Lincoln

Preface

The " Diocesan History of Lincoln " was entrusted some years ago by the Society to the late Canon Venables. Having many literary tasks on hand, Canon Venables was not able to devote much time to this history, and during the years that the matter was in his hands it advanced no further than the end of the life of Bishop Robert de Chesney, a.d. 1167. After the Canon's lamented death the Society entrusted the completion of the work to me, and I have now performed it to the best of my ability. The portion written by Canon Venables has been very slightly abbreviated, but scarce any alterations have been made in his statements. For the latter portion of the work I am greatly indebted to the assistance of Canon Overton.

George G. Perry.

W ALDINGTON, May 1896.

The diocese of Lincoln, as at present constituted, consists of the county of Lincoln, with which it is all but conterminous. The exceptions in defect and excess at the south-eastern and north-western extremities of the county are too insignificant to deserve specification. The present diocese is divided into two archdeaconries, that of Lincoln and that of Stow. These archdeaconries, from the time of the first formation of the see almost to the present time, were very unequal both in area and in number of benefices. The Archdeaconry of Stow, which in the opinion of Bishop Stubbs with great probability represented the ancient diocese of Lindsey or Sidnacester, was much the smaller. It comprised only four deaneries, lying at the north-western extremity of the county, between the Humber, the Trent, and the Ancholme, and extending to the city of Lincoln on the south, containing about 92 benefices, and a few chapelries. That of Lincoln comprised 22 deaneries, containing no fewer than 519 benefices, and many chapelries. This enormous disproportion was redressed, and the duties of the two archdeacons substantially equalized by two Orders of Council issued in 1876 and 1877, by which twelve deaneries were transferred from the Archdeaconry of Lincoln to that of Stow. By this arrangement of the 560 benefices in the present diocese, 285 are under the jurisdiction of the Archdeacon of Lincoln, and 275 under that of the Archdeacon of Stow.1 Several of the more extensive deaneries have been divided, and according to present arrangements there are now 40 deaneries or subdivisions of deaneries, each with its rural dean and decanal chapter. The office of rural dean, which had been long in abeyance, was revived during the wise and practical episcopate of Bishop Kaye (1827 — 1853). Each rural deanery has its own inspector of schools, under an inspector-in-chief.

The diocese of Lincoln stands third of the English ' and Welsh dioceses in acreage, being only exceeded by those of St. Davids and Norwich. Its superficial area is estimated at 1,767,879 statute acres, or about 2775 square miles. In population, however, it takes a much lower place, standing twenty-sixth of the thirty-four dioceses of the English Church. According to the census of 1891, the population was 472,778, and the number of inhabited houses 103,617. In the ninety years since 1801, the population has steadily grown, showing in that period an increase of little over 125 per cent.—/, e. it has more than doubled. Of the 560 benefices, many of which from the smallness both of income and population are held in plurality, more

1 Return made to Convocation, 1896. Consolidated benefices are counted as one.

than 500 are provided with parsonages. The number of clergy actually at work is returned as 702.

The present diocese of Lincoln is but a small fragment of the prae-conquestal diocese, the seat of which was transferred by Remigius, the first Norman bishop, from Dorchester-on-Thames to Lincoln, c. 1072. As thus constituted, the diocese embraced the whole of the eastern portion of the great Mercian kingdom, bounded by East Anglia and Essex to the east, and by the Mercian shires of Warwick, Stafford, Derby, and Nottingham to the west. It stretched all across mid-England, from the Humber to the Thames, a distance of more than 200 miles from north to south, and included within its wide-spreading limits no fewer than ten modern counties, those of Lincoln, Leicester, Northampton, Rutland, Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford, Buckingham, and Oxford. The process of breaking up this large diocese and reducing it to its present limits, has been a very gradual one. The first diminution, by the establishment of the see of Ely, took place in 1108, not very long after the transference of the see to Lincoln, under Robert Bloet, Remigius's successor. It was done ostensibly to relieve the bishop of a portion of his unwieldy charge, but more truly to gratify the ambition of Hervey, who, having made his see of Bangor too hot to hold him, had been made administrator of the Abbey of Ely during the vacancy of the abbacy ; and by his influence with Henry I., obtained the elevation of the abbacy into an episcopal see, with the county of Cambridge as its diocese. No further narrowing of the limits of the diocese occurred till the period of the Reformation, when, as a portion of the grand scheme of Henry VIII. for establishing new dioceses, so miserably maimed in execution, the diocese of Peterborough, comprising the counties of Northampton and Rutland, was founded in 1541, and the following year that of Oxford, with Oxfordshire as its diocese. Again there was a protracted halt in the subdivision of the still vast diocese, which, with the increase of population, became increasingly unmanageable. The formation of the diocese of Peterborough had also added largely to the difficulty of efficient episcopal superintendence, by cutting the diocese in two, and interposing a block between what in the maps appended to the Valor Ecclesiasticus, as published by the recent Commission, is called the " Pars Borealis," including the counties of Lincoln and Leicester, and the " Pars Australis," comprising the remaining three. -That he might occupy a more central position, and be within easier reach of the House of Lords, the bishop's residence was permanently fixed at Buckden in Huntingdonshire ; and Lincoln, where his palace had been ruined in the Great Rebellion and never adequately restored, saw but little of him.

