Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire - W. F. Rawnsley - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Tickencote—“Bloody Oaks”—Holywell—Tallington—Barholm—Greatford—Witham-on-the-Hill—Dr. Willis—West Deeping—Market Deeping—Deeping-St.-James—Richard de Rulos—Braceborough—Bourne.

Of the eight roads which run to Stamford, the Great North Road which here coincides with the Roman Ermine Street is the chief; and this enters from the south through Northamptonshire and goes out by the street called “Scotgate” in a north-westerly direction through Rutland. It leaves Lincolnshire at Great or Bridge Casterton on the river Gwash; one mile further it passes the celebrated church of Tickencote nestling in a hollow to the left, where the wonderful Norman chancel arch of five orders outdoes even the work at Iffley near Oxford, and the wooden effigy of a knight reminds one of that of Robert Duke of Normandy at Gloucester. Tickencote is the home of the Wingfields, and the villagers in 1471 were near enough to hear “the Shouts of war” when the Lincolnshire Lancastrians fled from the fight on Loosecoat Field after a slaughter which is commemorated on the map by the name “Bloody Oaks.” Further on, the road passes Stretton, ‘the village on the street,’ whence a lane to the right takes you to the famed Clipsham quarries just on the Rutland side of the boundary, and over it to the beautiful residence of Colonel Birch Reynardson at Holywell. Very soon now the Ermine Street, after doing its ten miles in Rutland, passes by “Morkery Wood” back into Lincolnshire.

The only Stamford Road which is all the time in our county is the eastern road through Market Deeping to Spalding, this soon after leaving Stamford passes near Uffington Hall, built in 1688 by Robert Bertie, son of Montague, second Earl of Lindsey, he whose father fell at Edgehill. On the northern outskirt of the parish Lord Kesteven has a fine Elizabethan house called Casewick Hall. Round each house is a well-timbered park, and at Uffington Hall the approach is by a fine avenue of limes. At Tallington, where the road crosses the Great Northern line, the church, like several in the neighbourhood, has some Saxon as well as Norman work, and the original Sanctus bell still hangs in a cot surmounting the east end of the nave. It is dedicated to St. Lawrence.

South Lincolnshire seems to have been rather rich in Saxon churches, and two of the best existing towers of that period at Barnack and Wittering in Northamptonshire are within three miles of Stamford, one on either side of the Great North Road.

Barholm Church, near Tallington, has some extremely massive Norman arches and a fine door with diapered tympanum. The tower was restored in the last year of Charles I., and no one seems to have been more surprised than the churchwarden or parson or mason of the time, for we find carved on it these lines:—

“Was ever such a thing

Sence the creation?

A new steeple built

In the time of vexation.

I. H. 1643.”

FORDS OF THE WELLAND

An old Hall adds to the interest of the place, and another charming old building is Mr. Peacock’s Elizabethan house in the next parish of Greatford, or, as it should be spelt, Gretford or Gritford, the grit or gravel ford of the river Glen, just as Stamford should be Stanford or Staneford, the stone-paved ford of the Welland. Gretford Church is remarkable if only for the unusual position of the tower as a south transept, a similar thing being seen at Witham-on-the-Hill, four miles off, in Rutland. Five of the bells there are re-casts of some which once hung in Peterborough Cathedral, and the fifth has the date 1831 and a curious inscription. General Johnson I used to see when I was a boy at Uppingham; he was the patron of the school, and the one man among the governors of the school who was always a friend to her famous headmaster, Edward Thring. But why he wrote the last line of this inscription I can’t conceive:—

“’Twas not to prosper pride and hate

William Augustus Johnson gave me,

But peace and joy to celebrate;

And call to prayer to heaven to save ye.

Then keep the terms, and e’er remember,

May 29 ye must not ring

Nor yet the 5th of each November

Nor on the crowning of a king.”

