Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/247



In the churchyard, after passing under a yew-tree arch, you see a magnificent walnut on a small green mound. There is no porch. You enter by a small, deeply moulded doorway at the north-west end of the north aisle. The pillars of the arcades are clusters of four rather thick shafts, some with unusually large round capitals, but others various in shape, and all of a bluish grey stone. There are four bays, three big and one a small one next the tower at the west end. There is a flat ceiling, both in nave and chancel, which cuts off the top of the Early English tower arch; hence the nave and aisles are covered, as at Swaton, near Helpringham, by one low, broad slate roof, reminding one of that at Grasmere. The chancel arch, if it can be called an arch at all, is the meanest I ever saw, and only equalled by the miserable, and apparently wooden, tracery of the east window. The chancel, which is nearly as long as the nave, is built of rough stones and has Decorated windows. On the floor is a curious brass of local workmanship probably, to Isabella, wife of Roger Barnadiston, c. 1420, and the artist seems to have handed on his craft, for the attraction of the church is a singular seventeenth century brass before the altar, to Sir Thomas Barnadiston, Kt. of Mikkylcotes, and his wife Dame Elizabeth, and their eight sons and seven daughters. The children kneel behind their kneeling parents, who are, however, on a larger scale, and have scrolls proceeding from their mouths. Above them is a picture of the Saviour, with nimbus, rising from a rectangular tomb of disproportionately small dimensions, while Roman soldiers are sleeping around. A defaced inscription runs all round the edge of the brass, and in the centre is the inscription in old lettering: "In the worschypp of the Resurrectio of ōr Lord and the blessed sepulcur pray for the souls of Sir Thos Barnadiston Kt. and Dame Elizabeth his wife

and of yr charite say a pr noster ave and cred and ye schall have a C days of p~don to yor med"

Another six miles brings us to the outskirts of Grimsby, the birthplace, in 1530, of John Whitgift, Queen Elizabeth's Archbishop of Canterbury. This is not at all an imposing or handsome town, but the length of the timber docks, and the size and varied life in the great fish docks, the pontoons which project into the river and are crowded with fishing boats, discharging tons