de Wellington, for in the thirty-second year of Edward III. (1359) another settlement is recorded of a dispute about Somerby Manor between Enericus de Welyngton Miles and Hawysia his wife on one side, and John Bluet and Alan Rynsley (one of the sixteen various spellings of Rawnsley) and his wife Margaret on the other, by which Alan and Margaret, for conceding their claims, receive 100 marks of silver. This and much other interesting information is to be found in a paper on The Manor of Somerby, by Gilbert George Walker, rector of the parish.
In the fifteenth century John Bluet held the living, one of whose ancestors was probably the civilian with his feet on a fleece, whose fine recumbent effigy is in Harlaxton church. His daughter married Robert Bawde, whose brass is in the church, and their family were in possession till 1720. A large monument on the north wall commemorates Elizabeth Lady Brownlow, née Freke, whose son John built Belton House. She died in 1684. There is also a brass to Peregrine Bradshaw and his wife, who died in 1669 and 1673.
Dr. William Stukeley, the famous antiquary, who was a Lincolnshire man, born at Holbeach in 1687, was, at one time, rector of Somerby.
Ropsley, two and a half miles to the east, shows some 'Long and Short' Saxon work at the north-east angle of the nave. The tower has a Decorated broach spire. At the south porch is the couplet,
"Hac non vade via
Nisi dices Ave Maria."
BISHOP FOX The church has also a very notable little stained glass window with an armed figure of Johannes de Welby. In the church a curious broad projection from the east window of the north aisle forms a bridge to the rood loft. In the eyes of a Corpus man, like the writer, Ropsley is sacred as being the birthplace of Bishop Fox, who held successively the sees of Exeter, Bath and Wells, Durham and Winchester, and founded, or helped to found, the Grantham Grammar School near his old home in 1528, and also, in 1516, the College of Corpus Christi, Oxford.
The Eden, whose course we have been tracing, having joined the Glen, crosses the Carr Dyke a mile beyond Wilsthorpe, after which the Glen becomes for a time simply a fen drain. The "Bourne Eau" goes into it and they proceed together with
