charter to the Corporation of the town, which exempted them from the
authority of the Sheriff of Lincolnshire in the execution and return
of writs, making the Alderman and his twelve Comburgesses magistrates
within the town and soke, and giving them a prison in the town. A charter
had been granted to the Alderman and Burgesses by Richard II. in 1377;
and Richard III.’s charter was probably an extension of the privileges
granted by a charter of Edward IV. in 1463. From 1463 Grantham dates its
existence as a corporate borough, the recognition of its Merchant Guild,
and the right of sending two burgesses to Parliament. Its Alderman was
elected by the Comburgesses annually in the church, the Corpus Christi
chapel of the chancel being used, as time went on, for that purpose.[63]
Probably the members of Parliament were at first elected in the church:
their election later on took place in the Grammar School, until in 1765
Corpus Christi College at Oxford, as trustee of the foundation, objected
to the damage done on these occasions. It was then decided to transfer
parliamentary elections to the church or the Guildhall. Grantham lost
one of its members in 1832, but still returns one. James II. converted
the Alderman into a Mayor by a charter of 1685. In April 1688, however,
a _Quo warranto_ summons was served on the Mayor; and in the following
November the Corporation, taking advantage of the banished King’s
proclamation which restored such bodies to their ancient rights, reverted
to their old state. Their later constitution included an Alderman, twelve
senior and twelve junior Comburgesses. For these the Municipal Reform Act
of 1835 substituted a Mayor, four Aldermen, and twelve Councillors.
We have seen the connection of the church with the civic life of the
town; and it is to the church and its history that we now turn. In 1085
it formed part of the royal manor, and the right of presentation to it
belonged then and for some time after to the King. The parish of Grantham
was then probably conterminous with the soke. The churches at Houghton,
which corresponds to the modern parish of Spittlegate, Londonthorpe, and
in the outlying member of the soke at Braceby, were regarded as chapels
of Grantham from early times. The extent of the mediæval parish is fairly
represented by the report of Henry VIII.’s commissioners in 1535-6. They
found the vicar of the northern mediety of Grantham holding as part
of his charge North Gonerby and Londonthorpe; while South Gonerby and
Braceby were in charge of the vicar of the southern mediety. Belton and
Sapperton, also members of the soke, formed independent parishes from
an early date: one can scarcely doubt that the alienation of property
there to religious houses was followed quickly by the alienation of
the townships from their mother church and the building of churches of
their own, to which their new lords presented.[64] In 1091 the lands and
endowments of the Church of Grantham were granted to St. Osmund, who gave
them to his new cathedral at Old Sarum. The presentation still remained
with the Crown. If we may trust the shaky memories of the jurors of
1275, with whose statements the justices apparently were satisfied,
the Empress Maud granted the advowson and right of presentation to
the Church of Sarum.[65] From that time it became a prebendal church
of the Cathedral of Sarum, divided into medieties, whose rectors, the
prebendaries of North and South Grantham, impropriated the endowments
already granted, and claimed some jurisdiction within their prebends.
The church was probably served by chaplains, until Hugh of Wells,
Bishop of Lincoln, whose energy in providing regular incumbents and
stipends for the impropriated benefices of his diocese, has a memorial
in the priceless rolls of institutions and charters belonging to his
episcopate, and in his book of ordinations of vicarages, arranged for the
presentation and institution of regularly paid vicars. The first vicar
of North Grantham was instituted on September 23, 1223; the first vicar
of South Grantham about two years later.[66] It is not at all unlikely
that many of these vicars were careless about residence, and that their
duties were often delegated to the chantry priests, whose number grew in
the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: we know that, in the seventeenth
century, the care of the parish was left often, if not habitually, to
one of the two incumbents. But each of the two prebendaries in Salisbury
presented his own nominee on a vacancy in his particular vicarage till
1713, when, on the voidance of the vicarage of North Grantham by death,
Mr. John Harrison, the south vicar, was instituted also to the other
mediety. There are still prebendaries of North and South Grantham in
Salisbury, who presented to the vicarage until 1870; but their connection
with the prebendal church is now severed save in name, and, while the
impropriation has passed into other hands, the vicar is collated by the
Bishop of Lincoln.
