Chapter V

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After _Horkstow_ we come to _South Ferriby_, where a chalk road leads along the edge of the cliff towards a little landing stage on the water’s edge, giving a pretty view over the wide estuary to the Yorkshire continuation of the Wold, and the little village of _North Ferriby_ opposite.

The church of South Ferriby, which is dedicated, as many coast churches are, to St. Nicholas, the patron Saint of children and fishermen, has its nave running north and south, and a bit railed off at the north end for the altar, though that is now placed at the south end.

The name suggests a ferry over the Humber, but the locality seems to forbid this, for in no place is the Humber wider until you have almost reached _Grimsby_, and from _Barton_ to _Hessle_, about three miles further down stream, it is only about half the width, and there, no doubt, there was a ferry. The reason of this great width is that the Humber has made inroads here and washed away a good deal of land which used to be between Ferriby Hall and the water. This being partly deposited on the “old Warp” sand bank, once the breeding place of many sea birds, has formed a permanent pasture there, now claimed by the Crown and called “Reads Island.”

[Sidenote: THE BARTON HOY]

A hundred years ago the ‘hoy,’ a sloop-rigged packet, used to take passengers from Barton Waterside Inn, just north of Barton, to Hull; and Sir J. Nelthorpe notes in his pocket book, under date August 9th, 1793. “arrived at Scawby after a very bad passage over the Humber, having been on the water five hours, and at last forced to run on shore in Barrow Haven, not being able to make Barton, owing to the negligence of the boatmen in not leaving Hull in time; my horses, seven in number, remained in the boat from four o’clock in the morning till seven at night, before they could be landed.”

Coming back from the Cliff Edge road, we turn up the hill for _Barton-on-Humber_, and from the top of the Wold, which here comes to an end, we get a really beautiful and extended view in all directions. But we must now speak of Barton, with its two old churches.

BARTON-ON-HUMBER

[Sidenote: BARTON-ON-HUMBER]

_Barton-on-Humber_ had a market and a ferry when Domesday Book was compiled, and was a bigger port than Hull. At the Conquest it was given to the King’s nephew, Gilbert of Ghent, son of Baldwin Earl of Flanders, whose seat was at Folkingham. The ferry is still used, and the Hull cattle boats mostly start from Barton landing-stage, but most of the passenger traffic is from the railway pier at New Holland, four miles to the east. The town is a mile from the waterside. It has two fine churches, of which St. Peter’s is one of the earliest in England; curiously one of the same type of Saxon church is also at a Barton, Earl’s Barton in Northants, and not far from it is another of similar date, at Brixworth, which is held to be the most noteworthy of all the early churches in England. Barnack and Wittering in the same county are also of the same style and of the same antiquity, and at Dover, at Bradford-on-Avon, and at Worth and Sompting in Sussex are others similar. Stow, near Lincoln, Broughton near Brigg, and Hough-on-the-Hill, and the two Lincoln towers and Bracebridge, are of similar age, but these last, like Clee and so many in the neighbourhood of Grimsby, Caistor and Gainsborough, have little but their tower or part of their tower left that can be called Saxon, while at Stow, and some of the churches in the other counties mentioned, there is more to see of the original building.

The last restoration of St. Peter’s, Barton, in 1898, has put the church into good condition and left the old work at the west end much as it was a thousand years ago; probably the church at first was very like what we may still see at _Brixworth_. The tower outside is divided into panels by strips of stone, which go deep into the walls and project from the rubble masonry, as at Barnack. This has been aptly termed “Stone carpentry,” but cannot really be a continuation in stone of a previously existing method of building with a wooden framework, such as we see in the half-timbered houses of the south of England, because that method of building was later. It is possibly a method imported from Germany; certainly the double light with the mid-wall jamb came from Northern Italy to the Rhenish provinces, and may have come on to England from thence. Hence it has been termed “Teutonic Romanesque.”

[Illustration: _The Avon at Barton-on-Humber._]

[Sidenote: A SAXON CHURCH]

[Sidenote: ST. PETER’S, BARTON]

Of the four stages of the tower the lowest has an arcading of dressed stone, as there is at Bradford-on-Avon, and on the east, south and west sides a round-headed doorway, and on the north a triangular-headed one, with massive “Long-and-Short” work. The next stage exhibits triangular arcading with double lights and a massive baluster and capital under a triangular arch. The third stage has no arcading, but a similar two-light window. The fourth stage is not Saxon but early Norman in style. From the west of the tower projects a sort of annexe, fifteen feet by twelve, of the same width as the tower and cöeval with it, having quoins of “Long-and-Short” work, this is pierced with two small rude lights north and south, and with two circular lights on the west. These circular lights are of extraordinary interest, for they still have in them, across the top of the upper opening and at the bottom of the lower one, a portion of the old original Saxon oak shutter, perforated with round holes to let in light and air, a thing absolutely unique. A chancel, whose foundations have been recently discovered, projected from the tower eastward, and just below the floor, near the north wall, is a curious bricked chamber, which might have been a small tomb.

