Part 13

In this state the church remained until the last quarter of the thirteenth century, a building handsome and interesting, but not specially remarkable for size, and without any peculiar or unique feature. Its western doorway may have opened straight upon what was then, it appears, the market-place of the town. The commercial prosperity of the place, its trade in wool, were growing; and we are justified in supposing that the merchants of the town took their part in the great extension of their parish church. This extension was no mere result of the fact that Grantham was a lordship belonging to the Crown; nor, we may be sure, did the Dean and Chapter of Salisbury undertake the gratuitous task of enlarging to nearly double its size a church which represented to them a portion of their income, and would certainly never occur to them in the light of a cherished possession demanding expensive care. But to the men of the town it was a cherished possession; and the greater part of the cost was doubtless supplied by merchants, the fathers and kinsfolk of the Haryngtons and Saltebys who founded chantries in the next century within its walls. But the mother church at Salisbury helped to supply at any rate some of the ideas to which the townsmen’s money-gifts gave shape. Her chapter-house was finished somewhere between 1270 and 1280, and the cusped circles in the heads of the windows of the north aisle at Grantham, the shafted mullions with plainly moulded caps and bases, are accurate reminiscences of its simple and beautiful geometrical tracery. Lincoln, too, where, in 1280, the great eastern chapel—the so-called “Angel Quire,” built to contain St. Hugh’s shrine—had been consecrated, supplied its share: the west window of the north aisle at Grantham is an ingenious adaptation to six lights, with a slight improvement, of the eight-light east window at Lincoln. These, however, are merely details by which the work at Grantham may be assigned to the year 1280 or a little later. The design of the masons included a western extension of the church, accompanied by a widening of the aisles, and, with this, the building of a western tower.

In setting out their plan, they remembered what had been done at Newark some fifty years before. There a western tower had been begun, standing free of the aisles on three sides; but, as the work advanced, the builders had determined to bring their aisles westward flush with the west wall of the tower, and had pierced arches, as an afterthought, in its north and south walls. The work at Newark was temporarily stopped, and, when it went on again, Grantham led the way with one splendid effort. The Grantham builders apparently began work with their north aisle. It was on a vast scale, and spaced with so little regard to the spacing of the columns of the nave that the north doorway, instead of opening against an interval between columns, has a column and part of an interval opposite it.[69] The earlier north aisle was totally enclosed by this new work, which not merely stretched three bays to the westward—the third of these bays, which roughly corresponds to the internal space occupied by the tower and its piers, being nearly as wide as the other two together—but also was extended a bay eastward, so that it encroached on the chancel wall, or, it may be, on the space hitherto occupied by the tower. From the walls of the aisle the builders probably passed to the lower courses of the tower piers, the arches from the tower into the new aisles, and the western doorway,[70] and then joined the tower piers to the west angles of the older nave by two arches on each side, with intermediate columns whose form was evidently suggested by that of the earlier columns east of them. If this hint was taken from the older work, the imitation did not extend to the rounded arches. The new arches were sharply pointed, and, to give uniformity to the connected work, new pointed arches were built up in place of the old rounded ones. This obviously was done by removing just as much of the upper wall of the nave as was necessary, and blocking the clerestory. No clerestory seems to have formed part of the new design. As part of this task, the chancel was connected by an arch with the eastern part of the new aisle, and the old west front and north aisle walls were removed.

We need not dwell on the beauty of this work, which touches exactly the Transition from the first to the second period of English Gothic, on the north doorway, with its array of mouldings and shafts, on the details of the windows, the grotesque carvings of the eaves, the boldness and cleanness of the outlines of buttresses and base-courses. The next work was the completion of the steeple, and this was done well, but apparently with some rapidity, about the year 1300. There is, perhaps, a slight indecision of design in the small stages of arcading and “smocking” above the west window; and the west window itself, with its mullions crossing in the head, is more effective from the point of view of its parade of “ball-flower” than from that of design; but there can be no question as to the beauty of the twin two-light windows above the “smocking” stage, or to the character which the belfry-lights, with their strongly defined central mullion, their crocketed triangular hoods, and the statued niches in the spandrils they form with the parapet, give to the tower.[71] Nor can there be anything but admiration for the great angle-buttresses, rising from their niched lower stages by a series of sloping offsets into four tall crocketed pinnacles round the base of the spire; nor for the method by which the diagonal sides of the spire, which rises from within a plain parapet, are connected by broaches with the pinnacled angles of the tower: nor for the crocketing, plain in detail but elaborate in effect, and the three ranges of lights of the spire itself. The top was rebuilt in 1664, probably a few feet lower than it had been. It was struck by lightning in 1797, and repaired rather timorously.[72]

The south aisle was already set out on a scale little less than that of the north aisle, and probably it was completed as far as a point corresponding to the east end of the nave, soon after the completion of the spire. This work was done more hastily, and with less consistent magnificence than that of the north aisle; but it has been so much restored that it is difficult to realise its appearance when it was built. The masonry, however, is of a poorer kind, and seems to indicate that funds were not so easily forthcoming as before. The south doorway and the outer doorway of the porch are thirteenth-century structures, removed from their original positions to corresponding places in relation to the new aisle. The windows, where they are original, show the design of crossing mullions which we have noticed in the west window of the tower, but the shafts used in some of them seem to be re-used from windows in the older south aisle.

