After Mrs. Mapp, the end came quickly. Sea-bathing finished the little town altogether; "the modern delightful practice of sea-bathing," as Pownall puts it with tolerance. He does not give up hope, even in 1825; he hopes that the medical profession will still give the wells a trial, and believes that the waters will be found worthy. After that he comes to the consideration of Epsom's races.

Water ended Epsom in 1715; wine began Epsom again in 1780. A party of gentlemen, drinking at Lord Derby's table at Lambert's Oaks, a house on the high ground above the town, lifted their glasses to the glories of horse-racing. They founded two races, one, in 1779, for three-year-old fillies; another, in 1780, for three-year-old colts and fillies. They named the races after their host and the house where they drank, and Epsom was made again. The Derby and the Oaks became national institutions. Before that roystering party, the downs had seen racing, but had not seen a racing crowd. Charles II had run his horses on Epsom and Banstead downs; perhaps his horse now and then bore away the silver bell, which was the first and simple prize when horses began racing. Queen Anne may have entered a colt or two at Epsom: her consort, Prince George of Denmark, loved horse-racing and drank Epsom waters. Greatest of all memories of the Turf, Eclipse lived for years by Epsom downs, and won poor little races for an obscure commoner. He would have won any race he could have been asked by a king, but it was the fate of the finest racehorse ever foaled to live before the Derby was founded, and before he could race another horse worthy to pass the starting post with him. Pownall, in his History of Epsom, has a pleasant passage extolling Eclipse's merits. He writes in 1825: he has studied, he tells us, Lawrence's History of the Horse and Bingley's British Quadrupeds, and this is the result:—

"Eclipse was withheld from the course till he was five years of age, and was first tried at Epsom. He had considerable length of waist, and stood over a large space of ground, in which particular he was an opposite form to the flying Childers, a short backed, compact horse, whose reach lay in his lower limbs; but, from the shape of his body, we are inclined to believe that Eclipse would have beaten Childers in a race over a mile course with equal weights. He once ran four miles in eight minutes, carrying twelve stone, and with this weight Eclipse won eleven King's plates.[A] He was never beaten, never had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur; nor was he ever for a moment distressed by the speed or rate of a competitor; out-footing, out-striding, and out-lasting (says Mr. Lawrence) every horse which started against him."

Eclipse, like Homer, had many birthplaces. Mr. Theodore Cook, who has written authoritatively of him where others have guessed or accepted tradition, has been informed of more than seven; and, in collecting details of relics of the great horse, he has been supplied with evidence that Eclipse possessed no fewer than six "undoubted" skeletons, nine "authentic" feet, sufficient "genuine" hair to have stuffed the largest armchair in Newmarket, and "certified" portions of skin which would easily have carpeted the yard at Tattersall's. There never was such an omnipresent animal.

After 1780, the horse-racing crowd grew. In Pownall's time, when the Derby and Oaks had not been established forty-five years, the Derby attracted some sixty subscribers, and the Oaks about forty, of fifty guineas apiece, and Epsom was full to overflowing. The watering-place has become a circus. The race week brings down all London. "At an early hour in the morning, persons of all ranks, and carriages innumerable, are seen pouring into the town at every inlet. All the accommodations and provisions that the surrounding villages can supply are put in requisition." The royal family would come to look on; sixty thousand spectators, Pownall thinks, met on the downs.

But Pownall has nothing to say of the road. The road must have been the thing to see; not as we see it to-day, when motor cars start for the course before lunch instead of before breakfast, and luxurious railway trains draw decadent race-goers to Tattenham Corner. In the real Derby days all racing men that were men drove to Epsom, early in the morning, by the road. Four-in-hand coaches travelled level in the pack and the dust by costermongers' donkeys; at every inn there were touts and tipsters, haunting creatures with secrets of betting; they knew what would win outright and what would certainly lose; the Duke's trainer had whispered to them, the swindling Captain had tipped them the wink; you merely had to pay for the knowledge. Wayside strips of green were turned into cocoanut shies, wherever a man might wish to shy at nuts; clowns on stilts stalked in chequered blue; bare-legged boys and girls turned amazing Catherine wheels. There was the hill to finish with by the course, and the plaudits of the crowd for him who took his team up in spanking style. They still drive four-in-hand coaches up the hill; but the motor-horn follows the coach-horn.

Frith has made the Victorian Derby day immortal; a less well-known hand has written of what Frith painted. The author who signed himself "Sylvanus," and wrote with an admirable gusto of racing men and racing scenes in the forties, has set down in his Bye-lanes and Downs of England a strange picture of the Ring on Epsom downs as he saw it. In his day it was formed "on the crest of the Down, round a post or limb of a gibbet"—similia similibus, you might suppose reading the list of heroes who met there. "The 'plunging prelate and his ponderous Grace'; my lord George, the 'bold baker,' and Mr. Unwell; Sir Xenophon Sunflower, the Assassin, and the flash grazier; the Dollar, hellite, billiard-marker, and bacon-factor; the ringletted O'Bluster, double-jointed publican, Leather lungs, and Handsome Jack contrasted in the pig's skin; and, ye Centaurs! what seats were there!" It must have been a sight for proper men to see. Not the veriest tailor would walk on Derby day. He "would mount a mis-teached hippogriff, and risk the chance of a purl, rather than not show at the covert-side." Who, indeed, would not bestride a steed when he might meet the Assassin and the O'Bluster in the ring? But there were others:—

At the time we write of, "Old Crutch," too, with his scaffolding under his arm, and disabled limb dangling like a loose girth from his rosinante's side, a quadruped equalling the Dollar's mount in beauty,—might have been seen side by side with Lord Chesterfield, on his thoroughbred, and addressing him in all the Timbobbinish horrors of his frightful vernacular. My lord was then in the zenith of his good looks and humour, and was, moreover, so well upon Cotherstone, that he saw graces in Old Crutch's physog, with the charming "thousand to forty" he hoped to draw him of on the Tuesday prochain,—that he joked and rattled with the uncouth old cripple in undisguised merriment. With these might have been noticed the elegant form of Lord Wilton, on his roan, shaded again by a round-shouldered knave from Manchester, with ungloved hands and snub nose, who had "potted the crack" for his special line of action. His yeoman Grace of Limbs, fresh and hearty as a summer gale, mounted on his Blue-eyed Maid, loomed in stalwart manhood by the side of some pallid greek or city trader, having a word of greeting and jollity for all alike, for he was there for the sake of sport, and had no anxiety beyond his "pony."

