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Newport Arch, Lincoln.

From the junction of these two roads a raised causeway, following the line of the present High Street, ran over the marshy ground to the gate of the walled town. This causeway, bearing in places the tracks of Roman wheels, is several feet below the present level, and even on the top of the hill several feet of debris have accumulated over the Roman pavements which were found in the last century where the castle now stands. Doubtless, as years went on, many villas would be planted outside the walls of the Roman city, but we know little of the history of the colony, except that it was always a place of considerable importance.

BISHOP REMIGIUS

To come to post-Roman times, Bede, who died in 785, tells us that Paulinus, who had been consecrated Bishop of York in 625, and had baptised King Ædwin and a large number of people at York in the church which stood on the site afterwards occupied by the Minster, came to Lincoln, and, after baptising numbers of people in the Trent, as he had previously done in the Swale near Richmond in Yorkshire, built a stone church in Lincoln, or caused his convert Blaeca, the Reeve of the city, to build it, in which he consecrated Honorius Archbishop of Canterbury. Bede saw the walls of this church which may well have stood where the present church of St. Paul does. William the Conqueror in 1066 built the Norman castle on the hill to keep the town, which had spread along the banks of the Witham, in order. It was about this time that Remigius, a monk of Fécamp, in Normandy, who had been made by William, Bishop of Dorchester-on-Thames in 1067, as a reward for his active help with a ship and a body of armed fighting men, got leave, after much opposition from the Archbishop of York, to build a cathedral at Lincoln on the hill near the castle. So, next after the Romans (and perhaps the Britons were there before them), it is to him that we owe the choice of this magnificent site for the cathedral. Remigius began his great work in 1075, of which the central portion of the west front, with its plain rude masonry and its round-headed tall recesses on either side of the middle door, and its interrupted band of bas-reliefs over the low Norman arches to right and left of the tall recesses, is still in situ. The sixteen stone bas-reliefs are subjects partly monkish, but mostly Scriptural, concerning Adam, Noah, Samuel, and Jesus Christ. They are genuine Norman sculptures, and they are at the same level as Welbourn’s twelve English kings under the big central window, but these are of the fourteenth century.