front and north aisle and Norman western lantern arch of the great Benedictine house of Crowland; one side of the Early English refectory, with the reading-pulpit, at Tupholme; a tall corner-wall of the south transept at Kirkstead; the uncovered sites and foundations at Louth Park, Revesby, Vaudey, and Haverholm; the roofless chapel of Monks Abbey at Lincoln, formerly a cell of St. Mary's Abbey at York, and a few more. The havoc made by Thomas Cromwell and his ministers has been indeed a sweeping one. Of the houses of the Gilbertines which arose in this country, the only monastic order which had its origin in England, there are hardly any remains. A portion of the church at Sempringham is all that is left of the mother-house founded there.

Turning from monastic to military architecture, we trace the same general destruction. The castles have almost entirely disappeared. The only one of any extent still standing is the Conqueror's great stronghold at Lincoln, with its Edwardian additions, eloquent of not a few great historical events-especially the great battle fought beneath its walls in 1141, in which Stephen was taken prisoner by the forces of the Empress Maud under Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and that of the Fair of Lincoln' in 1217 between the troops of the Dauphin and those of William Marshal, which determined whether England was to become a fief of the Crown of France or be ruled by her hereditary sovereign-which owes its preservation to having been utilized for the purposes of a prison and assize court. The fine brick tower of Tattershall, begun by Ralph Lord Cromwell, treasurer to Henry VI., in 1440, and probably never completely finished, contends with Herstmonceaux Castle in Sussex, erected about the same time, for the first place among the examples of mediæval brickwork in England. Somerton Castle, near Navenby, built in 1281 by the mighty Antony Beke, Bishop of Durham, King of Man, and Patriarch of Jerusalem, and presented by him to Edward III., retains some of its drum towers, one curiously vaulted from a central pillar. It is a place of some historical interest, as having been the scene of the imprisonment of King John of France after the battle of Poictiers, from August 1359 to March 1360. The accounts of the royal expenses during his incarceration, published by the Duc d'Aumale, have been made the subject of an interesting memoir by the Bishop of Nottingham. Their details are very curious. There are some small remains of the castle at Stamford, and one shattered tower of Bishop Alexander's castle at Sleaford; but of the once extensive castles at Boling

broke, Bourne, Bytham, Kinnard at Owston, &c., little more than grass-grown mounds and banks are to be seen.

From the churches and castles of Lincolnshire, passing over its civil history, we will now turn to its ecclesiastical annals, which naturally claim a leading place in our pages. Of the existence of a Romano-British Church in Lincolnshire we have no certain evidence. Indeed, the British Church generally was a Church of limited extent, and apparently of narrow means. It seems to have been confined to Roman settlements, to which it may have been introduced by officers or soldiers converted to Christianity, or members of families already Christianized, and not to have included the whole even of these. That so important a colony as ' Lindum' may have had a Christian Church planted within its walls is certainly possible, if not probable; but the evidence for its existence is very precarious. It is no more than this. One of the three bishops from Britain who attended the Council of Arles in 314 A.D. appears in the Conciliar lists as Adelphius de civitate colonia Londinensium.' As another of the three is described as 'Restitutus of London'-Eborius of York was the third-it may be regarded as certain that 'Londinensium' is a corruption of some other local name. Various suggestions have been made-Camulodensium' (Colchester) or 'Legionensium' (Caerleon). Dr. Bright was at first inclined to accept this latter identification; but in the second edition of his Lectures' he remarks that Lindum' was a colony,' and that, as far as we know,' Caerleon was not, and that though Lincoln is rather suspiciously near York to have been the seat of a second bishopric, yet, 'on the whole, the reasons for the Lincoln claim would appear to preponderate.' 2

However this may have been, there is absolutely no other evidence of a Christian Church in Lincolnshire in Roman times. Some cruciform devices on a mosaic pavement at Horkstow, in the north of the county, near the Humber, have been adduced; but these mosaics are, in the late Mr. Haddan's words,3' Pagan far more than Christian,' and beyond these not a single stone, inscription, or coin of Roman date has been found in Lincolnshire bearing any trace of the Christian Faith.

The preaching of Paulinus, c. 627 A.D., gives the earliest certain date for the introduction of the Christian Faith into Lincolnshire. In Paulinus the county may gratefully recog

1 For this we have the authority of the Ravenna chorographer. 2 Bright, Chapters of Early English Church History, pp. 9-10, Second Edition, 1888.

3 Haddan, Remains, p. 232.

nize its first known evangelist. Not content with proclaiming the Faith to the heathen of Yorkshire, his own special field, this true example of a missionary bishop, regarding, like John Wesley, 'the whole world as his parish,' crossed the Humber and made the way of salvation known to the men of Lindsey. He preached, as Bede tells us,1 in the old Roman hill-town of Lindum, and that so effectually that, 'the Lord opening His heart to attend to the words spoken by Him,' its reeve, Blacca by name-' the pale-faced one'--became a convert, and was baptized with all his family, and, proving his faith by his works, built a stone church of noble workmanship' (it must be remembered that churches at that epoch were commonly of wood and clay, mere huts of 'wattle and daub'), the roofless ruins of which, the building having probably been burnt in some heathen inroad, were still standing in Bede's day, and proved their sacred character by many reputed miraculous cures. It was in this newly-built church, probably represented by that of St. Paul-in-the-Bail--a corrupt form of St. Paulinus (churches being then named after their founders, and not placed under any special invocation), which has parallels in Wales and Cornwall and Brittany-that the fifth Archbishop of Canterbury, Honorius, was consecrated by the sole ministry of the first of a new line of bishops'—not yet archbishops' at York.'2

