CROYLAND ABBEY. Croyland Abbey was founded in 716 to commemorate the place on the island in the fen where St Guthlac had made his habitation. His landing on the island is illustrated in the bottom scene of the quatrefoil of the W portal. His cell W of the W end of the S aisle was excavated in 1908 but filled up again. The abbey, after Danish raids, was rebuilt by Thurketyl early in the C10 and again after a disastrous fire which took place in 1091. The fire and the beginning of the rebuilding are described in one of the most lively accounts in any of the English medieval chronicles (Historia Croylandensis) by Ingulph, the abbot himself under whom they took place. However the rebuilding proper only started under his successor Geoffrey of Orleans. The date of the start is 1114, the architect the lay brother Arnold, to whom the chronicle refers as ‘cementarie artis scientissimo magistro’. An earthquake interfered in 1117, a fire in 1146. Completion is attributed to abbot Robert, who died in 1190. The solemn translation of the relics of St Guthlac took place in 1195. In 1236 abbot Henry died who ‘had renewed nearly the whole church’. The E end was remodelled by Abbot Radulphus before 1281. So much for the documents. They do not help the architectural chronology much, as it is at once presented by the W front of the church.
The S aisle front is Norman. No doorway. Four tiers of blank arcading, the bottom one with small zigzag arches, i.e. a good deal later than 1114, an upper one intersecting. To the s the rubble walling where the W range of the monastic quarters adjoined. To the N enough to recognize the shafted Norman buttress, now hidden by a mighty Perp buttress, This was in fact the N wall of the cell built W of the Norman S aisle W wall, see its former doorway and an upper window. The nave W wall was completely remodelled in the mid C13. The style is close to Westminster Abbey. W portal with four orders of shafts with stiff-leaf capitals. The doorway itself divided by a renewed trumeau. Tympanum with a quatrefoil containing four scenes from the life of St Guthlac surrounded by stiff-leaf trails. To the l. and r. of the portal tall blank panels with trefoiled arches. In each of the panels stood a figure on a corbel. Both corbels remain, but only one figure. She is similar to the mid-C13 work at Westminster and the work of c.1260-70 at Lincoln, as is also the angel of the r. corbel with its small round head and smiling face. Then followed the stage of the E.E. W window. Its tracery is gone, and its top too. But to the l. and r. are two tiers of two figures each, below under gables, above in panels with Geometrical tracery a la Westminster and Lincoln. The former springing-point of the E.E. window can be surmised. It was heightened and received the Perp tracery of which signs remain. At the same time the tiers of smaller figures in niches went up, a lower tier of two l. and two r., and an upper of eight and two smaller niches. The shape of the top gable is unknown. It is assumed that the seated Christ now on the bridge (see below) was once in this gable.
The N aisle front was completely changed when the parochial N aisle received its mighty W tower in the second quarter of the C15 (Abbot Lytlington, 1427-70). Of the Norman buttress signs can again be seen, including some in the cell off the present W porch to the S. This porch projects beyond a projection of the W tower. The latter makes it flush with the big buttress between nave front and S aisle front. The porch itself is two-storeyed. Inside, below, are the springers of a two-bay fan(?)-vault. Deep-panelled W doorway. All the arches four-centred. The upper room is cruciform and has a window to the aisle. The W tower itself has on top of the buttresses detached, diagonally-placed square buttress-shafts connected with the tower by dainty flying buttresses. Very large six-light W window, five-light N window, six-light E window. Then, higher up, blank arcading including the low bell-openings and a short, rather stunted, recessed spire.
In the porch are many ARCHITECTURAL FRAGMENTS. Quite a number of them are Norman, and with fragments in other places they allow the reconstruction of plenty of details. But as one walks round the tower one does not return yet to Norman evidence. The N side is entirely the Perp parochial aisle which was made out of the old aisle in 1405 when the nave was also remodelled. It is widened in its W parts by three chapels. These were provided by a will of 1394. Two have their original four-light windows. Then, as if it were the chancel of a parish church, three four-light windows, tall, with a transom up in the tracery. However, this seeming chancel is in fact the E part of the N aisle. At its E end, still without entering, one can see where the Perp aisle had its (panelled) arch into the transept and also where its preceding Norman aisle had its arch into the Norman transept (the sS respond is exposed) and where the gallery was above. Then the former Norman crossing W arch and the start of the crossing N arch. They are of course very tall. Zigzag in the arches. Nothing further E, i.e. nothing of the late C13 chancel, remains above ground. So we can now enter the ruined part, by crossing the Perp pulpitum by one of its two doorways. We now look down the nave westward. All seems here Perp, i.e. of the work of Lytlington, though it is not quite. On the N side the respond and arch of the first Norman bay of the aisle arcade and gallery arcade remain visible. On the S side only the gallery arch; for in the C13 the lower part seems to have been replaced by a giant (triple?) respond and an arch nearly up to the Norman gallery arch. The gallery arches had a pretty motif on the hood-moulds: flat, radially-placed leaves. The rest Perp. On the N side a half-arch plus six arches plus the tower arch, all compound piers with continuous mouldings. On the S side the piers still stand detached, while on the N the enclosing of the present parish church does not allow their N side to be seen. Above the tall arcade was a wall passage, and then a broad band of blank wall and high tall clerestory windows. Their Perp tracery was all still there on the S side in the C18. Now there is nothing of this left. The nave was vaulted, see the springers. The aisles were also vaulted (and the N aisle still is, as we shall see presently), see the springers in the S aisle. Again a panelled arch to the transept.
