Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire - W. F. Rawnsley - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Cromwell’s Letter—The George and the Angel—The Elections—Fox’s Grammar School—The Church of St. Wolfram—The Market Place.

The usual way of reaching Grantham is by the Great Northern main line—all expresses stop here. It is 105 miles from London, and often the only stop between that and York. After the levels of Huntingdonshire and the brief sight of Peterborough Cathedral, across the river Nene, the line enters Lincolnshire near Tallington, after which it follows up the valley of the river Glen, then climbs the wold and, just beyond Bassingthorpe tunnel, crosses the Ermine Street and runs down the Witham Valley into Grantham. Viewed from the train the town looks a mass of ugly red brick houses with slate roofs, but the magnificent tower and spire soon come into sight, and one feels that this must be indeed a church worth visiting.

Coming, as we prefer to do, by road, the view is better; for there is a background of hill and woodland with the fine park of Belton and the commanding height of Syston Hall beyond to the north-east; and to the left you see the Great North Road climbing up Gonerby Hill to a height of 200 feet above the town.

THE MANOR AND THE GEORGE

Grantham has no Roman associations, nor did it grow up round a feudal castle or a great abbey; for, though a castle of some kind must once have stood on the west side near the junction of the Mowbeck and the Witham, the only proof of it is the name Castlegate and a reference in an old deed to “Castle Dyke.” That the town was once walled, the streets called Watergate, Castlegate, Swinegate, Spittalgate sufficiently attest, but no trace of wall now exists. The name Spittalgate points to the existence of a leper hospital, and I see from Miss Rotha Clay’s interesting and exhaustive book, “The Mediæval Hospitals of England,” that there have been two at Grantham—St. Margaret’s, founded in 1328, and St. Leonard’s in 1428.

The flat pastoral valley watered by the Wytham, then called in that neighbourhood the Granta, as the Cam was at Cambridge, seems to have been its own recommendation to an agricultural people; and the fact that the manor was from the time of Edward the Confessor an appanage of the queen, and remained all through the times of the Norman kings and their successors down to William III. a Crown property, used as a dower for the queen consort of the time, was no doubt some benefit to it. Even when the town was bestowed, as, for instance, by King John on the Earl of Warren who also owned Stamford, or by Edward I., who knew Grantham well, on Aylmer Valence Earl of Pembroke, it was looked on as inalienable from the Crown to which it always reverted. In the reign of Edward III., on August 3, 1359, King John of France, captured at Poictiers, slept at Grantham on his way from Hereford to Somerton Castle in custody of Lord d’Eyncourt and a company of forty-four knights and men-at-arms. In 1420 Henry V. allotted it as a dower to Katherine of France. In 1460 Edward IV. headed the procession which brought from Pontefract to Fotheringay for burial the body of his father Richard Duke of York, who was killed at the battle of Wakefield. In 1461 he granted the lordship and the manor to his mother Cicely Duchess of York, and the grant, it is interesting to know, included the inn called “le George.”

In 1503 Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII., passed with her attendant cavalcade through Grantham on her way to meet her affianced bridegroom,[3] James IV., King of Scotland. She arrived in state, and was met by a fine civic and ecclesiastical procession which conducted her the last few miles into and out of the town, and she lay all “Sounday the 9ᵗʰ day of the monneth of Jully in the sayde towne of Grauntham.”

OLIVER CROMWELL

In 1642 the town was taken by Colonel Charles Cavendish for Charles I., but his success was wiped out next year by Cromwell. Defoe in his “Memoir of a Cavalier,” writing of this, says “About this time it was that we began to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose out of the East and spread first into the North, till it shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three Kingdoms.... The first action in which we heard of his exploits and which emblazoned his character was at Grantham.” Cromwell was with the Earl of Manchester, but was in command of his own regiment of horse. Where the battle actually took place is uncertain, but probably on Gonerby Moor. We happen to have Cromwell’s own account of the skirmish—see vol. I., p. 177, of ‘Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches,’ by Carlyle. It was written to some official, and is the first letter of Cromwell’s ever published in the newspapers:—

“Grantham, 13ᵗʰ May, 1643.

“Sir,

“God hath given us, this evening, a glorious victory over our enemies. They were, as we are informed, one and twenty colours of horse troops, and three or four of dragoons.

“It was late in the evening when we drew out; they came and faced us within two miles of the town. So soon as we had the alarm we drew out our forces, consisting of about twelve troops whereof some of them so poor and broken, that you shall seldom see worse: with this handful it pleased God to cast the scale. For after we had stood a little, above musket shot the one body from the other; and the dragooners had fired on both sides, for the space of half an hour or more; they were not advancing towards us, we agreed to charge them; and, advancing the body after many shots on both sides, we came on with our troops a pretty round trot; they standing firm to receive us; and our men charging fiercely upon them, by God’s providence they were immediately routed, and ran all away, and we had the execution of them two or three miles.