The Heavies, as Thornhill of Riddlesworth, Sir Hercules Fitzoutlawe, and poor fatty Sutherland, together with my Lord Miltown, from his not being particularly adapted for an equestrian display, appeared in their several chariots on the outskirts of the ring, an occasional lull in the wordy tumult permitting the Irishman's lisping scream to penetrate the dense and agitated circle, in his praiseworthy efforts to do business. Old Crocky, too, was there, mounted on a subdued wretch of the horse-species, tenanted, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, by the evil spirit of some defunct croupier, and ready to "return on the nick" as usual. In this "mess tossed up of Hockley-Hole and White's," in addition to our foregoing inventory, were dukes and butchers....

But these are perhaps enough. Has the crowd on the hill changed much since the forties? The Ring roars no longer round a gibbet, of course; a Grand Stand of vast dimensions overlooks the course from starting-gate to paddock; dukes no longer ride side by side with butchers to make bets. But the crowd itself, and what the crowd does, and what it sees and feels—all that, surely, has changed hardly at all. The gipsies still swarm, and the touts still swindle; the bookmakers, bedizened with belts of silver coin, and outlandish hats, and flaring assertions of personal integrity, still clamour by their blackboards; they still chalk up the odds they offer against horses whose names they mis-spell; the sun still shines on the jockeys' silk jackets; still, down a course cleared empty, distracted dogs rush madly; still, before the start for the great race, there broods over that huge concourse an intense, almost a dreadful silence; still there is the shout as the jackets flash from the starting-gate, still the hum as they sweep down the bend, the roar as they rush for the straight, the yell as the leader drops back, shoots out, thunders past the judge. All that remains, and will remain. But two changes are insistent. One is the motor-cars, which are all over the hill and almost everywhere else; but that is a permanent thing. The other is the advertisements on the kites. In the old days the downs lay under blue sky and white clouds. Now they lie, on Derby day, under strings of kites. You may go to Epsom to see horse-racing, but you will not escape soap, mustard, or pills.

Of Epsom's residents and neighbours, Lord Derby won the race named after him in 1787, and doubtless others have won since. But the best record belongs to the owner of Durdans, who won the Derby in 1894 with Ladas, in 1895 with Sir Visto, and in 1905 with Cicero; and who, in addition to his career as politician, man of letters, and owner of racehorses, has added difficulties to the tasks of other writers by contributing to Mr. Gordon Home's Guide to Epsom a discouragingly brilliant preface.

Another peer has made Epsom history in a different way. At Pit Place lived the second Lord Lyttelton, and at Pit Place he died, leaving behind him a profligate name and a ghost story which Dr. Johnson thought the most extraordinary he had ever heard. It was in November, 1779; Lord Lyttelton had just returned from Ireland, and was seized with suffocating fits. One night he dreamt a dream. A dove hovered over him, changed to a woman in white, and spoke to him. It was a dead face, and he knew who it was; her two daughters were under his roof. Her words were few: "Lord Lyttelton, prepare to die!" "When?" he gasped. "In three days," she answered, and vanished. He called his man, who found him wet with sweat and his whole frame working. The third day came, and he jested with his guests at breakfast—"If I live over to-night, I shall have jockeyed the ghost." He dined at five, went to bed at eleven, called his servant a slovenly dog for not bringing a spoon for his medicine, and sent for a spoon. The man returned, found him in a fit, and roused the house. But Lord Lyttelton was dead. He was thirty-five.



FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: It is generally admitted, that a horse which will run four miles in eight minutes, carrying a weight of eight stone and a-half, must win plates.

Bingley.]



CHAPTER XXV

MID-SURREY DOWNS AND COMMONS

Ewell.—A Clear Stream.—Nonsuch Palace.—The Right Use for a King's Gift.—Cheam.—Satin Haycocks.—A Chained Anachronism.—Chessington.—Dancing Round the Mulberry Tree.—A House of Mourning.—A Fool for a present.—Esher.—The great horse Bendigo.—Macaulay and the Hop-pickers.—Surrey English.—Gypsy boys selling a pony.

North and south of Epsom are scattered villages on downs and commons; some, like Ewell and Cheam to the north and east, changing the word village into town; others, like Walton-on-the-hill and Headley to the south-west, or Chessington to the north-west, merely groups of cottages with a church. Epsom is the centre of the Surrey churches which have been destroyed or disused rather than restored, and the reason for the destruction of the group is obscure. Some strange infection ran in the destroyer's brains; Epsom, perhaps, began it; Ewell, Cheam, Headley fell later; Esher built a new church, but stayed from destroying the old. Walton, Woodmansterne, and Banstead have been altered almost out of recognition of what was old; Chessington alone looks upon almost untroubled centuries.

Ewell almost joins Epsom; Ewell with its old name Etwell, which its historians tell you means At ye Well; the guess looks too easy. The well is plain enough to see; Ewell has pools of the clearest water and springs running fast by the side of the street; it is the most definite beginning of a river that ever attracted a village to its banks, and it runs out of the village as the little Hog's Mill river—a stream with a sparkle in it that deserves a prettier name. But the village which the stream drew to it has changed. The High Street has kept some of its older houses, with upper stories jutting out over the road; but the church which the old houses knew has gone. They pulled it down in the forties—that unhappy decade for anything ancient and quiet in Surrey villages; all they left was the tower, a mighty mass of stone and ivy that stands with its nave reft from it, the forlornest and most meaningless of ruins. If the tower might stand, why not the nave? They pulled the nave down, and left the tower standing, so Mr. C.J. Swete, one of Epsom's historians, tells you, in order that it "should remain to beautify the landscape." They acted, he observes, "with good taste and judgment" in so doing. Theirs is that praise.

