Barnack

St John the Baptist, open, is one of those buildings that whilst I know, intellectually, that I should be blown away by,  it however left me emotionally cold. I loved many, many individual features but for me the whole was not greater than the sum of its parts but I can't really say why; it may have been that the light was fading and the nave was gloomy but I'm not sure. I need to revisit since I missed various bits and bobs which may lead to a re-appraisal, we'll see.

Pevsner, for one, thinks I'm wrong!

ST JOHN BAPTIST. Without any doubt one of the most rewarding churches in the county, with interesting work of all periods, none more interesting than that of the early C11 W tower. The exterior has irregular long-and-short quoins, the familiar thin, unstructural lesenes or pilaster strips, starting in quite an insouciant way even on top of arches or triangles, windows with arched and triangular heads, the typical unmoulded block-like abaci, the flat bands placed parallel with jambs and arch of an opening but at some distance from it, and in addition the most curiously moulded tower arch, an example of how unstructural Late Saxon architectural detail was. One ought to observe specially how, between capitals and abaci of the responds (if these terms can be used), the moulding recedes and rounds the corner instead of forming an angle. The form is almost streamlined. At least as noteworthy the decorative slabs outside the tower with scrolls branching off a stem symmetrically to the l. and r. and birds, one a cock, at the top.* The original entrance into the tower was from the  S. The W recess can never have been more than a recess, as one of the lesenes runs up the wall outside behind it. The S doorway is now blocked inside by the work done in the C13. This consisted of an internal strengthening e.g. by a rib-vault on corbels (single-chamfered ribs leaving a large bell-hole open) and the addition of the octagonal upper part of the steeple. Two big bell-openings of two lights with round arches, triple-shafted jambs and a pierced spandrel (i.e. the Y-motif), low broaches and, standing on them, tall, plain, polygonal angle pinnacles, short spire, or perhaps rather steep-pitched octagonal roof. If it is called a spire it must be one of the earliest in England. The angles of the Saxon nave, which was aisleless, can also still be seen. It was a little wider than the nave is now. In the SE angle a mysterious small arched niche which looks almost as if it had been a piscina. The Saxon roof-line appears on the E wall of the tower.

The Norman style is missing, except for a capital and a head, re-set in the former rood stair in the S aisle.

Next in time come the N aisle and N chapel. The chapel is of one bay. The capitals of the responds indicate a late C12 date. The arch is round but double-chamfered. The arcade is of three bays and has slender circular piers and crocket and volute capitals with small heads.** Square abaci with the corners nicked. Round arches, still with zigzags on the wall surface and at r. angles to it. The N doorway still has a waterleaf capital. So the date of all this is probably the late C12. Small clerestory windows are visible from inside the aisle. Only a little later the S aisle and S porch. The arcades now have fine quatrefoil piers with subsidiary shafts in the diagonals and shaft-rings. The capitals have upright stiff-leaf. The arches are still round but have many fine mouldings. The S porch is a superb piece, tall and gabled with a tall entrance flanked by three orders of columns with stiff-leaf capitals. Pointed arch with many mouldings. The sides inside with tall blank arcading again with stiff-leaf capitals. S doorway with once more three orders, stiff-leaf capitals, and a round arch with many mouldings. The stiff-leaf is all early, that is upright with separate single stems. So the date will be within the first twenty years of the century. An odd rib-vault rises right into the gable (single-chamfered ribs). Shortly after the completion of the porch work must have started on the tower, and must have continued slowly.

The chancel dates from c.1300-30. At the same time the S aisle was widened E of the porch. Pretty windows with segmental arches and ballflower above them. Simpler Dec the windows in the aisle wall W of the porch and in the chancel. The chancel E window, however, is a true showpiece: five steeply stepped lancet lights and below the arch of each light a cusped arch with a crocketed gable over - a very rare motif (but cf. Milan Cathedral, late C14). Of the same phase the chancel arch, the SEDILIA (hood-mould on heads and also one head with arms held up), the PISCINA (pointed-trefoiled arch leaning forward, as they do above the heads of C13 effigies, and crocketed gable), and also the N aisle windows. Perp vestry of two storeys, Perp S chapel (Walcot Chapel) with richly decorated parapet and battlements. Quatrefoil frieze at the base. Simple windows. Very wide arch to the chancel. In the E wall brackets and very tall richly panelled canopies for images.

FURNISHINGS. FONT. C13. Octagonal. Leaf decoration in segmental lunettes at the foot of the bowl and also as a top band. In between single flowers. The supports are pointed-trefoiled arches of openwork with continuous mouldings. - SCULPTURE. Seated Christ in Majesty, relief, Late Saxon and of exquisite quality. The draperies are managed as competently as never again anywhere for a century or more, and the expression is as human, dignified, and gentle as also never again anywhere for a century. - Annunciation, under a canopy, S13 chapel. The message is carried on rays emanating not from the angel but from the Trinity. Late C15. - STAINED GLASS. Many windows by a former rector, Marsham Argles, one dated 1873. They are remarkably good. - PLATE. Cup and Paten, 1569; Almsdish, 1683; Cup, Paten, and Breadholder, silver-gilt, 1707. - MONUMENTS. Cross-legged Knight, defaced (N chapel). - Lady of c.1400; this must have been of fine quality (N chapel). - Grey marble tomb-chest, with recess above and cresting. The recess has a straight lintel on quadrants. Early Tudor (S aisle). - Similar tomb with recess of temp. Henry VIII to a member of the Walcot family. Richly quatrefoiled tomb-chest, recess and four-centred arch. The arch is panelled inside. The back wall has one big shield and above it diapering. Top cresting. - Francis Whitestones d. 1598 and family. Signed (a rare thing at the time) by Thomas Greenway of Darby; 1612. With two groups of small kneelers.

Barnack was known throughout the Middle Ages for its quarries. Peterborough Cathedral is built of Barnack stone. So is e.g. Ely Cathedral. The quarries were exhausted in the C18.

* One such bird also now below an image bracket in the S aisle E wall.
** On one capital an entwined serpent.

BARNACK. It was the home of a vigorous people a thousand years ago. It has seen the Saxons and the Normans and has cherished their work for us as part of our English heritage. If as part of that heritage the name of Charles Kingsley lives in some of the noblest pages of our literature, we owe a debt to Barnack for that too, for this was the home of the Kingsleys a hundred years ago. Here at his father’s rectory (now called the Old Rectory) Charles lived for six years until he was eleven. It is not possible that a mind like his, drinking in the spirit and tradition of our old land as a thirsty man drinks water, should have been here in his formative years and remained unmoved by the appeal of this old tower, one of the four Saxon towers of Northamptonshire.

He must have been stirred by these ancient stones, the simple windows and doorways, and the judge’s seat inside the tower, where. we may sit today with the light falling through a Saxon window above us and look at this old church through the arch the Saxons made. Here Charles Kingsley’s two brothers were born, and here Charles became a poet. All through his life he kept the impressions made on him by this Fenland scene.

From the end of our first thousand years of history has come old Barnack Tower. The Normans preserved it but fashioned the church according to their own ideas, and the English who were fast absorbing their Norman invaders transformed the Norman church through all our great building centuries, and made it what it is. All these years the tower has stood unchanged, except that the Normans raised it another storey and the English gave it a stone steeple. It is certain that there is Danish influence in its carvings.

The Saxon tower rises in two stages with the familiar pilaster strips of stone running to the top on all sides. The stages are divided by a triple stringcourse, and above this on three sides are magnificent examples of Saxon carving, three rich panels of acanthus leaves in relief, all three with a bird on the top, and three other panels of ropework set in window openings. The lower stage has on the south a pure Saxon doorway, and above it a rounded window capped by a square moulding with two birds in the spandrels. The west window is one of the simplest Saxon windows we have seen, made up of seven stones crudely put together, but still as their builders left them a thousand years ago. Above this window is a much-worn head.

It was the Normans (doubtless working with the English that followed them) who added the third stage to the tower, an octagon with double window openings packed within eight-sided buttresses. The arches of the openings are all finely worked, each with three orders set on slender columns, a line of carving running up alongside each outer column. Over these arches a fine corbel table runs round the tower, and above it rises the sturdy-looking 13th century spire, completing as perfect a piece of Norman and Saxon work as we could desire.

The tower is as captivating within as without. The rough stones remain as the Saxons placed them, and in the west wall is a recessed stone seat which was brought to light in the middle of last century when the accumulated rubbish of many generations was removed. It is framed with great stones as used in a Saxon window, and it is believed that this seat is an old bench of justice, perhaps the oldest magistrate’s seat known in England, used by the President of the Court when justice was administered in this tower. In front of us as we sit in the old seat is the fine Saxon arch looking into the nave. lt is raised on simple stones in the true Saxon way, and the arch of two plain orders rests on the crudest of capitals; but it has stood while all the magnificence of our cathedrals has been rising in the land.

