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).

Lincolnshire Towers: St. Botolph’s, Boston

Part of a series, ‘Lincolnshire Towers’.

Today, the seventeenth of June, being the feast-day of St. Botolph, I am reminded of a memorable trip I made a few years ago, one unseasonably warm February day, to one of England’s greatest parish churches: a church dedicated to him, and whose town is named after him: Botolph’s town, or Boston, in Lincolnshire.

The tower of St. Botolph’s, Boston, seen from Church Street (February, 2019).

In truth, it all began with St. Wulfram, and his church at Grantham.  A few months previously I had finally done as I had long intended, and got off the train for a proper look at it — at least, one longer than the fifteen-seconds’ vision with which it beguiles the passengers of London- or Scotland-bound expresses, soaring heart-stoppingly into view above the blurred tiles and whizzing chimneys of its parish.  After all the occasions on which this astonishing spire — briefly England’s highest, and still the fifth-tallest of all our medieval steeples — had flashed before my eyes, a visit seemed long overdue, and it did not disappoint.  But then I realised that the spire of St. Wulfram’s was not alone, and that Grantham is the gateway of a county whose sky-line is studded with great and graceful towers: as well as Boston there was Louth, and of course the great cathedral at Lincoln itself, which had been for two centuries, before the collapse of its spires in 1548, the tallest building on earth.

So northwards from London it was once again, out of King’s Cross through an unpromising, almost greenish-grey morning.  Harringay… Hatfield… Hitchin… Huntingdon… and not forgetting, after Peterborough, to ‘hail humble Helpstone’, the home parish, resting-place, and in many ways the whole world of the poet John Clare.  (Incidentally, the parish church here is also St. Botolph’s.)

‘Hail, humble Helpstone’: a glimpse of John Clare country near Peterborough.

Boston from London means changing at Grantham, so before the Skegness train came in I had a chance to admire the tower of St. Wulfram’s once again, and to wonder how St Botolph’s would compare with it.  These two Lincolnshire towers both stand on the same river, the Witham, Grantham quite near its source and Boston at its mouth, but as well as sixty miles of river, two centuries and great differences of style lie between them. [1]  Grantham’s steeple, finished in 1320, is in all the handsomeness of the Decorated style, while Boston’s — mostly in the more ornate and intricate Perpendicular — was begun much later, in around 1430, and took until at least 1500 to complete.  St. Wulfram’s had been a launch into the unknown, literally to new heights, and its masons were learning as they went, but at Boston the Gothic style was being finessed and perfected — though this is not to imply any lack of audacity or inspiration in its construction.  On the contrary, these qualities were, as we shall see, abundant.

Onto the Poacher Line, then, and the train, soon happening clatteringly onto jointed railway track, wound on into Lincolnshire, past the Roman town of Ancaster (source of much limestone for the county’s churches, as well as for the colleges of Cambridge), through Sleaford with its despondent and derelict Bass Maltings, and then out into the open Fens.  ‘Six years of a flat land,’ wrote the poet Elizabeth Jennings, who was born in Boston, where her father was Chief Medical Officer: she meant the first six years of her life, before the family moved to Oxford.  A rather laconic verdict (and, remarkably, she never returned), but it must be admitted that there is something uncompromising about the sheer flatness of these parts, something that leaves nothing much to be said.  They are as flat as that, and that is flat.

How extraordinary to glimpse on the horizon, then, amid the relentless horizontality of everything, a vertical shape: a tower aimed straight at Heaven, built in an architectural style which took as its fundamental principle precisely the emphasis, the exaltation of verticality at every opportunity.  The closer it draws, the clearer the sheer contradiction it offers to its surroundings, and the sheer scale at which it does so.  ‘It dominates the town, it dominates the landscape,’ said Betjeman. [2]  Naturally, then, it has with been known for centuries with wry affection as ‘the Stump’.

The ‘Stump’ from just south of Boston’s Grand Sluice. The scaffolding is a frustration, but does provide a measure of the tower’s height — that of a forty-floor tower-block.

