Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/390

 clay sarcophagus, which possibly once contained the remains of a British king.

Just past the tumuli is the inn, at the four cross-roads. That to the left runs absolutely straight for eleven miles to Boston; to the right is the Horncastle road through Moorby and Scrivelsby, with the barn-like church of Wilksby in a grass field behind Moorby. Both these churches have good fonts; that at Moorby is the later of the two, having two crowned and two mitred heads at the four corners, and with very remarkable figures of the Virgin and Child learning, with open book and scourge; the sun and moon being depicted on either side looking on complacently, evidently they had never heard of the Montessori system, also there are six kneeling figures and two angels watching the dead body of the donor. A stone in the vestry, about fourteen inches by eight, exhibits two women and a man vigorously dancing hand in hand to the bagpipes, all in fifteenth century head-dresses and costumes. Moorby is in the gift of the Bishop of Manchester, it having been assigned presumably by Carlisle when the new see was carved out of parts of older ones. How Carlisle came to have patronage here may be briefly told. On St. George's Day, April 23—a day memorable as the birth and death day of Shakespeare, and the death day of Wordsworth—in the year 1292, John-de-Halton, who may well have come of the family who gave the name to Halton Holgate near Spilsby, being then Canon of Carlisle, was elected bishop. Within a month, a fire having destroyed the cathedral and all the town, he set to work and rebuilt the cathedral, and encouraged others to rebuild the town; and by the year 1297 Robert Bruce swore fealty to the king in his presence in the newly risen pile. He was a man of mark, and was mediator between Edward I. and John of Balliol in the claim to the Scottish throne. He planned Rose Castle, the palace of the Bishops of Carlisle. In 1307 he received at his cathedral, from the sick king's hands, the horse-litter which had brought him to the north; and within a few days saw the king, who had bravely mounted his charger at the cathedral door, borne back a dead man on the shoulders of his knights from Burgh Marsh (pronounced Berg) on the Solway shore. In 1318 he was driven from his diocese by Robert the Bruce, and came to the manor of Horncastle, which, as mentioned above, had belonged to the see since 1230,