Lincolnshire

“ As it is, the only bit of railway by which a person could gather that Lincolnshire was anything but an ugly county is that between Lincoln and Grantham.
But that it is a county with a great deal of beauty will be, I am sure, admitted by those who follow up the routes described in the following pages. They will find that it is a county famous for wide views, for wonderful sunsets, for hills and picturesque hollows; and full, too, of the human interest which clings round old buildings, and the uplifting pleasure which its many splendid specimens of architecture have power to bestow. ”

“ For the rest, Lincolnshire life to Volumnia is a vast blank of overgrown house looking out upon trees, sighing, wringing their hands, bowing their heads, and casting their tears upon the window- panes in monotonous depressions. A labyrinth of grandeur, less the property of an old family of human beings and their ghostly likenesses than of an old family of echoings and thunderings which start out of their hundred graves at every sound and go resounding through the building. ”

“ Once more it was brought to our minds that Lincolnshire is a land of hills as well as of fens! We were upon a glorious stretch of uplands that rose and fell around us in mighty sweeps, chequered by great fields, and enlivened here and there by comfortable-looking stone-built farmsteads, each with its rambling colony of outbuildings and corn-ricks gathered around. These, with a stray cottage or two for farm-labourers, saved the prospect from being desolate. Here water seems as scarce as it is over-abundant in the Fens! ”

“ Thus Chesney Wold. With so much of itself abandoned to darkness and vacancy; with so little change under the summer shining or the wintry lowering; so sombre and motionless always—no flag flying now by day, no rows of lights sparkling by night; with no family to come and go, no visitors to be the souls of pale cold shapes of rooms, no stir of life about it—passion and pride, even to the stranger’s eye, have died away from the place in Lincolnshire and yielded it to dull repose. ”

“ INDUSTRIES
THE most important early industries of Lincolnshire were connected with a great agricultural product of the county—that of wool. Foremost amongst the craftsmen were the Lincoln weavers, who had a charter from Henry II, which was unfortunately burnt, but which is stated to have provided that no one should exercise the office of weaver in the city of Lincoln or 12 miles [1] round unless he be in the guild of weavers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When we turn ourselves here, and look back to Lincoln, we see the road butts upon the western spires of the cathedral: and when from thence you survey the road, it is an agreeable prospect; your eye being in the middle line of its whole length to the horizon. I had a mind to pursue this branch through Lincolnshire as far as the first station, Agelocum: this ridge is likely to be of an eternal duration, as wholly out of all roads: it proceeds directly over the heath, then descends the cliff through the rich country at bottom, between two hedge-rows, by the name of Tilbridge lane. ”

“ Nevertheless, whether it be due to the climate, or the scarcity of railways, or the character of the people themselves, civilization seems a long way behindhand in North Lincolnshire, when compared with other parts of England. ”

“ I use the term ‘fen’ in the Lincolnshire sense for an endless flat stretch of black corn-land without tree or hedge, and intersected by straight-cut dykes or drains in long parallels. This is the winter aspect; in autumn, when the wind blows over the miles of ripened corn, the picture is a very different one.
It is curious that on the Roman road line all the way from the Welland to the Humber so few villages are found, whilst on the roads which skirt the very edge of the fen from Bourne to Heckington and then north again from Sleaford to Lincoln, villages abound. ”

“ The evidence of the Lincolnshire accounts, it will be found, points to the same conclusion. [16] For in them Rayner de Bada accounts both for the farm of the current year, 1129–30, and for that of the preceding year, 1128–9, which shows conclusively that by that year Lincolnshire was in other hands than Hugh's. Furthermore, while William Torniant is, further down the roll, found owing for an 'old farm', the position of the entry and the number of items compressed into it suggest that it contains the remains of an account of some years' standing. ”

“ In this instance I have also used a name associated with the ancient history of Lincolnshire as an imaginary Norman lord of Torksey. "William de Romara, lord of Bolingbroke, in Lincolnshire, was the first earl of that county after the Conquest. He was the son of Roger, son of Gerold de Romara; which Roger married Lucia, daughter of Algar, earl of Chester, and sister and heir to Morcar, the Saxon earl of Northumberland and Lincoln. In 1142 he founded the Abbey of Revesby, in com. Linc., bearing then the title of Earl of Lincoln."—Bankes' Extinct and Dormant Peerage. ”

“ Of this period no traces of the work of mankind have been found in the county of Lincolnshire.
It is a period which some experts strongly affirm show traces of the work of man in other more southern parts of Britain; so far as our experience by definite research has extended, we are not satisfied with the evidence offered, and prefer to keep an open mind. ”

“ The soil of Lincolnshire is so various as to include all sorts of land that are to be found in the whole kingdom, and its management varies accordingly.
Rabbits have always been an article of great consideration and attention in the light soils of this County, and immense warrens are kept for the purpose of supplying London with the skins ”

“ The great cop banks of Essex, Devon, and Cheshire are almost unknown—villages you scarcely see, farmhouses rarely from the roadside, for they mostly stand well back in the midst of their acres. Gradually creeping up the Wold—passing through, here vast turnip-fields, fed over by armies [183] of long-woolled Lincoln sheep; there, stubble yielding before from a dozen to a score of pair-horse ploughs, silent witnesses of the scale of Lincolnshire farming—at length we see descending and winding along a bridle-road before us, the pied pack and the gleam of the huntsman’s scarlet. ”

“ Lincolnshire is the most uninteresting part of all England. It is frequently water-logged till late in the summer: invisible a part of the year, when it emerges it is mostly a dreary flat. Willoughby is a considerable village in this shire, situated about three miles and a half southeastward from Alford. It stands just on the edge of the chalk hills whose drives gently slope down to the German Ocean, and the scenery around offers an unvarying expanse of flats. All the villages in this part of Lincolnshire exhibit the same character. ”