Thus in 1837 the diocese of Lincoln consisted of the whole of the counties of Lincoln, Leicester, Huntingdon, Bedford, and Buckingham, together with the better half of Hertfordshire and portions of Rutland, Oxfordshire, and Northamptonshire — the archbishop's peculiars and a few other peculiar jurisdictions being excepted. In 1837 the scheme of the first Ecclesiastical Commission for the rearrangement of dioceses and the equalization of episcopal incomes began to take effect. By Order of Council, dated April 19 in that year, the archdeaconry and county of Bedford, and as much of the archdeaconry of Huntingdon as was included in the diocese of Lincoln, was transferred to that of Ely. On July 19, the archdeaconry and county of Buckingham was transferred to the see of Oxford, and on August 21 the archdeaconry and county of Leicester was made a portion of the diocese of Peterborough. Of the old historic diocese of Lincoln, therefore, only the county of Lincoln, with its two archdeaconries, was left under the rule of the bishops of that see. But as a set-off against the relief afforded to the bishop by the subtraction of five counties from his diocese, the same Order of Council which removed Leicester to Peterborough, transferred to Lincoln the county of Nottingham, with the exception of the deanery of Southwell, which from the earliest ages of the English Church had formed part of the diocese of York. The causes which had led to the exception of the Southwell deanery having ceased to exist, that portion of the county was added on June 4, 1844. The diocese thus remodelled was held by Bishop Kaye during the closing years of his episcopate, by Bishop Jackson during the whole period of his rule (1853— 1869), and by Bishop Wordsworth till 1884, when the recently formed union was again severed, and Nottinghamshire was combined with Derbyshire to form the newly created diocese of Southwell. A preparatory step toward this separation had been previously taken by Bishop Wordsworth in the revival of the office of Bishop Suffragan, which, though duly authorized by Act of Parliament,1 had fallen into abeyance since the Reformation. The sanction of the Crown having been granted, the Rev. Henry Mackenzie, Archdeacon of Nottingham and Sub-dean of Lincoln, was consecrated Suffragan-Bishop of Nottingham at St. Mary's, Nottingham, February 2, 1870, and on his resignation from advancing age in 1877, the Rev. Edward Trollope, Archdeacon of Stow, was consecrated his successor under the same title.

