A not unapt parallel has been drawn between Boston and Venice for, like the Campanile, Boston steeple is a sort of Queen of the Waters, and before the draining of the Fens she often looked down on a waste of waters which stretched in all directions.

Leland, who wrote in the reign of Henry VIII., in Vol. VII. of his Itinerary, speaks of “the great Steple of Boston,” and describes the town thus: “Bosstolpstoune stondeth harde on the river Lindis (Witham). The greate and chifiest parte of the toune is on the este side of the ryver, where is a faire market place, and a crosse with a square toure. Al the buildings of this side of the toune is fayre, and Marchuntes duelle yn it; and a staple of wulle is used there. There is a bridg of wood to cum over Lindis, into this parte of the toune, and a pile of stone set yn the myddle of the ryver. The streame of yt is sumtymes as swifte as it were an arrow. On the West side of Lindis is one long strete, on the same side is the White Freies. The mayne sea ys VI miles of Boston. Dyverse good shipps and other vessells ryde there.”

Michael Drayton, who wrote in Elizabeth’s reign, was quite enthusiastic about the merits of the Witham, which runs out at Boston, and makes her speak in her own person thus:—

We have no definite information of what Boston was in Roman times, but as the Witham was the river on which their colony at Lincoln stood, it is more than probable that they had a station at Boston to defend the river-mouth, and whatever they may have called it, it is certain that it has got its name of Boston or Botolph’s town from an English saint who is said to have founded a monastery here in 654, which was destroyed by the Danes in 870. St. Botolph was buried in his monastery in 680, and his remains moved in 870, part to Ely and part to Thorney Abbey. The name as a town does not appear in Domesday Book, though “Skirbec” does, and Skirbeck covered all the ground that Boston does, and almost surrounded it. As the old distich declares—

This name for pride or conceit, whether deserved or not, seems to have stuck to Boston, for a rhyme of later day runs thus:—

And certainly Boston once had some reason to be proud, for though the town was quite an infant till the beginning of the twelfth century, in 1113 “Fergus, a brazier of St. Botolph’s town” was able, according to Ingulphus in his “Chronicles of Croyland Abbey,” “to give 2 Skillets (Skilletas) which supplied the loss of their bells and tower.” The gift, whatever it was (probably small bells), must have been of considerable value to Croyland, which had been burnt down in 1091, and argues much prosperity among Boston tradespeople. Indeed, the town and its trade rose with such rapidity during the next hundred years that when, in the reign of King John, a tax or tythe of a fifteenth was levied on merchants’ goods, Boston’s contribution was £780, being second only to the £836 of London. For the next two centuries it was a commercial port of the first rank, and merchants from Flanders and most of the great Continental towns had houses there.

When in 1304 Edward I. granted his wife Queen Margaret the castle and manor of Tattershall to hold till the heir was of age, he added to it the manor of St. Botolph and the duties levied on the weighing of the wool there. This was set down as worth £12 a year. A wool sack was very large—one sees them now at Winchester, each large enough to fill the whole bed of a Hampshire waggon—but at 6s. 8d. a sack the duties must have been often worth more than £12, for there was no other staple in the county but at Lincoln, and that was afterwards, under Edward III. in 1370, transferred to Boston, and whether at Boston or Lincoln, when weighed and sealed by the mayor of the staple, it was from Boston that it was all exported.

When a staple of wool, leather, lead, etc., was established at any town or port it was directed that the commodities should be brought thither from all the neighbourhood and weighed, marked and sealed. Then they could be delivered to any other port, where they were again checked. In 1353, during the long reign of Edward III., the staple was appointed to be held in Newcastle, York, Lincoln, Norwich, Westminster, Canterbury, Chichester, Winchester, Exeter and Bristol. Of these, York and Lincoln sent all the produce when weighed to Hull and Boston, Norwich to Yarmouth, Westminster to London Port, Canterbury to Sandwich, and Winchester (by water or road) to Southampton. In 1370 some of the inland towns—York, Lincoln and Norwich—were deprived of their staple, and Hull and Queensborough were added to the list; and, though Nottingham, Leicester and Derby petitioned to have the staple at Lincoln, which was much more convenient to them, the answer they got was that it should continue at St. Botolph’s during the king’s pleasure.

