England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Wyberton St Leodegar

The Parish

The parish of Wyberton lies in eastern Lincolnshire, it is a long thin parish and its eastern end forms a tiny part of Lincolnshire's coast with The Wash. Wyberton is located about 2 miles south of the port & town of Boston and sits on the busy A16 road which connects Boston through to Spalding. Whilst Wyberton was once a large and separate village growth has now connected it contiguously with Boston and it acts as a southern suburb to its larger neighbour with properties either side of the A16 forming a cross-river centre for the town. Wyberton would have been, and still is to some extent on the remaining un-built land, an intensively farmed landscape. Much of the land shows the work of man in draining the low-lying land and the rich and productive soils are much used for arable farming as well as market gardening. Man-influenced drains and ditches drain the parish the short distance to either the mouth of the nearby River Witham or to the equally near Wash coastal marshes. Wyberton is sited at around 4 metres above the sea and land is at or even below that level for a great distance in these flat lands of the coastal marshlands. Wyberton parish is a curious shape, a narrow band stretching northwest to southeast across the reclaimed land, it covered an acreage of almost 4,000 acres, mostly within Wildmore & West Fens, and would have supported a population of just under 600 parishioners. In Domesday times Wyberton was shared between Count Alan of Brittany and Guy de Craon, it offered 13 ploughs and some small meadows making it a medium sized place at that time.

The Church

St Leodegar's church sits some distance from the notional centre of the village, Church Lane heads towards the Wash from the A16 and the church sits on its southern side. The church has an interesting and eventful history. The original church was a cruciform building in the Early English Gothic style, internally one can see that style retained. Unfortunately the building met with an accident in that the central crossing tower collapsed in 1419 and severely damaged the nave and transepts. The damage was so extensive that the bulk of the church was rebuilt in a more fashionable style of the mid-15th century namely the Perpendicular. Documentary evidence, in the form of Chancery proceedings for default in payment to the masons, dates the rebuild quite firmly between 1426 & 1432. The major change since that rebuild was the change of the chancel to the present polygonal brick version which happened in 1760, in a Georgian style. Restorations of the Victorian period, in this case the late 1870s, made further changes resulting in today's church. St Leodegar sits behind a low brick wall with an ample pull-in for parking, arched metal gates grant access to a churchyard which is relatively free of photographic obstacles.