William Hanbury, born 1725, died 1778, rector of East Langton early in the time of George III., was a forceful person. He became rector in 1753, his father, a wealthy man, having purchased the advowson; but he had already, two years earlier, begun his huge planting operations in the neighbourhood. He introduced plants and seeds from all parts of the world, but was particularly enthusiastic in the cultivation of fruit-trees, and the neighbourhood is still, as a result of his labours, and the example he set, exceptional in fruit-growing. In 1758 he wrote and published “An Essay on Planting, and a Scheme for Making it Conducive to the Glory of God and the Advantage of Society.” He was a man of ideas that grew steadily larger and more impracticable. The first proposal, to annually dispose of the produce of the fruit-trees and thus to create a fund of £1,500, of which the interest was to provide for the decoration of the church, developed into a plan for amassing a £4,000 fund for the building of a hospital and schools, and this in its turn became a grandiose scheme for a series of Church Musical Festivals to be held in the surrounding districts. The income from all these sources was to accumulate until it reached a total sum sufficient to produce an income of £10,000 or £12,000, which was to be expended in founding a minster, a choral establishment, a public library, picture-galleries, a hospital, schools, a printing office, and many other things. The minster was to be in relation to all other cathedrals what cathedrals are to chapels. A central tower was to rise to a height of 493 feet, and its other dimensions were to be in proportion: the western towers themselves to be 399 feet high. No other cathedral that ever was, or would be, should rival this. St. Paul’s? Pooh! The most magnificent buildings yet known were to be squalid beside its walls, floors, and columns of marble, and the porphyry and jasper that were to decorate its choir. [Sidenote: _A GRAND PROJECT_] A city, so this odd projector anticipated, would spring up around these institutions, and included in it were to be, in his own words, “two pompous inns.” If any difficulty were experienced in the carriage of building materials, a canal from quarries in the neighbourhood of Stamford was to be dug to Market Harborough, and if possible the quarries of Ketton and Weldon were to be purchased. When he anticipated all these things would come to pass does not appear. A capital sum of at least a quarter of a million sterling would be required, to yield the income he considered sufficient: and you could not, even with £12,000 per annum, make much headway with such a cathedral, to say nothing of these expensive sideshows.