In Henry VIII.’s time, when the king passed through Lincolnshire after “the pilgrimage of grace” and the chief towns made submission and paid a fine, Boston paid £50, while Stamford and Lincoln paid £20 and £40 respectively.

In 1288 a church of the Dominican or Black Friars which had been recently built was burnt down, and a few years later a friary was re-established, which was one of the many Lincolnshire religious houses granted by Henry VIII. to Charles Brandon Duke of Suffolk. In 1301, under Edward I., a Carmelite, or White Friars, monastic house and priory was founded; and in the next reign, 1307, an Augustinian, or “Austin,” friary; and only a few years later, under Edward III., a Franciscan, or Grey Friars, friary was established. All these three were granted by Henry at the dissolution to the mayor and burgesses of Boston. He also granted the town their charter under the great Seal of England, to make amends for the losses they sustained by the destruction of the religious houses. It is a document with fifty-seven clauses, making the town a free borough with a market on Wednesday and Saturday, and two fairs annually of three days each, to which are added two “marts” for horses and cattle. The ground where the grammar school stands is still called the Mart-yard, and there you may still see the beautiful iron gate which was once part of a screen in the church, and is a very notable piece of good seventeenth-century work.

The charter also gave the corporation, among other things, “power to assess the inhabitants, as well unfree as free, with a tax for making a safeguard and defence of the borough and church there against the violence of the waters and rage of the sea.”

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there were no less than fifteen guilds in the town, six of them with charters. The hall of St. Mary’s guild still exists, the names of St. George’s Lane and Corpus Christi Lane is all that is left of the others, but the old names indicate the localities.

In 1360 we have mention on the corporation records of William de Spayne, one of a family of merchants of repute, after whom Spayne’s Place and what is now Spain Lane were named. William was an alderman of the Corpus Christi Guild, and sheriff of the county in 1378. Spain Lane had a row of great cellars, some of which were rented by the abbeys, and a quantity of wine was shipped from Bordeaux to Boston. King John of France had 140 tuns at one time, the carriage of which to Boston, and some part of it to the place of his detention at Somerton Castle (see Chap. XIII.), cost close upon £500. This large supply was sent to him from France, partly for his own consumption and partly to be sold in order to bring in money to keep up his royal state, and when we read of the silk curtains and tapestries, the French furniture for dining-hall and bedrooms which displaced the benches and trestles of an English castle, the horse trappings and stable fittings, and the enormous amount of stores and confectionery used at Somerton, we realise that his daily expenditure must have been a very large one. The cellars which stowed these large cargoes of wine were in Spain (or Spayne) Lane, and most of them were, in 1590, in accordance with Boston’s usual suicidal custom, destroyed, though the corporation still held two in 1640 which had once belonged to Kirkstead Abbey.

In the sixteenth century several trade companies—cordwainers, glovers, etc.—received charters. In this century Queen Elizabeth gave the mayor and burgesses a “Charter of Admiralty” over the whole of the “Norman Deeps” to enable them to repair and maintain the sea marks, and to levy tolls on all ships entering the port. But trade was then declining owing to the silting up of the river. This, in 1569, when the town was made a Staple town, had been in good order, and navigable for seagoing ships of some size, the tide water running up two miles inland as far as Dockdyke (now Dogdyke), and then a large trade was done in wool and woollen goods between Boston and Flanders. Hence it was that when, in the reign of Henry VII., a council was held to discuss the two great needs of the town, viz., the restraining the sea water from flooding the land, and the delivery of the inland waters speedily to the sea, it was to Flanders that the Boston men turned for an engineer, one Mahave Hall, who built them a dam and sluice in the year 1500. This is called the Old Sluice, and was effectual for a time. But in Queen Elizabeth’s reign the river below Boston was getting so silted up again that the waters of South Holland were brought by means of two “gowts” (go outs), or “clows,” one into the Witham above Boston at Langrick, and one below into the harbour at Skirbeck, to scour out the channel. The Kesteven men, from a sense of being robbed of their waters, opposed, but their objections were over-ruled by the chief justices. In 1568-9 the “Maud Foster” drain was cut and named after the owner, who gave easement over her land on very favourable terms.

