THE CHARTERHOUSE stopped and looked at him and then said, "So you're Sir Charles Anderson, are ye? Sure now there's scores of Andersons where I come from; there's one now in Sligo, a saddler. Ach! he's a good fellow is that; the rale gintleman. He gives without asking." Then, after a pause, "You've a look of 'em." The Andersons lived in Lincolnshire from the days of Richard II., first at Wrawby then at Flixborough, temp. Henry VII.
Knaith is noticeable as being the birthplace, in 1532, of Thomas Sutton, the founder of the Charterhouse in London, where he is buried. The church has what is not at all common in English churches, a baldacchino over the altar, but in fact it is not an ordinary church, being just a part of an old Cistercian nunnery, founded by Ralph Evermue, about 1180.
Thomas Sutton was of Lincoln parents. He served in the army and was made inspector of the King's Artillery. Having leased some land in the county of Durham, he proceeded to work the coal there, and became very wealthy, in fact the wealthiest commoner in the realm, and with at least £5,000 a year, so that he was able to give Lord Suffolk £13,000 for the house then called Howard House in Middlesex, which had been the original Charterhouse, founded in 1371 by Sir Walter Manney and dissolved in 1535. This was in May, 1611. He wished to do something to benefit the nation, but he left the details to the Crown. He died in December of the same year, but his charity was arranged to support eighty poor folk, and to teach forty boys, being, like Robert Johnson's foundation at Uppingham, both a hospital and a school. The hospital remains in its old buildings in London, the school was moved in 1872 to Godalming, where it greatly flourishes.
A central road runs through the middle of the flat country, half-way between the Lincoln-and-Gainsborough road and the Ridge. This takes us from Corringham by a string of small villages to Stow, and thence by Sturton to Saxilby, and so back to Lincoln. Of those villages Springthorpe and Heapham both have the early unbuttressed towers, described in Chapters XXII. and XXIII., the former with herring-bone masonry, the latter, like Marton, is unfortunately covered with stucco. In the next village of Upton again we find herring-bone masonry; at Willingham-by-Stow, the base of the tower is early Norman; so that in spite of the ruthless way in which succeeding styles destroyed the work of their predecessors, we have a large group
