NORTON DISNEY. The River Witham flows quietly by this small place, which takes the distinguishing part of its name from the Disney's, a Norman family of Isigny near Bayeux. Here in this Lincolnshire village the Disney's lived from the 13th century till the time of James the Second, when the last of them, William Disney, was beheaded after the Monmouth Rebellion. Nothing of their castle remains (it stood in a field west of the church), or of the manor house built from its ruins in the 17th century; but something far older than these was found here some years ago by a farmer, who, worried because his field grew nothing but weeds, dug down to solve the mystery. He made a discovery of first-rate importance, for there came to light a wall six feet thick dividing two rooms, some roof tiles, and two magnificent Roman pavements, one of them 20 feet long and 16 wide, designed in small cubes of coloured stone and marble.

          The Disney's are gone; but life still centres round the old church they knew, and within it are lovely monuments and a remarkable brass keeping their memory green. Here is such a church as Charles Lamb had in mind when he wrote in one of his imperishable essays "But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness? -Go alone on some weekday, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled there, the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there, the meek pastor, the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motion-less as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee."

          In its early days the church belonged to Sempringham Priory. It is a fine light building and has a 15th-century tower with 16 imps and demons looking out below the pinnacles, and steps leading down to a nave and aisles divided by an arcade of three bays, two of them 13th century, and one later. The chancel, chiefly 14th-century, has a north chapel. The font of about 1400 is deeply carved with shields, in the nave are some rough benches, and in the chancel some stalls with foliage and curious little men and angels back to back on their poppyheads-medieval faces grave and gay. The traceries screen is Elizabethan, the ample pulpit (in front of the old roodloft stairway) is Jacobean, and the aisle has its old roof with carved bosses, some showing foliage with a man's face and a lion with its tongue out.

          Most of the impressive array of monuments are in the chapel, and the oldest is from about l300, the lovely recessed figure of Joan d'Iseney in coif and wimple, her hands at prayer, a dog at her feet. Fifty years later is the rare sculptured stone of another lady of the house, now simply Joan Disney, with a Norman-French inscription; her features rugged, her hands at prayer, and with jewels in her hair, she lies as if half-hidden by her coffin-lid, so that we see only the upper part of her figure, and her feet with a dog beside them. Kingerby church has a similar stone to one of the Disney men.

           From the close of the 14th century comes the third monument of a woman, Hantascia Disney, who sleeps with angels and a lion by her pillow, and another lion at her feet; she wears a long gown, and her hair is caught up in a jewelled net. In the chancel, lying on a tomb is a l4th century knight in armour, his splendid shield enriched with three heraldic lions.

           The most remarkable memorial here is the splendid Disney brass in the chapel, displayed in a hinged oak frame to reveal both sides. It is a thick brass three feet by two, divided on the front into five compartments covered with shields and two rows of half-figures. One group shows William Disney with his wife and nine children kneeling in prayer, each with its name on a scroll, the other group shows fierce-looking Richard Disney with two wives, both prettily dressed and one with many bows on her sleeve. The first wife, who has 12 children behind her, was the grandmother of Lord Hussey, who, having refused to join the Pilgrimage of Grace, refused also to raise a force against the conspirators and was beheaded by Henry the Eighth; the second wife was the younger sister of the immortal Anne Askew who was martyred at Smithfield in 1546.

           Two unusual features of so late a brass (it was engraved about 1580) are the helmets worn by the men, who are in armour, and the fact that the portraits are only half-figures. But the brass is notable not only as an example of 16th-century art, but because it is a palimpsest, a brass reversed and used a second time. This is a Dutch brass, hearing on the back 33 lines of the original inscription, which is astonishingly completed by nine lines on another palimpsest brass at West Lavington in Wiltshire, the whole telling of the founding in of a mass at the altar of St Cornelius in St Martin's Church, Middelburg, Holland, in 1518.

          A modern sculpture to the fourth Viscount St Vincent shows a hovering angel bringing a victor's bays in one hand and an oak branch in the other. On the ground banners are resting against rocks, the whole symbolising the career of a soldier who, after service in the Zulu War and against the Afghans, died at  Abu Klea from wounds received in 1885 in the Sudan War. The glass of the east window, showing the Crucifixion with St John on one side and a Roman soldier on the other, is also in memory of this Lord St Vincent whose title had come down to him from John Jervis, that great admiral and disciplinarian raised to the peerage after his great victory over the Spaniards in 1797 near Cape St Vincent.

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