WAINFLEET school at Wainfleet and his college at Oxford may have originated in his having been appointed by Cardinal Beaufort to the mastership and chantry of St. Mary Magdalen hospital on Magdalen Down outside Winchester.
The bishop lived to the reign of Richard III., and died in 1486. He erected a monument to his father, Richard Patten. The son is called either Patten or Barbour, for he bore both names indifferently, though he soon discarded them both for the name of his birthplace, as was commonly done from the eleventh to the sixteenth century; his brother also taking the name of Waynflete. This monument was in the original church of All Saints, for the second church of St. Thomas had long been destroyed. But All Saints' church, built cruciform and with a light wooden spire on account of the soft nature of the soil on which it stood, was destined to the same fate, for the foolish inhabitants having, in 1718, put a heavy brick tower to it, with five bells in it, the weight brought a great part of the building to ruin. Subsequently it was pulled down, and the present church was set up at some distance from the old site in 1820, when the inhabitants added vandalism to their folly and wantonly demolished this fine tomb. The broken bits were collected and placed in the Magdalen School, and later were, by the intervention of the rector of Halton Holgate, Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, obtained for the President and Fellows of the Bishop's College at Oxford, and are now on the north side of the altar in the College Chapel. The figure has its feet resting on a bank of flowers and its head on a cushion and pillow supported by his two sons, John the Monk and William the Bishop. The face of the latter resembles the father, but is not so broad or so old as that of John. It is to be noted that Lincolnshire has produced two Bishops of Winchester, each of them the founder of a college at Oxford—Bishop Fox and Bishop Waynflete.
The town is older than Boston and existed in Roman days, possibly under the name of Vannona, and apparently a Roman road ran from Doncaster to Wainfleet, passing through Horncastle and Lusby. Certainly "Salters road," which crosses the East Fen, was a Roman road, and the Romans made a good deal of salt from the sea-water in the immediate neighbourhood of Wainfleet. In the charter rolls of Bardney Abbey (temp. Henry III.) we read that Matthew, son of Milo de
