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 formed for a scene of innocence and happiness, has been, by ungrateful man, so perverted as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes; in carrying into execution two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from the minds of man under the influence of the devil! namely, the making of gunpowder and of bank-notes! Here in this tranquil spot, where the nightingales are to be heard earlier and later in the year than in any other part of England; where the first bursting of the bud is seen in spring, where no rigour of seasons can ever be felt; where everything seems formed for precluding the very thought of wickedness; here has the devil fixed on as one of the seats of his grand manufactory; and perverse and ungrateful man not only lends him aid, but lends it cheerfully! As to the gunpowder, indeed, we might get over that. In some cases that may be innocently and, when it sends the lead at the hordes that support a tyrant, meritoriously employed. The alders and the willows, therefore, one can see, without so much regret, turned into powder by the waters of this valley; but, the Bank-notes! To think that the springs which God has commanded to flow from the sides of these happy hills for the comfort and the delight of man; to think that these springs should be perverted into means of spreading misery over a whole nation and that, too, under the base and hypocritical pretence of promoting its credit and maintaining its honour and its faith! There was one circumstance, indeed, that served to mitigate the melancholy excited by these reflections; namely, that a part of these springs have, at times, assisted in turning rags into Registers! Somewhat cheered by the thought of this, but, still, in a more melancholy mood than I had been for a long while, I rode on with my friend towards Albury up the valley."

The papermills which called down Cobbett's curses were probably originally powdermills, and were turned to their new uses first in the reign of Queen Anne. The Bank at first issued no notes of smaller value than L20; ten-pound notes were first issued in 1759, and five pound notes in 1793, and one and two pound notes four years later. Local tradition, for an explanation of the name Newlands Corner, has decided that it must have been called after Abraham Newland, who was chief cashier of the Bank of England for fifty years till 1807, and whose name, therefore, would be as familiar to King George's subjects, as is May or Owen to a later day. But local tradition is mistaken. The name occurs on Bowen's map of the county, dedicated to Richard, third Baron Onslow, in 1749, when Newland was an unknown boy of nineteen.

A much greater Surrey industry than paper-making is the manufacture of gunpowder. Indeed, whenever England was at war, from the days of Elizabeth to those of the Parliament, the control of the Surrey powder works was a vital point in the struggle. The first gunpowder manufactory seems to have been established at Rotherhithe, where Henry Reve had a mill in 1554. We were then getting a considerable quantity of our gunpowder from abroad, and that was a state of affairs which continued till the coming of the Armada. When the Armada came, England was dangerously unprepared for war. It was lucky that Howard's and Drake's fireships ended the fleet so quickly, for anything like a prolonged sea campaign would have been out of the question. We had not enough powder. Accounts made up in the year 1600 show that up to the day when the Armada sail was sighted, there was never more than twenty or thirty lasts (a last was about a ton) of English powder delivered yearly into the Queen's stores. After the Armada, the Queen's Ministers set to work to put the gunpowder supply on a proper basis, and it was then that Surrey and a great Surrey family became inseparably associated with the making of explosives.

George Evelyn (grandfather of a more famous grandson, John Evelyn of Wotton) and John, his son, were first licensed in 1589 to dig saltpetre in Great Britain and Ireland, and set up their first powdermills on the little Hogsmill River, which joins the Thames at Kingston. Later, George Evelyn retired, and John, having transferred his mills to Godstone, took his brother Robert and three others into partnership and started on a contract by which they supplied the Queen with a hundred lasts of powder yearly at 7d. the pound. In 1604 the firm was practically reduced to John and Robert Evelyn, and a partner named Hardinge, the others being dead or doing no work. The firm was now employing a thousand hands, and was given twenty-one years' contract to supply 120 lasts yearly at 8d. per pound—nearly L10,000 worth of powder. But James I soon broke this contract, and after three years the contract was given to the Earl of Worcester; though whether the Earl ever made any powder, or what he did with his contract, nobody knows. The progress of the manufacture of gunpowder now becomes very obscure, though probably John Evelyn kept his mills running at Godstone, making reduced quantities. It is not till 1621 that we find John Evelyn making another large contract with the Government, but after that date the contracts were renewed every two or three years, until the Evelyns in 1636 ceased to supply the Government altogether. Their difficulties must have been almost intolerable. John Evelyn and his son, also named John, who succeeded him in 1627, appear to have been always punctual and trustworthy in supplying the powder required, but the King would not or could not pay for it. The history of each contract is always the same; for a few months all goes swimmingly, then comes the Crown's inability to pay up; next stoppage of supplies; eventually, settling up and a new contract. The Evelyn mills made the last pound of powder for the King in 1636, and then under protest. Charles was used to protests.

So far very little powder had been made at Chilworth. The Evelyn mills were at Godstone—possibly near Wotton also. But it was the Chilworth powdermills which broke the Evelyns' business. Immediately on coming to the throne Charles I gave leave to the East India Company to set up powdermills on the skirts of Windsor Park; but the mills frightened the deer and were moved to Chilworth. Here, apparently, Sir Edward Randyll owned or built a large number of mills, which he leased to the Company, and it was the competition of the Company which silenced Evelyn's mills. But the Company was equally unsuccessful in keeping the business. Charles I was struck with the idea of turning shopkeeper himself, and gave the sole Government contract to one Cordwell, from whom he bought powder at 7-1/2d. the pound and sold it to the lieges at eighteenpence. That did not last long. The Long Parliament assembled in 1641, and the monopoly was abolished. From that date anybody might make gunpowder, and Surrey ceased to be the single centre of the industry. But the Chilworth mills still did a great deal of business—sometimes bad business. Sir Polycarpus Wharton, who had a twenty-one years' lease under Charles II, James II and William III, is said to have lost L24,000 over the mills, simply because he could not get paid by the Government, and actually went to a debtor's prison. Fifty years ago the industry had declined almost to a vanishing point. It revived in 1880, when experiments were made in new powders for heavy guns, and to-day the Chilworth Mills make cordite, without the miserable consequences which befel Sir Polycarpus Wharton.

It seemed worth while, at the risk of spattering the page with dates and facts of gunpowder dryness, to attempt this short sketch of the Surrey gunpowder industry, if only to escape from the confusion of current legends. Chief among the traditions of the Chilworth mills is that which makes them the property of John Evelyn of Wotton. No Evelyn owned a powdermill at Chilworth, and John Evelyn of Wotton, though he may have owned a casual mill or so elsewhere, is not the John Evelyn who owned and worked the Godstone mills. Those mills belonged to the diarist's grandfather, George Evelyn, and to George Evelyn's son and grandson, both named John. The latter was the diarist's cousin. I ought to add that I am indebted, for most of this history of gunpowder, to the admirable article on the subject by Mr. Montague Giuseppi, published in the Victoria History of the County.

Albury is nearly two miles from Chilworth station, and the Tillingbourne runs through and under it. Albury has a number of beautiful chimneys; chimneys that are tall and graceful, of red brick, shaped and moulded in ingenious spirals, with patterned sides and columns, and crowsteps and other ornaments and uses. You would not guess all that a chimney can be, until you have seen Albury. A year or two ago there was another charm in the village. You looked in from the main street at what seemed like half a road, half an entrance to a square of houses, and found yourself in the remains of an old farmyard, of which one side was a row of cottages. The rest was old red brick—I think I remember a great dovecote—and a quiet look of age and disuse. But now new buildings are rising in its place.



Just outside Albury is one of the Duke of Northumberland's houses, in Albury Park. The garden holds a historic yew hedge, but it is not shown to the public and I have not seen it. John Evelyn laid out the gardens; Cobbett has described the yew hedge. In his day it belonged to Mr. Drummond, a banker, and Cobbett, who had heard much of the park and gardens, rode up to the house and asked permission to see them. So he saw the yew hedge, and wrote about it.

"Between the house and the gardens there is a very beautiful run of water, with a sort of little, wild, narrow sedgy meadow. The gardens are separated from this by a hedge, running along from east to west. From this hedge there go up the hill, at right angles, several other hedges, which divide the land here into distinct gardens, or orchards. Along at the top of these there goes a yew hedge, or, rather, a row of small yew trees, the trunks of which are bare for about eight or ten feet high, and the tops of which form one solid head of about ten feet high, while the bottom branches come out on each side of the row about eight feet horizontally. This hedge, or row, is a quarter of a mile long. There is a nice hard sand road under this species of umbrella; and summer and winter, here is a most delightful walk! Between this row of yews, there is a space, or garden (a quarter of a mile long you will observe) about thirty or forty feet wide, as nearly as I can recollect. At the back of this garden, and facing the yew tree row, is a wall probably ten feet high, which forms the breastwork of a terrace; and it is this terrace which is the most beautiful thing that I ever saw in the gardening way. It is a quarter of a mile long, and, I believe, between thirty and forty feet wide; of the finest green sward and as level as a die."

