CHAPTER XIX

THE NORTH-EAST OF THE COUNTY

Thornton Curtis—Barrow—The Hull-to-Holland Ferry—Goxhill—Thornton Abbey—Immingham—The New Docks—Stallingborough—The Ayscough Tombs—Great Cotes—Grimsby—The Docks—The Church, Cleethorpes—Legend of Havelock the Dane.

We will now return to the north-east of the county.

From _Brocklesby_ a good road runs north by _Ulceby_, with its ridiculously thin, tall spire, and _Wootton_, to _Thornton Curtis_ and _Barrow-on-Humber_.

[Sidenote: THORNTON CURTIS]

_Thornton Curtis_ is a place to be visited, because it possesses one of the seven black marble Tournai fonts like those at Lincoln and Winchester. This stands in a wide open space at the west end of the church, mounted on a square three-stepped pedestal. The four corner shafts, like those at Ipswich, are of lighter colour than the central pillar and the top. The latter has suffered several fractures owing to its having been more than once moved, and the base is much worn as if it had been exposed to the weather. The sides are sculptured with griffins and monsters, and on the top at each corner is a bird. Of the church the groined porch has been renewed, but the doorway is old and good, and part of the ancient oak door remains with the original fine hinges, and a design in iron round the head of the door. On the floor near the south-west corner of the church is a sepulchral stone slab with a half effigy of a lady in deep relief showing at the head end. There is a fine wide Early English tower arch, and the handsome arches of the nave are borne on clustered pillars, which are all alike on the north side, but of different patterns on the south side, and with excellent boldly cut foliage capitals, the western capital and respond being especially fine. The north aisle is very wide, and the church unusually roomy. The pine roof and the oak seats were all new about thirty years ago. The light and graceful rood screen is also new, and has deep buttress-like returns on the western side, as at Grimoldby. The chancel has late twelfth century lancets, one with a Norman arch, the others pointed, showing the transition period; once the church was all Norman, but it was extended westwards early in the thirteenth century. There are two charming piscinas of the same period, with Norman pilasters and round-headed arches, but the western one has had a later pointed arch, apparently put on in more recent times.

In the north aisle wall there are three arched niches for tombs, and on the north side of the chancel outside is a wide Norman arch with a flat buttress curiously carried up from above the centre of the archway, as in the Jews’ House at Lincoln. Near the south porch is a mural tablet carved in oak, with old English lettering, which reads thus:—

In the yer yat all the stalles In thys chyrch was mayd Thomas Kyrkbe Jho Shreb byn Hew Roston Jho Smyth Kyrk Masters in the yer of Our Lorde God MCCCCCXXXII.

In the churchyard is half of the shaft of a cross, octagonal, with rosettes carved at intervals on the four smaller sides. Like the font, it is mounted on a broad, square three-stepped pedestal.

At _Barrow_, two miles further north, there was once a monastery, founded in the seventh century by St. Ceadda, or Chad, on land given by Wulfhere King of Mercia. This is an interesting corner of the county. New Holland, where the steam ferry from Hull lands you, is but three miles to the north, and near _Barrow Haven_ station, between the ferry pier and Barton, is a remarkable ancient Danish or British earthwork called “The Castles”—a large tumulus-topped mound with a wide fosse, and with other mounds and ditches grouped round it, which, when occupied, were surrounded by marshes and only approachable by a channel from the Humber. The claim that this is the site of the great battle of Brunanburh in 937 cannot be looked upon as more than the merest conjecture. Both _Barton_ and _Barrow_ have been claimed for it; and “Barrow Castles” might or might not have had some connection with the great battle, which certainly is referred to as near the Humber in Robert de Brunne’s chronicle, as follows:—

“He brought the King Anlaf up the Humber With seven hundred ships and fifteen, so great was the number. Athelstan here saw all the great host, He and Edward his brother hurried to the coast. At Brunnisburgh on Humber they gave them assault, From Morning to Evening lasted the battle, At the last to their ships the King gave them chase All fled away, that was of God’s grace.”

