Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/400



made a low obeisance to the King drank the Wine; after which, making another low obeisance to his Majesty and being accompanied as before, he departed out of the Hall, taking with him the said Cup and Cover as his fee."

The amount of work done by the Normans in England has always astonished me. Not only did they build castles and strongholds, but in every county they set up churches built of stone, and not here and there but literally everywhere. They apportioned and registered the land, measured it and settled the rent, and, though hard task masters, they showed themselves efficient guardians, nor was any title or property too small for the king and his officers to inquire into. Hence, in quite small out-of-the-way places in the county we find monuments in little and almost unknown churches which attest the activity of our Norman forefathers and which, when examined by the aid of documents from the Public Record Office or the abbey or manor rolls, old wills and all the early parchments in which the industrious bookworm revels, often unfold chapters of early history of extraordinary interest, if not for the general public, at least for students and for the local gentry who still haunt the places where once the armed heel of the knight rang and the monastery dispensed the unstinted doles of a period which would have held up both hands in astonishment at the luxury of our poor laws, the excellence of our roads and the enormity of our rates and taxes. Take, for instance, the little village of Driby in the Lincolnshire wolds, a village the early denizens of which my old friend, the late W. C. Massingberd, has taken the trouble to make acquaintance with, and to whose labours I am indebted for what little I know about it. He tells us how even in Saxon times a notable man lived at Driby, one Siward, not perhaps the great Northumbrian Thegn mentioned in Macbeth, but a later Siward who helped Hereward and his fenmen to oppose the Normans at Ely. Whoever he was, he held Scrivelsby and a large acreage in the Wolds. Next we find the great Lincolnshire Baron, Gilbert de Gaunt, succeeding Siward at Driby, holding, as Domesday Book (1086) shows, direct from the king.

Early in the next century Simon de Driby comes before us;