Highways and Byways in Surrey
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Title: Highways and Byways in Surrey
Author: Eric Parker
Illustrator: Hugh Thomson
Release date: February 12, 2009 [eBook #28057]
Most recently updated: January 4, 2021
Language: English
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HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN SURREY
* * * * *
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON. BOMBAY. CALCUTTA. MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK. BOSTON. CHICAGO. ATLANTA. SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
* * * * *
[Illustration: _High Street, Guildford._]
HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS IN SURREY
by
ERIC PARKER
With Illustrations by Hugh Thomson
MacMillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1909
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
Bread Street Hill, E.C., and
Bungay, Suffolk.
First Edition, 1908
Reprinted, 1909
PREFACE
A preface ought not to contain an apology. But mine must contain at
least an explanation, if only of omissions. The Highways and Byways of
Surrey belong not to one county or to one period of time, but to two
different ages, and, to-day, to two counties. London has made the
difference. What was Surrey country a hundred years ago has been
gathered into the network of London streets, and belongs, in the mind
and on the map, to London. Almost for ten miles south of the London
Thames the old Surrey countryside has disappeared, and the disappearance
has left the writer of a book of Surrey Highways a difficult choice. It
would have been easy to fill a large part of the book with the Surrey of
the past, the Surrey of Southwark, and the great church of St. Mary
Overie, and of Lambeth Palace and the Archbishops, of Vauxhall, and the
Paris Gardens, and the Bankside where Shakespeare brought out his plays.
But it is not easy to write anything new of any part of Surrey, and of
that part I could have written nothing new at all. So that it seemed
best to leave the Surrey that has disappeared to writers who have dealt
with its history far more adequately than I could, and to choose for the
Highways and Byways of this book only those which still run through open
country and through country villages and towns. That is the Surrey of
to-day.
The general plan of the book is simple. I have entered the county from
the west at Farnham, with the old Way along the chalk ridge, and I leave
it by Titsey on the east. Of course, not all the Surrey villages belong
to the ridge, though the chief towns lie along it. Other villages set
themselves along the banks of the two Surrey rivers, the Wey and the
Mole, and there are separate little groups like the villages of the Fold
country, or on the plateaux of the Downs round Epsom, or between
Chertsey and Windsor on the Thames. These group themselves in their own
chapters. But the main progress of the book is the trend of the great
Surrey highway. As to following the book through its chapters from west
to east, Surrey is threaded by such a net of railways that the
deliberate choosing of a route, with definite centres and points of
departure, is unnecessary. But those who believe that the best way to
see any country is to walk through it will find that, as a general rule,
the book and its chapters are divided, sometimes naturally, sometimes
perhaps a little perversely, into the compass of a day's walking. My own
plan has been simple enough: it has been to set out in the morning and
walk till it was dark, and then take the train back to where I came
from. Others will be able to plan far more comprehensive journeys by
motor-car, or by bicycling, or on horseback--though not many, perhaps,
ride horses by Surrey roads to-day. But only by walking would it be
possible to explore much of the country. You would never, except by
walking, come at the meaning or read the story of the ancient Way, or
the Pilgrims' Road that follows it; only on foot can you climb the hills
as you please, or follow the path where it chooses to take you. It is
only by walking that you will get to the best of the Thursley heather,
or the Bagshot pines and gorse, or the whortleberries in the wind on
Leith Hill, or the primroses of the Fold country, or the birds that call
through the quiet of the Wey Canal--though there, too, you may take a
boat; it is one of the prettiest of the byways. The walker through
Surrey sees the best; the others see not much more than the road and
what stands on the road.
The omission, or rather neglect, of Surrey in London is deliberate.
There must be many other omissions, I fear, which are not. For pointing
out some of them, and for suggesting alterations and additions, I have
to thank my friend Mr. Anthony Collett, who has kindly looked through my
proofs. I should like also to be the first to thank Mr. Hugh Thomson for
the pleasure and the help of his charming sketches.
WEYBRIDGE, _October, 1908_ ERIC PARKER.
NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
I have made several additions to the second edition of this book, and, I
hope, have corrected some mistakes. I am greatly indebted to reviewers
who have pointed out errors and omissions, and to correspondents who
have kindly written to me.
E.P.
_June, 1909._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I PAGE
THE PILGRIMS' WAY 1
CHAPTER II
FARNHAM 14
CHAPTER III
FRENSHAM AND TILFORD 30
CHAPTER IV
WAVERLEY ABBEY AND MOOR PARK 43
CHAPTER V
THE HOG'S BACK 55
CHAPTER VI
GUILDFORD 64
CHAPTER VII
GUILDFORD'S ENVIRONS 85
CHAPTER VIII
SHALFORD AND WONERSH 95
CHAPTER IX
THE VILLAGES OF THE TILLINGBOURNE 101
CHAPTER X
GUILDFORD TO LEATHERHEAD 115
CHAPTER XI
GODALMING 126
CHAPTER XII
HASLEMERE AND HINDHEAD 139
CHAPTER XIII
THURSLEY AND THE MOORS 153
CHAPTER XIV
THE FOLD COUNTRY 163
CHAPTER XV
CRANLEIGH AND EWHURST 173
CHAPTER XVI
CHERTSEY 179
CHAPTER XVII
WEYBRIDGE 190
CHAPTER XVIII
NORTH TO RUNEMEDE 200
CHAPTER XIX
CHOBHAM AND BISLEY 209
CHAPTER XX
THE WEY VILLAGES 217
CHAPTER XXI
RICHMOND AND KEW 235
CHAPTER XXII
KINGSTON 244
CHAPTER XXIII
THE DITTONS AND WALTON 250
CHAPTER XXIV
EPSOM 259
CHAPTER XXV
MID-SURREY DOWNS AND COMMONS 270
CHAPTER XXVI
LEATHERHEAD 280
CHAPTER XXVII
STOKE D'ABERNON 287
CHAPTER XXVIII
LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING 296
CHAPTER XXIX
DORKING 308
CHAPTER XXX
WOTTON AND LEITH HILL 316
CHAPTER XXXI
DORKING TO REIGATE 328
CHAPTER XXXII
UNDER LEITH HILL 335
CHAPTER XXXIII
REIGATE 344
CHAPTER XXXIV
CROYDON 357
CHAPTER XXXV
BEDDINGTON AND CARSHALTON 365
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHALDON TO THE DOWNS 373
CHAPTER XXXVII
HORLEY AND CHARLWOOD 380
CHAPTER XXXVIII
GODSTONE AND BLETCHINGLEY 389
CHAPTER XXXIX
LINGFIELD AND CROWHURST 401
CHAPTER XL
OXTED AND LIMPSFIELD 414
CHAPTER XLI
DULWICH TO WIMBLEDON 424
CHAPTER XLII
THE SURREY SIDE 432
INDEX 441
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
HIGH STREET, GUILDFORD _Frontispiece_
ALONG THE CHALK RIDGE.--LEITH HILL IN THE DISTANCE 3
THE HOG'S BACK 4
COMING IN TO PUTTENHAM 8
BY SLIPSHOE LANE TO THE RED CROSS INN, REIGATE 12
LOOKING TOWARDS FARNHAM FROM THURSLEY COMMON 15
FARNHAM CASTLE FROM THE HIGH STREET 17
COBBETT'S BIRTHPLACE AT FARNHAM 22
WEYDON MILL, FARNHAM 24
OASTHOUSES NEAR FARNHAM 26
IN FARNHAM CHURCHYARD 28
FRENSHAM POND 30
PIERREPONT HOUSE AND BRIDGE 31
BESIDE FRENSHAM POND 32
FRENSHAM POND HOTEL 33
FRENSHAM POND 34
THE DEVIL'S JUMPS, BEYOND FRENSHAM POND 35
THE DEVIL'S JUMPS, FROM FRENSHAM COMMON 36
BRIDGE AT TILFORD 37
BETWEEN TILFORD AND ELSTEAD 39
THE KING'S OAK, TILFORD 41
MOOR PARK 44
STELLA'S COTTAGE 46
IN MOOR PARK 47
WAVERLEY ABBEY 49
WAVERLEY ABBEY 50
IN THE GROUNDS, WAVERLEY ABBEY 51
CROOKSBURY HILL AND FRENSHAM LITTLE POND, FROM FRENSHAM COMMON 53
A DIP IN THE HOG'S BACK 55
TONGHAM CHURCH, WITH WOODEN TOWER FOR BELLS 56
SEALE 58
WANBOROUGH CHURCH 61
BARN AT WANBOROUGH 62
THE CASTLE GATE, GUILDFORD 67
ABBOT'S HOSPITAL, GUILDFORD 73
ST. MARY'S CHURCH, GUILDFORD 77
ST. CATHERINE'S CHAPEL 89
ST. MARTHA'S CHAPEL 92
SHALFORD 96
CHIMNEYS, ALBURY 106
FIREPLACE IN THE WHITE HORSE, SHERE 109
SHERE CHURCH 111
SHERE 112
GOMSHALL 114
MERROW 116
SLYFIELD PLACE 124
ON THE WAY TO GODALMING FROM HASLEMERE 127
THE TOWN HALL, GODALMING 128
TIMBERED HOUSE IN THE MARKET PLACE, GODALMING 129
CHURCH STREET, GODALMING 133
EASHING 135
BETWEEN ELSTEAD AND PEPERHAROW 137
VIEW FROM HINDHEAD 139
HASLEMERE 140
A PORCH AT HASLEMERE CHURCH 142
BROOKBANK COTTAGE, SHOTTERMILL 146
THE DEVIL'S PUNCH BOWL, FROM GIBBET HILL 151
THE POST OFFICE, CHURT 152
THE RED LION, THURSLEY 153
INTERIOR OF THURSLEY CHURCH 154
THURSLEY 155
ELSTEAD 158
WITLEY 159
THE WHITE HART, WITLEY 160
A CORNER IN THE WHITE HART, WITLEY, KNOWN AS GEORGE ELIOT'S CORNER 162
A SURREY BYWAY 166
THE CROWN INN, CHIDDINGFOLD 169
ROCK HILL, HAMBLEDON 170
BLACK DOWN, FROM HAMBLEDON 172
AT EWHURST 175
CHERTSEY 179
CHERTSEY BRIDGE 181
COWLEY'S COTTAGE, CHERTSEY 183
A BYWAY NEAR WEYBRIDGE 190
WEYBRIDGE 192
RUINS AT VIRGINIA WATER 201
ENTERING EGHAM 205
THORPE 207
THE CROUCH OAK, ADDLESTONE 208
HORSELL CHURCH 217
VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, WOKING 220
THE VILLAGE STREET, RIPLEY 223
TREES ON THE GREEN, RIPLEY 224
PRIEST'S DOOR AND NORMAN CHANCEL, RIPLEY CHURCH 225
OCKHAM CHURCH 226
NEWARK PRIORY 228
MILL ON THE WEY, BETWEEN PYRFORD AND RIPLEY 230
PYRFORD CHURCH 232
WISLEY CHURCH 233
RICHMOND BRIDGE 236
THE THAMES FROM RICHMOND HILL 238
PALACE YARD, RICHMOND 239
RICHMOND HILL 241
KEW CHURCH 243
KINGSTON 245
KINGSTON BRIDGE 246
THE SWAN, THAMES DITTON 250
WALTON CHURCH 256
EPSOM 259
A QUIET CORNER IN WITLEY 269
WOLSEY'S TOWER, ESHER 276
LEATHERHEAD 281
YE OLDE RUNNING HORSE INN, LEATHERHEAD 282
THE MOLE AT SLYFIELD PLACE 287
STOKE D'ABERNON CHURCH 291
YE OLD CHURCH STILE HOUSE, COBHAM, A.D. 1432, RESTORED 1635 293
BRIDGE OVER THE MOLE, COBHAM 295
MICKLEHAM CHURCH 297
CEDARS AT JUNIPER HALL 302
VIEW OF BOX HILL, MISTY DAY 307
DORKING 308
DORKING 310
THE WHITE HORSE, DORKING 312
WOTTON HOUSE 318
CROSSWAYS FARMHOUSE, ABINGER 321
FRIDAY STREET 323
AMONG THE PINES 325
LOOKING TOWARDS DORKING FROM WESTCOTT 328
THE RED LION, BETCHWORTH 331
BUCKLAND 333
THE ROMAN ROAD AT OCKLEY 335
NEWDIGATE CHURCH 342
REIGATE 345
A REIGATE BYWAY 346
PARK LANE, NEAR REIGATE 347
REIGATE HEATH 349
VIEW FROM NEAR REIGATE 353
WHITGIFT'S HOSPITAL, CROYDON 359
SUTTON 371
THE SIX BELLS INN, HORLEY 381
THE WINDMILLS AT OUTWOOD 384
CHARLWOOD 386
GODSTONE 389
OLD TIMBERED HOUSE NEAR BLETCHINGLEY 392
BLETCHINGLEY 394
NUTFIELD CHURCH 399
LINGFIELD 401
THE VILLAGE CAGE, LINGFIELD 402
CROWHURST CHURCH AND THE OLD YEW 409
THE FARMHOUSE OPPOSITE CROWHURST CHURCH 410
CROWHURST PLACE 411
THE BRIDGE OVER THE MOAT, CROWHURST PLACE 412
TANDRIDGE CHURCH 415
A STREET IN OXTED 417
OXTED CHURCH 418
THE GOLF HOUSE AND WINDMILL, WIMBLEDON COMMON 429
HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS
IN
SURREY
CHAPTER I
THE PILGRIMS' WAY
The Pageant of the Road.--Canterbury Pilgrims.--Henry II.
barefoot.--Choosing the Road.--Wind on the Hill.--Wine in the
Valley.--_Pilgrim's Progress._--Shalford Fair.--A doubtful
Mile.--Trespassers will be Prosecuted.--With Chaucer from the
Tabard.
East and west through the county of Surrey runs the chalk ridge of the
North Downs, the great highway of Southern England from the Straits of
Dover to Salisbury Plain. Of all English roads, it has carried the
longest pageant. It saw the beginnings of English history; for four
centuries it was one of the best known highways in Christendom: the
vision from its windy heights is one of the widest and most gracious of
all visions of woods and fields and hills. By the trackway they made
upon the ridge came the worshippers to Stonehenge; Phoenician traders
brought bronze to barter for British tin, and the tin was carried in
ingots from Devon and Cornwall along the highway to the port of Thanet;
Greeks and Gauls came for lead and tin and furs, and the merchants rode
by the great Way to bring them. When Caesar swept through Surrey on his
second landing, his legions marched over the Way before he turned north
to the Thames. When the Conqueror drove fire and sword through Southern
England, he went down to Winchester by the chalk ridge; and when the
great lords under the Conqueror and Rufus, Richard de Tonebrige and
William de Warenne, built their rival castles, they built them to
command the highway; so did Henry of Blois build his castle at Farnham;
and so was Guildford Castle built. Of warfare later than Norman days,
the Way saw nearly all that went through Surrey. Simon de Montfort and
his barons rode fast by the ridge the year before Lewes; they lay at
Reading on the twenty-ninth of June, and on the first of July at
Reigate. In the wars of the Parliament, Farnham west of the Way saw the
siege of an hour; Lord Holland led his little band from Dorking to
Reigate and fled back again. Last of the echoes of Stuart battles,
Monmouth, after Sedgmoor, was driven through Farnham to lodge for one
night of misery and fear at Abbot's Hospital in Guildford.
But the Way has another meaning and other memories. It is as the
Pilgrims' Way that it is best known, and as the Pilgrims' Way that it
has been written about and tracked and traced and surrounded with legend
and story and the haunting melancholy of an old road once used and now
half forgotten. The Pilgrims' Way is more than the old Way, for it runs
by more than one road. The old Way took its followers along the ridge or
just under it, high in the sun and wind where the traders and fighters
could see their route clear above the thick woods of the Weald. The
Pilgrims' Way lies as often on the low ground as on the hill. But it
follows the line of the chalk ridge, and the parallel roads, though here
and there it would be difficult to choose between them as to which was
most used by travellers, have become vaguely named the Pilgrims' Way,
and as the Pilgrims' Way they remain.
[Illustration: _Along the Chalk Ridge.--Leith Hill in the Distance._]
The Way became the Pilgrims' Way in 1174, four years after Thomas a
Becket was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. His tomb in the Cathedral
became the second shrine in Christendom, and pilgrims came to it along
the old trackway through Surrey, from Farnham east of the Hog's Back
along the hills to Canterbury in Kent. Henry the Second, one of the
earliest pilgrims of all, made his act of repentance a few days after
landing at Southampton from France, on February 8, 1174. Or so legend
relates, and adds that he swore to walk barefoot; history is less
precise. After Henry the stream of devotees multiplied. Pilgrims
landed, like Henry, at Southampton, or between Southampton and
Chichester, and came through Winchester or Alton to Farnham; travellers
from the West of England joined the foreigners at Winchester, or came to
Farnham by the old Harrow Way, another ancient track from Salisbury
Plain. Thousands made the journey; more and more followed year by year.
At last it was determined to divide the stream. St. Thomas was murdered
on December 29, and the great pilgrimage to Canterbury and the return
centred round that date. In 1220 pilgrims were given a chance of paying
their vows in summer as well as winter. St. Thomas's body, on July 7,
was moved from the crypt under the nave to the grand altar in the nave,
and from that day forward the Feast of the Translation took its share of
the pilgrims' numbers. A constant stream journeyed east and west;
travellers with vows unpaid met travellers returning from the shrine,
and on and round the peopled highway sprang up booths and shelters to
meet the pilgrim's needs. Pedlars and merchants hawked their wares and
drove bargains by the road. Fairs were instituted in the villages along
the route; strolling musicians earned idle wages; beggars sat by the
roadside, at the churchyard corners, at the foot of the hills, and asked
for alms.
[Illustration: _The "Hog's Back."_]
And here, before we follow the pilgrims across the county from Farnham
to the lane by which they leave it east of Titsey, I want to make a
point clear. The pilgrims did not all travel to Canterbury by the same
road, along the selfsame track so many feet wide, as the Ordnance map
and some of those who have written on the Pilgrims' Way would argue.
There is not one single, separate path along which every pilgrim who set
out from Winchester to Canterbury travelled through Surrey. All that the
pilgrims did was to journey forward either on, or near, the old Way from
west to east and east to west, and it has happened that they used, more
than any other track besides the Way itself, one particular road. This
road can be followed parallel to the old Way for a long distance,
running from church to church under the chalk ridge; and it is this road
which is marked in the maps as the Pilgrims' Way. Perhaps that is
convenient, but it should be understood that not all the pilgrims went
by it. For pilgrims, after all, were as human then as walkers along
country roads are to-day. They would not all want to do the same thing
in the same way. Some of them would set out to do one thing and some
another. Some would prefer to walk alone high up on the ridge; others
would choose a bevy of companions and chatter along the road under the
hill. Some would be thin, ascetic persons, who liked to stride along and
see how far they could go without eating or drinking; some would be
pleasant, good-tempered creatures, who would amble by dusty places and
be thankful for cool beer; some would eat or drink mechanically, filled
with a single thought of prayer and pilgrimage to a shrine. Some would
be always perverse, and because most people travelled by one path, or
halted at an easy spot, would choose deliberately another path, and halt
where others passed on. Some would determine, come what might of wind or
rain or sun, to sleep at a certain village at nightfall; others would
let the weather decide for them. The weather would decide much, and it
would choose differently for different travellers. One of the writers
who has discussed the problems of the Pilgrims' Way suggests that the
main route would vary with varying degrees of heat and cold. If the
weather were cold and wet, the pilgrims would travel on the chalk ridge;
and if it were hot, they would go by the leafy woodland path below. But
if I Were a pilgrim and the weather were hot, I should go by the top of
the ridge, so as to get the air and the view; probably I would go by the
ridge in any case, whatever the weather was.
If written proof were needed that the journeying pilgrims Were not
condemned to a sort of solemn observance of the rules of
"Follow-my-leader," or bound by uncomfortable routine like so many
Cook's tourists, it would not be difficult to find. From a paper on the
Pilgrims' Way, written by Major-General E. Renouard James, you may learn
that in 1463, nearly three hundred years after the first pilgrim
followed Henry II to Canterbury, St. Martha's chapel by Guildford--St.