On its first connection with the Cathedral of Sarum the church was much
smaller than it is now. As we stand beneath the tower and look along
the nave, we shall see that the second pillar east of the tower in both
arcades is a pier composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on
either side; and, coming nearer, we shall see that the western respond is
much later in character than the eastern. Across the space between these
composite piers, covering their site, and extending a little farther
to north and south, came the west front of the twelfth-century church,
possibly even that of the church mentioned in 1085.[67] It had no aisles;
its side walls stood a little outside the line of the present arcades,
where their foundations still exist. Of its connection with the chancel
we can say nothing, but high up in the north wall of the chancel there is
“herring-bone” masonry; there is “Norman” tooling on the stones in the
wall below the east window, and in the south wall it is possible that
some of the masonry is of the same date. If the chancel was originally of
its present length, it was as long as the nave—a most unusual proportion
in Norman times; but the nave may have extended farther east, or there
may have been a tower between nave and chancel. If so, the tower was
possibly built either as a continuation upward of the eastern parts
of the nave walls, or straight from the ground without transepts. The
imposing provisions for a rood-screen in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries removed all possible traces of the earlier arrangement.
About 1180, or a few years later, aisles were added to the nave. To
this work belong the two eastern responds already mentioned, and the
three beautiful clustered columns on either side between them and the
chancel-screen. These columns are of that type, in which the shafts,
although approaching the detachment and individual emphasis of each
member which are the great features of early Gothic art, have not yet
wholly broken away from their absorption by the main mass of stonework.
That mass, however, has acquired grace and slenderness without losing
strength; the pier, adequate to the weight it has to bear, has taken
the place of the shafted mass of wall, the bearing power of which was
out of proportion to its real function. The carving of the capitals,
too, marks the Transitional character of the work. The respond of the
north arcade has a carved capital of distinctly late Norman character.
As we go eastward, this conventional arabesque sculpture disappears, and
foliage, at first here and there, then altogether, takes its place.[68]
The carving of the capitals of the south arcade was evidently begun
after the north arcade was completed, and only one of them was finished.
These piers were connected by semicircular arches, the lower voussoirs
of which were in some cases retained as springing-points for the pointed
arches which we see at present. These later arches, with their acute
points, led to the blocking of the round-headed clerestory windows, the
openings of one or two of which may be traced in the wall above. This new
arcade was not built, as was so common, by taking the old church walls
gradually to pieces and building piers and arches in specially made
gaps and breaches; but the older walls seem to have been taken down,
and the arcades built, as has been noted, slightly within their line.
The east responds of the arcade are gone altogether, owing to the later
widening of the eastern bay; and of the aisles which were now added to
the church it is difficult to premise anything but this, that they were
in all likelihood about half as broad as the present aisles, if as much,
and were covered by lean-to roofs, abutting on the nave walls below the
clerestory. The earlier chancel, and, if there was one, the central tower
(a little to the east of centre), were probably left unaltered.
In this state the church remained until the last quarter of the
thirteenth century, a building handsome and interesting, but not
specially remarkable for size, and without any peculiar or unique
feature. Its western doorway may have opened straight upon what was then,
it appears, the market-place of the town. The commercial prosperity of
the place, its trade in wool, were growing; and we are justified in
supposing that the merchants of the town took their part in the great
extension of their parish church. This extension was no mere result of
the fact that Grantham was a lordship belonging to the Crown; nor, we may
be sure, did the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury undertake the gratuitous
task of enlarging to nearly double its size a church which represented to
them a portion of their income, and would certainly never occur to them
in the light of a cherished possession demanding expensive care. But to
the men of the town it was a cherished possession; and the greater part
of the cost was doubtless supplied by merchants, the fathers and kinsfolk
of the Haryngtons and Saltebys who founded chantries in the next century
within its walls. But the mother church at Salisbury helped to supply
at any rate some of the ideas to which the townsmen’s money-gifts gave
shape. Her chapter-house was finished somewhere between 1270 and 1280,
and the cusped circles in the heads of the windows of the north aisle at
Grantham, the shafted mullions with plainly moulded caps and bases, are
accurate reminiscences of its simple and beautiful geometrical tracery.
