to Roman
times, and has been told fully by the Rev. E. H. R. Tatham, Rector of the
neighbouring parish of _Claxby_, where the site of a Roman camp is still
visible, another being at _Willoughby_, two miles off eastwards in the
levels, where the marsh begins.
[Sidenote: HISTORY OF WELL]
The name was derived in Saxon times from the strong spring which wells
out from the chalk and feeds the lakes on either side the house. The
names Burwell and Belleau in the immediate neighbourhood are of similar
origin, though the latter is a Norman name. At the time of the Conquest
_Well_ and _Belleau_ were both bestowed on Gilbert de Gaunt, the
Conqueror’s nephew, and were let by him to one Ragener, whose family
took the addition “de Welle” and lived here for four centuries. In the
thirteenth century we hear of a church at Well, and William de Welle
(the third of the name) in 1283 obtained a licence for a market and fair
at Alford. His son Adam was summoned to Parliament as a baron in 1299.
In the fifteenth century the name was changed from Welle to Welles, and
Leo Lord Welles fell at Towton in 1461. The title was now combined with
that of Willoughby d’Eresby, and Leo’s son, Richard, who took it _jure
uxoris_, he having married the Willoughby heiress, was the Lord Welles
who was so basely put to death in 1470 by Edward IV. for complicity in
the Lincolnshire rebellion, together with his son-in-law, T. Dymoke, and
his son Robert. _See_ Chap. XXXIII.
Leo, who fell at Towton, had married for his second wife, Margaret
Duchess of Somerset, and her son John joined Henry VII., and after the
battle of Bosworth the king restored to him the Welles estate which had
been forfeited after Robert’s execution, made him a viscount, and gave
him the hand of Cicely, daughter of Edward IV. and sister to his own
queen, in marriage. It is interesting to read in Mr. Tatham’s paper that
“This lady carried the heir-apparent, Prince Arthur, at his baptism at
Winchester in 1486.” She subsequently married one of the Kyme family of
Kyme Tower near Boston. John Viscount Welles died in 1499, and the male
line of the Welles became extinct, but the Willoughby line went on, for
Cicely, the sister of the unfortunate Richard Welles, had married Sir R.
Willoughby, and her grandson William succeeded to that title as the ninth
Lord Willoughby. He was the father of Catharine Duchess of Suffolk and
subsequently wife of Richard Bertie, whose monument occupies so large a
space in the Willoughby chapel at Spilsby. The Welles estate remained
with the Willoughbys (who in 1626 were created Earls of Lindsey) till
1650, when the extortionate fines levied on Royalist families by the
Parliament made it necessary for Belleau and Welle to be sold. Belleau
went to Sir H. Vane, and Well to W. Wolley, who sold it about 1700 to
Anthony Weltden, a man who had a romantic career in the early days of the
Hon. East India Company. From him Well passed to James Bateman, one of
whose sons became Lord Bateman. Another, James, succeeded to the estate
and built the present house about 1725, a wing of which was pulled down
about 1845. This James married Anne, daughter of Sir Robert Chaplin of
Tathwell, who also came to live and die at Well. Bateman’s daughter
and heiress married a Dashwood in 1744—probably it was he who planted
the Vale (he died in 1825)—and in 1838 the estate was purchased by Mr.
Christopher Nisbet Hamilton, whose daughter, Mrs. Hamilton Ogilvy, has
just sold it to Mr. Walter H. Rawnsley.
[Sidenote: WELL VALE]
The following lines were written on the gate at the top of Well Vale by a
traveller taking his yearly tramp from Horncastle for a dip in the sea at
Mablethorpe, a good twenty miles.
Some say “All’s well that ends well,”
But here Well begins well.
They say too “Truth is in a well,”
But here there is in truth a Well.
Welcome then Well! since I well come along to her,
For well I’ve known Well and the charms that belong to her
Passing well to the view looks the Vale of fair Well,
And I, passing Well too, must bid her farewell
’Till again I’m this way; or perhaps for aye.
Farewell then (or ‘vale’) to fair Well Vale.
Farewell! Fair Well!
This is more than a mere assemblage of puns—there is some poetry in the
old fellow, and the penultimate line has an added pathos from the fact
that only a few months later the poet bid his final farewell to life, on
November 10, in the same year, at the age of seventy-six.