But Ewell has a greater ruin. Ewell Castle preserves it in Ewell Park; but when I was at Ewell the Castle and Park were for sale, and I could find no one who could show it me, or even who knew where it was. Few, perhaps, have seen it, and there can be little to see, by all accounts, but what remains is the ruin of Nonsuch Palace—just the foundations of the banquet hall; that is all that remains of the palace which was to be incomparable, like no palace a king ever built before, the royalest building in Christendom. That was what Henry VIII meant to make it, when he began it in 1538, and he had built most of it when he died nine years later. It stood unfinished for ten years more; then Mary sold it to the Earl of Arundell, and he finished it. Elizabeth bought it back, and so it came a royal palace to the Stuarts; even the Parliamentary wars left it untouched, and it was the refuge for Charles II's Exchequer at the fire of London. Pepys has a picture of Nonsuch, just after the Restoration. "A very noble house," he calls it, "and a delicate park about it, where just now there was a doe killed for the King, to carry up to the Court." Two years later he walked in the park and admired the house and the trees; "a great walk of an elm and a walnut set one after another in order. And all the house on the outside filled with figures of stories, and good painting of Rubens' or Holbein's doing. And one great thing is that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts and quarters in the walls, with lead, and gilded. I walked also into the ruined garden." That is Charles II; the doe killed in the park for the King, the ruined garden. An old print shows Nonsuch in 1582; a great quadrangle with towers at the corners, and cupolas, which perhaps were gilt, and bannerets round the cupolas, and countless little windows; along the face of the building are high Tudor windows with bas-reliefs between them; in the foreground of the park a great lady rides in a chariot with gaily caparisoned horses; a greyhound bounds by her side, spaniels in leash drag a huntsman after the carriage; in the far distance, beyond the palace, hounds and men hunt a noble stag, pictured as if the whole airy chase flew round a cupola. It was a great palace, and it should be standing to-day, with its lead and its gilt and its Rubenses and Holbeins. But Charles II gave it to Barbara Villiers, and she knew the right use for a king's gift.

Cheam, east from Ewell by two miles, has kept not the tower of its old church but its chancel. The little building stands apart in the churchyard; you may peep through a grille at the tombs and the pedigree of sixteen generations of Lumleys, and at a palimpsest brass mounted on a screen. But if Cheam's church has gone, in the village there is still the White Hall, a gabled Elizabethan house of painted timber; the daintiest and lightest little place, with tiny ordered lawns under its white wood, and old-fashioned flowers in the garden and in the windows. White Hall has the graces of old books, old ladies, old lace. But its gables and chimneys are not the only happy picture in Cheam. The road that passes by the left of the house leads to an untouched corner of little, white wooden cottages, as lowly and as English as anything in deep Surrey country, and this is nearly town. They will not last long, I am afraid; the new Cheam buildings are staring at them.

All above Cheam and Ewell are Banstead Downs, once as free and open as the downs by the Sussex sea, and even now sunny places where you may walk in fresh winds. But the houses are nearer every year, and they will be lucky if they escape another asylum; the high ground gives an opportunity to asylum architects. On Banstead Downs are Lambert's Oaks, where Lord Derby's roystering guests founded great races with bumpers of claret, and where Lord Stanley, when he married Lady Betty Hamilton, gave his famous Fete Champetre, which Horace Walpole guessed would cost L5,000; Lord Stanley had "bought all the orange-trees round London," and the haycocks he imagined were to be made of straw-coloured satin. Banstead itself, like Woodmansterne, its neighbour to the east, has not much to show of village buildings. Banstead and Woodmansterne churches have many memorials to the Lamberts, one of the very old Surrey families; and it is from Garratt's Hall, whose grounds border Banstead village, that Colonel F.A.H. Lambert dedicates his Guide to Surrey, a valuable little pocket-book, to Admiral Charles Mathew Buckle, head of another ancient Surrey family. One of the oldest things near Banstead stands in ground once owned by the Buckle family. Nork House has a field in which stands Tumble Beacon, a mound which saw the flares run from the hills of Hampshire to London, when the Armada was breasting the Channel and Hampshire had caught the signal from Dunkerry and the Lizard. Tumble Beacon would not light an alarm now; or if it did, it would burn pine trees and elders and nettles that grow about it, and would scare a hundred rabbits. How did the trees come there? A beacon should not be planted; it should stand open and high and free as when the Spaniards came, and from the same spot where Elizabeth's sailors in the Thames saw its flame, it should wait for jubilees and coronations to send its fires roaring up into the night.

Nork, etymologists have guessed, may be corrupted from Noverca—perhaps it once had a Roman owner. There were Romans who lived on the high ground near. Walton Heath, south of Banstead on the chalk plateau, has had the pavement of a Roman villa dug from it; I have been told that you may still find Roman pavements there, if you know where to dig. But Walton's chief possession—the village is Walton-on-the-hill, so named that you may never mistake it for Walton-on-the-Naze or Walton-on-Thames—is in the church. It is a leaden font, the only leaden font which Surrey possesses, though England has thirty; and of the thirty English fonts, Walton's is of as fine workmanship and design as any. Throned apostles circle the bowl, and bless with the right hand, or hold a book in the left. The church has some interesting old glass in a southern window, and, by an oddly deliberate anachronism, a chained Bible dated 1803. The chain is an old and genuine guard of the printed word, taken from Salisbury; but why should it chain Georgian printing? But Walton has long been anachronistic; there is a tomb outside the chancel, in a recess of the north wall, on which some modern Latin scholar has set the inscription, "Johannes de Waltune hujus ecclesiae fundator 1268." The weather has removed part, but the rest is in black paint.

A neighbouring village, Headley, has separated its new and old more definitely. The church has been taken down, all but the porch, which holds a grave and what looks like the sign of an inn; you may just distinguish the royal arms. The pillars of the old church have fallen, but where they stood, little clipped box-trees mark the line—a prettier memorial than a drawn plan to hang in the vestry, but need the old church have fallen? These level heights, perhaps, provoke church-building, but how few spires stand on the horizons. Ranmer spire you may see from half over mid-Surrey, but Ranmer is high on a ridge. Here you are on a plateau, and the heights see each other no more than the low ground. Kingswood's is the best seen of the spires on the plateau; a shining thing, white as the chalk of the ridge.