[Sidenote: THE HULL FERRY]

The Great Northern Railway runs south from Holland pier to Ulceby, and then splits right and left to Brigg and Grimsby; and here let me warn anyone who thinks to bring a motor over by the ferry to or from Hull. The sloping stage at New Holland is fairly easy, though the boats’ moveable gangway is not provided with an inclined approach board, the simplest thing in the world, but each car or truck has to bump on and off it with a four-inch rise, and an extra man or two are required to lift the wheels of each loaded truck on or off—a childishly stupid arrangement which reflects no credit on the brains of the officers of the Central Railway, who own the ferry service; but on the Hull side matters are much worse, and I don’t think that any method of loading or unloading even in a remote Asiatic port can be so barbaric and out-of-date as that which the Central Railway provides for its long-suffering customers. To get a motor on board from Hull is both difficult and dangerous; after threading an intricate maze of close-set pillars a car has to go down a very steep and slippery gangway, and when at the bottom has to turn at right angles with no room to back, and across a moveable gangway so narrow that the side railing has to be taken off and a loose plank added to take the wheels; then, whilst the car hangs over the water on the slippery slope, several men lift the front part round to the left and then, with a great effort, drag the back wheels round to the right, and after filling up a yawning gap between the slope and the gang-plank by putting a piece of board of some kind, but with no fit, to prevent the wheel from dropping through or the car going headlong into the sea, the machine is got on to the deck; and then all sorts of heavy goods on hand-barrows are brought on, four men having to hang on to each down the slippery planks, and these are piled all round the motor, and all are taken off on the other side with incredible exertions before the motor has a chance to move. The crossing itself takes but twenty minutes, but the whole process of getting on, crossing and getting off, occupied us two hours, and a really big car would never have been able to get over at all. No one at the Hull Corporation pier seems to know anything about the use of a crane for loading purposes, and it is evident that passenger traffic with any form of vehicle is not to receive any encouragement from this anything but up-to-date railway company. Why do not the Hull Corporation insist on something very much better? The parallelogram between the railway and Humber, when it turns south opposite Hull, has a belt of marsh along the river side, and because it was in old times so inaccessible, it contains some fine monastic buildings.

[Illustration: _Great Goxhill Priory._]

[Sidenote: GOXHILL]

[Sidenote: THORNTON ABBEY]

Two miles west of Barrow is _Goxhill_. Here there is a fine church tower, with a delicate parapet, and a mile south is the so-called “Priory,” which was probably only a memorial chapel served by a hermit in the pay of the De Spenser family. Murray gives this entry from the bishop’s registers for 1368: “Thomas De Tykhill, hermit, clerk, presented by Philip Despenser to the chapel of St. Andrew in the parish of Goxhill, on the death of Thomas, the last hermit.” It is now a picturesque ruin of two stories, the lower one vaulted and with three large Decorated windows at the sides, and a large double round-headed one at the end, all now blocked, the building being used for a barn. Two miles from this, and near Thornton Abbey Station, is all that is left of _Thornton Abbey_. A fine gateway, second only to that at Battle Abbey, and two sides of a beautiful octagonal chapter-house, with very rich arcading beneath the lovely three-light windows. Founded in 1139, for a prior and twelve Augustinian canons, it became an abbey in 1149, and in 1517 a “mitred” abbey, the only one in the county except Croyland. And these two are now the most notable of all the monastic remains in Lincolnshire. One of its abbots was said to have been walled up alive, and Bishop Tanner, in his MS. account of the abbey, now in the Bodleian, says of Abbot Walter Multon, 1443: “He died, but by what death I know not. He hath no obit, as other Abbots have, and the place of his burial hath not been found,” and Stukeley, 1687-1765, says that on taking down a wall in his time a skeleton was found in a sitting posture, with a table and a lamp, but I am glad to think that though the tradition is not infrequent,—probably as an echo from the days of the Roman Vestal Virgins—there is no positive evidence of anyone ever being immured alive; though an inconvenient dead body was doubtless got rid of at times in that way.

[Sidenote: THE ABBEY GATE]

The principal remaining part of the abbey is the fine grey stone gateway, a beautiful arch flanked by octagon turrets, with a passage through them, and then other arches on each side, and beyond these two corner towers. Above the central archway there are two rows of statues in niches with canopies. The Virgin being crowned by the Holy Trinity is flanked by full-length statues of St. Antony and St. Augustine. Other figures are above these, but not easy to make out. Inside the gateway are guard rooms, and a winding staircase leading to the large refectory hall. An oriel in this contained an altar, as the piscina and a squint from an adjoining chamber testify. The approach over the ditch up to the gateway is by a curious range of massive brickwork, with coved recesses and battlements, all along on each side. The ruin is owned by Lord Yarborough, and is kept locked, but an attendant is always on the spot, as both the abbey and Brocklesby Park are favourite objects for excursions from Hull, Grimsby, and Cleethorpes.

