Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/79

 Next to it is a very pretty half-timbered house, figured in Allan's "History of the County of Lincoln," 1830. This and the Angel stand on land once the property of the Knights Templars of Temple-Bruer.

Among the misdeeds of the eighteenth century are the pulling down of the George Inn and a beautiful stone oratory or guild chapel which stood near it. The Free Grammar school, founded by Bishop Fox 1528, still stands on the north side of the churchyard; but new buildings having been lately erected, the fine old schoolroom has been fitted up as a school chapel.

Fox endowed his school with the revenue of two chantries, which before the dissolution belonged to the church of St. Peter. This church is gone, but doubtless it stood on St. Peter's Hill on lands which had been granted by Æslwith, before the Conquest, to the abbey of Peterborough. Close by now is a good bronze statue of Sir Isaac Newton, and once there was an Eleanor cross, which, with those at Lincoln and Stamford, were destroyed by the fanatical soldiery in 1645.

We now come to the great feature of the town, its magnificent church dedicated to St. Wulfram, Archbishop of Sens, 680. We might almost call this the third church, for the first has entirely disappeared though its foundations remain beneath the floor of the eastern part of the nave, and the second has been so enlarged and added to, that it is now practically a different building; the tower, built at the end of the thirteenth century, belongs entirely to number three.

The ground plan is singularly simple, one long parallelogram nearly 200 feet long and eighty feet wide, with no transepts, its only projections being the north and south porches and the "Hall" chapel used as a vestry.

The second, or Norman, church, ended two bays east of the present tower, as is plain to see from the second pillar from the tower being, as is the case in Peterborough Cathedral, composed of a broad mass of wall with a respond on either side, the western respond being of much later character than the eastern. If the chancel was originally as it is now, it must have been as long as the nave, but the nave then perhaps included two of the chancel bays. At present the lengthening of the nave westward and the adding of the tower has made the nave twice the length of the chancel. At first the church had just a nave and a chancel, but, about 1180, aisles were added to the nave; to