Lincolnshire Towers: St. James’, Louth

For Lincolnshire Day (1st October), a third article in the ‘Lincolnshire Towers’ series.

St. James’ church, Louth, Lincolnshire, August 2021.

They could not have known how poignant their triumph would prove.  On 13th September 1515, the eve of the feast of the Holy Cross, the people of Louth in Lincolnshire gathered to see the new steeple of their parish church crowned with a magnificent weathercock:

William Ayleby, parish priest, with many of his brethren priests, there present, hallowed the said weathercock and the stone that it stands upon, and so conveyed upon the said broach [spire]; and then the said priests singing Te Deum Laudamus with organs, and the kirk-wardens garred ring all the bells, and caused all the people there being to have bread and ale, and all the loving of God, our Lady, and all saints. [1]  

Theirs was an achievement resplendent with superlatives.  Here, in the far north-east of their county, on the marshward and seaward side of the Wolds, and out on a limb from the central ‘limestone belt' of England’s main spire-building regions, they had raised the highest tower of any parish church in the land, at 287 feet 6 inches, and one of the slenderest spires, with an apex angle of only 9 degrees 7 minutes.  To this day the tower remains the third-highest extant medieval structure in Britain, after the cathedral towers of Salisbury (404') and Norwich (320') [2].  But the superlatives are not confined to facts and figures alone.  The tower’s weightless loveliness has entranced the eye of all from Pugin to Betjeman.  ‘It rises up stage after stage of impossible beauty,’ wrote Betjeman. [3]  Julian Flannery, in Fifty English Steeples, his magisterial architectural survey of medieval church towers, writes lyrically of ‘this most beautiful of English steeples’, with its ‘sublime verticality and soaring silhouette’.  For him it is ‘the apotheosis of English steeple-building’. [4]

St. James’ church seen from Westgate, August 2021.

The townsfolk that Holy Rood Eve could hardly have known how brief would be the fullness of their triumph, hardly have imagined that their tower would prove a final great masterwork of the English Gothic architecture and the medieval age.  ‘England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth and the arrival of the English Reformation,’ says Flannery,  ‘Within a generation […] medieval England had passed into history.’ [5]  Two decades later it was at this very church of St. James, at the foot of this very tower, and in part precisely because of its beauty, that one of the most violent episodes of the early English Reformation was to unfold.

From Queen Street.

There had been a church on this site since Saxon times but, as in so many parishes of many-towered Lincolnshire, the region’s great wool-wealth was put to repeated enlargements and embellishments.  From the early fifteenth century the entire church was largely rebuilt, and in the middle of the century work began on the great tower.  One remarkable aspect of the tale is that the start of construction can be dated almost at a glance: whereas the first few courses of stone are in white Yorkshire Magnesian limestone, only a few feet up there is a visible change, to the buff-grey Ancaster stone that constitutes the rest of the building.  The generally-accepted explanation for this switch is that the supply from across the Humber was disrupted by the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455 [6].  The testimony of numerous elder townsfolk (‘Thomas Bradley, mercer… Agnes, the wife of Robert English Barker… with many more…’) who at the time of the tower’s completion claimed to remember the laying of the foundation stone, adds corroborative weight to this dating. [7]

The 86ft-high vault beneath the tower…
‘one of the most stupendous volumes found
in any English church,’ says Flannery.  
The ceiling represents under a third of the
tower’s total height: above it soar a further
two hundred feet’s worth of belfry and 
spire.

Like the Gothic masters themselves, Flannery concerns himself equally with technicalities and aesthetics of construction — with art and science alike.  Here at Louth, he believes that, at the culmination of the lessons of three and a half centuries of Gothic steeple building, the art and the science were at last more or less perfected.   ‘Louth remains a seamless distillation of all that had been learned in the art of steeple-building during the preceding two centuries of evolution,’ he wrote.  ‘Faultless in conception and faultless in execution, the tower and spire of St. James’ Church form one of the most sublime achievements of English architecture.’ [8]  Beauty and elegance of design are married to economy and rigour of construction, both serving each other seamlessly: there is simply no tension between form and expression.  For example, as Betjeman puts it, the apparently weightless tower ‘seems to float’ above the town and surrounding countryside, yet is strong enough to support the eighth-heaviest peal of bells in the country in a belfry thrust ninety-two feet up into the air. [9]

The ‘Wild Mare’ treadmill high in the tower.

By 1501 the main tower was complete, and work began on the amazingly slender spire. One consequence of Louth’s relatively late construction is that important artefacts of the building project itself have survived, not least the First Churchwardens' Book of Louth, with its careful records of progress and expenditure.  We know that John Cole was the name of the master mason who began work on the spire, and it is to him that Flannery gives the main credit for the achievement.  Another remarkable survival is the wooden treadmill, or the ‘Wild Mare’ as it is called, by which building materials were hoisted the height of the tower: a workaday relic of an age about to vanish.

‘England was never more beautiful’… If some had witnessed the start of the building of the tower in 1455, how many more, watching its completion would live to see its fate in the next two turbulent decades?  For in 1536 it was in this church and on this day, October 1st, that William Ayleby’s less fortunate successor, Thomas Kendall, was to preach a sermon with momentous consequences.  At Vespers he spoke against the reforms of Henry VIII following the Act of Supremacy two years earlier, which were now encroaching even on Lincolnshire: and he warned the congregation, gathered now not in joy but in trepidation and anger, that there was soon to be a visitation of the church by the authorities.

From Upgate.

