SOMERBY their new pillars. Hard by is Newton with its lofty tower, Haceby, where once the Romans had a small settlement, and Braceby, which, with Ropsley and Somerby, complete an octave of Early English churches all near together.
Somerby is within four miles of Grantham. The church contains a singular effigy, date 1300, of a knight with a saddled horse at his feet, and a groom wearing the hooded short cloak of the period, holding the horse's head. Among the Brownlow monuments is the following inscription to Jane Brownlow, daughter of Sir Richard Brownlow of Humby, 1670,
She was of a solid serious temper, of a competent
Stature and a fayre compleaciton, whoes soul
now is perfectly butyfyed with the friution of
God in glory and whose body in her dew time
he will rais to the enjoyment of the same.
It is curious to find notes on stature and complexion in an epitaph, but it was only lately that I saw a tomb slab in the church of Dorchester-on-Thames, where, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, some of our Lindsey bishops had their Bishop-stool (see Cap. XII.), on which it was thought worth while to record, inter alia, that Rebekah Granger who died in 1753 was "respectful to her friends, and chearful and innocent in her deportment"; whilst close by is a somewhat minute description of the nervous idiosyncrasy of Mrs. S. Fletcher, who died in 1799 at the age of 29, ending with "She sank and died a martyr to excessive sensibility."
The feature of the church is the Norman chancel arch with double moulding. It is especially interesting as showing that the carving of the stones which form the arch was done not by plan but by eye; though the same pattern goes throughout, no two stones are exactly similar, and the pattern is larger or smaller as the mason cut it by guess, and has two zigzags or two and a half accordingly, and therefore the pattern in some places does not properly meet, but the whole effect is all right. The manor was held by the Threckingham family in the fourteenth century, and their arms are in one of the windows. In the feet of fines, Lincoln file 86, we have an agreement between Lambert de Trikingham and Robert, son of Walter le Clerk, of Trikingham, and Hawysia his wife, made at Westminster in the second year of Edward II. (1319). The lady with this charming name seeming to have afterwards married Sir Henry