It is good to come into this church by its south porch, which is considered one of the best porches in all England, with its high pitched and vaulted roof covered with heavy stones, its wall arcades, and its lofty pointed entrance arch with finely moulded shafts and richly decorated capitals. It leads us to a great round doorway with dainty English shafts, elegant capitals, and row upon row of moulding in the arch. This noble porch was built by the English who followed the Normans. On the wall is a scratch dial.

The church carries on the traditions of architecture through all the styles it has known in our countryside, from the simplicity of Saxon days, through the grandeur of the Normans, into all the phases of our three English building centuries. In the nave the north arcade is 12th century and the south arcade is 13th, as is also the extraordinary clerestory, very low and with only a few small trefoil windows. The chancel is 14th century and its chantries are 15th.

The lofty northern arches of the nave are carved with the zigzag of the Normans, and their foliage and faces are on the capitals; the south arcade is Norman and English, still with the round arches that were passing away, but with the clustered columns and the stiff foliage capitals of the first English builders. Simple Norman carving is on their arch between the chancel and the north chapel. In the middle of the wall of the south aisle is a recessed tomb with fleur-de-lys, and on the wall of the north aisle is a medieval stone relief of Our Lord in Majesty, three feet long, the robe of a finely diapered pattern and still bearing traces of colour; it was found under the floor, and is an impressive piece of craftsmanship.

In the chancel is a triple sedilia with a curious sculpture on the moulding of the arch, a grimacing head with arms thrown back to grip the stone. The piscina here (among several medieval ones) has elaborate 14th century carving. On the north wall of the chancel is a Jacobean monument with painted figures of Francis Whetstone’s family at prayer; he died in 1612. The east window has in the tracery a few fragments of original glass, almost lost among the modern panels. There is a little more old glass in the priest’s room, showing a pope wearing a triple crown, a king, and a youth in a big collar. A good modem window in the south chapel has the Madonna in blue with a red robed and green-winged Gabriel below her.

The north and south chapels, added in the 15th century, both have ancient sculpture in them. In the south chapel, on the left of the east window, is a niche with a rare stone carving of the Annunciation, three figures in the clouds sending rays to the heart of the Madonna,  who is kneeling at a prayer desk. It is a striking group set in a canopy, and has a village scene with a church in the distance. In another canopied niche on the right of this window is a modern Madonna and child. The altar table of the chapel is Jacobean, and is carved with the names of the Fallen in the First World War. In the north chapel is a tomb with carved and painted figures of a knight and his lady from Elizabethan days, and in another recess of this chapel are two battered figures 600 years old.

The font is unusual in shape and commands attention by its profusion of carving by the first English craftsmen. It is 13th century, and stands on eight open arches, looking rather primitive, as if the new style were struggling into being. Round the sides of the bowl are stiff rosettes, eight pairs, and above and below them are two bands of foliage. The cover is carved at its eight angles and crowned by the small figure of a child angel, with wings as big as itself. The pulpit and the screen are modern, the pulpit a good imitation of 14th century tracery, the screen with gilded figures of Mary and John, and a fragment of a medieval screen worked into it.

The church is built, of course, of Barnack Stone from the famous quarries known to the Romans and worked from the days of the Caesars until the end of the 15th century, when the Barnack Rag was exhausted. It was said in the old days that

Peterborough Minster would not have been so high
If Barnack Quarry had not been so nigh.

It is not surprising that in this quaint village the cottages should have medieval work built into them. One 14th century house has carved rosettes and another has a Saxon window.

The Kingsley Brothers

ALL the world knows Charles Kingsley and his Westward Ho! but his two younger brothers, though both brought distinction to the family, are less known. George Henry was born at Barnack Rectory in 1827 and Henry in 1830. We come upon Charles at Eversley in Hampshire where he lies. George entered on an adventurous life while still in his teens, and was wounded during the barricades in Paris in the revolution of 1848. He came back to England and at 21 was fighting an epidemic of cholera. His brother tells us of it in his novel Two Years Ago, where George Kingsley is Tom Thurnall. George was a brilliant talker, a keen sportsman, an enthusiastic field naturalist; and as he was familiar with many languages he travelled widely, and in his 65 years explored as many countries as almost any man of his time. He did much good literary work also, especially in editing manuscripts, and has another claim to fame as the father of the famous Mary Kingsley, who wrote so finely of her travels in West Africa and gave up her life as a nurse in a South African hospital at the time of the Boer War.

His brother Henry was a novelist and an editor during his 46 years, and he, too, travelled far, for he went to Australia when he was 23 and enjoyed his adventures in the Mounted Police. He wrote about twenty books, in which he put much of his experiences of the wild life of Australia, and few of our novelists have more faithfully sketched the best type of an English gentleman. His books are permeated by a fine spirit of romantic chivalry, and in this sense keep the high tone of Charles Kingsley’s books. As a journalist he went through the first war in which Germany attempted to subdue Europe, and after Sedan, when Napoleon the Third and his army were captured, Henry Kingsley was the first Englishman to enter the town.

A Founder of English Literature

GEORGE GASCOIGNE, sleeping in the vault of the Whetstones at Barnack, was one of the founders of English literature. Born at Cardington in Bedfordshire in 1525, he compressed into his 52 years activity enough for half-a-dozen men. A kinsman of Martin Frobisher, he shared the restless energy of his wonderful age, and plunged into the excesses that ruined many brilliant young men in Tudor London. But he had a scholar’s heart. He distinguished himself in Latin in response to a challenge at Gray’s Inn. He turned aside from hunting to write his first poem, and wrote for his Inn the first prose drama ever produced in English, The Supposes. Next he gave us the second blank verse tragedy in the language, Jocasta. He wrote the first prose tale of modern life, the first tragedy in English from the Italian, the first masque, the first satire in regular verse, and the first English essay on poetry.

He furnished Shakespeare with part of the plot for the Taming of the Shrew, but was himself far from being a Shakespeare, or a great poet. He was lawyer, Member of Parliament, soldier, bankrupt, Court poet, and ambassador by turn, a licentious writer turned Puritan, lamenting his early errors and atoning in the famous satire The Steel Glass, a mirror held up to reflect the vices and virtues of his countrymen. He accompanied Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth and wrote verses and masques in her honour. His life was full of adventure. He narrowly escaped shipwreck; he won honours in the field; he was surrounded at the head of 500 English by 3000 Spaniards, and was taken prisoner. On being released he came back to England but was sent out again on a mission, witnessed the sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards, and by his account of it (The Spoyle of Antwerp, Faithfully Reported) constituted himself the first English War Correspondent.

Flickr.

Bainton

Unfortunately a funeral was about to start when I arrived at St Mary, locked status unknown, so I only managed exteriors - a revisit is required.

I returned in early December and found it open, which is nice, but if I'm honest it's really rather dull.

ST MARY. The interior first. N arcade early C13. Three bays, circular piers, circular capitals and abaci, double-chamfered round arches. The W bay is later (pointed arch) and was built as a link with the new W tower. This is Dec. Angle buttresses. Each side in addition treated as a giant sunk panel. W window with Y-tracery but ogee details, tall tower arch towards the nave, bell-openings with Y-tracery, ballflower frieze. Spire with two tiers of lucarnes. Dec also the S doorway and the windows 1. and r. of it. Dec finally the N chapel (one bay, sunk quadrant mouldings). Late C13 rather than early C14 the two splendid PISCINAS, both not in situ: in the E wall of the chancel with a tall gable with naturalistic oak leaves and acorns; r in the E wall of the N aisle with crocketed gable and big finial. Perp chancel. In the E wall two brackets for images. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten, 1650. - MONUMENTS. Mary Henson d. 1805. By Sir Richard Westmacott. With a seated mourning young Grecian.

BAINTON. It has a long and picturesque green by which stand the ancient church and the shaft of the old cross, raised on very high steps and capped by a small stone ball. The decorated tower of the church is 14th century, and has a curious carved mullion at the belfry window, ballflower carving on all sides, and scraps of carved foliage set here and there among the plain stones. We come in by a charming 15th century porch with a crown of battlements. The nave has one arcade (on the north) from the end of the 12th century; the south aisle is 15th century, when the chancel also was built. The arch leading from the north aisle to the chapel is also 15th century. The sedilia, the piscina, and the brackets which once held statues have all little battlements. The font has clustered columns and is 700 years old. On the east wall of the north chapel is a marble relief by Richard Westmacott showing a figure mourning for Mary Henson who died in Trafalgar year. A wall monument in the north aisle to Robert Henson of 1734 tells us that he was Returning Ofiicer for Stamford and that bribes could not corrupt, promises seduce, nor threats deter him from doing his duty.

Flickr.

Maxey

St Peter [locked keyholder listed] is dominated by the Norman tower which is recognisable as such from a distance. Another fantastic exterior and setting but, since the church is way outside the village and I was beginning to lose light, I decided not to track down the keyholder, who would probably be at work anyway, and headed off to Bainton.

