ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a small group of sites — the dissolved monasteries of Barlings and Kirkstead, together with Tattershall Castle — which, people argue, had long held an embedded significance for secular rule in the county. Conventional documentary sources throw important light on the economic and tenurial changes that enabled him to take a lead in the county’s government. The Duke’s Willoughby connection, confirmed in 1533 by his marriage with his ward Katherine, provided him with an established lordly residence in Lincolnshire at Grimsthorpe and another at Eresby. Possession of Tattershall castle, in short, marked out and legitimized the leading secular lord of Lincolnshire. Brandon enhanced it in a princely fashion. The use of gardens through the 16th and 17th centuries to sustain complex religious and political imagery should occasion no surprise, either from the archaeological or from the literary and artistic record.
