Highways and Byways in LincolnshireRawnsley, W. F. (Willingham Franklin)
History
Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire
Rawnsley, W. F. (Willingham Franklin)
Lincolnshire (England) -- Description and travel
From Market Rasen three miles of low country brings us to _North
Willingham_. The Hall, the home of Mr. Wright, was for over a hundred
years the residence of the family of Boucherett, whose former mansion
stood a couple of miles to the west. The present house with its pretty
bit of water faces the road. In the village we may see a blacksmith who,
at the age of ninety, can still shoe a horse. We are now twelve miles
from Louth; a road to the left goes to Tealby and Bayons Manor, and to
the right by _Sixhills_ to Hainton; and here, instead of going right on
up the sweep of the hill, we will make the round by Tealby and come back
to the high road at Ludford Parva.
[Sidenote: BAYONS MANOR]
_Tealby_ is quite an ideal village, with beautiful trees, a fine and
well-placed church, a stream and bridges and picturesque cottages. One
road leads from it up the steep “Bully hill,” a 300 feet rise, another
road takes us to _Bayons Manor_, the seat of the Tennyson d’Eyncourt
family. Originally there was an old eleventh or twelfth century fortified
dwelling about a hundred yards up the hill, traces of which may still
be seen in bank or dyke. This was replaced about the sixteenth century
by a fairly large house, at one time thatched; part of this remains as
the nucleus of the present castellated mansion built in the romantic
era of the Waverley novels and completed with drawbridge and barbican
in the middle of the last century by Charles Tennyson, M.P., uncle of
the poet, who, after the death of his father, George Tennyson, took the
name of d’Eyncourt. His grandson, E. Tennyson d’Eyncourt, now lives
there. The house has a fine open-roofed hall, and is replete with
interesting mementoes of the Tennysons as well as of the ancient family
of d’Eyncourt. The site is good, with a charming garden sloping to the
park, in which is a fine piece of water. The name Bayons is derived from
its first Norman possessor, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. He was half-brother
to William the Conqueror on the mother’s side, and he was so exalted a
personage that he was called “Totius Angliae Vice-dominus, sub rege.”
Thus he was on occasions the king’s representative, and seems to have had
as much land in Lincolnshire and elsewhere granted to him by William, as
Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk had under Henry VIII., for we hear that
he held seventy-six manors in the county and 463 in other parts.
It is interesting to know that Bulwer Lytton in 1848, when he was trying
to recover his seat for Lincoln, wrote his historical romance “Harold”
here, making good use of his friend Mr. Tennyson d’Eyncourt’s fine
collection of early English chronicles.
A little north of Tealby is the temporarily disused church of _Walesby_,
where once Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of the “Anatomy of
Melancholy,” was rector, before he went to Segrave in Leicestershire. It
is hoped that this church may soon be in use again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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