For men unlearned I undertook In English speech to write this book, For many be of such mannere That tales and rhymes will gladly hear. On games and feasts and at the ale Men love to hear a gossip’s tale That leads perhaps to villainy Or deadly sin, or dull folly. For such men have I made this rhyme That they may better spend their time. To all true Christians under sun, To good and loyal men of Brunn, And specially all by name O’ the Brotherhood of Sempringhame, Robert of Brunn now greeteth ye, And prays for your prosperity. [Sidenote: ROBERT DE BRUNNE] Robert was a translator and no original composer, but he was the first after Layamon, the Worcestershire monk who lived just before him, to write English in its present form. Chaucer followed him, then Spenser, after which all was easy. But he was, according to Freeman, the pioneer who created standard English by giving the language of the natives a literary expression. [Illustration: _The Station House, Bourne._] [Sidenote: BLACKSMITH’S EPITAPH] It is difficult to see the abbey church, it is so hemmed in by buildings, and it never seems to have been completed. At the west end is some very massive work. In the churchyard there is a curious epitaph on Thomas Tye, a blacksmith, the first six lines of which are also found on a gravestone in Haltham churchyard near Horncastle:— My sledge and hammer lie reclined, My bellows too have lost their wind, My fire’s extinct, my forge decayed, And in the dust my vice is laid, My coal is spent, my iron’s gone, My nails are drawn, my work is done. My fire-dryed corpse lies here at rest, My soul like smoke is soaring to the bles’t. There is a charming old grey stone grammar school, possibly the very building in which Robert De Brunne taught when “Magister” at the abbey at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The station-master’s house, called “Red Hall,” is a picturesque Elizabethan brick building once the home of the Roman Catholic leader, Sir John Thimbleby, and afterwards of the Digbys. Sir Everard Digby, whose fine monument is in Stoke Dry Church near Uppingham, was born here. Another house is called “Cavalry House” because Thomas Rawnsley, great grandfather of the writer, was living there when he raised at his own expense and drilled a troop of “Light Horse Rangers” at the time when Buonaparte threatened to invade England. Lady Heathcote, whose husband commanded them, gave him a handsome silver goblet in 1808, in recognition of his services. He died in 1826, and in the spandrils of the north arcade in Bourne Abbey Church are memorial tablets to him and to his wife Deborah (Hardwicke) “and six of their children who died infants.” CHAPTER IV ROADS FROM BOURNE