CHAPTER XI
LINCOLN.—THE CITY
The City—The Corporation—The City Swords—Tennyson’s Centenary and Statue—Queen Eleanor’s Cross—Brayford Pool—Afternoon Tea.
[Sidenote: THE MINSTER YARD]
The rate at which the soil of inhabited places rises from the various layers of debris which accumulate on the surface is well shown at Lincoln. In Egypt, where houses are built of mud, every few years an old building falls and the material is trodden down and a new erection made upon it. Hence the entrance to the temple at Esneh from the present outside floor level, is up among the capitals of the tall pillars; and, the temple being cleaned out, the floor of it and the bases of its columns were found to be nearly thirty feet below ground. Stone-built houses last much longer, but when a fire or demolition after a siege has taken place three or four times, a good deal of rubbish is left spread over the surface and it accumulates with the ages. Hence, in Roman Lincoln or “Lindum Colonia” pavements may be found whenever the soil is moved, at a depth of seven or eight feet at least, and often more. Thus the Roman West Gate came to light in 1836, after centuries of complete burial, but soon crumbled away; and the whole of the hill top where Britons, Romans, Danes, and Normans successively dwelt, is full of remains which can only on rare occasions ever have a chance of seeing the light. Still there is much for us to see above ground, so we may as well take a walk through the city, beginning at the top of the hill. Here, as you leave the west end of the cathedral and pass through the “Exchequer Gate” with its one large and two small arches, under the latter of which may be seen entrances to the little shopstalls where relics, rosaries, etc., were once sold, you pass along the flat south wall of St. Mary Magdalen’s Church, beyond which the outer Exchequer Gate stood till 1800. The wall in which this and other gates of the cathedral close were inserted was built in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, to protect the close and the canons. The gateways were all double, except the “Potter Gate,” which is the only other one now extant. It is said that the Romans had a pottery near it; at present the road to the Minster Yard goes both through it and round one side of it.
[Illustration: _The Pottergate, Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: THE CASTLE]
Passing from the Exchequer Gate you see a very pretty sixteenth century timbered house, with projecting story, at the corner of _Bailgate_, now used as a bank. Hard by on your right is the White Hart inn, and on your left you have a peep down _Steep Street_ to the _House of Aaron the Jew_, a money lender of the reign of Henry II. Near this was once the South Gate of the Roman city, and some of the stones are still visible in the pavement. The gate was destroyed in 1775. Looking straight ahead from the Exchequer Gate you see the east gateway of the castle, a Norman arch with later semi-circular turrets corbelled out on either side of it. Inside is a fine oriel window, brought from John of Gaunt’s house below the hill. The enclosure is an irregular square of old British earthworks, seven acres in extent. The west gate is walled up and the Assize Court within the castle enclosure is near it. In the angles on either side of the east gate are two towers in the curtain wall, one, “the observatory tower,” crowns an ancient mound, and on the south side is a larger mound, forty feet high, on which is the keep, a very good specimen of very early work, in shape an irregular polygon. The castle was one of the eight founded by the Conqueror himself, apparently never so massive a building as his castle, which is now being excavated at _Old Sarum_, the walls of which, built of the flints of the locality, are twelve feet thick and faced with stone. At Lincoln the Roman walls were ten to twelve feet thick and twenty feet high. Massive fragments of this wall still exist in different places, the biggest being near the Newport Arch. Near here too is “The Mint Wall,” seventy feet long by thirty feet high, and three and a half feet thick, which probably formed the north wall of the Basilica. Most of the fighting in Lincoln used to take place around this spot, as Stephen felt to his cost. The old West Gate of the Roman city was found just to the north of the castle west gate. The line which joined the Roman East and West Gates ran straight then, and crossed the Ermine Street, now called here the Bailgate, near the church of St. Paulinus, but the result of some destructive assaults must have so filled the road that the street now called ‘East Gate’ was deflected from its course southwards and has to make a sharp bend to get back to its proper line.