ST PETER. The church lies away from the village, grey, broad, and of irregular blocks of varying age and shape. Broad Norman W tower. Flat, thin buttresses strengthened in the C14, when a pretty ogee-headed stair doorway was inserted inside. Corbel-table and above it tall two-light bell-openings flanked by pairs of blank arches.* The top is Perp. The arch to the nave makes an early C12 date certain. Shafted responds with demi-column. Steep bases with a flat zigzag (cf. Castor). Decorated capitals. The arch  was remodelled later. The original church was aisleless, see the W angles. Norman also and not much later (cf. Peterborough) the N arcade of two bays. Big circular piers with many-scalloped capitals and heavy square abaci. Arches with thick rolls. The S arcade is Norman too, but later, say c.1175-95 (cf. Peterborough). Circular piers and square abaci, less heavy. More busily scalloped capitals, nicked at the corners. Arches with two chamfers and a big outer nailhead. The Norman church had a clerestory. Its small windows can be seen from inside the aisles. Of the C13 the chancel arch; the chancel windows seem later, about 1290. Y-tracery cusped, also two lights with a foiled circle over. Perp E window. Attached to the chancel on the S side a treasury of the late C13 or a somewhat later date. It is a small chamber with lancet windows, some of them still with iron grilles, and has a vault. This has diagonal and ridge ribs (sunk wave moulding). Finally the ambitious N chancel chapel, founded as a chantry in 1367. Two bays, four-light E and three-light N windows, with transoms; Perp. Battlements. Arch to the chancel with two sunk quadrant mouldings. The E respond shows that a C13 chapel had existed before. Tall arch to the aisle, splendidly cusped and subcusped in pierced work. SEDILIA and PISCINA with ogee arches and crocketed gables. In the chancel a Perp EASTER SEPULCHRE, ogee-arched, with much quatrefoiling, etc. - PLATE. Cup, 1570; Cup and shallow Bowl on baluster stem, silver-gilt, secular, 1601.

* (Blank arcading inside this stage. VCH)

 MAXEY. We come to it across wide expanses of reclaimed marshland where alders and willows stand in lines by low-lying streams and dykes. On this low-lying land are the ruins of arches called Lolham Bridges, all that is left of a causeway originally built by the Romans to carry King Street, a branch of Ermine Street, across the marshes of the Welland Valley; this causeway was re-built in the 17th century. Now the Fens have been drained and there is little water under the arches, but they remain in their solitude a link with those far-off days.

The church stands solitary away from the village, and has a Norman tower with splendid arcades above a corbel table of stone heads. The tower was built about the time William Rufus was slain in the New Forest, and the belfry was added 500 years ago. There is a sundial on a buttress of the south wall, and the massive iron-studded south door has been here 600 years.

The nave is Norman and has graceful arcades, all the arches with fine capitals carved by the axe. The capitals of the tower arch are more elaborate, but the arch the Normans set on these capitals was replaced by the fine pointed arch of the English builders. One of the capitals has a head with foliage coming from the mouth. The nave has medieval windows, and the ancient clerestories light up the 500-year-old timbers of the roof.

The chancel arch is as high as the roof and is 700 years old. The earliest of the three windows in the chancel is framed by columns with flowered capitals; the other two windows are lancets with good modern glass of Gabriel with a Madonna lily and Michael with sword and scales, a tribute to the vicar’s youngest son, Gerard Sweeting, who fell in Belgium in 1915. The three stone seats for the priests are delicate examples of 14th century carving and have a continuous garland of trefoil moulding and three fine finials. In the north wall of the sanctuary is a richly decorated recess with a carved arch, the back of the recess panelled and traceried, the spandrels filled with carving, and the front below the recess enriched with panelled tracery. On the uprights of this elegant structure are the busts of a man and woman holding shields.

One of the rarest things here is a tiny room built about 1280 with a stone-vaulted roof carved with a four-leaved boss; it is at the south-east corner of the chancel and only six feet square. It has double doors leading to it from the sanctuary, one very old with three locks, suggesting that the chamber was a sacristy.

The north chapel is entered from the chancel by a fine plain arch, and from the aisle under hanging open tracery which has been here 600 years. The chapel has a piscina in the corner and some poppy-head benches, but its main interest is in the gravestones on the floor, and one or two coffins with carved lids. In the east window of this chapel are two small figures of saints in brown and yellow glass 500 years old; it is thought they are Peter and Paul, one carrying a sword over his shoulder. There are other fragments of old glass in the east window of the south aisle.

To students of medieval worship there is much interest in a piscina high up on the south wall of the nave between the top of a Norman arch and a doorway. Through this doorway can be seen the stairs to the old roodloft, and the piscina indicates that mass was celebrated at this high spot 500 years ago.

The exterior of the church is interesting for its examples of 15th century work added to the Norman, as in the top storey of the tower, the west window pierced in the Norman masonry, and the wheel-cross and battlements outside the north chapel.

Over the east window outside is a huge gargoyle with grinning mouth and outstretched claws, and we are not likely to forget our surprise as we stood looking at this strange sight with a solemn owl perched upon it, as still as stone until in an instant he flew away, leaving us alone with the monster in the unbroken stillness of this lonely spot.

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Helpston

Without wishing to sound rude there's not a lot to see in St Botolph, open, [there's a very good Francis Skeate Christ in Majesty east window] but the exterior and setting are lovely; I particularly enjoyed the striking tower, even if it was rebuilt in 1865.

ST BOTOLPH. Norman W tower rebuilt in 1865. The lowest parts are said to have had Saxon long-and-short work. This was exposed in 1865. Early C12 arch towards the nave with scallop capitals. The pointed arch is a re-modelling. Arches also to N and S. These have the original thick roll mouldings. The tower turns octagonal at the clerestory level. C14 bell-openings. Very short spire with one tier of lucarnes. Of the early C13 the S arcade of two bays with circular pier and circular capitals and abaci. Round arches with two slight chamfers. Mid C13 N arcade with octagonal pier and double-chamfered pointed arches. Then c.1300 the chancel and the E bay connecting it with the arcades. The chancel arch has filleted shafts. Original also the SEDILIA and PISCINA, and on the original lines the E window. The other chancel windows are strange replacements of 1609 (date on one of them). Tall, of two lights, straight-headed, with a pointed quatrefoil at the top of each light. Early C13 S doorway with one order of colonnettes and one waterleaf capital and one with upright leaves. Pointed arch. In spite of this, the doorway could go with the S arcade. The porch entrance is early C14. Early C14, i.e. Dec, also the pretty S aisle E window. - PLATE. Cup, 1768 (?); two Patens, 1828; Flagon, 1830.

Arthur waxes lyrical.

HELPSTON. The Romans were here and the Saxons after them, and after the Saxons the Normans, but it is not for antiquities that we come: it is for poor John Clare. Here he was born; here they laid him to rest after 70 years of one of the saddest lives in human annals.

The village in which he saw the light is not very far from the Lincolnshire border, where the level meadows of the Fenlands stretch into the distance broken by nothing but a spire or the great willow fringes of the dykes. The Clare cottage on the Castor road is one of a humble group; it was two houses when the poet was born, but became three, and when he married he took the house next door and was able to remain under the same thatched roof. The third doorway has been blocked up again; it is whitewashed and a tablet was placed on it in 1921 by the Peterborough Museum Society.

This was home to Clare for 40 years; he grew up among these woods and heaths, and here he heard the nightingale. The house is much as it was. He found it roomy and comfortable, though they paid for it only forty shillings a year. It nearly broke his heart when after 40 years he left it for the new house built for him at Northborough, and all the time he was there his thoughts were here, and he wrote:

The old house stooped just like a cave,
Thatched O’er with mosses green;
Winter around the walls would rave,
But all was calm within.

Here they brought him from Northampton. Then they laid him in his grave, and on a stone put these words: “Sacred to the memory of John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant poet. Born July 13, 1793. Died May 20, 1864. A poet is born, not made.”

Shaded by the tall trees that surround the churchyard are two farms on which we found witnesses of the ancient history of this village. On one farm a 15th century archway had just been found when we called, and in the garden were many ancient coffins of Barnack stone. In the other farmyard we came upon a colossal rounded stone, weighing probably two tons, which had been brought in from the cross-roads on the ancient Ermine Street. In the centre of this stone is a square opening apparently cut for a wooden pillar, and it is believed that the stone was the foundation stone of a gibbet.

A beautiful thing poor John Clare would know is the village cross which has thrown its shadow towards the old church tower for 600 years. It is one of the most delightful we have seen, rising from four circular stone steps to a height of 30 feet. The solid pedestal of the cross, set on the top step, has eight sides, carved with slender pilasters and pointed gables of lovely tracery, and round the top of the pedestal is embattled ornament. There is no cross in the usual sense, but a thin tapering shaft which well matches the rest of the monument. Near by is a curiously ornate cross which John Clare would not know, for it was erected in his memory. It stands on a small green in the same wide and picturesque street as the ancient cross, and on its panels are quotations from the poems. Near these crosses, divided from the road by gay flowerbeds are the almshouses built for his old village by James Bradford.