[Illustration: _St. Peter’s, Barton-on-Humber._]

[Sidenote: ST. MARY’S, BARTON]

The tower has four doorways irregularly placed and all differing from each other: it is fitted up for daily morning service, for which it has been used intermittently for over a thousand years; for no doubt the original church consisted simply of the tower and the two chambers east and west of it. At present, from the interior of the spacious Decorated nave, with its added Perpendicular clerestory, when you look up at the west end and see the rude round-headed arches of the first and second stages of the tower, and the double triangular-headed light of the next stage, all of which come within the nave roof, you see at the same time two deep grooves cut in the tower face for the early steep-pitched roof. These start from the double light and finish by cutting through the upright stone strips which run like elongated pilasters up the whole height of the tower on either side. The tower and its annexe is of such absorbing interest that one hardly looks at the rest of the church, or stops to note its beautifully restored rood screen with a new canopy to it, which serves to hide the wide ugly chancel arch. But we shall perhaps be able to make up for this if we go on to St. Mary’s Church, which was the church of the people of Barton, and served by a secular priest, St. Peter’s being an appanage of Bardney Abbey. The churches both stand high, and are quite near one another. St. Mary’s was a Norman building, as the north arcade testifies; the south arcade was rebuilt in the Early English period, to which the massive tower also belongs, the parapet being later. Once the nave and chancel had a continuous roof till the clerestory was added, and were of the same width, and built of brick and stone intermingled and set anyhow. The four-light windows in the chancel are handsome. The north arcade has five round arches, and one, at the west end, pointed. The south arcade has only four arches, but larger and with slenderer columns, consisting of eight light shafts round a central pillar. On the south the chantry chapel extends the whole length of the chancel, and has beside the altar an aumbry and, what is very unusual in such a chapel, sedilia. The aisles are wide and out of proportion to the building in both churches. The east window is white, with one little bit of old glass in it, and on the floor is a full-sized brass of Simon Seman Sheriff of London, in Alderman’s gown. Some Parliamentarian soldiers’ armour is in the vestry of St. Peter’s. There are also two fine oak chests, one hollowed out of a section of a large tree with the outer slab of the tree several inches thick as a lid. A similar, but smaller, chest is in Blawith church vestry, near Coniston Lake, Lancashire.[7]

[Illustration: _St. Mary’s, Barton-on-Humber._]

[Sidenote: INTEREST IN CHURCH HISTORY]

In Barton St. Peter’s the Rector has provided a very full account of the history of the church, for which all who visit it must be extremely grateful.

It is very pleasant to find that the number are so decidedly on the increase of clergymen who take an interest in the past history of their churches, and write all they can find out about them, either in their parish magazines or in a separate pamphlet. Some of these, too, take pains with their old registers, and if only the rector, or someone in the parish whom he could trust to do the work with skill, care, and knowledge, would copy the old sixteenth and seventeenth century registers in a clear hand, the parish would be in possession of the most interesting of all local documents in a legible form, and the originals could be safely housed in a dry place, which is by no means the case with all of them at present, and no longer be subjected to the wear and tear of rough handling and the decay from damp which has been so fatal to the earliest pages of most of them.

The printing and placing more frequently in the church of a card, pointing out the salient features and giving what is known of the history of the building, would also be a boon to those visitors who know something of architecture, and would stimulate a taste for it in others, and a respect for old work, the lack of which has been the cause of so much destruction under the specious name of restoration in the earlier half of the past century. Things are much better now than they were two generations ago, but ignorance and want of means may still cause irreparable damage, which, if the above suggestion were universally carried out, would become less and less possible.

[Sidenote: CHURCH PATRONAGE]

Amongst those who take the greatest interest in their churches I am especially indebted to the Rev. G. G. Walker, Rector of Somerby near Grantham, the Rev. Canon Sutton, of Brant Broughton, the Rev. F. McKenzie, of Great Hale near Sleaford, and the Rev. C. H. Laing, of Bardney, who has done such good work in the excavation of the famous abbey. The writer, too, of letters in _The Spilsby and Horncastle Gazette_, on town and village life in Lincolnshire, brings together much interesting information. From him I gather that as far back as 668, when Theodore was Archbishop of Canterbury, local provision was made for the village clergy who were then, of course, but few in number. His wise arrangement, that those who built a church should have the right of choosing their pastor, initiated the system of private patronage and thereby encouraged the building and endowing of churches, so that it is not surprising to hear that in Domesday Book—400 years later than Theodore’s time—the county of Lincolnshire had no less than 226 churches. The original patron often gave the right of presentation to an abbey, which was a wise plan, as it ensured to the people a pastor, and to the pastor an adequate means of living, and provided for the building and upkeep of the church, which was often larger than the population of the village warranted either then or since.

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