Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/277

 brooch found at Kirkoswald in Cumberland, which, for purity of design, richness of ornamentation and beauty of execution, it would be difficult to match in any age or country, and the cloak chain, found at Fiskerton, described in Chapter XIV.; all these are quite first-rate in their different lines, and should make us speak with respect of our Saxon ancestors.

Having already noted the Gainsborough group (Chap. XVII.) and the Caistor group (Chap. XX.), we will now make our way towards a third group of pre-Norman towers to be seen on the Louth and Grimsby road.

In Norman times strongholds and churches were built all over the country, and doubtless many domestic houses which did not aspire to be more than ordinary dwelling-places. It is curious how almost entirely these have vanished; one at Boothby Pagnell and three in Lincoln are among the very few left. In Lincoln 'The Jews' House,' 'Aaron's House,' and 'John of Gaunt's Stables' or 'St. Mary's Guild' go back to the beginning of the twelfth century. They none of them would satisfy our modern notions of comfort, but neither do the much later houses, such as the mediæval merchant's house called "Strangers' Hall," in Norwich, which is so interesting and so obviously uncomfortable. When King John of France was confined at Somerby Castle in the fourteenth century he had to import furniture from France to take the place of the benches and trestles which was all that the castle boasted, and to hang draperies and tapestries on the bare walls; and though some of these were supplied him by his captor, comfortable furniture seems to have been not even dreamt of at that time in England.

For the churches the Normans did surprisingly well, as far as the building and stonework went, but the beautiful wood-*work, which is the glory of our Lincolnshire marsh churches, is mostly the work of the men of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. We see this mediæval workmanship sometimes in the bench ends and stalls and miserere seats, but most notably in such of the rood screens as have escaped the successive onslaughts made on them in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whilst the shameful neglect of the eighteenth and the shocking ignorance of both clergy and laity in that and the