Qualla: Diocese of Lincoln

Diocese of Lincoln: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nhojjohn, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a particular kind of grandeur in a thing that has been shrinking for nearly a thousand years and still refuses to apologise. When Remigius de Fécamp, William the Conqueror's chaplain and the first Norman Bishop of Lincoln, set up his see in 1072, he inherited a diocese that ran from the Humber Estuary in the north to the River Thames in the south - all the territory of the modern counties of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Oxfordshire, plus large parts of Hertfordshire. It was, by a wide margin, the largest diocese in England. Roughly nine hundred years of administrative slicing later, it covers Lincolnshire and not much else. A retired bishop once described it as "2,000 square miles of bugger all." He was being affectionate, in the way that only a Lincolnshire bishop can be.

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Diocese of Lincoln: Roots in a Saxon Bishopric

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nhojjohn, CC BY-SA 4.0. The diocese's origins lie not at Lincoln at all but at Leicester, where a bishop was first installed around 679 by Theodore of Tarsus, the great organising Archbishop of Canterbury. The Saxon see of Leicester was abandoned during the Viking raids of the 9th century and re-establi...

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Diocese of Lincoln: The Long Reach to the Thames

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nhojjohn, CC BY-SA 4.0. Because Lincoln's territory ran all the way to the Thames, the Bishops of Lincoln retained significant landholdings in Oxfordshire long after the medieval diocese began breaking up. The market town of Banbury - sitting on the very far south of their reach - remained a peculiar of...

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Diocese of Lincoln: The Slow Subdivision

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ramsay Muir, M.A., CC BY-SA 4.0. Henry VIII began the dismemberment for the simplest of reasons: he needed dioceses to staff with bishops who supported the new church, and he had monastic wealth to redistribute. In 1541 the new Diocese of Peterborough took Northamptonshire, Rutland, and Leicestershire, and the f...

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Diocese of Lincoln: Twenty-Two Deaneries

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nhojjohn, CC BY-SA 4.0. The modern diocese is divided into three archdeaconries - Lincoln, Stow and Lindsey, and Boston - and twenty-two deaneries with evocative medieval names like Beltisloe, Bolingbroke, Calcewaithe and Candleshoe, Loveden, Lawres, Yarborough, Haverstoe. Each contains a clutch of pari...

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Diocese of Lincoln: What Remains, What Survives

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nhojjohn, CC BY-SA 4.0. Bob Hardy's wry phrase from 2002 - that the diocese is "2,000 square miles of bugger all" - was a joke from a man who loved the place. The Lincolnshire fens are not bugger all. They are wide, level, open lands where the sky takes up more of the view than the earth, where churches...

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