Laneham

Laneham
Laneham  Laneham shown within Nottinghamshire
Population	279
OS grid reference	SK804762
Shire county	Nottinghamshire
Region	East Midlands
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	RETFORD
Postcode district	DN22
Dialling code	01777
Police	Nottinghamshire
Fire	Nottinghamshire
Ambulance	East Midlands
EU Parliament	East Midlands
List of places UK England Nottinghamshire

File:UK Laneham.jpg

Signpost in Laneham

Laneham is a small Nottinghamshire village on the banks of the River Trent. It is 13 miles (21 km) due west of the city of Lincoln and 8 miles (13 km) east of the market town of Retford.

Geography

The Parish of Laneham had a total population of 279 people at the 2001 census, somewhat reduced from the 410 people who lived in the village in 1851. The parish covers an area of 1,589 acres (643 ha), and includes the two settlements of "Town" Laneham and "Church" Laneham, separated by the village beck and a short stretch of low-lying ground. The eastern boundary is formed by the River Trent. Prior to 1884, the parish included 155 acres (63 ha) of land used for parture on the eastern bank of the Trent, but most of this was transferred to the parish of Kettlethorpe. Communication to the east was once easier, as a ferry crossed the river here until 1922. The ferry had a very long history, since a list of stock held by the manor in 1388 included two gangways, which were used by passengers boarding the ferry. In earlier times the parish suffered some flooding from the Trent and the village beck, but the situation was improved by an Act of 1768-9 which set up drainage commissioners who were to protect Laneham and several other villages from flooding and improve the drainage of the land.

Infrastructure

There are a number of listed buildings in the village, including Manor Farmhouse, with three bays and two storeys, built in the early nineteenth century, and Binge Farmhouse, with five bays and two storeys, together with a basement and garret, built in the middle eighteenth century. Willow Tree Cottage is a single-storeyed eighteenth-century building with three bays and an attic, while Willow Tree Farmhouse is an L-shaped building, consisting of a seventeenth-century gable-ended wing and a nineteenth-century wing. The substantial farmhouses reflect the former prosperity of the village, based on the well-ordered fields surrounding the village, which in turn show the influence of the enclosure movement. Laneham was enclosed by Act of Parliament in the 12th year of George III's reign – 1772; the enclosure involved 1,073 of the parish's 1,589 acres (6.43 km²).

The village had three public houses: The Butchers Arms (demolished 2009–10), The Ferryboat, and the Ring o' Bells which stood on the site of the present senior citizens' bungalows. A village hall makes use of the former school building. The Parish Church of St. Peter remains open, and is a grade I listed building. Various parts were constructed in the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th centuries. It was restored in 1891, and the porch was renovated in 1932. The church is the focal point of Church Laneham; it is built on a small knoll above the river and contains a large, elaborate alabaster memorial to Ellis Markham and his son Jervase, which dates from 1636.

A small, disused Methodist chapel still stands in the village. A Laneham Methodist congregation was first recorded in the Society Book of the Epworth Circuit in 1799http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/whs/36-2.pdf.

Historical events

Thomas de Corbridge, Archbishop of York, decided to spend the summer months in his residence at Laneham in July 1303 – to which he presumably travelled by water. However, while staying in the village he became ill and died on 22 September. He was known as a hard-working archbishop and was still handling his business until five days before his death. His body was taken to Southwell for burial, presumably again by water, with most of his final journey being via the Trent.

Another known event in Laneham is one of the first legal cases involving a ‘carrier’, i.e. someone responsible for transporting another person or their goods. In 1346 William, a ferryman at Laneham, took a man named Richard, his horse and his goods across the river by ferry. However, he only took them part of the way, because William threw the horse and goods into the river. Possibly this might have been as the ferry was overloaded and they were all at risk of drowning (as in another case a couple of years later) but we know William’s conduct ‘inflicted other enormities to the grave damage and against the peace’. Damages to Richard’s property amounted to 40 marks.

Little is yet been found about Laneham having a role in civil administration, but it is known that at least one major 'trial' was held in the village. Thomas Hancock was the Puritan vicar of Headon from 1605 to 1623, arriving from Elkesley. In 1620 he was fined “6d for riot”, at a special sessions in Laneham to try 26 people indicted for riotous assault. Hancock had something of a record for challenging the establishment, having also been one of the Puritan curates sheltered by the Brewsters at Scrooby in the 1790s when he had conducted the apparently illegal wedding of another cleric, Robert Southworth.

In 1810 the church tower was rebuilt after being struck by lightning and four bells added at a cost of £800. According to a Church of England report at the time, efforts to raise funds for this locally failed 'as the parishioners are too poor.'

According to the Notts Guardian in 1865 there was a grave in the churchyard for James Penant, a blacksmith, who died on 27 May 1763, with the inscription:

My tongs and hammer I’ve declined

My bellows they have lost their wind

My fires extinct my forge decayed

And in the dust my vice is laid

My coals are spent my iron gone

My nails are drove my work is done.

Only a few parts of this text are still legible.