[Illustration: _The Jew’s House, Lincoln._]
[Illustration: _Remains of the Whitefriars’ Priory, Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: THE JEW’S HOUSE]
[Sidenote: THE FRIARS]
[Sidenote: ST. MARY’S GUILD]
Getting back to the ‘Bail,’ or open space between the castle gate and the Exchequer Gate, we can go down that bit of the old Ermine Street called “Steep Street” (and I don’t think any street can better deserve its name) and come into the High Street of Lincoln. If we go right down this, we shall see all that is of most interest in the town below the hill. First is the “Jew’s House” where the murderer of Little St. Hugh is said to have lived, a most interesting specimen of Norman domestic architecture, and more ornate than that at Boothby-Pagnell of a similar date. The house has a round-headed doorway, with a chimney-breast starting from above the doorway arch, and showing that the upper floor had a fireplace. On either side the door now are modern shop windows. Between the stringcourses are two double light windows, with a plain tympanum under a round arch. Belaset of Wallingford, a Jewess, lived here in the reign of Edward I. She was hanged for clipping coin in 1290, the year of the Jews’ Expulsion. At the bottom of the street, No. 333, is another charming old structure called “White Friars’ House” with a projecting timbered front, and a passage round one end like that at the old “God begot” house at Winchester. All Friars, whether White (Carmelite), Black (Dominican), Grey (Franciscan), or Black and White (Augustinian), were to be found in Lincoln as well as at Stamford, and, with the exception of the Dominicans, at Boston too. One more bit of old domestic building is the hall of St. Mary’s Guild, commonly called John o’ Gaunt’s Stables. Here you may see a combination of the round and the pointed arch, which dates it as late Norman. The house is longer than the other two, and the upper story mostly gone, but in Parker’s “Domestic Architecture” it is spoken of as “probably the most valuable and extensive range of buildings of the twelfth century that we have remaining in England.” The house within has round-headed windows with a mid-wall shaft, and a fireplace. The house just opposite was the palace built by John of Gaunt for Katharine Swynford; from which the oriel window inside the castle gateway was taken. These old Norman houses are all small. The really magnificent building which was once the boast of Lincoln was a thousand years earlier than these; this was the Roman Basilica, or Hall of Judgment, near Bailgate, perhaps, the baths at the town of Bath alone excepted, the finest Roman building in England. Figure to yourself a building 250 feet long by seventy feet wide, with a triangular pediment rising from a row of pillars thirty feet high, something like what we still see at Milan. Alas! that only the pillar bases of this fine hall have been found. The pillars ran along the west side of Bailgate facing east.
[Illustration: _St. Mary’s Guild and St. Peter’s at Gowts, Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: SAXON TOWERS]
[Sidenote: ST. BENEDICT’S]
As we pass down the High Street we shall see on our left the Saxon towers of St. Mary le Wigford and of “St. Peters at Gowts.” The “gowts” or sluices were the two watercourses for taking the waters of the “Meres” into the Witham, originally there were small bridges on either side over each, with a ford between them for carts. These towers are tall and without buttresses, having the Saxon long and short work and the upper two-light window with the mid-wall jamb, and only small and irregularly placed lights below. They are in style much what you see in Italy, though the Italian are higher, but certainly none in England are so uncompromisingly plain as the towers at Ravenna and Bologna. St. Andrews in Scotland comes nearest, and bears a really extraordinary likeness to that of St. John the Evangelist at Ravenna. Near St. Mary le Wigford is the picturesque little remnant of a beautiful but disused church, called St. Benedict’s; only the ivy-clad chancel, a side chapel and the recent low tower are left, a very picturesque and peaceful object in the busy town. Its original tower held a beautifully decorated bell, called “Old Kate,” the gift of the Surgeon Barbers in 1585, it used to ring at 6 a.m. and 7 p.m., to mark the beginning and end of the day’s labour. It now hangs in the tower of St. Mark’s.
The name of ‘le Wigford,’ Wickford or Wickenford, indicates the suburb south of the river. In the days when kings used to wear their crowns, an uneasy belief in the old saying—
“The crownéd head that enters Lincoln walls, His reign is stormy and his Kingdom falls,”
made the monarch take it off on passing from Wickford to the city, and certainly of all the kings who were crowned in the cathedral none wore the crown outside except Stephen, and he, as we have seen, soon had cause to repent it. It has been supposed that both these early Lincoln churches were built by a Danish citizen called “Coleswegen,” who is mentioned in Domesday Book as having thirty-six houses and two churches outside the city. But though Lincoln has not lost nearly so many churches and religious houses as Winchester has, yet, where she now has a dozen she once had fifty, so it must be extremely doubtful whether these two old ones that remain were those of Coleswegen. St. Mary’s now has a Perpendicular parapet, and, besides the curious tower arch, some interesting Early English work, and both churches have some good modern ironwork in pulpit, screen and rails from the Brant Broughton forge.