In Albury Park is a ruined church. Its history is not very edifying. Mr. Drummond, the banker, who built the Catholic Apostolic cathedral near by, obtained permission to shut up the old church if he built a new one elsewhere. He built the new church, and the old, with its graves and memories, was abandoned. The footpath leading to it remains open to the public, and runs under the shade of some superb Spanish chestnuts.

Perhaps half a mile from the park, in the depth of a wood of box, are the two Sherborne Farm ponds, one of which has come by the name of the Silent Pool. The Sherborne ponds lie somewhere near the track of the pilgrims, and I like to think that the journeying men knew them and drank their clear water. Legend has grown round the deeper, upper pool. Martin Tupper, in his strange medley Stephan Langton, has shaped it into his story. A lovely peasant girl used to bathe in the pool; King John, riding by, saw her and drove his horse at her, and she, trying to escape, fell into deep water and was drowned. That was not enough for Martin Tupper; he decided that her brother should try to rescue her and be drowned also. There they lay, the two of them; "the brother and sister are locked in each other's arms in the tranquil crystal depth of Shirebourne Pond; and the rippled surface is all smooth once more; and you may see the trout shoaling among the still green weeds around that naked raven-haired Sabrina, and her poor drowned brother in his cowskin tunic." So wrote Tupper; a most moving finish of a chapter.

To gain the Silent Pool, if you are in Albury, walk eastwards right through the village and turn to the left over the Tillingbourne. Then to the left again, and you will spy a cottage, the gate of which bears the legend "Key of the Pool kept here." How should a pool have a key? It turns out to be two keys, one of a padlock shutting an iron gate leading to a grove of box trees; you shut the padlock and find that you have left all who come after you—and on Saturdays at least they are many—to climb the fence. The Silent Pool, when I saw it first, a little disappointed me. I ought to have known that it would, because everybody could tell me where it was, even quite unintelligent people walking about the road two miles away. I think I hoped the pool would be, not only solitary and sequestered, but entirely deserted by human beings; a pool on which you came suddenly, lying hidden in the heart of chalky dells dark green with box trees; it was to be as deep as a well, and cold with the coldness of a spring; smelling, too, of bitter wet box and sun-warmed chalk. It was to be a pool at the side of which the stranger should seat himself, and discover the air of the place so quiet and enchanted that he could hear no sound of birds or beasts or men; only, perhaps, the melodious drip of the rain-heavy boughs into the clear peacock-green depths of water. And, in fact, the disappointment is that this is precisely what the Silent Pool might be. It is what it used to be, I think; but so many people have heard of it and have come on bicycles and in carriages and motor-cars to see it, that the leaf-strewn paths are trampled into mud round it; and it cannot be called silent, for you will not escape hearing other people, who have quite as much right as you to be there, talk about it and tramp round its margin. Then, too, for the convenience of visitors, there has been built on the edge of the pool a thatched arbour of wood, into which you admit yourself with a very large key, only to be deafened on the spot by ten thousand cockney names scrawled on the white walls round you. Those who have gibbeted themselves on the walls have also thrown the newspapers that held their lunch into the water, and bottles with the paper—a most unhappy spectacle. Had I the right to touch the place, the arbour would be packed up offhand for Rosherville. Only in one particular has the arbour any claim on the wayfarer's gratitude. It enables him to watch the large trout which swim in the clear deep water under him as closely as if they were behind the glass of an aquarium. Trout which leap out of the water every two minutes in a spring afternoon, and yet which are tame enough to come and be fed under the rail of a wooden arbour by trooping visitors, are a sight for idle fishermen to see. I have fed them with worms, but I suspect them to be better used to sandwiches.



The road runs eastward a mile from Sherborne ponds to Shere. Who first named the Shirebourne pond the Silent Pool? The old name is the best, and the water of the pond ought to be added to the beauties of Shere. If Shere is to be counted the prettiest Surrey village of all, I think it is the Tillingbourne which decides the choice. Six or seven other villages occur, each with its own fascination; Alfold, deep among the primroses of the Fold Country; Chiddingfold, with its old inn and the red cottages set round the green; Compton, with its flower gardens and old timber; Thorpe, quiet among the elms; Oxted, lining the hill road under the downs, and the Bell inn at the cross-ways; Betchworth and its cottage roses; Coldharbour dotted over the sandstone; Friday Street, hardly a village, on the banks of the tarn among the pines; but each fails compared with Shere. Friday Street shows the reason plain. Without the water Friday Street would pass unnoticed; it is the water which decides for Shere. The village groups itself with the little brook running through the middle: a low bridge crosses the stream, villagers sit on the bridge, white ducks paddle about the current and stand upside down among the weeds: beyond the brook are the tiny village green and the shade of elms; on one side of the village green is the old inn, the White Horse; and on the other the grey tower and the quiet of the churchyard. But it is the sparkle and the chatter of the Tillingbourne which are the first charm of all.

The White Horse is a pattern of an old village inn, with panelled rooms and dark beams over its ceilings, and a parlour hung with oil paintings, with the air of the Surrey countryside blowing through them. Your host is the artist, and fellow artists come to the White Horse to sketch with him. It is the only inn in Surrey I know which also sells a guide to the neighbourhood, and a good guide too, so far as directions for finding walks among the hills and woods can make a guide-book. Mr. Marriott Watson has written an introduction to it, of which the sum is that all walks start from the White Horse, and all walkers come back to it.



Shere church is a medley of alterations; perhaps its most interesting connection is its link with the old Surrey family of Bray. The Brays have lived at Shere for more than four hundred years. The first Sir Robert Bray was a knight of Richard I, and one of his descendants, Sir Reginald, was granted the manor of Shere, in 1497. Sir Reginald was one of the most distinguished of all the long line; he was a Knight of the Garter, and the Bray Chapel in St. George's, Windsor, is his work; his emblem the bray, or seed-crusher, is on the ceiling. But the member of the family who had most to do with the country was William Bray, the second of the two classical writers of the county history. William Bray was born in 1736, and was a scholar whose learning was only equalled by his astonishing vitality. He began his main work at an age when most men's work is done. When the Rev. Owen Manning, after years of labour at the history of Surrey, went blind and had to give up the hope of a lifetime, William Bray finished the book. He was untiring. The first volume appeared in 1804, when he was sixty-eight, and when the second volume was published, five years latter, he wrote in his preface "that there was not a parish described in it which he had not visited, and only two churches the insides of which he had not seen, and the monuments in which he had not personally examined, once at least, but to many he made repeated visits." The third volume came out in 1814, and then, at the age of seventy-eight, he edited John Evelyn's Memoirs from the original MSS. at Wotton. He was to live nearly twenty years after that, and he died at Shere at the age of ninety-seven; a tablet stands to his memory in the chancel of the church.



Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in a paper on "Shere and its Rectors" in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, gives the items of a will he discovered by accident, interesting as showing the amount of stock kept upon his farm by a yeoman of the sixteenth century. The will is dated 27th October, 1562, and the testator is John Risbridger—one of the good old Surrey yeoman names, like Evershed and Whapshot and Enticknap. He describes himself as "John Risbridger of Shere, yeoman, sicke of bodie and yet walkinge. His body to be buried in Parish Church of Shere, 'without my seats ende.' 1 calf and 2 shepe, with sufficient breade and drinke thereunto to be bestowed and spent at his burial towards the reliefe of the poore there assembled. To every man and maid servant, 1 ewe shepe; to Alice Stydman his maid, one herfore (i.e. heifer) bullocke, of two years and 15s: to his son William all his lease or terme of years in lands called Stonehill, and to him 4 oxen, 2 steares of 3 yeres, 2 horse beastes, a weane (wagon) yoke, cheynes to draw withal, 2 keyne, half a hundreth of shepe. Children, John, William, and Edward. To daughter Dorothie, L6. 13s. 4d.; all residue to wife Katherine. Proved 3rd May, 1654, by William Risbridger."

