In the 1950s, David Stocker's father was unsure where Grantham was, though he drove through it regularly. I am similarly unfamiliar with the town, so when furnished with this splendid volume, I took the train to see Grantham and have a Pevsnerian perambulation.
The editors assemble fourteen contributors, along with papers by themselves. This is the first time that an amount of archaeological and historical work about Grantham has been brought together, forming a solid building block (as it intends) for future research. The papers cover the landscape before Grantham, the prominent medieval buildings and civic monuments and its remaining early secular buildings. The town is a creation of the 1040s or 1050s, and comparatively little modern archaeological work has been done. There were Italians in Grantham in the 1270s, but they are not yet identified in the material record.
Unlike nearby Stamford, which had many parish churches and five friaries, Grantham only had one friary, and its merchant money was poured into one church, St Wulfram's, which is studied in three linked essays. Innovative 3d interpretation drawings of this complex building are joined with detailed observation of breaks in walls, tiny vestiges of former arches and seven different stages of external plinth. Analysis of 470 masons’ marks in the tower stair assists in the study of its construction. The ribbed vault of the tower is strange, and one parallel is in Moissac in south-western France.
Excavations of the Greyfriars in the 1970s are reported, though the specialist finds reports are only summarized. A paper by Stocker elucidates the tortuous history of a supposed medieval oratory on the High Street. This was walled and ceiled with elaborate sculptured panels from a very high-class freestanding cross shaft of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, which is reconstructed here; perhaps saved and rebuilt into this strange room in the middle of the seventeenth century. Then follow papers on Grantham House (a datable stair of 1574 must be quite early) and other, more humble secular buildings, but with a special study of Grantham's second most important medieval survivor, The Angel (and Royal) Inn. A concluding paper, also by Stocker, proposes stages in the town's growth and summarizes the work presented.
My only criticism concerns the report on fifty-nine human skeletons from the cemetery of the medieval hospital of Spitalgate, found by chance in 1991. This is sometimes hard to follow; some osteological terms are explained, but others are not. I needed my two-volume OED to understand endocrine, megaloblastic and an inter-proximal carious lesion. Please, osteological specialists must write for the general archaeological reader (and here, for Grantham's townspeople), not solely for each other.
Overall, this well-illustrated and colourful study, one of many publications from Heritage Lincolnshire, is a fine example of what a group of archaeologists and historians can produce, as they tap into the undoubted passion of townspeople to understand, appreciate and look after their own heritage.
