Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/241

 railway and Humber, when it turns south opposite Hull, has a belt of marsh along the river side, and because it was in old times so inaccessible, it contains some fine monastic buildings.

Two miles west of Barrow is Goxhill. Here there is a fine church tower, with a delicate parapet, and a mile south is the so-called "Priory," which was probably only a memorial chapel served by a hermit in the pay of the De Spenser family. Murray gives this entry from the bishop's registers for 1368: "Thomas De Tykhill, hermit, clerk, presented by Philip Despenser to the chapel of St. Andrew in the parish of Goxhill, on the death of Thomas, the last hermit." It is now a picturesque ruin of two stories, the lower one vaulted and with three large Decorated windows at the sides, and a large double round-headed one at the end, all now blocked, the building being used for a barn. Two miles from this, and near Thornton Abbey Station, is all that is left of Thornton Abbey. A fine gateway, second only to that at Battle Abbey, and two sides of a beautiful octagonal chapter-house, with very rich arcading beneath the lovely three-light windows. Founded in 1139, for a prior and twelve Augustinian canons, it became an abbey in 1149, and in 1517 a "mitred" abbey, the only one in the county except Croyland. And these two are now the most notable of all the monastic remains in Lincolnshire. One of its abbots was said to have been walled up alive, and Bishop Tanner, in his MS. account of the abbey, now in the Bodleian, says of Abbot Walter Multon, 1443: "He died, but by what death I know not. He hath no obit, as other Abbots have, and the place of his burial hath not been found," and Stukeley, 1687-1765, says that on taking down a wall in his time a skeleton was found in a sitting posture, with a table and a lamp, but I am glad to think that though the tradition is not infrequent,—probably as an echo from the days of the Roman Vestal Virgins—there is no positive evidence of anyone ever being immured alive; though an inconvenient dead body was doubtless got rid of at times in that way.

The principal remaining part of the abbey is the fine grey stone gateway, a beautiful arch flanked by octagon turrets, with a passage through them, and then other arches on each side, and beyond these two corner towers. Above the central archway there are two rows of statues in niches with canopies. The Virgin being crowned by the Holy Trinity is flanked by