CHAPTER XXXVI

THE FEN CHURCHES—NORTHERN DIVISION

Friskney—Frescoes in the Church—Its Decoys—Wrangle—John Reed’s Epitaph—Leake—Leverton—Benington—Frieston—The Font-Cover—Frieston Shore—Rare Flowers—Fishtoft—Skirbeck—Boston—The Church.

The two centres for “The parts of Holland” are Spalding and Boston. From the latter we go both north and south, from Spalding only eastwards, and in each case we shall pass few residential places of importance, but many exceptionally fine churches.

We will take the district north of Boston first.

Friskney, which is but three and a half miles south of Wainfleet, where we ended our south Lindsey excursion, is really in Lindsey. It stands between the Marsh and the Fen. The road from Wainfleet to Boston bounds the inhabited area of the parish on the east, and another from Burgh, which runs for ten miles without passing a single village till it reaches Wrangle, does the same on the west. Outside of these roads on the west is the great “East Fen,” reclaimed little more than 100 years ago, and on the east is the “Old Marsh,” along which went the Roman Bank, and east of which again is the “New Marsh,” and beyond it the huge stretch of the “Friskney flats,” over which the sea ebbs and flows for a distance of from three to four miles; the haunt of innumerable sea birds, plovers (locally pyewipes), curlew, redshanks, knots, dunlins, stints, etc., as well as duck and geese of many kinds and even, at times, the lordly swan.

[Sidenote: FRISKNEY]

Thus surrounded, _Friskney_ stands solitary about half way between Wainfleet and Wrangle, and if only the northern boundary of Holland had been made the “Black Dyke” and “Gout” as would have been most natural, Friskney would have been the north-eastern point of Holland, instead of being the south-eastern point of Lindsey. Since their discovery by the late rector, the Rev. H. J. Cheales, the most noticeable thing in the fine Perpendicular church is the series of wall paintings above the arcades of the nave, date 1320, most of them are faint and hard to make out, but there are drawings of them, and an account was published in 1884 and 1905 in the “Archæologia,” vols. 48 and 50. The subjects are the Annunciation, Nativity, Resurrection, and Ascension, and the Assumption of the Virgin, on the north arcade; on the south are the Offering of Melchizedek, the Gathering of the Manna, the Last Supper, one possibly of Pope Gregory, one of King Æthelred entering Bardney Abbey, and a most curious one of Jews stabbing the Host. There are two Norman arches in the aisle wall, and a beautiful tower arch with steps from the nave down into the tower, the lower part of which is transition Norman, the next stage Early English, and the next Perpendicular; there are six bells in it. The nave is very high, the clerestory, on which the paintings are, having been added early in the fourteenth century. The old roof has been preserved, and the chancel screen and two chantry screens, which are unusually high to match the nave. The rood stairs, as at Wrangle and Leake, are on the south side. The pulpit is dated 1659. The north chantry is entered by a half arch, and there is a squint and a curious low-side window placed oddly on the north side of the chancel arch. Some unusually fine sedilia with diaper work at the back, and a trefoiled aumbry and piscina are in the chancel, which has been nearly ruined by bad restoration with a new roof in 1849. It has large handsome windows and finely canopied niches on each buttress, with ornamentation carved in Ancaster stone. This chancel was the gift of John Mitchell of Friskney in 1566.

An effigy of a knight of the Freshney family (a local pronunciation of Friskney), of whom we have seen so many monuments in the Marsh churches at Somercoats, Saltfleetby and Skidbrooke, is at the west end, and a restored churchyard cross stands near the south door.

The family of Kyme, who had a manor near Boston and two villages called after them between Sleaford and Dogdyke, held land in Friskney through the thirteenth century and until 1339, when it passed by marriage to Gilbert Umfraville, whose son, the Earl of Angus, married Maud, daughter of Lord Lucy. She afterwards became the second wife of Henry Percy, first Earl of Northumberland, father of the famous “Hotspur,” whose wife, together with her second husband, Baron Camoys, has such a fine monument in Trotton church near Midhurst, Sussex. Hence, in the east window of the north aisle of the church at Friskney are the arms, amongst others, of Northumberland, Lucy, and Umfraville.

