Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/181

 The rooms were reached by a winding staircase in the north-*west angle. A well nine feet in diameter, and never dry, was in the precincts, and another, discovered in the eighteenth century, was found to have in it three large bells. The Earl of Dorset, who owned this interesting property in 1628, sold it to Richard Brownlow of Belton, whose daughter and co-heiress carried it to the family of Lord Guildford, and he sold it to the ancestors of Mr. Chaplin of Blankney.

It shows that the interest in the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem is not yet extinct when we read the following, which appeared in The Times of December 21, 1913:—

"HOUSE OF THE KNIGHTS AT RHODES.

"(FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT.)

, Dec. 23.

"The Tribuna announces that the House of the Knights at Rhodes has been acquired for France by the French Ambassador at Constantinople, M. Bompard. The house, which is one of the most beautiful in the island, is a Gothic edifice dating from the 15th century, and was originally the residence of the French Priors of the Order of Jerusalem.

" This appears to refer to the Auberge of the "Langue" of France, with its shield-adorned façade in the famous street of the Knights in Rhodes, which is still preserved in fair condition. Under the Ottoman regime no Christian was allowed to own a house or to sleep within the walled town of Rhodes, and before the revival of the Constitution foreigners were jealously excluded from the majority of the medieval buildings of the city. It is probably due to this suspicious and exclusive attitude that no such step as that just taken by France has been attempted before. It is to be hoped that the palace of the Grand Masters of the Order of the Hospital, which ruled the island from 1309 until 1522, is now no longer to be used as a common prison."

From Temple Bruer we return to the "High Dyke," and, crossing it, make westward for the Grantham road; but before we go along it, by Boothby Graffoe to Navenby, we must pause on the Ridge, or "Cliff," as they call it there, and look down on a solitary round tower on a slight elevation about a mile across the flat plain which extends westward from the Wolds to the Trent. This tower and its grassy mounds are all that is left of