Martha's being a corruption of "The Martyr's," that is, St. Thomas the
Martyr's chapel--was in need of repair. And so, through the Prior of
Newark, "forty days' indulgence was granted to such as should resort to
this chapel on account of devotion, prayer, pilgrimage, or offering; and
should there say Paternoster, the Angel's Salutation, and the Apostles'
Creed; or should contribute, bequeath, or otherwise assign anything
towards the maintenance, repair, or rebuilding of the same." But what
does that mean? It must mean that not all the pilgrims went into St.
Martha's to pray, or even went by St. Martha's on their way east. The
Prior specially framed the terms of his indulgence to attract more
pilgrims.
In Mr. Hilaire Belloc's admirably interesting book _The Old Road_, in
which he describes the way in which he, sometimes with one companion and
sometimes with two, sought out the exact track of a single Pilgrims' Way
from Winchester to Canterbury, I find him writing of the compulsions of
the pilgrimage--"The pilgrim set out from Winchester: 'You must pass by
that well,' he heard, 'it is sacred.' ... 'You must, of ritual, climb
that isolated hill which you see against the sky. The spirits haunted it
and were banished by the faith, and they say that martyrs died there.'
... 'It is at the peril of the pilgrimage that you neglect this stone,
whose virtue saved our fathers and the great battle.' ... 'The church
you will next see upon your way is entered from the southern porch
sunward by all truly devout men; such has been the custom here since
custom began.' From step to step the pilgrims were compelled to take the
oldest of paths." Well, some of the pilgrims, perhaps most of them,
since human nature imitates more often than it contradicts, may have
been so compelled. But not all. I should like to set next to Mr.
Belloc's passage a passage from the book of another pilgrim. Bunyan,
when he wrote _Pilgrim's Progress_, may not have referred directly to
the Way from Winchester to Canterbury, though his 'Vanity Fair' has been
guessed to correspond with Shalford Fair, and other details of the
progress have been fitted in with other happenings, as we shall see at
Shalford. But unquestionably he reproduces the state of mind with which
a pilgrim would undertake a journey, wherever his pilgrimage would take
him. He was born only ninety years after the last pilgrim had paid his
vows; he would have talked to men whose fathers had made the pilgrimage,
and as he writes of it the keynote is voluntary choosing of the road.
Here is the passage:--
"I beheld, then, that they all went on till they came to the foot of the
hill Difficulty, at the bottom of which was a spring. There were also in
the same place two other ways, besides that which came straight from the
gate: one turned to the left hand, and the other to the right, at the
bottom of the hill; but the narrow way lay right up the hill; and the
name of that going up the side of the hill, is called Difficulty.
Christian now went to the spring and drank thereof to refresh himself,
and then began to go up the hill, saying--
'The hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here.
Come, pluck up heart, let's neither faint nor fear,
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.
The other two also came to the foot of the hill. But, when they saw that
the hill was steep and high, and that there were two other ways to go;
and supposing also that these two ways might meet again with that up
which Christian went, on the other side of the hill; therefore, they
were resolved to go in those ways. Now the name of one of those ways was
Danger, and the name of the other Destruction. So the one took the way
which is called Danger, which led him into a great wood; and the other,
took directly up the way to Destruction, which led him into a wide
field, full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell, and rose no
more."
Now that is exactly the way in which the pilgrims might have separated
and gone their own ways at a dozen places along the road to Canterbury.
Take, to begin with, the joining and the parting of the ways at Farnham.
Pilgrims would meet there, as we have seen, coming through Winchester,
from Normandy, or by the Harrow Way from Salisbury Plain, from Wales,
from Ireland, and all the West of England. But they would not all
necessarily leave by the road that runs straight from Farnham to the
foot of the Hog's Back. Some would have letters to the Abbot of
Waverley, would spend a night at the Abbey two miles to the south-east,
and join the others perhaps at Puttenham, six miles further along the
Way. Then, among those who chose to travel straight to the western slope
of the Hog's Back, there would be different minds at the foot of the
hill. Some would climb the hill at Whitewaysend--the white way of the
chalk would begin for them there--and would stride along in the sunlight
the seven straight miles to Guildford. Others would prefer to keep to a
path under the hill, stopping at the churches and gossiping at the inns.
You can trace the old road clearly through Seale to Puttenham, where it
must have travelled south of the church door, instead of taking the
awkward and unnecessary turn to the north which is taken by the modern
road. Then at Puttenham the pilgrims would divide again. Some would
journey straight on across Puttenham Heath, heading towards St.
Catherine's Hill--you can see the rough track; others would turn aside
to the south-east, to visit Compton church; perhaps they would come down
into Compton as you may come down into it from the east to-day, by what
is evidently an old track cut deep in the woods. They would go up north
again from Compton; perhaps they would be tired of the valley, and would
climb the Hog's Back to walk the last mile or so into Guildford in the
wind; perhaps they would join the other stream of pilgrims travelling by
the sandy lane by which you may walk to-day as slowly as they did
towards St. Catherine's Hill. Most of them, I think, would collect on
St. Catherine's Hill; St. Catherine's was more popular than the
Guildford churches. So General James has discovered, examining ancient
records of litigation. The parson of St. Nicholas, Guildford, fearing to
lose his profit from the pilgrims who visited the town, purchased from
the lord of the manor the freehold of the site of the chapel, and
rebuilt it in 1317. Perhaps the attraction of St. Catherine's was that
it was on the way to Shalford Fair. Guildford had two special fairs, on
May 4 and November 22, to catch the summer and the winter pilgrims. But
Shalford Fair was the great fair, and actually covered 140 acres of
ground.
[Illustration: _Coming in to Puttenham._]
The pilgrims would cross the Wey under St. Catherine's Hill by a ferry
or a rough plank bridge. The merchants travelling with their horses, and
the ponies driven from Weyhill Fair out towards Salisbury Plain, would
come through the water by a ford. But the ferry and the bridge were both
of almost immemorial antiquity. In 1736 there was a dispute about the
bridge. The lord of the manor of Braboeuf had built a bridge over the
Wey for a fair on St. Matthew's Day. The owner of the church lands at
Shalford ordered it to be destroyed; he claimed the right of conveying
passengers over the river. They went to law, and it was alleged that
there had been a bridge there time out of record. Judgment, however,
decided "that there had been no bridge except _per unum battellum_ (one
plank) at the mill belonging to the heirs of Henry de la Poyle (a mile
lower), laid for convenience of the pilgrims going to the chapel of St.
Katherine at the time of the fair." General James has unearthed the
decision of the Court, and incidentally added another bypath to the
Pilgrims' Way.
Opposite the ferry under St. Catherine's the line of the Way to St.
Martha's is clear enough, a green track in a green field; and once I saw
it as the pilgrims may have seen it on a spring morning. It was in May,
and there was a haze over the meadowland by the river which blurred
shapes and colours. St. Catherine's was no longer a ruin; the buildings
on the hill faded into the trees; the clothes of wanderers by the
riverside took on mediaeval brightnesses, lost modern forms; and into the
foreground ran three bare-headed, yellow-haired children, and in their
brown arms great bunches of cuckoo-flowers. So might one returning from
the Martyr's chapel have seen the path to the ferry in the days when the
Clerk told the tale of Griselda.
The track crosses the road near the ferry, and by a wood named the
Chantries comes up to St. Martha's, at the foot of the hill a
close-cropped aisle of down grass, and nearer the top a loose, sandy
path among pines. At the base of the hill the pilgrims who had come by
the ferry would be joined by those who had left Guildford by Pewley
Hill, to come out through the valley past Tytings, now a private
residence, but once the dwelling of St. Martha's priest. And on the
other side of the hill a difficulty waits. Mr. Belloc traces the road
from the foot across a ploughed field, to connect with a narrow lane on
the other side of the road dropping from Newlands Corner to Albury.
Well, it is possible that some of the pilgrims strayed out in that
direction, though it means that they would have to descend a bank like
the wall of a house by the Newlands Corner road, which is a sunken
track; also, Mr. Belloc owns that a little further on this road he
chooses has a doubtful section of a mile and a half. May he not be on
the wrong road? Why should not the pilgrims drop down the road which
leads from the foot of St. Martha's Hill into Albury? The inns would
have tempted them; they would be heading straight for the church; and
the road leading to inns and church is clearly a road that led from St.
Martha's Hill into the valley of the Tillingbourne long before the hill
bore a Christian chapel. It is evidently an old British trackway. It
runs along a ridge, and yet it is sunk deep between two very high banks.
If it was there when the pilgrims came down from the Martyr's chapel,
why should they make a fresh track for themselves, especially one which,
as Mr. Belloc admits, "raises a difficulty unique in the whole course of
the way"? The track he follows goes by the wet, northward side of a
hill--"an exception to an otherwise universal rule."
I have no space to follow the way in detail through the country, but
this particular section seemed to me to illustrate clearly the need for
imagining what the pilgrims would be likely to do, rather than to try to
fit in their doings with a particular path or lane through Albury. I do
not see why the pilgrims should not have followed the same route as we
travel by to-day. Doubtless by what is now Albury Park the road has
become confused. May it not have led through Albury Park past the south
porch of the ruined church, and so come in a natural way to Shere church
by the old inn? All five would then lie in a line--the old track from
the Martyr's chapel, Albury Church, the White Horse Inn, the short road
to Shere Church, and the track that leads up from Gomshall to the flank
of the downs again. But that is only guessing; the line on the maps
tempts it.
East of Gomshall to Oxted almost on the county border the track of the
old Way and of the Pilgrims' Ways, sometimes coinciding, sometimes
running parallel to each other, runs along the crest and the southern
slopes of the chalk ridge. Yews and wind-bent thorn mark the ways,
sometimes, as east of Gomshall, by a clear cut ridge in the hill, lined
with ancient trees; sometimes, as under Denbies by Dorking, you can only
pick out the path by solitary yews studding grass fields and corn-land.
At the gap of the Mole by Dorking the old Way, perhaps, forded the Mole;
the pilgrims would cross by Burford Bridge, which joins the Roman Ermyn
Street to Stane Street beyond Dorking. Both the Way and the pilgrims'
track would join on the line of yews on Box Hill, and from Box Hill to
Reigate there is a succession of yew road-marks and hedges, with here
and there the whole face of the downs bitten out by a chalk pit;
gradually the road climbs, until the track above Reigate lies almost on
the highest point of the ridge. At Reigate the old Way carries on,
crossing the hill-road which was from the town north to London. The
slope of the modern road has been eased by cutting into the hill, and
the ancient Way now is joined, on Reigate Hill, by a suspension bridge.
But the pilgrims would drop down into the town to sleep and to eat and
drink. You may see their tracks on the chalk, streaming down from the
ridge like a bunch of white ribands in the wind. They came into Reigate
by Slipshoe Lane, and there, where the cross roads meet, they stood to
pray at St. Thomas's shrine, now no more.
[Illustration: _By Slipshoe Lane to the Red Cross Inn, Reigate._]
They would please themselves where they climbed the ridge again. Or they
joined the old Way, perhaps, in what is now Gatton Park, where the yews
point to Merstham church. After Merstham the tracks divide again. East
of an interrupting chalk pit, a thick yew hedge lines the side of the
hill, under which I once ate fine blackberries in December, as perhaps
the Wife of Bath ate them. But half way along the ridge of yews another
path climbs up a plough, and on the crest it joins a narrow lane which
is as much the Pilgrims' Way as any road on the downs; it runs by
Tollsworth Farm over the summit of White Hill, and is actually marked
"The Pilgrims' Way" twice on the sign posts, so sure are the local
painters of what they have to point out. East from White Hill you may
follow a single track, sometimes grass, sometimes modern road. There is
a puzzle at Godstone Quarry, where the chalk pits have cut the hill to
pieces, and the tiny path which perhaps still keeps the line across the
pits is a perilous slippery place in the rain. On the far side of
to-day's road by the chalk pit you may pick up the green track again,
though you will lose it rounding the spur of the hill that lies half way
between Godstone and the railway. The old Way probably still kept to the
ridge, and Sir Gilbert Scott thought he had traced the Pilgrims' Way
through the Hanging Wood north of Tandridge Hill Lane. But I think I
found it in a green track which runs westward from a gap in that same
lane. It looked like a rough cart-track through a field, and would join
the road already traced beyond. In its centre, a foot from the ground,
was placed, and doubtless remains, a blue enamelled notice board, with
the brief but usual caution to trespassers.
East of Tandridge Hill Lane, on the far side of a grass field, a curious
path, half ditch, half avenue of yews and thorns, leads down through
woodland to green trackway again. The green track crosses the railway
cutting, and so journeys on into Titsey Park on the level lowland. Under
the new Titsey church it runs, as it once ran past the old church in the
Park, and from Titsey church eastward, by a country lane through broad
and glorious cornfields, it passes out of Surrey into Kent.
By those ways they went, fur-clad Briton, ravaging Dane, Roman eagle,
traders of tin and drivers of ponies, along the ridge in the sun and the
wind and the rain; by their side and after them, along the ridge and
under it, travelled the knight and the clerk and the friar and the
summoner, as they travelled from the Tabard Inn to St. Thomas's shrine
with Chaucer; and we may follow them, beginning with Surrey's western
town, and journeying at the end from the Tabard again, with the pilgrims
passing to the east.
CHAPTER II
FARNHAM
The joining of the ways.--Georgian poke bonnets.--The Castle.--Kings
at Farnham.--Poet Soldiers.--A glorious battle.--The Bishop's
artillery.--Paradise and the Bull's Eye.--Izaak Walton.--Cobbett's
education.--An old alehouse.--Hopgrowers in difficulties.--King
Charles's cap.--Elmer's pheasants.
Westernmost of all Surrey towns, Farnham stands at the joining of the
ways. Traders from Cornwall, pilgrims from Winchester, horse-dealers
driving their ponies from Weyhill Fair, have met on the roads that run
into Farnham from the west and south and north. Farnham Castle, for
seven centuries a Bishop's palace, links Surrey to the See of
Winchester. The Farnham oasthouses and hop-grounds bridge the crossing
from the fertile Hampshire border to the Bagshot sands and the wild and
sterile moors of Frensham and Hindhead. The town, set in its cultured
plot of vines and flower-beds, with its historic castle, its tranquil
church, and the Wey watering the pastures under its walls, stands like a
garden between the military rigidity of Aldershot and the wind that
blows over the Thursley heather.
No town in Surrey has two such old and orderly main streets as Farnham.
Here and there modern taste for a noisy pattern has broken the quiet
level; a bank has piled up a huge building of timber, handsome but out
of keeping; the new Corn Exchange is out of keeping and hideous; and in
1866 municipal enterprise pulled down the old market house, which stood
at the junction of the main streets and was a fascinating little
building perched on pillars. But much that is ancient and simple in
square red brick remains. The plain, low-roofed houses, with their flat
facades and crumpled, lichened tiles, succeed one another down Castle
Street and West Street with a delightful monotony. The elaborate carved
and painted doorways, knockers, lunettes, doors and steps are quite a
model exhibition. The two streets wear a Georgian air of poke-bonnets
and long purse-strings. Or they are Georgian, at all events, once or
twice during the day; on a sunny morning before breakfast, perhaps, or
when, perhaps in the rain, the endless traffic of wheels quiets for an
hour. For Farnham stands on the high road from London, and the motor
cars chase the eighteenth century into the side-streets.
[Illustration: _Looking towards Farnham from Thursley Common._]
Farnham is mostly of one period, and searchers for very old architecture
will be disappointed. One of the oldest buildings in the town is a tiny
set of almshouses, whose lowly gables line the road under the castle
hill. They were built by Andrew Windsor, of the parish of Bentley in
Hampshire, in 1619, and were intended, as an inscription on the wall
informs you, "For the Habitation and Relief of eight poor Honest
Impotent Old Persons." Even with four epithets, the almoners seem to
find life supportable.
The greatest and the oldest building is, of course, the castle. It
stands nobly on a hill, towards which the street rises like a carriage
drive, ending in a flight of steps. Once it must have dominated the town
as a fortress, but since Cromwell broke down the keep, Farnham has
looked up at a quieter and more episcopal pile--a fine gateway tower,
built by Bishop Fox early in the sixteenth century. Much of the castle
stands as he rebuilt it after various misfortunes in baronial and other
wars, but the front as it looks down on Farnham is less severe. Two
imposing cedar trees, out of a group of several, break the line of Fox's
massive red brick. Local legend has aged them considerably, for two
hundred years is suggested as a modest estimate of their antiquity. As a
fact, they cannot be much more than one hundred years old. They were
planted by Mrs. North, wife of Bishop North, who held the See from 1781
to 1820, and in an engraving of the castle published in 1792 there is
not a sign of them. The cedar is a very fast-growing tree--one of the
reasons why it is so brittle. The Farnham cedars are as brittle as any
others. I was told that when the present Bishop went abroad early in the
year 1908, he was hesitating over cutting off some of the larger
branches which shaded the castle wall and would not let it dry. The
April snow settled the question for him, and broke the branches he had
thought of lopping.
Farnham Castle has entertained many Kings, from Edward I to Queen
Victoria. One of its earliest bishops was a king's brother, the great
Henry of Blois. Elizabeth was often at the castle, and once, bidding the
Duke of Norfolk dine with her there, spoke to him of his intrigue to
marry Mary Queen of Scots. According to one story she warned him "to be
careful on what pillow he laid his head"; according to another, the Duke
assured the Queen that the intrigue was none of his making, and that "he
meant never to marry with such a person where he could not be sure of
his pillow." He was thinking of Darnley, and that dark February morning
with the King stretched dead on the garden grass.
James I hunted at Farnham regularly, and actually took a lease from
Bishop Bilson of the castle, which he found a convenient centre for
hunting in the Surrey bailiwick of Windsor Forest. But James was the
last of the kings to hunt from Farnham. George III and Queen Charlotte
visited the castle because Bishop Thomas had been the King's tutor, but
Farnham's entertaining of royalty was nearly at an end. Once, in the
last century, Queen Victoria rode there from Aldershot with the Prince
Consort, inspected the Bible on which she had taken her oath at the
Coronation, admired the castle, and rode back again.
[Illustration: _Farnham Castle from the High Street._]
A castle with a keep and a moat, or rather a deep dry ditch, ought to
have memories of fighting, and Farnham Castle has seen some sharp
skirmishing. It has the distinction of having been twice held by a poet,
once for the Parliament and once for the King. George Wither was its
first commander, and his command did not increase his reputation either
as a man of letters or a man of war. Probably the castle was never worth
defending. It was isolated, and its possession, as it turned out, would
have helped neither side to control the movements of the other. But
Wither thought otherwise. He had made his name as a pastoral poet,
author of _Fidelia_ and _The Shepherd's Hunting_ and he now proposed to
make another name as a brilliant soldier. He saw all sorts of
possibilities in Farnham Castle and when the war broke out and he was
made Governor, he began at once building a drawbridge and a sallyport,
digging a well, and storing provisions. Unfortunately he had no
artillery, without which no self-respecting soldier could be expected to
hold a fort, even where, as at Farnham, there was no enemy within shot.
Riding up to London, he poured a perfect shower of requests into the
unwilling ears of Sir Richard Onslow, who was the chief pillar of the
Parliamentary party in Surrey, and at last he got an order for some
demi-culverins from the Tower. But his hopes were still to be dashed.
The next day came news that Prince Rupert was already in North Surrey,
and the demi-culverins were counter-ordered for fear of capture. Then
might he have light guns, drakes or falconets, which he could take along
by-roads? Sir Richard's answer was that the fortress, since it could not
be held, must be abandoned. For this decision Wither afterwards attacked
Sir Richard Onslow as a traitor, in two tremendous effusions entitled
_Se Defendendo_ and _Justitiarius Justificatus_, of which the latter
landed him in prison and was burnt by the common hangman. Meanwhile,
still protesting at being refused his guns, he rode down to his own
house at Alton, collected what carts and cattle he could find, took them
into Farnham, brought out all the stores and men he could command
through Farnham Park, and got them all safely to Kingston. He might have
been captured by Rupert; it was really quite an exploit.