Whether this aisle was closed by some temporary arrangement at the east end, or whether an east wall was ever built, we cannot tell; no foundations of such a wall exist, so far as is known. Work, at any rate, seems to have stopped about 1310-20. It was not long before it was resumed, but the resumption was gradual. Three great works belong to the next stage—the building of the south chapel of the chancel and the crypt beneath, the rebuilding and northward extension of the north porch, and the building of the rood-screen. Both the south chapel and the extended porch were the result of the foundation of guilds and the multiplication of chantry services.[73] The south chapel itself, extending the whole length of the chancel, and connected with it by an arcade of four bays cut in its south wall, was probably the chapel of the chantry of St. Mary, founded by William Gunthorp. Richard Salteby, whose canopied tomb is in the south wall of the nave, immediately east of the south porch, founded the chantry of St. John the Baptist, whose services were probably performed at an altar near the southern staircase to the roof. This altar may have stood at first against the east wall of the aisle; later, it would have stood against the screen across the entrance of the Lady Chapel. Of the position of the other fourteenth-century chantries we know little; but one helpful document, enrolled among the public records, tells us of some of the altars and services in the church in 1349, and, in particular, of the altar in the rood-loft (_in solario coram magna cruce in medio ecclesie_), at which a chaplain said mass daily “after the first stroke of the bell which is called Daybelle”—the bell which still rings at five o’clock every morning from Lady Day to Michaelmas.[74] The crypt below the Lady Chapel, divided into an eastern and western portion, and approached by two doors on the outside of the church, may have contained other chantry chapels; but the western portion was possibly used as a bone-hole.

The church, in addition to chantry foundations, contained valuable relics, among which were portions of the bodies of the patron saints of the church, St. Wulfran, Archbishop of Sens, missionary to Friesland, and monk of Fontenelle,[75] and of St. Symphorian, the martyr of Autun. It is highly probable that, as time went on, these relics were preserved in the eastern crypt; the beautiful staircase, with its elaborate doorway, by which this crypt in the fifteenth century was connected with the chancel, had evidently some special purpose. But it is almost certain that, on such days as the 15th of October, the feast of the translation of St. Wulfran, when people flocked into the town for what is now known as the Onion Fair, the relics would be exhibited to the devout visitors from the chamber above the north porch, through the small traceried window above the north door. This chamber was approached by staircases in the outer pinnacles of the north porch. Its construction seems to have been the _raison d’être_ of the rebuilding of which we have spoken; the whole lower storey, the inner porch, the open way in the middle, left to give room to church processions, the outer porch, were vaulted over, and, to admit of this vaulting, the pediment of the north doorway was ruthlessly mutilated. Those who have discovered in this upper chamber the vicarage of North Grantham will find in it rather a chapel where the relics belonging to the church were kept and exposed to the faithful, and in the two staircases (an expensive provision for so small a vicarage) a way of entrance and of exit for those who wished to visit the shrine and seek contact with its treasure.[76] The floor and the vaulting beneath it have now been removed, and the destruction which it caused to the north doorway is only too clearly visible. The date of the chamber above the south porch, in its present state, is rather uncertain; the little window looking into the church, which points to its use as a watching-chamber, is of the fifteenth century.