“I believe some of our soldiers did kill two or three men apiece in the pursuit; but what the number of dead is we are not certain. We took forty-five prisoners, besides divers of their horse and arms and rescued many Prisoners whom they had lately taken of ours, and we took four or five of their colours.

“I rest ...

“Oliver Cromwell.”

A fortnight later he writes from Lincolnshire to the Mayor and Corporation of Colchester announcing the victory of Fairfax at Wakefield, and asking for immediate supplies both of men and money. He tells them how greatly Lord Newcastle outnumbers Fairfax, infantry two to one, horse more than six to one. And he ends with:—

“Our motion and yours must be exceeding speedye or else it will do you no good at all. If you send, let your men come to Boston. I beseech you to hasten the supply to us:—forget not money! I press not hard; though I do so need, that I assure you the foot and dragooners are ready to mutiny. Lay not too much upon the back of a poor gentleman, who desires, without much noise, to lay down his life, and bleed the last drop to serve the Cause and you. I ask not your money for myself; if that were my end and hope,—viz. the pay of my place,—I would not open my mouth at this time. I desire to deny myself; but others will not be satisfied. I beseech you to hasten supplies. Forget not your prayers

“Gentlemen, I am,

“Yours

“Oliver Cromwell.”

It was six years after this that Isaac Newton went to school in Grantham. Since the Restoration, but for the pulling down of the market cross by Mr. John Manners in 1779, which he was compelled to put up again the following year, nothing of note happened at Grantham till the Great Northern Railway came and subsequently Hornsby’s great agricultural implement works arose.

PRICE OF VOTES

Grantham had been incorporated in 1463, and received the elective franchise four years later, in the reign of Edward IV., who more than once visited the town. The two families at Belvoir and Belton usually influenced the elections. But in 1802 their united interests were opposed by Sir William Manners, who had bought most of the houses in the borough. But the Duke of Rutland and Lord Brownlow won. There were then two members, and the historian makes the naïve statement, “previous to this election it had been customary for the voters to receive two guineas from each candidate; at this election the price rose to ten guineas.”

The Angel Inn, Grantham.

THE ANGEL

The mention of “le George” inn in the grant of 1461 brings to mind the other ancient hostel opposite to it. The Angel stands on the site of an earlier inn which goes back to the twelfth century. King John is said to have held his court in it in 1203. On October 19, 1483, Richard III., having sent to London for the Great Seal, signed the warrant for the execution of Buckingham “in a chamber called the King’s Chamber in the present Angel Inn.” This was a fine room extending the whole length of the front, and now cut up into three rooms. There are two oriel windows in this, and two more in the rooms beneath, which have all curved and vaulted alcoves of stone. The present front dates from 1450, the gateway from about 1350, and shows the heads of Edward III. and Queen Philippa on the hood-mould. Next to it is a very pretty half-timbered house, figured in Allan’s “History of the County of Lincoln,” 1830. This and the Angel stand on land once the property of the Knights Templars of Temple-Bruer.

Among the misdeeds of the eighteenth century are the pulling down of the George Inn and a beautiful stone oratory or guild chapel which stood near it. The Free Grammar school, founded by Bishop Fox 1528, still stands on the north side of the churchyard; but new buildings having been lately erected, the fine old schoolroom has been fitted up as a school chapel.

Fox endowed his school with the revenue of two chantries, which before the dissolution belonged to the church of St. Peter. This church is gone, but doubtless it stood on St. Peter’s Hill on lands which had been granted by Æslwith, before the Conquest, to the abbey of Peterborough. Close by now is a good bronze statue of Sir Isaac Newton, and once there was an Eleanor cross, which, with those at Lincoln and Stamford, were destroyed by the fanatical soldiery in 1645.

ST. WULFRAM’S

We now come to the great feature of the town, its magnificent church dedicated to St. Wulfram, Archbishop of Sens, 680. We might almost call this the third church, for the first has entirely disappeared though its foundations remain beneath the floor of the eastern part of the nave, and the second has been so enlarged and added to, that it is now practically a different building; the tower, built at the end of the thirteenth century, belongs entirely to number three.

The ground plan is singularly simple, one long parallelogram nearly 200 feet long and eighty feet wide, with no transepts, its only projections being the north and south porches and the “Hall” chapel used as a vestry.

