England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Winceby St Margaret

The Parish

The parish of Winceby lies in central Lincolnshire about 5 miles east of the market town of Horncastle. Winceby sits on B1195 road which head southeastwards from the A158 heading for Spilsby. There is very little to Winceby, just a single farmstead sitting adjacent to the road, a tiny place where even the church has been demolished. Winceby is a good example of a deserted medieval village, a quite important settlement in Domesday times (see below) it gradually faded into relative obscurity through population lost, probably augmented by the effects of plague. Its relative obscurity was temporarily broken during the English Civil War in 1643 when a short skirmish between Royalist & Parliamentarian forces took place just to its northeast, a victory for Oliver Cromwell's men. Winceby's economy, like so many in this county, is totally dominated by arable farming. Winceby is drained eastwards by a small tributary of the River Lynn, the latter becomes the Steeping River which makes a man-influenced course to the North Sea arriving just south of Gibralter Point. WInceby is sited at around 110 metres above the sea, somewhat high ground within its county, land reaches its local high point at the A158 and 129 metres a couple of mile to the north. A tiny parish in a county of many such parishes, covering just over 800 acres it would have struggled to support a population of a little over 50 parishioners. Yet in Domesday times, a holding of Earl Hugh of Chester, Winceby was recorded as boating an incredible 39 ploughs, a 350 acre meadow (almost half of the parish acreage) and an impressive 9 mills, assets sufficient to place it into the top 40% of settlements recorded in that tome.

The Church

St Margaret's church is no more having been demolished in 1964, there remains a few scattered gravestones but no trace of the church that stood here. From the B1195 a footpath and access road to farms heads north, the footpath turns left and the access track curls around its farm, the  church stood to the north of that footpath. The church that was removed in the 20th century was just a Victorian replacement and was not the church in which these marriages took place having been built in 1866; that venue was its predecessor a small thatched church of nave & chancel combined.