Lincoln, too, where, in 1280, the great eastern chapel—the so-called
“Angel Quire,” built to contain St. Hugh’s shrine—had been consecrated,
supplied its share: the west window of the north aisle at Grantham is an
ingenious adaptation to six lights, with a slight improvement, of the
eight-light east window at Lincoln. These, however, are merely details
by which the work at Grantham may be assigned to the year 1280 or a
little later. The design of the masons included a western extension of
the church, accompanied by a widening of the aisles, and, with this, the
building of a western tower.
In setting out their plan, they remembered what had been done at Newark
some fifty years before. There a western tower had been begun, standing
free of the aisles on three sides; but, as the work advanced, the
builders had determined to bring their aisles westward flush with the
west wall of the tower, and had pierced arches, as an afterthought, in
its north and south walls. The work at Newark was temporarily stopped,
and, when it went on again, Grantham led the way with one splendid
effort. The Grantham builders apparently began work with their north
aisle. It was on a vast scale, and spaced with so little regard to the
spacing of the columns of the nave that the north doorway, instead of
opening against an interval between columns, has a column and part of an
interval opposite it.[69] The earlier north aisle was totally enclosed by
this new work, which not merely stretched three bays to the westward—the
third of these bays, which roughly corresponds to the internal space
occupied by the tower and its piers, being nearly as wide as the other
two together—but also was extended a bay eastward, so that it encroached
on the chancel wall, or, it may be, on the space hitherto occupied by
the tower. From the walls of the aisle the builders probably passed to
the lower courses of the tower piers, the arches from the tower into
the new aisles, and the western doorway,[70] and then joined the tower
piers to the west angles of the older nave by two arches on each side,
with intermediate columns whose form was evidently suggested by that of
the earlier columns east of them. If this hint was taken from the older
work, the imitation did not extend to the rounded arches. The new arches
were sharply pointed, and, to give uniformity to the connected work,
new pointed arches were built up in place of the old rounded ones. This
obviously was done by removing just as much of the upper wall of the nave
as was necessary, and blocking the clerestory. No clerestory seems to
have formed part of the new design. As part of this task, the chancel was
connected by an arch with the eastern part of the new aisle, and the old
west front and north aisle walls were removed.
[Illustration: PLAN OF GRANTHAM CHURCH.]
