Note 194b — Chapter X

Although these events happened more than 250 years ago, it does not require many links to connect that day with the present. The writer was informed, at the time he was putting these records together, that a man named John Barber died in Horncastle, aged 95, in the year 1855 or 1856, whose grandfather remembered Oliver Cromwell sleeping in the above-named house, then a mud and stud structure, on the night before Winceby fight. In the Register of West Barkwith is recorded the burial of Nicholas Vickers in 1719, who guided Cromwell over Market Rasen Moor after the battle. Cromwell may well, therefore, have returned to the same house at Horncastle before proceeding northward by Market Rasen.