PREFACE
Having, through the kindness of the lord of the manor, been afforded the opportunity of transcribing and studying at my leisure the court rolls of a Lincolnshire manor, which form an unusually complete series, and seem to me of special interest, I have thought it worth while to print the results in the interests of county history, and I am even ambitious enough to hope that my abstracts may be found to have a still wider historical value. I am conscious that the rolls deserve to be edited by an expert, but, as that is impossible, I trust that the deficiencies of an editor who has done his best will be pardoned. A somewhat longer Introduction and some more notes might have been given, but I have largely exceeded my space already, and have felt that for historical purposes it was better to curtail my own remarks than to diminish the extracts from the rolls.
I cannot mark out on a map the boundaries of the ancient manor of Ingoldmells, and I should certainly get very wrong if I attempted to mark out the boundaries of the modern manor of Ingoldmells-cum-Addlethorpe. I show in the Introduction that the manor extended over part of six parishes, and for the information of those who do not know the county well I must explain that Ingoldmells and Skegness have a coast-line of six miles a little to the north of the Wash, a narrow strip of land in Skegness separating Winthorpe from the seashore and causing Ingoldmells and Skegness to adjoin on the sea coast side, though Winthorpe comes up to the Roman Bank. Very possibly this strip was considerably wider before the fifteenth century, when we read of lands being ‘inundated by the sea.’ Addlethorpe adjoins Ingoldmells on the west, Burgh