So the castle came to the Royalists. They put in command of it Sir John
Denham, who in that very same year had published, anonymously, his
famous _Cooper's Hill_. Wither had left behind him three hundred sheep
and a hundred oxen, so that the garrison was well victualled, and the
poet-Governor ought to have been able to put up a fight against an enemy
who had no artillery. Wither would have shown him how to do it. But Sir
John had no idea of what a battle should be. One December morning, a few
days after he had taken over the command, Sir William Waller, a
Parliament General, rode up at the head of his dragoons and demanded
surrender. Of course Sir John refused, and Sir William proceeded to fix
a petard to the gate, to blow it in. A military genius like Wither would
have ordered his men to fire their muskets at the enemy; but all the
soldiers on both sides escaped that day. The explosive was securely
fastened in position, the gate was shattered, the assailants rushed at
the breach, and began at once to pull down the barricade of timber
erected inside by the garrison. This done, the garrison surrendered, and
the glorious day was over.
But Sir John Denham got the best of Wither in the end. Not long
afterwards Wither was taken prisoner by the Royalists, and Denham, who
had wisely been set at liberty to rejoin the Royalist forces, begged for
his rival's life. Mr. Wither, he pleaded, should not be hanged, for
while Wither lived he was not himself the worst poet in England.
The castle keep was never to be held by a successor to Wither and
Denham. Sir William Waller blew up one of the walls when he took it from
Sir John, and the year before Charles was executed Parliament ordered it
to be dismantled altogether. The garrison fell to with enthusiasm,
stripped the building of all the lead, wood, and glass they could lay
their hands on, and sold the wreck to make up their back pay. At the
Restoration, when Bishop Duppa came to the See, he found the castle
almost uninhabitable. It cost him more than two thousand pounds to make
it fit to live in, and his successor, Bishop Morley, spent even more. He
actually laid out ten thousand pounds in improvements, only to meet with
John Aubrey's criticism that he had repaired the building "without any
regard to the rules of architecture." Doctor Peter Mew, who succeeded
Morley, set about improving the castle from outside, and planted the top
of the keep, into which the old walls had been tumbled, with fruit
trees. Bishop Sumner, who held the See for forty-two years from 1827,
turned the orchard into a garden.
Bishop Mew had a double record. He was a soldier as well as a prelate,
and he took part in the last battle fought on English soil. When King
Monmouth's Mendip miners were making their last stand at Sedgmoor, the
end of the fight came with the arrival of King James's artillery. The
heavy cannon might never have been drawn to the ground where the battle
was raging, for the artillery were unprovided with horses, had not the
Bishop offered his coach horses and traces. When they came to Sedgmoor,
he himself directed the fire.
The result of the various fortunes and misfortunes of the castle in war,
and of the different additions and alterations made by successive
Bishops, is naturally rather puzzling. The castle is a medley of the
building of eight centuries. Oldest of all is the ruined keep and the
framework, or foundations, of the castle buildings; the masonry of the
keep is the work of Henry of Blois, and belongs to the twelfth century.
Next come three pillars of the old chapel, now used as a servants' hall.
I saw it when it was set for a meal, and the severe cleanliness of the
white stone above the white tablecloth and glass and cutlery has
remained one of the distinctest of my memories of the castle. Next in
age is the outer gateway--doubtless the scene of Sir William Waller's
explosion--an imposing block of masonry. From each side of the gateway
runs the outer wall of the castle, and between the keep and the outer
wall what was once a ditch has grown into the Bishop's garden, a sloping
stretch of shaven lawn and flower borders, with a fountain and birds
bathing in it. The keep itself, almost from the broken parapet to the
tumbled stones at the base, is a mixture of wall and rock garden, in
which grow all the rock plants worth growing. Perhaps there were
wallflowers when Bishop Mew planted his orchard in the keep; but the
pasque flower and other rarer blossoms which crowd round the base belong
to the gardening of a later day. The level lawn and flower beds of the
inner garden of the keep are as serene and shining as those below, and
the view to the south over Hindhead and the south downs is finer and
freer than from anywhere in the grounds, though there are many fine
views from the castle windows. Fanny Burney, who visited Farnham in
1791, only a month released from the trammels of Court life, would
certainly have been able, as she tells us she wished, to see the hills
above her beloved Norbury. But ladies of the Court were delicate
creatures, and she could not climb to the top. "I was ready to fall
already, from only ascending the slope to reach the castle," she adds
with some humility.
Of all the bishops, Bishop Fox left the most enduring mark on the
castle. He built the noble and lofty gateway tower named after him, and
certainly altered the look of the castle as Farnham sees it to-day, more
than any other Bishop, though what it may have looked like when the
boundary walls were all landing can only be guessed. Within, one of the
chief restorers was Bishop Morley. The hall, before he made his
alterations, was a good deal larger than the present room; you can see
the old doorway in the wall of the wide entrance passage. He added the
splendid staircases, with their carved oak newels, the work of Grinling
Gibbons; and he built the chapel, which also has some fine carving. A
later and most princely Bishop, Anthony Thorold, who held the See from
1891 to 1895, laid down a mile and a hundred yards of stair carpet, and
repaired an acre and a fifth of roof. He also fitted up rooms for
ordination candidates, each room with a name. St. Francis and other
saints preside over the slumbers of some; some sleep in Paradise; a
Bishop who is an occasional visitor looks out upon the Castle garden
from the Bull's Eye.
Bishop Morley, who spent so much money on the Castle, spent very little
on himself. A tiny room, almost a cell, is shown as the chamber in which
he spent hours in prayer, and in the extreme corner is a stone couch, on
which he slept when he allowed himself sleep. He had but one full meal a
day, he never warmed himself at a fire, he never married, he was never
ill, and was found dead on his bed one morning, at the ripe age of
eighty-seven. Starved to death, you are told; the hint is almost of
suicide.
Izaak Walton knew Morley, and stayed with him at the castle. He wrote
his Lives of Hooker and Herbert under the Bishop's roof, possibly added
something to his Life of Donne; the room is shown. I like to think of
him sitting through a sunny morning writing gently about the
shortcomings of Mrs. Hooker, how she made her poor husband tend the
sheep and rock the cradle; or setting down the superb last sentences of
the Life, and then taking down his fishing rod and wandering down by the
Wey after trout and chub. Perhaps, indeed, he could get a salmon. Among
the dues collected by the Bailiffs of the Borough early in the
seventeenth century I find the following----
"Of every fishmonger that selleth ffish at his window in the lent to
paye at good ffriday a good lb. of samon or of the beast ffish they
have then leaft."
The salmon, presumably, swam with the other "beast ffish" in the Wey.
[Illustration: _Cobbett's Birthplace at Farnham._]
Farnham's greatest man was not an ecclesiastic, but a politician.
William Cobbett, soldier, farmer, Radical, editor of _Peter Porcupine_
and the _Weekly Political Register_, and author of a diary unequalled of
its kind in English writing, was born at Farnham on March 9, 1762. The
house in which he was born, once a farmhouse and now the Jolly Farmer
inn, stands on the outskirts of the town near the Wey, conspicuous with
a white gable. As a boy, he must have been one of the busiest on any
farm in the neighbourhood. His father used to boast that he had four
boys, of whom the eldest was only fifteen years old--William Cobbett was
the third--and yet that they would do as much work as any three men in
Farnham. "When I first trudged a field," you read in the _The Life of
William Cobbett, by Himself_, "with my satchel swung over my shoulder, I
was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and at the close of day,
to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty." He was taught the
beginnings of farming at Farnham, and he first ran away from Farnham to
be a gardener. He was employed as a boy in the castle grounds, and there
he met a man who was a gardener at Kew. They talked, and the
eleven-year-old boy was fired to see for himself what gardening could
be. Next day he started off, with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and
walked all day till he came to Richmond. There he should have had
supper; he had threepence left to get it with. But threepence was
exactly the price of a little book, _The Tale of a Tub_, which he spied
in a bookseller's window. He bought it, took it into a field near Kew
Gardens, and sat down to read; read on till it was dark, tumbled to
sleep under a haystack, and woke to ask the head gardener for work. He
was given work, but the gardener persuaded him to return home. Ten years
later he ran away from Farnham again, and for the last time. He was out
on the road to meet some friends on the way to Guildford Fair; the
London coach swung by, he swung up behind, and by nine that night was in
London with half-a-crown in his pocket. He left London for a soldier,
and his Farnham boyhood was over.
Riding by Farnham forty years after, Cobbett showed his son the spot
where he received his education. It was easily come by, but he was of
opinion that if he had not had it, "if I had been brought up a milksop,
with a nurserymaid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been this
day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous
idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or
from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities." The
spot is a sandy bank above the Bourne, a little stream, dry in summer,
which runs a mile south of Farnham, from Holt Forest to the Wey. This is
the education, described in _Rural Rides_:--
"There is a little hop-garden in which I used to work when from
eight to ten years old; from which I have scores of times run to
follow the hounds, leaving the hoe to do the best that it could to
destroy the weeds; but the most interesting thing was a _sand-hill_,
which goes from a part of the heath down to the rivulet. As a due
mixture of pleasure with toil, I, with two brothers, used
occasionally to _disport_ ourselves, as the lawyers call it, at this
sand-hill. Our diversion was this: we used to go to the top of the
hill, which was steeper than the roof of a house; one used to draw
his arms out of the sleeves of his smock-frock, and lay himself down
with his arms by his sides; and then the others, one at head, and
the other at feet, sent him rolling down the hill like a barrel or a
log of wood. By the time he got to the bottom, his hair, eyes, ears,
nose, and mouth were all full of this loose sand; then the others
took their turn, and at every roll there was a monstrous spell of
laughter."
[Illustration: _Weydon Mill, Farnham._]
When will _Rural Rides_ be added to the cheap editions? No other book
of the open air and open politics mixes the two with such a breezy grip
as Cobbett's. One rides with the sturdy old man over the road which he
thought the prettiest in England--the four miles between Guildford and
Godalming--or across "the most villainous spot God ever made," which was
Hindhead, and listens to him praising the bean fields and the turnips
here, and the oaks and acacias there, cursing the Wen-devils and
place-men and pensioners, the reptiles, toad-eaters and tax-eaters, and
yet the sheer honesty and affection of the man shine from every page.
There never was such a mixture of execration and the scent of
bean-blossom. But _Rural Rides_ remains a book of the library rather
than the bookshelf.
Farnham has two other authors, one a native and one a friend. Miss Ada
Bayly, known to her readers as Edna Lyall, made Farnham her holiday home
since she was four years old, and set the scenes of two of her novels in
the town. Even better known by his work, if not by his name, is Augustus
Toplady, the author of the hymn, "Rock of Ages." Toplady was born in a
little house in West Street, now pulled down, in 1740. He wrote much
that was bitter; all that is remembered is his hymn.
Every town on the Portsmouth road has its old coaching inn, and
Farnham's is the Bush. It stands modestly aloof; you must walk under an
arch to finds its oldest walls and its wistaria. It was not always the
best inn in Farnham. In 1604, in the account of the Borough, the
receipts of the Bailiffs are thus recorded:--
"Dewes which hath bene payed accostomly paied to the Baylleffs of
the Borrough and Towne of Farneham, beyond the memory of any man
that now liveth as Aniale rents always as followeth:--
For the 4 Inns 28s
That to saye of the Georg 7s
of the Whit Hart 7s
of the Anteolop 7s
of the Crown 7s
Of every alhouse within the Borough 2s
Of every alhouse out of the Borough 12d
Of every alhouse at the chosing of the
Bayleffs, called knowledge money 1d
Of every alhouse as will unlisensed or
licinsed at every ffayr day every
on of them 1d."
The Bush is not mentioned by name; it was a mere alehouse. Soon it
became a full-grown inn, and the Georg, the Whit Hart and the Anteolop
paled their ineffectual hearths.
[Illustration: _Oasthouses near Farnham._]
Farnham was once the greatest market in England for wheat. Now the chief
industry is hops. Farnham hops are some of the best grown, and have
always fetched long prices. In Cobbett's day, Kentish hops averaged five
pounds a hundredweight, and Hampshire hops were about the same price;
Farnham hops fetched seven pounds. English hops to-day average perhaps
less than five pounds a hundred, and the hopgrower is in distress.
Eighty years ago he was being ruined. Cobbett makes up his accounts,
writing at Chilworth on Sept. 25, 1822:--
"The crop of hops has been very fine here, as well as every where
else. The crop not only large, but good in quality. They expect to
get _six_ pounds a hundred for them at Weyhill Fair. That is _one_
more than I think they will get. The best Sussex hops were selling
in the Borough of Southwark at three pounds a hundred a few days
before I left London. The Farnham hops _may_ bring double that
price; but that, I think, is as much as they will: and this is ruin
to the hop-planter. The _tax_, with its attendant inconveniences,
amounts to a pound a hundred; the picking, drying, and bagging to
50s. The carrying to market not less than 5s. Here is the sum of L3
10s. of the money. Supposing the crop to be half a ton to the acre,
the bare tillage will be 10s. The poles for an acre cannot cost less
than L2 a year; that is another 4s. to each hundred of hops. This
brings the outgoings to 82s. Then comes the manure, then come the
poor-rates, and road-rates, and county-rates; and if these leave one
single farthing for _rent_ I think it is strange."
Hop-buyers and sellers in those days met in the old Market House, and
were doubtless familiar with the queer inscription, still remembered by
middle-aged Farnham farmers. John Clark built the Market House in 1566,
and wrote on it his riddle:--
"You who don't like me, give money to mend me,
You who do like me, give money to end me."
The Local Board of 1866, looking round for some worthy object on which
to spend their money, liked the old house so well that they ended its
existence on the spot.
No parish church is more difficult to drive up to than St. Andrew's at
Farnham. If you know the way you can come to a corner of the churchyard
by a side street, but Farnham goes to church chiefly by alleys and
footpaths. The churchyard is more striking than the church, much of
which is new. The thick turf, shaven and level, runs to the foot of
mossy brick walls; an avenue of pollarded elms leads from the south
door; all round stand little, old red houses. Six o'clock on a sunny
autumn evening is the time to wait in Farnham churchyard. Every three
hours the mellow, feeble bells ring a chime which suits September
twilight:--
"Life let us cherish
While yet the taper glows,
And the fresh floweret
Pluck ere it close.
Away with every toil and care,
And cease the rankling thorn to wear;
With manful hearts life's conflict meet,
Till Death sounds the retreat."
Vernon House, a Tudor building changed from its old name, Culver Hall,
and altered so as to front on West Street, has an unhappy memory of the
Parliament wars. Charles the First lodged there one December night, a
closely guarded prisoner on his way from Hurst Castle to Windsor. A
month later he was to leave Windsor for Whitehall. He had little to give
his host, and gave him all he had. It was a white morning cap of quilted
silk, which Mr. George Vernon, inheriting from his grandfather, left in
1732 to his grandson, "desiring it may always go to the next heir male
of my family, as a testimony of our steadfast loyalty and adherence to
the Crown, which is the only bounty my family ever received for all the
losses and expenses they sustained for the royal cause, which amounted
to several thousands of pounds."
[Illustration: _In Farnham Churchyard._]
I had nearly forgotten Farnham's painter. He was Stephen Elmer, and a
picture of his, "The Last Supper," hangs in the church tower. But his
forte was painting fish and game, dead and alive. In a curious old
pamphlet, "_The Earwig, or An Old Woman's Remarks on the present
Exhibition of Pictures of the Royal Academy--a critical pamphlet
published in Fleet Street_, 1781, I find the following entries. Of the
painters and subjects, Mr. Elmer and Mrs. Robinson belong to Surrey. The
rest supply the setting:--
"10. Thais--Sir Joshua Reynolds, R.A.--The face was painted from the
famous Emily Bertie ... It was a cruel _snouch_ in the Painter, a
fine Girl having paid him seventy-five guineas for an hour's work,
and being unable to pay for the other half of her portrait, to
exhibit her with such a sarcastic allusion to her private life--to
call her Thais--to put a torch in her hand, and direct her to set
flames to the temple of Chastity. Such rigorous punishment seldom is
inflicted by a rich man on a pretty woman, merely from her want of
money.
79. Damn'd bad.
106. Mrs. Mahon in the character of Elvira--J. Roberts.--Painting,
painted.
107. Portrait of Mrs. Robinson--J. Roberts.--At some distance the
effect nearly the same as the preceding number; but on closer
inspection, the colour not quite so thickly laid on. We must do
justice to the Exhibiting Artists by saying that there are no worse
_of their size_ in the room than these Dulcineas.
129. Brace of Pheasants--S. Elmer, A.--No artist can come nearer to
the object he attempts. His fish, his birds, and fruit are as
exquisitely fine as any of the Flemish masters."
The National Gallery lacks an Elmer: private collectors may be luckier.
Mr. J.E. Harting, to whom all Surrey naturalists owe a debt, reminds me
that many of Elmer's best pictures were engraved to illustrate Daniel's
_Rural Sports_, and that it was Elmer who painted the picture of the
hybrid between a blackcock and a pheasant which readers of _Selborne_
will remember was sent by Lord Stawell to Gilbert White. "It had been
found by the spaniels of one of his keepers in a coppice, and shot on
the wing."
[Illustration: _Frensham Pond._]
CHAPTER III
FRENSHAM AND TILFORD
A Surrey Labourer.--The Witch's Caldron.--Frensham Ponds.--The Last
of the Blackcock.--Herons and Waterlilies.--The Tilford
Oak.--Cobbett's Mistake.--Silver Billy.--The heroic age of
Cricketers.
Farnham has expanded to the south-east, and not prettily. But it is the
key to the great stretch of pine wood, heather and bogland which lies to
the south about Frensham, Tilford and Crooksbury Hill; and it is the
best centre from which to visit Waverley Abbey and Moor Park, and to
take long walks over some of the wildest country in the county. A week
would not be long enough to explore the dozen square miles south of the
town.
Wrecclesham lies to the south-west, almost on the Hampshire border, and
still makes green pottery of patterns which were favourites in the
sixteenth century. Further south runs the tiny Bourne, the stream by
which Cobbett and his brothers had so good an education, as we have just
seen, in the sand. The Bourne, which runs dry in summer, has few
associations as a stream; one, perhaps, will remain with it. Readers of
_The Bettesworth Book_ and _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_ will perhaps
not be very wrong if they fix on this sandy valley as the Surrey which
Bettesworth knew best. Than the _Memoirs_, I think, no more discerning
study of an old labourer's fight to keep on his own legs, out of the
workhouse, earning his own money with his spade and hoe, belongs to any
Surrey village.
[Illustration: _Pierrepont House and Bridge._]
Deep country begins south of the Bourne, with the first Surrey bridge
over the Wey, or rather one of the two Weys that are to join at Tilford.
Untouched as yet by any town, the little river runs here over gravel and
sand, clear and weedy. Trout lie under the bridge below Pierrepont
House, in George III's day a seat of Evelyn Duke of Kingston, who named
it after his family. He was the Duke who married the beautiful Countess
of Bristol when her lawful husband was still alive: perhaps she used to
stare into the Wey at Pierrepont and wonder whether it was worth doing.
[Illustration: _Beside Frensham Pond._]
Frensham stands a little distant from the river, just a cottage or two
and a church. But the church holds a famous relic--an enormous caldron
of beaten copper. Nobody knows its age; everybody has a story about it.
It was brought by the fairies, is one tradition; it was nothing of the
kind, is another. Mother Ludlam, the witch of Moor Park, four miles
away, used it for boilings and philtremakings, according to one story;
yet another connects it with a great stone which used to lie in the
neighbourhood. John Aubrey, the antiquary, who "perambulated" Surrey in
1673 and 1674, gives the legend in full:--
"In the vestry of the church, on the north side of the chancel, is
an extraordinary great kettle or caldron, which the inhabitants say,
by tradition, was brought hither by the fairies, time out of mind,
from Borough hill, about a mile from hence. To this place, if any
one went to borrow a yoke of oxen, money, etc., he might have it for
a year or longer so he kept his word to return it. There is a cave
where some have fancied to hear music. On this Borough hill (in the
Tithing of Cherte, in the parish of Frensham) is a great stone lying
along, of the length of about six feet: they went to this Stone, and
knocked at it, and declared that they would borrow, and when they
would repay, and a Voice would answer when they should come, and
that they should find what they desired to borrow at that Stone.
This caldron, with the trivet, was borrowed here after the manner
aforesaid, but not returned according to promise; and though the
caldron was afterwards carried to the stone, it could not be
received, and ever since that time no borrowing there....
"The people saw a great fire one night (not long since), the next
day they went to see if any heath was burnt there, but found
nothing."
