Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/438

 work remains from an earlier church. A knight in alabaster, a good Jacobean pulpit, and a remarkable old alms-box made out of a solid oak stem are in the church, and round the churchyard is a moat with a very large lych-gate on the bridge across it. A mile and a half east of this are the remains of an old stone building of early date, called the Moat House.

Two of the Conington family were vicars here in the seventeenth century, and a Thomas Arnold was curate in 1794.

Leverton is but two miles from Leake, and Benington only one mile further. The churches in this district have no pinnacles. Leverton was thatched until 1884, when the present clerestory was built. The chancel has some beautiful canopied sedilia, which are spoken of by Marrat in his "History of Lincolnshire" as "three stone stalls of most exquisite workmanship, to describe the beauties of which the pen seems not to possess an adequate power." At the back of one of these is an aumbrey, or locker. The windows are square-headed, the font is tall and handsome, but the greatest charm of the building is the sacristy or Lady chapel to the south of the chancel—a perfect gem of architecture, the carved stone work of which is rich and tasteful. Crucifixes surmount both gables of this, and also that at the chancel end, this profusion being a consequence of the church being dedicated to St. Helena. Whether she was the daughter of a Bithynian innkeeper or a British princess, she was the wife of Constantius Chlorus and mother of Constantine the Great; and the legend is that, being admonished in a dream to search for the Cross of Christ, she journeyed to Jerusalem, and, employing men to dig at Golgotha, found three crosses, and having applied each of them to a dead person, one of the crosses raised the dead to life, so she knew that that was the one she was searching for. The church of North Ormsby is also dedicated to her. At Leverton the rood-loft steps exist on the south of the chancel arch, and the churchwarden's book, which begins in 1535, gives the bill for putting up the rood loft and also for taking it down. At the beginning of last century Mrs. A. Skeath, of Boston, made a new sea-bank three miles long, which effectually reclaimed from the sea 390 acres for this parish.

The village of Benington has a fine church with a good porch and a turret stairway to the north-east of the nave. The roof retains its old timbers with carved angels. In the chancel