[Illustration: _Thornton Abbey Gateway._]

[Sidenote: THE CHAPTER HOUSE]

The abbey was a very magnificent one, occupying 100 acres. Henry VIII. was so well entertained there in 1541 that when he had suppressed the abbey he bestowed the greater part of the land on a new foundation in the same building, a college of the Holy Trinity; but a few years later, either in 1547 or 1553, that in turn was dissolved, and the land granted to the pitifully subservient Bishop Henry Holbeche. Inside the gateway is a large square, on the east side of which stood the chapter-house, a handsome octagonal building, of which two sides remain, as does also a fragment of the beautiful south transept, and, still further south, the abbot’s lodging, now in use as a farmhouse. The church was 235 feet long and sixty-two feet wide, the transepts being double of that. The architecture was mainly of the best Decorated period. There are many slabs with incised crosses still to be seen, one of Robert Girdyk, 1363.

[Illustration: _Remains of Chapter House, Thornton Abbey._]

_East Halton_ lies east of the abbey, whence the road runs through _North_ and _South Killingholme_, at the corner of which is a picturesque old brick manor-house of the Tudor period, with linen-pattern oak panelling and grotesque heads over the doors inside, and outside a remarkably fine chimney-stack and some fine old yew trees. The church has a very large Norman tower-arch, an interesting old roof and the remains of a delicately carved rood-screen. From here we go to _Habrough_ and _Immingham_, where some curious paintings of the Apostles are set between the clerestory windows.

[Sidenote: IMMINGHAM DOCK]

_Immingham_ village is more than two miles from the haven, and here the most enormous works have long been in progress. Indeed, at _Immingham_ a new port has sprung up in the last five years, and to this the Great Central Railway, who so utterly neglect the convenience of passengers with vehicles at the Hull ferry, have given the most enlightened attention, and by using the latest inventions and all the most advanced methods and laying out their docks in a large and forward-looking way to cover an enormous area, have created a dock which can compete successfully with any provincial port in England.

A deep-water channel leads to the lock gates on the north side of what is the deepest dock on the east coast, with forty-five acres of water over thirty feet deep. It runs east and west, and it is about half a mile long. A quay 1,250 feet long, projects into the western half of this, leaving room for vessels to load or unload on either side of it, direct from or into the railway trucks. A timber-quay occupies the north-west side of the dock, and the grain elevator is at the east end, while all along the whole of the south side runs the coaling quay. There are at least twenty-seven cranes able to lift two, three, five, ten, and one even fifty tons on the various quays, and on the coaling-quay eight hoists, on to which the trucks are lifted and the coal shot into the vessels, after which the truck returns to the yard by gravitation automatically. Each of these hoists can deal with 700 tons of coal an hour, and as each hoist has eight sidings allotted to it there are 320 waggons ready for each. One of these hoists is moveable so that two holds of a vessel can be worked simultaneously. The means for quick and easy handling of the trucks, full and empty, by hydraulic power, and light for the whole dock also is supplied from a gigantic installation in the power-house, near the north-west corner of the dock; and this quick handling is essential, for the many miles of sidings can hold 11,600 waggons, carrying 116,000 tons of coal or more, besides finding room for empties. The coal is brought from Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts, and Lincolnshire, and not far short of 3,000,000 tons of coal will be now sent out of England from this port alone.[9] It seems to the writer that to send away at this tremendous rate from all our big coaling ports the article on which all our industries virtually depend is a folly which no words are too strong to condemn. With coal England has the means of supplying all her own wants for many generations, but it is not inexhaustible, and when it is gone, where will England be? Will anything that may be found ever take its place? And, unless we are able to reassure ourselves on this point, is this not just a case in which a wise State would step in and prohibit export, and not allow the nation to cut its own throat like a pig swimming? Large store sheds are now (1914) being built for wool to be landed direct from Australia. Thus Immingham will compete with Liverpool, where I have seen bales so tightly packed that when you knock with your knuckles on the clean-cut end of one it resounds like a board.

[Sidenote: STALLINGBOROUGH]

Going on south from Immingham village we come, after three miles, to _Stallingborough_.