There are nobler churches to look at than this, but there are only one or two churches in all England which take us back to Norman, Saxon, and Roman days. The church was refashioned by the medieval builders, but it has Norman and Saxon stones in its walls, and it may be said that the way to the altar is older than the Christian Church in England. Saxon work is seen in pilaster strips on the tower, in a tiny Saxon coffin lid with a fine cross in a splay of the west window, and in carved Saxon stones inside the tower above the doorway to the turret. Norman work is in three arches of the nave arcades, and Roman work is part of a pavement recovered from a Roman villa in the neighbourhood. It is made up of tiny pieces of tessellated paving, which must have been a jig-saw puzzle to put together and have been relaid outside the altar rails. They are laid in the form of two rectangles about five feet by one, inset with circles, the colour of the little stones being red and yellow, and some of them adorned with trefoils and quatrefoils.

The tower of the church, with its octagonal upper stage and its dumpy spire, has been taken down and rebuilt within living memory, its stones being numbered and reset as in the 14th century. The 15th century porch leads to a 13th century doorway with foliage capitals, in which hangs a door dated 1708 but still on the original hinges. There are two mass dials.

The nave has round and pointed arches, a 15th century clerestory, and a lofty 13th century chancel arch has clustered columns. In each wall of the chancel is a 15th century doorway, and the priest’s door on the south is hung on the original hinges. On one wall are three medieval recesses facing the 13th century sedilia; and the chancel has curiously carved stone heads, an ancient piscina, and two square peepholes from the aisles.

There is a beautiful little gravestone, with flowers in the spandrels, which has been brought indoors and rests against the moulded base of the tower arch; it is to William Salisbury who died in 1693. A blue marble stone nine feet long in the nave floor has a Norman French inscription to Roger de Hegham, who died about 1320. On the wall hangs a great frame containing a painting of the Royal Arms of James the First, unusual for this county. The unicorn has a very bushy tail, the lion is a very furious beast, and there is a cherub in each (upper corner, with good scrollwork round the royal motto. The frame has a double arch at the top. We found this striking painting looking very smart, fresh from its cleaning by the village school teacher, a lady.

Poor John Clare

THE histor of literature is strewn with tragic tales of immortal strugglers and genius that failed to bear full fruit, of men who starved in attics and left behind them better things than gold; but few of these tales touch the heart more deeply than John Clare’s. The poetry of Burns is more vigorous than Clare’s, but it could hardly be more wistful, and it was produced by the same sort of battling with life against the poverty of the countryside. Clare was born almost a pauper, yet as a boy he would buy paper instead of sweets so that he might hide himself away and write on it.

He would sit in the hedges writing poetry, and was already a poet when he met Martha Turner, the faithful struggling partner of the rest of his life. She was 17 and he was 24. They married, and she lived all through his strange eventful life, the same Patty through all the years. It was his love for her that urged him on. He sat in a lane and wrote a letter to a bookseller appealing for 300 subscribers for a book of poems he proposed to publish. He could not afford the stamp and walked with it to Stamford. Only seven people responded, the headmaster of Stamford Grammar School being the first. But when the book came out 3000 copies were sold and it made him the talk of the town. It was then that he married Patty, and he seemed like a new star appearing on the horizon. He came up to London and great people took an interest in him. He just missed meeting Keats, but met fashionable people who raised a fund for him and got him a cottage to live in. They found him rustic and as simple as a daisy, as one of them said, and indeed this shy and nervous John Clare was actually afraid to walk down Chancery Lane, and offered a watchman a shilling to take him another way to Fleet Street.

He went back home and wrote more poems, worked on the farm for a labourer’s wage, and would come back to London again, meeting such men as Charles Lamb, De Quincey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Tom Hood, Coleridge, and Hazlitt. Yet somehow it was all unsatisfactory, for he did not fit into the scene. His half-helpful friends urged him to remain a peasant and not to “spoil himself,” and the harvest he reaped from their friendship was scanty enough.

He would walk about London streets almost penniless when his songs were being sung at Covent Garden. He never had more than a labourer’s .wage to live on, including the £40 a year which came from the fund. He was uncertain of himself, too nervous for company, and the great people who invited him to their houses and patronised him would send him to the servant’s hall for dinner. Once the Bishop of Peterborough’s wife took him to a theatre, and he stood up in the middle of the play loudly cursing Shylock as he called for his pound of flesh. He was fuddled in his brain by poverty and drink. At times he was reduced to hawking his poems about the countryside, yet he would be entertained at a public dinner, and at one of these functions at Boston he contrived to disappear, escaping from the friends who had just put £10 into his bag.

All this time Patty was struggling at their little cottage, where she became quite used to footmen in splendid livery calling to ask John Clare to visit this nobleman or that, or to strangers stopping at the door to ask if John Clare lived there. She would call the Nine-Days Wonder from the fields to be looked at by grand people from London; yet Patty had hardly enough to live on, and could barely feed and clothe her seven children. John himself had not enough to eat, and his health had been visibly weakening for years. At last he broke down, and designed his own gravestone, on which he put “Here rest the hope and ashes of John Clare.”

Patty’s seventh child had just been born when a friend took John and housed him in a mental home. He escaped, and Lord FitzWilliam, who had long been his friend and gave him his cottage free, paid eleven shillings a week to keep him in Northampton Asylum, where he lived 22 years. Patty could not bear to go to see him, and never did see him again, yet Northampton people would see him day after day sitting in the portico of All Saints Church, for he was harmless at times, and allowed to go out like this.

Once in London he had stood in Oxford Street and seen Lord Byron’s funeral pass by; now in Northampton they gave him a seat from which he watched Queen Victoria and Prince Albert pass by; and it is curious for us to read what John Clare did not know that Wordsworth was watching the procession too.

He had wished to lie on the north side of Helpston churchyard where the morning and evening sun could linger longest on his grave, and they laid him there after 71 years of troubled life which had brought him strange fame and ceaseless poverty. Yet he had asked very little of life, for his chief love was in the fields - the primroses and violets and cowslips, the brook that mirrored the blue sky, the bird that sang on bush or tree, the wild flower dancing in the wind. They were all the riches he ever had, and it can hardly be said that they brought him happiness. His life was melancholy and its flashes of enchantment could in no way make up for the dreary years of hopeless poverty and muddling through.

We give the beginning and the end of the poem that represents him best, for it is true to a life lived on a stormy sea, shipwrecked all through, except for some few passages of smooth water and dazzling sunshine that were just enough to show what might have been:

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am tossed.

I long for scenes where man has never trod,
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept,
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.

Flickr.

Etton

I found St Stephen locked with keyholders listed but since the porch gates sported a bicycle lock I decided that the keyholder notice was window dressing and moved on to Helpston.

ST STEPHEN. Memorable as a completely C13 church. W tower with flat angle buttresses, lancet windows, and bell-openings of two lights with a circular shaft between and under a shafted, still round arch. This is remarkably late for a round arch. Frieze with heads, stiff-leaf, and a horizontal figure. Shortish, simple broach spire with low, broad broaches and two tiers of lucarnes in alternating directions. They are just single-chamfered lancets. The aisle windows are of two lights with circles over (originally they were foiled). The blocked N doorway has a pretty trefoiled head. The S porch entrance is round-arched with a chamfer and a hollow chamfer. In the chancel the E window is of five steeply stepped lancets under one arch, and the S windows have two lights and a trefoiled circle. There are no N windows. A blocked arch in the N wall shows that there was a chapel here. Inside the church, the tower arch is pointed and double-chamfered. The C13 roof-line can be seen above it. The quatrefoil clerestory windows are therefore later (C14?). The arcades, not in axis with the tower arch, are of three bays. Circular piers, circular capitals and abaci (different S from N), pointed double-chamfered arches. Some nailhead ornament on the S side. The chancel arch has two hollow chamfers. PISCINAS in chancel and S aisle. SEDILIA in the chancel, pointed-trefoiled. - PLATE. Cover Paten, 1610.

ETTON. It lies secluded from the world, away from the Peterborough Road, and its life has been going on for many centuries. It has the names of nearly 50 rectors who have served its church since John de Stoke came as priest ten years after Magna Carta; and it has the name of Defoe in its annals, for the parents of Daniel Defoe lived here before they migrated to London.

Two pathetic figures haunt this lovely comer of our countryside, John Clare and Michael Hudson. The poet worked at the manor as a ploughboy, and in one of his letters we read that in wet weather the moat used to overflow the path that led to the house so that the farm folk were obliged to wade up to their knees in water. As for Michael Hudson, his brave life ended in the Civil War - in the moat of the manor house John Clare knew, now called Woodcroft Castle. It is one of three fine houses belonging to Etton. The vicarage itself is modern but magnificent, set in its big garden within a massive wall. Facing the east end of the church is a picturesque 16th century house with attractive gables and a spacious porch of two storeys. Woodcroft Castle, lying a mile away, is believed to have been built in the middle of the 13th century by an abbot of Peterborough.