[Illustration: _Frensham Pond Hotel._]
"These stories," says Aubrey, "are verily believed by most of the old
women of this parish, and by many of their daughters." The daughters
ought to have known better. So ought Aubrey, according to Salmon,
another Surrey historian, writing in 1736. He cannot understand why
there should be anything astonishing about the size of the caldron,
"there having been many in England till lately to be seen, as well as
very large spits which were given for entertainment of the parish at the
wedding of poor maids." It was a notable thing to roast an ox whole.
Clearly it would be satisfactory to boil a sheep.
[Illustration: _Frensham Pond._]
From Frensham village a road runs straight across the common to the
south-west corner of the Great Pond, but the prettiest road to the water
is by the side of the Wey. The Wey runs here deep and clean, edged with
forget-me-nots through all the summer, winding and straightening through
serene and shining pastures. There is nothing quieter in all Surrey than
this little path by the tiny river, with the bank on one side rich with
roses and elderflower, and on the other the sunlight gleaming on the
chestnut coats of the cattle moving slowly through the sedge. Here is an
old oak bridge, solid and lichened; here, facing the stream, a high bank
of white sand, bored and tunnelled by sand-martins; a little further,
and the brushwood flames with the pink and crimson spires of a thousand
foxgloves. The grassy path runs on, until on a sudden bend the ground
rises, and over a wooden stile opens out the vista of the great
Frensham Pond. Could there be a deeper contrast? Behind lies green
pasture-land, rush and sedge, oak and alder; before you, the shoulder of
a hill purple with ling, the long level of grey and silver water,
dancing under the wind away to a far strip of yellow sand flecked with
patches of white foam; high above that, burnt and blackened ridges of
heather-ground and gorse. Frensham Pond has often been painted, but that
is the view I should choose, as I saw it first. To one coming up from
these green depths of pasture, the air blows across the water with the
freshness of the sea.
[Illustration: _The Devil's Jumps, beyond Frensham Pond._]
Frensham Pond still lies open and wild to the sky, though it may not be
long before its shyer visitors leave it for more secluded waters. The
motor omnibuses from Farnham have not yet frightened them all away. Coot
and moorhens paddle in and out of the reeds, and great grebes float
leisurely about its surface. It has always been famous for its fishing.
In Aubrey's time it was "well known for its carps to the London
fishmongers," and to-day it holds pike, perch and tench. I heard of no
carp. Who would eat a carp?
In the bar of the little inn that stands on the edge of Frensham Pond
there is an interesting case holding two blackcocks and a grey-hen,
whose unhappy lot it was to be shot--perhaps the last of their race seen
in this part of Surrey. They were killed nineteen years ago, in 1889.
Actually the last blackcock chronicled in Surrey were a pair seen near
Hindhead, I believe in 1906.
[Illustration: _The Devil's Jumps, from Frensham Common._]
From Frensham Great Pond one may push on to Hindhead, three or four
miles to the south-east, or may return to Farnham through Tilford by way
of the Little Pond, another broad and shining stretch of water. The way
to Farnham is the better, for it means leaving the high road for the
natural paths that run over and round the windy ridges of the commonland
to the east. From the rising ground between the two Frensham ponds there
is a fine panorama of pine and heather. Crooksbury Hill juts up dark and
commanding to the north; the level line of the ridge on the left, a few
hundred yards away, is broken and humped with barrows; far away to the
east lies Charterhouse, grey in the haze by Godalming; behind, to the
south-east, the Devil's Jumps, three little squat, conical hills whose
very oddity is one of their attractions. They edge the horizon like
inverted pudding bowls covered with bracken, and with bell-heather
kindling to crimson in the July sunlight.
[Illustration: _Bridge at Tilford._]
July is the month in which to visit Frensham Little Pond. It was an
accident which first showed me the pond as it ought to be seen, and as
few see it. I had been watching a number of herons through my glasses;
one of them eyeing me discontentedly from the reeds on a southern arm of
the water, and three more flapping majestically over the trees,
apparently dropping suddenly down into the valley of the Wey. Trying to
take a short cut to the stream I missed my way among the woodland rides,
and suddenly found myself again on the edge of the pond. It was worth
making the mistake. The northern corner of the pond by the little
boathouse is one sheet of white waterlilies. The corner runs into a
rough triangle, with two sides fifty yards in length and a base of
perhaps thirty yards. There must be nearly a thousand square yards of
lilies, and from five to ten lilies to the yard, green buds, opening
blossoms, and great white cups and gold-centred chalices, wet and
swaying in the wind. Through all the summer those lilies flower, and
there cannot be as many people see them as there are lilies.
Fortunately, it would be difficult to find them unless you were walking:
you could not drive a motor-car or ride a bicycle down those sandy
lanes, and nobody on foot would pick the lilies.
To walk from Frensham Little Pond over Tilford Common to Tilford is to
traverse some of the wildest and freshest commonland in Surrey. For some
distance from the northern corner of the pond the way runs through
woodland, crossed and recrossed by so many sandy paths that it is a good
deal easier to get lost than to find the high road running into Tilford
from the south. It is worth while getting lost, for that matter, if only
to realise the wildness of the place; though it would perhaps be better
to choose daytime for the business, for there are some awkward-looking,
though perhaps not dangerous, bogs on the lower ground near the Wey.
This lower ground, by the way, is a wonderful place for rabbits. You
come suddenly out from the wood on the border of a reedy field, and see
dozens of scampering bodies cleaving paths through the shaking rushes.
Now and then a rabbit, puzzled by the silence following the sound of the
invader's coming, sits and cocks up a pair of ears above the grass; his
head goes a little higher, his timorous eye catches yours, and the
greenery closes behind him.
Tilford to-day cannot be very different from the Tilford of the days of
Cobbett. It is a straggling little hamlet, lying about the triangle
formed by its cricket-green. The Wey runs halfway round the green, and
is crossed by two grey and ancient bridges. But the chief glory of
Tilford is its mighty oak, one of the greatest of English trees. Its age
is unknown, and perhaps would hardly be known if it were felled. It has
been claimed as "the oak at Kynghoc," mentioned in the charter given to
Waverley Abbey in 1128; but that oak is mentioned as standing on the
Abbeyland boundary, and the Tilford oak has never stood on the boundary.
These historic oaks make difficult problems. Wherever you find a great
tree, local legend gathers round it. Queen Elizabeth dined under it or
shot a stag under it; Charles II climbed in it; Wesley preached under
it; it is the boundary of the parish; it was the boundary of the
Abbeyland eight hundred years ago. But was it always, then, the greatest
tree for miles round? Eight hundred years ago, may there not have stood
another tree near where it stands to-day, as large or even larger?
Surely the traditions of one great tree pass, when the tree falls, to
its nearest great neighbour; but they pass so seldom, and so slowly,
that the villagers hardly note the change. Three generations are born
and die, and no villager living has seen the older greater oak; the
younger, slighter tree succeeds to its glories. Tilford's oak to-day is
called by all Tilford the King's Oak. On the old estate maps it is
Novel's Oak; Novel, perhaps, was a yeoman farmer.
[Illustration: _Between Tilford and Elstead._]
Cobbett made a curious mistake about the Tilford Oak. He and his son
were riding through Tilford to Farnham on an autumn day in 1822:--
"We veered a little to the left after we came to Tilford, at which
place on the Green we stopped to look at an _oak tree_, which, when
I was a little boy, was but a very little tree, comparatively, and
which is now, take it altogether, by far the finest tree that I ever
saw in my life. The stem or shaft is short; that is to say, it is
short before you come to the first limbs; but it is full _thirty
feet round_, at about eight or ten feet from the ground. Out of the
stem there come not less than fifteen or sixteen limbs, many of
which are from five to ten feet round, and each of which would, in
fact, be considered a decent stick of timber. I am not judge enough
of timber to say anything about the quantity in the whole tree, but
my son stepped the ground, and, as nearly as we could judge, the
diameter of the extent of the branches was upwards of ninety feet,
which would make a circumference of about three hundred feet. The
tree is in full growth at this moment. There is a little hole in one
of the limbs; but with that exception, there appears not the
smallest sign of decay."
Visitors to Tilford can amuse themselves with trying over Cobbett's
measurements. I could not reach to measure it ten feet from the ground;
but at five feet I made its girth, in July, 1907, twenty-four feet nine
inches. Probably it was not much less when Cobbett was a little boy.
That independent, combative mind would not accept another's
measurements, and if he remembered the tree as a little tree, then a
little tree he was right in remembering. Since his day the signs of
decay have set in; the oak is still superb, but a Jubilee sapling has
been planted as a neighbour. Centuries hence the sapling, perhaps, will
be the King's Oak again.
Tilford has another memory of green old age. William Beldham--"Silver
Billy," because of his straw-coloured hair--lived most of his life in
the village, where he kept an inn, and died in a cottage close under the
oak. He was born at Wrecclesham on February 5, 1766, and died February
20, 1862, aged 96, having played thirty-five years' unbroken "great"
cricket, as Lillywhite calls it--a finer name than first-class. Let John
Nyren, most discerning of biographers, describe him:--
"William Beldham was a close-set, active man, standing about five
feet eight inches and a-half. He had light-coloured hair, a fair
complexion, and handsome as well as intelligent features. We used to
call him 'Silver Billy.' No one within my recollection could stop a
ball better, or make more brilliant hits all over the ground.
Wherever the ball was bowled, there she was hit away, and in the
most severe, venomous style. Besides this, he was so remarkably safe
a player; he was safer than the Bank, for no mortal ever thought of
doubting Beldham's stability. He received his instructions from a
gingerbread baker at Farnham, of the name of Harry Hall....
"He would get in at the balls, and hit them away in a gallant style;
yet, in this single feat, I think I have seen him excelled; but when
he could cut them at the point of the bat he was in his glory; and
upon my life, their speed was as the speed of thought."
[Illustration: _The King's Oak, Tilford._]
When were the great days of Surrey cricket? When Surrey could lend All
England William Beldham, and still win--which they did twice--a Tilford
man might answer. At all events, they were days in which cricketers
lived to heroic ages. Abarrow, who lies at Hambledon over the Hampshire
border, lived to be 88; James Aylward, "rather a bulky man for a
cricketer," was buried close to Lord's ground, aged 86; Barber, who
kept the Bat and Ball on Broad Halfpenny Down, was 71; William Fennex,
at the age of 75, walked ninety miles in three days, carrying an
umbrella, clothes, and three cricket bats (but he died soon after);
William Lambert, almost the greatest of Surrey hitters, and the first
player who ever made two centuries in the same match, died at 72; Lumpy
Stevens, who won L100 for Lord Tankerville by hitting a feather once in
four balls, and lies in Walton churchyard, was 84; John Small, who saved
his life by playing his violin to a ferocious bull, to the "admiration
and perfect satisfaction of the mischievous beast," lived to be 89; Tom
Sueter--"I have never seen a handsomer man than Tom Sueter," wrote
Nyren--lived to be 77; "Shock" White, with his bat as broad as his
stumps, "a short and rather stoutly-made man," was buried at Reigate,
aged 91; Yalden of Chertsey,--he jumped over a fence and then on his
back caught the ball--was 84; and John Wells, buried at Farnham, died at
the age of 76. John Wells shared with "Silver Billy" a curious
distinction. He was Beldham's brother-in-law, and an admiring publican
at Wrecclesham put up a sign to draw thirsty wayfarers to Wrecclesham's
best beer. It was "The Rendezvous of the Celebrated Cricketers, Beldham
and Wells." If it were still standing, it would attract a pilgrimage.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IV
WAVERLEY ABBEY AND MOOR PARK
Jonathan Swift, Secretary.--A new Tale of a Tub.--Sir William
Temple, Essayist.--Swift's "Stella."--A heart under a
sundial.--Dorothy Osborne.--Mother Ludlam's Cave--Waverley
Abbey.--Two tons of wine.--Comfort from Cromwell.--A Surrey
Landmark.
Hardly two miles from Farnham, and reached by a road overarched by fine
oaks, Moor Park stands on the banks of the Wey. A turn in the lane
throws open a view of rich hayfields and pasture, with the river winding
in and out under a ridge of oakwoods; much the same view, perhaps, as
Swift first had of the fields and the Wey when he came to Moor Park from
Ireland to copy out Sir William Temple's essays and to meet the
dark-eyed waiting-maid who was to inspire one of the great passions of
literary history.
Moor Park was Sir William Temple's new name for an old manor. The name
under which he bought the house and land was Compton Hall, and he
renamed it after a property in Hertfordshire. "The perfectest figure of
a garden I ever saw, either at home or abroad, was that of Moor Park in
Hertfordshire, when I knew it about thirty years ago," he wrote in his
_Essay on the Gardens of Epicures_: and he laid out his own garden in
the Dutch style which he admired. The garden has changed with the
changing tastes of later owners; the house has fared a little better,
though it was once metamorphosed into a Hydropathic Sanatorium--a new
and dismal Tale of a Tub.
[Illustration: _Moor Park._]
Moor Park, when Sir William Temple had it, saw the writing of many
books. Sir William Temple himself, deeply hurt with his sovereign, James
II, for striking his name off the Privy Council, had vowed to give up
diplomacy and turn to gardening and writing for the rest of his life.
His gardening may have been as good as his writing, and his essay on
Gardening is, of all his writings, perhaps the best. But it was in his
seclusion at Moor Park that he wrote, also, one of the most ridiculous
papers that ever brought the fame of an essayist to a retired
politician. His _Essay Upon the Ancient and Modern Learning_ remains one
of the most astonishing examples of the admirable writing down of trash
in the history of letters. Quite unnecessarily, he had taken up the task
of comparing modern writers with ancient, to the disadvantage of the
modern, and he cannot be said to have been well equipped for the
business. He had never read a word of Greek, and he achieved the
distinction of criticising modern writing without a single reference to
the works of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Moliere, Racine,
Corneille, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare. The extraordinary
thing is that the book was welcomed, and when a quarrel was struck over
his claim that the Letters of Phalaris (which he could not read) were
the best Letters in the world, he found ready champions. They were
hopelessly defeated by Bentley, but Sir William Temple fortunately died
before the defeat.
Better books were written at Moor Park by Sir William's secretary.
Jonathan Swift, angry and rebellious, hating the authority and restraint
of his Irish University, came to England an uncouth, ill-balanced,
extravagant creature of twenty-one, and settled, or half-settled, to his
work as amanuensis. He threw up his post in a rage, went over to Ireland
and was ordained priest, made up his quarrel with his patron and came
back to Moor Park to write _The Tale of a Tub_ and _The Battle of the
Books_. But the books were almost incidents. The mainspring of his life
was his melancholy devotion to the pretty girl who waited on Lady
Giffard, Sir William Temple's sister. She was Esther Johnson, daughter
of Sir William's steward, but as Swift's Stella she lives in the story
of sad and mysterious passions with Heloise and Laura.
Sir William Temple died in 1699, and was buried by his wife's side in
Westminster Abbey; all but his heart, and that was laid in a silver box
under the sundial in his garden. He left his papers to Swift, who wrote
that there had died "with him all that was good and amiable among men,"
and to prove it quarrelled acrimoniously with the family.
Of another, gentler inmate of Moor Park we hear very little. Her fame
was assured her when, as Dorothy Osborne, she had waited seven years to
marry William Temple, and had sent to him, without an idea that they
would reach an English public, some of the most graceful girlish letters
ever written. After her marriage she leaves the scene, or we see her
seldom. She corresponded with Queen Mary, but Swift has little to tell
us about her. She, at least, could never have enraged him.
[Illustration: _Stella's Cottage._]
Moor Park lies along the banks of the Wey, and through it runs a drive
open to foot passengers, but not to bicycles or dogs. Nearly at the end
of the drive going towards Waverley Abbey is a curious cave, lined and
roofed at the entrance with stone, and barred and gated and spiked with
iron, evidently a fit habitation, once upon a time, for a very
witch-like old woman. The gates, or rather railings which do not open,
must have been placed there many years ago, for no initials have been
carved, or at least none are visible, on the stone within. The cave runs
back, some way from the road, into pleasantly dubious darkness. In this
case, according to the tradition of the place, lived the witch, Mother
Ludlam, whose caldron lies in the tower of Frensham Church. Another
excavation in the ground a few yards away has also its own tradition,
or rather two traditions. One is that it was the regular abode of a
hermit named Foote, who starved to death in it; another, that Foote was
a lunatic who was found dying in the hole, but actually died in the
workhouse. The details are precise. "Foote was a gentleman. He came one
day to the Unicorn Inn at Farnham. Next day he hired a man to wheel a
heavy portmanteau to Moor Park gate, when he told the man to put it
down. Foote was taken very ill, was found by old Hill the keeper and
taken to Swift's cottage where Hill lived. The union officials took
Foote and his heavy portmanteau to the Union. 'It's only buttons
inside,' said they. 'It's gold! gold!' exclaimed Foote with his dying
breath." So runs the local version.
[Illustration: _In Moor Park._]
At the gates of the entrance of Moor Park stands a charming cottage,
brick and timber embowered in roses. It has been known at different
times as "Dean Swift's Cottage" and "Stella's Cottage." Perhaps neither
lived there. Outside the park the Wey broadens out into a wide pool,
shaded by magnificent sycamores, and then drops through sluices to a
lower level, to twist back to the north-west under the walls of Waverley
Abbey.
Waverley Abbey is the greatest of the ruins in a county where ruins are
few. Once the Abbey precinct covered sixty acres of ground; to-day
nothing remains but tumbled walls and broken gates. It was not the
oldest nor the richest of Abbeys in the county, but in some ways it was
the noblest foundation of all. It was the earliest house of Cistercian
monks in England; it inherited the spirit and the traditions of one of
the finest of the monastic orders, the stricter sect of the monks of St.
Benedict; its brethren were simple, kindly men with few wants and little
money, who yet were generous hosts and the most skilful farmers of their
day; it was the elder sister of Tintern Abbey, the mother of the Abbeys
of Garendon, Ford, Combe and Thame, and the grandmother of seven others;
and its abbots had precedence in the chapters of abbots throughout the
order of Cistercians.
The White Monks, as the Cistercians were called, used to choose wild and
lonely places for their churches, and Waverley Abbey, which stands in
fields even now sometimes flooded, in its early days was more than once
in difficulties through rain and bad seasons. It was founded in 1128 by
William Giffard, the second Bishop of Winchester after the Conquest,
and the buildings were still unfinished when, in 1201, a great storm
inundated the Abbey, almost carried away its walls, and ruined all its
crops, wheat, hay, and flax. Two years later, from the failure of the
harvest after the flood, corn was so scarce that the monks had to
scatter themselves among other Convents till they could thresh another
summer's corn. In 1215 the spring from which they got all the water
suddenly failed, and the monks were without water for their wine till
one of them found a fresh spring and took it by pipes to the admiring
Abbey. Eighteen years later came another storm and vast floods; the
water rushed through the Abbey grounds, carrying away walls and bridges,
and was eight feet deep in the buildings. There were other floods; in
1265 the monks had to sleep where they could out of the water, and it
took days to clean away the silted mud. Those were some of the penalties
of being so conveniently near to a river.
[Illustration: _Waverley Abbey._]
[Illustration: _Waverley Abbey._]
Round the buildings accumulated the traditional virtues. The Annals of
Waverley record that in 1248 a youth fell by accident from the very
parapet of the church tower to the ground without receiving the smallest
injury. He was stupefied, and was thought to be dead, but after a little
while began to speak and to be sensible, and soon completely recovered.
On an earlier occasion, Aubrey tells us that "a boy of seven or eight
years of age, standing near the Abbey gate, fell into the river, on the
Feast of the Invention of the Cross, and by the rapidity of the stream
was drove through four of the bridges, and was afterwards found on the
surface of the water, dead to all outward appearance; but being taken
out and carefully attended, he was brought to life, and came to his post
at the gate from whence he had not been missed nor inquired after."
When the church was dedicated in 1278--it had taken seventy-five years
to build--there was great rejoicing and a superb banquet. Nicholas de
Ely, Bishop of Winchester, to make the occasion splendid, supplied
feasting at his own expense for nine days to all who attended; abbots,
lords, knights and noble ladies came to the dedication, and on the first
day seven thousand and sixty-six guests sat down to meat. That is
Waverley's greatest record of hospitality. Another record belongs to a
guest. King John spent four days at the Abbey in Holy Week, 1208, and on
that occasion one R. de Cornhull was ordered to be paid five marks for
"two tons of wine" carried from Pagham.