[Sidenote: THE STARLINGS]
Speaking of Well Vale, I think I have seen and heard more starlings
collected together in a young larch plantation there than I ever came
across at once elsewhere. The only multitude of birds at all comparable
to it was the army of cranes I have seen covering half a mile or more of
sandbank in the Nile, near Komombos, while clouds of them kept dropping
from the sky. They have black wings and white bodies, so that aloft they
looked black, but standing on the sandbank as close as they could pack
they looked all white.
But to return to our starlings. It is a very curious thing this massing
of countless thousands of these birds amongst the osiers[11] in the fenny
parts of the county, or in some of the plantations in the Wolds. If you
take your stand about sunset near one of these, when the wood pigeons,
after much noisy flapping of their wings, have settled down to rest,
a loud whirring noise will make you look up to see the sky darkened
by a cloud of these birds, which will be only the advance portion of
the multitudes that will quickly be converging from all sides to their
roosting quarters. They have been feeding in many places, often at a
considerable distance; but each night they assemble, and for a quarter
of an hour or more the noise of their chattering and fluttering as each
successive flight comes in will be indescribable. If a disturbing noise
is made, myriads will rise with one loud rush, but nothing will prevent
their return and, when the noise and movement has at length subsided,
the trees will be black with their living load, which will sleep till
sunrise, and then again disperse for the day in quest of food, returning
every night for several weeks, till the call of spring scatters them for
good.
CHAPTER XXII
Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Mediæval Art—Fonts.
When we talk of Anglo-Saxon art it is not to be implied that no artistic
work was done before Saxon time in Britain. But if we speak of churches,
though doubtless British churches were once to be found here, there are
certainly none now existing, and we cannot get back beyond Saxon times.
The British churches were built probably of wattle, or at the best of
stones without mortar, and so were not likely to be long-lived. Still,
Stonehenge is British work, and domed huts, like beehives, similar to but
smaller and ruder than those to be still seen in Greece, were made by the
ancient Britons. It was the Romans who first introduced architecture to
our land. They had learnt it from those wonderful people, the pioneers of
so much that we all value, the Greeks, who in turn had got their lessons
from Egypt and Assyria. That takes us back eight thousand years, and we
still profit by the art thus handed down through the centuries. When the
Romans left us, all the arts at once declined in our islands, and notably
the art of building.
In speaking of the churches in the south of the county, I drew attention
to the number in which traces of Saxon work were still visible and
spoke of the two remarkable specimens only three miles over the border
at Wittering and Barnack. It is pleasant to hear so good an authority
as Mr. Hamilton Thompson say that Lincolnshire is more rich than any
other county in churches which, though only in few instances of a
date indisputably earlier than the Conquest, yet retain traces of an
architecture of a distinctly pre-Norman character. We do not vie with
Kent and Northumbria, for we cannot show anything which can be referred
to the first century of Anglo-Saxon Christianity associated with the
name of Augustine, nor had St. Ninian, St. Kentigern, St. Oswald, St.
Cuthbert, or St. Wilfrid any work to do in Lincolnshire. St. Paulinus
alone, by his visit to Lincoln, connected the province of Lindsey, which
was part of his diocese of York, with the religious life of Northumbria.
But the only existing trace of this is the dedication of the church in
Lincoln to St. Paul, _i.e._, St. Paulinus.
[Sidenote: SAXON TOWERS]
Still, Saxon architecture was a real thing in the two centuries preceding
the Norman invasion, and we have in Lincolnshire an unusually large
number of churches (I can mention no less than thirty-eight at once),
which represent a late state of Saxon architecture carried out probably
by Saxon workmen for Norman employers and bearing traces of Norman
influence. At Stow, near Lincoln, is some very fine Saxon work, but there
the Norman overlies the Saxon more decidedly than it does in the notable
church of Barton-on-Humber; both of these have been discussed in previous
chapters. But we may here draw attention to the less magnificent Saxon
remains in the county, and notice how often the churches with Saxon work
still visible, lie in groups. Thus, quite in the north we have Barton,
Winterton, and Alkborough, with Worlaby not far off. Then in the course
of ten miles along the road from Caistor to Grimsby we have Caistor,
Cabourn, Nettleton, Rothwell, Cuxwold, Swallow, Laceby, Scartho, and
Clee; with Holton-le-Clay and Waith just to the south on the road to
Louth. On the west, near Gainsborough, we have a group of five close
together at Corringham, Springthorpe, Harpswell, Heapham, and Glentworth;
and Marton and Stow are not far away, one by the Trent and the other on
the central road between the Trent and the ‘Cliff.’