It stands, this solitary place, half hidden by old yews, never a castle, but a fine example of a 14th century manor house, with a deep moat still filled with water and walls four feet thick. It was built in two wings, and has a tower where both wings meet. A room over the gateway was used as a chapel and has kept its piscina through all these generations. The house itself has been modernised with much care and its ancient beauty is preserved. We found the gardens on each side of the drive gay with flowers.

It was here that Michael Hudson met his tragic fate. He was rector at Uffington, not far away over the Lincolnshire border, when the house was besieged by the Parliamentary troops. It was nearing the end of the war and no Royalist defence could last for long; and at last the defendants were overpowered and forced to yield. Michael Hudson was among them, making a gallant stand on the roof until the soldiers flung him from the battlements. They were bitter days and Cromwell’s soldiers knew no mercy. It happened that the gallant Hudson saved himself by catching hold of the parapet as he fell, whereupon a soldier took his sword and slashed off his hands, so that he fell into the moat; one more martyr for a lost cause.

The church is mostly 13th century except for the 14th century clerestory and most of the timber roofs. The main beams of the nave roof are 14th century. The building comes from the days when the Norman style was changing and the English were turning the round arches of the Normans into pointed ones. The tower has three stages, the lower ones with narrow lancets, the top stage having double openings with columns supporting a round arch, and just above this a corbel table from which the spire slants away. The corbels are fascinating in their variety, with small heads, fleur-de-lys, four-leaved carving, and a complete profile figure of a man.

We come in by the south doorway, 700 years old, and still with part of its original timber built into its massive door. The nave has three arches on each side. The narrow lancet in the west wall of the tower is deeply splayed and throws its band of light through a tower arch above which can be seen the marks of the roof removed by the 14th century builders of the clerestory, which has three quatrefoil windows on each side. The chancel arch leads into a very long chancel, in which is a triple sedilia with four plain columns, a double piscina with three small heads on its moulded arches, and one of the tiniest openings we have seen into an aumbry. On the moulding of a window which has been blocked up are two beautiful heads carved 500 years ago. The back of a seat made from a small octagonal table is an elaborately carved panel of a double eagle, probably 18th century. The plain font is medieval, and there is a 13th century piscina with a trefoiled arch in the south aisle. The priest’s doorway into the chancel is only five feet high.

Flickr.

Northborough

St Andrew, locked keyholders listed, is probably, no..definitely, the strangest exterior I've come across to date [it's my 1096th church so it's taken a while to get to this level of weird]; a somewhat mundane C12/13 nave and chancel are made extraordinary by the addition of a massive south transept, part of an expansion plan by an unknown Delamare which was then derailed for unknown reasons, probably lack of money looking at the scale of building, resulting in a, being generous, half built extension which appears to make the church leak like a sieve. It's bonkers and naturally I loved it.

ST ANDREW. The general impression is more curious than beautiful - a small church like many others in the neighbourhood and the fragment of an enlargement so bold that it would have given Northborough one of the biggest parish churches in the county. The original building is late C12 to C13. Late C12 the W end with the bellcote. Four thin buttresses, two open bell arches with continuous roll mouldings, and a gable. C13 the s doorway (orders of colonnettes, moulded arch with very wilful details, a little stiff-leaf and two head-stops), the S and N aisle windows, the arcades inside (three bays, circular piers, circular capitals and abaci, double-chamfered arches), and the SEDILIA and PISCINA in the S aisle. The chancel is Dec - see the chancel arch with fillets on the responds and knobbly leaves on one capital - and the N and S windows. Dec also the start of the great renewal. The work was paid for by a member or members of the Delamare family. In the new S transept end wall, two large tomb recesses are provided, and as the effigies have disappeared (cf. however Glinton) one cannot now say which of the Delamares was the benefactor. Geoffrey died in 1327, Henry in 1340. The transept is two big bays long and ends in a wall with a big five-light window between two polygonal turrets. The window has flowing tracery of original design under a four-centred arch. The E and W windows are equally interesting. They have segmental arches, and the tracery beneath them is of arch heads standing on the apexes of the arches of the lights. The arch heads are filled with minor tracery motifs. The transept is embattled and has a frieze of ballflower below the parapet. The W wall is obviously not in its final form. To the N of the window it recedes, and there is an arch there rising only partly above the roof of the old aisle. This arch must be intended to be the connexion between the new work and a new, much higher aisle, i.e. a completely new W arm.

In the interior the incompleteness is even more noticeable. Arch into the chancel with continuous mouldings (two waves). Another, much too high, into the aisle. But as the transept W wall lies a little further to the W, this arch rests on a detached pier, and thus a narrow passage is formed between the main vessel of the projecting part of the transept and its W wall. The pier is slender and has a square core with four demi-shafts. Moulded capitals, arch mouldings as in the other arches. At the S end the arch stands on a small horizontal human figure. The window is shafted inside, the other windows have head-stops. In the E Wall between the two windows, and originally no doubt above the altar, two brackets for statues and two rich canopies. The two tomb recesses have already been mentioned. The work is lavish throughout and done in excellent masonry. - PLATE. Cup and Cover Paten, 1776. - MONUMENT. James Claypole d. 1594. Big, rather bare standing monument with a plain arch. No effigy. The Claypoles owned Northborough Manor House. Cromwell’s daughter married a Claypole. His widow also lived at Northborough.

NORTHBOROUGH. A pleasant village of grey stone houses, with a wealth of trees and cottages standing in their own gardens, a village in which Fame has called at the cottage as well as the manor. Northborough lies seven miles across the Fenlands from the stately cathedral of Peterborough. It is a village to come to for its own sake, but if it had no natural charm the pilgrims still would come, for here lie two widows, Mrs Oliver Cromwell and Mrs John Clare.

Cromwell’s widow came here after the Restoration to spend the last years of her life with her son-in-law John Claypole, who had married Elizabeth, the fairest and best beloved of Cromwell’s daughters. He, too, was bereaved, for his wife had passed away less than a month before her father, and was laid to rest in the Abbey, the only Cromwell allowed to remain there when Charles the Second took his revenge by flinging the bones of Cromwell and Blake into the dust. The manor house of the Claypoles, now a farmhouse, is a stone-roofed group with a courtyard, a house of mellow stone, built in 1340, with a vaulted gatehouse and a dignified Tudor porch. Over the porch is a little room called Cromwell’s Closet, for it is said that Cromwell was often a visitor here, and there are those who believe that his body may have been laid in the churchyard. The theory is suggested by the existence of a document saying that the body was conveyed by night from London to “Narborough,” and it is said that a headless body was once seen at the opening of a grave here. But the evidence is against it, and it is generally accepted that Cromwell’s body rests at the house of his daughter Lady Fauconberg, Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire, walled up in what is known as Cromwell’s Room.

What is certain is that in this lovely manor house Cromwell’s widow lived through the evening of her life, and that they laid her to rest under the floor of the beautiful Claypole chapel.

John Clare’s widow was taken to the churchyard from the cottage in which she lived with the poet until his reason failed him, and he was taken away from here to live 22 years in a madhouse. Their cottage is still here, with its thatched roof, and in front of it grow Madonna lilies, a lovely feature of most cottage gardens here. The cottage was built for the poet, and he was able to arrange with the builder to face it away from the road so that he could pass through his front door into his secluded garden, and could hide, when visitors came, behind the thick yews which his boys cut so neatly into circles and cones. Often he would hide here while Patty was telling some fashionable caller that he had just gone out:.

Beyond the garden was the orchard, and beyond its willow boundary was the pasture. He had come here as a farmer, a rich patron having built the house for him, but was too poor to stock the farm, so that he had to let the pasture. One of his half-helpful friends in London bought him a cow, another sent him two pigs and five pounds for tools, but it was all of little avail, and muddle-headed John, who could get nothing much out of life except the poetry that came into his head, wrote that he quite agreed with Solomon that it was better to die than to be poor. He was under this roof for five years, having come from Helpston where he had been under the same roof for 40 years, and then his independent life was at an end.

We found his grandson, another John Clare, mowing the grass by the roadside a little way from the village, and he talked with us with simple dignity of the sad old age of the first John Clare who had written his poetry as he walked these roads and fields. He was never happy here, for he had been transplanted from his native soil. He had roses climbing up his porch, the lovely yews still growing in his garden, and delightful country around, but he had lost his home, and his fits of melancholy became ever more frequent as he voiced his loneliness and grief in his poems.

The church which shelters the figures of these two famous widows was begun in Norman days and bears the mark of builders of succeeding centuries. Of the Norman building all that remains is the west wall of the nave, a striking spectacle for it has neither doorway nor window, while above it is a double bellcot with little round Norman arches framing the two bells, one medieval and the other 17th century. Even more striking are the two eight-sided turrets, battlemented walls, and ballflower ornament of the 14th century south chapel.

