Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/53

 *

the finest in the county, in which are herds of both fallow and red deer, is very large, and full of old oaks and hawthorns; the latter in winter are quite green with the amount of mistletoe which grows on them. The lake covers one hundred acres. The house is a vast building and contains a magnificent hall 110 feet long, with a double staircase at either end, and rising to the full height of the roof. In the state dining-room is the Gobelin tapestry which came to the Duke of Suffolk by his marriage with Mary, the widow of Louis XII. of France. Here, too, are several Coronation chairs, the perquisites of the Hereditary Grand Chamberlain. The Willoughby d'Eresby family have discharged this office ever since 1630 in virtue of descent from Alberic De Vere, Earl of Oxford, Grand Chamberlain to Henry I., but in 1779, on the death of the fourth Duke of Ancaster, the office was adjudged to be the right of both his sisters, from which time the Willoughby family have held it conjointly with the Earl of Carrington and the Marquis of Cholmondeley. Among the pictures are several Holbeins. The manor of Grimsthorpe was granted to William, the ninth Lord Willoughby, by Henry VIII. on his marriage with Mary de Salinas, a Spanish lady in attendance on Katharine of Aragon, and it was their daughter Katherine who became Duchess of Suffolk and afterwards married Richard Bertie.

Just outside Grimsthorpe Park is the village of Swinstead, in whose church is a large monument to the last Duke of Ancaster, 1809, and an effigy of one of the numerous thirteenth century crusaders. Somehow one never looks on the four crusades of that century as at all up to the mark in interest and importance of the first and third under Godfrey de Bouillon and Cœur de Lion in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; as for the second (St. Bernard's) that was nothing but a wretched muddle all through.

Two miles further on is Corby, where the market cross remains, but not the market. The station on the Great Northern main line is about five miles east of Woolsthorpe, Sir Isaac Newton's birthplace and early home.

I think the most remarkable of the Bourne roads is the Roman "Kings Street," which starts for the north and, after passing on the right the fine cruciform church of Morton and then the graceful spire of Hacconby, a name of unmistakable Danish origin, sends first an offshoot to the right to pass through the fens to