We pass the Humber, an arm of the sea of about two leagues breadth. The weather was bad, but we crossed it in a good barge to Barton, the first town in that part of Lincolnshire. All marsh ground till we came to Brigg, famous for the plantations of licorice, and then had brave pleasant riding to LINCOLNLincoln, much resembling Salisbury Plain. Lincoln is an old confused town, very long, uneven, steep, and ragged; formerly full of good houses, especially churches and abbeys. The Minster almost comparable to that of York itself, abounding with marble pillars, and having a fair front (herein was interred Queen Eleanora, the loyal and loving wife who sucked the poison out of her husband's wound); the abbot founder, with rare carving in the stone; the great bell, or Tom, as they call it. I went up the steeple, from whence is a goodly prospect all over the country. The soldiers had lately knocked off most of the brasses from the gravestones, so as few inscriptions were left; they told us that these men went in with axes and hammers, and shut themselves in, till they had rent and torn off some barge loads of metal, not sparing even the monuments of the dead; so hellish an avarice possessed them: beside which, they exceedingly ruined the city.
Here, I saw a tall woman six feet two inches high, comely, middle-aged, and well-proportioned, who kept a very neat and clean alehouse, and got most by people's coming to see her on account of her height.