Some extracts made by Mr. Leveson-Gower from the Parish Registers have an interest which is not peculiar to Shere, but the Registers are a good example of village history written in the names of its inhabitants. You begin with the simplicity, almost the affection, of the early entries, the Johns and Anns and Marys repeated year after year, and the few words describing the older people; then comes the Georgian day when Fielding and Richardson were on the bookshelves, and children were named after the heroines of the novels. Here are a dozen entries out of hundreds:—

Elizabeth Gatton (widow), neer 100 yeeres old, was Buryed 13 of July, 1691. Widow Rowland (old and poor). May 18, 1701. Elizabeth Nye, an ancient widow. Buried 23 Mar., 1715. 1732. Old Edward Stone, yeoman. Dec. y^e 30^th. 1739. William Wood, a poor unfortunate lad, being drown'd, was buried Ap. 27. Mary, daughter of Thomas Evershed, bap. Ap. 30, 1729. Ann, daughter of Thomas Evershed, bap. Aug. 17, 1733. Mary, daughter of Thomas Evershed, bap. May 14, 1736. Ann, daughter of Mr. Robert Parkhurst, bap. Feb. 23, 1741-2. 1779. Gosling, Tho., son of Thomas and Dinah. May 25. (Note) —married, child christened, wife churched the same day, by me, Tho^s Duncumb, Rector. 1817. Carbetia Hall, of Shere, gentlewoman. Sep. 2, 68. 1821. Servilla Briscoe, of Abinger. April 17, 23.

One of the later entries in the Registers is interesting to historians. Harriet Grote, widow of George Grote, died at Shere in 1878, aged 86. Her grave is south of the church: Grote lies in Westminster Abbey.

Shere and Gomshall are only divided by an avenue of elms—half a mile of the pleasantest and shadiest of roads. Gomshall is a village scattered round many lanes; it has a Black Horse inn near the station, but the prettiest Gomshall cottages are away from the Black Horse, down the lanes off the main road. Gomshall Manor, now a boarding-house, has traditions of the Middle Ages. There is a story of a door leading to a secret chamber which ought to be somewhere in Martin Tupper's books, but I cannot find it. King John was annoyed with a retainer, shut him in this room and turned the key in the door, and there the miserable retainer starved to death. It was just like King John to do it, but what he did at Gomshall only tradition knows.



CHAPTER X

GUILDFORD TO LEATHERHEAD

Merrow.—The Horse and Groom.—Mr. Kipling on Surrey downs.—Clandon Park.—The village mole-catcher.—A fearful battle.—February sunshine.—Wide Ploughs.—Thomas Goffe and Thomas Thimble.—Locked churches.—An atmosphere of war.—Effingham and its admirals.—Little Bookham.—General d'Arblay in his garden.—Mistletoe.

Of the two roads which run parallel to the downs east of Guildford, doubtless the road south of the ridge runs through the prettiest villages. Albury, Shere and Gomshall are a more charming trio than any three that lie on the northern road, if only because of the woods about them and the clear trout stream that runs under their walls and bridges. The villages north of the ridge hardly have a good-sized pond between them. But the walk from Guildford to Leatherhead, which can be shortened at any railway station you please from Clandon to Bookham, is for all that a walk through delightful country and villages of unchanging quiet.

Merrow is the first of the little hamlets that dot the Leatherhead road, and though the Guildford villas are stretching out their gardens further and further to the polite east, Merrow is still a mere group of downside cottages. The church might have been better restored; but the chief feature of the village is the old Horse and Groom Inn, with its gabled front and its noble stack of chimneys, three sister shafts of peculiar grace and mellow colour. The date, 1615, which records the age of the inn above one of its bay windows, reads a reproach to the aggressively modern porch and doors; and the white rough-cast with which the walls are covered apparently conceals admirable timber and herringbone brickwork. But the roof and the gables and windows still belong to an inn and not a public-house, and the Horse and Groom too, swings a good sign, vigorously drawn, of a prancing steed. Most of the signs of the many White Horse and Black Horse inns are more like rocking-horses than racers.



Above Merrow stretches some of the most perfect downland in England. If the Sussex downs by Rottingdean inspired Mr. Kipling to his finest poetry, the Surrey downs by Merrow taught him some of the most haunting lines of all. I quote from eleven stanzas that ought not to be separated:—

MERROW DOWN

There runs a road by Merrow Down— A grassy track to-day it is An hour out of Guildford town, Above the river Wey it is.

Here, when they heard the horse-bells ring, The ancient Britons dressed and rode To watch the dark Phoenicians bring Their goods along the Western Road.

But long and long before that time (When bison used to roam on it) Did Taffy and her Daddy climb That down, and had their home on it.

The Wey, that Taffy called Wagai, Was more than six times bigger then; And all the Tribe of Tegumai They cut a noble figure then!

Of all the Tribe of Tegumai Who cut that figure, none remain— On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry— The silence and the sun remain.

But as the faithful years return And hearts unwounded sing again, Comes Taffy dancing through the fern To lead the Surrey spring again.

In mocassins and deer-skin cloak Unfearing, free and fair she flits, And lights her little damp-wood smoke To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far—oh, very far behind, So far she cannot call to him, Comes Tegumai alone to find The daughter that was all to him.

Merrow to the east edges on Clandon Park, the seat of one of the great Surrey families, the Onslows. It is a notable space, perhaps a mile square of grass dotted with superb groups of elms. "Capability" Brown laid out the park, and he certainly saw what the capabilities of that sunny sward could be. The house, which stands on the south-east corner, is an imposing cube of red brick, patched here and there with ivy, and as square and formal as the ornamental water and the park below it is formal and serpentine. Leoni built it, and Rysbrach designed two of its chimney-pieces.

In the park you may chance to meet the mole-catcher of the place—an upholder of right traditions of an old English village. I met him searching disconsolately for a couple of his traps, which he had set too near the pathway and which had been carried off by thieving passers-by, on whom may malisons light. "I've got forty traps about here," he told me with some pride, adding with resignation to a persistent fate that "they" would not let him set a trap near the path. "They" always took it if he did.

West Clandon church stands in the corner of the park, and is chiefly remarkable for a very curious old sundial, belonging perhaps to the days of Henry II, and built upside down by "restorers" into a buttress of the south wall. Time has dealt hardly with the church, and time, perhaps, may still restore its own dial. Under the dial, when I was last in the carefully tended little churchyard, the level turf was studded with snowdrops.

In a field close by the village once took place a remarkable battle. A correspondent of the Gentleman's Magazine of 1796 gives the following account of it, which he had verbatim from an old inhabitant. "A serpent once infested a back lane in the parish of West Clandon for a long time. The inhabitants were much disturbed and afraid to pass that way. A soldier who had been condemned for desertion promised, if his life was spared, he would destroy this serpent. Accordingly he took his dog with him. A fierce battle ensued, the dog fastened him and the soldier killed it with his bayonet in a field belonging to the glebe called Deadacre." According to the magazine's correspondent, an "ancient piece of carving in wood" representing this frightful struggle, had been "preserved for many years in the parsonage house."

Between the two Clandons, West and East, the road runs by what is surely the finest ploughland in the county. A single field of over a hundred acres stretches up the side of the down to a belt of firs—a field for Cincinnatus himself to plough. I remember standing to stare at that great reach of shining stubble and furrow when first I saw it from the road on a day of marvellous February sunlight. Farm labourers were topping and tailing turnips two hundred yards away; partridges newly paired whirred up from the roadside; beyond the white stubbleland lay the pines of Netley Heath, a thin line of palest blue; a hundred larks filled the sky with singing, and I heard suddenly behind me the impetuous thrill of a chaffinch, that most summery of carols. The ploughland is Lord Onslow's, and it must need a Minister of Agriculture to look after it.

East Clandon lies under that broad ploughland, a mile from Clandon Park. Everything in East Clandon is what it ought to be, and everybody does what he ought to do. The timbered cottages are old and quiet; the barn roofs by the churchyard are long and lichened; the churchyard is bordered by a thick holly hedge, and about its graves, little clipped yew-trees stand like chessmen, perhaps meant to suggest a text; the cottage gardens are full of simple flowers and fruit-trees, and the cottagers work in them as if it were the best work to do, which doubtless it is. There could not be a happier looking village. One building only in the village knows, or shows, much suffering. At East Clandon is the country branch of the Queen Alexandra Nursing Home for children with hip disease. In fine weather the children lie in their cots on the verandah, like broken toys, and wave happily from their red blankets to passers-by.

In the days of Charles I East Clandon boasted a poet. He was Thomas Goffe, a writer of tragedies, and most unhappily married. Aubrey tells the story:—

"His wife pretended to fall in love with him, by hearing of him preach: upon which, said one Thomas Thimble (one of the Squire Bedell's in Oxford, and his Confident) to him: 'Do not marry her: if thou dost, she will break thy heart.' He was not obsequious to his friend's sober advice, but for her sake altered his condition, and cast anchor here. One time some of his Oxford friends made a visit to him she looked upon them with an ill eye, as if they had come to eat her out of house and home (as they say), she provided a dish of milk, and some eggs for supper, and no more: They perceived her niggardliness, and that her husband was inwardly troubled at it (she wearing the breeches) so they were resolved to be merry at supper, and talk all in Latin, and laughed exceedingly. She was so vexed at their speaking Latin that she could not hold, but fell out a weeping, and rose from the table. The next day, Mr. Goffe ordered a better dinner for them, and sent for some wine: they were merry, and his friends took their final leave of him. 'Twas no long time before this Xanthippe made Mr. Thimble's prediction good; and when he died, the last words he spake were: 'Oracle, Oracle, Tom Thimble,' and so he gave up the ghost."

