Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/223

 This village is on the great east-and-west highway from Gainsborough to Market-Rasen, and here, too, the fine Transition Norman church has been magnificently restored by Bodley at the sole cost of Miss Beckett, of Somerby Hall. It now has a fine rood-screen, good modern stained-glass windows, and a painting of the adoration of the Magi for a reredos. There is here a brass in memory of Robert and Thomas Broxholme, 1631, placed by their brother and sister, Henry and Mary, who all had "lived together above sixty years and for the most parte of the time in one family in most brotherly concord." A long rhymed epitaph goes on to say:—

"Though none of them had Husband Child or Wife They mist no blessings of the married life; For to the poore they eva were insteed Of Husband Wife and Parent at their need."

From Corringham a turn to the right brings us after four miles to Gainsborough. From this town on the extreme edge of the county four roads and four railway lines radiate, and the Trent runs along the edge of the town with a good wide bridge over it, built in 1790, for which a stiff toll is demanded. It is described by George Eliot in "The Mill on the Floss," as "St. Oggs," where the 'Eagre' or 'bore' is thus poetically referred to. "The broadening Floss hurries on between its green banks to the sea; and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace." Constantly overrun by the Danes, the town was eventually looked on as his capital city by Swegen, who, with his son Canute, brought his vessels up the Trent in 1013, and died here, "full King of the Country," in 1014. In the Civil War it was occupied first by the Royalists and afterwards by the Parliamentarians, and one of Cromwell's first successful engagements was a cavalry skirmish at Lea, two miles to the south, when he routed and killed General Cavendish, whom he drove "with some of his soldiers into a quagmire," still called 'Cavendish bog.' The place has some large iron works and several seed-crushing mills for oil and oil-*cake, and much river traffic is done in large barges. Talking of barges, Gainsborough has the credit of having owned the first steam-packet seen in Lincolnshire waters. This was the 'Caledonia,' built at Glasgow, and brought round by the Caledonian Canal, to the astonishment of all the east coast fishermen, in