Cavalry House

This unusual house in South Street is so named because the former owner Mr Thomas Rawnsley (1755-1826), a wool stapler of some means, raised at his own expense a volunteer yeomanry troop known as the Light Horse Rangers among local residents in the early part of the 19th century when Britain was at war with revolutionary France for national defence against a possible invasion threatened by Napoleon.

The volunteers practised military drill regularly on common land in the town while the emergency lasted but had no chance to display their valour because the invasion never came.

Rawnsley was a member of a well known Lincolnshire family who settled in the county during the 18th century. He was the great-grandfather of Canon H D Rawnsley, author of Memories of the Tennysons, and of W F Rawnsley, who wrote Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire. He owned land in the town and in Thurlby, the Isle of Ely and Norfolk but chose to live in Bourne where he married a local girl, Deborah Hardwicke in 1784. Their fifth son was the Rev Thomas Hardwicke Rawnsley (1789-1861) who became rector of Folkingham. Thomas Rawnsley died in 1826 and the north arcade of the Abbey Church contains a memorial tablet to him.

A history of Cavalry House and some of its past occupants can be found on the
CD-ROM A Portrait of Bourne together with a biography of Thomas Rawnsley