We need not dwell on the beauty of this work, which touches exactly the
Transition from the first to the second period of English Gothic, on the
north doorway, with its array of mouldings and shafts, on the details
of the windows, the grotesque carvings of the eaves, the boldness and
cleanness of the outlines of buttresses and base-courses. The next work
was the completion of the steeple, and this was done well, but apparently
with some rapidity, about the year 1300. There is, perhaps, a slight
indecision of design in the small stages of arcading and “smocking” above
the west window; and the west window itself, with its mullions crossing
in the head, is more effective from the point of view of its parade of
“ball-flower” than from that of design; but there can be no question as
to the beauty of the twin two-light windows above the “smocking” stage,
or to the character which the belfry-lights, with their strongly defined
central mullion, their crocketed triangular hoods, and the statued niches
in the spandrils they form with the parapet, give to the tower.[71] Nor
can there be anything but admiration for the great angle-buttresses,
rising from their niched lower stages by a series of sloping offsets into
four tall crocketed pinnacles round the base of the spire; nor for the
method by which the diagonal sides of the spire, which rises from within
a plain parapet, are connected by broaches with the pinnacled angles
of the tower: nor for the crocketing, plain in detail but elaborate in
effect, and the three ranges of lights of the spire itself. The top was
rebuilt in 1664, probably a few feet lower than it had been. It was
struck by lightning in 1797, and repaired rather timorously.[72]
The south aisle was already set out on a scale little less than that
of the north aisle, and probably it was completed as far as a point
corresponding to the east end of the nave, soon after the completion of
the spire. This work was done more hastily, and with less consistent
magnificence than that of the north aisle; but it has been so much
restored that it is difficult to realise its appearance when it was
built. The masonry, however, is of a poorer kind, and seems to indicate
that funds were not so easily forthcoming as before. The south doorway
and the outer doorway of the porch are thirteenth-century structures,
removed from their original positions to corresponding places in relation
to the new aisle. The windows, where they are original, show the design
of crossing mullions which we have noticed in the west window of the
tower, but the shafts used in some of them seem to be re-used from
windows in the older south aisle.
Whether this aisle was closed by some temporary arrangement at the
east end, or whether an east wall was ever built, we cannot tell; no
foundations of such a wall exist, so far as is known. Work, at any rate,
seems to have stopped about 1310-20. It was not long before it was
resumed, but the resumption was gradual. Three great works belong to the
next stage—the building of the south chapel of the chancel and the crypt
beneath, the rebuilding and northward extension of the north porch, and
the building of the rood-screen. Both the south chapel and the extended
porch were the result of the foundation of guilds and the multiplication
of chantry services.[73] The south chapel itself, extending the whole
length of the chancel, and connected with it by an arcade of four bays
cut in its south wall, was probably the chapel of the chantry of St.
Mary, founded by William Gunthorp. Richard Salteby, whose canopied tomb
is in the south wall of the nave, immediately east of the south porch,
founded the chantry of St. John the Baptist, whose services were probably
performed at an altar near the southern staircase to the roof. This
altar may have stood at first against the east wall of the aisle; later,
it would have stood against the screen across the entrance of the Lady
Chapel. Of the position of the other fourteenth-century chantries we know
little; but one helpful document, enrolled among the public records,
tells us of some of the altars and services in the church in 1349, and,
in particular, of the altar in the rood-loft (_in solario coram magna
cruce in medio ecclesie_), at which a chaplain said mass daily “after the
first stroke of the bell which is called Daybelle”—the bell which still
rings at five o’clock every morning from Lady Day to Michaelmas.[74] The
crypt below the Lady Chapel, divided into an eastern and western portion,
and approached by two doors on the outside of the church, may have
contained other chantry chapels; but the western portion was possibly
used as a bone-hole.
[Illustration: NORTH PORCH, GRANTHAM CHURCH (ST. WOLFRAN’S).]
The church, in addition to chantry foundations, contained valuable
relics, among which were portions of the bodies of the patron saints of
the church, St. Wulfran, Archbishop of Sens, missionary to Friesland, and
monk of Fontenelle,[75] and of St. Symphorian, the martyr of Autun. It
is highly probable that, as time went on, these relics were preserved in
the eastern crypt; the beautiful staircase, with its elaborate doorway,
by which this crypt in the fifteenth century was connected with the
chancel, had evidently some special purpose. But it is almost certain
that, on such days as the 15th of October, the feast of the translation
of St. Wulfran, when people flocked into the town for what is now known
as the Onion Fair, the relics would be exhibited to the devout visitors
from the chamber above the north porch, through the small traceried
window above the north door. This chamber was approached by staircases in
the outer pinnacles of the north porch. Its construction seems to have
been the _raison d’être_ of the rebuilding of which we have spoken; the
whole lower storey, the inner porch, the open way in the middle, left
to give room to church processions, the outer porch, were vaulted over,
and, to admit of this vaulting, the pediment of the north doorway was
ruthlessly mutilated. Those who have discovered in this upper chamber
the vicarage of North Grantham will find in it rather a chapel where the
relics belonging to the church were kept and exposed to the faithful, and
in the two staircases (an expensive provision for so small a vicarage) a
way of entrance and of exit for those who wished to visit the shrine and
seek contact with its treasure.[76] The floor and the vaulting beneath it
have now been removed, and the destruction which it caused to the north
doorway is only too clearly visible. The date of the chamber above the
south porch, in its present state, is rather uncertain; the little window
looking into the church, which points to its use as a watching-chamber,
is of the fifteenth century.