The Lady Chapel is one of the most perplexing portions of the church: the masonry of its walls and the early fourteenth-century tracery of one of its windows suggest that, if there was a more than temporary wall at the east end of the south aisle, its materials were re-used here. The arcade and the tracery of the remaining windows, almost disagreeably fantastic in its exaggerated curves, point to an advanced period in the fourteenth century for its completion, and show signs of that failing force which was an immediate result of the Black Death. We may assign the ten years between 1350 and 1360 to this work. The circular buttress-turrets at the east end are very like those which flank the north porch at Holbeach Church in South Lincolnshire, a building of much the same date. When this work was finished, only one thing remained to be done to give the church the form of a regular aisled parallelogram. This was the building of a north chapel to the chancel, a continuation eastward of the great north aisle. As we have seen, the eastern bay of that aisle already opened into the chancel. The lengthening was not taken in hand until a century and a quarter after the Lady Chapel was built; and, in the interval, one important piece of work was achieved, the widening and heightening of the eastern bay of the nave on either side, evidently to give dignity to the rood-screen and loft. It is not at all unlikely that there may have been a chancel arch up to this time, perhaps with twelfth-century jambs supporting a pointed arch, like those which had been added to the nave arcades. If so, it was now cut away: the responds of the arcades on either side were destroyed, and from the wall-face thus mutilated—the recklessly hacked surface may be seen by opening a hinged panel in the side of the modern screen—wide and lofty arches were thrown across to single dwarf-shafts resting on the abaci of the twelfth-century piers to the west. Thus unimpeded space was obtained for the screen with its loft, and the great rood on its beam above. The character of the work is later than 1350; and the screen to which the document of 1349 refers probably underwent some alteration, or was now replaced by a new one, the central portion of which was certainly of stone.[77] Of fifteenth-century work is the crypt door, with its solid panelled screen on the south of the chancel; a window of much the same date was inserted in the south aisle, just east of the south doorway of the nave. In the latter half of the century the east wall of the north aisle was removed; the north wall of the chancel was pierced with three wide arches with slender responds and intermediate piers, poor in design and detail; and the north chancel chapel, with its large Perpendicular windows, was built. This was known as the “Corpus Christi Quire.” This has been repeatedly referred to the munificence of Richard Foxe, Bishop of Winchester, a great benefactor of Grantham Grammar School and the founder of Corpus Christi College at Oxford. Foxe certainly was one of the trustees for the foundation of a chantry in Grantham Church, served by two priests, one of whom was to be the grammar schoolmaster; but the chief founder of the Corpus Christi chantry was a certain John Orston, whose name also occurs as founder of the Trinity chantry. This foundation (1392) was nearly a century earlier than the actual building of the “Corpus Christi Quire.” We have seen how the chapel was the scene of the election of aldermen. For many years the records of the borough were preserved in the eastern crypt, in a great wooden chest with three locks. Foxe’s emblem of the pelican is said to occur on the lower side of the bowl of the octagonal font. However, the font, with its sculptured panels of events in the life of our Lord, is probably earlier than Foxe’s day; and the pelican is, of course, a common emblem of the Blessed Sacrament.

Early in the sixteenth century the present vestry, a long room at right angles to the western bay of the north chancel chapel, was built as a chantry chapel by a wealthy family named Hall. It is now entered through the arch which formerly stood above the founder’s tomb; the small doorway at the side has been blocked. This building abutted against one of the pinnacled turrets by which the roof was approached, and blocked its entrances. This was the last structural alteration to the church during the Middle Ages. The great building, served by its two vicars and at least eight chantry priests—to say nothing of the chaplain, whose stipend bound him to read the Gospel as deacon at the daily mass at the high altar—stood, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in something like its cathedral-like seclusion of to-day. The vicars had their houses on either side of the church; the chantry priest of St. Mary lived in a house whose site is now absorbed by the south-west corner of the churchyard. The houses of the other members of what was now called the College were either round the church or not far away. A house called the Chantry House stood in Watergate till the middle of the nineteenth century; it was then removed and entirely rebuilt in Belton village, where the date 1470 may be seen above one of the old windows, which was preserved in the rebuilding. East of the church was the mansion of the Halls, where Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII., stayed in 1503, on her way to Scotland to become the wife of James IV. A handsome house of the later seventeenth century stands on the site; the pretty little thirteenth-century doorway in the garden wall may possibly have belonged to the church; its mouldings agree with those of the south doorway and some of the jamb-shafts of the windows of the south aisle, which are obviously remains of work of this period. On the north side of the churchyard still stands the sixteenth-century Grammar School, founded with the aid of Bishop Foxe in 1528, and endowed by Edward VI. in 1553 with the possessions of the Trinity and Lady chantries. Foxe was born at Ropsley, in the hilly country south of Grantham. From Woolsthorpe, in the same district, but further west, came the most famous pupil of the school, Sir Isaac Newton. Among its earliest scholars was William Cecil, a native of Bourn, afterwards famous as Lord Burghley; and a third name, this time of a native of Grantham itself, is that of the metaphysician, Henry More, the head of the school of Cambridge Platonists. Colley Cibber was also educated here, an interesting if not altogether illustrious pupil. The schoolroom was used till within the last few years. Since then handsome school buildings have been completed on the opposite side of the headmaster’s house, in the dip through which the Mowbeck used to flow visibly, and the old schoolroom has been fitted up as a school chapel.