[Sidenote: THE AYSCOUGH TOMBS]

The old church having fallen, the present brick parallelogram, with tower and campanile, was built in 1780. Inside, though destitute of any touch of church architecture, it is beautifully clean, and if you penetrate up to the very end you will be rewarded by seeing what the organ absolutely obscures till you reach the altar rail—a really wonderful alabaster tomb of the Ayscoughe, Ayscugh, or Askew family, at the north-east corner, inside the chancel rail. Above is part of a bust of Francis, the father, who lived at South Kelsey, near Caister, and who so basely, in terror for himself, betrayed his sister Anne’s hiding-place, which resulted in her being first tortured and then burnt at Smithfield in 1546, her crime being that she had read the Bible to poor folk in Lincoln Minster. The whole story is too horrible to dwell upon. This cowardly brother is portrayed half length, in a recess, leaning his head on his left hand and holding in his right a spear. From this it will be seen that this is no ordinary sepulchral monument, but a work of art. Below him his son, Edward of Kelsey, 1612, lies supine in plate armour and a ruff, with bare head pillowed on a cushion, while on a raised platform, just behind him, his wife Esther, daughter of Thomas Grantham, Esq., leans on her right elbow; she, too, in a ruff with hair done high and with a tight bodice and much-pleated skirt. The faces look like portraits, and Sir Edward has a singularly feeble, but not unpleasant, face, with small, low forehead. On the wall at his wife’s feet is a painted coat of arms on a lozenge, with nineteen quarterings, and a real helmet is placed on the tomb slab below it. The slab is a very massive one, and below it is an inscription in gold letters on a black ground in Latin, which is from Psalm CXXVIII. “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house, thy children like the olive branches round about thy table, lo thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord”; and beneath this, on the side of the tomb, are the kneeling effigies of six sons and six daughters. The whole thing—both the effigies and the inscription—is similar to the Tyrwhit tomb at _Bigby_. Above the mural monument of the father is the Ayscoughe crest, a little grey ass coughing, and under his half-effigy is a later inscription, which doubtless refers to his son, and not to himself, the poor, unhappy cause of his sister’s dreadful sufferings. It runs thus:—

Clarus imaginibus proavum, sed mentis honestae Clarior exemplis, integritate, fide. Una tibi conjux uni quae juncta beatas Fecerat et noctes et sine lite dies. Praemissi non amissi.

And a thing called on the monument an “Anigram,” which is past the understanding of ordinary men, is also part of the inscription. The extraordinary state of preservation of the whole group is a marvel.

Other inscriptions and brasses are in the church, though partly hidden by the organ and the altar, one to the second wife of Anne’s father, Sir William, along with others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the churchyard is the stem of a cross.

Four miles further south the fine broad fifteenth-century tower of _Great Cotes_ of rich yellow stone, attracts anyone who is passing from Goxhill to Grimsby, and it is a church which well repays a visit.

[Sidenote: GREAT COTES]

In the churchyard, after passing under a yew-tree arch, you see a magnificent walnut on a small green mound. There is no porch. You enter by a small, deeply moulded doorway at the north-west end of the north aisle. The pillars of the arcades are clusters of four rather thick shafts, some with unusually large round capitals, but others various in shape, and all of a bluish grey stone. There are four bays, three big and one a small one next the tower at the west end. There is a flat ceiling, both in nave and chancel, which cuts off the top of the Early English tower arch; hence the nave and aisles are covered, as at Swaton, near Helpringham, by one low, broad slate roof, reminding one of that at Grasmere. The chancel arch, if it can be called an arch at all, is the meanest I ever saw, and only equalled by the miserable, and apparently wooden, tracery of the east window. The chancel, which is nearly as long as the nave, is built of rough stones and has Decorated windows. On the floor is a curious brass of local workmanship probably, to Isabella, wife of Roger Barnadiston, _c._ 1420, and the artist seems to have handed on his craft, for the attraction of the church is a singular seventeenth century brass before the altar, to Sir Thomas Barnadiston, Kt. of Mikkylcotes, and his wife Dame Elizabeth, and their eight sons and seven daughters. The children kneel behind their kneeling parents, who are, however, on a larger scale, and have scrolls proceeding from their mouths. Above them is a picture of the Saviour, with nimbus, rising from a rectangular tomb of disproportionately small dimensions, while Roman soldiers are sleeping around. A defaced inscription runs all round the edge of the brass, and in the centre is the inscription in old lettering: “In the worschypp of the Resurrectio of o̅r Lord and the blessed sepulcur pray for the souls of Sir Thos Barnadiston Kt. and Dame Elizabeth his wife

and of yʳ charite say a pʳ noster ave and cred and ye schall have a C days of p~don to yoʳ med”