The poverty of Laneham’s former curate was reported in the news in 1842 when an income tax return was sent back from the village with the following verse attached:

There’s nothing here but poverty,

Scottish rags and hunger;

If Sir Robert Peel has sent you here

Surely it was in anger.

The writer was Rev. John Irvine, a Scottish man who had taken on the curacy of both Laneham and Rampton for the ‘shamefully small’ stipend of £50 a year. At that time it was quite common for a parish to have a vicar or rector – usually well-connected – who drew most of the income and then paid a small portion to a less well-connected clergyman to act as curate and do most of the work. After a year or two Irvine had to give up the role at Rampton (we do not know why) and was reduced to just the Laneham role for which he was paid 10 shillings (£0.50) a week – so his pay was little more than that of an agricultural labourer. When Laneham’s rector died, Irvine felt he had a strong claim on the senior position and petitioned the patron of the benefice, the Dean and Chapter of York, for the place – without success.

To make ends meet, Irvine was forced to open a parish school where he could charge parents for the education of their children, but clearly this produced only a small income for him.

Some of the vicars of Laneham were also interesting. In 1764 John Welch was "not able to do any duty, being a little insane". In 1842 Edmund Wallis died, having been vicar for 60 years; this perhaps explains some aspects of Irvine's story.

A few minor crimes have received press coverage giving an insight into Laneham life in the past. In 1839 two women ‘had words’ in the street and then took to blows in a ‘desperate encounter’, which ended with one at death’s door apparently. In 1843 at harvest the locals mixed with Irish itinerant workers in one of the village inns, but hostility was bubbling under the surface; Charles Parr, Thomas Lane and other local ‘ruffians’ were found ‘absolutely roasting’ a young Irish reaper on the fire of the inn until its landlord intervened.

Laneham Drainage

In December 1768, a group of landowners from this part of Nottinghamshire asked the civil engineer John Grundy, Jr. to investigate the possibility of draining some 10 square miles (26 km²) of land on the west bank of the River Trent, stretching from Laneham to West Burton. He was accompanied by Samuel Goodhand, his clerk, on the initial site visit, and proposed three components to a solution. The first was a catchwater drain, which would intercept the streams flowing into the area at its western edge, and discharge into the Trent at West Burton. In order to prevent high water levels in the river flooding the land, he proposed a 7-mile (11 km) flood bank, which would run from Laneham to West Burton. Finally, rainwater would be collected by a Mother Drain and numerous side drains, which would discharge into the Trent through an outfall sluice at Sturton Cow Pasture.

The landowners liked the plans, asking Grundy to produce detailed proposals, and to supervise the obtaining of an Act of Parliament to authorise the work. Assisted by the surveyor George Kelk and a colleague called David Buffery, who checked the levels, he spent six weeks producing his plans, which he presented in February 1769. He estimated that 5,900 acres (2,400 ha) would be improved by the scheme, which would cost £2,700 for the catchwater drain, £6,800 for the bank along the river from Laneham to West Burton, £2,400 for the Mother Drain, with an additional £1,200 for the side drains, and £900 for the sluice at Sturton, making a total of £14,000. He spent most of March and April in London, to ensure the bill passed through Parliament, and received £329 for his work up to this point. A detailed plan of the area at a scale of 1:21,120 was published.

The Act appointed Drainage Commissioners, who met for the first time on 29 May 1769. Grundy became the engineer for the scheme, Buffery was the surveyor of works, and Kelk was the land surveyor. Grundy's plans for Sturton Sluice show a 12-foot (3.7 m) waterway. Brickwork and masonry were erected by local contractors, while the major excavations were handled by Dyson and Pinkerton. Grundy changed the plans somewhat, as he decided that a drainage mill would be needed at Sturton. This had a 15-foot (4.6 m) scoop wheel, and was completed in April 1770 by Henry Bennett from Spalding, at a cost of £458. The works were finished on time in May 1772, with the final cost amounting to around £15,000. Grundy visited the works at least seven times to ensure that his specifications were being met. The only known details of the scheme are preserved in Grundy's Report Books, which he spent the last few years of his life preparing. Running to 12 volumes and 4,000 pages, they were lost, but were re-discovered in the library at the University of Leeds in 1988. The Laneham Drainage scheme is covered in volumes 10 and 11.

The drainage mill which pumped water from the Mother Drain into the Trent was replaced by a 43 hp (32 kW) steam-powered beam engine in 1847. It had a larger scoop wheel, which was 26.5 feet (8.1 m) in diameter and 2.25 feet (0.69 m) wide. It was scrapped some time before 1937, and has been replaced by an Allen-Gwynnes 24-inch (61 cm) electric pump. With the passing of the Land Drainage Act 1930, most land drainage authorities were superseded by Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs), and the original scheme formed the central section of the Laneham IDB, who were responsible for 78.5 miles (126.3 km) of drains and ditches, which helped to prevent flooding of 22.9 square miles (59 km²) of low-lying land. They maintained 10 pumping stations, which included those at the end of the catchwater drain and the Mother Drain. In April 2012, they amalgamated with the Newark, Kingston Brook, and Fairham Brook internal drainage boards to become part of the Trent Valley IDB.

External links

Media related to at Wikimedia Commons