His hearers had some idea of what might be coming.  Only a month earlier Louth Abbey had been dissolved, the land given to a friend of King Henry’s and the treasures dispersed.  Did a similar fate await their own church?  Louth, as we know, was rich: there were chantries richly-endowed by the town guilds; there was plentiful church plate and silver.  Local historian and verger Chris Marshall records that among much else the church possessed a shrine of enamelled silver weighing 435 ounces and three silver crosses perhaps as heavy as 237 ounces.  The church as a whole was a thing of such beauty as they could hardly have borne to see defaced.   As Marshall says, ‘The men of Louth were justly proud of their church and it was clear that St. James’ had much to lose.’ [10].  

Father Kendall could hardly have wished for swifter action than what followed: there and then the commoners, led by the shoemaker Nicholas Melton (alias ‘Captain Cobbler’), seized the keys from the church-wardens, rang the bell to summon the townspeople, and set up a watch all night to guard the church’s treasures.  Thus was sparked the Lincolnshire Rising, which, though brief, was to prove one of the most serious manifestations of popular opinion against Henry.

From Eastgate.

Events were to spiral rapidly out of control.  The following day, Monday 2nd, was supposed to be the annual Michaelmas Court; John Heneage, the steward of the Bishop of Lincoln, was pre-emptively seized on arrival and made to swear an oath to the commoners.  Dr. John Frankish, the Bishop's Registrar, was also seized, and as the crowd grew restive he thought it judicious to climb the market cross for safety, though some books and papers he dropped were snatched away and burned.  Two Commissioners working for Thomas Cromwell were fetched from nearby Legbourne and put in the stocks.  The unrest rapidly spread to neighbouring towns: Horncastle, Caistor, Spilsby were up in arms.  They mustered at Orford: they were marching on Lincoln.  The Rising had begun.  Beacons were lit on the Wolds to alert the marshes to the east, and by the Humber to raise Yorkshire.  And then things really turned ugly: Dr. John Raynes, the Bishop’s Chancellor, though ill, was dragged from his sick-bed at Old Bolingbroke, taken to Horncastle, and beaten to death.

By Friday 6th a sizeable rebel force were encamped at Newport on the edge of Lincoln, reinforced by a contingent from Boston and the southern towns twenty miles to the south.   Chris Marshall suggests that a total of ten thousand men were involved.  News came of trouble in Yorkshire — the beginning of the longer and ultimately more serious rebellions known as the Pilgrimage of Grace — and meanwhile, a list of grievances was prepared.  This was sent to the King on Monday 9th.

King Henry did not tarry, replying two days later, not mincing his words:

Concerning choosing of counsellors, I never have read, heard nor known, that princes’ counsellors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people; nor that they were persons meet or of ability to discern and choose meet and sufficient counsellors for a prince. How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience, to find fault with your prince for the electing of his counsellors and prelates, and to take upon you, contrary to God’s law and man’s law, to rule your prince whom ye are bound to obey and serve with both your lives, lands, and goods, and for no worldly cause to withstand. [11]

It is, I think, greatly to the credit of the people of Lincolnshire that they should be thought 'brute and beastly’ by the likes of King Henry VIII.  But the quarrels that subsequently broke out among the rebels were to prove the Rising’s undoing.  The gentry decided to surrender; then on Thursday 12th the King’s men arrived, under the Duke of Suffolk, Henry’s brother-in-law, and five thousand strong.  Lincoln was never to be sacked: the commoners were sent home — though not without first being ordered to leave their weapons behind.

From George Street to the south.

Unfortunately for the rebels, the law was still to run its course.  Having secured Lincoln and rounded up an initial batch, the Duke of Suffolk and his men were soon in Louth to deal out punishment.  ‘Captain Cobbler’ was one of fifteen ring-leaders arrested; William Moreland, a former monk of the dissolved Louth Park Abbey, was another.  Thomas Kendall had fled to Coventry, but his letters back home were intercepted, and he too was arrested.  Of those sentenced to death, many were hanged in Louth in March 1537, but Kendall was among those taken to the Tower of London and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 25th March 1537. [12]

Plaque opposite St. James’ Church marking the Lincolnshire Rising.

The townspeople’s fears for their church were to be vindicated.  The guilds and the chantries, the shrines and the ‘lights’ of the candles before the images, were all dissolved and removed.  Yet when in 2006 a public vote was held to decide the date of the proposed Lincolnshire Day, it was today, October 1st, the anniversary of Thomas Kendall’s defiant sermon, that was chosen.  Memories are long in this proud and spirited county, guardian of the last secrets of Deep England, and they have not faded yet.

References:

[1] The First Churchwardens’ book of Louth, quoted in Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016), p. 467.

[2] Ibid., p. 15.

[3], John Betjeman and Richard Surman, eds., Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2011), p.405.

[4] Flannery, ibid., p. 9, p. 471.

[5] Ibid. p. 9.

[6] Ibid. p. 460.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. p. 9.

[9] John Betjeman and Richard Surman, eds., Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2011), p. 405)

[10] Chris Marshall, Occasional Papers, 4: St James’ Church Louth and the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536.  (Louth: District Church Council of the Parish Church of St. James’, 2019), p.10.

[11] Claire Ridgway, ‘4 October 1536 – The Lincolnshire Rising’, published 2016 on the website of the Tudor Society, retrieved September 2022 from <https://www.tudorsociety.com/4-october-1536-the-lincolnshire-rising/>.

[12] Chris Marshall, ibid. p. 4.

Principal sources:

• Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016)
• Claire Ridgway, ‘4 October 1536 – The Lincolnshire Rising’, published 2016 on the website of the Tudor Society, retrieved September 2022 from <https://www.tudorsociety.com/4-october-1536-the-lincolnshire-rising/>
• Chris Marshall, Occasional Papers, 4: St James’ Church Louth and the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536’.  (Louth: District Church Council of the Parish Church of St. James’, 2019) 
• John Betjeman and Richard Surman, eds., Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2011).