Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/252

 second wife was Ann Roper, sister-in-law to Margaret Roper, who was the daughter of Sir Thomas More, and who—

"clasped in her last trance Her murdered father's head."

The Hundon tombs have recumbent stone effigies under recessed arches in the North wall, one being of Sir W. de Hundon cross-legged, with shield, and clad in chain-mail from head to foot. He fought in the last crusade, 1270. Another, in a recess massively cusped, is of Sir John de Hundon, High Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1343, and Lady Hundon his wife, in a wimple and the dress of the period. Sir John is in plate armour, with chain hauberk, and girt with both sword and dagger, and both wear ruffs. She has a cushion at her head, and a lion at her feet. He lies on a plaited straw mattress rolled at each end, and wears a very rich sword-belt and huge spurs, but no helmet.

The singular cluster of very early church towers near Caistor are similar to those near Gainsborough, and to another group just south of Grimsby (see Chapter XXIII.). South of Caistor is Rothwell, which we hoped to reach in a couple of miles from Cabourn, but could only find a bridle road, unless we were prepared to go two miles east to Swallow, or two miles west to Caistor, and then make a further round of three miles from either place. The church, which keeps the register of marriages taken in Cromwell's time before Theophilus Harneis, Esq., J.P., after publication of banns "on three succeeding Lord's Days, at the close of the morning exercise, and no opposition alleged to the contrary," has two very massive Norman arches, the western bays with cable moulding. The tower is of the unbuttressed kind, and exhibits some more unmistakable "Long-and-Short" work than is at all common in the Saxon-built towers of Lincolnshire churches, built, that is to say, if not by Saxon hands, at least in the Saxon style, and in the earliest Norman days. The village is in a depression between two spurs of the Wold, and a road from it, which is the eastern one of three, all running south along the Wold, leads to Binbrook. The middle road is the "High Dyke," the Roman road from Caistor to Horncastle, and has no villages on it. The western one goes by Normanby le Wold, Walesby, and Tealby, and joins the Louth-and-Rasen road at North-Willingham. From this