held in capite by military service, but by what part of a knight's fee is not known. It was alienated by Poutrell, on payment of a fine to Queen Elizabeth of twenty pounds, to one William Thornhill, of Laughton, in whose family it remained for many generations, until it came by descent to Ann, a daughter, who married one Banks, who sold it to Mr. Woodhouse, of Owston Place, in whose family it still remains.

years

The ruins of this monastic establishment were removed some few since. They were of considerable extent, and the floors had been curiously inlaid with bricks.

In the Valor Ecclesiasticus of Henry the Eighth the lands in Manley, including those in Haxey and Epworth and Owston are valued at £58. 16s. 3d.

GUNTHORPE,

Or GULNETHORPE, that is the Village of Reeds, is a small hamlet on the bank of the Trent, and extending to Heckdyke, forms the southern extremity of the Isle of Axholme. As no mention is made of this place in the Doomsday Book, nor in any antient records of the kingdom, and as it is now evident that before the operations of Vermuyden, scarcely any land here could be dry, I conceive that it is one of those few places which has arisen since the Conquest. When the waters overflowed the low grounds in this part of the parish of Owston, the Village of Reeds was a most appropriate designation; but drainage, warping, and cultivation have done wonders, and it is now as fertile a spot as any in the kingdom.

THE

WEST BUTTERWICK.

THE township of West Butterwick comprises a considerable portion of the parish of Owston. The village is situated on the bank of the Trent, and in former times must have stood in the very midst of that immense forest which then covered the whole face of the country. The name of Butterwick is evidently a corruption of the Saxon word Boot, a boat, and Wic, a village or crooked shore; hence Butterwick may signify the Boaters' Village.

Tradition says that this place was formerly an island, surrounded by two streams or rather channels of the river Trent, which receives confirmation from a piece of water considerably inland, now reduced to the size of a horse pond, called the Fleet. The present channel of the Trent being full of the roots of trees as they grew, proves to demonstration that the course of the river has been diverted; and nothing can be more probable than that in past ages, before any efforts were made to restrain its course, the water covered a considerable space, similar to Amcoats Hook; that the warp or sediment of the daily tides formed an island in the centre, and then in course of time, by means of embankments and staiths, the force of the water was diverted to the east side, and made to flow over ground which had hitherto been dry. The west channel would then naturally warp up, and leave what is usually termed in such cases a fleet hole.

The entry in Doomsday book is as follows. be taxed.

"Three carucates of land to

Soke and inland in Owston. One sokeman and six villanes have

there one plough, and one mill of four shillings."

There has been here from very early times a Chapel of Ease to the Parish Church of Owston, which was formerly a spacious and strong building; for

De

De la Prymne tells us, in his History of the Antiquities of Winterton*, that during the time of the Commonwealth, a company of gentlemen who had undertaken to drain the Level of the Ancholme, pulled down this Chapel to make the foundation of Ferriby Sluice. This would never have been done had not the timbers of the Chapel been of very considerable strength and size, and the stones of such dimensions as to make them very desirable for such a work. The owner of the estate was probably not altogether free from blame when this outrage was perpetrated; for we learn from Clarendon that this family had taken part with the Parliament against the Crown, the Earl of Mulgrave being one of the twenty peers who remained in London when the King assembled a Parliament at Oxford; and that Colonel Sheffield, a younger son, was wounded in a skirmish with Prince Rupert, in Chalgrave Field; who "acted his hurts so well, and pretended to be so ready to expire, that upon his paroles neither to endeavour or endure a rescue, was suffered to rest at a private house by the way, about a mile from the field, until his wounds should be dressed, and he himself so much recovered as to be able to render himself prisoner at Oxford. But the King's forces were no sooner gone than he found means to send to his comrades, and was the next day strong enough to suffer himself to be removed to Thame by a strong party from the Earl of Essex; and between denying what he had promised, and saying what he would perform, never submitted himself a prisoner, as much against the law of arms as his taking up arms was against his allegiance."