THE INTERIOR

The second, or Norman, church, ended two bays east of the present tower, as is plain to see from the second pillar from the tower being, as is the case in Peterborough Cathedral, composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on either side, the western respond being of much later character than the eastern. If the chancel was originally as it is now, it must have been as long as the nave, but the nave then perhaps included two of the chancel bays. At present the lengthening of the nave westward and the adding of the tower has made the nave twice the length of the chancel. At first the church had just a nave and a chancel, but, about 1180, aisles were added to the nave; to do this the nave walls were taken down and the eastern responds made, which we have just spoken of, and the beautiful clustered columns of the arcades, three on each side, set up. The aisles were narrow and probably covered by a lean-to roof. The arches springing from these columns would be round-headed, the pointed arches we see now being the work of a century later, when much wider north and south aisles were built; that on the north being on a particularly grand and massive scale. The westernmost bay on either side was made nearly twice the width of the others so as to correspond with the breadth of the tower, because one of the features of the church is that the two aisles run out westwards and align with the tower, and as the chapels on either side run out in the same way eastwards, as far as the chancel, we get the parallelogram above mentioned. As you enter the west door you are at once struck by the great size of the tower piers, and next you will notice the beauty of the tower arch, with its mouldings five deep. There is no chancel arch, and the church has one long roof from end to end. The aisles are very wide, and the pillars tall and slender, so that you are able to see over the whole body of the church as if it were one big hall. Curiously, the west window of the south aisle is not in the centre of the wall, and looks very awkward. Below it is a bookcase lined with old books. There are two arched recesses for tombs in the south wall, and there is a monument between two of the south arcade pillars, where a black marble top to an altar tomb is inscribed to Francis Malham de Elslacke, 1660. The east end of the north aisle is used as a morning chapel. A tall gilt reredos much blocks the chancel east window. When I last visited the church the north and south doorways being wide open gave the church plenty of wholesome fresh air, so different from the well-known Sabbath “frowst” which, in the days of high pews, and when a church was only opened on Sunday, never departed from the building.

THE TOWER

The north porch is very large, and has a passage-way east and west right through; it was built with the north aisle about 1280, and was extended and a room built over it about 1325, when the head of the north doorway was much mutilated to let the floor in, at the same time a Lady chapel was constructed on the south side of the chancel, and with a double vaulted crypt, entered from outside, and also from the chancel, by a beautiful staircase with richly carved doorway. The rood screen was also built now, on which was an altar served by the chaplain daily at 5 a.m. “after the first stroke of the bell which is called Daybelle.” It is said that this bell is still rung daily from Lady Day to Michaelmas, but whether at 5 o’clock deponent sayeth not. The Lincoln daybell rang at 6. To reach this rood loft there is an octagon turret with a staircase on the south side at the junction of the nave and chancel. The south porch has also a staircase to the upper chamber, and the north porch has two turreted staircases, probably for the ingress and egress of pilgrims to the sacred relics kept there. Besides this there were at least five chantries attached to the church; the latest of these were the fifteenth century Corpus Christi chapel along the north side of the chancel, and the contiguous “Hall” chapel which dates from the fifteenth century. There is a good corbel table all along the aisles outside, and the west front is very fine and striking.

But the great glory of the building is the steeple. We have seen that the nave runs up to the large eastern piers of the tower, and the aisles run on past each side of it as far as the western piers, and so with the tower form a magnificent western façade, examples of which might even then have been seen at Newark, which was begun before Grantham, and at Tickhill near Doncaster.

LINCOLNSHIRE SPIRES

The tower, one of the finest bits of fourteenth century work in the kingdom, has four stages: first, the west door and window, both richly adorned with ballflower, reminiscent of the then recent work at Salisbury, to which North and South Grantham were attached as prebends. Then comes a stage of two bands of arcading on the western face only, and a band of quatrefoil diaper work all round. In the third stage are twin deep-set double-light windows and then come two very lofty double lights under one crocketed hood mould. Both this stage and the last show a very strong central mullion and the fourth, or belfry stage, has statued niches reaching to the parapet and filling the spandrils on either side of the window head. Inside the parapet at the south-west corner is a curious old stone arch like a sentry-box or bell turret. The magnificent angle buttresses are crowned by pinnacles, from within which rises the spire with three rows of lights and lines of crockets at each angle running up 140 feet above a tower of equal height. It seems at that distance to come to a slender point; but we are told that when it was struck by lightning in 1797 a mill-stone was set on the apex into which the weathercock was mortised. There are ten bells, a larger ring than is possessed by any church in the county but one, viz., Ewerby near Sleaford.

