Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/444

 as it soars upwards from basement to lantern, that in the distance it looks more like a thick mast or the headless stem of a gigantic tree than a church steeple.

There was once here a church of the type of Sibsey, said to date from 1150, of which but little has been discovered. The present building was begun in 1309, when the digging for the foundation of the tower began "on ye Monday after Palm Sunday in the 3rd yr of Ed. II." They went down thirty feet to a bed of stone five feet below the level of the river bed, overlying "a spring of sand," under which again was a bed of clay of unknown thickness. The excavation was a very big job, and the "first stone" was not laid till the feast of St. John the Baptist (Midsummer Day) by Dame Margaret Tilney, and she and Sir John Truesdale, then parson of Boston, and Richard Stevenson, a Boston merchant, each laid £5 on the stone "which was all ye gifts given at that time" towards the expense which, we are told, was, for the whole tower, under £500 of the money of those days. Leland, Vol. VIII., 204, says: "Mawde Tilney who layed the first stone of the goodly steeple of the paroche chirch of Boston lyith buried under it." The work of building up the tower was interrupted for fifty years, and the body of the church was taken in hand, the present tower arch serving as a west window. Then the tower began to rise, but it was finished without the lantern. In the middle of the fifteenth century the chancel was lengthened by two bays, and the parapets and pinnacles added to the aisles. The parapet at the east end of the north aisle is very curious and elaborate, being pierced with tracery of nearly the same design as that on the flying buttresses of Henry VII.'s Chapel at Westminster. There were several statues round the building on tall pedestals rising from the lowest coping of the buttresses to about the height of the nave parapets; one is conspicuous still at the south-east corner of the tower and above the south porch. The tower has three stages, arranged as in Louth church, and then the lantern above. In the first stage a very large west window rises above the west doorway, and similar ones on the north and south of the tower, and all the surface is enriched with panelling both on tower and buttresses. The next stage is lighted by a pair of windows of great height, finely canopied and divided by a transom, on each side of the tower; this forms the ringing chamber, and a gallery runs round it in the thick