1 Act of 26 Henry VIII., ch. 14.

Contents

I. THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH IN

LINCOLNSHIRE ... ... ... 1 5

II. THE FOUNDATION OF THE SEE, AND ITS

Chapter I The Beginnings Of The Church In Lincolnshire

The origin of the Church in Lincolnshire, as in England generally, is shrouded in impenetrable darkness. In the words of Dr. Bright, "The question where was the Christian Faith first preached in Britain, is one which it is impossible not to ask, but which it is also impossible to answer. Answers no doubt have been suggested with more or less of definiteness and confidence ; but they appear to possess no trustworthy foundation." We may safely pass by all attempts to discover an apostolic foundation for the British Church, as savouring more of insular vanity than of historic probability ; but there is no reasonable ground for doubt that "some Christians did cross the Channel to our shores during the second century, if not earlier," and scattered the seeds of the faith over the soil of our island, planting Christian settlements here and there amongst its inhabitants. These settlei6 ments would necessarily be generally limited to the cities and towns of Roman Britain, the country people remaining according to the literal meaning of their name pagani — pagans. That these sporadic Christian communities were gradually welded together in a National Church, and that this Church was a duly organized member of the Catholic Church throughout the world, with a threefold ministry, is placed beyond all doubt by the fact that when in 314 a.d. the great Council of Aries was summoned to heal the troubles caused by the Donatist schism, among the bishops summoned were three from Britain, attended by a presbyter and a deacon. The names of these three bishops were Eborius of York, Restitutus of London, and Adelphius "de civitate Colonic Londiiiensium." This last designation has been held by many leading authorities to be a mistake of the Roman scribe, unfamiliar with the names of British cities, for " Colonia Lindensium," and to point to a bishop of Lincoln — the old " Lindum Colonia "-^existing at that early period of the Church's history. But without further documentary evidence, which, now that the archives of the Vatican are thrown open, it is by no means impossible may be brought to light, the question is one which must remain open. That there is some mistake is certain. It is incredible that London could have sent two bishops to the Synod. Some other word must be substituted for " Londinensium " ; either Legionensium, and that Adelphius' see was the famous city of Caerleon-on-Usk, the "Camp of the Legions" in South Wales ; or, as I have said, that we should read " Lindensium," and place him at Lincoln, which we know to have been "a colony," while we have no evidence that Caerleon was.

Passing beyond Lincoln itself, we have no evidence of the existence of a Christian Church in any part of Lincolnshire in Roman times, or those immediately subsequent to them. The Roman British Church was evidently a Church of limited extent, and apparently of narrow means. It seems to have been confined to Roman settlements, and to have drawn its converts from Roman colonists, or from Romanized natives, and to have struck but feeble roots in the soil. It was like many a Church now-a-days, a struggling Missionary Church, "scanty in numbers, and poor in wealth."

With the early part of the seventh century, we pass from the cloudland of conjecture to the solid ground of historic fact. In St. Paulinus, the founder of the Christian Church in Northumbria, Bishop of York, and afterwards Bishop of Rochester, our county recogni/es its first recorded Evangelist. Paulinus, who, according to Alcuin, was a citizen of Rome, and an inmate of the famous monastery of St. Andrew on the Coelian Hill, had been despatched with three others "by Gregory to strengthen the Kentish mission in 60 1 ; and five-and-twenty years afterwards, a.d. 625, on the marriage of Edwin the King of Northumbria, still a pagan, to Ethelburga the daughter of Eadbald, King of Kent, and granddaughter of Augustine's royal convert, Ethelbert, was sent by Augustine as the chaplain and spiritual adviser of the princess, having previously, as the first step towards carrying out Gregory's desire that Voik should be erected into a second metropolitan see, received episcopal consecration from Augustine. After two years of patient waiting for the fulfilment of the long-deferred hope, it will be remembered that Edwin became a convert to Christianity, and accepted baptism at Paulinus' hands, where the magnificent fabric of York Minster now rears its stately bulk, on Easter Day, 627 ; together with many of his nobles and members of his family. Edwin established Paulinus as bishop of his dominions — sees being then conterminous with kingdoms — to the evangelization of which he at once strenuously devoted himself. But not content with proclaiming the faith of Christ to the heathen of Deira, this true example of a missionary bishop turned his compassionate thoughts to the idolaters to the south of the Humber. Travelling probably by the Roman road, which runs from Eboracum (York) to Donum (Doncaster), and crossing the Trent at Segelocum (Littleborough), from whence the road runs along Lelbridge Lane and joins the Ermine Street to the north of Lincoln, entering Lindum Colonia by the still standing Newport Gate, Paulinus preached, as Bede tells us,1 in the old Roman hill-town, then occupied, after a longer or shorter period of desertion and ruin, by the Angle settlers, and that so effectually that its reeve or "prefect," as Bede calls him — Blsecca by name — " the pale-faced one " — became a convert, and was baptized " with all his house," and proving his faith by his works, built a "stone church of noble workmanship," when the churches generally were commonly of the humblest materials — of turf, or of wood and clay, mere huts of "wattle and daub." Of this, the first 1 Bede, H. £., vol. ii., p. 16.