From Epsom to the north is quiet, empty countryside. Esher is five miles to the north-west as the crow flies; something more by road, but the best roads near Esher are the wild pathways of Esher common. Midway between Epsom and Esher, but among pastures, not in the heather of the common, is Chessington. Chessington Hall and Chessington Church are deep in the fields. The Hall may not be to-day quite the simple little building that Fanny Burney knew, when Samuel Crisp, "Daddy" Crisp, had it, but the garden and the trees, and the avenue to the church where she walked and talked over his music with Dr. Burney can be little changed. It was at Chessington that Fanny Burney took a packet from the postman and found herself famous. Evelina, which not even her father knew she had written, had taken the town. All the talk of the great men was of Evelina. Dr. Johnson was praising it; Sir Joshua Reynolds would not let his meals interrupt him, and took it with him to table. Edmund Burke had sat through the night to finish it. That was in 1778, and a hundred and thirty years after that wonderful morning her delight is as infectious as dance music. "Dr. Johnson's approbation!" she writes in her diary, "—it almost crazed me with agreeable surprise—it gave me such a flight of spirits that I danced a jig to Mr. Crisp, without any preparation, music, or explanation—to his no small amazement and diversion." She danced round the mulberry tree on the Chessington lawn, so she told Sir Walter Scott years afterwards.

She was just twenty-six. The mulberry-tree still stands by the window, and the fields by Chessington are still as green and quiet as when poor Mr. Crisp, a writer whom a careless world did not want to read, retired from his disappointments to a home where none but his friends should find him. He lies in the churchyard, under the shadow of the quaint little spire that sits on its bells like a candle-snuffer; Dr. Burney has written an epitaph for him, in the formal Georgian English that was always somewhere, too, in Fanny Burney's head. It was only the girl in her that kept it out of Evelina; after Evelina the girl survives almost only in her diary and her letters. The books grow dull.

Esher, beyond Claygate, is three miles to the north-west, and Claremont borders Esher Common. Claremont is a house of happiness and mourning. Queen Victoria spent the brightest days of her childhood there; princes and princesses have lived here and died before their day; a great name darkens its memories, ennobles its history. The first house at Claremont was built by Sir John Vanbrugh; afterwards the Duke of Newcastle had it; on his death Lord Clive bought it, pulled it down, and built the Claremont of to-day. A hundred thousand pounds he spent on the house and garden, and in the serenity of his chosen home he should have ended his days. Envy and persecution prevented that, and Clive of Arcot and Plassey died in London. Forty-two years later, in 1816, Prince Leopold, afterwards King of the Belgians, brought his bride, Princess Charlotte, to Claremont; she died with her baby the next year, a girl of twenty-one. In 1848 Louis Philippe, a refugee from the Revolution, came to Claremont; he died there in 1850. Seven years after, in 1857, Claremont and the countryside were in mourning for the Duchess of Nemours, a princess of glorious beauty. Queen Amelie died at the house in 1866. To-day the Duchess of Albany has Claremont; perhaps, as it lies so near a great highway, it might be worth while to say that it is not shown to the public.



A ruined palace is Claremont's neighbour. The great gateway of the building stands on the bank of the Mole, in the grounds of Esher Place. William of Waynflete built it; Wolsey repaired it, and was sent there in disgrace by his King; the Great Seal had been taken from him. Stow has a story of the fallen Minister's journey to Esher; Wolsey had left the river at Putney, and was riding along sadly enough, when a messenger brought him a kind word from the King. In his joy and relief he looked round for a present to send back; he fixed on Patch, his fool, and ordered him to the Court. Patch was all rage and tears, and stormed his unhappiness at his master. It was no good; he was for Henry, and six yeomen—it took the tallest Wolsey had—carried him struggling back to the King.

The Palace did not keep Wolsey long; he was allowed back at Richmond. After him, in Elizabeth's reign, came Richard Drake, and kept Spanish grandees prisoners there, taken from the Armada by Sir Francis Drake. After the Drakes came the Lattons, one of whom, John, held a remarkable number of offices under William III. Aubrey gives the list:—

In the reign of William III, this John Latton had given him by that Prince the Honours and Places following—

Equery,

Avener,

Master of the Buck-Beagles,

Master of the Hariers,

Master of the Game 10 miles round Hampton-Court, by particular patent, distinct from that of Justice in Eyre,

Master of the Lodge at the Old Park at Richmond, with a lease of 30 years from the Crown for the lands thereto belonging,

Steward of the Manor of Richmond,

Keeper of Windsor-House Park,

Head-customer at Plymouth.

All which were conferr'd upon him, without asking for, directly or indirectly, and were all held together during that reign.

Esher Palace as John Latton knew it survives now only in old prints; they show a long wing on each side of William of Waynflete's gateway. Opposite the palace a pleasure-boat, half dinghy, half barge, asks for passengers; on the bank a fashionably dressed lady holds a long fishing rod hopefully over the river, shaded by an enormous parasol.

Esher itself is scattered round a village green and a long broad street. By the green is the modern church, and in the churchyard a strange tomb. Lord Esher, the late Master of the Rolls, lies in white marble with Lady Esher; Lord Esher designed the tomb in his lifetime, and would pass it on his way to church. But the real Esher lies away from the village green, along the main road to Portsmouth—a road edged with trees and strips of grass; behind the trees stand the little, low, one-storied red houses, and Esher's fine inn, the Bear. The Bear has been rebuilt, but it has kept the air of a coaching inn; in the hall there is a vast pair of boots, once worn by the postillion of Louis Philippe.

