in the accompanying vignette) form an interesting antiquarian object
beside the Trent, twelve miles from Lincoln, and seven from
Gainsborough. The entire absence of any authentic record, as to the date
of the foundation, or its former possessors, leaves the imagination at
full liberty to clothe it with poetic legend. Visits made to it, in my
childhood, and the hearing of wild narratives respecting the treasures
buried beneath its ruins, and the power of its lords in the times of
chivalry, fixed it, very early, in my mind, as the fit site for a tale
of romance. In addition to the beautiful fragment of a front on the
Trent bank, massive and extensive foundations in the back-ground show
that it must have been an important building in by-gone times.

Torksey was, undoubtedly, one of the first towns in Lincolnshire, in the
Saxon period. Only three of the towns in the county are classed in
Domesday Book, and it is one of them: "Lincoln mans. 982; Stamford 317:
_Terchesey_ 102." (Turner's Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons, 1836, vol. iii.
page 251.) Writers of parts of the county history,--(for a complete
history of Lincolnshire has not yet been written,)--affirm that Torksey
is the _Tiovulfingacester_ of Venerable Bede; but Smith, the learned
editor of the Cambridge edition of Bede, inclines to the opinion that
Southwell is the town indicated by the pious and industrious monastic.
The passage in Bede leaves every thing to conjecture: he simply relates
that a truth-speaking presbyter and abbot of _Pearteneu_, (most likely,
Partney, near Horncastle, in Lincolnshire,) named Deda, said that an old
man had told him, that he, with a great multitude, was baptized by
Paulinus, in the presence of King Edwin, "in fluvio Treenta juxta
civitatem quae lingua Anglorum Tiovulfingacaestir vocatur"--in the river
Trent, near the city which in the language of the Angles is called
Tiovulfingacaestir (Smith's Bede: Cambr. 1722, page 97.)--This passage
occurs immediately after the relation of the Christian mission of
Paulinus into Lindsey, and his conversion of Blecca, governor of
Lincoln, and his family, while the good King Edwin reigned over East
Anglia, to which petty kingdom Lincolnshire seems sometimes to have
belonged, though it was generally comprehended in the kingdom of Mercia,
during the period of the Heptarchy.

If Stukeley be correct in his supposition that the "Foss-dyke," or canal
which connects the Trent here with the Witham at Lincoln, be