In the map to the first volume of the “History of Lincolnshire,” published by Saunders in 1834, the Langrick Gowt (or gote) finds no place; but the “Holland Dyke” is probably meant for it. The Skirbeck dyke is marked very big and called “The South Forty-foot,” which, along with the North Forty-foot and Hobhole drains, and others of large size, aided by powerful steam pumps, have made the Fens into a vast agricultural garden.

But the Elizabethan expedient was only successful for a time, and in 1751 a small sloop of forty to fifty tons and drawing about six feet of water could only get up to Boston on a spring tide. To remedy this and also to keep the floods down, which, when the cutfall was choked, extended in wet seasons west of the town as far as eye could see, an Act of Parliament was passed to empower Boston to cut the Witham channel straight and set to work on a new sluice. This “Grand Sluice,” designed by Langley Edwardes, had its foundation carried down twenty feet, on to a bed of stiff clay. Here, just as, near the old Skirbeck sluice, where Hammond beck enters the haven, at a depth of sixteen feet sound gravel and soil was met with, in which trees had grown; and at Skirbeck it is said that a smith’s forge, with all its tools, horseshoes, etc., complete, was found at that depth below the surface, showing how much silt had been deposited within no great number of years. The foundation stone of the present Grand sluice was laid by Charles Amcotts, then Member of Parliament and Mayor of Boston, in 1764, and opened two years later in the presence of a concourse of some ten thousand people. He died in 1777, and the Amcotts family in the male line died with him. In Jacobean times much good embankment work under Dutch engineers had been begun, and had met with fierce opposition from the Fen men, and the same spirit was still in existence a hundred and fifty years later, for when, in 1767, an Act was passed for the enclosure of Holland, the works gave rise to the most determined and fierce riots which were carried to the most unscrupulous length of murder, cattle maiming, and destruction of valuable property, and lasted from 1770 to 1773. But at length common sense prevailed, and a very large and fertile tract of land to the south-east of Boston was acquired, which helped again to raise the fortunes of the town to prosperity. Following on this in 1802 a still larger area was reclaimed on the other side of Boston in the East, West, and Wildmore Fens. But, as in all low-lying lands near the coast which are below the level of high-water mark, constant look-out has to be kept even now, both to prevent the irruption of the sea and the flooding of the land from storm-water not getting away quickly enough.

The Louth Abbey “Chronicle,” a most interesting document, extending from 1066 to the death of Henry IV., 1413, records disastrous floods in the Marsh in 1253 and 1315, and a bad outbreak of cattle plague in 1321. From other sources we have notice of a great flood at Boston in 1285; another in ‘Holland,’ 1467; and again at Boston in 1571 a violent tempest, with rain, wind, and high tide combining, did enormous damage. Sixty vessels were wrecked between Newcastle and Boston, many thousands of sheep and cattle were drowned in the Marsh, the village of Mumby-Chapel was washed into the sea and only three cottages and the steeple of the church left standing. One “Maister Pelham had eleven hundred sheep drowned there.” At the same time “a shippe” was driven against a house in the village, and the men, saving themselves by clambering out on to the roof, were just in time to save a poor woman in the cottage from the death by drowning which overtook her husband and child. So sudden and violent was the rise of the flood that at Wansford on the Nene three arches of the bridge were washed away, and “Maister Smith at the Swanne there hadde his house, being three stories high, overflowed into the third storie,” while the walls of the stable were broken down, and the horses tied to the manger were all drowned.

At the same time the water reached half way up Bourne church tower. This shows the tremendous extent of the flood, for those two places are forty-four miles apart. This is the “High tide on the Lincolnshire Coast” sung by our Lincolnshire poetess, Jean Ingelow. She speaks of the Boston bells giving the alarm by ringing the tune called “The Brides of Mavis Enderby.”