[Illustration: _In the Grounds, Waverley Abbey._]
At the Dissolution Waverley's end came quickly. The Abbey was one of the
first of the smaller monasteries to fall. The obsequious adventurer whom
Thomas Cromwell sent to Waverley to report on the Abbey establishment
was Doctor Layton, and evidently he was neither feasted nor bribed by
the simple Abbot and his monks. Thus he writes to Cromwell after his
visit:--
To the right honorable Mr. Thomas Crumwell, chief secretary to the
King's highness.
It may please your mastership to understand that I have licenced the
bringer, the Abbot of Waverley, to repair unto you for liberty to
survey his husbandry whereupon consisteth the wealth of his
monastery. The man is honest, but none of the children of Solomon:
every monk within his house is his fellow, and every servant his
master. Mr. Treasurer and other gentlemen hath put servants unto him
whom the poor [fool?] dare neither command nor displease. Yesterday,
early in the morning, sitting in my chamber in examination, I could
neither get bread nor drink, neither fire of those knaves till I was
fretished; and the Abbot durst not speak to them. I called them all
before me, and forgot their names, but took from every man the keys
of his office, and made new officers for my time here, perchance as
stark knaves as the others. It shall be expedient for you to give
him a lesson and tell the poor fool what he should do. Among his
monks I found corruption of the worst sort, because they dwell in
the forest from all company. Thus I pray God preserve you. From
Waverley this morning early before day, ready to depart towards
Chichester, by the speedy hand of your most assured servant and poor
priest,
RICHARD LAYTON.
It is satisfactory to learn that the weasely Doctor was "fretished,"
which must be pretty nearly the same thing as perished with cold and
hunger. The Abbot's plea for his monastery--surely one of the honestest
letters ever written--sets in contrast the characters of the monastery
and its visitor. He writes to Cromwell on June 9, 1536:--
To the right honourable Master Secretary to the King.
Pleaseth your mastership I received your letters of the vij^th day
of this present month, and hath endeavoured myself to accomplish the
contents of them, and have sent your mastership the true extent,
value, and account of our said monastery. Beseeching your good
mastership, for the love of Christ's passion, to help to the
preservation of this poor monastery, that we your beadsmen may
remain in the service of God, with the meanest living that any poor
men may live with, in this world. So to continue in the service of
Almighty Jesus, and to pray for the estate of our prince and your
mastership. In no vain hope I write this to your mastership, for as
much you put me in such boldness full gently, when I was in suit to
you the last year at Winchester, saying, 'Repair to me for such
business as ye shall have from time to time.' Therefore, instantly
praying you, and my poor brethren with weeping yes!--desire you to
help them; in this world no creatures in more trouble. And so we
remain depending upon the comfort that shall come to us from
you--serving God daily at Waverley. From thence the ix^th day of
June, 1536.
WILLIAM, the poor Abbot there, your chaplain to command.
[Illustration: _Crooksbury Hill and Frensham Little Pond, from Frensham
Common._]
The comfort that came to the White Monks was the dissolution of the
Abbey in the month following. After the dissolution the buildings fell
gradually to pieces, generously helped by builders of other houses. When
Sir William More was giving Loseley near Guildford the shape we see
to-day he carted waggon-load after waggon-load of stone from the ruined
church, and Sir William More was perhaps not the first and certainly not
the last of the spoilers. The neighbourhood quarried from the ruins
until only a few years ago. When Aubrey saw the Abbey in 1672 he found
the walls of a church, cloisters, a chapel used as a stable, and part of
the house with its window-glass intact, and paintings of St. Dunstan and
the devil, pincers, crucibles and all. To-day most of the ruins have
fallen flat. There is some beautiful vaulting left, and massive heaps of
stone show the corners and boundaries of the church and other buildings.
Ivy-stems, coils of green gigantic pythons, climb about the walls and
broken doorways; pigeons nest on the window-ledges and clatter like
frightened genii out over the field.
Above Moor Park, a landmark for miles round, Crooksbury Hill lifts like
a dark pyramid. Crooksbury Hill has a dozen different wardrobes. You may
wake to find her grey in the morning, you may leave her behind you
grey-green with the sun full on her flank, you may turn at noon to find
the sun lighting her deep emerald; she is sunniest and hottest in a
shining blue; and in the evening with the setting sun behind her she
cloaks herself in purple and black as if her pines belonged to Scotland.
She cannot see so far as Chanctonbury Ring, which is the watching
comrade of all walkers in the country of the South Downs, and she has
not the height of Leith Hill or Hindhead; but she is the grave and
constant companion of all travellers for many miles round her, and
measures for them the angle of the sun or the slope of the stars, as do
all good landmarks for those who love a landmark like a friend.
[Illustration: _A Dip in the Hog's Back._]
CHAPTER V
THE HOG'S BACK
Whitewaysend.--Tongham.--A carillon of
sheep-bells.--Timber-carting.--Falling on board a
transport.--Cottages under the Hog's Back.--Puttenham. The Maypole
at Compton.--The two-storied sanctuary.--A great
picture.--Bird-baths.--Swarming bees.--The Hog's Back; a noble
highway.
If any of the pilgrims from Farnham were drawn aside down the banks of
the Wey to the hospitality of Waverley Abbey, they probably rejoined the
rest at the foot of the Hog's Back, perhaps near Whitewaysend. That is a
name with some meaning, for here first the road from Farnham runs up on
to the great chalk ridge which traverses the county from west to east.
The break in the colour of the roads under the ridge is from bright
yellow sand to staring white, but the full white does not begin until
the road is almost at its highest level, at the cross-roads above
Tongham.
Tongham is the only village between Farnham and Guildford north of the
Hog's Back and near the ridge, and though there is little in it for
antiquarians, the pretty little white inn and the oasthouses have often
attracted painters, and the approach to the village from the south is
by a road pillared and canopied with lofty elms. The churchyard holds a
curious structure. A slender oak tower, recently erected as a memorial,
stands apart from the church, riveted to the ground with iron struts,
and contains a peal of thirteen small bells. A carillon is rung every
Sunday and Wednesday; I have not heard it, but have been told that it
sounds "like sheep-bells."
[Illustration: _Tongham Church, with Wooden Tower for Bells._]
Not much can have been written about the older days of Tongham, but at
least one delightful passage in a modern book belongs to it, and should
be read under the great elms by the roadside. In Mr. George Bourne's
_Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, Bettesworth describes an almost
incredible feat of carting timber:--
"I see a carter once," said Bettesworth, "get three big elm-trees up
on to a timber-carriage, with only hisself and the hosses. He put
the runnin' chains on and all hisself."
"And _that_ takes some doing," I said.
"Yes, a man got to understand the way 'tis done ... I never had
much hand in timber-cartin' myself; but this man.... 'Twas over
there on the Hog's Back, not far from Tongham Station. We all went
out for to see 'n do it--'cause 'twas in the dinner-time he come,
and we never believed he'd do it single-handed. The farmer says to
'n, 'You'll never get they up by yourself.' 'I dessay I shall,' he
says; and so he did, too. Three great elm-trees upon that one
carriage.... Well, he had a four-hoss team, so that'll tell ye what
'twas. They _was_ some hosses, too. Ordinary farm hosses wouldn't
ha' done it. But he only jest had to speak, and you'd see they
watchin' him.... When he went forward, after he'd got the trees up,
to see what sort of a road he'd got for gettin' out, they stood
there with their heads stretched out and their ears for'ard. 'Come
on,' he says, and _away_ they went, _tearin'_ away. Left great ruts
in the road where the wheels sent in--that'll show ye they got
something to pull."
We got one shrub a little further, Bettesworth grunting to a heavy
lift; then, in answer to a question:
"No, none o' we helped 'n. We was only gone out to see 'n do it. He
never wanted no help. He didn't say much; only 'Git back,' or 'Git
up,' to the hosses. When it come to gettin' the last tree up, on top
o' t'other two, I never thought he could ha' done it. But he got 'n
up. And he was a oldish man, too: sixty, I dessay he was. But he
jest spoke to the hosses. Never used no whip 'xcept jest to guide
'em. Didn't the old farmer go on at his own men, too! 'You dam
fellers, call yerselves carters,' he says; 'a man like that's worth
a dozen o' you.' Well, they couldn' ha' done it. A dozen of 'em 'd
ha' scrambled about, an' _then_ not done it! Besides, their _hosses_
wouldn't. But this feller the old farmer says to 'n, 'I never
believed you'd ha' done it.' 'I thought mos likely I should,' he
says. But he never had much to say."
A few hundred yards further along the Hog's Back the road drops down
south-east to Seale, the first of the three ancient and interesting
villages which lie under the ridge between Farnham and Guildford. Seale
is a fascinating little place. It consists only of a few cottages, shy
and red-roofed, deep among high hedges, bushy dells and reedy meadows,
with wheatfields and barleyfields clothing the chalky slopes above. The
church has been rebuilt, but has some inscriptions worth looking at. One
is an epitaph on a young officer, Edward Noel Long, who was drowned at
sea. According to the inscription:--
"On his way to join the British forces in Spain, he, with others of
his regiment, perished in the sea near Cape St. Vincent, during the
confusion of a fatal accident occasioned by the _Isis_ man-of-war
falling on board the transport on which he was embarked on the night
of the 6th March, 1809."
That was just after Corunna. A carved bas-relief represents the _Isis_
under full sail "falling on board" the transport.
[Illustration: _Seale._]
Here, under the Hog's Back north and south, nearly all the cottages are
old and nearly all have gardens. One perfect little building stands not
far from Seale on the road to Puttenham, bowered in vines and quaintly
chimneyed, with white-curtained windows opening on a low wall and
stone-crop and high box borders, and, when I saw it in July, bunches of
pink and white mallows glowing under an old oak door. No cottages count
sunnier hours than these that stand about the long strip of green
country under the chalk downs. This part of Surrey, perhaps, has changed
as little as any part during the last twenty or thirty years, which have
added so many miles of brick and slate to Surrey villages and towns;
probably the greatest change has been in the roads. Mrs. Henry Ady, for
instance, writing of the Pilgrims' Way just fifteen years ago, speaks of
the road that runs through Seale, Puttenham, and Compton as being "a
grassy lane, not always easy to follow, and little used in places." The
road as it runs here may not take the exact line of the Pilgrims' Way,
but no one could call it difficult to follow. Here and there it passes
through cornfields, and it is by leaving the road to take a footpath
through a cornfield that the best view is to be had of Puttenham, whose
red roofs and grey church tower are set delightfully among rich elms,
with a splash of ploughed chalk blazing white through the trees beyond.
Puttenham has added only a few new cottages to its outskirts; under the
church it is still red and mossy and lichened. The cottages are oddly
built to suit the sloping ground, for the road to the church rises on a
hill, and necessitates different levels for foundations and stone
pathways. One of the cottages has an outside staircase to its front
door, for what reason there is no guessing.
The next village under the Hog's Back on the way to Guildford is
Compton, perhaps the third stage of thirsty pilgrims journeying from
Whitewaysend. The main road enters Compton from the north, but the
prettiest way to find the village is to drop down on it by a woodland
footpath from the west. Icehouse Wood is the name of the few acres of
trees through which the path runs; an old brick-lined pocket in the side
of the hill suggests the name, but there are remains of another brick
building higher up the slope which look nothing like an icehouse. Was
the name ever Oasthouse wood, perhaps, and did they grow hops here as at
Farnham? If any pilgrims left the beaten track from Puttenham which runs
north of Compton they may have come to the church and the inn by this
footpath. It is centuries old; it is lined, before it enters the wood,
by ordered holly which may once have marked a road, and as it drops down
the hill it cuts as deep into the sand as the old trackways north of
Anstiebury Camp or west of Albury. Great beeches coil their roots about
its edge--younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.
Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The
cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring
buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are
challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black
beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the
road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of
the quietest country. When I was walking through Compton I was told of a
village festival which had been held in the spring, in which children
from Bermondsey--Bermondsey once a Thames-side village itself--dressed
in the old dresses and danced the old dances. They had a Queen of the
May and they twined a maypole with ribands; and as I went out of Compton
there were the Compton village children, six or seven of them, dancing
over the dances the Bermondsey children had shown them, in the same
field where the festival was held. The first of May would come round
again; they would choose their own Queen and twine their own maypole.
Compton church is one of the most interesting in the country. It must be
forgiven a hideous organ, whose blue and red pipes block the western
arch of the nave; the sanctuary is the beauty of the church. It is the
only two-storied sanctuary in England, and the origin of two-storied
sanctuaries is unknown. Mr. Lewis Andre, writing in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_, is inclined to think that the dedication of
the upper sanctuary may have been to St. Michael; there are several
altars dedicated to St. Michael in the galleries of continental
churches. Another feature of the church is the wooden Norman screen
which fences off the upper sanctuary; it is the oldest known in England,
and dates back to 1180, according to the archaeologists. Some Jacobean
screen work in the pulpit and the altar rails is an interesting
contrast.
Half a mile north of Compton are a chapel and a cemetery, the joint gift
of the late George Frederick Watts and Mrs. Watts; the chapel, designed
by Mrs. Watts, strikes a dominant note of terracotta and red brick.
There are strengths and splendours which belong to the building and its
frescoes, but to me, at all events, it seems to lack the peace and
mystery of quieter, duller chapels. A noble memorial of a master mind is
the picture gallery in the grounds of the terracotta designing school
founded by the late painter's wife. The gallery contains many of his
finest pictures, and in particular the last of all which he
painted--_Destiny_, a tremendous figure with a shadowed face; masses of
filmy light are about it, and power moves in the arm that holds the
book; there is a secret hidden which the grey face knows. The gallery is
lighted as no London gallery is; the ceiling and walls are washed with
old gold, which takes all the hardness from the spaces of sunshine
playing through the roof. Mrs. Watts, I believe, added this charm to the
gallery. Others besides critics owe her gratitude. Outside the gallery
stand rows of pottery, the work of her pupils. Urns, vases, basins,
cups, pedestals, fountains await translation to flower gardens. The
birds of many Surrey lawns owe a debt to Compton for wide splash-baths
of water to bathe in and drink at in the heats of summer.
Compton can be seen either from Guildford or from Godalming, and the
traveller has the choice at Puttenham either of rejoining the Hog's Back
immediately above the village, and so dropping down into Wanborough on
the other side, or going on to Compton and perhaps climbing up again to
the road on the ridge afterwards. Wanborough, a fascinating little
hamlet, is worth the extra climbs up the hill. It is little more, in
reality, than a manor house or farm homestead, wealthy with huddled
ricks and superb barns, and a simple little church, perhaps the tiniest
of all in Surrey; it measures only forty-five feet by eighteen. I found
it locked, but a village child with engaging confidence told me to "look
under the brick" for the key, and under a loose brick in the porch I
found it. It may be lying there to-day. There is little in the church
itself; but when I saw it there was a fine nest of honeybees in the
roof near the bell that hangs on the wall outside. Why do bees so often
swarm in churchyards? Country villagers believe that they like the sound
of dinning metal; perhaps they are attracted to a church by Sunday's
bell.
[Illustration: _Wanborough Church._]
Wanborough sends a rough but pleasant field-road up again to the Hog's
Back, which from here runs another four straight miles along the ridge
to Guildford. This is certainly the noblest highway in Surrey, and,
perhaps, the most characteristic of the county. You may often travel
along it and yet not see the finest of the view on either side; in the
summer, more frequently than not, the whole countryside north and south
of the ridge is swimming in a blue haze which dims and muffles the
horizon. But there is no other road on which you can walk so far and see
so much broad Surrey country open out mile after mile on either side,
and from which you can watch so many changes of woodland and common and
cultured fields, from the green and golden hops about Farnham to the
wheat and oats above Seale and Puttenham, and the long potato drills in
the chalk by Wanborough. But the view is not the single beauty of the
Hog's Back, though to walk high in the wind along open spaces is
possible only on a few roads in the county. The Hog's Back has a treble
charm belonging wholly to the roadway itself; its width, its spacious
grassy rides on each side of the broad hard riband of metal that runs
white and unswerving east and west, and most gracious of all, its deep
and exuberant hedges. All along the road in a light wind you will get
the scent of bed-straw and thyme and clover from the green border of the
road, and in the short down grass find the plants that love
chalk-ground, like the little blue milkwort, which spreads like a film
over the higher slopes of the ridge in summer. If the roadside is
scented with flowers, so are the hedges. Guelder rose and dog rose and
privet blossom side by side with elder and spindle wood; above holly and
hazel and buckthorn stand up gnarled and wind-driven yews, bent over the
road from the south-west. To the south, it is often only through the
gate-gaps in the hedge that you can see out over the flank of the hill;
on the northern side the hedge is lower--low enough, indeed, to be
broken in summer by tall spikes of mullein, yellow against the grey-blue
air over the heaths of Pirbright and Worplesdon. The highest point of
the road lies a mile beyond Wanborough on the way to Guildford; here you
are over five hundred feet up, and the road drops gradually, ending with
a sudden slope almost as soon as Guildford, bricky and cheap-looking
from this aspect, comes into view.
[Illustration: _Barn at Wanborough._]
CHAPTER VI
GUILDFORD
The prettiest High Street in the south of England.--Guilou, Wey, and
Wye.--The Castle.--A legend of murder.--Looking at St.
Christopher.--Royal hunters.--Stephen Langton.--Cloth and how to
stretch it.--Aubrey scents a swindle.--King Monmouth after
Sedgmoor.--A pike for a baby.--The keeper at Bramshill.--Mysterious
windows.--Admirable calm.--The Queen's.--The Regent and the
Apse.--St. Mary's Wall-paintings.--An ancient school.--The
Angel.--Pepys at the Red Lion.--Sparagus for supper.--A Vanished
Heart.--The undaunted clockmaker.
To arrive at Guildford by train is like walking into a garden over a
rubbish heap. In the grace of its building, the charm of its colour, the
fascination of the prospects of its hillside High Street, no town in
Surrey, and perhaps only Oxford in England, is comparable with it. But
between the railway station and the High Street it is desolation and
blank walls. A few pretty old cottages jut out over a narrow pavement;
beyond a huddled roof or two rises the tower of St. Nicholas' Church,
umber and solid; nearly all else is tumbled down ugliness, broken
brickwork, mud and shaggy grass. A clear space, a level green, a bed of
flowers--what an introduction that might be to Guildford. But,
doubtless, the rubbish heap is, or some day will be, too valuable as
building land.
Beyond the turn of the road is the most delightful street in the south
of England. It rises from the bridge crossing the Wey steep into blue
air over the hill. Each side of it is a stairway of roofs up the slope,
a medley of facades, a jumble of architecture astonishing in sheer
extravagance and variety. Gabled houses, red-tiled and gay with
rough-cast and fresh paint; dull, sad-faced houses with sleepy windows
like half-shut eyes; square, solid Georgian houses for doctors with
white chokers and snuff-boxes, and prim old ladies with mittened wrists;
low, little dolls'-houses, red brick neatly pointed; tall, slim houses
graceful with slender casements and light shafts of wood; casements
nobly elaborate in wood-carving and heavy with leaded panes; bay windows
which should belong to nurseries and high, square-latticed windows which
should light a library, delicately fastened with wrought iron; painted
pillars supporting window seats for cats and demure young ladies;
broad-stepped entrances to hotel halls, and archways under which barrels
roll to bursting cellars; Guildford High Street is a model of what the
High Street of an English town should be. Has it a single dominating
feature, or is its air of distinction merely compact of the grace and
old-worldliness of its shops and houses? Perhaps the single extreme
impression left by the High Street is its clock, swung far out over the
road. Massive, black and gilt, and fastened to the face of the old Town
Hall with an ingenious structure of steel stays, it has told Guildford
the time for two centuries and a quarter.
Guildford High Street has its landmarks of history in its Hospital, its
School, and its Town Hall, but its oldest standing record is in one of
its churches. The tower of St. Mary's church, indeed, contains the most
ancient piece of building in the town, perhaps in the county.
Archaeologists are to be found who will argue that part of it, at least,
belongs to the reign of Alfred, though there is little evidence to show
that stone was used for building in Surrey before the eleventh century.
