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PARLIAMENT AT STAMFORD

The early importance of Stamford may be gauged by the facts that Parliament was convened there more than once in the fourteenth century, and several Councils of War and of State held there. One of these was called by Pope Boniface IX. to suppress the doctrines of Wyclif. There, too, a large number of nobles met to devise some check on King John, who was often in the neighbourhood either at Kingscliffe, in Rockingham Forest, or at Stamford itself—and from thence they marched to Runnymede.

STAMFORD TOWN

The town was on the Great North Road, so that kings, when moving up and down their realm, naturally stopped there. A good road also went east and west, hence, just outside the town gate on the road leading west towards Geddington and Northampton, a cross (the third) was set up in memory of the halting of Queen Eleanor’s funeral procession in 1293 on its way from Harby near Lincoln to Westminster.

St. George’s Square, Stamford.

CITY ARMS

There was a castle near the ford in the tenth century, and Danes and Saxons alternately held it until the Norman Conquest. The city, like the ancient Thebes, had a wall with seven gates besides posterns, one of which still exists in the garden of 9, Barn Hill, the house in which Alderman Wolph hid Charles I. on his last visit to Stamford in 1646. Most of the buildings which once made Stamford so very remarkable were the work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and as they comprised fifteen churches, six priories, with hospitals, schools and almshouses in corresponding numbers, the town must have presented a beautiful appearance, more especially so because the stone used in all these buildings, public and private, is of such exceptionally good character, being from the neighbouring quarries of Barnack, Ketton and Clipsham. But much of this glory of stone building and Gothic architecture was destroyed in the year 1461; and for this reason. It happened that, just as Henry III. had given it to his son Edward I. on his marriage with Eleanor of Castile in 1254, so, in 1363, Edward III. gave the castle and manor of Stamford to his son Edmund of Langley, Duke of York; this, by attaching the town to the Yorkist cause, when Lincolnshire was mostly Lancastrian, brought about its destruction, for after the battle of St. Alban’s in 1461, the Lancastrians under Sir Andrew Trollope utterly devastated the town, destroying everything, and, though some of the churches were rebuilt, the town never recovered its former magnificence. It still looks beautiful with its six churches, its many fragments of arch or wall and several fine old almshouses which were built subsequently, but it lost either then or at the dissolution more than double of what it has managed to retain. Ten years later the courage shown by the men of Stamford at the battle of Empingham or “Bloody Oaks” close by, on the North Road, where the Lancastrians were defeated, caused Edward IV. to grant permission for the royal lions to be placed on the civic shield of Stamford, side by side with the arms of Earl Warren. He had had the manorial rights of Stamford given to him by King John in 1206, and he is said to have given the butchers a field in which to keep a bull to be baited annually on November 13, and the barbarous practice of “bull running” in the streets was actually kept up till 1839, and then only abolished with difficulty.