[Illustration: _St. Benedict’s Church, Lincoln._]
[Illustration: _St. Mary-le-Wigford, Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: THE “CONDUIT”]
[Sidenote: THE BRIDGE AND THE STONEBOW]
The woodwork in St. Peter’s was done by the parish clerk, a pleasant feature not nearly so common now as it used to be. At the road side, and close to the churchyard rails of St. Mary’s, is a handsome carved drinking fountain, here called a “conduit,” partly made of stones from the demolished Whitefriars monastery founded 1269. Leland speaks of it as new in 1540, and it was repaired in 1672. The Grey Friars conduit and the High bridge conduit are supplied from the same chalybeate spring, which once sufficed to turn the mill at the monks’ house, now standing in ruins a mile to the east of the city. This was one of the good deeds of the Franciscans, to bring good drinking water within reach of the poor. A similar system of “conduits” also due to them, existed at Grantham. A serious epidemic, traced to the drinking water, which broke out in Lincoln a few years ago, caused the town to go to great expense in laying on a new supply which comes twenty miles in iron pipes from Elkesley, Notts, between Retford and Clumber, and crosses the Trent at Dunham on a little bridge of its own.
The “High bridge” marks the spot where the Ermine Street forded the Witham. It is the only bridge left in England out of many which still carries houses on it. The ribbed arch is a very old one, twenty-two feet wide. The houses are now only on one side, they are quaintly timbered, and their backs, seen from below by the waterside, are very picturesque. On the other side is an obelisk, set up 150 years ago, to mark the site of a bridge chapel dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury. From here you get the most magnificent view that any town can boast, as you look up the steep street to the splendid pile which crowns the height, and see the cathedral in all its beauty.
The length of the High Street is relieved by the “Stonebow.” There was always a gate here from Roman times onward, for when the Roman town was extended southward to a good deal more than twice its original size, it was here that the new wall crossed the Ermine Street. The road had crossed the swampy ground and forded the river, and was now about to enter the city and climb the hill. The mediæval gate which succeeded the Roman ‘porta’ was removed in the fourteenth century, and the present one dates from the sixteenth, and was repaired in 1887, at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. It has one central and two side arches, with slender towers between, carried up to a battlemented parapet. On the east tower is a tall figure of the Archangel Gabriel, and in a niche on the other tower the Virgin Mary. The patroness of the city and cathedral is represented treading on a dragon. A long room above the arch with timbered roof is used as a Guildhall; in it are portraits of Queen Anne and Thomas Sutton of Knaith, founder of the Charterhouse. The corporation, to whom they belong, has had a long and distinguished existence, for municipal life in Lincoln began in Roman times; and when they left, and Saxons, Danes or Normans ruled, and the counties and towns had to adopt new names under each successive conqueror, Lincoln retained throughout her Roman name and her right of self-government. The corporation, besides their fine Restoration mace, have three civic swords, one apparently made up out of two, but said to have been presented by Richard II. when he visited the city in 1386, to be carried point uppermost, except in presence of the sovereign.
[Illustration: _The Stonebow, Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: THE CIVIC SWORDS]
[Sidenote: THE “FOX”]
The facts about the swords are these: the Charles I. sword, supposed to have been presented to the city at the beginning of the Civil War, in 1642, has been mutilated to supply a new blade to the Richard II. sword. This was done by order of the mayor in 1734. The blade has on it the orb and cross mark and also the running wolf—a fourteenth century German mark—but so common was it on the foreign blades used in England in the sixteenth century that, the figure being taken for a fox—as wolves were not then common in England—the term “Fox” was transformed to the sword; hence in Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” act iv., scene 4, we have Pistol saying to his French prisoner on the field of battle:—
“O Signieur Dew, thou diest on point of fox.”
and in one of Webster’s plays we have—
“Of what a blade is’t? A Toledo or an English fox?”
The two finest churches in Lincoln were at one time St. Swithun’s and St. Botolph’s. The former was burnt down, but, after a century, was rebuilt badly, but has now been restored by the munificence of Messrs. Clayton and Shuttleworth to its former grandeur, and has a really fine tower and spire, designed by Fowler, of Louth. St. Botolph’s, near the south “Bargate,” had to endure a similar period of decay, but was at last resuscitated, the south aisle being the last gift to the town of Bishop Christopher Wordsworth.
Lincoln’s last new building, the Carnegie Library, designed by Mr. Reginald Blomfield, stands in St. Swithun’s Square. It was opened on February 24th, 1914.
[Illustration: _Old Inland Revenue Office, Lincoln._]
Two other houses are interesting because of their inmates in the eighteenth century; one the old Jacobean mansion of the Bromheads of Thurlby, whose descendant, Captain Gonville Bromhead, won with Lieutenant Chard undying fame by the defence of Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War, 1879. The other is a house called Deloraine House, in which once lived George Tennyson, grandfather of the poet; and we cannot quit Lincoln without going to see the fine bronze statue of the poet by G. F. Watts, which stands in the close at the east end of the cathedral.