Alfred, at all events, mentions Guildford in his will; he spells it
"Guldeford," one of the dozen old ways of spelling a name that has
always been a puzzle and a pleasure to the etymologists. What does
Guildford mean? Naturally "The Ford of the Guild." The town had a guild
of merchants, and there was a ford; nothing could be simpler. But the
simple explanations are usually wrong; and the most convincing
derivation is one which has been suggested by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who
discovered a river named Guilou in Asser's _Deeds of Alfred_, and points
to several other names along the Wey which may be traced to the same
source. There is Willey House, and Willey Mill near Farnham; Wilsham
Farm near Alton, and Willey Green on another branch of the river.
Guildford, then, is probably the "ford of the Guilou," which in Welsh is
presumably Gwili. Where, then, did the name Wey come from? It may
originally have been Wye. The corruption would be easy; indeed, Cockney
boating parties very likely get the right pronunciation, by accident,
to-day.
Older than St. Mary's tower in associations, if not in stone-work, is
Guildford Castle. The Castle stands on a mound, partly natural, perhaps,
and almost certainly partly artificial. Originally, perhaps, the mound
was used for an early English fortification; it was heightened by
scraping up earth from a ditch at its bottom, and round it was built up
a palisade of wood; possibly there was a wooden house on the top of it,
and then it would have looked precisely like one of the fortified mounds
in the Bayeux Tapestry. Later, it was enclosed in a shell keep; later
still, a Norman square keep was built inside the shell keep; to-day,
except the walls of the square keep, almost all the Castle is gone. It
was never a Castle in much more than name. It has no associations of
great battles; it never stood a siege; it never even held a royal
prisoner. In King John's reign it was already used as a gaol, and a gaol
it remained until James I, in 1612, gave it to one Francis Carter of
Guildford, who used it as a private residence. Four hundred years before
it had seen all its fighting. That was when the French Dauphin, invited
by John's angry barons, marched against it and took it from defenders
who seem to have cared little whether they kept it or not.
But the Castle still has its legend--a legend only--of cruelty and
bloody massacre. In 1036, when Harold Harefoot was king, Alfred the son
of Ethelred was travelling from Normandy to join his mother at
Winchester. He landed in Kent, and was marching with his Normans along
the Way, whether or not with the intention of eventually trying to
recover his father's kingdom is uncertain; at all events, at Guildford
he was seized and put to death. So much is history; legend supplies a
dreadful embellishment. Early in the morning after their capture,
Alfred's followers were led out into the street and condemned to death.
Nine out of every ten men were butchered, until out of six hundred
Normans sixty only were left alive. That was not enough to glut their
captors' fury. The sixty were gone through again, and all but six were
ferociously tortured to death. Alfred himself was given to Harold, who
put out his eyes, loaded him with chains, and threw him into prison,
where he died. Fortunately, nobody need believe the story.
[Illustration: _The Castle Gate, Guildford._]
An environment of meaner modern buildings has spoiled the setting in
which the castle should stand. Seen from certain points, especially from
below, the keep is not a very imposing structure; you cannot get far
enough away from it. Far the best view is to be had from the rising
ground to the south-east, where you can set the castle in outline
against the sky. Then it takes on something of the romance of a Norman
ruin, with its tumbling masses of ivy, its broken battlements, and the
mixed greys and ochres of its masonry. The interior is uninteresting,
except for the sad little carvings left by prisoners on the walls, among
them a crucifix, a hermit, St. Catherine's wheel, and St. Christopher.
If St. Christopher was not exactly the patron saint of prisoners, he was
the kindliest saint to carve on a dungeon wall. If you looked on St.
Christopher you were safe, at least for that day, from sudden death. How
many thousand days of "safety" he must have brought to the Guildford
prisoners!
The castle enceinte is now laid out as a pleasure ground, with all a
public garden's advantages and disadvantages. Public taste demands
"bedding out," even though geraniums and calceolarias fit unhappily
enough with masonry fourteen feet thick and Saxon earthworks. A bowling
green is in its proper place; thorns and old rose-trees have a right to
grow round ruined castles; wallflowers belong to stones and mortar. But
lobelias do not. Still, something even worse than bedding-out might have
befallen the Castle grounds. Dr. G.C. Williamson, in his valuable little
book _Guildford in the Olden Time_, mentions that, when the grounds were
bought for the Corporation in 1886, premiums were offered to various
landscape gardeners for plans showing the best means of laying out the
space. One of the plans which was rejected, although attractive in other
ways, "started its schedule of work with a suggestion that the ugly ruin
in the centre of the grounds should be removed, and in lieu of it should
be erected a light iron bandstand painted green, picked out with gold."
What, one wonders, were the other attractions of the "landscape"?
Just possibly Guildford Castle was for some time a royal residence.
Nearly all the old kings used to visit the country round for hunting and
hawking. Henry II, soon after he came to the throne, enclosed a large
tract of land north of Guildown and made it into a royal park, but
whether, when he came to hunt, he stayed at the Castle itself or at the
palace which was built in the park, none of the chroniclers say. The
palace has long since disappeared, though it is said that the outline
can be traced when the land on which it stood is under corn. The corn is
supposed to turn a different colour along the lines of the foundations.
In later days, the kings certainly stayed at the palace, and not at the
Castle. John was at Guildford nineteen times in eleven years, and kept
Christmas there in 1200 "with uncommon splendour and magnificence."
Henry III had his wines stored at Guildford, probably in the caverns
near the Castle, and once, with a capital eye for business, ordered that
no other wines should be sold in the bailiwick of Surrey until his had
found a buyer. Edward I, according to an untrustworthy story, brought
Adam Gordon, a highway robber, to Guildford after he had fought and
beaten him with his own royal hands, and forgiven him afterwards. The
next two Edwards were often at the palace; Henry VI and Edward IV lay
there; Henry VII made Sir Reginald Bray, ancestor of Surrey's historian,
keeper of the Park and Manor; Henry VIII hunted in the park, and
Elizabeth travelled about so frequently between the royal residences at
Guildford and elsewhere that the county actually framed a remonstrance
against having to pay so much for her carriages and horses. She was
probably the last of the sovereigns to ride through the town from north
to south, though Charles II was feasted there at the Restoration and
presented with a service of plate, a proceeding which swamped the
Corporation in debt.
One other distinction Guildford owes to its associations with kings. It
has been selected as the scene of a remarkable novel by a remarkable
writer. Martin Tupper, in his preface to _Stephan Langton_, takes a
devoted public into his confidence as to the manner in which such a book
should be, and indeed actually was, completed. He set out to write a
historical novel dealing with Guildford in the days of King John,
weaving into it various local legends and a love-story of an abbess and
an archbishop; he "began the book on November 26, 1857, and finished it
in exactly eight weeks, on January 21, 1858, reading for the work
included." The list of books which he consulted in Mr. Drummond's
library at Albury must be read in full for the mere physical labour of
the business to be appreciated; but after such abstruse searchings, to
have crammed into ninety thousand words of solid print such a
concatenation of murders, arsons, slayings, swoonings, drownings and
burnings must always remain a considerable achievement. The story itself
is sad stuff.
Apart from palaces, Guildford's history, until comparatively recent
times, has been the history of the wool trade and cloth manufacture. The
beginnings of the industry go back to the settlement in the south of
England, in the reign of Edward III, of Flemish weavers and dyers.
Guildford naturally attracted the trade, for sheep could be successfully
farmed on the downs, water-power for the fulling-mills could be had from
the Wey, and the best fuller's earth in the country was to be had from
Nutfield and elsewhere, only a few miles away. The fuller's teazle, and
woad for dyeing, also grew, and still grow, I learn from Dr. Williamson,
though I have not found either, in the neighbourhood. Before the end of
the fourteenth century the cloth industry had come to the dignity of
legislation. Nobody might buy cloth before it had been "fulled and fully
performed in its nature"; this was to prevent dishonest people from
stretching the cloth and so giving the public short measure. Later,
under the Tudors, nobody might manufacture cloth except in a market-town
where cloth had been manufactured for ten years past. This was no doubt
for the convenience of the ulnagers, officers deputed to measure and
seal all cloth brought to market. It was highly illegal to stretch cloth
in any way. Thomas West, of Guildford, in 1607, was charged with having
used "a certain instrument (a tenter) and other engines wherewith 100
cloths of white wool called kerseys, rough and unwrought and made for
sale at Guildford, were stretched and strained in breadth and length."
On another occasion five clothiers were summoned to answer a charge of
having used "a certaine engine called a rope" to stretch their cloth. So
important a part of Guildford's life had clothmaking become under
Elizabeth that the Corporation required special acknowledgment of the
fact from the innkeepers, doubtless because prosperity in the town meant
full tankards emptied at the inns. Every alehouse keeper had to have a
signboard hung above his door with a woolsack painted on it, under a
fine of six-and-eightpence; he had to buy the sign from the hall warden
at the Town Hall, and pay two shillings for it. Woolsacks were added to
the borough arms. Yet the prosperity of the trade was short-lived, after
all. The pride of Guildford's industry fell. Less than fifty years after
the alehouse signs swung woolpacks to guide thirsty clothiers, the
business came down with a run. Godalming, Farnham, and Wonersh were
other flourishing centres of the trade, and in 1630 one Samuel Vassall,
the merchant who took the Godalming and Wonersh cloth for shipment
abroad, failed his customers. He was under arrest, and no one else could
be found to take up his contracts. All the Godalming eggs were in one
basket, and Guildford and Farnham suffered in sympathy. Three thousand
workers were in distress; it was the beginning of the end. It could not
have happened, of course, if Samuel Vassall's failure had been the only
difficulty. That would have been got over somehow. But there was another
agent at work. The real cause of the destruction of the Surrey cloth
industry was the fact that for years the Company of Merchant Adventurers
and the London Drapers' Company had been working to get the cloth trade
into their own hands, and they had practically succeeded. Godalming held
on for a time; but Guildford, Wonersh, and Farnham went under.
Aubrey is not content with so simple an explanation. He scents a
swindler. The trade of Wonersh, he writes, "chiefly consisted in making
blue cloth for the Canary Islands; the decay and indeed ruin of their
trade was their avaricious method of stretching their cloth from 18
yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their
commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same
fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He
probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business
competition. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a
vanished trade. There still lingers a superstition at Guildford that
Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate
prisoners (perhaps the Jews whom Martin Tupper describes as suffering
agonies of enforced dentistry and other tortures) were stretched upon
the rack. It is, of course, the plot of ground on which were set up the
wooden racks, or frames, on which the Guildford blue cloth was stretched
and dried in the wind and sun.
Guildford was singularly happy in its lack of history during the
Parliamentary wars. The battles over Farnham Castle we have seen.
Guildford Castle was not thought worth holding. Surrey gentlemen and
Surrey towns had been as backward as the rest of England in supplying
Charles with his ship-money; but during the whole of the war not a shot
was fired within hearing of the county capital. There was a question of
safeguarding the powdermills at Chilworth, and these were secured for
the Parliamentary Army. Otherwise, Guildford heard nothing more of the
war than the rattle of accoutrements; there were a few levies stationed
in the town, and a troop or two of horse rode through it. Perhaps
Guildford's unhappiest memory of war is an echo of Sedgmoor, forty years
later. The Duke of Monmouth, leaving his colliers and ploughmen to do
their best against the King's cannon, had ridden off the field into
Hampshire, turned his horse loose at Cranbourne Chase, and tried to hide
himself in some rough ground near Ringwood. Lord Lumley and Sir William
Portman were after him with the Militia; there was a reward of five
thousand pounds on his head, and for a day and a night he was hunted
through undergrowth and standing crops. Dogs were run through the high
oats and peas, and except oats and peas he had nothing to eat. He was
caught in the morning, shivering and grey-bearded, in a ditch; two days
later, he was on his way from Ringwood to London, his coach guarded by
strong bodies of troops, and sitting opposite him in the coach an
officer whose orders were to stab him if there was an attempt at rescue.
So they rode into Guildford on a Saturday afternoon, and that night the
terrified prisoner lay under the roof of Abbot's Hospital. Perhaps he
slept; perhaps he could only stride about the room feverishly scribbling
letters of abject entreaty to the King and the great courtiers; staring
wild-eyed at the early July sunlight beyond the hospital chimneys, and
wondering whether he should see another Sunday dawn. It was his last; on
the Wednesday morning his head was hacked from his shoulders.
Abbot's Hospital has pleasanter memories. Foremost must be the memory of
its founder, Guildford's greatest citizen, the stern, kindly old
Archbishop Abbot, son of a poor clothworker of the town, scholar of
Balliol College, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and predecessor
to Laud in the See of Canterbury. It was a great career, and, according
to an old family story, it had a curious beginning. Aubrey gives this
version:--
"His mother, when she was with child of him, dreamt, that if she
should eat a _Jack_ or _Pike_, her son in her womb would be a great
man, upon this she was indefatigable to satisfy her longing, as well
as her dream: she first enquired out for the fish; but accidentally
taking up some of the river water (that runs close by the house) in
a pail, she took up the much desired banquet, dress'd it, and
devour'd it almost all: This odd affair made no small noise in the
neighbourhood, and the curiosity of it made several people of
quality offer themselves to be sponsors at the baptismal fount when
she was delivered; this their poverty accepted joyfully, and three
were chosen, who maintained him at school, and at the university
afterwards."
[Illustration: _Abbot's Hospital, Guildford._]
The great archbishop's days ended in gloom. He was shooting deer in Lord
Zouch's park at Bramshill, and by an unlucky accident killed a keeper,
one Peter Hawkins. Kingsley has pictured the scene:--
"I went the other day" (he writes in a letter from Eversley) "to
Bramshill Park, the home of the _seigneur de pays_ here, Sir John
Cope. And there I saw the very tree where an ancestor of mine,
Archbishop Abbot, in James the First's time, shot the keeper by
accident! I sat under the tree, and it all seemed to me like a
present reality. I could fancy the noble old man, very different
then from his picture as it hangs in our dining room at Chelsea. I
could fancy the deer sweeping by, and the rattle of the cross-bow,
and the white splinters sparkling off the fated tree as the bolt
glanced and turned--and then the death shriek, and the stagger, and
the heavy fall of the sturdy forester--and the bow dropping from the
old man's hands, and the blood sinking to his heart in one chilling
rush, and his glorious features collapsing into that look of
changeless and rigid sorrow, which haunted me in the portrait upon
the wall in childhood. He never smiled again!"
In those jealous days, an archbishop was not forgiven an accident.
Bishops refused to be consecrated by a prelate with blood upon his
hands. A free pardon was granted him; but he never recovered his spirit,
and fasted once a month on Tuesday for the rest of his life. Peter
Hawkins's widow was by no means so disconsolate. The Archbishop settled
an annuity of L20 upon her, and she got another husband at once.
The Archbishop's great legacy is the Hospital. Unlike Whitgift's
Hospital at Croydon, it has charming surroundings; like it, it is quiet
and old and solid, of good dark red brick, with mullioned windows and
latticed panes, four turrets over the entrance gate, and the most
graceful chimneys that ever carried up smoke from pensioners'
fireplaces. There are many delightful groups of chimneys in Surrey
villages and on Surrey mansions, but Guildford's chimneys are best of
all.
In summer, the quadrangle is bright with geraniums, and through a
passage opposite the entrance is a glimpse of a simple kitchen garden.
In it, as one of the pensioners, a white-haired, blue-eyed old man, told
me, vegetables are grown for the inmates of the hospital. I gathered
that they were not allowed to manage the garden themselves, but that the
garden produce was divided. But they cook for themselves. The pride of
the hospital, however, is not the garden, but the old oak of the
staircases and dining hall and board room, the settle and table, the
copper caldron and the windows with their punning legend "Clamamus Abba
Pater." I am not sure if my old pensioner could read it, but he pointed
it out to me, and when I read it, approved. In the chapel, where there
are a number of Latin verses telling the story of the painted windows,
it was easier for him; he handed me a written explanation. But the
explanation matters very little; the real thing is the superb colour.
The story, which is of Jacob, Esau and Laban, is told on two windows,
with nine lights. There are purples and greens in those windows at which
you might gaze through a dozen sermons; but there is one robe of
burning, translucent orange that would light a cathedral.
The history of these windows would be worth knowing. They were evidently
not wholly made for the tracery, though parts of them may have been.
According to one account, they were purchased by Archbishop Abbot from
the Dominican Friary which used to stand at the end of Guildford North
Street, and which was converted into a Manor House after the dissolution
of the monasteries. But the glass belongs to more than one period, and
some of it was evidently added by the Archbishop, for among the heraldic
devices above the Jacob and Esau lights are the Abbot arms impaling the
Canterbury arms. Also--a point which the antiquarians have no doubt
noticed, but I can find no reference to it in any book--the initials
S.R., which appear in the centre top opening of the north window under
the date 1621, are evidently part of another inscription. On the left
side of the S is part of a V or U, as if the end of a Latin word ending
in "us" had had its tail chopped off. The letters must have been
selected from the original inscription for some definite reason; what
can it have been?
Archbishop Abbot's bones lie opposite his hospital, in the church of
Holy Trinity. Of the three churches which stand on the High Street,
Trinity Church is the highest up the hill, and was called the Upper
Church in the days when Puritanism preferred not to mention dedications.
It is, comparatively speaking, a modern building, red-brick and heavy;
it was built after the old church fell down in 1740. An admirable calm
must have pervaded the citizens of Guildford on that occasion. Russell,
one of Guildford's historians, observes that the inhabitants, "desirous
of improving" the church, had recently repaired it at a cost of L750. He
then adds, reflectively, that "As the arches and pillars which supported
the steeple were then taken away, it was soon after supposed to be in a
very ruinous condition." On April 18, 1740, an order was given for the
church to be inspected. On the 19th it was inspected, and the steeple
was reported to be very unsafe. On the 20th, therefore, which was
Sunday, service was performed for the last time. On the 23rd the steeple
fell in and took the roof with it; the workmen had left the church a few
minutes before. Even then there was at least one untroubled soul in
Guildford. The verger was told that the steeple had fallen. "That cannot
be," he replied, "I have the key in my pocket."
The vault in which the archbishop lies was accidentally opened in 1888,
when the church was being repaired, and some brickwork fell away.
Through the gap, it is said, the coffin could be seen on the floor; the
form of the body was distinct, and the beard was still there. The vault
was sealed again; it had been unopened for more than two hundred and
fifty years. It was during these alterations that the cenotaph standing
over the vault was removed further east to where it now stands. It is a
typical piece of Renaissance work, florid, intricate, insistent on the
ghastliness of death. The effigy of the archbishop, stern and noble,
lies on its marble bed supported by stacks of gilt-clasped books;
underneath, a grating reveals a medley of human bones, carved with the
minutest detail. The artist evidently enjoyed the work. But it is better
worth looking at, for all that, than the monument on the other side of
the church, where the recumbent form of Sir Arthur Onslow is apparently
giving vague directions to an imaginary audience. Wrapped in a Roman
toga, he waves a sleeveless right arm; his left is propped by a set of
Journals of the House of Commons. It is a relief to pass beyond such
tawdry pomposities into the solemn little chapel, sacred to one of the
great regiments of the Army, the Queen's, the old Second of the Line.
Their badge, the Lamb and Flag, and their name they get from Katherine
of Braganza, Charles the Second's queen. Later, as Kirke's Lambs, they
added to a dreadful fame at Sedgmoor; but rebellion breeds brutality,
and Kirke was probably no more ferocious than others who have had to
deal with insurgents. Since Sedgmoor, the Queen's, or to give them their
other and less distinctive name, the Royal West Surrey Regiment, have
served in practically every important campaign in which the Army has
been engaged. Their tattered banners, with the broken, proud
inscriptions of campaigns and battles, droop above long lists of dead.
Of the two other great Guildford churches, the lower, or Church of St.
Nicholas, stands at the bottom of the High Street on the far side of the
Wey. Probably it is the fourth church that has stood on this site; there
are at all events, records of three previous demolitions, though each
demolition has left one feature standing--the Loseley Chapel, belonging
to the Mores of Loseley Park. With the exception of this chapel, with
its brasses and monuments, dating back to the fourteenth century
memorial of Arnold Brocas of Beaurepaire (surely a name of names!), the
church is chiefly interesting as being a really satisfying piece of
modern architecture. It was built in 1875, and, though the interior,
with its modern glass and high colouring, has none of the quiet of age,
it dulls to the right tone at dusk.