This tune, which Miss Ingelow only imagined, was subsequently composed, and is now well known at Boston, for, besides the ring of eight bells, the tower has a set of carillons like those at Antwerp. They were set up in 1867, thirty-six in number, by Van Aerschodt, of Louvain, but not proving to be a success, were changed in 1897 for something less complex, and now can be heard at 9 a.m., and every third hour of the day playing “The Brides of Mavis Enderby.”

A violent gale is recorded on February 16, 1735, which did much damage, and in 1763-4 there was a great flood, not owing to any high tide but simply, as in 1912, from continued heavy rains, and we are told that the flood lasted for many weeks. Just lately, in 1912, this was aggravated by the bursting of a dyke in the Bedford level which flooded miles of fenland. In August, 1913, the land was parched by drought, but in 1912 it was a melancholy sight to see, in August, on both sides of the railway between Huntingdon and Spalding the corn sheaves standing up out of the water, and the farm buildings entirely surrounded, while the rain continued to fall daily. Even after three weeks of fine weather in September, though the drenched sheaves had been got away, water still covered the fields, stretching sometimes as far as eye could see. In 1779, when the reclamation of the Holland ‘Fens’ had been carried out, many vessels are said to have been driven by a violent gale nearly two miles inland on the ‘Marsh.’ This was long spoken of as “The New Year’s Gale.”

Exceptionally high tides, each four inches higher than its predecessor, in the streets of Boston are recorded for October 19, 1801, November 30, 1807, and November 10, 1810. This last accompanied by a storm of wind and rain. On this occasion the water was all over the streets of Boston and flowed up the nave of the church as far as the chancel step, being nearly a yard deep at the west end. Since then high-water marks were cut on the base of the tower showing how deep the nave was flooded in 1883 and 1896. In 1813 another high tide caused the sea-bank assessment to rise to 13s. 8d. an acre, the normal rate then, as it is now, for the drainage tax in the east fen, amounting to 3s. an acre. Even that seems to be pretty stiff, £15 a year on a hundred acre farm! Of course it is an absolute necessity, and has been recognised from the earliest times. We know that in the reign of Edward I. an assessment was levied on all who had land to keep the drains in repair. This was as long ago as 1298.

The great feature of Boston is the wonderful church tower. But the town is from many points very picturesque. The deep-cut channel of the tidal river goes right through it. Passing close up against the western side of the great steeple, it goes with houses almost overhanging its eastern bank down to the bridge, a structure of no beauty. After this it runs alongside the street. From the windows you look across and see the masts of the small sea-going craft tied up to the bank, which, with all the old weed-grown timbers of landing-stage and jetty, the natural accompaniments of a tidal river, make quaint and effective pictures. In another street the boys in their old-fashioned blue coats and brass buttons let you into the secret of Boston’s many educational charities. One is in Wormgate (or Withamsgate), one in White Friars Lane, dating from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and another in Shodfriars Lane. The very names of the streets in Boston are full of history, and the recently-restored “Shod Friars Hall,” to the south-east of the Market Place, helps, with its abundant timbers and carved gables, to take one right back to the fourteenth century, though the name was only recently bestowed on this particular building.

But alas, not only all the monastic buildings, but nearly all the domestic buildings which once made Boston like a medieval Dutch town are gone, though the fifteenth-century brick Guildhall remains. The citizens seem to have had a fatal mania for pulling down all that was most worth preserving of their old buildings. Gone, too, is much else which Bostonians might well have preserved. Such, for instance, as “the prodigious clock bell which could be heard many miles round, and was knocked to pieces in the year 1710.” It is but a few years ago that some of the Boston Corporation plate was sold in London for immense prices, and when astonished people asked how it came to the hammer they heard a miserable tale how the fine collection of civic plate, and it was unusually fine, had been sold in 1837 for £600, nothing approaching to its value, by the corporation itself, for the purpose of liquidating some civic debt. But any sin Boston may commit, such as the crude colouring of the interior of the much-renovated Guildhall, and painting and graining of the deal panels only last year, will be forgiven, so long as they have their uniquely glorious church tower to plead for them.