[Sidenote: “LONG-AND-SHORT” WORK]
Lincoln has its two famous church towers of St. Mary-le-Wigfords and
St. Peters-at-Gowts. Near it, to the south, are Bracebridge, Bramston,
Harmston and Coleby, the two latter close together, and all with traces
of “Long-and-Short” work; and if we continue our way southwards, we shall
pass Hough-on-the-Hill between Grantham and Newark, with its interesting
pre-Conquest stair turret, and so finish our Saxon tour by visiting three
churches on or near the river Glen, at Boothby-Pagnell, Little Bytham and
Thurlby. This is not an exhaustive list, for Great Hale near Heckington
must be included, and Cranwell near Sleaford and Ropsley near Grantham,
both show “Long-and-Short” work. But the more closely the churches
mentioned are examined, the more clear it becomes that, though the dates
of the building, when we can get at them, mostly point us to the eleventh
century, the art is of a pre-Conquest type, and could only have been
executed before the general spread of Norman influence which that century
witnessed. We are therefore quite justified in speaking of this work as
Saxon.
Here, perhaps, the term “Long-and-Short” work should be explained.
It is often said that the Saxon architecture was the development in
stone of the building which had previously been done in timber and
wattle, and thus in Barnack, and Barton, and at Stow, but nowhere else
in Lincolnshire, parallel strips of stone run up the tower at intervals
of a couple of feet, as if representing the upright timbers. This
theory, perhaps, will not bear pressing; still, though the arch over
a window is often triangular, made by leaning two slabs one against
another, not unfrequently a square-ended stone projects from the top of
a rounded arch, which seems to be a reminiscence in stone of the end
of a wooden beam. This may be seen at Barnack on the south side of the
tower. The towers have no buttresses, and though the stones between the
upright strips are small and rubbley, the stones at the angles of the
tower are fairly large and squared. When these are long-shaped, but set
alternately perpendicular and horizontal, this is called “Long-and-Short”
work, and is definitely “Saxon,” even though built by Norman hands.
The herring-bone work, as seen at Marton, is Romanesque and a sign of
Norman builders. They also copied the Romans in facing a rubble core with
dressed stone, whereas the Saxons only used dressed stones at the angles.
[Illustration: _Ancient Saxon Ornament found in 1826 in cleaning out the
Witham, near the village of Fiskerton, four miles east of Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: SAXON ORNAMENTS]
The enormous activity of the Norman builders in every part of the kingdom
has thrown previous architectural efforts into the shade; but the Normans
found in England a by no means barbarous people. Anglo-Saxon or Anglian
art had exhibited developments in many directions, in metal work and
jewellery, in illumination of MSS., in needlework, in stone-carving, as
well as in architecture; and when Augustine landed in 597 it was not to
a nation of barbarous savages, but to people quite equal in many ways to
those he had lived among in Italy or conversed with in Gaul, that he
had to preach the tenets of Christianity. As proof of this we can point
to the beautiful carved stonework of the Anglians of Northumbria on the
great crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell, and the cross of Bishop Acca of
Hexham, now in the Durham library, all of the seventh century; and to the
Lindisfarne Gospels of St. Wilfred’s time which was only some fifty years
later; whilst to show the continuity of Anglo-Saxon art we have the St.
Cuthbert stole in the Durham Cathedral library, a triumph of needlework
by the nuns of Winchester in the days of Athelstan; and, besides the
celebrated Alfred Jewel, a silver trefoil brooch[12] found at Kirkoswald
in Cumberland, which, for purity of design, richness of ornamentation
and beauty of execution, it would be difficult to match in any age or
country, and the cloak chain, found at Fiskerton, described in Chapter
XIV.; all these are quite first-rate in their different lines, and should
make us speak with respect of our Saxon ancestors.
Having already noted the Gainsborough group (Chap. XVII.) and the Caistor
group (Chap. XX.), we will now make our way towards a third group of
pre-Norman towers to be seen on the Louth and Grimsby road.