The Earl’s grandson, the second Earl of Northumberland, who was killed at the battle of St. Albans fighting for Henry VI., May 22, 1455, possessed no less than fifty-seven manors in Lincolnshire, many of them inherited from the Kymes.

William de Kyme, uncle of Gilbert Umfraville, left a widow Joan who married Nicolas de Cantelupe. He founded a chantry dedicated to St. Nicolas in Lincoln Cathedral, and she, one dedicated to St. Paul.

[Sidenote: LOST INDUSTRIES]

It is melancholy to hear of old-fashioned employments fading away, but it is the penalty paid by civilisation all the world over. Friskney in

## particular may be called the home of lost industries. For instance,

“Mossberry or Cranberry Fen,” in this parish, was so named from the immense quantity of cranberries which grew on it, and of which the inhabitants made no use until a Westmorland man, knowing their excellence, taught them; and thence, until the drainage of the fens, thousands of pecks were picked and sent into Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire every year, 5_s._ a peck being paid to the gatherers. After the drainage they became very scarce and fetched up to 50_s._ a peck.

Similarly, before the enclosure of the fens there were at least ten _Duck Decoys_ in this part of the county, of which five were in Friskney, and they sent to the London market in one season over 31,000 ducks. Eighty years ago there were still two in Friskney and one in Wainfleet St. Mary’s, and I remember one in Friskney which still maintained itself, in the sixties, though each year the wild fowl came to it in diminishing numbers.

Bryant’s large map of 1828 shows a decoy near Cowbit Wash, no less than five near the right bank of the River Glen in the angle formed by the “Horseshoe Drove” and the “Counter Drain,” and two on the left bank of the Glen, all the seven being within a two-mile square, and two more further north in the Dowsby Fen, and four in the Sempringham Fen probably made by the Gilbertines.

[Sidenote: THE DECOY]

The decoy was a piece of water quite hidden by trees, and only to be approached by a plank across the moat which surrounded it, and with a large tract of marshy uncultivated ground extending all round it, the absence of disturbing noises being an essential, for the birds slept there during the day and only took their flight to the coast at evening for feeding. The method of taking them was as follows. The pond had half-a-dozen arms like a star-fish, but all curving to the right, over which nets were arched on bent rods; and these pipes, leading down each in a different direction and gradually narrowing, ended in a purse of netting. All along the pipes were screens, so set that the ducks could not see the man till they had passed him, and lest they should wind him he always held a bit of burning turf before his mouth. Decoy birds enticed by hemp and other floating seed flung to them over the screens kept swimming up the pipes followed by the wild birds, and a little dog was trained to enter the water and pass in and out of the reed screens. The ducks, being curious, would swim up, and the dog, who was rewarded with little bits of cheese, kept reappearing ahead of them, and so led them on to follow the decoys. At last the man showed himself, and the birds—ducks, teal, and widgeon—rushed up the pipe into the purse and were taken. The decoy was only used in November, December, and January, and it is not in use now at all. But there are still two of the woods left round the ponds at Friskney, each about twelve acres, and the water is there to some extent, but the arms are grown over with weeds and are barely traceable. Indeed it is a hundred years and rather more since the famous old decoy man, George Skelton, lived and worked here with his four sons. His great grandson was the last to follow the occupation, but when the numbers caught came to be only three and four a day, it was clear that the business had “given out.” Absolute quiet and freedom from all the little noises which arise wherever the lowliest and smallest of human habitations exist was necessary, for at least a mile all round the wood, and as cultivation spread this could not be obtained. Nothing is so shy as wild-fowl; and Skelton said that even the smell of a saucepan of burnt milk would scare all the duck away. The mode of taking birds in “flight nets” is still practised on the coast, the nets being stretched on poles at several feet above the ground, and the birds flying into them and getting entangled. Plover are taken in this way, and the smaller birds which fly low in companies along by the edge of the sea, or across the mud flats.