Christian Church in Lindsey, the building having been probably burnt in some heathen inroad, the roofless ruins were still standing in Bede's time, and proved their sacred character by the miraculous cures of those who sought them in faith. Blaecca's church is now probably represented by that of St. Paul's-in-the- Bail — a corrupted form of St. Paulinus, churches being then called after their founders, and not placed under any special invocation — which has parallels in Wales and Cornwall and Brittany. It was here that was consecrated, on the death of Archbishop Justus, his successor Honorius, by the sole ministry of Paulinus, the only English bishop.

This was not the only occasion when Paulinus visited Lindsey as a missionary. At some period during his episcopate — Bede does not specify the time — accompanied by his royal convert, Edwin, he appears 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 Deda, the Abbot of Partney, a cell of the abbey of Bardney, " a man of the utmost veracity," who had heard the tale from an aged man, who had himself received baptism from Paulinus " at noon-day " on that occasion, and in a few vivid touches, adopted by Wordsworth, presents 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."

The place of this multitudinous admission to the

Christian fold is fixed by Bede near the city, called in the English tongue " Tiovulfingceaster," the camp or stronghold of the clan of Tiovulf. This has been conjecturally identified with Southwell, which, however, does not stand on, nor in close proximity to, the Trent, and with Torksey, which, though now a small village, was an important town at the taking of the Domesday survey, with 263 burgesses in the time of P^dward the Confessor, doing considerable trade with York. It may, perhaps, be more probably placed at Littleborough, a little above Gainsborough.

The next great name connected with the Church history of Lincolnshire is that of St. Chad, in whom we hail a welcome link with St. Aidan, the meek and sympathetic, but resolute and indefatigable, missionary bishop of the north, who deserves, with Augustine, to be styled Apostle of England. It will be remembered that Chad, having reluctantly consented to be consecrated to the see of York, for which he " felt himself unworthy," after a three years' rule which Bede calls " sublime," at the bidding of Archbishop Theodore, who, at his visitation in 669, detected some irregularity which vitiated his consecration, gladly laid down his office and retired to the more congenial quiet of his monastery of Lestringham. But he was not allowed to stay there long. Wulfhere, the King of Mercia, or Mid-England, wanted a bishop for his kingdom. Theodore, who could not have failed to be impressed with the beautiful character of Chad, and his evangelistic fervour, suggested him for the office. Wulfhere gladly accepted the recommendation. The informality of his consecration having been corrected,

Chad in 664 entered on the spiritual charge of an unwieldy diocese, almost entirely heathen, embracing nineteen counties, and at least nine modern dioceses, of which Lincoln was one, placing his episcopal see at Lichfield, where the name Chadstow, near a holy well at the east end of the fort which menaces the spires of that most graceful of minsters, preserves the memory of this "holy and humble man of heart." In those early days, before the consolidation of the local kingdoms, for which the wise policy of Archbishop Theodore in welding together the separate provincial Churches into one Church of England formed the precedent, Lindsey, as the border-land between Northumbria and Mercia, owed a fluctuating allegiance to one or the other, according as its fortunes were in the ascendant. At this period it was under Mercian rule. From the days of Diuma, the Irish missionary, the first bishop of the Mercian sovereignty, who died 658 a.d., any episcopal superintendence Lindsey enjoyed was given by him or his successors. Of these, St. Chad was almost the last. Of his work in Lindsey we unhappily know nothing. All that is recorded in connection with Lincolnshire is that one of his missionary centres was at a place called " Ad Barvoe," or " at the grove," where his royal patron Wulfhere had given him fifty hides of land for the endowment of the bishopric, on which he had erected a religious house, where, in Bede's day, some traces of the regular monastic life established by him — "instituta ab ipso regularis vitas vestigia" 1 — were still to be found. One of Bede's editors identifies this with Barton-on- 1 Bede, H. E., vol. iv\, p. 3.

