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 feature of the church is the Norman chancel arch with double
moulding. It is especially interesting as showing that the carving of the
stones which form the arch was done not by plan but by eye; though the
same pattern goes throughout, no two stones are exactly similar, and the
pattern is larger or smaller as the mason cut it by guess, and has two
zigzags or two and a half accordingly, and therefore the pattern in some
places does not properly meet, but the whole effect is all right. The
manor was held by the Threckingham family in the fourteenth century, and
their arms are in one of the windows. In the feet of fines, Lincoln file
86, we have an agreement between Lambert de Trikingham and Robert, son of
Walter le Clerk, of Trikingham, and Hawysia his wife, made at Westminster
in the second year of Edward II. (1319). The lady with this charming name
seeming to have afterwards married Sir Henry de Wellington, for in the
thirty-second year of Edward III. (1359) another settlement is recorded
of a dispute about Somerby Manor between Enericus de Welyngton Miles and
Hawysia his wife on one side, and John Bluet and Alan Rynsley (one of
the sixteen various spellings of Rawnsley) and his wife Margaret on the
other, by which Alan and Margaret, for conceding their claims, receive
100 marks of silver. This and much other interesting information is to
be found in a paper on The Manor of Somerby, by Gilbert George Walker,
rector of the parish.
In the fifteenth century John Bluet held the living, one of whose
ancestors was probably the civilian with his feet on a fleece, whose fine
recumbent effigy is in Harlaxton church. His daughter married Robert
Bawde, whose brass is in the church, and their family were in possession
till 1720. A large monument on the north wall commemorates Elizabeth Lady
Brownlow, _née_ Freke, whose son John built Belton House. She died in
1684. There is also a brass to Peregrine Bradshaw and his wife, who died
in 1669 and 1673.
Dr. William Stukeley, the famous antiquary, who was a Lincolnshire man,
born at Holbeach in 1687, was, at one time, rector of Somerby.
_Ropsley_, two and a half miles to the east, shows some ‘Long and Short’
Saxon work at the north-east angle of the nave. The tower has a Decorated
broach spire. At the south porch is the couplet,
“Hac non vade via
Nisi dices Ave Maria.”
[Sidenote: BISHOP FOX]
The church has also a very notable little stained glass window with
an armed figure of Johannes de Welby. In the church a curious broad
projection from the east window of the north aisle forms a bridge to
the rood loft. In the eyes of a Corpus man, like the writer, Ropsley is
sacred as being the birthplace of Bishop Fox, who held successively the
sees of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham and Winchester, and founded, or
helped to found, the Grantham Grammar School near his old home in 1528,
and also, in 1516, the College of Corpus Christi, Oxford.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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