Description
Holbeach, a town, a parish, and the head of a union and county court district in Lincolnshire. The town, which has a station on the Bourn and Lynn branch of the G.N.E., is 8 miles E by N from Spalding, is a place of great antiquity, consists of one main street and some smaller diverging ones, and is well paved and drained. It is a seat of county courts. and petty sessions, and has a head post office, two banks, and some good inns. It has a weekly market on Thursday, fairs for horses and foals on 17 May and 17 Sept., and a pleasure-fair on 11 Oct. There is a commodious market-house. The-church is a very fine building of stone of the Late Decorated period, with some portions of Perpendicular date; includes a nave of seven bays, a chancel, and N and S aisles; has-a spacious and magnificent Later English porch, and also a-square tower and an octagonal spire of great beauty and jointly 189 feet high, and a costly memorial pulpit, an octagonal font, and an alta-tormb of Sir H. Littlebury of 1420. The Church of All Saints was restored in 1882 at a cost of £3200. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Lincoln;. net value, £4: 36, in the gift of the Bishop of Lincoln. There are also Baptist, Congregational, Free Methodist, Primitive Methodist, Wesleyan, and Wesleyan Eeform chapels. A cemetery of about 7 acres was formed in 1853, lies outside the town, on the Penny Hill Road, and has chapels in the Pointed style, connected by a spire-surmounted arch. The grammar school was founded about 1669, and rebuilt in 1815 and 1874, has a varying endowment worth about £220 a year, and had for a pupil Dr Stukeley the antiquary. A market-cross was built in 1383 by Lord Egremont, and reconstructed by Dr Stukeley, but has disappeared. An hospital for a warden and fifteen poor persons was founded near the church about 1351 by Sir John de Kirketon, but it also has disappeared. Many urns, coins, and other relics of the Romans and the Saxons have been found at different periods in the town and its neighbourhood. Lawrence de Holbeche, a learned monk who died in 1410, Bishop Holbeche, a compiler of the Liturgy, who died in 1551, and Dr Stukeley, already mentioned, who died in 1765, were natives.
The parish, which is very extensive, being about 21 miles long from N to S, and of variable width, has an area of 21, 469 acres; population, 4771; of ecclesiastical parish, 3143.