[Sidenote: THE TENNYSON STATUE]
[Sidenote: THE POET’S WOLFHOUND]
In the autumn of 1909 the centenary of the poet’s birth was celebrated at Lincoln. Dean Wickham preached an eloquent sermon to a large congregation in the cathedral nave, after which, the choir, leaving the cathedral, grouped themselves round the statue and sang “Crossing the Bar,” and Bishop King gave a short and memorable address. In the evening the writer read a paper on Tennyson to an intently listening audience of twelve hundred people, which is now published by Routledge & Co., in a little book called “Introductions to the Poets, by W. F. Rawnsley.” Lincoln that day showed how fully she appreciated the great Lincolnshire poet. The statue, a colossal one, represents him looking at a flower, as described in his poem, “Flower in the crannied wall,” and his grand wolf-hound is looking up into his face. This hound was a Russian, whose grandfather had belonged to the Czar Alexander II., he who freed the serfs in 1861, and was so basely assassinated twenty years later. The wolf-hound was a very handsome light brindle, with a curious black patch near the collar. She had a litter of thirteen, and one of these with the mother, “Lufra,” was given to the writer when living at Park Hill, Lyndhurst, in the New Forest. The puppy, “Cossack,” was Mrs. Rawnsley’s constant companion till he died of old age in his sleep; the mother went to Farringford to replace an old favourite that Tennyson had lately lost. Her new owner changed her name to Karenina, and she was his constant companion to the end. Once again, if not twice, she had a litter of thirteen, and the cares of her large family not unnaturally were at times too much for her temper. She is now immortalised with her master in bronze, executed with loving care by his own old friend and quondam neighbour in the Isle of Wight. The inscription at the back of the pedestal is: “Alfred Lord Tennyson, born 1809, died 1892”; and below it is “George Frederick Watts, born 1817, died 1904.”
[Illustration: _James Street, Lincoln_]
Another monument which once adorned Lincoln was the first and one of the very best in the list of Queen Eleanor’s crosses, designed by the famous “Richard of Stowe,” who carved the figures in the angel choir. Only a fragment of this survived what Precentor Venables calls “the fierce religious storm of 1645.” Before starting on its long funeral procession to Westminster, the Queen’s body was embalmed by the Gilbertine nuns of St. Catherine’s Priory, close to which, at the junction of the Ermine Street and Foss Way, the cross was set up, near the leper hospital of Remigius, called the Malandery (Fr. Maladerie) hospital.
[Sidenote: THE “STUFF BALL”]
Two railway stations and the many large iron and agricultural implement works, which have given Lincoln a name all over the world, occupy the lower part of the town, with buildings more useful than beautiful; for this industry has taken the place of the woollen factories which were once the mainstay of Lincoln. But a tall building with small windows, known as “The Old Factory,” still indicates the place in which the “Lincoln Stuff” was made, from which the Lincoln “Stuff Ball” took its name. In order to increase the production and popularise the wear of woollen material for ladies’ dresses, it was arranged to have balls at which no lady should be admitted who did not wear a dress of the Lincolnshire stuff. The first of these was held at the Windmill Inn, Alford, in 1785. The colour selected was orange; but, the room not being large enough for the number of dancers, in 1789 it was moved to Lincoln, where it has been held ever since, the lady patroness choosing the colour each year. In 1803 the wearing of this hot material was commuted to an obligation to take so many yards of the stuff. The manufacture has long ago come to an end, but the “Stuff Ball” survives, and the colours are still selected.
The swamps of the Wigford suburb have also disappeared, but _Brayford Pool_, beloved of artists, where the Foss Dyke joins the Witham, still makes a beautiful picture with the boats and barges and swans in front below, and the Minster towers looking down into it from above. This Foss Dyke was a Crown property, until James I., finding it to be nothing but an expense, with economic liberality presented it to the mayor and corporation.
[Illustration: _Thorngate, Lincoln._]
[Sidenote: THE “GREY FRIARS”]
The river was always outside of the Roman town, for the south wall, running east and west from the Stonebow, where are now Guildhall Street and Saltergate, turned up by Broadgate Street, and here, just inside its south-east angle, is now the interesting “Grey Friars,” a thirteenth century building consisting of a vaulted undercroft and long upper room, now used as a museum.
[Sidenote: AFTERNOON TEA]
I have no Lincoln notes of the eighteenth century of any special interest, but from this little extract it looks as if the institution of afternoon tea had been anticipated by a hundred years in Lincoln. The extract is from “A Sketch wrote Aug. 4, 1762, at Lincoln,” and deals with housekeeping expenses. The entries are:—
“Three guineas a year for tea £3 3 0 “Loave sugar 3 0 0 “Tea, a quarter of an ounce each morning. “Sugar, half of a quarter of a pound each morning. “Also an allowance for sometimes in the afternoon.”
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