[Sidenote: NORMAN DWELLINGS]
In Norman times strongholds and churches were built all over the country,
and doubtless many domestic houses which did not aspire to be more than
ordinary dwelling-places. It is curious how almost entirely these have
vanished; one at Boothby Pagnell and three in Lincoln are among the
very few left. In Lincoln ‘The Jews’ House,’ ‘Aaron’s House,’ and ‘John
of Gaunt’s Stables’ or ‘St. Mary’s Guild’ go back to the beginning of
the twelfth century. They none of them would satisfy our modern notions
of comfort, but neither do the much later houses, such as the mediæval
merchant’s house called “Strangers’ Hall,” in Norwich, which is so
interesting and so obviously uncomfortable. When King John of France was
confined at Somerby Castle in the fourteenth century he had to import
furniture from France to take the place of the benches and trestles which
was all that the castle boasted, and to hang draperies and tapestries on
the bare walls; and though some of these were supplied him by his captor,
comfortable furniture seems to have been not even dreamt of at that time
in England.
[Sidenote: ROOD-SCREENS]
For the churches the Normans did surprisingly well, as far as the
building and stonework went, but the beautiful woodwork, which is the
glory of our Lincolnshire marsh churches, is mostly the work of the
men of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. We see this mediæval
workmanship sometimes in the bench ends and stalls and miserere seats,
but most notably in such of the rood screens as have escaped the
successive onslaughts made on them in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, whilst the shameful neglect of the eighteenth and the shocking
ignorance of both clergy and laity in that and the first part of the
nineteenth century, have swept away much that was historically of the
utmost interest, and which the better informed and more responsible
guardians of the churches to-day would have preserved and treasured. This
mediæval woodwork is found most frequently in the more remote parts of
the country. The best rood loft I have ever seen is in a little church
in Wales, near Towyn, and some of the finest rood screens with canopies
are in the churches of Devon; of these, Mr. Hubert Congreve, in his
paper contributed to the Worcester Archæological Society, notes that at
_Stoke-in-Teignhead_ there is one of the fourteenth century, carved in
the reign of Richard II. From this the loft has been removed, and it
was generally the case that when this was taken away as idolatrous, the
screen itself was not objected to.
Many of these screens in the Devon churches have an extremely rich and
deep cornice, and they often extend right across the nave and both
the aisles. Perhaps the finest of these is in the famous parson Jack
Russell’s church at _Swymbridge_. This is of the fifteenth century. From
the same source we learn that _Bovey Tracey_ has a similar screen, but
it has had to be greatly restored since the Commonwealth destruction,
and that _Atherington_ has a lovely screen in the north aisle, with
fan-shaped coving springing from figures of angels holding shields. The
cornice is delicately carved, and there is some fine canopy work over the
parapet, with niches which once held figures of the saints. This screen
was originally in the chapel at Umberleigh Manor, and is perhaps the only
screen in the county which has never been painted. When I visited lately
the quaint little town of _Totnes_ I saw what is most uncommon—a stone
screen. This dates from 1479, and richly and beautifully carved, much
after the pattern of the screen in the Lady Chapel at Exeter Cathedral.
All this fine mediæval work suffered terribly from the ultra-Protestant
mania for iconoclasm which exhibited itself in the reign of Edward VI.,
in 1547, and again under Elizabeth in 1561. Finally, under the Parliament
both in 1643 and 1644, was issued “An ordinance of the Lords and Commons
assembled in Parliament for the utter demolishing, removing and taking
away of all Monuments of superstition and idolatry.”
This Act provided specifically for the taking away of all altar rails and
the levelling of the “Chancel-ground” and the removal of the Communion
table from the east end, and the destruction of all stone altars, so that
it is always noticeable when we find one such, either in a side chapel or
in the pavement, with its five and occasionally six dedication crosses
cut on the stone. Norwich has one in which a small black slab bearing the
crosses is let into the large altar slab.
[Sidenote: ICONOCLASM]
All images, “representative of the persons of the Trinity or of any
Angell or Saint” were to be “utterly demolished,” and all vestments
“defaced”; with the quaint proviso that the order should “not extend to
any image, picture or coat-of-arms set up or graven onely for a Monument
of any King, Prince or Nobleman, or other dead person _which hath not
been commonly reputed or taken for a saint_.”
FONTS.