The sky was still sullen as we rounded the curve into Boston, and this, combined with the warehouses and supermarkets around the station, lent weight to a first impression of the town as a place with its sleeves rolled up, unprettified and unpretentious.  Although it is a market town amid swathes of arable land, it was originally (and indeed remains) a port —  after all, it was from the sea, and the wool trade, that the wealth came to the church — and the town retains, I think, a port’s brisk unkemptness, a refusal to give itself airs, even though, with its handsome Georgian buildings, it could afford to do so.  Yet even as I approached the church from the station, a strengthening sun dispelled the cloud, and the day transfigured itself into bright cloudless warmth, quite untypical of February.  And there it was, the mighty tower, the great upthrust of Gothic glory, with an incredible audacity, even a youthfulness about it, seeming all the more extraordinary after the greyness and the garages a moment before.

Only one thing marred the view: the scaffolding cladding the entire western face of the tower — quite a contract for someone!  The programme of works on the tower also meant that, unusually, it was closed to the public.  On the other hand, the filigree of poles and planks did provide a useful measure of the tower’s scale — and, already, an excuse to return for a second visit.

St Botolph’s from the Market Square

‘One of the glories of England,’ Peter Hitchens has said of it, ‘and in my view one of the sights of the world (and I’ve seen a few).’  Julian Flannery, in his magisterial survey of English medieval steeples, calls the tower —

…one of the greatest triumphs of medieval engineering.  It is quite as daring as the hammer-beam roof of Westminster Hall, the octagonal lantern of Ely Cathedral or the pendant fan vault of the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, and yet is on a greater scale than any of these masterpieces.  For sheer spectacle, the 266 feet of masonry soaring straight from the pavement to the sky is unsurpassed by any church or cathedral in England. [3]

‘Dizzyingly open’, even with
scaffolding 

Two-hundred-and-sixty-six feet makes this the seventh tallest of any extant English medieval tower.  Older churches had risen higher — Grantham to 274ft — and the weathercock of St. James’ church at Louth, at 287 feet the highest parish church in England, was placed into position not long after Boston was completed — but, since all the other towers incorporate a spire, this is the tallest medieval parish church tower measured ‘to its roof’.  It was not a question simply of height, though; there were other things in the masons’ minds.  Flannery observes out how slenderly and economically the tower was built, with the walls between the load-bearing buttresses so lean (scarcely three feet thick) as to be almost skins of stone.  The result, as Flannery goes on to point out, is an interior spacious enough that it could fit most ordinary church towers inside.  The space beneath the tower is also flooded with light, fulfilling another principal aspiration of medieval masons — it is ‘dizzyingly open from inside’, says Betjeman.  Again, on my visit in 2019, scaffolding impeded the view, but even this seemed to leave open an incredible amount of space and height.

Excavations in the north aisle.

Even without the great tower, the older body of the church itself would be worth coming a long way to see.  Not least because nave and chancel are contiguous with the enormous space under the tower, this is the largest parish church in England by volume.  It is also a ‘calendar church’, having twelve internal pillars for the months of the year, fifty-two windows for the weeks of the year, seven doors, and three hundred and sixty-five steps to the top of the tower. [4]  The chancel, built to a scale which in most churches would make for an impressive nave, contains fourteenth-century stalls and misericords, and a remarkable altar-piece.  There was plenty of life in the church, in spite of the works: a little gift-shop, where I bought a post-card for my desk at work, a growing scale Lego model to raise funds for the church, and other pilgrims moving quietly round the church — families, a group of Scouts, a young couple holding hands.

The chancel with fourteenth-century stalls and misericords.

It was time to have a look at the town itself, so I ambled around the market-place, and the side-streets, and then a little way upstream to the Boston Lock Café for lunch (the all-day breakfast is warmly recommended).  The ‘Lock’ of the café’s name is the Grand Sluice right in front of it: it is here that the river Witham technically ends, and the tidal waters of the Haven, leading out to the Wash and the open sea, begin.  Various works in the eighteenth century to improve the navigation of the Witham brought about a second heyday for Boston, hence its many Georgian buildings.  Fortunes seem to rise and fall nowhere so dramatically as in ports, or at any rate seem to rise and fall much faster than a great church can be planned and built.  In fact, even as the tower here was being raised, the town itself had fallen on hard times, and the booming trade of the thirteenth century was a thing of the past.  Julian Flannery draws an interesting comparison with the city of Liverpool, where construction of the Anglican cathedral was completed in the 1970s under economic circumstances quite different from those in which is had started in 1904.

Where Red Lion Street meets Wormgate.