Humber, others place it at Bardney, but the weight of authority leans to Barrow-on-Humber. On Chad's death, in 672, he was succeeded by Winfrid, Abbot of "Ad Barvse." He was a disciple of Chad's, trained up by him in the discipline he had established at Barrow, and became his deacon. He is described by Bede as a " good and modest man." His tenure of the see was very short. At the Council of Hertford, in 673, he was deposed by Theodore for some "disobedience " — " per meritum cujusdam inobedientiae" 1 — which is not explained, but is supposed to have been a refusal, like that of Wilfrid a little later, to acquiesce in Theodore's wisely designed but too autocratic plan for the subdivision of his huge diocese. Winfrid, not improbably glad to be relieved of the responsibility of such an episcopate, offered no resistance to 1 heodore's act of deposition, and meekly retired to the old monastery, in which he had passed his youth, where he ended his days "in all holy conversation."

The same year which witnessed the deposition of Winfrid, 673, brings before us the romantic tale of the flight of St. Etheldreda, or Audrey, which, transient as it was, has left a lasting memorial in Lindsey in the dedication of the church of West Halton in the north-west of the county, and in the noble minster of Stow.

Another name deservedly ranking high in English hagiology, with which the religious history of our county is connected, is that of Oswald, King of Northumbria, that most beautiful type of Christian kingship. Oshyth, the wife of Ethelred, King of 1 Rede, H. £., vol. iv., p. 6.

Merck, who came to the throne in 675, was Oswald's niece, being the daughter of his brother and successor, Oswy. Both Oshytli and her husband were devoted Christians. The Abbey of Bardney, on the left bank of the Witham, was probably founded by them. The bodies of departed saints were regarded as the mostto-be-coveted treasures a religious house could possess. Oshyth desired to enrich Bardney with the relics of her royal uncle, who had died on the battle-field, fighting against the fierce old heathen, Penda, King of Mercia, Ethelred's father, a true marytr for the cause of Christ. The wain containing the sacred treasure arrived at the gates of the Abbey as night was falling. The monks refused to open the gates to the body of one who, saint as he was, had fallen in an endeavour to bring Lindsey under an alien yoke. Deaf to the expostulations of the Queen, they suffered the royal corpse to remain in the open air all night. A tent was spread over it by the attendants, to guard it from desecration. That night a sign was shown from heaven. A pillar of light stood over the wain, reaching to the sky, and seen far and wide. Nearly all Lindsey, Bede tells us, witnessed this marvellous attestation of Oswald's sanctity. The next morning the monks of Bardney, in contrition for their error, were as eager to receive the bones as they had been the previous night to exclude them.

The relics were received with all honour. They were reverently washed, and deposited in a shrine within the church, above which was hung a banner of purple and gold, betokening Oswald's twofold dignity as saint and king. According to the belief of the age, miracles ratified Oswald's saintly dignity. The very water in which his bones had been washed, nay, even the earth on which it had been poured, was endued with curative power. The most acceptable gift Oshyth could bestow on Ethelhild, the Abbess of the cell at Skendleby, when visiting her at Bardney, was some of this hallowed dust, enclosed in a casket. This chapter of the early religious history of Lindsey ends mournfully. In 697, Oshyth was murdered by the nobles of Lindsey, who thus vented their implacable hatred for the royal house of Northumbria from which she had sprung, the kings of which had so often made the province the battle-field between them and the rival sovereigns of Mercia. Ethelred, saddened by the blow like so many members of the Anglo- Saxon royal houses, abdicated his throne, and, in the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was " shorn a monk " in the Abbey of Bardney, of which he died Abbot in 716. The next century saw the overthrow of Bardney by the Icenes, in common with all the religious houses of Eastern England, and the sacred deposit was transferred to Gloucester, where it gave its name to the Abbey of St. Oswald.

A few years after the reception of Oswald's body, Bardney was the scene of the meeting of the truly great though impracticable Wilfrid — the star on whom "the most brilliant period of our early ecclesiastical history so worthily set " — on his triumphant return from his second visit to Rome in 704, and King Ethelred, then the Abbot of the house. The two old men, we are told by Wilfrid's biographer, Eddi, embraced and wept for joy. Ethelred prostrated himself before the papal rescript, which was to be received far otherwise by Wilfrid's sovereign, Alfred of Northumbria.