Henry VIII. numbered Grantham among those sees which he intended to found. Not till lately has a suffragan bishop in the diocese of Lincoln taken the title of Bishop of Grantham. The dissolution of the chantries put an end to the “College,” and the vicars of the “prebendary church” in post-Reformation times had to be content with very small stipends. Puritanism raised its head in Grantham formidably, as in most parts of Lincolnshire; and the Corporation, though in the main orthodox, had, in 1620, established a weekly lecture in the church on Tuesday, to which they invited the most eloquent clergy of the neighbourhood. The preacher afterwards attended a Corporation dinner, and was allowed a pint of sack. These lectures, although doubtless intended to afford a substitute for irregular prophesying, also gave opportunities to lecturers of a Puritan cast of thought. Preaching was evidently regarded at Grantham as of more importance than the decency of ritual. The communion-table stood in the middle of the chancel without a rail round it, and was treated without reverence. Peter Titley, instituted to the south vicarage in 1625, removed it, set it altar-wise against the east wall, and railed it in. Unhappily, the Alderman of Grantham in 1627 was a Puritan, and Titley had made himself unpopular by inhibiting the lecturers. Attending the church in state, the Alderman ordered his mace-bearers to remove the altar to its old position. A free fight followed, and Alderman and Vicar appealed to Bishop Williams. The Bishop delayed a final decision; and, a few days later, the Alderman, followed by the Vicar, rode off to seek a personal interview at Buckden. Williams, although he had expressed approval of Titley’s action, and after Titley’s death officiated at the altar itself, acted with some partiality towards the Puritans. His answer to the Vicar, which he sent through the hands of the inhibited lecturers, raised a controversy beyond Grantham; and the war of pamphlets, in which Heylyn, Prynne, Burton, and others took part, became a matter of other than local history. Titley seems to have held his own, and the altar was still against the east wall after his death in 1633.[78] During Titley’s incumbency some additions were made to the church. Possibly the east window, of a very plain Perpendicular type, resting on a fourteenth-century sill, was inserted at this time.[79] A clerestory was added to the chancel about 1628, when the roofs of the church were lowered; and it is much to be regretted that this was destroyed at a nineteenth-century restoration, in that spirit of iconoclasm which imagines that, by destroying post-mediæval masonry and furniture, it is restoring churches to their “original state.” In 1640 the Chancellor of the diocese presented the church with an organ; but although the Corporation approved, the Puritans opposed the gift for the time successfully.[80] The organ was erected, but probably was not used; and the great event of the year was the re-hanging of the bells and the blocking up of the ground floor of the tower by a wooden ringers’ gallery.

Three times between 1601 and 1640 had plague visited the town; and early in 1643 came the scourge of civil war. The Royalists were the first to occupy the town, their troops being quartered in the tithe-barn of the prebendaries, to the south-east of the churchyard, and close to the site of the Castle. In spite of a temporary repulse, they held Grantham till May 22, 1643, when Cromwell won his first battle on a field to the north of the town. “Belton fight” was followed by the battle of Winceby, in October. The year before the Corporation plate had been seized by order of Parliament, but was fortunately restored to the town. This year Fairfax demanded a vote of £300 from the Corporation, who did as they were told; but the town refused to pay, and the Alderman and some of the Comburgesses were sent to Nottingham Castle. Released in 1644, they formed a Royalist faction in and outside the town, corresponding with the garrison at Belvoir, and taking part in the guerilla warfare of the countryside. But in 1646 came the end of the war. Belvoir and Newark castles were surrendered, and their fortifications slighted. Under Puritan rule the Royalist burgesses were deprived of their rights; but the town returned to something of its old quiet and prosperity. The woodwork of the church had been destroyed by the soldiers during the Civil War, who used it for fuel, and probably the state of the building was rather dreary. When in 1648 an Alderman was elected in church, the deprived Royalists took the occasion to brawl. The weekly lectures were restored in 1646, and, somewhat earlier, the poorly paid vicars had their stipends augmented by the sequestration of the Salisbury prebends. In spite of this, one of the vicars found it more agreeable to his conscience to be non-resident. In 1651, the Mercers’ Company, trustees of an investment left by Lady Campden to form the endowment of two lectureships, one of which was to be in Lincolnshire, granted the moiety to Grantham. The Campden Lecture is still preached on Wednesday morning in every week; and yearly by the provisions of another endowment, chargeable on the “Angel Inn,” a sermon is preached against the sin of drunkenness. Of course, after 1646, the colour of the lectures in Church were strictly Puritan; but the ejected parsons of Boothby Pagnell and Barrowby, Dr. Sanderson and Dr. Hurst, were living in Grantham; and their spotless life and example seem to have won the respect of all. Sanderson became Bishop of Lincoln at the Restoration. It was during the Commonwealth period, from 1651 to 1656, that Isaac Newton was at school in Grantham, lodging with one Mr. Clarke, and experimenting with an amateur sundial and with models of horsemills and windmills.