The course of my amblings was largely determined by the sheer difficulty of photographing the tower: I had to retreat by some distance simply to fit it into the frame.  As the afternoon wore on, I found myself to the east of the church, and meeting with the sight of the sun shining straight through the open lantern at the top: another demonstration of the slenderness and lightness of the construction.  Yet the tower is still strong enough to hold a full peal of ten bells, and these above the cavernous space already described — there must be few belfries higher than Boston’s.

From Wide Bargate in late afternoon

Yes, they built it not only beautifully but masterfully, for in spite of its position right on the banks of the Haven it has never needed shoring up or major structural work.  There was a practical purpose to it, as well: the tower has served as an unmistakeable aid to navigation for miles around, especially for seafarers on the Wash.  (Scorch-marks on the masonry offer evidence that beacons were hung here for precisely this purpose: it really was a lantern tower.)  On a clear day the Stump is even visible from the west coast of Norfolk, and I have never forgotten a spine-tingling picture of St. Botolph’s on the horizon, silhouetted starkly against the setting sun, which the photographer Gary Pearson captured from Hunstanton, twenty-one miles away.

From the Market Place

Another interesting aspect of the tower observed by Flannery are its four distinct levels, corresponding roughly to the four generations of masons it took to build it.  He adds, though, that in order to avoid too prominent a horizontal division between them, and so to maintain the priority of verticality, the breaks in the masonry of the buttresses at the corners are made at different levels to those of the tower faces.  By thus interrupting the horizontal lines, while keeping the vertical lines continuous, there is nothing to distract or mislead the eye as it is drawn heavenwards.  The similarity of the tower’s lower half to that of St James’s at Louth has led some to suppose that a spire was the original intention here too, but owing to various aspects of the construction Flannery thinks this unlikely.  As for the unmistakeable octagonal lantern tower, he points out precedents and possible influences as various and far-flung as Beverley Minster, the belfry at Bruges and Brussels’ Town Hall as evidence that this was the intention all along.  The Flemish connection is interesting: ‘People called it Holland,’ remembered Elizabeth Jennings, and not only because of the flatness: in the other Low Counties, too, great belfries like this were raised.

The ‘Stump’ and the Haven in evening light.  

Spring-like as the weather might have been, the law of the sun was still winter’s, and all too soon the time came for the train home.  From London a day-trip to Boston is easily possible by train, but it perhaps does not allow for a very long day.  I could hardly complain about mine, though, as the train set off back westwards, through the the dark levels and glassy drains, to Grantham and the main line — but I knew there would have to be a return, once the scaffolding was gone, to admire the tower in its full glory.

The South Forty Foot Drain, west of Boston, seen from the Nottingham train

References / footnotes:

1.   The river Witham has a curious course: from Grantham it flows northwards all the way to Lincoln (at one point being separated from the Trent by only a narrow watershed) and then, once through the Lincoln Gap, back south-eastwards again.  Though it is eighty-two miles in length, its mouth and its source are fewer than thirty miles apart as the crow flies.

2.  Richard Surman (ed.), Betjeman’s Best British Churches (London: Collins, 2001))

3.  Julian Flannery, Fifty English Steeples (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016),

4.  Soul architects, ‘Conservation Architect for St Botolph’s Church ‘Boston Stump’, Lincolnshire’, web article retrieved 17 June 2021 from <https://soularchitects.co.uk/conservation-architect-for-st-botolphs-church-boston-stump-lincolnshire/>.

A down express flies past St. Wulfram’s Church, Grantham, in the dusk.

Lincolnshire Towers: St. Wulfram’s, Grantham

The steeple of St. Wulfram’s church first caught my eye, as it must many people’s, at about 105 miles per hour, the speed at which non-stop express trains hammer through the Lincolnshire town of Grantham, shooting out onto the high embankment across the town, leaning into the curve — and there, soaring above the chimneys and rooftops flashing jaggedly by in the foreground, there is Wulfram’s tower, with the same serenity with which it has weathered the seven centuries of its age; and the spirit soars with it.  The vision hangs and swivels, lingering for perhaps fifteen seconds, and is gone, and the train is pressing on towards Lincolnshire’s borders and London, or Yorkshire, or Scotland.