Lord Hussey’s tower and the Kyme tower are ruins, built about the end of the fifteenth century, and at the end of the eighteenth century a big house was still standing which may have been Lord Hussey’s. The brick tower stands near the school fields, not far from the Public Gardens, which are a credit to Boston, and have some first-rate salt-water baths close by, which belong to the corporation.

The Kyme tower is also called the Rochford tower, that family having held it before the Kymes. It is a massive tower, also of brick, as may be seen from the illustration. It stands about two miles outside the town to the east.

Of celebrated folk born in Boston we have, to begin with, John Fox, author of the “Book of Martyrs,” who was born there in 1517. He was sent to Brasenose, Oxford, and worked very hard, but was expelled as a heretic when he forsook the Roman Catholic religion. The Warwickshire family of Sir Thomas Lucie, a name made famous by Shakespeare, gave him shelter and employment as a tutor; and later he tutored the children of the Earl of Surrey who, in the reign of Queen Mary, helped him to escape from Bishop Gardiner’s deadly clutches. Like so many who suffered persecution for their religion, he made his home at Basle till Elizabeth’s accession allowed of his return. He then spent eleven years on his “Acts and Monuments,” and died in 1587.

At about this time the plague raged at Boston, 1585, and broke out again in 1603. Boston and Frampton had, as the Registers show, suffered an unusual mortality in 1568-9. The water was not good, and as late as 1783 a boring to a depth of 478 feet was made in a vain search for a better supply. The town was at that time supplied from the west fen through wooden pipes.

Hallam, the historian, and Professor John Conington, whose monuments are in the church, were both of Boston families, as was also Jean Ingelow; and the statue near the church preserves the memory of John Ingram, Member of Parliament for the town, and founder of the Illustrated London News. Saunders tells us that Oliver Cromwell lay at Boston the night before he fought the battle of Winceby, near Horncastle, October 10, 1643. He must have been up betimes, for a crow couldn’t make the distance less than sixteen miles, and fen roads at that time were a caution.

Boston is a great centre for the fen farmers, and, as at Peterborough, you may see and hear in the market much that is original. It was at Peterborough that the “converted” sailor made his famous petition when asked to do a bit of praying in the open: “O Lord! bless this people! bless their fathers and mothers! and bless the children! O Lord bless this place! make it prosperous, send thy blessing upon it and make it—make it, O Lord! a sea-poort-town!” Boston having the Marsh farmers as well as the Fen-men meeting in her market, preserves a more racy dialect. I was once in the Boston Station waiting-room as it was getting dusk on a winter evening; three people of the sea-faring class were there—a tall, elderly man standing up, his son asleep on the floor, and the son’s wife sitting and apparently not much concerned with anything. The father, seeing me look at the sleeper, said “He’ll be all right after a bit. My owd son yon is. He’s a bit droonk now, but he’s my owd son. A strange good hand in a boat he is, I tell ye. They was out lass Friday i’ the Noorth Sea and it cam on a gale o’ wind, they puts abowt you knooa, an’ runs for poort. The seäs was monstrous high, they was, and the gale was a rum un, an’ the booat she was gaff-hallyards under. The tother men ‘She’s gooing!’ they says, ‘She’s gooing!’ But my owd son he hed the tiller. ‘She’s all right,’ he säys, and mind ye she was gaff-hallyards under, but ‘She’s all right,’ he säys, and he brings her right in. Aye he’s a rare un wi’ a booat is my owd son, noan to touch him. He’s a bit droonk now, but he’s my owd son.”

On another occasion at Boston I heard one farmer greet another with “Well, Mr. Smith, how’s pigs?” a very common inquiry, for in Lincolnshire pigs fill a large space on the agricultural horizon. Witness the reply of an aged farmer, probably a little unmanned by market-day potations, to a vegetarian who, with a cruelty hardly to be suspected in the votary of so mild a diet, had attacked him with “How will you feel at the day of Judgment when confronted by a whole row of oxen whose flesh you have eaten?” “’Taint the beasts I’d be scared on; it’s the pigs; I’ve yetten a vast o’ pigs.”