Louth spire is one of the sights of Lincolnshire; it is a few feet higher than Grantham, which it much resembles, and in beauty of proportions and elegance of design one feels, as one looks at it, that it has really no rival, for Moulton, near Spalding, though on the same lines, is so much smaller. The way in which it bursts upon the view as the traveller approaches it from Kenwick, which lies to the southward, is a thing impossible to forget. Taking the place of originally a small Norman, and later a thirteenth century building, the present church of St. James dates from the fifteenth century. Louth once had two, if not three, other small churches, dedicated to St. John, St. Mary, and St. Herefrid; but no certain traces of these remain, and only the north and south doorways of the thirteenth century church are now visible. Excavations made at the last restoration in 1867 revealed the pillar bases of this church and some fragments of eleventh century moulding of the earlier one. The present building has nothing of interest inside—it is only the shell from which the living tenant has long been absent. Once its long aisles were filled with rich chapels, and the chancel arch was furnished with a rood-loft and screen, and the church was unusually rich in altars, vessels, vestments, and books, of which only the inventory remains. In the vestry an oak cupboard has medallions carved in the panels of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York; and that is all. The steeple, with its large belfry windows, was doubtless built for its clock and bells; there were at first but three, which in 1726 were increased to a full peal of eight, but the clock and its chime was there as early as 1500. The spire was not completed till 1815; the weathercock was fixed then, but no lightning-rod until 1844 after the spire had been struck and damaged three times, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in the eighteenth it escaped. The first of the Louth churchwardens’ books has an ill-written entry of the year 1515-16, the time of the second (or thirteenth century) church, which tells us that one Thomas Taylor, a draper, bought a copper basin in York and had it made at Lincoln into a “Wedercoke” for the church. This is very interesting, for the basin had been part of the spoil taken from the King of Scots at Flodden. [Sidenote: THE KING’S LETTER]