Bear Hunting in Lincoln
31 July 09: Without a doubt, Lincoln has been the favorite town of the tour so far: founded as a Roman retirement colony (the ‘coln’ in Lincoln) it’s been built upon beautifully. We were there for four days in June: great weather, a friendly creaky old theatre run on a shoestring, nice people and an excellent vintage clothes shop, where I bought a shirt owned by the shopkeeper’s grandfather.
I took a walking tour with Dave Calhoun – there we are underneath the Harlequin pub, originally an Elizabethan theatre that put on Shakespeare. Informative and friendly: here are some nifty facts I learned from Dave:
• Tudor buildings are shaped the way they are – each floor larger than the one beneath it – because in Tudor times you were only taxed on the ground space you occupied.
• Sometimes the ascending floors got so large the overhanging eaves of two opposite houses would meet above a street. Occupants of the houses could listen to what was happening below them: they were ‘eavesdroppers’.
• In Tudor days if you built your home on unclaimed land, and had your hearth lit cooking your supper by nightfall, the land became yours. There are several houses in Lincoln that were constructed in the forest, disassembled and rebuilt in the middle of a wide Roman street. When the builders lit their hearth, they legally owned the property, their part of the street included.
• He recommended the Usher Museum, and he was right: it's a terrific little gallery: with a great collection of clocks, porcelain, and paintings of De Wint, Stubbs, Turner & Lowry.
• The Lincoln Cathedral houses one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta, in well-lit sealed frame in the entrance. There were 41 originally, one for each county in the UK, and a copy to the King and each noble signatory. Dave can remember as a Cathedral choirboy being called into a room by the Pastor, who then, saying he had something interesting to show them all, pulled a rubber band off a rolled piece of paper and spread it out: the Magna Carta. Afterwards he just rolled it up again and stuck it back in the drawer…
• The oldest house in the city is still very much in use: a Norman building with original Norman arched windows and doorways.
• Public Hangings took place in Lincoln until the ban in 1875, and railways would run special cars from London carrying tourists. They used long lengths of ropes to hang the victims, cutting them up afterwards into small 3-inch pieces and flogged as souvenirs – and that's where the expresson ‘money for old rope’ comes from.
• The White Hart pub was where the tank was invented. During the First World War, Churchill ordered a land vehicle to be designed and built that could accompany infantrymen into battle. The designers met at the White Hart and came up with the first tank. The men actually assembling them were told they were making mobile watertanks. Only after the final pieces – the gun turrets – were put on top, was it clear what they were making. Nevertheless, the name ‘tank’ stuck.
• Lincoln’s Cathedral used to be the tallest in the country, until two spires collapsed, and the front steeple was struck by lightning. The town decided to knock the whole Cathedral down – temporarily keeping the front façade – and rebuild it starting from the back. When they finally got to the front, years later, they either ran out of money or simply gave up, and just reattached it. If you look inside tho, you can see they were about a meter off – the ceiling is out of true, the pillars are oddly spaced and there’s an extra wall on one side of the building. It’s still beautiful, and we got to hear our Richard, the ASM/understudy, sing at Evensong.
• Catherine Aragon Howard was caught in flagrante in palace behind the cathedral in Lincoln. She got the chop from King Henry 8.We go back to Lincoln at the end of the tour – at Christmas. Climbing the steep hills of the old town in the snows of winter will be a whole nother experience, and I’m very much looking forward to it….