THE PLAGUE-STONE
On the whole the plan is said to have answered well enough,
and the stone is an interesting relic of the time. There is one
in situ at Winchester, not so big as this, and now built in as
part of the basis to the Plague Monument outside the West
Gate of the city. It is, I believe, plain to distinguish, being
of a darker colour than the rest of the monument; but you
cannot now see the hole in it any more. That stone was used
in 1666, the year after the great plague in London. The Croft
register speaks of 1630 as the plague year, but a plague seems
to have visited Partney in 1616; at Louth 754 people died in
eight months in 1631. At Alford the plague year was 1630.
On the 2nd of July in that year the vicar, opposite the entry
of Maria Brown's burial has written "Incipit pestis" (the
plague begins), and between this date and the end of February,
1631, 132 out of a population of about 1,000, died, the average
number of burials for Alford being 19 per annum, so that the
rate was 100 above normal for the nineteen months; indeed,
for the rest of 1631 only eight burials are registered in ten
months. July and August were the worst months, six deaths
occurring in one family in eleven days. It has been said that
the stone was placed on the top of Miles-Cross hill, whence the
folk from Spilsby and the villages of the Wolds, when they
brought their produce, could look down on the plague-stricken
town from a safe distance. But that would be a long pull
for the poor Alford people, and it is more likely that it was
placed near where the railway now crosses the high road;
certainly the Winchester stone was barely 100 yards from the
Gate.
We can now go back to Alford and start again on the Louth road. To get to the fine Marsh churches of the east Lindsey district, four miles out we turn off to the right near Withern, and pass two little churches on the border of the district called Strubby and Maltby-le-Marsh. Each of these has, like Huttoft, a remarkable font, but that at Maltby is extraordinarily good—angels at each corner are holding open books, and their wings join and cover the bowl of the font, below an apostle guards each corner of a square base. There is in this church, too, a cross-legged effigy of a knight. In Strubby are some good poppy-head bench ends and a fourteenth century effigy without a head, and on the south wall near the door a curious inscription in old English letters hard to decipher. There is also a
