Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/473

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mention of the name is not in the fens but at Navenby, where one Osbert Coste had held land in King John's reign.

The neighbourhood of Croyland Abbey, of Spalding Priory, and of Boston Haven, with its large wool trade, made "Holland" a district of considerable importance, and led some of the more enterprising mercantile families to settle in the neighbourhood.

The same causes occasioned the building of the fine fen churches, which still remain, though the great houses have disappeared. Custs settled in Gosberton and Boston as well as at Pinchbeck. At the latter place, what is now the River Glen was in the fifteenth century called the "Bourne Ee," or Eau, and the road by it was the "Ee Gate." Here Robert Cust in 1479 lived in "The Great House at Croswithand," in which was a large hall open to the roof and strewed with rushes, with hangings in it to partition off sleeping places for the guests or the sons of the house, the daughters sharing the parlour with their parents. Robert is called a "Flaxman," that being the crop by which men began to make their fortunes in Pinchbeck Fen. He continually added small holdings to his modest property as opportunity arose, and his son Hugh, succeeding in 1492, did the same; buying two acres from "Thomas Sykylbrys Franklin" for 50s. and one and a half from Robert Sparowe for £5, and so on. Hugh is styled in 1494 "flax chapman," in 1500 he had advanced to "Yeoman." He then had three farms of sixty-nine acres, and by economy and industry he not only lived, but lived comfortably, and had money to buy fresh land, though his will shows that things were on a small scale still, so that individual mention is made of his "black colt with two white feet behind." After the death of his two sons, Hugh's grandson Richard succeeded in 1554, and married the juvenile widow, Milicent Slefurth née Beele, who brought him the lands of R. Pereson, the wealthy vicar of Quadring, with a house at Moneybridge on the Glen, which she left eventually to her second son, Richard. His grandson Samuel took to the legal profession, and, disdaining the parts of Holland after life in London, left the house there to his brother Joshua, who was the last Cust to live at Pinchbeck. The family were by this time wealthy, and had a good deal of land round Boston and elsewhere. Samuel's son, Richard, married in 1641 Beatrice Pury, and had a son called Pury, whence spring the Purey Custs. The Pury family then lived