River traffic below Gainsborough is somewhat hampered during the time of spring tides by the Eagre, which, when the in-rushing tide overcomes the river current and rides on the surface of the stream, rising in a wave six or seven feet high, rolls on from the mouth of the Trent to Gainsborough, a distance of more than twenty miles. The long street leading to the bridge is so dirty and narrow that you cannot believe as you go down it that you are in the main artery of the town. But when you have crossed the bridge and look back, the long riverside with its wharf and red brick houses, boats, and barges, has a very picturesque and old-world effect. The great sight of the town is the Old Hall, which stands on a grassy plot of some two acres, with a very poor iron railing round it, and a road all round that. In the middle of this rough grass-grown plot in the heart of the town is a charming old baronial hall, rebuilt in the times of Henry VII. and Elizabeth, after its destruction in 1470, and still occupied as a private residence. There was doubtless a building here before the time of the Conquest, and here it would be that Alfred the Great stopped on the occasion of his marriage with Ethelwith, daughter of Ethelred, and here, too, it would be that Swegen died, and his son Canute held his court. The present building is of brick and timber with a fine stone-built oriel on the north side, as the centre of a long frontage, and is of various patterns, having tall chimneys and buttresses on the west, and a brick tower on the north-east, and two wings on the south projecting from a magnificent central hall with much glass and woodwork, and a lantern. The large kitchen with its two huge fireplaces is at the end of this hall. Henry VIII. and Katharine Howard were entertained here by Lord Burgh, whose ancestor rebuilt the hall in Henry VII.’s time, _c._ 1480; and another of his Queens, Katharine Parr, was often here, being at one time the wife of Lord Burgh’s eldest son. [Sidenote: THE MASTER BUILDER] The wide area round the hall, with its untidy grass and the miserable iron fence, gives a singularly forlorn appearance to a beautiful and uncommon-looking building. It is supposed that the famous master-builder, “Richard de Gaynisburgh,” was born at Gainsborough, with whom, then styled “Richard de Stow,” the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln in 1306 contracted “to attend to and employ other masons under him for the new work,” at the time when the new additional east end or Angel Choir as well as the upper parts of the great tower and the transepts were being built. He contracted “to do the plain work by measure, and the fine carved work and images by the day.” One of the Pilgrim Fathers was a Gainsborough man, and a Congregational Chapel has been built as a memorial to him.