motto, “N’aj je le droit?”), the badge of office, marks the period of building as coinciding with that of Lord Cromwell’s tenure of the Lord Treasurership, _i.e._ from 1433 to 1443. It is an interesting thought for Lincolnshire folk that very probably a celebrated Lincolnshire man, William Patten of Wainfleet, Bishop of Winchester, was the architect of these “bricky towers”; the school at Wainfleet, also in brick, is another token of his architectural skill in this material, as his work at Winchester Cathedral and at Magdalen College, Oxford, testified in stone. He was a great architect, a personal friend of Lord Cromwell’s, and was one of his executors (another one being, curiously enough, Chief-Justice Sir John Fortescue, an ancestor of the present proprietor); the neighbouring church of Tattershall being unfinished at Lord Cromwell’s death, William of Wainfleet helped to complete it, having probably designed it also. The plan of a mediæval castle was, generally speaking, as follows: There was an outer wall surrounded by a ditch, over which a drawbridge would give access to the main entrance. Then separated from the first by a second ditch would be the second (the inner) wall. Both walls would be strengthened by towers at suitable points. Within this inner ward, as the space inside the inner wall was termed, the chief living rooms—the barracks, so to speak—would stand. Finally, there would be the donjon or keep, the strongest of the castle buildings, frequently erected on a mound, and capable itself of withstanding for some time a hostile attack even though the rest of the castle was in the enemy’s hands.