“ In the beginning of October 1536 a rebellion broke out in Lincolnshire, when the commissioners for levying the subsidy came to Caistor. Hatred of oppressive taxation was joined to dislike of innovation in religion and of the suppression of monasteries, which had already made some progress. The Duke of Suffolk was sent down in haste to Lincolnshire, while the Earl of Shrewsbury, anticipating the king's commands, ordered loyal subjects to meet him at Nottingham and march against the rebels. The king himself also proposed to take the field. ”

“ The two risings of 1536 in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire were provoked partly by the dissolution of the monasteries, partly by the collection of a subsidy and fears of fresh taxation on births, marriages and burials, and partly by the protestantizing Ten Articles of 1536 and Cromwell’s Injunctions. They were conservative demonstrations in favour of a restoration of the old order by means of a change of ministry, but not a change of dynasty. The Lincolnshire rising was over before the middle of October, the more serious revolt in Yorkshire under Aske lasted through the winter. ”

“ Heckington is a town-like village on the main road, and its splendid church, which faces you at the end of the street, as at Louth, is one of the wonders of Lincolnshire. It is entirely in the Decorated style, with lofty spire and four very high pinnacles. It owes its magnificence to the fact that the great abbey at Bardney, which had a chantry here, obtained a royal licence in 1345 to appropriate the church. Certainly it is the most perfect example of a Decorated church in the kingdom. ”

“ The Lincolnshire towns suffered from the general decay of trade in the eastern counties which marked the 15th century, but agriculture was steadily improving, and with the gradual drainage of the fen-districts culminating in the vast operations of the 17th century, over 330,000 acres in the county were brought under cultivation, including more than two-thirds of Holland. ”

“ The worst months in Lincolnshire were July and August, yet even then, in spite of the severity of the plague and the disorganisation which it occasioned in all the social and religious life of the age, ordinary business, we are told, went on, and the bishop never ceased his constant journeys and visitations to all parts of his enormous diocese, reaching as it did from Henley on the Thames to the Humber, and including besides Lincoln, the counties of Northampton, Rutland, Leicester, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford, Buckingham, and Oxford. ”

“ Lincolnshire (473) , maritime county in the E. of England, between the Humber and the Wash, next to Yorkshire in size, consists of upland country in the W., chalk downs in the E., and fens in the S., but these well reclaimed and cultivated. It is watered by the Trent, Witham, and Welland, and crossed by numerous canals. Iron abounds in the W.; sheep, cattle, and horses are raised. Grimsby is a shipping and fishing centre. Sir Isaac Newton and Lord Tennyson were born in the county, which has many historic associations. ”

“ In a county like Lincolnshire, mainly agricultural, in which the operations of man are, for the most part, confined to the earth’s crust, in ploughing and sowing, and, as some one has said, in “tickling” the earth’s surface into fertility,—in such a county we are not led ordinarily to explore the inner bowels of the world; as is necessary in mining districts such as certain parts of Yorkshire, Durham, Cornwall and elsewhere. ”

“ Yet, notwithstanding its evil odour, statistics disclose to us that Lincolnshire is amongst the driest counties of England.
One of the most thankless offices of science is that of destroying popular beliefs. If it were not to run the hazard of bringing witch-burning into repute again, we should much like to assert that while wizards and alchemists flourished society was more honest and simple and courteous ”

“ The porch will lead into the nave of the church, oblong and aisleless; and, in the east wall of the nave, an arch will give access to a small rectangular chancel. This is the normal Lincolnshire, and indeed the normal English plan; and this plan powerfully affects the architecture of the Norman and Gothic periods of English art. The centralised plan may survive in beautiful forms, and will always be the more interesting, owing to its greater capacity for variation ”

“ The Lincolnshire Hereward is the hero of the fens. He held of the abbot of Peterborough, and Ulfcytil, who was appointed in 1062, was the abbot in question. This brings us to only four years before the battle of Hastings, and another entry in Domesday, thanks to the scholarship of Mr. Round, proves that Hereward was deprived of his Lincolnshire lands not before but after the great fights at Hastings and in the fens. ”

“ The nobleman who had to answer for the peace of Lincolnshire was Lord Hussey of Sleford. Lord Hussey had spoken, as I have stated, in unambiguous language, of the probability and desirableness of a struggle. When the moment came, it seems as if he had desired the fruits of a Catholic victory without the danger of fighting for it, or else had been frightened and doubtful how to act. When the first news of the commotion reached him, he wrote to the mayor of Lincoln, commanding him, in the king’s name, to take good care of the city; to buy up or secure the arms; to levy men ”

“ Grantham, in the centre of the hunt, and Sleaford, on the Blankney borders, are the best Lincolnshire hunting centres for followers of the Belvoir.
The best country on the Lincolnshire side lies round Folkingham, where there is a wide extent of grass and two capital gorse coverts—Folkingham Gorse and Heathcote's Gorse; the Sapperton and Newton Woods also always hold stout foxes. There are some large woods on the southern part of the Lincolnshire country. ”

“ IN remote times the fen districts of Lincolnshire, which lie chiefly in the Holland, or south-eastern, division of the county, were the site of great woods. Vast stores of bog timber have been found a few feet below the surface of the peaty soil, and are occasionally still discovered where new drainage works are undertaken. This buried forest has been known to the fen-men from time immemorial; but the stories, both ancient and modern, as to old bog-wood being found which showed traces of having been hewn by man, even in the rudest fashion, are fabulous. ”