Coates medieval settlement and moated site

Coates medieval settlement lies in quiet Lincolnshire farmland two miles east of Stow. A single farmyard and a church now stand where a village once thrived. The remains include earthworks, a moat and the Grade I listed Church of St Edith, all part of a Scheduled Monument. The village appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 with six households. By the early fourteenth century its population had grown, but the Black Death reduced it and recovery never came. Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire acquired the church and lands in the late twelfth century. Today the site shows ridge-and-furrow fields, a buried west–east road, ditched house plots and a fragment of the original moat. The church itself is likely Saxon at its core yet wears a mainly twelfth-century Norman face. Inside, a fifteenth-century rood screen is the only one left in Lincolnshire. Rough benches line the nave beside a Jacobean family pew and a Charles I royal coat of arms dated 1635. Outside, the Maltby tomb stands south of the chancel, while a water-filled depression marks the surviving edge of the vanished moat.