The Lady Chapel is one of the most perplexing portions of the church: the
masonry of its walls and the early fourteenth-century tracery of one of
its windows suggest that, if there was a more than temporary wall at the
east end of the south aisle, its materials were re-used here. The arcade
and the tracery of the remaining windows, almost disagreeably fantastic
in its exaggerated curves, point to an advanced period in the fourteenth
century for its completion, and show signs of that failing force which
was an immediate result of the Black Death. We may assign the ten years
between 1350 and 1360 to this work. The circular buttress-turrets at the
east end are very like those which flank the north porch at Holbeach
Church in South Lincolnshire, a building of much the same date. When this
work was finished, only one thing remained to be done to give the church
the form of a regular aisled parallelogram. This was the building of a
north chapel to the chancel, a continuation eastward of the great north
aisle. As we have seen, the eastern bay of that aisle already opened
into the chancel. The lengthening was not taken in hand until a century
and a quarter after the Lady Chapel was built; and, in the interval, one
important piece of work was achieved, the widening and heightening of
the eastern bay of the nave on either side, evidently to give dignity
to the rood-screen and loft. It is not at all unlikely that there may
have been a chancel arch up to this time, perhaps with twelfth-century
jambs supporting a pointed arch, like those which had been added to the
nave arcades. If so, it was now cut away: the responds of the arcades on
either side were destroyed, and from the wall-face thus mutilated—the
recklessly hacked surface may be seen by opening a hinged panel in the
side of the modern screen—wide and lofty arches were thrown across to
single dwarf-shafts resting on the abaci of the twelfth-century piers to
the west. Thus unimpeded space was obtained for the screen with its loft,
and the great rood on its beam above. The character of the work is later
than 1350; and the screen to which the document of 1349 refers probably
underwent some alteration, or was now replaced by a new one, the central
portion of which was certainly of stone.[77] Of fifteenth-century work
is the crypt door, with its solid panelled screen on the south of the
chancel; a window of much the same date was inserted in the south aisle,
just east of the south doorway of the nave. In the latter half of the
century the east wall of the north aisle was removed; the north wall of
the chancel was pierced with three wide arches with slender responds and
intermediate piers, poor in design and detail; and the north chancel
chapel, with its large Perpendicular windows, was built. This was known
as the “Corpus Christi Quire.” This has been repeatedly referred to the
munificence of Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, a great benefactor
of Grantham Grammar School and the founder of Corpus Christi College at
Oxford. Foxe certainly was one of the trustees for the foundation of a
chantry in Grantham Church, served by two priests, one of whom was to be
the grammar schoolmaster; but the chief founder of the Corpus Christi
chantry was a certain John Orston, whose name also occurs as founder of
the Trinity chantry. This foundation (1392) was nearly a century earlier
than the actual building of the “Corpus Christi Quire.” We have seen how
the chapel was the scene of the election of aldermen. For many years the
records of the borough were preserved in the eastern crypt, in a great
wooden chest with three locks. Foxe’s emblem of the pelican is said to
occur on the lower side of the bowl of the octagonal font. However, the
font, with its sculptured panels of events in the life of our Lord, is
probably earlier than Foxe’s day; and the pelican is, of course, a common
emblem of the Blessed Sacrament.