There are those who call the East Coast Main Line dull and boring, mainly because, south of County Durham at least, it runs relatively straightforwardly through England’s flatter counties.  But there are more than mountains to be seen from the window of a train.  For this line, as much as any other, I am sure, is proof of the poetry conjured up by that conspiracy if churches and railways.  Four medieval cathedrals — Durham, York, Peterborough and Lincoln — can be spotted to varying degrees at various points along its length, and plenty of other fine churches greet the eye as well, from the fifteenth-century spire of St. Mary Magdalene at Newark-on-Trent to Doncaster Minster’s Victorian Gothic, or handsome St. Peter’s at Offord D’Arcy.  But of all these, save perhaps only Durham, the sight of St. Wulfram’s at Grantham is surely the most thrilling.  Here the line speed (105mph beats ninety at Durham!), the eye-level view from the embankment, the church’s proximity to the railway, and, above all, the sheer beauty of the steeple, all conspire to lend those few seconds of the journey a meaningful, harmonious, unforgettable form, that of a theatrical scene, revolving like a snow-globe.  In other words, they turn Grantham into a poem.

St. Wulfram’s spire from a passing London train, 6th June 2017

Other travellers have noticed this before me.  For the writer Peter Hitchens, who ‘normally make[s] a point’ of looking out of the window whenever he comes this way, this is ‘one of the loveliest steeples in all England’.  And, according to the BBC programme Songs of Praise, which came to Grantham in 1980, ‘a certain Fr. Stanton’ would apparently stand up in the middle of the compartment to raise his hat in honour of the spire and its builders, and request his fellow passengers to do the same.  For myself, I resolved one day to visit Grantham properly, and to savour the poem more slowly, more closely, and from within.

That resolution was to be fulfilled one brisk autumn day in 2018. The train had pelted headlong from London, so it was barely mid-morning when my sister and I alighted half-way up England, under shredded bands of cloud scudding intermittently across the face of a kindly sun.  Off we set, through a pleasing warren of terraced houses immediately east of the station, down to where the Great North Road swoops in.  Even now it is not difficult to imagine the stage-coach days, with the inswooping mail trailing its column of dust, all wheels and thumping hooves and harnesses ajangle.  Not far along the road we found the majestic Victorian Guildhall, a building worthy of a major town on the Great North Road, with a statue of Isaac Newton outside, and a bustling local writers’ fair inside.  I was warming to Grantham already, sensing a certain self-respect that did not need to give itself airs (or maybe a down-to-earth-ness, appropriately enough for Newton’s home patch).  But there was no time to linger, for there was business to attend to.  Our plan was not to head straight for the church, but to hare up Hall’s Hill, the rise bounding the town to the east, in order to admire the great steeple from afar.  Hindered only by a bush full of angry wasps, which we doubled back to avoid, we climbed up high enough to be able to look back down on the town, and watch the sunlight and shadow cascading over it, and the fast trains hurtling through in the middle distance.

The view westwards from Hall’s Hill, 3rd November, 2018.

There in the autumn noon stood the tower that has been the glory of this broad, shallow valley of the young Witham since about the year 1320.  We were looking at a sight instantly recognisable, by this one essential feature, to twenty generations before us.  Briefly this was England’s highest steeple, until within ten years Salisbury Cathedral’s spire overtook it.  The two projects were not in fact unconnected, as Julian Flannery explains in his peerless Fifty English Steeples (Thames & Hudson, 2016), because Grantham actually belonged to Salisbury diocese: clearly one spire was not enough!  In any case, according to Flannery’s comprehensive theodolite surveys, St. Wulfram’s remains England’s fifth highest surviving medieval steeple after Salisbury and Norwich Cathedrals, the fellow Lincolnshire steeple of St. James’ in Louth, and St. Michael’s in Coventry (that is, the ‘old’ Coventry Cathedral).  It is worth mentioning in passing that three of the four highest medieval steeples of English parish churches are to be found in Lincolnshire: Louth amid the dreaming Wolds (287 feet), Grantham in south-western Kesteven (274 feet), and fen-defying Boston (266 feet).  This is to say nothing of Lincoln cathedral, once the tallest building in the world by virtue of its 520-foot central spire.  (Even after this spire collapsed in 1549, and the two others at the west end were taken down in the eighteenth century, Flannery believes that what remains of the central tower ‘may just exceed’ St. Botolph’s at Boston.)

The spire seen from Park Road.