Esher's old church lies behind the Bear, the saddest little deserted place. Sorrels and grasses wave about its forgotten graves; you open the church door, and you are back in the days of Waterloo. The pews are square and high, the pulpit is a three-decker, the paint is that peculiar yellow dun which belongs to Georgian and early Victorian aesthetics. But the value of the church is that it is untouched. No restorer has laid a hand on the mouldering baize which lines the pews; no one has knocked down the hideous galleries; nobody has broken into the gallery pew in which, warmed by a fireplace and chimney in winter, the little Princess Victoria of Kent used to sit when she was allowed to visit Claremont. You may see at Esher, better than in any other Surrey church, the surroundings in which our Georgian great-grandfathers worshipped; the service might almost have ended yesterday—there should be a forgotten prayer-book somewhere under a seat, praying for the health of his gracious Majesty King William. Or there might be in the body of the church; not in the Queen's pew. I think American visitors have been there.

To racing people Esher is Sandown, and Sandown is what all travellers see from the railway. Of the smaller racecourses few can be prettier; the long flank of a green hill, the white pavilion under dark pines, and the curving course picked out with fresh painted railings and green canvas—it is as spick and span as a lawn. Either in the summer, for the Eclipse Stakes, or in the spring for the steeplechases, most of the great English racehorses go to Sandown. Bendigo won the Eclipse Stakes of L10,000 for Mr. Hedworth Barclay in 1886—the first time any horse won so huge a stake. Bendigo is surely one of the great names. Even those who know least about horse-racing may talk of Bendigo; Bendigo whom the crowd loved, Bendigo who never failed them, Bendigo who carried 9 stone 7 lb., and won the Jubilee Stakes at Kempton in 1887. I have for Bendigo the affection of a schoolfellow.

What is Surrey English? Lord Macaulay heard it at Esher. He was walking from Esher to Ditton Marsh, he writes on September 22nd, 1854, and he listened to it in a public-house:—

"A shower came on. Afraid for my chest, I turned into a small ale-house, and called for a glass of ginger beer. I found there a party of hop-pickers, come back from the neighbourhood of Farnham. They had had but a bad season, and were returning, nearly walked off their legs. I liked their looks, and thought their English remarkably good for their rank of life. It was in truth Surrey English, the English of the suburbs of London, which is to the Somersetshire and Yorkshire what Castilian is to the Andalusian, or Tuscan to Neapolitan. The poor people had a foaming pot before them; but as soon as they heard the price, they rose and were going to leave it untouched. They could not, they said, afford so much. It was but fourpence halfpenny. I laid the money down, and their delight and gratitude quite affected me. Two more of the party soon arrived. I ordered another pot, and when the rain was over, left them, followed by more blessings than ever, I believe, were purchased for ninepence."

Perhaps the English of the Surrey suburbs was different in Macaulay's days. There is little dialect left anywhere to distinguish Surrey English from any other; even the gypsies speak the English of the suburbs of London. There are still gypsies on Esher common; I came across quite a settlement once, walking over the common to Cobham on a sunny morning after late April snow. The common was patched with sparkling white and blue; the snow lay in blue shadows unmelted under the gorse bushes, and among the gorse and sodden bracken twenty ponies snuffed for grass. Three gypsy boys shuffled through the fern near them. What did they do with the ponies? I asked, and the eldest told me they sold them; they were good ponies; he was voluble in suburban English. What did they fetch? That depended. What was that one worth?—it was a small chestnut creature with a child's pink pinafore for a halter. "Ah! That one," he began, and his eyes became inscrutable. He would have sold it well.



CHAPTER XXVI

LEATHERHEAD

The Millpond.—Magic water.—Leatherhead Bridge.—The Running Horse.—The Tunnyng of Elinour Rumming.—Noppy Ale.—A penny a coffin.—Deflected chancels.—Judge Jeffreys and his daughter.—Emma.—Mr. Woodhouse's gruel.

Leatherhead ought to be entered from the west and left by the south. To meet the little town on the road from Fetcham is to begin with a stretch of water, which is always a good introduction; and to leave it and travel south is to pass through one of the most fascinating valleys of all Surrey.

The stretch of water lying to the west is the millpond, and is unlike any other pond I know. It is two or three hundred yards long and perhaps eighty yards wide, slopes gradually from the sides over a chalky bottom, and is of an intense clear green. Here and there are open spaces in the weeds; patches of deeper blue-green, which can be seen, if you look closely, to be moving—a most uncanny motion. The water wells up incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones, which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a puzzling thing. The stone strikes the surface and sends out a widening ripple. Then you watch the stone sinking down slowly against the up-rush of water, but distinct and white and wavering. Then another ripple—a mere ring of light, in some way mirroring the real ripple of the surface—leaps out apparently from the side of the pool a foot or so under water, touches the white, wavering stone, and the stone vanishes. There is no stirring of mud, as there would be if it struck the bottom of an ordinary pond; it merely disappears into an invisible mouth in the green.



No frost ever sets ice on the millpond, it is said, and in hard winters wildfowl flock to it. I never have seen on the water any fowl that were wild, but it is crowded with swimming and diving birds. You can count thirty or forty coots, besides moorhens and a dozen dabchicks or so, and at the end where the mill stands there are fat duck and a bevy of swans. It is an arresting picture, the long, clear surface, the coots with their white foreheads dabbling in the weeds or rushing after one another with loud splashings, the dabchicks diving six at a time out of sight, and the dignified swans breasting the flowing water under the red brick and lichens of the mill. The coots, unlike all other coots, too, actually swim up to be fed. There is a strong spell of magic over all that strange pool. Some naiad Circe combs her hair far below the weeds, and has bewitched the wildfowl and the green cold water.



It would be easy to believe that the rushing springs of the millpond were in reality the Mole reappearing from her dive below ground at Mickleham, higher up the stream. But if that is so, the river must pass through some kind of filter, for it can be thick and cloudy at Mickleham, but is never anything but clean and pure at the mill. The mill stream joins the Mole just below Leatherhead Bridge, a fine span of fourteen arches. The Mole can put on many faces, but I think she is nowhere in all her journey more fascinating than where she divides her stream under Leatherhead, and comes dancing down by separate channels to her broad sheet of ripples at the bridge.

