THE 'GOOD OLD DAYS' but I doubt if a single post remains. Eighty years ago some still held their ghastly record. My uncle, Edward Rawnsley, who was born in 1815, told me once that he had passed one with a skeleton hanging in chains, as he rode from Bourne to Wisbech. The Melton Ross gallows was renewed in 1830.
Only two miles east of West Rasen we reach Middle Rasen, which has an interesting church. It once had two, one on each side of the stream; the existing one, which belonged to Tupholme Abbey, has a very fine Norman south door and Norman piers to the chancel arch, and a deeply moulded Early English arcade, on which is a singular beaded moulding. There is also a low-side window and a beautiful Perpendicular rood screen, also a fourteenth-century effigy of a priest with vestments and chalice. In the churchyard is the font of the other church.
In the days of toll-bars there were two at Middle Rasen; usually they were let to the highest bidder, and the man who took the main road gate in the year 1845 is still living, at the age of eighty-nine, in 1912. A toll-bar keeper in the days before railways, when all the corn went to market by road, had little rest at night, as waggons full or empty passed through at all hours. In his early days food was dear—tea eight shillings a pound—and wages were low, and bread and water and barley-chaff dumpling were the common fare. He is now a rate-collector and, of course, can read and write, but he never went to school, and at eight years of age he began to earn a little by "scaring crows." At fifteen he was mowing and using the flail at his native village of Legbourne. In a field, near where the station now is, he remembers a man mowing wheat for six days on bread and water, and the crop yielded six quarters to the acre. A woman of ninety-three, now living in the Wolds, remembers when flour was 4s. 6d. a stone, and a loaf cost 11-1/2d. instead of 2-1/2d. They mixed rye with wheat flour and baked at home; and a labourer who earned enough to buy a stone of flour a day thought he could live well.
Only the other day I heard of a labouring family living just between the Wold and the Marsh, seven sons of a retired Crimean soldier. The clergyman used to make them a present at the christening if he might choose the name, and he gave them grand historic names for them to live up to, e.g., Washington and Wellington, and the plan certainly answered, for they all took to the land and by steadiness, hard work and good