But I am day-dreaming.  St. Wulfram can be put off no longer; it is time to go down the hill, threading through the suburban houses and the park — all almost conspicuously unpretentious, as if the town thinks the tower is showing off enough! —  to see the great church at closer quarters.

The west front.

So this is the steeple before which Ruskin swooned.  Here, as well as anywhere, it is possible to see the glory of the Gothic: the sheer verticality of everything, every little detail doing its bit to add to the upthrust of the whole.  The whole structure is straining towards Heaven, and the wide traceried windows let in Heaven’s light.  Flannery pointed out the one major mistake made by the builders in the staircase at the south-west corner, which was built too far out at the bottom, and which unfortunately, by becoming more pronounced as the tower tapers with height, throws the whole slightly off its symmetry.  Yet this lesson was learned here once and for all; the error was not repeated in any of the later great English towers.

Looking west from the chancel.  The tower stands right over the west door.

Considering the steeple’s emphasis on verticality, there is an interesting contrast waiting inside the church: the enormous and spacious width of its interior.  The two side-aisles are each almost as broad as the nave: John Betjeman even declares that the ‘power of the grand interior is horizontal rather than vertical’ (Best British Churches, Collins, 2011 edition, p. 400).  The church impresses us first by its height, then by its breadth.  In the north wall an alcove is visible where St. Wulfram’s relics are likely to have been displayed.  I wonder what grand processions there have been through this church over the years.  One spectacle that has been recorded for posterity is the visit of the BBC programme ‘Songs of Praise’ in 1980, which, for all sorts of reasons, in texture, language and content, seems caught at a curious, fascinating position, between the old Britain and the new.

We were, I think, about the only visitors at that point on the Saturday afternoon, but there were quite a few townsfolk pottering around.  Chairs and parts of a dismantled stage were being cleared away and loaded into a van after a secular awards ceremony the previous night, and a youngster no more than ten years old was being given a lesson on the mightly organ.  (I hope he will one day support a mighty surge of singing, as in Songs of Praise above!)  I bought a tea-towel showing the great spire (it has to be a particularly large tea-towel to fit the tower in) and we took our leave.

From the south-west.

This being a non-party-political blog, no party-political allegiance should be read into the detour we then made to see the building where, on October 13, 1925, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, was born.  This red-brick corner shop is, I think, revealing about her character, even though it is no longer Roberts the greengrocer but a chiropractic clinic.  This must have been, as has often been pointed out, and which seems in common with Grantham in general, an unpretentious but decent place to grow up; plain and unvarnished but dignified and unbowed (and is even raised slightly above the level of the road).  The Methodist church where the Roberts family worshipped is only a few doors down.

Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace, North Parade, Grantham.

It seems arguable that this building goes some way to explain both Margaret Thatcher’s sympathy as a politician for those who worked hard to earn their living, which aided her electoral success, and her apparent lack of sympathy with those who were not capable of doing so, which is generally acknowledged to have precipitated the end of her premiership.  I was also struck by the shop’s position actually right on the old Great North Road, and not far at all from the railway either; she must, as she was growing up, have felt London and the wide world beckoning to her the moment she stepped outside the front door.

Almost directly opposite Margaret Thatcher’s birthplace is one of the most curious Catholic churches I have ever seen.  From outside, St. Mary the Immaculate is a solemn, sober early nineteenth-century neo-classical edifice.  Inside, however, it is completely different: the church seems to have been altogether transformed in the 1960s, so that the altar now faces north, not east, along what must once have been the length of the church, rather than its breadth.  I don’t think I have ever seen a church with an interior differing so dramatically from the exterior.  This surprise certainly competes with the contrast between horizontal and vertical in St. Wulfram’s!

Inside the church of St. Mary the Immaculate, looking north

Daylight began to fade as we drank hot chocolate in Cafe Leo along Westgate, and so the time came to take our leave of this reserved, unshowy town with its ardent steeple, and of the unsung, wide-skied county in which it is set.  But not for long, for another tower further east, that of St. Botolph in Boston, was soon to beckon me back to Lincolnshire.

Postscript: Writing this at Whitsuntide, I am reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous poem ‘The Whitsun Weddings’.  Poetically at least, this week is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the journey it records.  It was down this line that Larkin’s train came that ‘sunlit Saturday’.  He would have passed through Grantham, and one of those weddings may well have been solemnised in St. Wulfram’s church.  Truly England is a poem.