Beyond the bridge on the left, is the site of a very famous old inn. The present inn, the Running Horse, has been partly rebuilt, and has few external attractions, but the mistress of the old inn, four hundred years ago, was the subject of an ode written by the Poet Laureate. She was Elinour Rumming, ale-wife of a cabaret at "Lederhede in Sothray," and John Skelton, perhaps to amuse Henry VIII, and perhaps to please himself, wrote one of his pungent, tumbling romps of doggerel about her. "The Tunning of Elinour Rumming, per Skelton Laureate," as one of the old editions prints it, is an interminable piece of rhyme, mostly an orgy of coarseness, but with a certain rude vigour of humour and live truth. Here are a score of lines out of some hundreds:—

THE TUNNYNG OF ELINOUR RUMMING, PER SKELTON LAUREATE.

"Tell you I chill If that ye wyll A while be still Of a comelye gyll That dwelt on a hyll But she is not gryll For she is somewhat sage And well worne in age For her visage It would asswage A mannes courage.

And this comely dame I understande her name Is Elinoure Rumminge At home in her wonnyng And as men say She dwelt in Sothray In a certain stede By syde Lederhede She is a tonnish gyb The deuell and she be sib But to take up my tale She breweth noppy ale

And maketh thereof poorte sale To travellers, to tinkers To sweters, to swinkers And all good ale drynkers That will nothinge spare But dryncke till they stare And bringe them selfe bare With now away the mare And let us sley care As wise as an hare."

The legend is that Skelton was a fisherman, and used to come over from Nonsuch Palace by Epsom to fish in the Mole. Perhaps he did, and drank Elinour's "noppy ale"; in any case, a portrait of the Leatherhead ale-wife found its way into one of his books, with a rhymed couplet beneath it:—

"When Skelton wore the Laurell Crowne My Ale put all the Ale Wives downe."

The portrait is of a hag of such appalling ill-favour as would certainly "asswage a manne's courage."

An inn of more interest, though never the subject of a Laureate's ode, is the old coaching hostel, the Swan. It was a famous house in the seventeenth century, and cooked the Mole trout as well as the Dorking inns cooked their water-souchy of carp and tench. The Reverend S.N. Sedgwick, in his ingenious little collection of Leatherhead legends, adds a strange record to the inn property. He founds one of his stories on a local tradition that the carrying of a dead body can establish a right of way, and he says that in quite recent times the sum of one penny has been charged for permission to bring a corpse through the Swan Brewery Yard, to prevent a right of way being established.

Whether or not the right of way was established originally by carrying a dead body over it, there is another Leatherhead tradition of a right of way which is connected with the church. The church, with the curious double dedication of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, stands apart from the southern road out of Leatherhead, above the banks of the Mole. The tower is strangely out of the axis of the nave—as much as three or four feet—and the tradition is that it was so built to avoid encroaching on an established right of way. Probably the explanation is something more symbolical or superstitious. One of the most learned of all Surrey archaeologists, Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, holds to the theory that these deflections of the church axis are connected with legends of the Crucifixion. The deflected chancel, he thinks, suggests the head bowed upon the cross. But the deflected tower seems more difficult. The church is interesting in other ways. It contains a leather-bound Book of Homilies, chained in its original position to one of the northern pillars of the nave; and in the porch is an upright gravestone erected to the memory of Lady Diana Turner, the story being that she chose to be buried under the very spot where her sedan-chair stood for the Sunday service. She was paralysed, and listened to the Homilies from the porch.

Leatherhead has two faces. She shows one, which is slate and new, to the traveller entering the town from Ashtead and Epsom to the north-east; and another, which is the old bridge and the church road and the best of her, to those who approach her from Feltham or Mickleham. St. John's School, founded for the sons of poor clergy, lies on the Ashtead road, a large modern building of red and grey patterned brick. But the best of Leatherhead's houses stand about the Mole. One is Thorncroft, which represents the domain of Tornecrosta in Domesday Book. Another is a fine early Georgian building now known as Emlyn House, but formerly as "The Mansion." Alexander Akehurst, M.D., one of the churchwardens who presented the Book of Homilies to the church, rebuilt this house early in the eighteenth century, but parts of the older building remain. Once it belonged to Sir Thomas Bludworth, whose sister married Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assize. According to a local tradition, Jeffreys, when his worthy master King James had fled to France, slunk in disguise to Leatherhead. It was one of the many roads he found closed against him in his attempts to escape. But he did not come to Leatherhead solely because it lay on the road to the south. His little daughter lay at the point of death at her uncle's house, and his desire was to see her once more before she died. The once mighty Lord Chancellor, dressed as a common sailor with shaven eyebrows and coaldust smeared on his cheeks, hated with a furious intensity of loathing which has never been felt for an Englishman before or since, knocked fearfully at dead of night at the door of the house where his dying daughter lay. So says the legend, and history does not forbid belief. For the register dates the child's funeral on December 2, 1688, and it was ten days afterwards that a wild crowd nearly tore the judge limb from limb at Wapping.

A gentler memory, or rather association, belongs to the Church street and the houses in the neighbourhood. There have been many attempts made by Miss Austen's readers to identify Highbury, "the large and populous village, almost amounting to a town" of Emma, with some Surrey town or village. There is a school of serious students who place it at Esher; another band of enthusiasts support Dorking. Mr. E.V. Lucas, in his engaging introduction to a new edition of the novel, has another suggestion. He recommends the theory that Highbury was Leatherhead, which satisfies most of the conditions of the book. It is, as he says, rightly placed as regards London, Kingston and Box Hill; though seven miles, which was the drive from Hartfield to Box Hill, is surely rather a generous estimate of the actual distance. But Leatherhead certainly has a river and a "Randalls," and Mr. Lucas has been told that it has an "Abbey Farm." That may be a mere coincidence; but, if so, it is the more striking when one turns to the parish registers, and finds in them the uncommon name of Knightley. Mr. Knightley, in 1761, raised the pulpit of the church, and erected a new reading-desk and seat for the clerk, and it was "hereby ordered that the thanks of this vestry be paid in the most respectful manner to Mr. Knightley for this fresh mark of his regard." Surely that is precisely what would have been the attitude of Mr. Elton's parishioners to Emma's husband. If Miss Austen read the parish literature, she may also have set eyes on a poem entitled, "Norbury Park," which was written by a minor bard of the neighbourhood named Woodhouse. But that is insisting too much; though, to be sure, from the quality of his verse, Mr. Woodhouse, author of "Norbury Park," may well be imagined to have had, like Emma's father, a nice taste in gruel.



