Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/234

 reading prayers (a notable change this), not so crowded in the memory of man." Each president of the Wesleyan Conference sits in Wesley's chair on his inauguration, and has Wesley's Bible handed to him to hold, as John Wesley himself holds it in his left hand in the statue.

We have alluded to the process of warping which is practised in the isle. The word is derived from the Anglo-Saxon Weorpan ( = to turn aside); it indicates the method by which the tide-water from the river, when nearly at its highest, is turned in through sluices upon the flat, low lands, and there retained by artificial banks until a sufficient deposit has been secured, when the more or less clarified water is turned back into the river at low tide, and the process may be continuously repeated for one, two, or three years. The water coming up with the tide is heavily charged with mud washed from the Humber banks, and this silt is deposited to the depth of some feet in places, and has always proved to be of the utmost fertility. The process is a rather difficult and expensive one, costing £10 an acre, but it needs doing only once in fourteen years or so. A wet season is bad for warping, and 1912 was as bad as 1913 was good.

At Crowle is a church of some importance, for in it is a bit of very early Anglian carving, probably of the seventh century. It is part of the stem of a cross, and has been used by the builders of the Norman church as a lintel for their tower arch. On it are represented a man on horseback (such as we see on the Gosforth cross, and on others in Northumbria), some interlacing work and a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Also two figures which I have nowhere seen accurately explained, but explanation is easy, for if you go and examine the great Anglian cross at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire, you will find just such a pair of figures with their names written over them thus: "S. Paulus et S. Antonius panem fregerunt in Deserto." The figures are so similar that they would seem to have been carved by the same hand, and the cross at Ruthwell can be dated on good evidence as but a year or two later than that at Bewcastle, whose undoubted date is 670.

The church is dedicated to St. Oswald, not the archbishop of York who died in 992 and was buried at Worcester, but the sainted king of Northumbria who died in battle, slain by Penda, King of Mercia, at Maserfield, 642. His head,