ESHER PLACE so big as Tattershall. The other bit of fine bricklaying which is of the same rather severe character as Tattershall and Magdalen School at Wainfleet, is the gate-house of Esher Place, occupied by Cardinal Wolsey October, 1529, to February, 1530. It belonged to the Bishops of Winchester, and Wolsey then held that see together with York. Waynflete, who was bishop 1447-1486, and finished Tattershall about 1456, a year after the Lord Treasurer Cromwell's death, had partly re-built Esher Place in his inimitable brickwork, about seventy years before. He used bricks for the lintels and mouldings, and even put in the same sunk spiral handrail, which we have noticed as so clever and remarkable a device in the turret staircase at Tattershall. Waynflete's arms, the lilies, so familiar to us at Eton and Magdalen, were found by the Rev. F. K. Floyer, F.S.A., only last year (1912), when some plaster was removed, on the keystone of the curiously contrived vaulting over the porch. It is noticeable that Henry Pelham, who bought the house in 1729, has introduced also his family badge, the Pelham buckle, which is cut on the stone capitals of the door. This badge we have spoken of in the chapter on Brocklesby. So we have two Lincolnshire families of note, each of which has left his cognisance on the gateway of the once proud Esher Place, the "Asher House" in that magnificent scene of Act III. in Shakespeare's "Henry VIII."
Norfolk. "Hear the king's pleasure, cardinal; who commands you
To render up the great seal presently
Into our hands: and to confine yourself
To Asher-house, my lord of Winchester's,
Till you hear farther from his highness."
Tattershall had a double moat, the outer one reaching to the River Bain. Over both of them the entrance would probably be, as it certainly was over the inner one, protected by a draw-*bridge and portcullis. This was still to be seen in 1726 at the north-east corner of the quadrangle. All that is now left is this one great pile of the Lord Treasurer's and one guard-*house of the fifteenth century. The original castle was begun 200 years earlier, when Robert, the direct descendant of Hugh Fitz Eudo—founder in 1138 of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstead, who had received the estate from William the Conqueror—obtained leave from Henry III. to build a castle there. We have seen how the castle became the property of Joan who
