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St. Peter’s Hill, Stamford.

A MAZE OF STREETS

STAMFORD’S GREAT MEN

A glance at a plan of the town would show that it is exactly like a maze, no street runs on right through it in any direction, and, for a stranger, it is incredibly difficult to find a way out. To the south-west, and all along the eastern edge on the river-meadows outside the walls, were large enclosures belonging to the different Friaries, on either side of the road to St. Leonard’s Priory. No town has lost more by the constant depredations of successive attacking forces; first the Danes, then the Wars of the Roses, then the dissolution of the religious houses, then the Civil War, ending with a visit from Cromwell in his most truculent mood, fresh from the mischief done by his soldiers in and around Croyland and Peterborough. But, even now, its grey stone buildings, its well-chosen site, its river, its neighbouring hills and wooded park, make it a town more than ordinarily attractive. Of distinguished natives, we need only mention the great Lord Burleigh, who served with distinction through four reigns, and Archdeacon Johnson, the founder of the Oakham and Uppingham Schools and hospitals in 1584, though Uppingham as it now is, was the creation of a far greater man, the famous Edward Thring, a pioneer of modern educational methods, in the last half of the nineteenth century. Archbishop Laud, who is so persistently mentioned as having been once Vicar of St. Martin’s, Stamford, was never there; his vicarage was Stanford-on-Avon. But undoubtedly Stamford’s greatest man in one sense was Daniel Lambert, whose monument, in St. Martin’s churchyard, date 1809, speaks of his “personal greatness” and tells us that he weighed 52 stone 11 lbs., adding “N.B. the stone of 14 lb.” The writer once, when a schoolboy, went with another to see his clothes, which were shown at the Daniel Lambert Inn; and, when the two stood back to back, the armhole of his spacious waistcoat was slipped over their heads and fell loosely round them to the ground.