Halfway from East Clandon to West Horsley is Hatchlands, a fine country house and park with noble beeches; and next to Hatchlands one of the prettiest and completest farmsteads in the county. The building in the neighbourhood is, indeed, some of the best to be seen. West Horsley itself is a fascinating collection of old cottages, vine-bowered and fronted with clipped yews. One such yew, standing by the door of what the picture postcards vaguely designate "old cottage, West Horsley," is an extraordinarily elaborate piece of rustic topiary. Another feature of the village is the now disused workhouse, a solid old brick building overlooking a horsepond: another, the bole of a superb elm, quite rightly stationed in the carpenter's sawyard. Of West Horsley church it is more difficult to speak. It is possible to see from outside that there is a beautiful three lancet east window, but the rest of the church, with its chapel and fine monuments, is a sealed book. The door is locked, and the keys are kept at the rectory a mile away: the sexton, next door to the church, is not allowed a key. It is not easy to write soberly of an authority which compels for one who should be allowed to see the church, four journeys of a mile to ask for and to return the keys. From West Horsley to Leatherhead is a pilgrimage by locked churches: East Horsley is locked, though you can get the key; Effingham and Little Bookham are locked, but I had no time to search for more keys when I was there; possibly they are easily found. Great Bookham is open, but Fetcham is locked; Leatherhead is more hospitable.

The great families of West Horsley are those of Berners and Nicholas. The effigy of Sir James Berners, of West Horsley Place, is in the church: he was one of the followers of Richard II, and was beheaded on Tower Hill, in 1388. His daughter, according to tradition, was the famous Dame Juliana Berners, Prioress of Sopwell, and author—or part author—of the Boke of St. Albans, a "Treatyse perteynynge to Hawkynge, Huntynge, Fysshynge, and Coote Armiris." Probably she wrote no more than the hunting, but it is pleasant to think that she may have watched her greyhounds "headed like a snake, and necked like a drake" on the downs above Horsley. Another Berners, the second Baron of the name, translated Froissart. Of the Nicholas family, Sir Edward was a Royalist and Secretary of State under both the Charleses. Of other owners of West Horsley Place, its mistress, Geraldine Browne, wife of Sir Anthony Browne, is claimed to be the "Fair Geraldine" of Surrey's poem; but any other Geraldine would suit as well, if, indeed, Geraldine ever existed. Another doubtful tradition of West Horsley is that the head of Sir Walter Raleigh is buried in the church with his son Carew. Certainly no one knows that it was buried anywhere else.

Leaving West Horsley, you are immediately in an atmosphere of war. At East Horsley, the Duke of Wellington guards the cross-roads and dispenses excellent bread and cheese and beer; at Effingham Prince Bluecher used to stand on the main road, quite correctly placed to the east of the Duke; he has now marched down into the village and billeted himself as comfortably as before. The atmosphere of swords and sharpness has even entered ecclesiastical precincts. In East Horsley church there is a curious fresco, painted, I am told, by the late Lady Lovelace. It shows St. Martin dressed as a soldier in high boots, cloak and hat, cutting off the skirt of his cloak with his sword, to clothe a naked beggar kneeling before him. It is curious that a second legend of a cloak should belong to a neighbourhood connected with Sir Walter Raleigh.

Horsley Towers, on the left of the road to Effingham, is a large, grey, castellated building; its entrances might be fortifications. The park holds some superb beeches. But the grey coldness of Horsley Towers is a little exotic among these stretches of southern English parkland. Good Jacobean or Georgian red-brick much better suits oaks and beeches than the chateau-like towers of a Scottish castle.

Effingham, although so small a village, has a name that will last with the history of the English Navy. It gave his title to the first Lord Howard of Effingham, the illustrious father of a still more illustrious son. The first Lord of Effingham was William Howard, son of the second Duke of Norfolk, and one of the great men of the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth. He was with Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold; he was Lord High Admiral; at Sir Thomas Wyatt's rebellion he shut Ludgate in Wyatt's face, and more than any Englishman he helped Elizabeth to her throne. But his son is an even greater figure. Like his father, he was Lord High Admiral, but the father never had the son's opportunity. For the second Lord Howard of Effingham commanded the English Navy against the Spanish Armada, and as the victor of that tremendous fleet and the captor of Cadiz he was made Earl of Nottingham, and held the office of Lord High Admiral until the green old age of eighty-three, when "he retired," we are told, "from public life, and the rest of his life was peace and prayer." He lies with his father at Reigate, which with the churches of Lingfield and Great Bookham holds the dust of many generations of the Surrey Howards. Fourteen Howards have been buried at Reigate, twelve at Lingfield, and thirty at Great Bookham; but so far as I can find, none, curiously enough, at Effingham itself.

Scarcely half a mile separates the churches of Effingham and Little Bookham, the latter a tiny building considerably altered by various restorations, but containing some interesting remains of Norman work. Almost touching the church stands, and has stood since days before Domesday book was written, a great yew, dark and shining, with another thousand years' life in it, if its vigorous branches tell the truth. The village itself is not much more than a cottage or two, but Little Bookham must always be a place of interest, at all events for those who read and write newspapers, for the Manor House is the home of one of the doyens of English journalism, Mr. Meredith Townsend, for forty-four years joint-editor of the Spectator.

"Master and friend, whose ardent soul Burns brighter as it nears the goal, Whose indefatigable pen Stirs envy in us younger men——"

So has Mr. Charles Graves addressed him, and so might others feel a noble envy.

Great Bookham, less than a mile away, was once the home of another writer. Fanny Burney lived there for four years after she had married General d'Arblay, and the two of them with their baby, and an income of L125, were superlatively happy. Here she wrote Camilla, which was to build and to christen the house she lived in later, and it was from Bookham that she set out to take the first bound copies to King George and the Queen at Windsor. "About how much time did you give to it?" asked the good-natured King, and "Are you much frightened? As much frightened as you were before?" The Queen asked M. and Madame d'Arblay to dine the next day, and in the interval the General, having been introduced to the Queen's gardener at Frogmore, "a skilful and famous botanist," consulted him seriously about the Bookham cabbages. M. d'Arblay was a gardener of greater courage than science. His wife sends her father a picture of the work done among the Bookham fruits and flowers.

"Our garden," she writes, "is not yet quite the most profitable thing in the world; but M. d'A. assures me it is to be the staff of our table and existence." But M. d'Arblay had very little luck. He planted strawberries hoping to gather fruit within three months, and was disappointed:—

"Another time, too, with great labour, he cleared a considerable compartment of weeds, and, when it looked clean and well, and he showed his work to the gardener, the man said he had demolished an asparagus bed! M. d'Arblay protested, however, nothing could look more like des mauvaises herbes.

"His greatest passion is for transplanting. Everything we possess he moves from one end of the garden to another, to produce better effects. Roses take place of jessamines, jessamines of honeysuckles, and honeysuckles of lilies, till they have all danced round as far as the space allows; but whether the effect may not be a general mortality, summer only can determine."

The picture of the General turning his sword into a reaping hook is even more alluring:—

"I wish you had seen him yesterday, mowing down our hedge—with his sabre, and with an air and attitudes so military, that, if he had been hewing down other legions than those he encountered—i.e. of spiders—he could scarcely have had a mien more tremendous, or have demanded an arm more mighty. Heaven knows, I am 'the most contente personne in the world' to see his sabre so employed!"

The garden in which these severely military operations took place still surrounds the same windows, gay with wistaria and roses. Possibly the gnarled apple trees which fringe the lawn are actual survivors of the general's sabre.

Great Bookham has grown a good deal since the d'Arblays knew it. But the splendid shell of an ancient elm still shades the churchyard gate; the flint-walled church, with ivy bunched over its buttressed tower, and lichens glowing on the Horsham slabs of its chapel roof, can have changed but little. Two or three of its monuments are interesting. One is a brass plate recounting the virtues and the pedigree of Edmund Slyfield and his wife Elizabeth. They were of Slyfield Place; he was "a stoute Esquire who alwaies set God's feare before his Eyes"; she was a model of all the graces, and descended from the Paulets, Capells, Sydneys, Gainsfords, Finches, Arundels, Whites, and Lamberts—a good long list to bring into an epitaph, but there are twenty-eight lines of honest doggerel to do it in. Another monument is quite as striking, which represents Colonel Thomas Moore in the full uniform of the commanding officer of a regiment of foot in the reign of Queen Anne, which the sculptor's convention has idealised into a mixture of a bathing costume, a kilt, and a plaid. The church, indeed, is a museum of records of different times and tastes to a degree uncommon in far more important buildings. In the east wall of the chancel is a slab commemorating in three Latin hexameters the founding of the building by John de Rutherwyk, the great Abbot whom we meet at Chertsey; and the east window of the Slyfield chapel is dedicated, in a long, biographical inscription in brass, to the memory of Lord Raglan, who as Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, military secretary to the Duke of Wellington, lost an arm at the Duke's side at Waterloo, and forty years later commanded the British army in the East before Sebastopol, where he died. Lord Raglan's connection with Great Bookham is slight: but his niece, Lady Mary Farquhar, who put up the window, lived at Polesden, a mile or two away.