The name of St. Botolph, still living among us in the great seaport of Boston (St. Botolph's Town), and stamped in larger characters on the other side of the Atlantic, strikingly evidences the continuity of history bridging over the centuries. Botolph was by birth an Englishman. Early in the seventh century, with his brother Adulph, he crossed the sea to Germany, to be more fully instructed in the Gospel they had received, from some unrecorded source. There they became monks, and Adulph, it is said, was eventually the first Bishop of Utrecht. Botolph passed into France, where, in the Abbey of Chales, near Paris, he took under his care the two sisters of Ethelmund, sub-king of the South Angles, who, according to the fashion of the day, had been sent thither for religious instruction, monasteries being then very rare in England. On his return, in 654, Ethelmund gratefully offered him an endowment from the royal demesnes for the foundation of a religious house. Rejecting all more attractive localities, Botolph chose a lonely spot deep in the marshes skirting the estuary of the Witham, named Ikanhoe, "the hill of oxen." There he built his monastery, where monks gathered round him, living under a rule compiled from old and new authorities. The fame of his piety and learning spread far and wide, attracting strangers from distant parts. Among these was Ceolfrid, the active coadjutor of Benedict Biscop at Wearmouth, afterwards Abbot of Jarrow. Bede paid him a visit, c. 679, to profit by his experience for the government of his own monastic house.

A still more celebrated name is that of the royal youth, the Mercian Guthlac; that typical example of "a strange and intensely mediaeval saintship," who in his early years baptized Christians, though he was true to what is said to be the meaning of his name, " Battle-sport." Fired with emulation of the ancient heroes of his house, he became, like David, "the captain of a fierce band, carrying fire and sword through the lands of his enemies " ; but " even then restoring to the plundered a third part of the booty." " Nine years of this predatory life," writes Dr. Bright,1 " suffices him. He begins to see what life and what death means. He thinks of the woeful end of mighty princes ; estimates the vanity of earthly glory; trembles at the thought of the inevitable end." One morning, in 697, while still in the prime of his youth, only twenty four years old, he takes farewell of his followers, and bids them find another leader. After two years in a monastery at the royal town of Repton, where he won all hearts by his " frank, modest, and affectionate discipline," in an all-mastering desire to serve God more perfectly than contact with mankind in any form allowed, he plunged into the deepest recesses of the trackless fens, where the sluggish waters of the Welland and the Nen soak their way to the Wash, and reared "himself a hermitage on a spot of hard ground forming an islet in ihe midst of the dismal swamp, environed with dark forests. This was Crowland, properly "Cruland," " coenosa terra," afterwards the site of the great historic monastery, destined in after ages to become the mother 1 Lectures on Early English Church History, p. 395.

of the University of Cambridge, Guthlac is recorded to have reached this dreary spot in the boat of one Tatwin, one of the few to whom the almost inaccessible spot was known, on St. Bartholomew's day, August 24, 699: There he remained for fifteen years, doing battle with fancied evil spirits, the creation of the delirium of marsh fever, and a life "of unnatural austerity, receiving crowds of visitors of all ranks." Abbots, monks, earls, the rich, the poor, the sick, the sorrowful, attracted "even from the remoter parts of Britain," by the fame of bis piety and sympathetic wisdom, to unburden their hearts to him, and none being sent away without finding relief drawn from the Holy Scriptures, on which he based all his counsels. " Nothing," wrote his biographer Felix, "staid in his mind but charity, peace, pity, forgiveness. No one ever saw him angry, hurried, sorrowful ; always cheerful himself, always helpful to other, with unwearied patience and keen discrimination." But such a life in such unwholesome surroundings was not destined to be a long one. He died, fifteen years after his first settlement in Crowland, April 11, 714, at the comparatively early age of forty-seven. To carry on the history of Crowland a little further, Ethelbald of Mercia, who came to the throne two years after Guthlac's death, and died himself in 757, is said to have built a stone monastery on the marshy islet, strengthening the treacherous foundations with piles of wood, as a token of gratitude for the counsel afforded him by the holy hermit in his early days of exile. The tale, however, though not improbable, rests on no undoubted authority. But when and by whomsoever it was founded, it cannot be doubted that a monastery existed at Crowland at an early date, and that it almost certainly perished with its sister houses with Danish invasions, to revive again under one of the race of the destroyers, Turkytel by name, in the period shortly preceding the Norman Conquest.