The present building bears very evident marks of having been erected out

of

*They built a very large sluice of squared stone and arched work, which cost three thousand nine hundred pounds building. It had twenty four doors, each so weighty that it would have loaded a cart. The foundation of all was laid on thirty-nine loads of the best trees that could be got in Broughton and Thornholme woods; but that which perhaps brought a curse upon all, and hath involved not only the country but also the undertaking in great trouble, to the utter neglect of the drainage and great decay of the said sluice, was the pulling down of Butterwick Chapel to build the same on. Then began the civil war, which by the great infidelity and wickedness that it brought into the nation, made churches so contemptible that during the same a great many of them were totally ruined, and others suffered to fall to the ground for want of repairs." Prymne's Antiquities of Winterton.

of the ruins of a more stately fabric. In the walls, which are scarcely ten feet high and built chiefly of rubble, are great ashlar stones, three, four, and five feet long, and from one to two feet thick, thrown in without any regard to order or design among the rubbish; and on one of them has been cut a sun dial, which is now the wrong side up. The south door bears no proportion to the rest of the building: it reaches to the eaves of the roof, and has been ornamented with quaterfoils and images of angels the work of no mean artist. One of the windows on the south side, which is now about three feet high and reaches to the roof, has evidently from its proportions been, when placed in the original building, at least five times that height, and must have been large enough for one of the principal windows in the Chancel of Althorpe Church, or any such stately building. Before the Chapel was repaired in 1821 for the more convenient celebration of divine worship, the open seats were formed of great large oak beams, which from the mortices, &c. in them had evidently formed part of the roof.

At the time when the Valor Ecclesiasticus was taken by order of Henry the Eighth, there was a resident minister in this place.

What other means of subsistence he had I am not able to conjecture. There are no presentations to this Chapel in the registry at Lincoln; and it appears from the Registrar's Office at Buckden, that since the year 1660 the Vicars of Owston have always provided for the duty, which until the year 1821 was performed once a month. During the last century the inhabitants, in consideration of the extreme penury of the stipend, gave eleven selions of land or mere furrows in the open fields as a small augmentation; and in the year 1824 two thousand pounds was appropriated by the Honourable the Governors

Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty, when it was made a perpetual curacy in the gift of the Vicar of Owston. The late Rev. Richard Empson was the first perpetual curate.

In the reign of Richard the First Roger de Mowbray gave certain lands in this township to the Abbey of Selby, which most probably consisted of the inclosures now called the German Closes, or the Closes which formerly belonged to the Abbey of St. Germain.

There has been in this place a small community of Baptists almost from the time that this denomination of Christians had congregations in England, which according to Neale was about the year 1640, when they separated from the Independents. They have a meeting house, with a burial ground adjoining, and a small endowment in land, called the Belton Closes, which let for seven pounds per annum, the rents of which is distributed among the poor members. It appears from their Church Book, now lying before me, that formerly they had a travelling preacher. At present the duty is performed by laymen, who, like the local preachers among the Methodists, depend on some trade for their subsistence. They generally baptise adults in the south Butterwick drain, probably because one of the members of the society has a house upon the bank, which serves as a convenient vestry. They solemnized mar

riages,

* In the year 1835, seventeen guineas were dug out of the grave in this Chapel yard in which one John Clarke had been interred about thirty years before. This John Clarke was drowned in the river Trent as he was returning from Stockwith fair, with that sum of money about him. A very singular story is told concerning the discovery of his corpse. A captain who was sleeping on board a brig anchored off Kelfield, dreamed that he saw two men rob another man and throw him into the water, and that the dead body had floated athwart his cable. So strong was the impression that he resolved to ascertain if such was the fact, and sure enough he found the body of John Clarke as he dreamed. The relatives not finding the money about his person which he was known to have received at the fair, buried him in his clothes, as is usual when corpses have been some time in the water, and were convinced that the other part of the dream about the robbery and murder must be true also. Two men were taken up on suspicion, and the captain of the vessel swore that they were the men whom he had seen in his dream perpetrate the crime. As however there was no other evidence to corroborate this testimony they were discharged; but they remained under the obloquy of having been guilty of robbery and murder, until the money, which it appears had escaped the scarch of the persons who prepared the corpse for interment, was discovered in his grave.