Nothing else Norman; only the S aisle W wall with just one blank shafted arch and the base of one pier underpinned with a mixtum compositum of drums and shafts. E.E. of course the inner wall of the W front. The segmental arch of the portal is characteristic (cf. again Westminster).
Now into the parochial aisle. Through the broad panelled tower E arch into the aisle itself. The vault is preserved. It is a simple, uncomplicated tierceron-vault. The outer chapels were also vaulted; see the springers. At the E end the arch opening to the Norman transept is also visible inside. Of the monastic premises nothing at all remains. The abbey in the C14 to early C16 had between twenty-four and forty-one monks, fewer than the layman would imagine, though more than most other Lincolnshire monasteries.
FURNISHINGS. FONTS. An E.E. font, round with corner shafts, is built into the tower arch as a stoup. - Simple octagonal Perp font. - COMMUNION RAIL. Georgian. - SCREEN. Partly Perp. One-light divisions. Some old colour. - PAINTING. Panel with Moses and Aaron, C18, primitive. - PLATE. Chalice and Paten, by T.S., 1681; Paten, by John Stocker(?), 1713; Almsbasin, by Abraham Buteux, 1725; two Cups (used as vases), by Robert Garrard, 1830-1. - MONUMENTS. Under the tower parts of a Perp tomb-chest. Also the large early or mid-C14 incised slab to an architect, see his L-square and dividers. Ci gist mastre William de Warmington, etc., is the inscription. Above his head an ogee arch.
TRIANGULAR BRIDGE, called by Gough ‘the greatest curiosity in Britain, if not in Europe’. Three arches joined to each other at an angle of 120 degrees. The function of the bridge was to serve three streams at the junction of the Nene and Welland. Its date is the later C14, although in 943 a similar bridge is mentioned.* The bridge may also have been the base of a great cross. The mouldings of the arch ribs partly hollow chamfers, partly wavy chamfers. - SCULPTURE. Large seated figure, probably Christ, and quite possibly from the gable of the abbey W front. The date certainly seems to be that of the W front.
* ‘A Ponte de Croyland triangulo per aquam de Weland.’
Fame came to Crowland because of its great Benedictine abbey, founded in memory of a saint. It was in A.D. 699 that a little boat came to rest by this patch of dry ground in the dismal morass which gave the place its name—for Cru-land means soft, muddy land. In the boat was a young Mercian noble, named Gutblac, over whose shrine was to rise Crowland Abbey.
St Guthlac, who was born about A.D. 673, belonged to a family from which had sprung the kings of Mercia. After a wild youth, however, during which he was a leader in lawless fighting and plunder, he decided to abandon his wealth and military career and devote himself to religion.
For about two years he was at Repton Abbey in Derbyshire, where he studied assiduously. Then, when he was about 26, he determined to live a life of still greater solitude and austerity, and, setting off in his boat down the River Trent, he came eventually to Crowland. Here he built himself a hut and little chapel, and for the rest of his days lived on simple and meagre fare ,clad in the skins of animals, but happy amid the dreary waste as a follower of God and a student of Nature.
Here at Crowland Guthlac was sought by men in need of spiritual counsel; and here, in flight from his cousin Ceolred, came the future King Ethelbald, to be assured by Guthlac that he would gain the crown without bloodshed. Guthlac died in 714, and was buried in his own little chapel, which soon became a place of pilgrimage. Two years later Ethelbald became King of Mercia, and, true to his promise to Guthlac if his prophecy should be fulfilled, founded the abbey in remembrance of his friend and protector. Such were the romantic beginnings of Crowland Abbey.
When, many centuries later, the melancholy swamps that Guthlac knew had become fields of golden corn the glory of the abbey had passed away. Three times in its long history it was destroyed by fire, and three times it was rebuilt, ever with increasing splendour, until it eventually became the wealthiest mitred abbey in the county. After the Dissolution the monastic buildings and cloisters (which lay on the south side of the church) were largely destroyed, and the church lost its choir, transepts, and central tower; but all that lay westward was left to serve as the {parish church.