Last of the villages on the road from Guildford to Leatherhead is Fetcham. A park, a road bordered by cottages and a pretty house or two, and a battlemented church-tower deep among yews, and hollies, and ivy-trees—Fetcham is as pleasantly small and quiet as her western neighbours. But what a string of churches it is, along these twelve miles of Surrey roadway; nine villages, each with its grey-walled building and the cool whiteness of the arches, aisles, and chancels. No pilgrim of the old centuries could tire on such a journey. To-day he might. Only four of the church doors give him a welcome.

Above Fetcham's church, which, like Stoke D'Abernon and one or two others, fronts on the flowers and lawns of a private garden, great bunches of mistletoe darken the winter tree-tops. Fetcham is on the border of the mistletoe country, which stretches from Leatherhead to Dorking and Boxhill.



CHAPTER XI

GODALMING

A country town.—Peter the Great's breakfast.—Pykes in the Wey.—Dogs and fish-carts.—Off to Botany Bay.—Owen Manning.—A most malignant priest.—Eashing Bridges.—Peperharow deer.—Loseley from a distance.—Charterhouse in the future.

The best view of Godalming is from the hill roads above Farncombe. Not many towns group themselves so well against hills and woods; few have so spacious and quiet a foreground. The church stands on the Wey; the churchyard runs down to the very banks, and the noble leaded spire lifts its chanticleer higher, I think, from the tower than any other church in Surrey. Between the foot of the hill and the Wey spreads wide meadowland; the Wey flows tranquilly by willow-herb and alder; beyond the Wey are the red roofs of Godalming clustered in the trees. It is the completest little country town; the green fields in front and the woods beyond set it compact together, clustered as a country town should be about its church and its High Street, with the river running clear at its side.



Godalming High Street has not kept the grace of Guildford, nor had it ever the width and the air of Epsom or Farnham, but it has more than one building of distinction, and its links with the past are in old inns, timbered stories and forgotten courts. The White Hart still juts its wooden beams over the pavement; the King's Arms, a later building, has a square-set front which has watched many coaches jangle off to Portsmouth. The King's Arms has had more than one king as a guest. The Emperor Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William of Prussia dined there in the year before Waterloo; a more famous and a more greedy monarch who knew the King's Arms was Peter the Great in the days of Queen Anne. He had a suite of twenty with him, and the record of his bill of fare for the day is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I have not seen it, but the historians who have supply abounding details. Peter and his twenty had for breakfast besides side-dishes, half a sheep, half a lamb, ten pullets, a dozen chickens, seven dozen eggs and something over a quart apiece of mulled wine, with a gallon or so of brandy. Dinner was a better meal; three stone of ribs of beef was the main dish, with a sheep, a lamb, and a couple of joints of veal to help it out; capons and rabbits tempted the jaded, and four dozen of sack and wine made up for what was lacking at breakfast.



Besides the inns, two old houses in particular set their mark on the High Street. One is dated 1663; both are of rich brickwork, almost extravagantly ornate with ledges, patterned courses, elaborate parapets and casements. The unhappy addition is the paint. If they had never been painted, or if the paint could be done away with, the pattern would take on twice its charm. But that is the main regret for all Godalming. If the High Street could have its false fronts pulled down, and all its old timber and brick shown to the road, it would fascinate as Guildford does. It would be worth the town's while to spend money to show what it possesses of older centuries. But that is a frequent reflection in other towns.



One memory of the past has survived the attacks of Godalming's newest and noisiest citizens. The little Town Hall, built squarely in the middle of the road at the west end of the High Street on the site of an older building, has been threatened by a section (I am told) of Godalming tradesmen for many years, and would tremble still, if it were not so solidly built of good Georgian brick. It is said to be awkward for motor traffic, to be not handsome, and generally to be out of date and in the way. As to its looks, it belongs to 1814, and is plain and simple enough, but it carries a graceful clock tower and a copper cupola, and its destruction is not to be thought of. The day has gone for wanton throwing into the past what the past has left, and the little Town Hall will continue to slow down the traffic and draw visitors to the High Street, it is to be hoped, for many years to come. The town corporation have done better for themselves than to pull down the old Town Hall. They have set up some modern buildings for town business, which for good work in good material are as excellent a modern addition as could have been made to any old town.

Godalming's history, like Guildford's and Wonersh's, has been largely the history of the wool industry. It was Godalming's careless trust in the stability of its contractor, Samuel Vassall, which dealt the first and shrewdest blow at its business, as we saw at Guildford. But Godalming kept its head higher than the other two for a time. In Bowen's map of Surrey, drawn in 1749, the printer has put a little side-note explaining Godalming's capabilities to the curious, and you read that for the manufacture of clothing, "it is the most considerable town in the county. The sorts are mixed Kerseys, and Blue ones, for the Canary Islands, which for their Colours, can't be matched in any other Part of England." But that is not all; Bowen adds an afterthought—"Here is plenty of good fish, especially Pykes. Here are two or three Paper Mills, and three Corn Mills." So Godalming had food and clothing too. She still markets woollen goods, but the pykes, I fear, gave out long ago. Men fish in the Wey at Godalming as they fish at Guildford and Weybridge, but they seldom catch a pyke, I know, for I have watched them.

Fish have had other associations with Godalming besides swimming in the Wey. Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who has written so much of Surrey gardens, and has her own wonderful garden at Munstead not much more than a mile away, has described in her fascinating book, Old West Surrey, the carrying of fish for the London market from the seaport towns through Godalming. It was taken in special fish-vans. "They were painted yellow and had four horses. But some of it, as well as supplies for other inland places, was carried in little carts drawn by dogs. The dogs were big, strong Newfoundlands. Teams of two or four were harnessed together. The team of four would carry three to four hundredweight of fish, besides the driver. The man would 'cock his legs up along the sharves,' as an old friend describes it, and away they would go at a great rate. They not only went as fast as the coaches, but they gained time when the coach stopped to change horses, and so got the pick of the market. A dog-drawn cart used to bring fish from Littlehampton to Godalming, where oysters were often to be bought for three a penny." Three a penny, fresh oysters! Fourpence a dozen all alive! The street cries must have been most encouraging.

Other memories of old Godalming Miss Jekyll has preserved, one of them her own, of a carrier-cart plying between Bramley and Guildford drawn by dogs. Then there were the coaches that stopped at the King's Arms and the Red Lion and other inns; Godalming, on the road to Portsmouth, saw traffic which was merry and miserable. Sometimes a coach would swing into the town carrying sixteen sailors, four inside and twelve out, paid off from a man-of-war and going to London to spend their money. They would walk back. Sometimes a midnight coach would bring unhappier passengers; gangs of convicts in chains would be given something to eat at the Red Lion; or the yard gates of the King's Arms would be closed, and armed warders would let out their prisoners for a little rest on the way to Botany Bay. But the sailors were the merry folk. They would brandish their bottles and cheer, and sometimes, when the coach swayed, would swing with it as sailors should on a sloping deck; then the coach turned over.

Restorers in 1840, that unhappy age for beautiful old buildings, did what they could to spoil Godalming's parish church. They packed it from floor to roof with pews and galleries, knocked off a porch here, a chantry there, doubled its accommodation and quartered its charm. Thirty-nine years later Sir Gilbert Scott and Mr. Ralph Nevill did their best to repair the injury and show the Norman pillars as they should be, but some of the injury done was final. Still, the church within and without is a noble building, and the leaden spire which soars up from the tower is the finest in the county. The church has had at least three famous vicars. One was Owen Manning, famous perhaps against his will, for he asked that no monument for him should be added to the church. His epitaph should be Si monumentum requiris, perlege, for he was the originator and part author of the history of the county which was finished, as we saw at Shere, by William Bray. Owen Manning's was a great mind, but he had a great heart as well; for the work he did for his book sent him blind at seventy-five, and he bore five more years of life knowing that he had not been suffered to finish what he had begun. He died in 1801; and there is a curious story that he was nearly buried alive when he was a boy. He had had the small-pox and was actually laid out for dead. His father went in to see him, raised him in his arms saying, "I will give my dear boy another chance," and as he did so, saw signs of returning life.