Lincolnshire Towers

St. Wulfram’s church, Grantham, 3rd November, 2018.

Of all our counties I suspect few more strongly than Lincolnshire of keeping hidden, somewhere, the last remaining corner of Deep England.  For a start, there is so much of it in which to hide: after North Yorkshire it is the second-largest of the ceremonial counties, while the density of its population is the seventh lowest overall (ranking forty-second of forty-eight).  All that undisturbed, unmotorwayed acreage, almost as wide as mid-Wales, largely spared by industry and development, and unblemished by any major conurbation, in which Deep England might yet linger.  The river Trent, the Humber estuary, the Fens and the Wash, once its arteries of commerce, have come to serve as buffers against the cutting edges of modernity; and even its western, inlandmost parts are only incidentally served by the Great North Road and the East Coast Main Line (which latter never comes within thirty miles of that coast while Lincolnshire has anything to do with it).  It is true that the county has a grittier side — Scunthorpe steelworks, the port of Grimsby with its face set like flint against the North Sea, or the austerely dead-flat southern Fens — but its heart, the landscape of the Wolds or south Kesteven, has an otherworldly softness, even a tameness, about it.  That homeliness is matched by the place-names, among which even those of Danish derivation retain only a slight angularity: Willoughby… Hagworthingham… Scamblesby… Then there are all the old railway stations whose names appear in Flanders and Swann’s song ‘The Slow Train’, hinting at the heavy blow struck here by the Beeching Axe: Mumby Road, Dogdyke, Tumby Woodhouse.  Even the name of the county, with its buttery consonants, has a welcoming warmth to it.  And consider Bag Enderby in the light of Bag End, the name of Bilbo Baggins’ home in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  If in these parts the mythical Shire can shimmer just beneath the surface, then why not very Deep England itself?

It is worth noting, too, that many Yellow-Bellies themselves — as Lincolnshire people are called — can fairly be said to be in sympathy with the ideals of Deep England. One of the most famous, indeed the son of a rector of Bag Enderby, and born nearby at Somersby, was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose verses tell of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and vanished Lyonesse, and of many things loved and lost.  Or there is the late Roger Scruton, arguably the most articulate defender of Deep England in the past forty years, who began life in the tiny hamlet of Buslingthorpe near Market Rasen.  I concede, however, that Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe) and Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) are harder to square with this list…

In any case, Lincolnshire has form where the preservation of Deep England is concerned.  The March of Progress always seems to be missing Lincs: is it too much to hope to find something that it has left alone altogether?  Not necessarily, is Lincolnshire’s murmured answer.  I think of Ruddock’s, the old-fashioned stationers and bookshop in Lincoln’s High Street, to which I paid tribute here at the time of its sad demise in 2017.  Or the quirky Bubble Car Museum near Boston.  And Lincolnshire sausages of course, the glorious centrepiece of any Full Deep English Breakfast.  Then there is another, less tangible but momentous example: whereas, in more urbanised parts of the country, who knows how many traditional folk-songs had been forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, in Lincolnshire some were still remembered.  Here the last folk-singers lived just late enough to coincide with the earliest recording equipment and the Edwardian folk-song revival which saved so many tunes from extinction.  It was in the north of the county that the composer Percy Grainger discovered, and duly recorded and transcribed, such beautiful melodies as ‘Brigg Fair’ or ‘Rufford Park Poachers’.  That we can hear the voice of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, a man born in 1832, singing the songs of his youth, is cause to be thankful not only for Grainger and the singers who sang for him, but for the county which had preserved that folk-memory for so long.  Those songs are not only artefacts of the past, but to many ears some of its profoundest and most vivid evocations: this is borne out by the misty and chromatic arrangements that many composers made of them, Grainger’s own ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ being an example.*  Things linger in Lincolnshire: the old is slow to fade, and the new takes time to set in.  As I was once told by the guide on a rooftop tour of Lincoln Cathedral: "When the cranes go up in Lincoln, you know there’s a recession on the way."

