Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/445

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door of one of these is a remarkable handle, a ring formed by two bronze lizards depending from a lion's mouth. The clustered shafts and springers of the stone vault were built at the beginning, but the handsome groined roof with its enormous central boss 156 feet from the ground was not completed until 1852. The next story has large single-arched windows of a decidedly plain type. These are the only things one can possibly find fault with, but probably when the tower had no lantern the intention was to exhibit the light from this story, the bells being hung below and rung from the ground. Eventually the eight bells were hung in the third story, and the lantern, by far the finest in England, was added, which gives so queenly an effect to the tall tower. Before this was done four very high pinnacles finished the building, subsequently arches were turned diagonally over the angles of the tower so as to make the base of the octagonal lantern. The roof of the tower and the gutters round it are of stone and curiously contrived. The lantern has eight windows like those in the second stage of the tower, but each one pane longer, and the corners are supported by flying buttresses springing in pairs from each tower pinnacle. The whole is crowned with a lofty parapet with pierced tracery and eight pinnacles with an ornamented gable between each pair of pinnacles. Inside was a lantern lighted at night for a sea mark. The church of All Saints, York, has a very similar one, and there the hook for the lantern pulley is still to be seen.
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Inside, one is struck by the ample size and height of the church and its vast proportions. The choir has five windows on each side. But the nave is spoilt by a false wooden roof which cuts off half of the clerestory windows. It is a pity this is not removed and the old open timber roof replaced. In the chancel are sixty-four stalls of good carved work, and the old and curiously designed miserere seats, often showing humorous subjects as at Lincoln, are of exceptional interest. Of the once numerous brasses most are gone, but two very fine ones are on either side the altar: one to Walter Peascod, merchant, 1390, and one to a priest in a cope, c. 1400; an incised slab of 1340 is at the west of the north aisle. The Conington tablet in memory of John Conington, Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford, on the south wall