[Illustration: _St. Mary's Church, Guildford._]
The Middle Church, St. Mary's, is the most interesting of the three. The
tower was built before the Conquest, possibly originally for defence: at
all events, there are two windows looking north and south which are
doubly splayed, after Saxon fashion, a good deal above the ground
level. The rest of the church has been built at different times,
beginning with the chancel, which is pure Norman, and there are actually
three levels to the floor, which gives rather an odd effect. The
proportions of the church have been spoiled by the cutting off of the
apse of the chancel--an entirely unwarrantable piece of destruction. The
history of the mutilation is characteristic of the days of the Regency.
George, Prince of Wales, used to drive down to Brighton, and perhaps his
coach stuck in Quarry Street, which must have been horribly narrow,
between the apse of St. Mary's and the town gaol opposite. He swore as a
Georgian prince should, offered the town a good round sum to have the
street widened, and the Corporation, who could have sliced something off
the gaol and harmed nobody, preferred to cut at the church. They never
got a penny of George's money.
But the most interesting feature of St. Mary's is the group of
wall-paintings in the chapel of St. John, north of the nave. These are
second in importance only to the famous painting at Chaldon, and have
been admirably explained by Mr. J.G. Waller, writing in the _Surrey
Archaeological Collections_. They belong to that curious age when
paintings on church walls were used as texts and preached from on
Sundays, to be scratched and whitewashed out of recognition in later
years by destroyers and "restorers" alike. The subjects chosen by the
painter in St. Mary's Church are peculiar and strangely grouped. The
centre of the group is a "Majesty," the conventional representation of
the second coming of Christ. The head of the Christ has its nimbus; that
He is "in his glory" you can see by the mantle of royal purple, and "the
holy angels with Him" are represented by two little cramped figures, set
apart to make room for other drawings. Altogether there are six
medallions besides the "Majesty," and there are also designs in the
spandrils above the arch, but these are separate from the subjects of
the medallions. The medallions, Mr. Waller explains, represent certain
scenes in the lives of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, though
only two of the stories depicted belong to the Bible. One of them, next
to the "Majesty," shows the Evangelist seated in a caldron of boiling
oil, in which he is being held by a hideous tormentor with a pitchfork,
while a seated figure of Christ confers protection upon the Saint. In
another medallion the Evangelist is seen raising to life the dead
Drusiana, a lady of Ephesus who died just before the Apostle came to the
city; he is also shown turning sticks and stones into gold and jewels,
which he did in illustration of a sermon preached against riches. In a
third medallion the Saint drinks harmlessly from a chalice of poison
which has just killed two malefactors dead at his feet; and in a fourth
the other John, the Baptist, is painted with a rope round his neck,
dragged by an executioner before Herod. The executioner next beheads the
saint, and evidently sees some terrible portent on doing so, for his
hair stands on end, and his hand flies up in horror. The two other
medallions are separate subjects. In one, a figure with a rope round his
neck is dragged before Christ by demons; other demons, one red and one
white, scream and hold out threatening claws; perhaps their question is
"Art Thou come hitherto torment us before the time?" The other subject
is obscure. A Jew, apparently, is being baptised; and a deed with seals
is being examined by another figure, over a stream of water and blood.
Mr. Waller thinks that the reference is to a legend of a Jew who
desecrated an image of Christ with a spear, in imitation of the story of
the crucifixion, when out of the wound there gushed a stream of blood
and water. This miracle converted the Jew and his friends, who
immediately made over their synagogue to the Christian Church. That
would explain the sealed deed.
Other paintings in the spandrils--pictures of Soul-weighing and
Punishment--belong to other theologies. St. Michael holds the balance,
and a demon tries to press down one of the scales so that the soul being
weighed may kick the beam. But the subject of the painting is, of
course, older than St. Michael. The doctrine that souls are weighed, and
that devils and angels strive for the possession of them, is one of the
oldest in the history of the world's religions. It finds a place in all
the creeds; it belongs to Brahminism, to Buddhism, to Mahommedanism; it
is identical with the Ritual of the Dead of Egyptian mythology, in which
the souls of men are weighed before Osiris, and pray for mercy as they
are weighed. As at Chaldon, in another part of the painting the
condemned souls are being taken away. A demon carries them off, tied up
in a bundle, to the fires of hell. Doubtless the Guildford
congregations, listening Sunday after Sunday to the exposition of such
potent texts, came to have little taste for theology that was not served
up hot and strong.
Guildford has had other teachers besides theologians. The school, a
grey, venerable building, which fronts on the High Street above Trinity
Church, is the oldest in the county. It was founded in 1509, by one
Robert Beckingham, a rich London grocer, who owned property in
Guildford. But his benefactions did not permit any great latitude in
building, and it was not until Edward VI had given the school a charter
and a grant, and other great Guildford men had provided funds for
building and endowment, that the school, nearly at the end of the
sixteenth century, found itself in full working order. Since then it has
educated some famous scholars. Guildford's greatest man, George Abbot,
Archbishop of Canterbury; his brother, Robert Abbot, Bishop of
Salisbury; another brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, Lord Mayor of London;
John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich; Henry Cotton, Bishop of Norwich, and
his brother, William Cotton, Bishop of Exeter; Arthur Onslow, Speaker of
the House of Commons; Richard Valpy, author of the Greek grammar; and
Sir George Grey, the Colonial statesman, Governor in 1846 of New Zealand
and in 1855 of the Cape, are among its distinguished pupils. Of late
years, perhaps, Charterhouse has drained away some of the supply of
future Abbots and Onslows. But the school still flourishes, and the
memory of its "great" headmaster, Dr. Merriman, is kept green by
middle-aged Guildfordians.
Guildford's inns have been famous for centuries. Guildford is the only
town in Surrey which Camden mentions in his _Britannia_, as having good
inns; John Aubrey remarks that they are "the best perhaps in England;
the Red Lion particularly can make fifty beds, the White Hart was not so
big, but has more noble rooms." John Taylor, the Water Poet, in his
_Catalogue of Taverns in Ten Shires near London_, made in 1636, goes out
of his way to mention particularly that Guildford "hath very faire Innes
and good entertainment at the Tavernes, the Angell, the Crowne, the
White hart, and the Lyon"; and Guildford only, of all the towns he
mentions, has all its inns either still standing or represented under
the same names, wholly or partially rebuilt. The Angel has kept more of
what is old than the others, including a panelled hall with a
seventeenth century clock, and some fine timber and brickwork best seen
from the inn yard. Under the Angel, too, lies one of a pair of vaulted
crypts which have puzzled all the archaeologists. The two crypts lie on
opposite sides of the street, and are beautiful examples of fourteenth
century work in chalk; in one of them, too, there was evidently once
some fresco work, but that has nearly all been rubbed away. What were
the crypts for? No one knows for certain. Mr. Thackeray Turner thinks
they were without doubt the undercrofts of merchants' houses; but there
is better reason for supposing that they are remains of some religious
foundation, perhaps of White Friars. At one time there stood in the
centre of the High Street, between the two crypts, the "Fyshe Crosse,"
which John Russell, the Guildford historian, tells us carried on its
summit a flying angel carved in stone, and was erected by the White
Friars in 1345. There is no evidence to prove that this was so, though
it may have been; in any case, the "Fyshe Crosse" was demolished in 1595
as being abominably in the way of the street traffic. If the White
Friars ever had a convent near the cross, possibly the Angel was
originally their guest-house, afterwards turned into an inn.
The Red Lion was the best inn, according to Pepys. It was at the Red
Lion that he "lay in the room the King lately lay in," which would have
pleased Pepys; and it was with the drawers of the inn, one Saturday
night, that he and Mr. Creed made merry over the minister of the town,
who had a girdle as red as his face, but preached next day a better
sermon than Pepys had looked for. The inn had a garden, out of which on
another occasion the gossiping little Admiralty official cut "sparagus
for supper--the best that ever I ate but in the house last year."
Doubtless the host of the Red Lion liked Pepys's recommendation, but
Pepys and his wife must have occasionally been rather noisy guests. It
was in the same inn garden that he and Mr. Creed "played the fool a
great while, trying who could go best over the edge of an old fountain
well; and I won a quart of sack of him." Afterwards, at supper, "my wife
and I did talk high, she against and I for Mrs. Pierce (that she was a
beauty) till we were both angry." Pepys's journeys to Portsmouth, where
his Admiralty business took him, seem generally to have been broken at
Guildford, which was the first stopping place after leaving "Fox Hall"
as he calls Vauxhall. The roads must have been pretty bad, for on one
occasion the coach lost its way for "three or four miles" about Cobham.
However, they ended as usual at the Red Lion, and "dined together, and
pretty merry" and so back to Fox Hall.
A gentler traveller through Guildford used to drive along the Hog's Back
in the early morning, breakfast at the Lion or the Angel, and reach
Sloane Street at half-past six or so in the evening, when she was glad
to get to bed early. That was when Jane Austen was writing at Chawton.
One of her letters, very typical of her in its regard for the pleasant
little minutiae of a day's business, describes a drive from Chawton up to
London. At Guildford she was "very lucky in my gloves--got them at the
first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near
than because it looked like a shop, and gave only four shillings for
them; after which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting
that they cannot be good for anything." She was then at work on _Emma_,
whom we meet again at Leatherhead.
Guildford High Street has kept its main features for centuries. But the
town has lost one of its chief buildings, which only survives in the
name of Friary Street, and in one or two other names, such as Walnut
Tree Close. This was the old Dominican Friary probably founded by Black
Friars in the first half of the thirteenth century. Not a stone of the
old Friary remains in its place, but the building saw in its time a good
deal of Guildford history. Prince Henry, the eldest son of Edward I and
Eleanor of Castile, died there of an illness which not even the skill of
the friars could abate, though they tried their utmost and sent
messengers riding to London for syrups and candies. The friars had a
good deal to do with royalty, and had many presents from the kings.
Edward I gave them oak trees for fuel and timber; Edward II gave them
eight shillings; Henry IV and his family lodged with them and gave them
forty shillings; Henry VII let them gather fallen wood in his park, but
never gave them a penny; Henry VIII gave them many presents, of which
the largest were two of five pounds, and his daughter, Princess Mary,
gave them seven shillings and sixpence. But the friary fell, of course,
at the Dissolution and after that, apparently, Henry used the building,
which he enlarged, for his own purposes when he came to Guildford to
hunt. Later, probably before the time of James I, the old friary
buildings were demolished and another house built which went with the
Guildford Park estate through several families. One of its owners was
Daniel Colwall, a founder of the Royal Society, who conferred on its
annals the dismal distinction of a suicide. He pistolled himself in an
armchair, and the chair is still shown, black with blood, in the
master's quarters of the Abbot's Hospital. Later still, the house was
used as cavalry barracks, and three years after Waterloo, when perhaps
barracks seemed less necessary than before, the buildings were pulled to
pieces.
Guildford once had nine "gates"; eight have disappeared. They are marked
on an old map of the borough, classically described as the "Ichnography
or ground plan of Guildford." Of six "gates" or streets south of the
High Street, Ratsgate, Bookersgate, Tunsgate, Saddlersgate, Bakersgate,
and Shipgate, only Tunsgate remains; and on the north side Swangate,
Bull's Head Gate, and Coffeehouse Gate have vanished. The charm of the
chief buildings remains, but here and there modern needs have spoiled
the smaller houses. In the High Street, for instance, Number 25, not
much more than a hundred years ago, must have been a quite perfect
little house, with its large casements and their curious iron
fastenings, its noble staircase, and its delightful doorway. It was once
the private residence of the Martyr family, who were hereditary town
clerks of Guildford, but unfortunately it has now been turned into a
shop. The proprietor very courteously allows visitors to examine the
interior, but much of the fascination of the ground floor, with its
panels under the windows and its delicate iron railing, has vanished
altogether, and can only be recovered in imagination with the help of an
old drawing. This house, by the way, a century ago contained a strange
relic, strangely lost. When Peter de Rupibus, the great Bishop of
Winchester, died at his castle at Farnham, his body was buried in
Winchester Cathedral, but the heart was taken to Waverley Abbey. About
1730 it was accidentally dug up among the Abbey ruins, and brought to
Guildford, where Mr. John Martyr kept it at Number 25, safe in its
original lead case. A hundred years later the heart disappeared. No one
knows how it vanished, or where it lies.
One building has altered very little. That is the old town hall, whose
clock swings out over the road, and has been sketched more often,
perhaps, than any clock in Surrey. The original town hall belongs to the
time of Elizabeth, and was probably built into the present structure,
which dates from 1683. It is in some ways the chief feature of the High
Street, with its heavy balcony, supported by monstrous black oak
brackets, and its cupola and bell-turret. The clock has a separate
history. In the year when the town hall was built, one John Aylward, a
clockmaker, came to Guildford and asked leave to set up in business. He
was a "foreigner," that is, he came from another part of England, and
the Gild-merchant refused permission. Undaunted, he retired and set up
his shop outside the borough, made a great clock, presented it to the
governing body, and so obtained the freedom of the town.
CHAPTER VII
GUILDFORD'S ENVIRONS
The prettiest town Cobbett ever saw.--Semaphores and the THING.--The
Road on the Ridge.--Newlands Corner.--The Father of the
Forest.--Pilgrims to St. Martha's.--A quiet churchyard.--Mr.
Allnutt's poem.--St. Catherine's and the
Hammer.--Worplesdon.--Sutton Place.--The Weston Rebus.--Lady Susan,
the Tame Wild Sow.--The earliest mention of Cricket.
Cobbett's is the most attractive description of Guildford and its
environs. "The town of Guildford," he writes in _Rural Rides_, "taken
with its environs I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the
prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most
happy-looking that I ever saw in my life. Here are hill and dale in
endless variety. Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other
in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows.
Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but _fat
marshes_ and their skeleton-making _agues_. The vale all the way down to
Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for
the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from
Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty
four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the
houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows,
all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly
pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles
without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion,
as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett
better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls
Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked
smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber
and clean farming.
In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the
suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of
Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by
undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett
as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood
naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and
Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and
telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the
telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London
and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and
alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch
of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a
few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of
one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich).
All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the
line:--
"This building is, it seems, called a _Semaphore_, or _Semiphare_, or
something of that sort. What this word may have been hatched out of I
cannot say; but it means _a job_, I am sure. To call it an _alarm-post_
would not have been so convenient; for, people not endued with Scotch
_intellect_, might have wondered why the d---- we should have to pay for
alarm-posts and might have thought that with all our 'glorious
victories' we had 'brought our hogs to a fine market' if our dread of
the enemy were such as to induce us to have alarm-posts all over the
country!" The semaphore north of the road from Guildford to Farnham
urges him to even higher flights:--
"What can this be _for_? Why are these expensive things put up all over
the country? Respecting the movements of _whom_ is wanted this _alarm
system_? Will no member ask this in Parliament? Not one! not a man: and
yet it is a thing to ask about. Ah! it is in vain, THING, that you thus
are _making your preparations_; in vain that you are setting your
trammels! The DEBT, the blessed debt, that best ally of the people, will
break them all; will snap them, as the hornet does the cobweb; and even
these very 'Semaphores' contribute towards the force of that ever
blessed debt."
Semaphore House still stands upon Pewley Hill, a modern villa; opposite
it, which would infuriate the old reformer if he could see it, War
Office Ground, marked off with barbed wire and minatory notice-boards. A
hundred years hence, perhaps the fort on Pewley Hill will be exhibited
as one of the curiosities of nineteenth-century Guildford.
Pewley Hill is dull enough in itself to-day, when the down grass has
gone and the bricks are multiplying, but it leads to some of the wildest
and oldest and sweetest of all scenes in the county. You must go over
Pewley Hill to come to the downs, and the downs between Guildford and
Netley, by Newlands Corner, above Albury and Chilworth, are for me, at
all events, the loveliest spot in Surrey. There are other heights in
Surrey with wider views of scenery; there is Hindhead with its almost
complete circle of horizon, from Nettlebed by Henley to the Devil's Dyke
above Brighton; there is the road above Reigate, which looks out over a
thousand roofs and miles of well farmed fields; and there is Leith Hill,
the highest of all hills in south eastern England. But the stretch of
downland running from Guildford to Newlands Corner has a charm that
belongs to none of these. It is not merely the peace and sunshine of the
broad path along the ridge, with its downland flowers and Chalk Hill
Blue butterflies; not only the width and extent of the view over the
Weald, though it is of all views in Surrey one of the loveliest--unlike
the flatter panoramas of Leith Hill and Reigate in that it is a view not
only of fields and meadows, but of tree-clad hills, shouldering into
fainter greens and greys away to Hampshire and Sussex. The enchantment
is something else; the closeness of touch with so much that is dim and
old; the nearness of so much that cannot be reached in changing towns,
on modern roads. For this is unchanged, untouched, unsoiled, part of the
great Way that brought the merchants of Cornwall riding to the Roman
port of Rutupiae in the Isle of Thanet with tin mined in the
Cassiterides. The valley below may have changed from forest to meadow
and plough, but the green road along the ridge remains what it was
before ever it felt a Roman wheel. No fresher air nor clearer sunlight
lies on any Surrey downs than on those broad aisles of shaven turf,
lichened whitethorns and wind-bent yews.
Newlands Corner has seen more than one battle. Mr. St. Loe Strachey,
editor of the _Spectator_, and one of the earliest founders of rifle
clubs in the country, has his home on the downs close by, and Newlands
Corner, the centre of the rifle clubs of Surrey, has been the scene of
assaults and the counter-attacks made by Volunteer cyclists against
defending bands of riflemen. The riflemen have held their own under the
severest fire; Ministers and distinguished soldiers have watched them.
On the downs by Newlands Corner, near the great trackway of the trading
Britons, stand some of the finest yews in England. To one of a group of
trees, a monarch whose descendants count their centuries in a ring about
him, belongs a noble poem. Mr. William Watson, under the shade of its
branches, wrote _The Father of the Forest_. These are the opening
lines:--
Old emperor Yew, fantastic sire,
Girt with thy guard of dotard kings,--
What ages hast thou seen retire
Into the dusk of alien things?
What mighty news hath stormed thy shade,
Of armies perished, realms unmade?
Already wast thou great and wise,
And solemn with exceeding eld,
On that proud morn when England's rays,
Wet with tempestuous joy, beheld
Round her rough coasts the thundering main
Strewn with the ruined dream of Spain.
Hardly thou count'st them long ago,
The warring faiths, the wavering land,
The sanguine sky's delirious glow,
And Cranmer's scorched, uplifted hand.
Wailed not the woods their task of shame,
Doomed to provide the insensate flame?
Mourned not the rumouring winds, when she,
The sweet queen of a tragic hour,
Crowned with her snow-white memory
The crimson legend of the Tower?
Or when a thousand witcheries lay
Felled with one stroke, at Fotheringay?
Ah, thou hast heard the iron tread
And clang of many an armoured age,
And well recall'st the famous dead,
Captains or counsellors brave or sage,
Kings that on kings their myriads hurled,
Ladies whose smile embroiled the world.
The pilgrims' road, as I have tried to show elsewhere, separates from
the Way again at Guildford. The old British track probably kept to the
northern ridge; the pilgrims who visited Guildford may have left by the
same road, but they turned away across the valley to the little chapel
of St. Martha, which stands on a hill two miles south-east of the town.
The pilgrim's track to the chapel, vanished in parts, becomes plain
enough when it crosses the road which now runs from Guildford to
Chilworth west of the chapel by perhaps half a mile. Here it is a wide
smooth path of the finest down grass, cropped close by rabbits, with
which all this breezy hill must be alive by night. Nearly at the top the
path breaks into sand, which must have tested the less elastic of the
travellers to the shrine pretty severely, but the sand breaks again into
an open plateau of as fine grass as the path below. On this plateau
stands the little church, alone in the sun and wind.
[Illustration: _St. Catherine's Chapel, Guildford._]
Sixty years ago St. Martha's was a ruin; as unhappy a little building as
St. Catherine's on the hill beyond the Wey. It was restored in 1848, and
has taken out of the past a quiet and serenity that set it in the old
years, in tranquil sunshine, in the peace of English Sundays. All the
winds blow about it; it is alone in its acre of smooth down grass;
within its churchyard wall are the graves of country labourers and their
children, lowly mounds hardly seen, without the memory of a name, at one
with the purpose of the earth they dug and sowed. Pine trees stand round
the open space of the hill; bluebells in May spread a film under them;
beyond the grasses, heather and ling die from August purples to the
bronze of autumn. The Surrey hills are to the south and west; farthest
on the horizon is the faint blue of the Sussex downs.