A decoy still exists near Croyland, and another at Ashby west of Brigg, in the lower reaches of the Trent; and formerly there were many in Deeping Fen and other parts of Holland. But wild-fowl were not the only birds the Fenmen had to rely on, and Cooper’s “Tame Villatic Fowl,” and the goose and turkey in particular, are a steady source of income, as the Christmas markets in the Fens testify.

[Sidenote: WRANGLE]

[Sidenote: THE REED EPITAPH]

From _Friskney_ we run on about four miles to _Wrangle_. What the road used to be we may guess from the constable’s accounts for the parish of Friskney, in which the expenses for a journey to Boston are charged for two days and a night “being in the winter time.” The distance is thirteen miles. In the eighteenth century corn was still conveyed to market on the backs of horses tied in strings, head to tail, like the camels in eastern caravans. The name of _Wrangle_ is Weranghe, or Werangle, in Domesday, said to mean the lake or mere of reeds, from “wear,” a lake, and “hangel,” a reed. A friend of mine passing Old Leake station (which was first called “Hobhole drain,” but, at the request of the Wrangle parishioners, because the name deterred visitors, was altered afterwards to Leake-and-Wrangle), observed that this name reminded him of the words of Solomon that the beginning of strife is like the letting out of water.[30] The place used to be a haven on a large sea creek, and furnished to Edward III. for the invasion of France, in 1359, one ship and eight men, Liverpool at that time being assessed at one ship and five men. The church is large, and the rectors have been for over a hundred years members of the family of Canon Wright of Coningsby, a nephew of Sir John Franklin. The outer doorway of the south porch has a beautiful trefoiled arch with tooth moulding, and curious carvings at the angles. Near this is a fine octagonal font with three steps and a raised stone, called a ‘stall,’ for the priest to stand on. This is not uncommon in all these lofty Early English fonts. The tower was once much higher, as is shown by the fine tower arch with its very singular moulding. The tracery in the clerestory windows marks a period of transition, being alternately flowing and Perpendicular. There is a good deal of old glass of the fourteenth century in the north aisle, quite two-thirds of the east window of the aisle being old, with the inscription “Thomas de Weyversty, Abbas de Waltham me fieri fecit.” There is a turret staircase for the rood-loft stair at the junction of the south aisle and chancel, hence the door to the rood loft is on that side. The pulpit is Elizabethan. The Reed family have several monuments here, and it is probable that the three first known parsons of Wrangle—William (1342), John (1378), and Nicolas (1387)—were chaplains to that family. On a large slab in the chancel pavement to “John Reed sum time Marchant of Calys and Margaret his wyfe,” date 1503, are these lines:—

This for man, when ye winde blows Make the mill grind, But ever on thyn oune soul Have thou in mind, That thou givys with thy hand Yt thou shalt finde, And yt thou levys thy executor Comys far behynde. Do thou for thy selfe while ye have space. To pray Jesu of mercy and grace, In heaven to have a place.

Sir John Reade, the great-grandson of John and Margaret, who died in 1626, is described as “eques aureus vereque Xianus eirenarcha prudens,” etc., the last substantive meaning Justice of the Peace.

There is an old Bede-house founded 1555, which we shall pass now on our way to _Leake_, and we may perhaps trace the old sea-bank just behind it. There was once one also at Benington, a few miles further on, called “Benington Bede.” But before leaving so much that is old we may delight our eyes, if we are lucky enough to find Mr. Barker (the vicar) or his wife in the church, with a sight of some most exquisite modern church embroidery in the form of an altar cloth, lately made by the ladies of the rectory.

[Illustration: _Leake Church._]

[Sidenote: LEAKE]

_Leake_, little more than a mile from Wrangle, has a most massive Perpendicular tower which was fifty-seven years building and never completed; here, too, there was a seaway to the coast. The south aisle of the church and the nave have been restored, but the north aisle is still in a ruinous condition, and reflects little credit on the patrons who are, or were, the governors of Oakham and Uppingham schools. There is a magnificent clerestory of six windows with carved and canopied niches between each window, giving a very rich effect; and, as at Wrangle, there is an octagonal rood turret and spirelet at the south-east of the nave. The wavy parapet of the nave gable reminds one of the similar work round the eastern chapel at Peterborough Cathedral, and the tall nave pillars resemble those at Boston. Only a very little Norman work remains from an earlier church. A knight in alabaster, a good Jacobean pulpit, and a remarkable old alms-box made out of a solid oak stem are in the church, and round the churchyard is a moat with a very large lych-gate on the bridge across it. A mile and a half east of this are the remains of an old stone building of early date, called the Moat House.

