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 CHAPTER XXIX

CHURCHES IN SOUTH LINDSEY

Spilsby to Wainfleet—Little Steeping—Tomas-de-Reding—Monksthorpe—The Baptists—Thomas Grantham—Firsby—Thorpe—Churchwarden's Book—The "Dyxonary"—Wainfleet—William of Waynflete—Halton Holgate—Sire Walter Bec—Village Carpentry.

The record of the churches in the marsh land of the South Lindsey division would not be complete without some mention of Wainfleet. The Somersby brook, which, winding "with many a curve" through Partney and Halton, becomes at last "the Steeping river," is thence cut into a straight canal as far as Wainfleet, and then, resuming its proper river-character, goes out through the flats at Wainfleet Haven, near that positive end of the world, "Gibraltar Point."

Little Steeping has just undergone a most satisfactory restoration in memory of its once rector, Bishop Steere, who succeeded Bishop Tozer of Burgh-le-Marsh as the third missionary bishop in Central Africa, and there did a great work as a missionary, and also built the first Central African cathedral in what had previously been the greatest slave market of the world—Zanzibar. The restorers have had a most interesting find this year (1912), for the chancel step, when taken up, proved to be the back of a fine recumbent effigy of a fourteenth century rector. Doubtless the monument was taken from the arched recess in the north wall of the chancel and thus hidden to save it from destruction in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. The masons who fitted it into its new bed had no scruple in knocking off the inscribed moulding on one side, and a bit of the carved stone got broken off and was found in the rectory garden.