Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/409

 lodgment for the masons engaged on the castle and church. Of these the latter is singularly well built, as any building supervised by Bishop William of Waynflete was sure to be, and evidently of very good stone; and the two buildings being close together are striking specimens of the secular and ecclesiastical architecture of the period.

The Treasurer's wife, who was sister and coheir of William fifth Baron d'Eyncourt, died a year before her husband. They are buried in the church, and two very fine brasses once marked the spot. He was a K.G., and this shows him with the Garter and Mantle of his Order, but the brass is sadly mutilated now; while her effigy is, sad to say, lost entirely.

Two other fine brasses of this family are in the church. One, of the Treasurer's niece, Joan Stanhope, who married first Sir Humphrey Bourchier, son of the Earl of Essex, who was made fourth Baron Cromwell in her right in 1469; and secondly, after her first husband had been slain at the battle of Barnet, 1471, Sir Robert Ratcliffe. She died in 1479, and was succeeded in the property by her sister Matilda, who had married Lord Willoughby d'Eresby. Her brass has also been a particularly fine one. She died in 1497, and ten years before this the Tattershall estate had passed to the Crown. The inscription on her brass is filled in by a later and inferior hand, and no mention is made of her two next husbands.

There is a very fine brass also of one of the last provosts or wardens of the college, probable date between 1510 and 1520. In 1487 Henry VIII. granted the manor to his mother, Margaret Countess of Richmond, and, the Duke of Richmond having no issue, Henry VIII., in 1520, granted it with many other manors in the neighbourhood to Charles Duke of Suffolk. This grant was confirmed by Edward VI. on his accession in 1547, but the duke and his two sons having died, he granted it, in 1551, to Edward Lord Clinton, afterwards Earl of Lincoln. The Clintons held it till 1692, when it passed, through a cousin Bridget, to the Fortescue family under whom both church and castle have suffered severely. Amongst other vandalisms, Lord Exeter, when living at Revesby, was allowed to remove the fine stained glass windows to his church of St. Martin's in Stamford, in 1757. He paid £24 2s. 6d. to his steward for white glass to be put in in their stead, but the glass was not put in, and for eighty years the church was open to the wind