THE MARKET CROSS are gone and some of the best are mutilated, for as Tennyson says in "The Village Wife":—
"The lasses 'ed teäred out leäves i' the middle to kindle the fire."
Only here it was not the lasses but the mediæval verger.
The bowl of the font has most interesting carved panels of the Annunciation, the Magi, the Nativity, Circumcision, Baptism, Blessing of Children, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and one other. The oak chancel screen and the parcloses by Scott, the reredos by Bodley, and the rest of the oak fittings by Blomfield, are all very good. The screen takes the place of the old stone screen which is quite gone. There is some excellent modern glass, and for those who understand heraldry, I might mention that in the east window were once many coats of arms of which Marrat gives a list with notes by Gervase Holles, from which I gather that the armorial glass was very fine, and that the arms of "La Warre" are "G. crusily, botony, fitchy, a lion rampant or." It is pleasant to know this, even if one does not quite understand it.
The extending of the church westwards encroached upon the open space in which stood the reinstated "Applecross," at one time replaced by a quite uncalled-for stone obelisk in the marketplace, opposite the Angel, with an inscription to say that the Eleanor Cross once stood there, which was not true, as that was set up in the broad street or square called "St. Peter's Hill," where now the bronze statue of Newton stands. In Finkin Street the town, until ten years ago, preserved a splendid chestnut tree, and other fine trees near the church add a beauty which towns now-a-days rarely possess.
As at Lincoln, the Grey Friars first brought good drinking water to the town, and their conduit is still a picturesque object in the market square. It is on the south side, close to the Blue Sheep. Blue seems to have been the Grantham colour, for there are at least twelve inns whose sign is some blue thing—Bell, Sheep, Pig, Lion, Dragon, Boy, etc. Blue pill is almost the only thing of that colour not represented.
The connection of Grantham with Salisbury is a very old one, as far back as 1091 the lands and endowments of the church were granted to St. Osmund, and by him given to his new cathedral at Old Sarum, the site of which is now being cleared in much the same manner as has been adopted at Bardney
