Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/474

 at Kirton, near Boston. He left the law for a soldier's life, and was "captain of a Trained Band in the Wapentake of Skirbeck in the parts of Holland." He succeeded his father in 1663 and lived, after the Restoration, at Stamford. In 1677, by interest and the payment of £1,000, he obtained a baronetcy. His son, Sir Pury Cust, who had been knighted by William III. in 1690, after the battle of the Boyne, in which he commanded a troop of horse under the Duke of Schomberg, died in 1698, two years before his father. His wife, Ursula, the heiress of the Woodcock family of Newtimber, had died at the age of twenty-four in 1683. Her monument is in St. George's church, Stamford. She traced back her family to Joan, "the fair maid of Kent," through Joan's second husband, John Lord Holland, if we are to take it that she was really married first, and not simply engaged when a girl to Lord Salisbury. At all events, her last husband was the Black Prince, by whom she was mother of Richard II. Her father was Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, the sixth son of Edward I.

In 1768 Sir John Cust was Speaker of the House of Commons. The present head of the Cust family is the Earl of Brownlow.

Close to Pinchbeck, on whose already sinking tower the builders had not dared to place their intended spire, is Surfleet, where the tower and spire lean in a most threatening manner. Arches have been built up to support it, and by the well-known power of old buildings known as "Sticktion," it may last for many generations, but it presents a very uncomfortable appearance. For the next twenty miles we shall be constantly crossing the great dykes which drain the fens, all running eastwards. The road which divides after crossing the Hammond Beck and the Rise-Gate-Eau passes through Gosberton, once called Gosberdekirk, a large village with a very fine Perpendicular church. You enter by a richly moulded doorway from a very wide porch, over the entrance to which is a figure. To the right of the porch, arched recesses are seen under each south aisle window. There is a central tower with large transepts and a lofty crocketed spire. A Lady chapel adjoins the south transept. The clerestory is a later addition, and the ground has been filled up so that the beautifully carved bases of the nave pillars are two feet below the present paving. A trap-door is lifted to show one of them. The rood staircase is on the south side, and in the south transept is a particu