We have seen the connection of the church with the civic life of the town; and it is to the church and its history that we now turn. In 1085 it formed part of the royal manor, and the right of presentation to it belonged then and for some time after to the King. The parish of Grantham was then probably conterminous with the soke. The churches at Houghton, which corresponds to the modern parish of Spittlegate, Londonthorpe, and in the outlying member of the soke at Braceby, were regarded as chapels of Grantham from early times. The extent of the mediæval parish is fairly represented by the report of Henry VIII.’s commissioners in 1535-6. They found the vicar of the northern mediety of Grantham holding as part of his charge North Gonerby and Londonthorpe; while South Gonerby and Braceby were in charge of the vicar of the southern mediety. Belton and Sapperton, also members of the soke, formed independent parishes from an early date: one can scarcely doubt that the alienation of property there to religious houses was followed quickly by the alienation of the townships from their mother church and the building of churches of their own, to which their new lords presented.[64] In 1091 the lands and endowments of the Church of Grantham were granted to St. Osmund, who gave them to his new cathedral at Old Sarum. The presentation still remained with the Crown. If we may trust the shaky memories of the jurors of 1275, with whose statements the justices apparently were satisfied, the Empress Maud granted the advowson and right of presentation to the Church of Sarum.[65] From that time it became a prebendal church of the Cathedral of Sarum, divided into medieties, whose rectors, the prebendaries of North and South Grantham, impropriated the endowments already granted, and claimed some jurisdiction within their prebends. The church was probably served by chaplains, until Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln, whose energy in providing regular incumbents and stipends for the impropriated benefices of his diocese, has a memorial in the priceless rolls of institutions and charters belonging to his episcopate, and in his book of ordinations of vicarages, arranged for the presentation and institution of regularly paid vicars. The first vicar of North Grantham was instituted on September 23, 1223; the first vicar of South Grantham about two years later.[66] It is not at all unlikely that many of these vicars were careless about residence, and that their duties were often delegated to the chantry priests, whose number grew in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: we know that, in the seventeenth century, the care of the parish was left often, if not habitually, to one of the two incumbents. But each of the two prebendaries in Salisbury presented his own nominee on a vacancy in his particular vicarage till 1713, when, on the voidance of the vicarage of North Grantham by death, Mr. John Harrison, the south vicar, was instituted also to the other mediety.