Two of the Conington family were vicars here in the seventeenth century, and a Thomas Arnold was curate in 1794.

[Sidenote: LEVERTON]

_Leverton_ is but two miles from Leake, and _Benington_ only one mile further. The churches in this district have no pinnacles. Leverton was thatched until 1884, when the present clerestory was built. The chancel has some beautiful canopied sedilia, which are spoken of by Marrat in his “History of Lincolnshire” as “three stone stalls of most exquisite workmanship, to describe the beauties of which the pen seems not to possess an adequate power.” At the back of one of these is an aumbrey, or locker. The windows are square-headed, the font is tall and handsome, but the greatest charm of the building is the sacristy or Lady chapel to the south of the chancel—a perfect gem of architecture, the carved stone work of which is rich and tasteful. Crucifixes surmount both gables of this, and also that at the chancel end, this profusion being a consequence of the church being dedicated to St. Helena. Whether she was the daughter of a Bithynian innkeeper or a British princess, she was the wife of Constantius Chlorus and mother of Constantine the Great; and the legend is that, being admonished in a dream to search for the Cross of Christ, she journeyed to Jerusalem, and, employing men to dig at Golgotha, found three crosses, and having applied each of them to a dead person, one of the crosses raised the dead to life, so she knew that that was the one she was searching for. The church of North Ormsby is also dedicated to her. At Leverton the rood-loft steps exist on the south of the chancel arch, and the churchwarden’s book, which begins in 1535, gives the bill for putting up the rood loft and also for taking it down. At the beginning of last century Mrs. A. Skeath, of Boston, made a new sea-bank three miles long, which effectually reclaimed from the sea 390 acres for this parish.

The village of _Benington_ has a fine church with a good porch and a turret stairway to the north-east of the nave. The roof retains its old timbers with carved angels. In the chancel are the springers for a stone roof. The pillars of the nave have a very wide circular base, and in the Early English chancel are sedilia with aumbries and piscina, and also an arched recess which may have been used for an Easter sepulchre. The tall red sandstone font is singularly fine, both bowl and pedestal being richly carved with figures under canopies.

[Illustration: _Leverton Windmill._]

The practice of putting inscriptions into rhyme is exemplified in the windows of these churches.

[Sidenote: BENINGTON]

Benington has a Latin couplet:—

Ad loca Stellata Duc me Katherina beata

Leverton one in Norman French:—

Pour l’amour de Jhesu Christ Priez par luy q moy fatre fist.

(Pray for him who caused me to be made.)

[Sidenote: BUTTERWICK AND FRIESTON]

[Sidenote: FRIESTON SHORE]