The date 1280 is assigned to the tower and north aisle because the windows of that aisle reproduce in the cusped circles of their head-lights the patterns of windows which had just a few years before been inserted in Salisbury chapter-house, and the west window of the aisle is a reduction to six lights of the great eight-light east window at Lincoln; but neither Lincoln great tower nor Salisbury spire had yet been built, and as they are the only buildings which are admitted to surpass Grantham steeple—the former in richness of detail, the latter in its soaring spire—and as Boston was not built till a hundred years later, nor Louth till 200 years after Boston, it is clear that in 1300 Grantham for height and beauty stood without a rival. Now-a-days, of course, we have both Boston and Louth, and have them in the same county, and though Sir Gilbert Scott puts Grantham as second only to Salisbury among English steeples, and though in the grandeur and interest of its interior as well as in the profuse ornamentation of its exterior Louth cannot compete with it at all, yet there is in the delicate tapering lines of Louth spire and the beautiful way in which it rises from its lofty tower-pinnacles connected with their four pairs of light flying buttresses a satisfying grace and a beauty of proportion which no other church seems to possess; and when we look closely at the somewhat aimless bands of diaper work and arcading in the second stage of Grantham tower and then turn to the harmonious simplicity of the three stages in the Louth tower and the incomparable beauty of the belfry lights with their crocketed hood-mouldings which are carried up in lines ascending like a canopy to the pinnacled parapet, it seems to satisfy the eye and the desire for beauty and symmetry in the fullest possible measure.

The church has not a great number of monuments; that to Richard de Salteby, 1362, is the earliest, and there is, besides the Malham tomb, one of the Harrington family, and a huge erection to Chief Justice Ryder, whose descendants derive their title of Harrowby from a hamlet close by. There are two libraries in the church, one with no less than seventy-four chained books. But a church forms a bad library, and many are gone and some of the best are mutilated, for as Tennyson says in “The Village Wife”:—

“The lasses ’ed teäred out leäves i’ the middle to kindle the fire.”

Only here it was not the lasses but the mediæval verger.

Grantham Church.

The bowl of the font has most interesting carved panels of the Annunciation, the Magi, the Nativity, Circumcision, Baptism, Blessing of Children, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and one other. The oak chancel screen and the parcloses by Scott, the reredos by Bodley, and the rest of the oak fittings by Blomfield, are all very good. The screen takes the place of the old stone screen which is quite gone. There is some excellent modern glass, and for those who understand heraldry, I might mention that in the east window were once many coats of arms of which Marrat gives a list with notes by Gervase Holles, from which I gather that the armorial glass was very fine, and that the arms of “La Warre” are “G. crusily, botony, fitchy, a lion rampant or.” It is pleasant to know this, even if one does not quite understand it.

THE MARKET CROSS

The extending of the church westwards encroached upon the open space in which stood the reinstated “Applecross,” at one time replaced by a quite uncalled-for stone obelisk in the market-place, opposite the Angel, with an inscription to say that the Eleanor Cross once stood there, which was not true, as that was set up in the broad street or square called “St. Peter’s Hill,” where now the bronze statue of Newton stands. In Finkin Street the town, until ten years ago, preserved a splendid chestnut tree, and other fine trees near the church add a beauty which towns now-a-days rarely possess.

As at Lincoln, the Grey Friars first brought good drinking water to the town, and their conduit is still a picturesque object in the market square. It is on the south side, close to the Blue Sheep. Blue seems to have been the Grantham colour, for there are at least twelve inns whose sign is some blue thing—Bell, Sheep, Pig, Lion, Dragon, Boy, etc. Blue pill is almost the only thing of that colour not represented.

The connection of Grantham with Salisbury is a very old one, as far back as 1091 the lands and endowments of the church were granted to St. Osmund, and by him given to his new cathedral at Old Sarum, the site of which is now being cleared in much the same manner as has been adopted at Bardney Abbey. The Empress Maud added the gift of the living and the right of presentation, so the prebendaries of North and South Grantham became the rectors; North Grantham comprising Londonthorpe and North Gonerby, and South Grantham South Gonerby and Braceby. Later, about 1225, vicars were appointed, but there was no vicarage, and the work was mainly done by the chaplain and the chantry priests. In 1713 the dual vicars were merged in one, and since 1870 the presentation has been in the hands of the Bishop of Lincoln.

THE CHANTRIES

We have spoken often of chantries. A chantry was a chapel endowed with revenues for priests to perform Mass therein for the souls of the donors or others. Hence we have in Shakespeare—

“Five hundred poor I have, in yearly pay,

Who twice a day their wither’d hands hold up

Toward heaven, to pardon blood; and I have built

Three Chantries where the sad and solemn priests

Sing still for Richard’s soul.”

Henry V. iv. i.