Withern (also known as Withern with Stain) is a village and civil parish in the East Lindsey District of Lincolnshire, England. It is situated on the A157 road, and 7 miles (11 km) south-east from Louth. Stain was once an independent parish but was combined with Withern when the old church of St John the Baptist was destroyed some centuries ago.
The parish was in the ancient Calceworth Wapentake in the East Lindsey district in the parts of Lindsey. After the Poor Law Amendment Act reforms of 1834, the parish became part of the Louth Poor Law Union. The common lands, some 600 acres (2.4 km2), were enclosed in 1839.
The now redundant church of St Margaret's is the burial place of Auguste Pahud and Annie Pahud, whose love story is the raison d'être for the country park of Hubbard's Hills. St Margaret's was rebuilt in 1812.
A Wesleyan Methodist chapel was built in 1875, though the congregation dates from about 1811.
Lincolnshire is very low-lying and land had to be drained for agriculture to be successful. The larger drainage channels, many of which are parallel to each other, became boundaries between parishes. Many parishes are long and thin for this reason.
There is much fenland in Lincolnshire, particularly in the Boston and Horncastle areas. Fenlands tended to be extraparochial before the mid 1850s, and although many sections were identified with names and given the title "civil parish", little information has been found about them. Many appear to be abolished in 1906, but the parish which adopts them is not given in A Vision of Britain through Time. Note the WR category Lincolnshire Fenland Settlements which is an attempt to organize them into one list.
From 1889 until 1974 Lincolnshire was divided into three administrative counties: Parts of Holland, Parts of Kesteven and Parts of Lindsey. These formal names do not fit with modern grammatical usage, but that is what they were, nonetheless. In 1974 the northern section of Lindsey, along with the East Riding of Yorkshire, became the short-lived county of Humberside. In 1996 Humberside was abolished and the area previously in Lincolnshire was made into the two "unitary authorities" of North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire. The remainder of Lincolnshire was divided into "non-metropolitan districts" or "district municipalities" in 1974. Towns, villages and parishes are all listed under Lincolnshire, but the present-day districts are also given so that places in this large county can more easily be located and linked to their wider neighbourhoods. See the WR placepage Lincolnshire, England and the smaller divisions for further explanation.