Another vicar was Samuel Speed, grandson of the John Speed who made the maps, and at one time he was chaplain of the fleet when Lord Ossory fought the Dutch. Sir John Birkenhead immortalised him in a ballad on the fight:—

His chaplain, he plyed his wonted work, He prayed like a Christian, and fought like a Turk, Crying now for the King, and the Duke of York, With a thump, a thump, thump!

Another of Godalming's clergy was the Reverend Nicholas Andrewes, who came into severe collisions with his parishioners. They petitioned Parliament against being compelled to bear with him any longer. They charged him among other offences with "preachinge but seldom, and then alsoe but in a verie fruytlesse and unprofitable mann^r." They urged that he was "a Haunter, and frequenter of tiplinge in Innes, and tavernes, and useth gameinge both at cards and Table as well uppon the Lords dayes as others." They accused him of having declined to church one Mrs. Buckley "when she came to church and sate there all the tyme of dyvine service, because she was not attyred wi^th an hanginge kerchief." They said that he kept a curious crucifix "in a Boxe wi^th foldinge windowes." Finally, John Monger and John Tichborne alleged "that the said vicar and M^r. Wayferar, Parson of Compton, in the said Countie of Surry, roade to Southampton, to eate Fishe and to make merrie togeather, and there (dyverse tymes) drank healthes to the Pope calling him that honest olde man." So much, and more, the parishioners had to say against him. He was decided to be a Malignant Priest; White, in his First Century of Scandalous and Malignant Ministers, arraigns him, among other offences, for having "expressed himself to be an enemy to frequent preaching, inveighing in his sermons against long Sermons, saying that Peters sword cut off but one eare, but long Sermons like long swords cut off both at once, and that the Surfeit of the Word is of all most dangerous, and that the silliest creatures have longest eares, and that preaching was the worst part of God's worship, and that if he left out anything he would leave out that." And that, for Mr. Andrewes, was the end; a man who lost his living because he would rather pray than preach.



Two women have left records behind them, one strange and the other cruel, in the parish annals. One was a remarkable person named Mary Tofts, wife of a clothworker, who in 1726 professed to have had a lamentable misadventure. She asserted that while she was weeding in a field she was startled by a rabbit jumping up near her, and that subsequently, she presented her husband, instead of a fine boy, with quantities of rabbits. The effect of the announcement was prodigious. More than one well-known physician believed her implicitly; pamphlets were published on clinics, Hogarth printed a cut of the Wise Men of Godlyman; nobody would eat a rabbit; at last Queen Caroline ended the business by sending her own doctor to investigate, and Mary Tofts was lodged in Bridewell. Another poor woman deceived less and was punished more. The parish registers hold the record.

Aprill the 26^th 1658. Heare was taken a vagrant, one Mary Parker, Widow with a Child, and she was wipped according to law, about the age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the place of her birth, that is in Grauesend in Kent, and she is limitted to iiij days, and to be carried from Tithing to Tything tell she comes to the end of the s^d jerney.

A reformer of prison discipline, who was a native of Godalming, would have read the entry with rage. General Oglethorpe, founder of the colony of Georgia, and originator of the inquiry into the state of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons, was born at Westbrook in Godalming forty years after Godalming beat the woman through its friendless streets. We meet General Oglethorpe at Haslemere; perhaps if he had lived earlier he would have dared to lift his hand against the savage Elizabethan law.

How could a town assent to such shame, and yet maintain on its outskirts an almshouse? Godalming's almshouse is a long low building of red brick, standing behind a white gate and some elms on the road by Farncombe. It was founded by Richard Wyatt, a rich Londoner, three times Master of the Carpenters' Company, and the inscription over the entrance stands as he made it:—

"This Oyspitall was given by M^r. Richard Wyatt of London, Esq.: for tenn poore men w^th sueficient lands to it for y^ier mayntenance for eve^r, 1622."



Farncombe is Godalming's suburb, and from above its hilly streets can be had a strangely romantic view of the valley by Guildford, with St. Martha's chapel crowning the hill. From Farncombe, too, you may take one of the prettiest walks of all by the Wey, through rich fields of grass ennobled with bordering elms, and with the Wey running here level with you through meadowsweet and iris, and here below the footpath, seen through the trees. If you push up stream, you will come to Eashing Bridge, one of the oldest and strongest of Surrey bridges, and now a national possession, secured from attacks of brick and iron by the Society for Preserving Places of Historic Interest—an admirable Society. Eashing Bridge, or rather Bridges, for it crosses the Wey twice, and has more than five buttresses standing in the water, has stood over the Wey for more than seven centuries. The old engineers perhaps built over a stronger Wey than to-day's, for they made the buttresses that point up stream to divide the water; on the other side they are round and blunt. The time to stand on Eashing Bridge is when it is quietest, on a Sunday morning. Up stream is the mill, humming out one of the best of all songs of water; to the left is a row of timbered cottages, cream-painted brick and black beams, and gay when I saw them on a blue August morning with sweet peas and dahlias; a villager and his wife gathered fruit in a garden banked above the road, and white-frocked, black-stockinged children sat demurely in the cottage doorways. But there is a patch of corrugated iron by the Eashing cottages and bridge which calls for a Society of Destroyers.

Godalming has two fine parks for neighbours, Peperharow and Loseley. Peperharow, which became the first Lord Midleton's in 1712, once belonged to Sir Bernard Brocas, who was Master of the Buckhounds to Richard II; afterwards it came to the great family of the Coverts. Peperharow Park has its own church, but the beauty of the place is in the parkland itself, with its noble trees and stretches of grass, and the Wey running through it down to Eashing. Deer wander in the sunshine there, dark and comely under the great cedars, or grazing slowly and sedately by the banks of the stream. One might walk out from Godalming only to watch the Peperharow deer; but a walk beyond the park brings another pleasure. Above Peperharow the Wey is bridged again, by stone as old, I think, as at Eashing: the buttress of the main part of the bridge is the same shape as Eashing's. Above the bridge is a fall built across the stream: only a few inches of masonry, but it changes the stream completely. The higher water is a broad, shadowy pool, cooled and darkened by alders meeting overhead and dipping in the water; below, the shallow water ripples over stones, as clear and black as a northern salmon stream. The difference between the Wey here and the Wey at Eashing or Tilford is, of course its bed. The Wey runs over as many beds as any little river in England; here it races over clean ironstone.

Loseley has a longer story than Peperharow, and Loseley House is a very fine old Tudor building, the best, perhaps, in Surrey, after Sutton. Sir William More built most of it, and took much of the stone from Waverley Abbey, for which it would be difficult to forgive him if he had made a less beautiful house. Sir William More was son of Sir Christopher, Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex under Henry VIII. Sir Christopher first had the estate in 1515; at the Domesday Survey the Earl of Arundel had it. The family history of the Mores is too long for a chapter; so would be a detailed list of the furniture and pictures of the house, some of which are catalogued in the guide-books, though the general public may see them but seldom. The house has had royal visitors; Queen Elizabeth came to see Sir William More there, and King James and his son were both guests of Sir George More, Sir William's son. It was Sir George More who was so furious with his daughter for marrying John Donne, though he lived to be good enough to forgive her.



I like to look at these great houses from a distance. When one enters a house that has been used by an historic family for generations, the first thing that demands attention is far more often than not something new, an alteration, an adaptation of old means to new methods. The mark set on the house is of the living, and the fascination of it belongs to other years gone. But distance blots out all the innovations; the haze of half a mile sets it in the landscape as it has stood for centuries. I like to look at Loseley from the dusty, forgotten places of the old pilgrims' road passing at the boundary of the park; not that the pilgrims ever saw Loseley, but the old countrymen still using the road would have seen it first, perhaps, from that ancient trackway, and have wondered what manner of man its master might be, and how much he paid for the building of it, and whether the King or the Queen would be coming to Loseley again soon. That is the Loseley they would have seen; a noble dwelling of grey gables and spacious windows, looking over broad parkland and wide water with red cattle standing in it, flicking at the flies with their tails. So, perhaps, would Henry Wriothesley, second Earl of Southampton, have looked at Loseley from a distance, when Elizabeth sent him there, the Papist prisoner of Sir William More. He would have glanced doubtfully up and down the old road and wondered over the hopelessness of escape.

Godalming's nearest, and in point of size, its greatest neighbour is Charterhouse. Charterhouse is the name; the buildings are not yet forty years old. The school moved from Aldersgate to the hill above Godalming in 1872, and took the memories of Addison, Steele, and Thackeray with it in its museum and library. The Charterhouse buildings belong to the future. Centuries will add the grace of dulness to its new stone; trees will grow round its cricket ground, distance will set a haze round the names of its Surrey schoolboys; it will have venerable wood, there will be legends of the passages and the stairs; the doors will have been darkened by great men; there will be a film and a glory of years about its chapel. To-day it is admirably arranged, hygienic beyond praise: then it will be an old building as well as an old school.