THE DEEPINGS

DEEPING FEN

To return to Gretford. In the north transept is a square opening, in the sill of which is a curious hollow all carved with foliage, resembling one in the chancel at East Kirkby, near Spilsby, where it is supposed to have been a sort of alms dish for votive offerings. Here, too, is a bust by Nollekens of a man who had a considerable reputation in his time, and who occupied more than one house in this neighbourhood and built a private asylum at Shillingthorpe near Braceborough for his patients, a distinguished clientèle who used to drive their teams all about the neighbourhood; this was Dr. F. Willis, the mad-doctor who attended George III. But these are all ‘side shows,’ and we must get back to Tallington. The road from here goes through West Deeping, which, like the manor of Market Deeping, belonged to the Wakes. Here we find a good font with eight shields of arms, that of the Wakes being one, and an almost unique old low chancel screen of stone, the surmounting woodwork has gone and the west face is filled in with poor modern mosaic. Within three miles the Bourne-and-Peterborough road crosses the Stamford-and-Spalding road at Market Deeping, where there is a large church, once attached to Croyland, and a most interesting old house used as the rectory. This was the refectory of a priory, and has fine roof timbers. The manor passed through Joan, daughter of Margaret Wake, to the Black Prince. Two miles further, the grand old priory church of Deeping-St.-James lies a mile to the left. This was attached as a cell to Thorney Abbey in 1139, by the same Baldwin FitzGilbert who had founded Bourne Abbey. A diversion of a couple of miles northwards would bring us to a fine tower and spire at Langtoft, once a dependency of Medehamstead[1] Abbey at Peterborough, together with which it was ruthlessly destroyed by Swegen in 1013. On the roof timbers are some beautifully carved figures of angels, and carved heads project from the nave pillars. The south chantry is a large one, with three arches opening into the chancel, and has several interesting features. Amongst these is a handsome aumbry, which may have been used as an Easter sepulchre. The south chantry opens from the chancel with three arches, and has some good carving and a piscina with a finely constructed canopy. There is a monument to Elizabeth Moulesworth, 1648, and a brass plate on the tomb of Sarah, wife of Bernard Walcot, has this pretty inscription:—

Thou bedd of rest, reserve for him a roome

Who lives a man divorced from his deare wife,

That as they were one hart so this one tombe

May hold them near in death as linckt in life,

She’s gone before, and after comes her head

To sleepe with her among the blessed dead.

At Scamblesby, between Louth and Horncastle, is another pathetic inscription on a wife’s tomb:—

To Margaret Coppinger wife of Francis Thorndike 1629.

Dilectissimæ conjugi Mæstissimus maritorum Franciscus

Thorndike.

L.(apidem) M.(armoreum) P.(osuit)

The old manor house of the Hyde family is at the north end of the village. The road for the next ten miles over Deeping Fen is uninteresting as a road can be. But this will be amply made up for in another chapter when we shape our eastward course from Spalding to Holbeach and Gedney.

THE FATHER OF FEN FARMERS

In Deeping Fen between Bourne, Spalding, Crowland and Market Deeping there is about fifty square miles of fine fat land, and Marrat tells us that as early as the reign of Edward the Confessor, Egelric, the Bishop of Durham, who, having been once a monk at Peterborough, knew the value of the land, in order to develop the district, made a cord road of timber and gravel all the way from Deeping to Spalding. The province then belonged to the Lords of Brunne or Bourne. In Norman times Richard De Rulos, Chamberlain of the Conqueror, married the daughter of Hugh de Evermue, Lord of Deeping. Their only daughter married Baldwin FitzGilbert, and his daughter and heiress married Hugh de Wake, who managed the forest of Kesteven for Henry III., which forest reached to the bridge at Market Deeping. Richard De Rulos, who was the father of all Lincolnshire farmers, aided by Ingulphus, Abbot of Croyland, set himself to enclose and drain the fen land, to till the soil or convert it into pasture and to breed cattle. He banked out the Welland which used to flood the fen every year, whence it got its name of Deeping or the deep meadows, and on the bank he set up tenements with gardens attached, which were the beginnings of Market Deeping. He further enlarged St. Guthlac’s chapel into a church, and then planted another little colony at Deeping-St.-James, where his son-in-law, who carried on his activities, built the priory. De Rulos was in fact a model landlord, and the result was that the men of Deeping, like Jeshuron, “waxed fat and kicked,” and the abbots of Croyland had endless contests with them for the next 300 years for constant trespass and damage. Probably this was the reason why the Wakes set up a castle close by Deeping, but on the Northampton side of the Welland at Maxey, which was inhabited later by Lady Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., who, in addition to all her educational benefactions, was also a capital farmer and an active member of the Commissioners of Sewers.

