Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/347

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pool and did not believe in the efficacy of infant baptism. This was doubtless one of the places which was ministered to by the famous leader of the "General Baptist Church" who suffered such shameful and repeated persecution in the days of Cromwell and Charles II., Thomas Grantham, for he was a native of Halton, where the name still exists, and throughout a long life showed himself a man of a truly religious and eminently courageous heart, of whom his native village may well be proud. He died in 1692, aged seventy-eight, at Norwich, and was buried inside the church of St. Stephen, as a memorial to him set up therein states, "to prevent the indecencies threatened to his corpse," such as, we read on a tombstone in Croft churchyard, had been perpetrated on the body of his friend and fellow-Baptist, Robert Shalders, whose body was disinterred on the very day of his funeral by inhabitants of Croft, and dragged on a sledge and left at his own gates. Doubtless the clergyman was privy to this, so hot was the feeling for religious persecution in those days, and took credit to himself for it, for in the parish book of Croft we may read as follows:—

"Dec 20th, 1663. These persons here underwritten, viz. Roger Faune, Gent., Robert Shalders, Anne Montgomerie, Cicilie Barker, Alice Egger, were excommunicated in the parish church of Croft the day and year above written,

"per me R. Clarke Curate Ibid      Philip Neave }       John Wells   } Churchwardens."

Two miles east of Steeping a good road to the right goes to Firsby, where is a small church built by Mr. G. E. Street to show how an entirely satisfactory building adapted to the needs of quite a small parish could be put up at a very small cost. The whole church cost under £1,000, and was built in less than six months, and opened November 5, 1857. In Thorpe we find a graceful font, a well-carved Perpendicular screen and a good Jacobean pulpit. The place belonged after the Conquest to the Kyme family. The Thorpe churchwardens' book commences in 1545, and in 1546 contains such items as these about the rood light and the light in the Easter Sepulchre:

"An° reg° regs Hen. VIII, xxxvij. "By thys dothe ytt appr what Symon Wyllȳson & Roger Hopster hath payd & layd for the cherche cocernyng the