Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/249

 with clustered shafts and carved capital, the base of which rests on a panelled block, which looks like an old font. Many bits from the old church, which was restored throughout in 1885, are ranged on the low wall of the churchyard walk, some of which look worthy of a better place.

The line from the docks runs along by the shore to Cleethorpes, where the Humber begins to merge into the sea. The wide, firm sands and the rippling shallow wavelets of the brown seawater are the delight of thousands of children; the air is fresh, food and drink are plentiful, and all things conspire to make a trippers' paradise, while the Dolphin Hotel, which, like the others, looks out on the sea, is no bad place for a short sojourn in the off season.

The corporation had in old times two seals, one the common seal, and one the mayor's seal; the latter showed a boar charged by a dog and a huntsman winding his horn, an allusion to an ancient privilege of the mayor and burgesses of hunting in the adjacent woods of Bradley Manor. The common seal bore a gigantic figure of a man with drawn sword and round shield, and the name 'Gryem,' the reputed founder of the town; on his right a youth crowned, and the name 'Habloc,' and on his left a female figure with a diadem and the legend "Goldeburgh," the name of the princess he is said to have married.

These two interesting and distinctive old seals have, sad to say, been discarded for one bearing the arms of the corporation, just like what any mushroom town might adopt.

The figures on the old seal alluded to the tradition embodied in the old Anglo-Danish ballad of Havelock the Dane, which was borrowed from a French romance of the twelfth century, called "Le lai de Aveloc," which in turn was probably taken from an Anglo-Saxon original. It tells how Havelock, son of the Danish King Birkabeen, was treacherously put to sea and saved by one Grim, a Lincolnshire fisherman, who brought up the waif as his own. He grew to be of huge stature and strength and of great beauty, and, from serving as a scullion in the king's kitchen, he became betrothed to the king's daughter; and his royal descent being discovered, the Danish king rewarded Grim with a sum of money with which he built a village on the coast and called it Grim's town or Grimsby.