THE LIMESTONE SPRINGS

We must now get back to Stamford. Even the road which goes due north to Bourne soon finds itself outside the county; for Stamford is placed on a mere tongue or long pointed nose of land belonging to Lincolnshire, in what is aptly termed the Wapentake of ‘Ness.’ However, after four miles in Rutland, it passes the four cross railroads at Essendine Junction, and soon after re-crosses the boundary near Carlby. Essendine Church consists simply of a Norman nave and chancel. Here, a little to the right lies Braceborough Spa, where water gushes from the limestone at the rate of a million and a half gallons daily. This is a great district for curative springs. There is one five miles to the west at Holywell which, with its stream and lake and finely timbered grounds, is one of the beauty spots of Lincolnshire, and at the same distance to the north are the strong springs of Bourne. We hear of a chalybeate spring “continually boiling” or gushing up, for it was not hot, near the church at Billingborough, and another at Stoke Rochford, each place a good ten miles from Bourne and in opposite directions. Great Ponton too, near Stoke Rochford, is said to “abound in Springs of pure water rising out of the rock and running into the river Witham.” The church at Braceborough had a fine brass once to Thomas De Wasteneys, who died of the Black Death in 1349. After Carlby there is little of interest on the road itself till it tops the hill beyond Toft whence, on an autumn day, a grand view opens out across the fens to the Wash and to Boston on the north-east, and the panorama sweeps southward past Spalding to the time-honoured abbey of Croyland, and on again to the long grey pile of Peterborough Minster, once islands in a trackless fen (the impenetrable refuge of the warlike and unconquered Gervii or fenmen), but now a level plain of cornland covered, as far as eye can see, with the richest crops imaginable. A little further north we reach the Colsterworth road, and turning east, enter the old town of Bourne, now only notable as the junction of the Great Northern and Midland Railways. Since 1893 the inhabitants have used an “e” at the end of the name to distinguish it from Bourn in Cambridgeshire. Near the castle hill is a strong spring called “Peter’s Pool,” or Bournwell-head, the water of which runs through the town and is copious enough to furnish a water supply for Spalding. This castle, mentioned by Ingulphus in his history of Croyland Abbey, existed in the eleventh century; possibly the Romans had a fort here to guard both the ‘Carr Dyke’ which passes by the east side of the town, and also the King’s Street, a Roman road which, splitting off from the Ermine Street at Castor, runs through Bourne due north to Sleaford. There was an outer moat enclosing eight acres, and an inner moat of one acre, inside which “on a mount of earth cast up with mene’s hands” stood the castle, once the stronghold of the Wakes. To-day a maze of grassy mounds alone attests the site, amongst which the “Bourn or Brunne gushes out in a strong clear stream.” Marrat in his “History of Lincolnshire” tells us that as early as 870 Morchar, Lord of Brun, fell fighting at the battle of Threekingham. Two hundred years later we have “Hereward the Wake” living at Bourn, and in the twelfth century “Hugh De Wac” married Emma, daughter and heir of Baldwin FitzGilbert, who led some of King Stephen’s forces in the battle of Lincoln and refused to desert his king. Hugh founded the abbey of Bourn in 1138 on the site of an older building of the eighth or ninth century.