The two aisles with their deeply splayed west windows, and the arcades on round pillars, come from the 13th century. In the north aisle is an aumbry and a recess with lovely window tracery at the back which may have served as an Easter Sepulchre. The south aisle, still with its original roof, has a beautiful doorway with columns and deep mouldings, and at the east end is a double arch which served as sedilia, and a trefoil-headed piscina long hidden by a wall of the chapel. The south porch and the clerestory, which also has its original roof, were added in the 15th century. The eight-sided font is also medieval, and the existence of ancient wall-paintings beneath the thick plaster is indicated by black letter inscriptions and other fragments of ornament on various parts of the wall and arcades. The chancel with its two piscinas is 14th century and the capitals of its wide arch have the distinctive natural foliage of this period.

A little later in the 14th century Geoffrey de la Mare built his splendid chantry, now called the Claypole Chapel. He set a great arch in the south wall of the chancel, and a loftier arch at right angles to this (leading into the south aisle) which forms part of the chapel arcade and is supported by a beautiful clustered column with a solemn face above. A tiny doorway here, in the corner, is the only clue to the existence of the turrets seen outside. One of these contains a stairway leading from the roof and down to a charnel house; two openings in the east wall outside belong to chutes through which for centuries gravediggers conveniently disposed of bones. In the other turret is a tiny room which was probably used by the chantry priest; one of them is said to have been found dead here sitting in his chair. We may pass through a doorway in one of these turrets and have the curious experience of walking along the windowsill of the great south window of the chapel, the little doorways opening in the columns forming the window jambs. Below the window are two exquisitely carved recesses which may once have held the altar tombs and figures of Geolfrey de la Mare and his wife, and a quaint head links the two arches. Between the windows in the east wall of the chapel are two beautiful canopies for sacred statues, canopies said to have been models for the stalls of Peterborough Cathedral.

Beneath the floor of this lovely chapel, somewhere near the centre (now encumbered by an organ tending to mar its graceful lines) lies Mrs Oliver Cromwell, buried here on November 19, 1665, year of the Great Plague. Near her lie two of her grandchildren, Martha and Cromwell Claypole, children of the Protector’s favourite daughter Elizabeth, who herself sleeps in Westminster Abbey. It is interesting to record that Cromwell Claypole in his will asked to be buried “as near my grandmother Cromwell as convenience will permit.” There is an arched recess in a ten-foot tomb of an Elizabethan James Claypole, but of other Claypoles the only legible stone is Martha’s, buried two years before her grandmother.

John Clare’s widow, Patty, lies in the churchyard, east of the chancel, and near her rest some of her children. Over a daughter’s grave is the poet’s Universal Epitaph, with the last line spoiled by the substitution of ‘ woman ’ for ‘ man ’:

No flattering praises daub my stone
My frailties and my faults to hide.
My faults and failings all are known
I lived in sin and in sin I died.
But oh condemn me not, I pray,
Ye who my sad confession view,
But ask your soul if it can say
That I’m a viler woman than you.

An unhappy epitaph, written by an unhappy man.

Mrs John Clare

IT was in the second autumn after Waterloo that Patty Turner met John Clare in the lanes at Great Casterton. He said he was John Clare and she said she was Martha Turner. They stopped in sight of a cottage with a barn, when Martha said this was her home and he must go. But John Clare came again and again, and always when Patty saw him she would run for her gingham frock. She had never known anyone who talked like this young man from the lime kilns, and he had actually written a poem about her, in which he said “My love, thou art a nosegay sweet.”

His Patty was so dear to him that for the first time in his life he made a serious effort to find some occupation away from the lime kilns. He would become a poet, and now Patty, whose father had forbidden their meetings, and who had been half in love with a cobbler, defied her father and gave up the cobbler and married the poet.

Alas, John muddled his life through. He wrote fine poems, hundreds of them, and his name will live in literature, but he could not control his life; we read at Helpston how he frittered it away.He was a nine-days-wonder in London, and footmen in livery would call at Patty’s cottage while he was working in the fields to give an invitation for John to visit this nobleman or that. Patty must have been a little tired of all this patronage while she was struggling to buy food and clothes for her growing family. She saw the children weakening for want of nourishment, and John’s health breaking down, and all his lovely verses were of little comfort to her now. Sickness, debts, and the constant nag of poverty were only a little relieved by the kindly help of a few faithful friends, and at last John’s mind gave way.

One terrible winter Patty’s seventh child came, and John Clare lost his reason. A friend took him away and Patty never saw him again, though he lived in a madhouse for 22 years. Her dreams, like his, had been broken. She, like him, had loved the sunshine and the flowers, but the drudgery of life, the long long gloom with rare brief patches of sunlight breaking through was too much for her. She bore the burden of his long and bitter life but could hardly have been said to share his rare hours of enchantment. She could not endure the misery of going to see him in Northampton Asylum, and she lived on after him and was carried to her grave in Northborough churchyard, a grave unmarked and now forgotten.

Mrs Oliver Cromwell

THE simple woman who was to share the life of Oliver Cromwell was the daughter of a knight of Essex, Sir James Bourchier, and was married to Cromwell when he was only 21. The marriage took place at the altar of St Giles’s in Cripplegate, where long afterwards they were to bring an old man named John Milton for his long rest.

Cromwell was at that time a country gentleman of moderate fortune, and it was a comfortable home to which he took his bride, and there were born to them four girls and four boys. When the Civil War broke out, and Cromwell, who had never had a day’s military training, became a leader of the Parliamentary forces, Elizabeth was left to watch over the safety of the children, and of Oliver’s aged mother, while he was fighting the country’s battles. In the end, when Cromwell became Protector, king in all but name, Elizabeth remained the same modest woman who had ruled over his house in Huntingdon.

When he was away she would write him homely letters, playfully begging him not to forget her and the children, and it was one of these letters that Cromwell, who used to write to her at every opportunity, sat down to answer after his great victory at Dunbar:

My dearest, I have not leisure to write much. But I could chide thee that in many of thy letters thou writest that I should not be unmindful of thee and thy little ones. Truly, if I love thee not too well, I think I err not on the other hand. Thou art dearer to me than any other creature.

Again in the following year we find him writing:

My dearest, I could not satisfy myself to miss this post, although I have not much to write; yet indeed I Iove to write to my Dear, who is very much in my heart.

That is charmingly said, after thirty years of married life; but Elizabeth also had her difficult times, for Cromwell was given to fits of melancholy and lasting sadness, and it was her part to comfort him.

She came very near to being Queen of England, but was saved from that false step by the tough old warriors of an unconquerable army, who, while they loved Cromwell and would have died for him, would not tolerate the idea of another king. Parliament voted him £100,000 a year and two palaces, Whitehall and Hampton Court, but the life of the Cromwells was very simple and their food was as plain in their great days as when they were plain country folk.

When Oliver died, Elizabeth, like all the Cromwells, fell on evil days. Within two generations Cromwells were begging their bread. Scandal mongers spread abroad abusive reports of Mrs Cromwell, now living in quiet poverty, saying she had stolen things belonging to the royal house, and gangs of ruffians visited her house repeatedly, pretending to search for the king’s property but themselves stealing her small possessions. She bore it for a while, then wrote to the king affirming her innocence and begging for his protection. Her appeal was ignored, the letter being casually put away with the king’s papers, marked “The petition of Old Noll’s wife ”; so Cromwell’s widow crept away from London, and no one knows where she hid till at last she found refuge at her son-in-law’s farm at Northborough. Here she died on November 19, 1665. Had she died ten years before she would have had a national funeral in Westminster Abbey; as it was the woman who had been so near the throne passed away unnoticed, and was laid to rest in a simple grave.

Flickr.

Glinton

St Benedict's, open, enormous spire dominates the area and kept re-appearing all day but I really liked the gargoyles particularly the mooning man.  Unlike today when buildings are constructed under fixed price contracts, the mediaeval craftsman, on completion of each individual piece, was paid according to the item’s worth as assessed by the patron. We can only assume that our mason considered his patron  - the Bishop of Peterborough - had grossly undervalued his work and, no doubt turning his back on working again for him, expressed his disgust in like manner with his last gargoyle.

ST BENEDICT. Norman W window in the N aisle. Early C13 chancel chapel. One bay, semicircular responds, capitals with single upright leaves, remodelled pointed arch with one chamfer and one wave moulding (C14 ?). Of c.1300 the S porch entrance, with dogtooth in the arch, and the S aisle windows. Perp arcades (octagonal piers, castellated abaci) and clerestory. Big figures as supports of the former roof  beams. Short Perp W tower with a spire recessed behind battlements and taller than the tower. Two tiers of lucarnes. The outline of the spire has a marked entasis. - FONT. Square, Norman, with decoration of squares, saltire crosses, etc. - PLATE. Cup, 1710; Paten on foot, 1711. - MONUMENT. Stone effigies of a Forester with horn and a Lady, early C14, very defaced. Perhaps from Northborough, in which case the man might be Geoffrey Delamare, supposed to have been Forester of Kesteven.

