There is notably good openwork on the east gable of the church, much resembling that at Grimoldby and Theddlethorpe-in-the-Marsh, a few miles to the east of Louth. Turner’s picture of the horse fair at Louth shows the spire, which was no doubt the motive of the picture, and until one has seen it, both from a distance and from the street of Louth itself, one can have no notion how beautiful a thing a well-proportioned spire can be, one is never tired of looking at it. An old statue of Edward VI. over a doorway in the Westgate indicates the grammar school where Alfred and Charles Tennyson spent a few uncomfortable years. The school seal shows a boy being birched, with the motto “Qui parcit virgam odit filium,” and date 1552. Among other pupils were Governor Eyre, one of the victims of British sentimentality, and Hobart Pasha. Thomas of Louth gave a clock to Lincoln Minster in 1324, and William de Lindsey, Bishop of Ely, 1290, who has there a beautiful monument, was also a Louth native. [Illustration: _Hubbards Mill, Louth._] [Sidenote: LOUTH PARK ABBEY] Louth Park Abbey, about a mile and a half to the east of the town, was built on a site belonging to the Bishops of Lincoln, and was given to the Cistercian colony from Fountains Abbey, who found Haverholme too damp for comfort, by Bishop Alexander in 1139. The Cistercians built themselves a large church, 256 feet long and sixty-one feet in width, with transepts which more than doubled this; parts of these and the chancel, also a portion of the west front and one nave pillar, are all that is left of it, but the ground plan has been excavated, which shows that there were no fewer than ten bays to the nave, and massive circular piers. There was a cloister on the south, surrounded by monastic buildings, and east of these a chapter-house with groined roof springing from six pillars. A very large gateway stood at the south-west, and outside was a double moat to which the water from St. Helen’s Spring was conducted by what is still known as “the Monk’s Dyke.” It flourished greatly at the beginning of the fourteenth century, having then sixty-six monks and 150 lay brethren. The Louth Park Abbey Chronicle, though very valuable, is not exactly contemporaneous with the things it mentions, for it was all written by a scribe in the fifteenth century. It covers the years from 1066 to the death of Henry IV. in 1413. Near the abbey, but on the other side of the canal, is _Keddington_, where the arch of the organ chamber is made of carved stones, no doubt brought from the abbey. The church, which is built of chalk and greensand, is older than any in the immediate neighbourhood, and has a Norman south door. It has a remarkable lancet window on the south side, in the upper part of which is a carved dragon, and has also what is very rare, a wooden mediæval eagle lectern. [Sidenote: ROADS FROM LOUTH]