[Sidenote: GRIMSBY]

Another six miles brings us to the outskirts of _Grimsby_, the birthplace, in 1530, of John Whitgift, Queen Elizabeth’s Archbishop of Canterbury. This is not at all an imposing or handsome town, but the length of the timber docks, and the size and varied life in the great fish docks, the pontoons which project into the river and are crowded with fishing boats, discharging tons of fish and taking in quantities of ice, are a wonderful sight. 165,510 tons of fish were dealt with in 1902—it is probably 170,000 now; and 300 tons of ice a day is made close by. The old church is a fine cruciform building, with a pair of ugly turrets at the end of nave, chancel, and transepts. Inside it is fine and spacious, and in effect cathedral-like. The transepts have doorways and two rows of three-light windows with tooth moulding round the upper lights and the gables. A corbel table with carved heads runs all round the church.

The south transept Early-English porch had eight shafts on either side, in most cases only the capitals now remain. The south aisle porch is good, but less rich. The tower arches are supported on octagonal pillars, which run into and form part of the transept walls. They are decorated by mouldings running up the whole length. The nave has six bays, and tall, slender clustered columns and plain capitals, with deeply moulded arches. Dreadful to relate, the columns and capitals are all painted grey.

There is a unique arrangement of combined triforium and clerestory, the small clerestory windows being inserted in the triforium into the taller central arches of the groups of three, which all have slender clustered shafts. This triforium goes round both nave, chancel and transepts, a very well carved modern oak pulpit rests on a marble base with surrounding shafts. The lectern is an eagle of the more artistic form, with one leg advanced and head turned sideways and looking upwards. I wonder that this is not more common, for I see it is figured in the A. and N. Stores catalogue. The sedilia rises in steps, as at Temple Bruer. A raised tomb carries the effigy of Sir Thomas Haslerton, brought from St. Leonard’s nunnery; he is in chain armour with helmet. A chapel in the north aisle has a squint looking to the high altar. This chapel is entered by a beautiful double arch from the transept, with Early capital to the mid pillar. The proportions of the whole church are pleasing, and its size is very striking. The tower has an arcaded parapet, and on each side two windows set in a recess under a big arch, between them a buttress runs up from the apex of a broad and deep gable-coping, which goes down each side of the tower, forming the hood-mould into which the gables of the nave transepts and chancel fit. All the doors, curiously enough, are painted green outside. There is in the churchyard a pillar with clustered shafts and carved capital, the base of which rests on a panelled block, which looks like an old font. Many bits from the old church, which was restored throughout in 1885, are ranged on the low wall of the churchyard walk, some of which look worthy of a better place.

The line from the docks runs along by the shore to _Cleethorpes_, where the Humber begins to merge into the sea. The wide, firm sands and the rippling shallow wavelets of the brown seawater are the delight of thousands of children; the air is fresh, food and drink are plentiful, and all things conspire to make a trippers’ paradise, while the Dolphin Hotel, which, like the others, looks out on the sea, is no bad place for a short sojourn in the off season.

[Sidenote: THE CORPORATION SEALS]

The corporation had in old times two seals, one the common seal, and one the mayor’s seal; the latter showed a boar charged by a dog and a huntsman winding his horn, an allusion to an ancient privilege of the mayor and burgesses of hunting in the adjacent woods of Bradley Manor. The common seal bore a gigantic figure of a man with drawn sword and round shield, and the name ‘Gryem,’ the reputed founder of the town; on his right a youth crowned, and the name ‘Habloc,’ and on his left a female figure with a diadem and the legend “Goldeburgh,” the name of the princess he is said to have married.

These two interesting and distinctive old seals have, sad to say, been discarded for one bearing the arms of the corporation, just like what any mushroom town might adopt.

The figures on the old seal alluded to the tradition embodied in the old Anglo-Danish ballad of Havelock the Dane, which was borrowed from a French romance of the twelfth century, called “Le lai de Aveloc,” which in turn was probably taken from an Anglo-Saxon original. It tells how Havelock, son of the Danish King Birkabeen, was treacherously put to sea and saved by one Grim, a Lincolnshire fisherman, who brought up the waif as his own. He grew to be of huge stature and strength and of great beauty, and, from serving as a scullion in the king’s kitchen, he became betrothed to the king’s daughter; and his royal descent being discovered, the Danish king rewarded Grim with a sum of money with which he built a village on the coast and called it Grim’s town or Grimsby.

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