CHAPTER XII

HASLEMERE AND HINDHEAD

Six hundred feet up.—Haslemere's Museum.—A strange Tomb.—The Lion.—The Cow.—Snipes in Conduit Street.—Shottermill Trout.—Hindhead.—The Riddle of a Crime.—A deserted Road.—The View from Gibbet Hill.—Airly Beacon.—The Broom Squire.—Highcombe Bottom.—Pheasants, Tadpoles, and Swifts.

Hindhead commands the south-west corner of the county, but Haslemere is the key to it. You cannot walk away from Hindhead and take a train back if you want to, which you ought always to be able to do from a centre. Besides, to return to Hindhead is to end with a steep hill to climb; coming back to Haslemere, you can either drop down the hill from Hindhead, or the railway will carry you uphill to the little town from Milford or Witley down the line.

It is really uphill, for Haslemere lies higher than any town in the south of England—or is said to do so; I have not measured them all. I think Tatsfield and Woldingham in the east of the county lie higher; but they are villages, not towns. Haslemere is between five and six hundred feet above sea level; as high as Newlands Corner and nearly three times the height of St. George's or St. Anne's Hill. If Hindhead were sliced away, Haslemere's view to the north would be superb.



Haslemere has strayed higher and higher on the slopes above the old town. The core lies round a broad street in which the White Horse faces the Swan, and the town hall stands between them, a rather dull little building, in the middle of the road. The town has kept less of the past than Farnham; perhaps it had less to keep; but it has some good red seventeenth-century houses, weather-tiled gables, and tall brick chimneys. Toadflax and arabis climb over the old garden walls: one little house looks as if its walls were held together by coils of wistaria. In another, a square, comfortable building with an elaborate doorway, lived the water-colour painter and wood engraver, Josiah Wood Whymper, father of the Whymper whom a later generation knows best as a painter of animals and game birds.

The most interesting interior in Haslemere is the museum. It was presented to the town by Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, and teaches history, geology, botany and everything to do with Haslemere's (and other) birds, beasts, and reptiles. You may study the development of the world from the birth of life perhaps thirty-one million years ago—that is the age Haslemere teaches—down to the present day. Skulls of elephants, antelopes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, gorillas and giraffes instruct the zoologist; local vipers and grass snakes curl in spirits of wine; stuffed quadrupeds, including a large kangaroo, illustrate climates foreign to Haslemere; local ornithologists contribute cases of the birds of the neighbourhood. Witley sends a case of crossbills; twenty years ago a pair of hen harriers—or are they Montagu's harriers?—were killed on Hindhead; a blackcock guards his grey hen, and was shot not far away. Are blackcock extinct in Surrey? The last Lord Midleton wrote to The Times some years ago to state his belief that they were. At Frensham I was told that the last pair were shot in 1889. But Mr. E.D. Swanton, the curator of the Haslemere Museum, learned in everything that a museum should hold, from Celtic pottery to caterpillars, told me when I was at Haslemere that he had seen a pair (I write in 1908) only two years ago. He was not at all certain that there were no more blackcocks in the county. But I fear the villas have been too much for them.

The church stands a little apart from the town, and holds two very different memorials. One is the Burne-Jones window to the memory of Tennyson, who lived at Aldworth on Black Down over the border; the other is a strange, rough heap of peat and heather, piled inside the gate of the churchyard. Under it lies John Tyndall. He was one of the discoverers of Hindhead as a place to live in instead of merely a hill to climb; the tragedy of his death is a recent memory. It was his wish that his grave should be no more than a mound of heather, but such wishes can end unhappily. If the grave is neglected, perhaps that is what he hoped it would be; but neglect, can grow into something worse. When I last saw the grave—perhaps on an unfortunate day—the heather had somehow collected newspapers and empty jampots; it looked like soon becoming a rubbish heap.

A writer in the Gentleman's Magazine visited Haslemere in 1801 and described the painted glass in the windows. One of them he catalogued thus:

"Offering of the Wise Men. Among the numerous presents, I distinguished some fine hams, poultry, and mutton."

A recent inspection fails to distinguish among the numerous presents either fine hams or mutton.

Years ago Haslemere had a lion. It was an old beech tree, twenty feet in girth, and the late Louis Jennings, in his Field Paths and Green Lanes, tells us that since Murray's Handbook spoke of a lion, he searched for it for long, and when he found it he was disappointed. To-day it is a stump, or is said to be, but nobody could show it me; I am sure I looked for it longer than Louis Jennings, but I never found it. All I found was what will perhaps some day grow into another lion—a beech tree and a holly apparently growing from the same root.



Haslemere's history is mostly political, and not always very respectable. Elizabeth, perhaps, made the village a borough; at all events, two members sat for Haslemere first in the Parliament of 1584, and two members represented the borough until it was unkindly abolished by the reforms of 1832. Some of its members came of old Surrey families—Carews, Mores, Oglethorpes, Onslows, Evelyns; and some of its elections were highly irregular. One of the most successful pieces of jobbery stands to the credit of the year 1754, when the Tory sitting members, General Oglethorpe and Peter Burrell, were opposed by two Whigs, James More Molyneux and Philip Carteret Webb, a London lawyer. Molyneux and Webb were elected by 73 votes to 45, but some at least of the 73 (perhaps also some of the 45) would not have borne strict investigation. Eight of the winning votes were faggot votes manufactured out of the Cow Inn, of Haslemere, which inspired Dr. William King, Principal of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, to a ballad of forty-two verses, entitled The Cow of Haslemere, or The Conjurer's Secretary at Oxford. Dr. King liked politics in poetry to be hot and strong, thus:—

"No Man could hear, But he must fear Her loud infernal Roar, Such horrid Lies, And Blasphemies She bellow'd out and swore.

But what must make The stoutest quake, And all with Horror gape, At one strange Birth, This Cow cast forth Eight Calves in human Shape.

For in this Cow Each did somehow A Tenement possess, How big this Beast Must be at least From hence, Sirs, ye may guess.

The Crew march'd out, An horrid Rout, No Bear's Cubs could be bolder! Each calf did vote, And swear by Rote He was a good Freeholder."

One, at least, of Haslemere's members was more than a mere party politician. General James Edward Oglethorpe, who was defeated on the occasion of the Cow's remarkable parturition, was the son of a former member, Sir Theophilus Oglethorpe, and sat for Haslemere from 1722 till he was beaten at the poll. He was the great philanthropist of his day; he was the generous and active friend of imprisoned debtors; he was the founder of the colony of Georgia, and a general who held a position with 650 men against 5,000 Spaniards. It was General Oglethorpe who obtained an inquiry by Parliament into the management of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons. A friend of his named Castell had been thrown into the Fleet for debt, and because he could not pay the warder's dues had been shut in a house where the small-pox was raging: he took the disease and died. Oglethorpe was thoroughly roused, and the inquiry held into the gaol system of the country was the beginning of his work for debtors and prisoners. Later, he got Parliamentary sanction and large sums of money to found a colony of emigrant debtors in the New World, made friends with the Creek and the Choctaw Indians, fought the Spaniards, and planted the roots of his little settlement so firmly that he lived to see Georgia acknowledged by the Mother Country as a sovereign independent State.

Some years ago there was an exhibition of Old Haslemere held at the Museum, of which Mr. Swanton very kindly gave me particulars. One of the pictures lent by Mr. J.W. Penfold, an old, if not the oldest, inhabitant, shows General Oglethorpe with the accompanying note:-"General James Oglethorpe. Died 30th June, 1785, Aged 102, said to be the oldest General in Europe. Sketched from life at the sale of Dr. Johnson's books, February 18, 1785, where the General was reading a book he had purchased without spectacles. In 1706 he had an Ensign Commission in the Guards, and remember'd to have shot snipes in Conduit Mead, where Conduit Street now stands." The compiler of the note may have been right about the snipes, but he was wrong about the General's age, for he was no more than 96. But the admirable caution of the phrase "said to be" remains on record.

When Haslemere was finally deprived of its two members, the local reformers were jubilant. One of them, in The Burial of the Boroughs, printed at Petersfield in 1832, burst into verse:—

"Old Borough-bridge is broken down, In spite of its proud pier; And Seaford, too, is just dry'd up, And so is Hasle-mere.

It is not strange they've damn'd Newport, It is such cursed trash; And where's the gourmand would complain For kicking out Salt-ash.

Toll, toll: these Boroughs ne'er will be By us through life forgotten; Nor will their patrons when they lie, Just like their Boroughs, rotten."