GLINTON. Gleaming in the blue like a needle, the delicate white spire of the church is so isolated in space that an aeroplane seems almost to touch it in its flight. Lovely in position and design is the small 17th century manor house. Standing back in an old garden behind a low hedge, it has brown curved gables, massive chimneys, and deeply-mullioned windows. The churchyard is a spacious place, and the spire of the dignified church is striking with its curves and its eight beautiful openings. Under the battlements of the south roof of the nave are four monster gargoyles, half man, half beast, and there are many heads, frowning, grinning, scowling.

The porch is 15th century, but its outer doorway is 13th; in the porch roof are five original floral bosses and two defaced stone figures, a woman wearing a wimple and a forester with horn, bow, and arrows. The high arcades of the nave are 15th century, and  the clerestory windows are eight heads which held up the old roof.

The font is from the Norman church and has deep bands of carving, and there is more Norman craftsmanship on the columns on which the English builders raised an arch leading from the chancel to the north chapel. There is an elegant 14th century piscina with an elaborate canopy, in contrast to the plain 13th century piscina in the south aisle. The church has two old chests. On the south wall of the chancel is a monument with two quaint figures on either side of a Latin inscription of 1696 to John Wyldbore.

But this village has another tale, for here John Clare as a boy of seven took lessons from a white-haired old schoolmaster named Seaton, and it was in the church vestry that they sat. Seaton taught him to read and write and do a little arithmetic, and if his work was good the old man would give the boy threepence a week; once it was sixpence for reciting the third chapter of Job. In later years Clare met his first love here, Mary Joyce, and though nothing came of it she remained his ideal of love and beauty, and she haunts his muse.

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Peakirk

A highly successful run through the Sole of Peterborough began at St Pega, open, which, despite an unprepossessing exterior, is a cracker. Full of interest with some good glass, a Norman south door and fabulous wallpaintings this was a great start to the day.

ST PEGA. A unique dedication. St Pega was the sister of St Guthlac of Croyland across the Lincolnshire border. The W wall belonged to an aisleless Norman building. The bellcote is Norman too. It has two plain arches on plain imposts and one above them. Gable with one set-off to allow for the two lower arches. Norman also the ornate s doorway. One order of slim colonnettes. Tympanum with three fan-motifs, two horizontal from the bottom corners spreading to the centre, the third vertically rising in the middle. Arch with zigzag on the surface as well as at r. angles to it and with other motifs. The outer porch entrance is Dec (cf. Werrington). The N doorway is plain, round-arched, and single-chamfered. Of the C13 the W lancets. Internally the C12 is represented by the N arcade of three bays. Circular piers with many-scalloped capitals and square abaci. Round arches with roll mouldings. A little later the N chancel chapel. The responds still have many-scalloped capitals and the arch still has rolls, but it is pointed. The tall chancel arch cannot be later either, yet it is pointed too. The capitals of the responds have late C12 leaves. Fully E.E. the S arcade. Circular piers, circular moulded capitals, and abaci with a little nailhead decoration. Double-chamfered pointed arches. - LECTERN. The wooden stem is of the early C14 - a rarity. It has slender attached shafts. - SCULPTURE. Two pretty C14 head corbels in the E wall of the N aisle. - WALL PAINTINGS. Mostly C14. Cycle of the Passion above the N arcade in two tiers (top l. the utensils on the table of the Last Supper, below Scourging of Christ; then a later St Christopher interrupting the cycle; then Christ washing St Peter’s feet and Crucifixion and Deposition below, followed by Entombment and Resurrection; at the E end Mocking of Christ and the Noli me Tangere below). Below both tiers a zigzag band painted in perspective. In the S aisle (SE corner) one unidentified representation, in the N aisle (near the NE corner) also an unidentified representation. In addition, in the N aisle E of the N door the Three Quick and the Three Dead (cf. Longthorpe Tower). The upright corpses and the insects around them are very horrible. Also a scene representing a Warning to Gossips. Two women sit whispering to one another. A devil presses their heads together. - STAINED GLASS. E window by Kempe & Tower, c.1914. - PLATE. Cup, 1710, and Paten, 1711; Almsdish, 1791.

PEAKIRK. It is a typical stretch of Fenland that brings us to it from Crowland. Once a great marsh, it is now cut up by deep dykes and small streams, wild and almost uninhabited, the silence broken only by the cry of wild birds as they sweep from their hiding in clumps of reeds and rushes.

In this desolate swamp 1200 years and more ago St Pega founded for herself a little hermitage while her famous brother St Guthlac was building a cell in the more desolate marshes on which Crowland Abbey stands. Guthlac and Pega were of royal descent, but had left their home to live a life of meditation and retirement in these wide solitudes. There is no doubt that a Christian church has stood in this place ever since those days. This is the only church dedicated to Pega in this country.

Apart from the church in a garden, and sharing in its simplicity, is a small chapel still known as the Hermitage and probably standing on the site of St Pega’s cell. The chapel we see was built by the Abbot of Crowland in the 15th century, and the builders set a Saxon cross on the east gable and a stone with Saxon ornament in the chapel. The altar has a reredos of supreme beauty, the lower panels being very rich in medieval tracery, while modern craftsmen have carried on the surrounding panels and figures of the Crucifixion scene above. On the walls hang copies of a sacred painting by Rubens and another by an Italian master, and there are photographs from the Guthlac Roll at the British Museum.

The church has Saxon and Norman masonry in its walls. It has no tower but a gabled turret with three round arches for bells. Saxon long and short work is clearly seen at the corners of the nave, and Norman work on the capitals of two magnificent arches of the north arcade and on the 13th century arch leading from the chancel into the north chapel. Norman work is seen also on two doorways, one of which has an 800-year-old masterpiece of carving in its tympanum. At the base is a group of fan-shaped designs, and the arch expands with seven bands of carvings, all different, probably 200 pieces of ornament so clear and well-preserved that it seems incredible it has been here all these centuries. The other Norman doorway is a plain round arch cut from a single stone.

The chancel is 15th century, but the arch rests on lofty Norman pillars with finely moulded Norman capitals. The clerestory, with its eight lancet windows, is 14th century. The chancel is magnificently lighted by two great windows in the south wall and the five-light window which almost fills the east wall. The 14th century builders also set spacious windows in the aisles, carving on the outside of one a band of ballflowers linked by slender sprays. They pierced the Norman west wall to insert the west window. but left on each side of it the deeply splayed windows which had been inserted 300 years before.

The east window shows St Pega in brilliant colours with Mary, Peter and John, and is in memory of a curate who came and stayed as rector until he completed all but 60 years. He was Canon Edward James, a county alderman who erected the village cross here; it was his brother who restored the Hermitage and brought from Gloucestershire the old panels of tracery for the reredos.

The octagonal font is medieval, the altar table is 17th century, the reading desk is on a 14th century pedestal formed of eight clustered wooden columns which spread out at the base to fit into a 14th century stone foundation, an elaborate piece of moulding with the upper half eight-sided and the lower part square. The altar rails are modern with open tracery; they are a memorial to a boy chorister who came at eight and sang in the choir until he died. There is a 15th century piscina facing an aumbry with lovely modern doors, and a second piscina (a plain one of the 13th century) is in the south aisle beside another aumbry. At the four corners of the chancel are four stone heads which bore the weight of the original roof.

A striking window in the chancel is in memory of Francis Faithfull, who fell at Ypres in 1915. It has figures of Joshua and David with the Captain of the Lord of Hosts between them. Joshua, clad in mail and wearing a green cloak, is saying: “Art thou for us or for our adversaries?” and David, with a bow and arrow, a staff and a sling, is saying: “I am come in the name of the Lord of Hosts.” A wall-tablet in mosaic of brilliant colours bears the names of the Fallen in the First World War, and among the designs are the kangaroo and the maple leaf, a reminder of the Colonial troops who fought with the sons of the village.

Standing in a field near the entrance to the village is a brown stone dovecot about twenty feet square.

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Conington

All Saints is a CCT church and is one those rarities that are kept locked with keyholders listed in the village. I had approached from the north east and found the road closed [the road had literally been washed away] about half a mile before the church and so was on foot. As I had no idea where the village was I failed to gain access and will, rather pleasingly, have to go back.

This was definitely the church of the day set in a stunning location this peculiar concoction of a church is outstanding and the interior looks to match the exterior.

I did the interior in April 2017 and it probably exceeded my expectations. The interior is vast and, as all CCT churches should be, full of bird and bat shit, monuments and most of all interest. Absolutely stunning.