A lane here leads eastwards to Benington-Sea-End, which is close on the Roman bank. And, as the main road to Boston is devoid of interest, we will bend to the left hand, and pass through Butterwick to Frieston and so to the shore. An old register records in rhyme the planting of the fine sycamore tree in _Butterwick_ churchyard, in 1653. The name Butterwick occurs in the East Riding of Yorkshire, and is derived probably from the Dane Buthar, as are Buttermere in Cumberland, and Butterlip-How in Grasmere. At _Frieston_, which, like Friskney and Firsby, is said to indicate a colony of Frieslanders, the present church is the nave of a fine old priory church of the twelfth century founded by Alan de Creon for Benedictines and attached as a cell to Croyland, where his brother was abbot. It had a central tower adjoining the east of the present building; the west piers of this tower are visible outside. Inside there are six Norman and three pointed arches, the latter leading to a massive western tower with a stone figure in a niche dating from the fifteenth century. The south aisle is now all of brick, the Norman stone corbelling being replaced above the eight large three light clerestory windows. The most remarkable thing in the church is the beautiful carved wood font-cover, at least twelve feet high, and surmounted by a figure of the Virgin. This is similar, but superior, to that at Fosdyke, but in no way equal to the beautiful and richly carved example ten feet in height at Ufford church in Suffolk. The font itself has carved panels and two kneeling-steps for priest and sponsor. The churchyard is an extremely large one. The sea once came close up to Frieston, the coast bending round to Fishtoft and towards Skirbeck; at the present time the Frieston shore is two and a half miles off. The road runs close up to the sea-bank. A long old-fashioned hostelry, with a range of stables telling of days gone by, stands under the shelter of the bank, on mounting which you find a bench on a level with the bedroom windows of the inn, whence you look out towards the sea, which forms a shining line in the far distance, for it is over two miles to ‘Boston deeps,’ far over a singular stretch of foreshore channelled with a network of deep clefts by which the retreating tide drains seaward through the glistening mud. The first part of this desolate shore is green with sea-grasses, visited daily by the salt water, and along the fringe of it there are here many rather uncommon flowers growing just below high-water mark, such as the yellow variety of the sea aster (_Aster tripolium var. discoideus_), and the rare _Suæda fruticosa_; and in the ditches leading inland the handsome marsh-mallow (_Althæa officinalis_) flourishes, as it does on Romney Marsh, near Rye. At high water all looks quite different; and a sunrise over the lagoon-like shallow water gives a picture of colour which is not easily forgotten.

[Illustration: _Frieston Priory Church._]

From Frieston shore one gets by a circuitous three-mile route to _Fishtoft_. Here once was a Norman church. The present one has two rood screens; one, at the west end, having been purchased from Frieston, which, however, retained its two aisle screens. There is a good small figure of St. Guthlac, the patron saint, over the west window of the tower, much like that at Frieston. On a tombstone in the churchyard is the following:—

Interred here lies Anne the wife Of Bryon Johnson during life The 25ᵗʰ day of November In 68 he lost this member.

He only survived her two months, and the next inscription is:—

Now Bryon is laid down by Anne ’Till God does raise them up again.

This rhyme might do for Norfolk or Devonshire, but is not Lincolnshire.

[Sidenote: BOSTON STUMP]

And now two miles more bring us to _Skirbeck_ on the outskirts of Boston. The only interesting feature of the church here is in the columns of the nave, which have four cylinders round a massive centre pillar, all four quite detached except at the bases and capitals, which last are richly carved. We shall find exactly similar ones at Weston, near Spalding. We now follow the curving line of the Haven with its grassy banks right into Boston. The splendid parish church, the sight of whose tower is a never-failing source of delight and inspiration, stands with its east end in the market-place, and its tall tower close on the bank of the river. It has no transepts as the Great Yarmouth church has, but, apart from its unapproachable steeple, it is longer and higher and greater in cubic contents than any parish church in the kingdom. The tower, 288 feet, is taller than Lincoln tower or Grantham spire, and is only exceeded in height by Louth spire, which is 300 feet. The view of it from across the river is one of the most entirely satisfying sights in the world.[31] The extreme height is so well proportioned, and each stage leads up so beautifully to the next, that one is never tired of gazing on it. Add to this that it is visible to all the dwellers in the Marsh and Fen for twenty miles round and from the distant Wolds, and again far out to sea, and is as familiar to all as their own shadow, and you can guess at the affection which stirs the hearts of all Lincolnshire men when they think or speak of the ‘Owd Stump,’ a curious title for a beloved object, but so slightly does it decrease in size as it soars upwards from basement to lantern, that in the distance it looks more like a thick mast or the headless stem of a gigantic tree than a church steeple.

