In 1051 Thorold of Bockenhale (now Bucknall, near Horncastle) gave his castle of Spalding and the chapel attached to it as a cell or monastery for the Benedictines of Crowland. Out of this grew the priory, which, however, was dissolved in 1535; the last fragments of its ruins were removed in 1832. About two miles north-east of Spalding stands the ruined chapel of Wykeham, dedicated to St Nicholas and built in 1311 by Prior Clement Hatfield. The building is of the Decorated period, and has been roofless since 1782; its interior dimensions are 43 feet long by 22 feet wide; the walls are 44 ½ feet high. Each side contains three three-light windows with moulded flowing tracery, and each end one four-light window of similar character. The only one which retains its original mullions and tracery is the centre window on the south side. After the Conquest the estates and priory of Spalding were given by William I. to Ivo Tailbois, who found such a stout antagonist in Hereward the Wake, lord of Brunne or Bourn.

SPALDING, William (1809-1859), logician and literary historian, was born in Aberdeen in 1809. After a thorough education at the grammar school and at Marischal College there, he came to Edinburgh in 1830, where he was called to the bar in 1833. In that year he published a Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of the Two Hoble Kinsmen, which, by its critical acumen and the knowledge of the old dramatists which it displayed, attracted the notice of Jeffrey and procured the author an invitation to become a contributor to the Edinburgh Review. Before settling down to the business of the bar he undertook a prolonged Continental tour. He was absent fifteen months, the greater part of the time being spent in Italy, and in 1841 the fruits of his stay appeared in three volumes entitled Italy and the Italian Islands from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time. This learned and comprehensive work went through five editions in a few years. His attempts to gain a legal practice not proving successful, he became a candidate in 1838 for the chair of rhetoric in Edinburgh university, which he held till 1845, when he was appointed professor of logic in the university of St Andrews. He held the latter post till his death on the 16th November 1859.

Besides the works already mentioned, and various articles contributed to the Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine, he was the author of a concise History of English Literature, which has many merits and has been much used as a text book. He also wrote the articles “Logic” and “Rhetoric” (as well as a number of literary biographies) for the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The former article, written mainly on Hamiltonian lines, constitutes a systematic treatise on Formal Logic, and is honourably distinguished by its clear scientific exposition. By these two articles and his History of English Literature Spalding is chiefly remembered.