A History of Horncastle from the Earliest Period to the Present Time

In dealing with what may be called “the dark ages” of local history, we are often compelled to be content with little more than reasonable conjecture. Still, there are generally certain surviving data, in place-names, natural features, and so forth, which enable those who can detect them, and make use of them, to piece together something like a connected outline of what we may take, with some degree of probability, as an approximation to what have been actual facts, although lacking, at the time, the chronicler to record them.

It is, however, by no means a mere exercise of the imagination, if we assume that the site of the present Horncastle was at a distant period a British settlement. Dr. Brewer says, “nearly three-fourths of our Roman towns were built on British sites,” (Introduction to Beauties of England, p. 7), and in the case of Horncastle, although there is nothing British in the name of the town itself, yet that people have undoubtedly here left their traces behind them. The late Dr. Isaac Taylor says, “Rivers and mountains, as a rule, receive their names from the earliest races, towns and villages from later colonists.” The ideas of those early occupants were necessarily limited. The hill which formed their stronghold against enemies, or which was the “high place” of their religious rites, and the river which was so essential to their daily existence, of these they felt the value, and therefore naturally distinguished them by name before anything else. Thus the remark of an eloquent writer is generally true, who says “our mountains and rivers still murmur the voices of races long extirpated.” “There is hardly (says Dr. Taylor) throughout the whole of England a river name which is not Celtic,” i.e. British.

As the Briton here looked from the hill-side, down upon the valley beneath him, two of the chief objects to catch his eye would be the streams which watered it, and which there, as they do still, united their forces. They would then also, probably, form a larger feature in the prospect than they do at the present day, for the local beds of gravel deposit would seem to indicate that these streams were formerly of considerably greater volume, watering a wider area, and probably having ramifications which formed shoals and islands. The particular names by which the Briton designated the two main streams confirm this supposition. In the one coming from the more distant wolds, he saw a stream bright and clear, meandering through the meadows which it fertilized, and this he named the “Bain,” that word being Celtic for “bright” or “clear,” a characteristic which still belongs to its waters, as the brewers of Horncastle assure us. In the other stream, which runs a shorter and more rapid course, he saw a more turbid current, and to it he gave the name “Waring,” which is the Celtic “garw” or “gerwin,” meaning “rough.” Each of these names, then, we may regard as what the poet Horace calls “nomen præsente notâ productum,” they are as good as coin stamped in the mint of a Cunobelin, or a Caradoc, bearing his “image and superscription,” and after some centuries of change, they are in circulation still. So long as Horncastle is watered by the Bain and the Waring she will bear the brand of the British sway, once paramount in her valley.