This was not the only occasion on which Paulinus visited Lincolnshire as a missionary. Accompanied by his royal convert, Edwin of Northumbria, we find him on the banks of the Trent declaring the way of salvation to the crowds which gathered round him, and baptizing them in its waters. Bede describes the scene as it had been reported to him by one who had heard it from an aged man who had received baptism from Paulinus on that occasion 'at noonday,' and in a few vivid touches, adopted by Wordsworth, sets the great Italian missionary bishop before us :

'Of shoulders curved and stature tall,
Black hair and vivid eye, and meagre cheek,
His prominent feature like an eagle's beak.
A man whose aspect doth at once appal
And strike with reverence.' 3

The place of this multitudinous admission to the Christian fold was near 'Tiovulfingceaster,' ie. the stronghold of the clan of Tiovulf. This has been conjecturally identified with

1 Beda, H. E. ii. 16.

2 Bright, u.s., p. 128.

5 Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sketches. 'Paulinus.'

Torksey, which, though now sunk to a small village, was a populous town when the Domesday Survey was taken, or with still less probability with Southwell, which is at some distance from the Trent, or by the late Mr. J. R. Green with Farndon, near Newark, but more recently, with far greater show of reason, by Mr. James Parker, with Littleborough, the Roman Segelocum, where the Roman road from Lincoln to Doncaster, and so on to York, crosses the river.1

The next great name connected with the Church history of Lincolnshire is that of St. Chad. Lindsey, as the borderland between Northumbria and Mercia, owed a fluctuating political allegiance sometimes to the one, sometimes to the other kingdom, according as its fortunes were in the ascendant. From the days of the Irish missionary Diuma, the first bishop of the Mercian province, who died 658 A.D., until the huge episcopate, originally embracing nineteen counties, was broken up into separate dioceses, any episcopal superintendence Lindsey enjoyed was given by Diuma and his successors. Of these St. Chad was the last. Of his work in Lindsey we unhappily know nothing. All that is recorded of him in connexion with Lincolnshire is that one of his missionary centres was at a place called 'ad Barvæ,' or 'at the Grove,' where his royal patron, Wulfhere, king of Mercia, had given him fifty hides of land for the endowment of his bishopric, and where he had erected a monastery, where in Bede's day some traces of the regular monastic life instituted by him—' instituta ab ipso regularis vitæ vestigia '3—were still existing. On St. Chad's death in 672 A.D. Archbishop Theodore appointed as his successor Chad's former deacon, Winfrid, described by Bede as 'a good and modest man-'virum bonum et modestum '4-abbot of his monastery 'ad Barvæ.' For some act of disobedience, the exact nature of which is not recorded, Winfrid was deposed by Theodore the next year at the Council of Hertford. Glad, perhaps, to be relieved of the heavy responsibilities of the episcopate, he offered no resistance to the decree of his somewhat imperious metropolitan, and meekly retired to his

3

1 Mr. Parker's identification is accepted by Dr. Bright in his Second Edition (p. 127, n. 7), who points out that Segelocum, being a station between Lindum and Danum, Paulinus, coming to or returning from Lindum, would naturally cross the Trent there. Torksey was not on that road.

2 Identified by some authorities with Barton, or with Bardney, but more probably Barrow-on-Humber.

3 Beda, H. E. lib. iv. c. 3.

4 Ibid.

'Offensus per meritum cujusdam inobedientiæ,' ibid. c. 6. Smith, in his notes to Bede, suggests that this may have been a refusal, like that of Wilfrid, to allow his diocese to be divided.

old home at Barvæ,' where he ended his days 'in all holy conversation.'

Another name belonging to the same connexion, that of St. Higbald, has stamped itself too permanently on the county to be altogether omitted. Our knowledge of him is the slightest little more than that he was the abbot of a religious community somewhere in Lindsey-'a man,' according to Bede, of the greatest holiness and continence'-that he was the tutor of Swidbert the companion of Willibrod in his mission to the Frisians, and the friend of Egbert the Irish monk, the organiser of that enterprise. The dedication of the church at Hibaldstow-the name of which points to its having been the residence and chief mission station of St. Higbald-as well as of those at Manton and Scawby, close by, and that of Ashby-de-la-Launde, further south, are a record of the lasting influences of the missionary work of this otherwise almost unknown monk in the district.

Bardney, in the valley of the Witham, ten miles below Lincoln, is another of the early Christian centres of Lindsey. This once mighty monastery monasterium nobile,' of which only the moated site remains, affords a striking example of the violent revulsion of religious feeling common in those early ages. If not actually founded by Ethelred, king of the Mercians, the son of the fierce old heathen Penda '-'flagellum Dei et Ecclesiæ' (it was probably anterior to his time in its first beginnings), it certainly enjoyed his royal favour in the highest degree; and in his later years, like so many members of his family, and of the Merovingian dynasty on the other side of the Channel-'out of the eater coming meat '—he was there shorn a monk,' and died 716 A.D., as abbot of the house. Bardney obtained great celebrity as the resting-place of the bones of Oswald, the young king of Northumbria,'' the very ideal of a royal Christian hero,' as Montalembert calls him, who had fallen in battle with Penda on the fatal day of Maserfield, after which-apparent discomfiture being the precursor of triumph-the cause of Christ's Church seemed only to rise again with greater strength and glory. Strange to say, not Ethelred alone, but also Penda's eight children, three following him successively on the Mercian throne, became intrepid champions of the faith their father sought to destroy. Ostryth, Oswald's niece, was Ethelred's queen, and she desired that her sainted uncle's mutilated body should find a home at Bardney. The

1 The relics of St. Oswald were subsequently transferred to the religious bearing his name at Gloucester; only two or three small bones remained at Bardney.