By the middle o the 18th century the south aisle had been taken down and the nave had fallen into ruin (weakened perhaps by Cromwell’s bombardment of the abbey in 1643, when it had been fortified by the Royalists) leaving the north aisle to serve as the parish church-as indeed it had always been, and is still, with the grand old tower at its west end, and a short chancel added in 1897.
This aisle and tower are the only complete survival of the old abbey; but grouped with them are splendid fragments-—the ruined nave with its glorious west front, the lovely west arch of the central tower, and a portion of the west front of the old south aisle. To the west of this aisle walling, in the churchyard, is the site of the cell in which St Guthlac lived his hermit's‘life; and about a mile away, by the road to Spalding, is Anchor Church Field, where he is said to have landed. ( It was on St Bartholomew’s Day that Guthlac came to Crowland, and both saints have a place in the abbey’s dedication.) Of the abbey’s first wooden buildings there is, of course, nothing to be seen, but grave-diggers in the churchyard have come upon the oak piles on which they were set.
A century-and-a-half after its foundation, Crowland Abbey was burned by the Danes, who murdered its abbot (Theodore) at the altar. In the first half of the 10th century rebuilding was begun by Abbot Thurcytel (a kinsman of Edward the Elder), who founded the Crowland library and obtained from King Edgar a charter still extant. He it was who set up stones to mark the extent of the abbey’s domain; and in a garden at Brotherhouse (four miles away, near the Asen Dyke) still stands one marking the boundary between Crowland and Spalding, and proclaiming (in Latin) “This rock, I say, is Guthlac’s utmost bound.”
It was Thurcytel, too, who gave the abbey a huge bell called Guthlac; and according to Ingulphus, the abbey chronicler, a better bell could not be found in the land. Abbot Elgeric, who went on with rebuilding after Thurcytel’s death in 975, is said to have added six bells and so made the first peal in England. Whether that be true we know not; but it is certain that the six bells now in the old abbey tower have made Crowland Abbey known to countless folk who have never seen it, for their fine peal has been carried by wireless far and wide. One of the bells is 15th-century, and another sounds the curfew at 8 o’clock every night, followed by a number of rings corresponding with the day of the month.
In the time of Edward the Confessor, Abbot Ulfketil restored some of the wooden buildings and began to build a new church of stone, having found a generous benefactor in the famous warrior-earl Waltheof, the only man ever condemned to death by the Conqueror. Waltheof’s body was allowed burial in the abbey, and miracles are said to have been wrought at his tomb. In 1091, while Ingulphus the historian was abbot, the abbey was destroyed a second time by fire-this time, it is said, owing to the carelessness of a plumber. The whole library of 700 manuscripts perished in the flames, and what little of the building survived was pulled down in the time of Abbot Jolfrid of Orleans, who began the next rebuilding in 1113.
The massive Norman church built by Joflrid and his successors had the shape of a cross, with transepts and central tower, and although it was damaged by earthquake in 1118 and was partly burned down in 1143, some remains of it are still to be seen. There is Norman work in the remaining portion of the west front of the south aisle, enriched with arcading in which are clearly seen the old masons’ marks-—among them a pair of compasses, a circle with the four points of a star, and a circle with rays. On the eastern side of this wall is a blocked Norman arch. The most striking feature of the Norman remains, however, is the western arch of the vanished central tower; richly adorned with zigzag, and set on its two lofty piers, it stands out like a graceful bow against the sky, defying Time. Beneath the arch is a 15th-century stone screen, pierced with two doorways, and carved and panelled on its eastern side, where an astonishing detail is the marks of a fire lit one day in the 18th century when the squire decided to roast an ox for his son’s coming-of-age.
Next in order of time to this Norman work is the west front of the nave. It has all the richness of a cathedral front, and is almost complete except for its vanished gable, the tracery of its vast window, and some of the splendid statues in niches which adorn it from top to bottom. The lower portion of the front is 13th-century work, and the rest was rebuilt early in the 15th century after it had been blown down. In the tympanum of the richly-moulded double doorway is a bold quatrefoil showing five carved scenes (now very worn) from the life of Guthla - his boat landing at Crowland where a sow and her litter are resting; his ordination by the Bishop of Winchester; his compelling of Satan to bring stone for the abbey; his body being prepared for burial; and his elevation to Heaven by two angels.
