THE AYSCOUGH TOMBS art. Below him his son, Edward of Kelsey, 1612, lies supine in plate armour and a ruff, with bare head pillowed on a cushion, while on a raised platform, just behind him, his wife Esther, daughter of Thomas Grantham, Esq., leans on her right elbow; she, too, in a ruff with hair done high and with a tight bodice and much-pleated skirt. The faces look like portraits, and Sir Edward has a singularly feeble, but not unpleasant, face, with small, low forehead. On the wall at his wife's feet is a painted coat of arms on a lozenge, with nineteen quarterings, and a real helmet is placed on the tomb slab below it. The slab is a very massive one, and below it is an inscription in gold letters on a black ground in Latin, which is from Psalm CXXVIII. "Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house, thy children like the olive branches round about thy table, lo thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord"; and beneath this, on the side of the tomb, are the kneeling effigies of six sons and six daughters. The whole thing—both the effigies and the inscription—is similar to the Tyrwhit tomb at Bigby. Above the mural monument of the father is the Ayscoughe crest, a little grey ass coughing, and under his half-effigy is a later inscription, which doubtless refers to his son, and not to himself, the poor, unhappy cause of his sister's dreadful sufferings. It runs thus:—
Clarus imaginibus proavum, sed mentis honestae
Clarior exemplis, integritate, fide.
Una tibi conjux uni quae juncta beatas
Fecerat et noctes et sine lite dies.
Praemissi non amissi.
And a thing called on the monument an "Anigram," which is past the understanding of ordinary men, is also part of the inscription. The extraordinary state of preservation of the whole group is a marvel.
Other inscriptions and brasses are in the church, though partly hidden by the organ and the altar, one to the second wife of Anne's father, Sir William, along with others of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the churchyard is the stem of a cross.
Four miles further south the fine broad fifteenth-century tower of Great Cotes of rich yellow stone, attracts anyone who is passing from Goxhill to Grimsby, and it is a church which well repays a visit.