CHAPTER XXVII

STOKE D'ABERNON

Slyfields.—A Great Bowl of Silver.—The Heir.—The Danger of Parish Relief.—Stoke D'Abernon Church.—A Knightly Memorial.—Stolen Woad.—Sire Richard le Petit.—Long Sermons.—The Earliest Honeymoon.—Cobham.—A Hermit for L700.—Matthew Arnold at Pain's Hill.

The Mole wanders west away from Leatherhead by Randall's Farm and Randall's Park, and perhaps Miss Austen used to imagine Emma and Mrs. Weston walking along the rather dull road that runs up the valley by the side of the stream. North of the road, about a mile from the town, stands an old Roman camp, now buried in a small wood, with notice-boards loudly forbidding access. Another mile to the west—but you must walk two to get there—is one of the most charming of old Surrey manor-houses, now a farmhouse, but still known by its name of Slyfields.

The Slyfields were essentially a Surrey family. They lived and worked as gentlemen and yeomen and parsons among small Surrey villages, Send and Great Bookham and Byfleet and Pirford and Ripley and the Clandons; one of them, Edmond, was Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in the time of Elizabeth. He was the greatest of the Slyfields, and left behind him sixteen sons and daughters, four Surrey manors, and a will as careful and studious as himself. Some of the items are quaint reading:—

To his son Walter, "my black velvett dublett and paire of hose of wrought velvet, my best night gowne, my best hatt, fower of my best shirtes and my best riding Cloake."

To his son William, "my coate of Tuftaffatie and a shorte cloke of rashe, laide with parchment lace."

To his son-in-law, Edward Skeete, "one shorte Cloake, called the Dutch cloke, of Black Damaske furred with squirrell, faced with caliber, and garded with velvett."

To Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, L40, "but she not to troble molest or disquiett my saide wyfe, her mother, my executrix."

To his grandson Edmond one of his great bowls of silver.

The last item is one of the most interesting. It ought to be read in conjunction with an earlier item in the same will, in which special directions are left to the executors not to pull down or to deface any manner of wainscot or glass in or about the house of Slyfield. For the end of the Slyfield family as a power in Surrey came with bitter suddenness. Henry, the Sheriff's eldest son, succeeded his father in 1590, and died in 1598. He was succeeded by his son Edmond, who had been left one of the "great bowls of silver." Within sixteen years Edmond Slyfield had sold every stick and stone of the Slyfield manors, the Slyfield house was razed to the ground to make room for a new building, and in the new building and on the old tombstones alone the name of Slyfield remains.

The new manor-house is nearly three hundred years old, and was built for the possessor of another great Surrey name, George Shiers. He was the grandfather of Sir George Shiers, baronet, who was one of the most generous of testators to Surrey villages. Among other bequests, he left a sum of money to the parish of Great Bookham, which was to be thus devoted:—

In preferring in Marriage such Maids born in this Parish as have lived and behaved themselves well for seven Years in any one Service, and whose friends are not able to do it.

To dispose of the surplus to such Poor as by Sickness, Age, a great Family of Children, or otherwise, shall be in Danger of coming under the common relief of this Parish.

The "danger of coming under the common relief" of the parish was evidently felt to be real—a strange dislike forerunning the hatred which the modern English villager feels for "the House." When Louise Michel, the leader of the petroleuses of the French Revolution, was shown over one of the great London Unions not long before her death, she was filled with wonder and admiration. "If we had had that in France," she said, "we should have had no revolution." The Englishman leaves legacies to enable poor parishioners to escape from the danger.

Slyfields Manor, picturesque though it is, is still only a remnant. Only one side of what was once a quadrangular building remains, but the solid symmetry of its red-brick walls and ivied gables, and the hugeness of its ornate and lichened barns and granaries, make it as imposing as any farmhouse well could be. Curiously enough, like the older Crowhurst Place, the other side of the county, a farmhouse it still remains.

The Slyfields and the Shiers lie in Great Bookham church. Another church stands not half a mile away from the house, in a smooth and green garden on the banks of the Mole. Stoke D'Abernon church contains one of the great possessions of Surrey—the oldest brass in England—a monument which, besides being the oldest of its kind, is the very knightliest memorial an English gentleman could have. A plain slab of brass, on which has been elaborately engraved the figure of a soldier in full chain mail, with his six-foot lance and its fringed pennon, his long prick-spurs, and his great two-handed sword, it has lain in an English church for nearly six centuries and a-half. The Lombardic lettering which runs round the brass is half illegible, but the form of the old inscription, perfect in its simple dignity, is clear enough:—

SIRE : IOHAN : DAUBERNOUN : CHIVALER : GIST : ICY : DEV : DE : SA : ALME : EYT : MERCY.

By Sir John D'Abernon's brass lies that of his son, and between the dates of the two brasses are fifty years—1277 and 1327. The D'Abernons were a knightly family, but they never provided an English king with a great soldier, or a great politician, or with anything much more than the quiet services of a country gentleman. The founder of the family in England was Roger de Abernun, who in Domesday Book is a tenant of Richard de Bienfaite, son of Gilbert Count of Brionne. The first Sir John D'Abernon, whose brass lies in Stoke D'Abernon church, was the most distinguished of the family. Like Edmond Slyfield, he was Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex.