ALL SAINTS. A large and important church, all of c.1500, with a W tower truly monumental. It is ashlar-faced and of four stages and has panelled polygonal buttresses (cf. Cambridge), a base frieze and a panelled top frieze, a surprising recessed doorway with a small pointed tunnel-vault, a transomed (over restored) W Window of five lights, then, above small two-light windows, round windows, looking C17 in their details, four-light bell-openings under four-centred arches, and big pinnacles re-done in 1638 by Sir Thomas Cotton. The rest of the church is cobble. Embattled nave and aisles, four-light aisle windows, three-light clerestory windows (except for the much wider W bay, which has five-light windows), a higher rood-stair turret, and a chancel only projecting by one bay beyond the chapels. Internally the greatest surprise is due to the restorations of the C19. The tower was originally open to the nave by a high arch, and at that height there was a vault. Now there is a low W entrance hall with a tierceron-star vault and as high up as the original vault a plaster vault. The arcades are of four bays with a very complex Perp section to the piers and capitals only towards the arch openings. The aisle roofs stand on the wall side on shafts carried up from the floor. The chancel chapels are of only one bay. In the chancel very handsome SEDILIA, straight-topped with three little hanging vaults. The seat front has a frieze of reticulation units. The PISCINA has a shelf. - FONT. Octagonal, Late Norman, with intersecting pointed arches on colonnettes. - SCREENS. To the S chapel, of broad one-light divisions with ogee arches. - To the N chapel simpler. - (CHAIR. High-backed Gothic armchair, probably late C14. The back has a blank panel with a cusped and subcusped arch.)* - PEWS. 1841, and characteristic of the date. - (FRONTAL. Parts of two Italian C17 maniples and two stoles. Silver embroidery on pink silk.) - PLATE. Large foreign Plate; Paten on foot of Britannia silver, 1702-3; Britannia silver Cup, 1711-12.

MONUMENTS. Conington is uncommonly rich. The series starts with the memorable Purbcck-marble effigy of a Franciscan tertiary, a young face, perhaps someone who joined, as was not unusual, shortly before he died to be buried a religious. It is a noble, very sensitive piece. The date must be about 1300. - Then, all of about 1600, the memorial tablet between two columns to Thomas (inscribed XIII) Cotton d. 1519 and his Wife and in the same position in the other aisle that to Prince Henry of Scotland,** and one much larger to Thomas (XV) and Thomas (XVI) Cotton and their wives with two arches and columns and an upper display of strapwork and heraldry, and opposite it in the other aisle that to David King of Scotland in two tiers with columns. In the upper part lies just a crown in the arch between the two columns. - Sir Robert Cotton d. 1631, the famous antiquary whose collection of manuscripts is now in the British Museum, and Sir Thomas d. 1662, both erected by Sir John about 1675 or thereabouts. The composition and details of the two tablets are identical except that Sir Robert’s bust is in an oval recess and the garland below is of laurel, whereas Sir Thomas’s is in a circular recess, and the garland is different. In spite of the identity in so many ways, the sculptural quality differs. The bust of Sir Thomas is good, that of Sir Robert  outstanding. Who was capable at the time of characterizing so strikingly and modelling so perfectly? - Sir John d. 1702 and his wife, also d. 1702, two identical tablets with portrait medallions at the top. Very similar to the Cotton monument at Conington, Cambridgeshire, dated 1697 and signed by Grinling Gibbons.

* As the brackets indicate, I have not seen this chair. Mr McHardy doubts that it is medieval. He thinks it may belong to the pews. Photographs make me inclined to believe the date of the RCHM, but with the proviso of heavy restoration about 1840.

** Members of the Scottish royal family were lords of the manor in the C12 and early C13.

CONINGTON. It is famous as the home of the Cottons, and their 16th century castle still stands, a splendid spectacle with quaint gables and grey chimneys. It stirs us to remember that its walls have stones which must have been among the last things Mary Queen.of Scots would see as she walked to the block, for the stones came from Fotheringhay. A mile or so away is a round hill, once a fort, and close by is a farm still bearing the proud name of Bruce’s Castle.

A splendid spectacle, too, is this 15th century church, its lovely chancel, its beautiful great windows, and its impressive tower, all the work of master hands. Everywhere there is dignity. Seen from a churchyard shaded by yews, it has the strength of a castle and the charm of a palace, the tower with four great pinnacles like spires.

Perhaps we come to see the Conington tombs, a proud assemblage of those fashionable monuments beloved in their day but not in ours. Four of them were put here by Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary who built up a famous library and built Conington Castle partly from the ruins of Fotheringhay. On one of these monuments the proud Sir Robert put the royal arms of Scotland with crowns and shields and unicorns, and another is to Prince Henry of Scotland, from whom Sir Robert claimed descent. There are marble medallions of Sir John Cotton and his wife, another of Sir Thomas, and one of Sir Robert himself, who came to lie among the monuments of his ancestors in 1631.

But older than the Cottons, older than anything else in the church, is the marble figure of a 13th century man in habit and cowl with a knotted cord hanging from his waist.

The chancel has a fine canopied stone seat, a 13th century font; 16th century oak screens, an iron-bound chest, an ancient painting of St George and the Dragon, and an altar table with a frontal which has in it 17th century fragments of Italian robes embroidered with silver flowers. In the tower is a broken stone on which is an engraving of a 15th century crucifix with a figure on either side and a heraldic shield. There is a stone in the north aisle marking the burial place of a curate of Holme named Johnson, who saved Oliver Cromwell’s life when he fell from his horse into the river.

The story is told that a curate of Conington saved Cromwell’s life from drowning and that, on being asked if he remembered it, said to Oliver in later years, “Yes, but I wish I had put you in rather than see you in arms against your king.”

But what will seem to most people its most unexpected and dramatic possession is a stately chair like a wooden throne, its arm-rests adorned with carvings of angels, swans, and doves, most attractive little figures. It is said to have been an abbot’s chair at Peterborough, but its historic interest is that it is believed to have been used by Mary Queen of Scots as she lay waiting for death at Fotheringhay.

By three doors still swinging on their hinges men and women have been coming to see the glory of this place for 400 years, and we do not doubt that the doors will be swinging still in 400 years more.

Robert Bruce’s Descendant and His Treasures

BORN at Denton, three miles away, Robert Bruce Cotton (Bruce because he claimed descent from Robert Bruce) had the fortune to be sent as a boy to Westminster School, where was sown the seed that was to furnish a unique harvest for the advantage of mankind.

After his course at Cambridge he returned to London and settled down at a house wlwse site the House of Lords now covers, Cotton House, in which Charles  Stuart was to lodge throughout his trial. Here Cotton began that collection of books, manuscripts, coins, and other riches of antiquity which brought him European fame.

The dissolution of the monasteries had broken up and scattered the literary treasures of ages, and many were perishing, to leave irremediable gaps in knowledge. The hour brought the man, and the man was Cotton. Deeply learned, he had that passion for literature which animated Chaucer’s parson, and he had ample wealth to gratify his desires.

He bought old manuscripts as an act of piety, but he read them, so that he became the foremost authority on English history and precedents, and to him the King and Parliament turned when guidance was necessary on questions of precedence, taxation, or constitutional law. His treasures and the joy with which he lent them brought him friendships beyond compare. At his house were to be seen Bacon, Ben Jonson, Selden, Stow, Speed (“lighting his taper” at his patron’s torch), Bodley, Pym, Wentworth, Coke, everybody of note in learning and letters.

He helped Raleigh with documents for his History, written during his imprisonment in the Tower; he collaborated with Camden; Bacon, Stow, and Speed worked in his library. His Saxon charters are the very foundation of the history of pre-Norman England. He himself wrote history and antiquarian tracts and pamphlets, but it is as collector and source of information that he remains unique. His greatest acquisitions were two of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta, one given him by a friend, and the other bought for fourpence from a tailor who was about to cut it up for stiffening a collar! At first a favourite of James and one of his baronets, Cotton was the firm friend of Carr, the royal favourite, whose part in the Overbury murder landed Cotton in the Tower as a very distant accessory long after the fact. His views on national liberty lost him the favour of Charles, and he was imprisoned on a trumped-up charge and his library taken from him.

He was eventually liberated, but never recovered his treasures, which, though restored to his family by Act of Parliament, became in 1702 a national possession, the Cottonian Library now housed magnificently in the British Museum.

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Holme

To be honest I didn't think St Giles, locked keyholder listed, looked like it was likely to be very interesting inside, and wanting to get to Conington before the light went, so I didn't bother searching out the keyholder and contented myself with Exteriors only. Reading Pevsner I don't think I missed much.

ST GILES. 1862 by Edward Browning. Rock-faced, with a double bellcote. Dec in style, even the round clerestory windows with flowing tracery. The even, straight-headed three-light aisle windows look well from inside. Inside old materials were re-used. The E respond and two pier capitals N and S are medieval, S with a scalloped C12 capital and a moulded C13 capital, N with C13 octagonal capitals. - PLATE. Cup of 1709-10.

HOLME. One of the Fenland villages, it has lost a lake, which became good ploughland a hundred years ago, but it has still Holme Wood, all that is left of its old forest. It was in Denton Fen close by that an iron post was driven through 22 feet of peat to the underlying clay in 1852. When examined in 1932 it was found that the peat had shrunk ten feet, showing that the Fens are losing their rich mould and sinking a foot about every ten years.

There is a fragment of an ancient cross by the road, a 17th century cottage with beautiful Dutch gables, a group of thatched cottages, and a church only a lifetime old, though its altar table is three centuries old and its arcades go back to the Normans.

There is a very fine brass candelabra swung from the west arch of the chancel. The chancel and sanctuary have a fine tiled floor which has been uncovered in our time.

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