[Illustration: _Boston Church from the N.E._]

[Sidenote: THE BUILDING OF THE CHURCH]

[Sidenote: THE INTERIOR]

There was once here a church of the type of Sibsey, said to date from 1150, of which but little has been discovered. The present building was begun in 1309, when the digging for the foundation of the tower began “on ye Monday after Palm Sunday in the 3ʳᵈ yr of Ed. II.” They went down thirty feet to a bed of stone five feet below the level of the river bed, overlying “a spring of sand,” under which again was a bed of clay of unknown thickness. The excavation was a very big job, and the “first stone” was not laid till the feast of St. John the Baptist (Midsummer Day) by Dame Margaret Tilney, and she and Sir John Truesdale, then parson of Boston, and Richard Stevenson, a Boston merchant, each laid £5 on the stone “which was all ye gifts given at that time” towards the expense which, we are told, was, for the whole tower, under £500 of the money of those days. Leland, Vol. VIII., 204, says: “Mawde Tilney who layed the first stone of the goodly steeple of the paroche chirch of Boston lyith buried under it.” The work of building up the tower was interrupted for fifty years, and the body of the church was taken in hand, the present tower arch serving as a west window. Then the tower began to rise, but it was finished without the lantern. In the middle of the fifteenth century the chancel was lengthened by two bays, and the parapets and pinnacles added to the aisles. The parapet at the east end of the north aisle is very curious and elaborate, being pierced with tracery of nearly the same design as that on the flying buttresses of Henry VII.’s Chapel at Westminster. There were several statues round the building on tall pedestals rising from the lowest coping of the buttresses to about the height of the nave parapets; one is conspicuous still at the south-east corner of the tower and above the south porch. The tower has three stages, arranged as in Louth church, and then the lantern above. In the first stage a very large west window rises above the west doorway, and similar ones on the north and south of the tower, and all the surface is enriched with panelling both on tower and buttresses. The next stage is lighted by a pair of windows of great height, finely canopied and divided by a transom, on each side of the tower; this forms the ringing chamber, and a gallery runs round it in the thickness of the wall communicating with the two staircases. On the door of one of these is a remarkable handle, a ring formed by two bronze lizards depending from a lion’s mouth. The clustered shafts and springers of the stone vault were built at the beginning, but the handsome groined roof with its enormous central boss 156 feet from the ground was not completed until 1852. The next story has large single-arched windows of a decidedly plain type. These are the only things one can possibly find fault with, but probably when the tower had no lantern the intention was to exhibit the light from this story, the bells being hung below and rung from the ground. Eventually the eight bells were hung in the third story, and the lantern, by far the finest in England, was added, which gives so queenly an effect to the tall tower. Before this was done four very high pinnacles finished the building, subsequently arches were turned diagonally over the angles of the tower so as to make the base of the octagonal lantern. The roof of the tower and the gutters round it are of stone and curiously contrived. The lantern has eight windows like those in the second stage of the tower, but each one pane longer, and the corners are supported by flying buttresses springing in pairs from each tower pinnacle. The whole is crowned with a lofty parapet with pierced tracery and eight pinnacles with an ornamented gable between each pair of pinnacles. Inside was a lantern lighted at night for a sea mark. The church of All Saints, York, has a very similar one, and there the hook for the lantern pulley is still to be seen.

[Sidenote: BOSTON, U.S.A.]

Inside, one is struck by the ample size and height of the church and its vast proportions. The choir has five windows on each side. But the nave is spoilt by a false wooden roof which cuts off half of the clerestory windows. It is a pity this is not removed and the old open timber roof replaced. In the chancel are sixty-four stalls of good carved work, and the old and curiously designed miserere seats, often showing humorous subjects as at Lincoln, are of exceptional interest. Of the once numerous brasses most are gone, but two very fine ones are on either side the altar: one to Walter Peascod, merchant, 1390, and one to a priest in a cope, _c._ 1400; an incised slab of 1340 is at the west of the north aisle. The Conington tablet in memory of John Conington, Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford, on the south wall of the chancel is to be noticed, and the Bolles monument in the south aisle, and, near the south porch, the chapel which was restored by the Bostonians of the United States as a recognition of their Lincolnshire origin. Close to this is a curious epitaph painted on a wooden panel, which reads as follows:—

My corps with Kings and Monarchs sleeps in bedd, My soul with sight of Christ in heaven is fedd, This lumpe that lampe shall meet, and shine more bright Than Phœbus when he streams his clearest light, Omnes sic ibant sic imus ibitis ibunt. Rich. Smith obiit Anno salutis 1626.

[Illustration: _Boston Stump._]

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