This is not simply happenstance, either.  The county has a definite streak of rebelliousness, and its people stick by their principles.  I count very much in their favour the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in turn sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious popular opposition to confront Henry VIII; also the Lincolnshire Martyrs, who include two canonised saints.  The knowledge that Henry VIII hated Lincolnshire, declaring it ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, only makes me fonder of it still.  Less clear-cut morally is the tradition (if that’s the word) of poaching, which does, it must be said, have in its defence the injustice of the eighteenth-century enclosures of common land by wealthy land-owners.  The song ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, as sung by Joseph Taylor, with its pleasingly defiant declaration —

A buck or doe, believe it so,
A pheasant or an hare,
Were put on earth for everyone
Quite equal for to share […]

— captures the spirit, as does the more famous ditty ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (apparently a favourite of George IV; presumably it was not his hares that were being filched!).  Those landowners had come to see the land merely as an asset or a useful resource, whereas for the poachers and ordinary folk it was simply home, and home for their minds and spirits as much as for their empty stomachs.  To this day, it is not Lincolnshire’s way to follow the herd or pay heed to fashion overmuch, and this tendency to dig in heels, combined with the fondness for old things, creates conditions highly favourable, I would say, to the secret abiding of Deep England.

For it is not altogether unthinkingly that Deep England drowses green and gold in the haze of the afternoon.  I like to believe that those who dwell in that lost land are awake and alive to truth and beauty, pondering great thoughts and bold deeds over another hearty round of ale.  The proof that such folk did once live in Lincolnshire —  if they do not live there still — is plain to see in the heirlooms they left us, which stand amid the low rises and shallow hollows of this gentle county, startling us with their beauty: I mean the towers, the great audacious medieval church towers, with their youthful exuberance, their sheer verticality, which everywhere point heavenwards.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral, 20 March 2014.  With its original spire, it once stood at 520 feet; without, it is now 271 feet high.

There is of course Lincoln Cathedral — in John Ruskin’s estimation ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’ — which, when it still had its spires, was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548.  The highest spire, 520 feet tall, crowned a county that never naturally rises higher than 551 feet above sea level.  But these are not Lincolnshire’s only towers.  The relative prosperity of this region in the Middle Ages, as well as its ready access to the raw material of the Great Limestone Belt (which stretches south-west from Lincolnshire’s Kesteven through Rutland, Northamptonshire and the Cotswolds, all the way to Somerset), provided conditions favourable to the building of great towers by any self-respecting town.  So it is that Lincolnshire came to possess some of England’s greatest treasures.  At Louth it boasts the tallest medieval parish church tower in England, St James’s, whose spire stands at 287 feet.  St. Botolph’s at Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) has the tallest church tower to its roof: instead of tapering to a spire, the masonry shoots straight upwards to a height of 266 feet.  The spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram, 274 feet high, sweeps into sight at 105mph when beheld, sudden, serene, from express trains on the East Coast Main line.  And hundreds of other towers, less lofty but all distinctive, all dignified, lay claim to their segment of the wide Lincolnshire sky, each raised up in intercession for its parish and all souls there dwelling.**  That is because the folk of these parts in the Middle Ages committed their wool-wealth to the dressing of their homeland for Heaven, ornamenting this lowest-lying of counties with ardent upliftings of passionate stone.

As Julian Flannery says so movingly in ‘Fifty English Steeples’, an epic volume of detailed architectural surveys of medieval church towers, and one of the most treasured books on my shelves, 

England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth [church tower in September 1515] and the arrival of the English Reformation.  The pre-industrial landscape was dominated by the steeples of 17 cathedrals, 900 monasteries and 9,000 churches.  The spire of Lincoln Cathedral was the highest man-made structure the world had ever seen, and the construction of the great chapels at Westminster, Windsor and Cambridge had reached its magnificent conclusion.  Within a generation the monasteries had been dissolved, church-building had ceased, Lincoln spire had fallen, and medieval England had passed into history.  [p. 9]

Yet, for all the reasons above described, I have my suspicions that it is in Lincolnshire that the lost beauty he describes has lingered longest, and in particular in Lincolnshire’s towers that it survives most fiercely.  In a series of articles to come, I hope to describe what I found when I went to see some of them for myself.

St. Botolph’s church, Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’), under scaffolding on the 2nd February, 2019.  The tower is 266 feet high.

* Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy was used as the incidental music for John Betjeman’s 1964 BBC film Branch Line.
** One other Lincolnshire tower, that of the parish church of Deeping St Nicholas, photographed from the Peterborough-Spalding line on the 20th March 2014, illustrates the title banner of this blog.