Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/262

 in the panels of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York; and that is all. The steeple, with its large belfry windows, was doubtless built for its clock and bells; there were at first but three, which in 1726 were increased to a full peal of eight, but the clock and its chime was there as early as 1500. The spire was not completed till 1815; the weathercock was fixed then, but no lightning-rod until 1844 after the spire had been struck and damaged three times, in the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries; in the eighteenth it escaped.

The first of the Louth churchwardens' books has an ill-written entry of the year 1515-16, the time of the second (or thirteenth century) church, which tells us that one Thomas Taylor, a draper, bought a copper basin in York and had it made at Lincoln into a "Wedercoke" for the church. This is very interesting, for the basin had been part of the spoil taken from the King of Scots at Flodden.

Twenty years later the vicar of Louth was hanged with others, at Tyburn, for his part in the Lincolnshire rebellion, when 20,000 men took up arms in defence of the pillaged monasteries. Concerning this rebellion, there is a graphic account of the receipt of Henry VIIIth's letter in response to the people's petition, which was read in the chapter-house at Lincoln, on October 10, 1556. Moyne tells how, when they thought to have read the letter secretly among themselves in the chapter-house, a mob burst in and insisted on hearing it: "And therefore," he goes on to say, "I redd the Kynges letter openly and by cause there was a lyttyl clause therein that we feared wolde styr the Commons I did leave that clause unredd, which was persayved by a Chanon beying the parson of Snelland, and he sayde there openly that the letter was falsely redd be cause whereof I was like to be slayn." Eventually they got out by the south door to the Chancellor's house, while the men waited to murder them at the great West door, "And when the Commons persayved that wee were gone from theym another way, they departed to ther lodgings in a gret furye, determynyng to kill us the morowe after onles wee wolde go forwards with theym."

The "lyttyl clause" referred to as likely to "styr the Commons," was wisely omitted, for it is that in which the king expresses his amazement at the presumption of the "rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and