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
The bishop lived to the reign of Richard III., and died in 1486. He
erected a monument to his father, Richard Patten. The son is called
either Patten or Barbour, for he bore both names indifferently, though he
soon discarded them both for the name of his birthplace, as was commonly
done from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; his brother also taking
the name of Waynflete. This monument was in the original church of All
Saints, for the second church of St. Thomas had long been destroyed. But
All Saints’ church, built cruciform and with a light wooden spire on
account of the soft nature of the soil on which it stood, was destined to
the same fate, for the foolish inhabitants having, in 1718, put a heavy
brick tower to it, with five bells in it, the weight brought a great part
of the building to ruin. Subsequently it was pulled down, and the present
church was set up at some distance from the old site in 1820, when the
inhabitants added vandalism to their folly and wantonly demolished this
fine tomb. The broken bits were collected and placed in the Magdalen
School, and later were, by the intervention of the rector of Halton
Holgate, Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, obtained for the President and Fellows of
the Bishop’s College at Oxford, and are now on the north side of the
altar in the College Chapel. The figure has its feet resting on a bank of
flowers and its head on a cushion and pillow supported by his two sons,
John the Monk and William the Bishop. The face of the latter resembles
the father, but is not so broad or so old as that of John. It is to be
noted that Lincolnshire has produced two Bishops of Winchester, each of
them the founder of a college at Oxford—Bishop Fox and Bishop Waynflete.
The town is older than Boston and existed in Roman days, possibly under
the name of Vannona, and apparently a Roman road ran from Doncaster to
Wainfleet, passing through Horncastle and Lusby. Certainly “Salters
road,” which crosses the East Fen, was a Roman road, and the Romans made
a good deal of salt from the sea-water in the immediate neighbourhood of
Wainfleet. In the charter rolls of Bardney Abbey (_temp._ Henry III.) we
read that Matthew, son of Milo de Wenflet, paid annually “to God, Saint
Oswald and the Monks of Bardney 4 shillings and eighteen sextaires of
salt by the old measure” for the land he held in the village of Friskney.
Later we find that (_temp._ Edward II.) Hugh le Despencer held lands in
Wainfleet in 1327, and we know that a Robert le Despencer did so in Burgh
in the time of Edward I. In the reign of Edward III. Wainfleet furnished
two ships and forty seamen for the invasion of Brittany.
_Wainfleet St. Mary’s_ lies one and a half miles to the south. The church
is a massive structure with five arches on the north and four on the
south of the nave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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