The statues are in five tiers, occupying the whole front except for the space taken by the doorway and window. With the three figures believed to have been on the missing gable there were 29 in all; now there are 20. Highest of all are saints and apostles, including Philip with three loaves, James the Greater with staff and wallet, Andrew, Peter, James the Less, and Jude. The second row, divided by the head of the window, has King Ethelbald, the two patron saints (Bartholomew and Guthlac) and Richard the Second in whose reign the abbey was refounded. (Guthlac is shown holding the three-thonged whip which he is supposed to have obtained in answer to prayer, for warding off the “fiends” which assailed him at Crowland, one of which is shown here at his feet.)
The first statue of the third tier is either Kenulph (the first abbot) or Thurcytel; then come William the Conqueror and his Queen Matilda, and Abbot Ingulphus holding a volume of his history. Below them are the Conqueror’s Archbishop Lanfranc, King Wiglaf, who found refuge at Crowland and was buried here in 825, Earl Waltheof, and Abbot Jolfrid. By the doorway is the one remaining Evangelist.
Except for three stately bays of its south arcade, little is left of the rest of the nave, which, together with the old north aisle and the tower, belongs to the great 15th-century rebuilding under the three abbots who ruled from 1393 till 1469—Thomas Overton, Richard Upton, and John Lytlyngton.
The tower (which was given its two-storeyed west porch and its stumpy spire with four dormer windows early in the 16th century) has a great six-light west window with fine tracery, an arcaded top stage, and panelled buttresses rising to a plain parapet. Its interior is a glorious lantern, with enormous arches framing windows with panelled sides. There are four galleries at various levels, and a great panelled arch leads to the old north aisle which through the centuries has been the people’s church. With its great windows and its fine vaulted roof of stone, this old aisle is a lovely sight from the tower, giving a vivid impression of the beauty and dignity which the complete church must have possessed. One of the roof ’s six golden bosses, showing a staff over a tun, is the rebus of Abbot Overton in whose time the abbey was mitred.
The fine 15th-century oak chancel screen, enriched with tracery and still retaining some of its original colour, once enclosed the lady chapel in the north transept; in the spandrels of its lower panels are leaves and flowers, a man in a boat, a bat-like grotesque, a fierce dragon, and a man's head with golden hair. Here are also two fonts-a traceried one of the 15th century, and a round font of Norman times set in an arched and vaulted recess in the south pier of the tower arch. Two of the three old chapels on the north side of the old aisle are vestries now, and in the rector’s vestry stands a solid oak chest five centuries old. Gathered together in a south window is a mosaic of old glass fragments, including two little angels in white and gold.
The upper room of the west porch is used as a chapel, and within the porch is the entrance to a dark little room where the abbots of old may have sheltered people who claimed sanctuary. Some fragments of old stonework are preserved within it.
Against the inner wall of the tower is a fine tombstone with the engraved portrait of William of Wermington, the 15th-centur master of works responsible for much of this splendid architecture. standing under an elaborate canopy, he holds the instruments of his craft, a pair of compasses and a square. Nearby hangs a miniature stone coffin-lid—the top of a heart-burial casket. Also in the tower is an inscription to an 18th-century sexton, William Hill, who though blinded in middle age could still walk unaided about the town and find his way to every grave in the churchyard.
Hanging on the north wall is a wooden tablet bearing the quaint epitaph of a family of Queen Anne’s time:
Man’s life is like unto a winter’s day,
Some brake their fast and so depart away;
Others stay dinner, then depart full fed;
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader then behold & see:
As we are now so must you be.
Father, mother, and three children all were laid to rest in the time of Henry Perne, rector here for 51 years till 1722.
One other ancient sight known far and wide has Crowland. Standing at the cross-roads in the middle of the town is the famous Triangular Bridge, a relic unique in the land. Built when these streets were waterways, it is like three halves of bridges meeting at a centre and climbed by three fiights of steps. Built in the second half of the 14th century, it replaced a wooden bridge mentioned in a document of 1000 years ago, and may have served as the base of a great cross, as well as a three-way bridge. For about 200 years the bridge has been adorned by a seated figure of Our Lord holding the World. It is believed that this statue was originally on the missing gable of the west front of the abbey church, where it perhaps had figures of St Mary and St John for company.
Henry the Sixth, who gave the town its charter for a market and a fair, landed here when he came to stay with the abbot in 1460, and some years later Edward the Fourth stepped from the bridge on to a boat that was to take him to Fotheringhay Castle.
Half a mile from the town, in a field by the Spalding road, is a notice-board recording an odd feat in early Victorian times by a man of 56. Henry Girdlestone was his name, and his feat was to walk 1000 miles in 1000 hours. From this spot to an inn in the town he tramped to and fro, stopping only for sleep and refreshment, until he had accomplished his freakish feat of endurance.
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