Bourne Abbey Church.

BOURNE

FAMOUS NATIVES

Six generations later, Margaret de Wake married Edmund Plantagenet of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the sixth son of Edward I., and their daughter, born 1328, was Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent, who was finally married to Edward the Black Prince. Their son was the unfortunate Richard II., and through them the manor of Bourn, which is said to have been bestowed on Baldwin, Count of Brienne, by William Rufus, passed back to the Crown. Hereward is supposed to have been buried in the abbey in which only a little of the early building remains. Certainly he was one of Bourn’s famous natives, Cecil Lord Burleigh, the great Lord Treasurer, being another, of whom it was said that “his very enemies sorrowed for his death.” Job Hartop, born 1550, who sailed with Sir John Hawkins and spent ten years in the galleys, and thirteen more in a Spanish prison, but came at last safe home to Bourn, deserves honourable mention, and Worth, the Parisian costumier, was also a native who has made himself a name; but one of the most noteworthy of all Bourn’s residents was Robert Manning, born at Malton, and canon of the Gilbertine Priory of Six Hills. He is best known as Robert de Brunne, from his long residence in Bourn, where he wrote his “Chronicle of the History of England.” This is a Saxon or English metrical version of Wace’s Norman-French translation of the “Chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” and of Peter Langtoft’s “History of England,” which was also written in French. This work he finished in 1338, on the 200th anniversary of the founding of the abbey; and in 1303, when he was appointed “Magister” in Bourn Abbey, he wrote his “Handlynge of Sin,” also a translation from the French, in the preface to which he has the following lines:—

For men unlearned I undertook

In English speech to write this book,

For many be of such mannere

That tales and rhymes will gladly hear.

On games and feasts and at the ale

Men love to hear a gossip’s tale

That leads perhaps to villainy

Or deadly sin, or dull folly.

For such men have I made this rhyme

That they may better spend their time.

To all true Christians under sun,

To good and loyal men of Brunn,

And specially all by name

O’ the Brotherhood of Sempringhame,

Robert of Brunn now greeteth ye,

And prays for your prosperity.

ROBERT DE BRUNNE

Robert was a translator and no original composer, but he was the first after Layamon, the Worcestershire monk who lived just before him, to write English in its present form. Chaucer followed him, then Spenser, after which all was easy. But he was, according to Freeman, the pioneer who created standard English by giving the language of the natives a literary expression.

The Station House, Bourne.

BLACKSMITH’S EPITAPH

It is difficult to see the abbey church, it is so hemmed in by buildings, and it never seems to have been completed. At the west end is some very massive work. In the churchyard there is a curious epitaph on Thomas Tye, a blacksmith, the first six lines of which are also found on a gravestone in Haltham churchyard near Horncastle:—

My sledge and hammer lie reclined,

My bellows too have lost their wind,

My fire’s extinct, my forge decayed,

And in the dust my vice is laid,

My coal is spent, my iron’s gone,

My nails are drawn, my work is done.

My fire-dryed corpse lies here at rest,

My soul like smoke is soaring to the bles’t.

There is a charming old grey stone grammar school, possibly the very building in which Robert De Brunne taught when “Magister” at the abbey at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The station-master’s house, called “Red Hall,” is a picturesque Elizabethan brick building once the home of the Roman Catholic leader, Sir John Thimbleby, and afterwards of the Digbys. Sir Everard Digby, whose fine monument is in Stoke Dry Church near Uppingham, was born here. Another house is called “Cavalry House” because Thomas Rawnsley, great grandfather of the writer, was living there when he raised at his own expense and drilled a troop of “Light Horse Rangers” at the time when Buonaparte threatened to invade England. Lady Heathcote, whose husband commanded them, gave him a handsome silver goblet in 1808, in recognition of his services. He died in 1826, and in the spandrils of the north arcade in Bourne Abbey Church are memorial tablets to him and to his wife Deborah (Hardwicke) “and six of their children who died infants.”