There are early Norman walls and arches in the restored chapel. St.
Martha's may be one of the three churches which Domesday assigns to the
manor of Bramley, belonging to Bishop Odo of Bayeux. A less trustworthy
tradition is that Stephen Langton is buried there; the lids of the old
stone coffins found in the chapel when it was restored probably account
for that legend. Martin Tupper accepted the legend as history.
St. Martha's chapel has inspired more than one poet, Tupper among them,
but none have written with more charm on the lonely little building than
Mr. Sidney Allnutt, in a poem which was published in the _Spectator_
last year. Here are six stanzas out of many:--
A little chapel grey with years,
And bleached with sun and rain,
One solid four-square tower it rears
Above strong walls which still oppose
Firm front to elemental foes
That rage at them in vain.
Far southward from St. Martha's Hill,
And to the east and west,
The downs heave up green shoulders, till
The distance with its magic blue
Envelops every other hue,
And crest is lost in crest.
Safe sheltered by the encircling downs
The chequered valleys show
Their tapestry of greens and browns,
Made rich by fields of golden grain,
And threaded by a silver vein
Where Wey's clear waters flow.
A churchyard bare of shrub or tree,
All open to the sky,
To every wind of heaven free,
Lies round the chapel, carpeted
With soft, sweet turf where happy dead
In dreamless slumber lie.
For, far removed from camp or mart,
Beneath the sacred sod
Of that blest hill they sleep apart:
Forgotten by the world below,
After life's spendthrift toil they know
The rest that comes from God.
And, oh, it must be good to sleep
Within that churchyard bare,
While turn by turn the seasons keep
A bedside watch, and God may see
Safe in St. Martha's nursery
His children pillowed there.
If I had to choose a month and an hour to visit St. Martha's, it would
be an evening late in April with the trees in the valley at their
freshest and the song of blackbirds about the hill. Others, perhaps,
would choose an August day, with the wind scented and the hill purpled
with heather; perhaps, too, in August the rabbit-cropped turf is
smoothest and greenest. Others may find the chief beauty of the hill in
the bronze and yellow of the changing leaves of October; there are no
hills where the beech glows with a deeper fire than over Albury and the
Tillingbourne. Others even might ask for the vague, wet airs of
midwinter, with the shouldering hilltops east and south and west faint
and mysterious in the clinging mist, and never a house-roof to be seen.
That is an effect of strange loneliness; but the abiding charm of St.
Martha's is the peace of clear air, in the enchantment of low spring
sunlight on the down turf and the quiet walls.
Once I saw a remarkable sight by St. Martha's. Incongruously enough, the
wooded hillsides below the chapel are preserved as game-coverts; indeed,
pheasants are shot quite close to the churchyard. There are rides cut
through the wood in which broods of young pheasants are fed by their
fostermothers' coops; and looking down one of these rides on a day early
in August, I watched for some time a curious collection of birds
feeding together in front of the coops. There were the young pheasants,
of course, there was quite a crowd of small birds, finches chiefly, but
a few thrushes and hedge-sparrows; there were seven or eight
turtle-doves, five jays, and, queerest of all companions for doves and
pheasants, a carrion crow. I thought at first he must be a rook, but
there was no doubt about it. I looked up as I walked away, and over me
sailed five herring gulls, high and slow.
[Illustration: _St. Martha's Chapel._]
St. Catherine's chapel, on the other side of Guildford, has not the same
lonely charm as St. Martha's. It has never, like St. Martha's, been
restored, and the hill on which it stands is sacred to nobody. Children
climb about its walls and windows; cockneys scratch their names, and
picnic parties bestrew the grass with paper. Yet St. Catherine's, in the
days before pilgrimages ceased and shrines were left to moulder, perhaps
heard as many Aves as her sister chapel on the hill beyond the Way. A
country legend is common to both chapels. St. Catherine and St. Martha,
in the wonderful days of the giants, were sisters who built chapels on
neighbouring hills. They had but one hammer between them, and they
hurled it high over the valley one to another, St. Martha catching it
from St. Catherine, driving in a nail and hurling it back again.
North of Guildford to the west is Worplesdon Common, a stretch of
heathery, rushy ground over which have gone many marches and
manoeuvres, and north of the common is the home of Mr. Frederick
Selous, the African traveller and naturalist. Mr. Selous throws his
collection of trophies open to the public for a small sum, and his
garden is known to the readers of the _Field_ as the home of rare and
shy birds. The owner has described, with callous disregard of the
feelings of less fortunate ornithologists, the nesting operations among
his bird boxes of half a dozen nuthatches.
To the north-east, a mile from the main road from Guildford to Ripley,
is Sutton Place, perhaps the finest piece of domestic architecture in
the south of England. Mr. Frederic Harrison has described it at length
in his _Annals of an Old Manor House_. It was built by Sir Richard
Weston about 1525. The architect is unknown, but the house is peculiarly
interesting, partly because it is the best example of the use of terra
cotta in the moulding combined with brickwork, and partly because it is
one of the earliest houses in England built as a country home rather
than a castle. Sir Richard Weston, the founder, was one of the ablest
servants and greatest friends of Henry VIII, the more astonishing a
friendship in that it was never broken. Henry VIII sent his friend's son
to the scaffold, accused as a lover of Anne Boleyn; he went to the block
protesting his innocence, and there was nothing to prove him guilty; his
last words were a defence of the queen. His son, a baby when his boyish
father was executed, married the daughter of Sir Thomas Arundell. Sir
Thomas had suffered for treason, so that husband and wife were the
children of parents who had been sent to the block. They entertained
Elizabeth at Sutton; she would have a child's memory of the founder of
the house, and doubtless praised the rebus in the terra cotta moulding,
the "R.W.," the grapes and the tun.
Later representatives of the Westons at Sutton were the Salvin family,
and it was one of these Salvins, I imagine, to whom Frank Buckland
refers in his edition of White's _Selborne_. Captain Salvin lived at
Whitmoor House, near Guildford, and was the happy owner of a tame wild
sow. Lady Susan was her name, and this is how her master describes
her:--
"My sow originally came from Syria, and was given to me by H.H. the
Maharajah Duleep Singh. She is a remarkably fine healthy animal,
and her instinct and affection can only be equalled by the dog. She
follows me almost daily in my walks like a dog, to the great
astonishment of strangers. Of course I only take her out before the
crops are up, and too low to injure, during the spring and summer
months. I always have her belled, to hear when she is in the wood,
etc.; and the bell, which is a good sheep's bell, is fastened round
her neck with a strap and a buckle.
"Her leaping powers are extraordinary, either over water or timber;
indeed, only a few weeks since she cleared some palings (between
which she had been purposely placed to secure her for a time) three
feet ten inches in height. Knowing my pig's excellent temper, even
when she has young pigs, and when domestic sows are always most
savage, I was once guilty of a practical joke. I got a blacksmith
who was quite ignorant of even the existence of my pig, to 'come and
ring a pig.' The stye being under a building, he had to enter it at
a low door, which was some distance from the sow's yard, where she
was feeding. He entered, shutting the door to keep the pig in, and
thinking his subject was an ordinary one and that assistants were
following him to hold the cord, etc. He had not been gone a minute,
before I heard the greatest 'rum-ti-tum' at the door, and cries of
'For goodness' sake, sir, let me out! let me out! I never saw such a
beast in all my life!' and out came the poor blacksmith pale with
fright, but all the consolation he got was a jolly good laugh at his
own expense."
All English cricket owes a debt to Guildford. It is in the annals of
Guildford that there occurs the first known mention of the game of
"crickett." In 1598 there was a dispute over the rights of a plot of
land near the north town ditch, and "John Derrick, gent., one of the
Queen's Majestie's coroners of the county of Surrey, aged fifty-nine"
was called to give evidence. He stated that he had known the land for
fifty years and more, and that when he was a boy at the Free School at
Guildford he and his fellows "did runne and plaie there at crickett and
other plaies." The evidence is interesting, because he is not asked for
an explanation. Everybody at that date evidently knew at once what
cricket meant. Besides being a cricket ground, the land was used for
baiting bears.
CHAPTER VIII
SHALFORD AND WONERSH
Shalford and its Stocks.--The Common.--Vanity Fair.--The Court of
Dusty-Feet.--Unstead in floodwater.--Dog Smith.--Bramley
Mill.--Wonersh, Ignorsh, Ognersh.--A village well cared for.--A
Grisly Barometer.--Tangley Manor.
Eight highroads converge on Guildford, and these are fed, of course, by
many minor roads. Besides the roads, five lines of railways run into and
leave the town, so that it is eminently possible, from Guildford, to do
either of two things, to take a walk in a ring and return to the town by
another road, or, what is perhaps a little more luxurious, but enables
you to cover more country, you can walk in almost any direction, and at
the end of the day take a train back to the town. The highroad runs
north to Woking and Horsell; north-east the Ripley road goes by Cobham
to Kingston and London; eastwards, under Merrow Downs, you can walk by
Clandon and the Horsleys to Leatherhead; a smaller road travels
south-west by St. Martha's Chapel to Chilworth; almost due south a road
runs through Shalford to Wonersh, or breaks off at Shalford to go east
to Dorking; another southern road is to Godalming; the great west road
passes over the Hog's Back to Farnham, and north-west lie Worplesdon
and Bisley. And the railways can be joined north, east, south, and west.
Godalming, four miles away, is a centre in itself, and has its own
chapter. But Guildford is the best centre from which to see some of
Godalming's neighbours. A good ring is by Shalford through Bramley and
Wonersh, returning by Chilworth under St. Martha's. Shalford lies a mile
to the south, and with its old mill, its inn, its white and green
cottages, and its stocks, is a charming survival perilously near the
Guildford builder. The stocks stand by the churchyard gates, side by
side with a curious little shrubbery. Shrubberies are rare ornaments of
a village, but this sets a pretty foreground to the low line of whitened
cottages behind it.
[Illustration: _Shalford._]
Shalford Common is wide and breezy; geese cackle over its grass, and you
may see more than one cricket match being played on holiday afternoons.
Once, in 1877, eleven Mitchells played eleven Heaths on the common; the
Heaths were all of the same family, but the Mitchells, though related,
were not. But the greatest tradition of Shalford Common is its
connection with a Bedfordshire man, John Bunyan. Bunyan is said to have
lived in two houses in Surrey, a cottage on Quarry Hill in Guildford,
and at Horn Hatch, now pulled down, on Shalford Common. Probably the
tradition would not have grown up without good ground; there is one
possible reason, at all events, for connecting Bunyan with this part of
Surrey. The idea of _Pilgrim's Progress_ is said to have been suggested
to him by the very Pilgrims' Way, and Vanity Fair to be the fair held on
the meadow between Shalford and Guildford below St. Catherine's Chapel.
The Rector of Shalford had the privilege of holding a fair from the days
of King John, and undoubtedly Shalford Fair was one of the largest held
on the Way; indeed, it was so popular that the Guildford clergy disputed
the Rector's right to exact fees from the Winchester merchants attending
it. They wanted the money in Guildford. But the Chief Justice of the
King's Bench gave his judgment in the Shalford Rector's favour, and at
the height of the fair's prosperity it actually covered a hundred and
forty acres of ground. If tradition is right, then, it was in the fields
by Shalford Church that Bunyan pictured Christian and Faithful seized
and brought before the Court of the fair, and poor Faithful sentenced by
Lord Hategood "to be led from the place where he was to the place from
whence he came, and there to be put to the most cruel death that could
be invented." No doubt Bunyan's description of the trial of the two
pilgrims at the fair is an exact picture of the methods of the Court of
Pie-powder, or _Pied-puldreaux_, the tribunal which could be summoned at
a moment's notice among the merchants of the fair. The Court of
Dusty-Feet certainly worked with alarming despatch.
If Bunyan really drew his _Pilgrim's Progress_ from his memories of the
pilgrims and their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his
mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been
the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and
Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of
Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting
Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the
Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead Heath. But whether Bunyan
ever saw it there is another matter.
From Shalford Common the road runs almost straight to Bramley. But it is
worth while to leave the main road as it crosses the single railway line
from Shalford to Bramley and Cranleigh, and to turn to the right down
the little road that leads to Unstead Farm, a delightful brick and
timber building, with exceptionally graceful chimney-stacks and latticed
casements, behind which, in summer, there should surely be the largest
bowls of roses. I saw the old house last in a frosty December sunset,
surrounded by floodwater, with farm horses splashing up the road, and
plovers crying round the edges of the stream. It looked desolate enough;
but three hundred years ago it was a fine house, at one time the
property of the Austens of Shalford, and later passing into the hands of
the trustees of Henry Smith, the "Dog Smith" who gave so much to Surrey
charities, and about whom Aubrey heard a quaint legend. "He had the
nickname of Dog-Smyth, because he kept no house, but dined at friends'
houses, and then desired a bit for his dog, which was to refect
himself." Was he merely a crochety old gentleman who always went about
with his dog, or did he keep the dog's dinner for himself? Another story
about him was that once, when he was a poor boy, he was whipped through
one of the Surrey parishes--accounts differ as to whether it was
Chilworth, Tatsfield, or Wanborough--and that he struck that particular
parish out of his will, but left large sums to all the others. He
certainly left a large fortune to Surrey parishes, and no bequests have
found their way to Chilworth, Tatsfield, or Wanborough, but that is the
only foundation for the old story.
A mile south-west of Unstead Farm lies Bramley, which has grown up round
the station of the single railway line running to Guildford. The
restored church holds some good glass, but the prettiest thing in
Bramley is an old mill which, with its medlar tree overhanging the
water, its ducks and pigeons, its octagonal brick dovecot and lichened
roofs, and its sweet-water grape vine clambering on the old walls, has
a rich grace of colour and age setting it, in modern Bramley, a thing
apart.
Bramley is almost joined by Wonersh to the east: Wonersh with its quaint
other names, Wogheners, which was perhaps the original form, Wonish,
Ignorsh, and Ognersh. Wonersh was once a very important village. It was
one of the centres of the wool trade in the county, and of Wonersh, as
of Guildford, Aubrey has the same sad story to tell of cheating
clothiers. But, as we have seen, the real cause of the decay of the
Surrey wool industry was something quite different. Perhaps one of
Wonersh's rival clothiers started the story of the stretched cloth;
perhaps it was never a libel.
One of the features of the village is an enormous wall, built by one of
the Lords Grantley who had Wonersh Park, and put up the wall,
apparently, to prevent neighbours and passers-by from gazing with too
great enthusiasm at his lordship's grass and trees. It was a brother of
the third Lord Grantley, George Norton, Recorder of Guildford, who
married the famous Mrs. Norton, one of the three beautiful
granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Besides Lord Grantley's wall, the village holds some charming old
cottages, several of them carefully restored, and two or three
square-set, solid eighteenth-century houses. There is also a slender
brick chimney of elaborate design of which Wonersh residents are justly
proud. The village, indeed, conveys the impression of being
affectionately cared for, which is not always the case with villages
which belong so much to builders long dead; but nothing, perhaps, is a
better example of the care with which the past is preserved than the
church, which is a perfect piece of restoration and scholarly rebuilding
combined. It is the work of a Surrey architect, Sir Charles Nicholson, a
neighbour at Chilworth, who carried out his difficult task in 1901, and
has since written an interesting little pamphlet on the church's
history. Two or three peculiarities distinguish the interior. One is a
crypt, paved with fourteenth-century encaustic tiles, which Aubrey
describes as "a vault strongly barricaded with iron." Another is a
magnificent Flemish chandelier, not a common adornment of a chancel. A
third is a high tomb of Sussex marble, which bears no inscription. But
the person buried in it must have been of considerable distinction, for
the cassia in which the remains Were embalmed still sweats from the
marble in wet weather--a grisly barometer. Possibly within may rest the
remains of one of the Westons or Carylls, both of which were great
families of the neighbourhood. It was John Caryll, buried in this
church, on whom was written an epitaph quoted by Aubrey, but not now to
be found. The eight lines of rhyme ended with what was perhaps thought
appropriately cheerful resignation:--
"And now, which long before he did desire,
Caryll sings Carrolls in the Heavenly Choire."
North of Wonersh rises Chinthurst Hill, a knoll conspicuous for miles
round, especially in winter, when the bleached grass of its wind-swept,
pine-crowned cap gleams strangely white in the sun. North of Chinthurst
Hill, again, on the far side of the open stretch of Shalford Common,
stands one of the most perfect timbered houses--perhaps it is the most
perfect--in the county. This is the famous Tangley Manor, which
according to the legend was one of King John's hunting boxes, and is now
as delightfully picturesque a country house as is to be seen in the
south of England. Like other old mansions in the county, Crowhurst
Place, for instance, the building of it belongs to two periods. It is a
house, or rather a hall, within a house. The hall is the older part. It
was a feature of English country life previous to the sixteenth century
that the labourers and dependants of the great country estates ate, and
in the earliest days even slept, in the hall of the mansion. When that
system of common hall life ended, it nearly always happened that the
great hall was cut in two, by a floor and bedrooms built in the upper
part. This is what has happened at Tangley and at Crowhurst Place, and
in each case the remains of the hall can be traced in the superb oak
tie-beams which cross the bedrooms from side to side of the house. The
hall is cased by a more modern building, a rich timber framework with
the date 1582 carved sprawling on the wood. The garden has every charm
that can belong to lichened brick walls, loop-holed and many-gated, and
through the garden round the house runs a moat, in which trout swim, or
once swam. John Evelyn of Wotton knew the Tangley manor moat and garden;
possibly some of the daffodils which brighten the grass in April are
descendants of bulbs he planted. On a pane of glass in one of the
bedrooms he has scratched his name and the date "John Euelyn, 1641."
Beyond Tangley Manor to the north the railway runs a loose parallel to
the little Tillingbourne, through Chilworth, Albury, Shere and Gomshall.
But the villages of the Tillingbourne belong to another chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE VILLAGES OF THE TILLINGBOURNE
Chilworth.--Gunpowder and Banknotes.--Cashier for fifty years.--The
Evelyns' Powdermills.--Albury's chimneys.--A Yew hedge quarter of a
mile long.--Sherborne ponds: the Silent Pool.--King John and Sabrina
drowned.--Trout fed on Sandwiches.--Shere.--The prettiest village of
all.--The Tillingbourne.--William Bray, aged 97.--A Yeoman's
Will.--Shere Registers.--From Ann to Carbetia.--Gomshall.--Starving
a Retainer.
Four villages and a group of powdermills stand on the banks of the
Tillingbourne, which runs its short race of clear spring water from the
northern slopes of Leith Hill to the Wey by Shalford. There are scarcely
a dozen miles of the Tillingbourne altogether, but it runs through the
prettiest string of villages in the county. Friday Street is at its
source; Abinger Hammer, with two large millponds, is next; Gomshall lies
a mile to the west of Abinger Hammer, Shere a mile to the west again,
and Albury beyond Shere. Chilworth stands last on the bright little
stream, hardly a village; not much more than a station, some
powdermills, and reedy ponds.
The quickest road from Guildford to Chilworth is the railway. The best
road is over the downs. The road which Cobbett took when he came from
Kensington was over Merrow Downs to Newlands Corner, and it is worth
while to climb up Newlands Corner to look at the view as Cobbett saw it,
with the pale distances of eight counties on his horizon, and the dark,
tall chimneys of the powdermills he detested smoking below him. "Here we
looked back over Middlesex," he writes, "and into Buckinghamshire and
Berkshire, away towards the north-west, into Essex and Kent towards the
east, over part of Sussex to the south, and over part of Hampshire to
the west south-west." He might have added Oxfordshire. Nothing in Surrey
delighted Cobbett more than "the narrow and exquisitely beautiful vale
of Chilworth," at which he used to gaze from these downs. Only Hawkley
Hanger, just over the Hampshire border, filled him with greater
pleasure. But the Chilworth powdermills goaded him to fury:--
"This valley," he writes, white hot, "which seems to have been created
by a bountiful providence, as one of the choicest retreats of man; which
seems
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