After the burial of the rotten boroughs came the railway, and a long time after the railway the artists and authors. Most of them climbed further, up to Hindhead, but Haslemere kept a few. Mrs. Allingham painted the Haslemere fish-shop and other village scenes, though she lived nearer Witley than Haslemere. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle played cricket for Haslemere till he went up the hill: Dr. George Macdonald built a house on the London road: the Whympers we have met. Tennyson's memorial is in the church, but Tennyson's was a Sussex home, on Blackdown.

Shottermill joins Haslemere on the west, and has had its own author. George Eliot wrote much of Middlemarch in a cottage near the church. Fishermen know Shottermill, for its hillsides are ladders of small ponds, in which tens of thousands of trout have been bred for other, wilder streams. The Surrey Trout Farm began its existence in one of these chains of ponds; its farmers breed their Loch Levens and rainbows now, I think, in another chain. What is the metier of a trout farm? Who shall decide? There are fishermen who would never knowingly throw a fly over a trout that had been hand-fed with chopped horseflesh; and there are other fishermen who, if there were no trout farms, would never have anything to fish for. The ponds have their own fascination; not, perhaps, at meal-times, when the water is lashed to froth by the darting, gleaming bodies—that is too greedy a business. But when a passer-by on a spring morning sees a pound fish fall back into the water with a meditative flop, he may pay the pond the compliment of wishing himself elsewhere. One accompaniment of a trout farm he may hope to escape—the sight of a dead kingfisher. Without wire netting, kingfishers find out the young fry only too quickly, and a dead kingfisher spoils all pleasure for a fisherman.

And so, from Haslemere by a rough path up the hill, or through Shottermill by a straight main road, or a shady lane grown over with almost every tree of hedgerows and woods, we come to Hindhead. There are many ways to the top, and these, though in some ways the most convenient, are not the best. But the best, which is to reach it by the old Portsmouth road from Thursley, can be kept for later in the day. The worst way to see Hindhead is to follow the motor-cars up the main road. The motor-cars see the road, but never Hindhead at all.



Hindhead is the most superb and the most disappointing thing in Surrey. A quarter of a century ago it was wild moorland; then Professor Tyndall proclaimed that since he could not go to the Bel Alp, he would go to the next best place, and from that day the hill has changed to streets, villas, and hotels. London arrives every Saturday: London swarms on Sunday. But you can still see, or can guess, something of the grandeur and loneliness of the place; best, perhaps, on the east and the northern slopes towards Thursley; most fully, alone on the highest point, Gibbet Hill.

Hindhead, before the town came there, had a grisly sound in the name. The Hindhead murder has grown from a sordid case of robbery and killing into one of the great crimes of English local history. Nothing would have seemed less likely to the murderers. Probably not one of them could read or write; perhaps any sensible calculation of the chances of escape was beyond them; possibly they never planned the murder at all. Their crime, in a sense, was paltry; if it had never been discovered, there would have been no further consequences; no one but the murdered man, so far as can be told, was injured; the man was never missed nor owned by a friend. The murder of a king reshapes history; an assassinated Minister may change a Constitution; the killing of this man, apparently, mattered to no single living soul. Yet his murderers, in all their clumsiness and ignorance, contrived a crime which should be talked of daily for a century, and should have its separate, distinct record in stone when a thousand plots and passions of regicides and usurpers should be as clean forgotten as if their record had never stained blank paper.

Where is the permanent quality? Perhaps it is murder isolated, set exactly in the light which means and belongs to murder, in the atmosphere in which all imagination of murderers moves and hides. It was at night, it was in a wild place, with the horror of a great height about it; the corpse was stripped, the man was nameless. He was a sailor, walking from London to Portsmouth on September 23rd, 1786, to look for a job. He had money in his pocket; at Esher he fell in with three men, also on the road to Portsmouth, but without money; he paid for food and drink and lodging for them, and he was last seen alive with them at the Red Lion near Thursley. Perhaps the men were followed—one account says they were watched—perhaps the finding of the body was by chance. Two cottagers, coming after them over the highest stretch of the hill, saw below them, white in the dim light, on the slope of the Punch Bowl round which the road runs, the dead body as they thought of a sheep. One climbed down and saw what it was. Pursuers rushed down the road at Sheet, near Petersfield, the three were caught, trying to sell the dead man's clothes. They were tried at Kingston, and hanged in chains on the highest point of Hindhead; and there their bodies swung in the wind over every coach that drove from London to Portsmouth.

The old Portsmouth road ran over the summit of the hill. The new road, cut in 1826, winds lower down, and on the lower road the stone stands to commemorate the crime. It was moved by the Ordnance Survey from the higher ground, heedless of the warning engraved on it. On one side runs the inscription:—

ERECTED

In Detestation of a barbarous Murder Committed here on an unknown Sailor, On Sep^r. 24^th, 1786, By Edw^d. Lonegan, Michael Casey, and Ja^s. Marshall, Who were all taken the same day, And hung in Chains near this place.

The back of the stone informs us that it was erected by order and at the cost of James Stillwell, of Cosford, 1786, and that he lays a curse on "the man who injureth or removeth this stone." However, that had no effect on the Ordnance Surveyors.

The gibbet stood for years. Gilbert White writes to Thomas Barker from Selborne on New Year's Day, 1791:—

The thunder storm on Dec. 23 in the morning before day was very aweful: but, I thank God, it did not do us the least harm. Two millers, in a wind-mill on the Sussex downs near Good-wood, were struck dead by lightning that morning; and part of the gibbet on Hind-head, on which two murderers were suspended, was beaten down.

Local art has depicted the scene; four original oil-paintings grace the walls of the Huts Hotel. Than the drawing of the stage-coach in full gallop up to the gibbet in the dead of night, nothing could be well more frightful.

Louis Jennings's description, in Field Paths and Green Lanes, of the Portsmouth road as he saw it in 1876, is worth reading at Hindhead on a summer day:—

It is with surprise that in this lonely waste one sees, between the Devil's Punch Bowl and the top of the hill, a fine, broad, and well-kept road; nor is that surprise diminished when you come upon it, and find that it is as hard and smooth as any road in a private park can possibly be. There are very few marks of wheels to be found upon it, but abundant traces of sheep. This is the main Portsmouth road, and to any one who knows what the roads are in country places, and even in large towns, throughout the United States, this splendid thoroughfare must seem one of the greatest curiosities in England; for the traffic of London Bridge might be driven along it, and even in this steep and wild country it is kept in the most perfect order. I declare that I stood looking at that road in amazement for pretty nearly quarter of an hour, and I am inclined to think that if I had stayed there till now I should not have seen anybody or anything coming along it in either direction. Will the tide of English summer travel ever again turn towards England itself?

The tide turns every Saturday and Sunday. But besides the tide, for which policemen set traps along the level road, Hindhead maintains a colony of its own. The western side of the hill and Grayshott on the Hampshire slope are almost a town. Grayshott lies actually in Hampshire, but geographically it belongs to Hindhead; so do Waggoner's Wells, a string of ponds rather like the Shottermill trout hatchery, but set much more prettily among trees.

Of Hindhead it is as true as of other places with magnificent views, that you must live on the spot to be sure of getting them. It is only the greatest good luck that allows a casual visitor full measure of the splendour of clear air all round him, north, south, east, and west. Even if it is clear to the south it may well be misty to the north, and, of course, the angle of the sunlight makes all the difference to the sharpness with which this or that detail of scenery stands out from its surroundings. In one respect the view from the highest point of Hindhead is never perfect. To the south-east, on a neighbouring slope, the pine trees that crest the ridge block out the downs over Brighton and Newhaven. It is a pity, for only from the tower on Leith Hill, not on Leith Hill itself, is there another view in the south-east of England with so wonderful an expanse of country seen clear away to the horizon. St. George's Hill is blocked with trees, so is St. Anne's; Leith Hill is almost clear, but from Hindhead, until those unlucky pines grew up, you could see pretty nearly thirty miles on any side. Not that the Devil's Dyke and the downs beyond cannot any longer be seen from Hindhead; you can get a fine view of them a mile away to the north, from the old Portsmouth road, on the other side of the new road, but from that point the view is not nearly so fine on the other sides. The hill is not so high. On Gibbet Hill you are 895 feet above sea level according to the ordnance map; if you have no map, you can consult a brass disc which has been erected on the plateau, which gives you also other interesting information. All the distances to the neighbouring towns are marked, for instance, with the direction in which they lie as the crow flies—an admirable idea, due to the generosity of Mr. T.W. Erle of Bramshott Grange, brother of the Sir William Erle who put up the granite cross which stands close by. It will be safer, in future, perhaps, to trust to the ordnance map rather than the disc for the exact figures, for some of them have already been nearly rubbed out, and Cockney names have been scratched on the brass. There they remain, the only gibbet on Gibbet Hill.