Edmond Slyfield, dead three hundred years before our day (we can see his brass in Great Bookham church), perhaps often stared at the brass of Sir John D'Abernon, dead three hundred years before him. Perhaps, little guessing that within thirty years the Slyfield manors would belong to a stranger, and the Slyfield name be half forgotten, he reflected comfortably on the misfortunes of his predecessor in office. For Sir John was a most unlucky Sheriff, and lost a large sum partly by robbery and partly in the law courts. The story of his loss is a strange medley. One William Hod, of Normandy, in the year 1265 shipped to Portsmouth ten hogsheads of woad. Robbers seized the woad at Portsmouth and carried it off to Guildford; Hod, pursuing, recaptured his hogsheads and lodged them in Guildford Castle. Immediately appeared Nicholas Picard and others from Normandy, demanding the woad in the name of Stephen Buckarel and others. If the woad was not given up, they threatened to destroy the whole of Guildford by fire the next morning. The under-sheriff, whose family lived in the neighbourhood, at once gave up the woad, whereupon Hod instituted proceedings against Sir John D'Abernon the Sheriff, and won his case. Sir John had to pay as damages six score marks—about equivalent to L900 of our money.

Stoke D'Abernon church holds a number of other interesting monuments and brasses; indeed, for its size, it is fuller of valuable work and memorials than any other Surrey church. One of them, placed to the memory of "Sir Richard the Little, formerly parson of this church," has a haunting note of personal loss. It is a pleasure to puzzle out the old Norman-French:—

SIRE RICHARD LE PETIT IADIS PERSONE DE CEST EIGLISE ICI GIST RECEYVE LA ALME IESU CHRIST.

Another rare form of brass is that of a little chrysom child, Ellen Bray; another, a curious engraving of Lady Anne Norbury, with four tiny sons and four tiny daughters gathered at her feet in the folds of her gown. There are imposing monuments to Sir Thomas and Lady Vincent, Sir Thomas enormous in trunk hose and his Lady with her hair elaborately frizzed in a Paris hood. In the body of the church, the pulpit is a magnificent piece of early seventeenth century carving, and to the wall near it is fastened a wrought-iron hour-glass, which must have measured many a weary discourse. Another of Stoke D'Abernon's possessions is one of the finest thirteenth century oak chests in the southern counties.



Outside, the church is interesting in other ways. You can see in the south wall of the chancel a large slice of Roman herringbone brickwork, perhaps brought by pre-conquest builders from some villa or other ruins close at hand; and on the south wall of the nave, high up, is a sundial which before the conquest probably stood above the old south door. With so much that is old and venerable in the building and its monuments it is dismal to add that much, also, that was old and venerable has been destroyed. It is probably the worst restored of all old churches worth restoring.

Stoke D'Abernon has a claim on the attention of those about to marry. The manor-house is the first which is recorded as having been lent for a honeymoon. So I learn from Mr. J.H. Round, writing in the Ancestor. When William Marshall, in 1189, secured the hand of the heiress of the Earls of Pembroke, who was as good as she was beautiful, he proposed that they should be married on her own estates on the Welsh border. His host, however, a wealthy Londoner, would not hear of such a thing, and insisted on their being married in London and paying the cost of the wedding himself. After the ceremony, as the Society papers of the time might have put it, the young couple left for Stoke D'Abernon in Surrey, the peaceful and delectable country mansion of Sir Enguerrand D'Abernon, kindly lent for the occasion. Mr. Round has extracted this the earliest known reference to an orthodox honeymoon in the country, from the bridegroom's poetical biography, L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal:—

"Quant les noces bien faites furent, E richement, si comme els durent, La dame emmena, ce savon, Chies sire Angeran d'Abernon, A Estokes, en liu paisable E aesie e delitable."

The bill for the trousseau of the heiress has also been discovered, entered in the Pipe Roll of the year. It cost L9 12s. 1d.

The road from Stoke D'Abernon runs north-west through the two Cobhams, Church Cobham and Street Cobham. The little Plough Inn, which acts as refreshment-room for Cobham railway station, suggests the proper spirit of village revelry. A spreading yew arbour should shade good ale from the summer suns, and by the side of the garden across the road, gay with geraniums, see-saws and swings, runs a tiny stream, rippling down to the Mole.

Unlike the Wey, the Mole runs by few churches. Only five, Horley, Betchworth, Leatherhead, Stoke D'Abernon, and Cobham, stand near the river, and only Stoke D'Abernon actually on its banks. Stoke D'Abernon, too, has the best view from the churchyard across the stream, over a broad stretch of grassland on which partridges call and rooks stalk majestically. At Cobham you can scarcely see the Mole when you are in the village, but there are few prettier glimpses of its stream than the brimming pool by the road outside. A grey mill stands in the stream, double-wheeled and doubly silent; swans oar themselves leisurely about the eddies, and the meadow beyond in May is a sheet of kingcups.



"Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham, 1432, restored 1635," is the engaging legend painted on a low-roofed timbered house which stands at the churchyard gate. With its square beams, its latticed windows and red curtains, it is a model of what a "Home of Rest for Gentlewomen"—which is its vocation—should be. Cobham has one or two other good houses, Georgian, red and solid, but the best perhaps is the old White Lion posting inn at Cobham Street, half a mile away on the Portsmouth Road. The White Lion stood by the fourth tollhouse on the highway from London, and its oak-panelled parlours have entertained travellers for four centuries or more—none thirstier, perhaps, than "Liberty" Wilkes, who passed that way on a day in 1794, and drank "a large bowl of lemonade."

Pain's Hill, which rises above the Mole a little further on the road, is a name associated with a gardener and a poet. The gardener was Charles Hamilton, who burdened his lawns with such an astonishing variety of temples, chapels, grottos, castles, cascades and ruins—including a hermitage with a real live hermit—that the result was voted one of the greatest achievements in landscape gardening of the Georgian or any other age. The hermit, sad to relate, was a failure. He was offered L700 to live a Nebuchadnezzar-like existence in his cell, sleeping on a mat, never speaking a word, and abandoning all the conveniences of a toilet. He would gladly have taken the L700, but threw up his post after three weeks.

The poet was Matthew Arnold, who spent most of the last fifteen years of his life at Pain's Hill Cottage. He wrote little poetry there; he came to Pain's Hill in the year after he had published Literature and Dogma, when his mind was occupied with his revolution against the sombreness and narrowness of modern English religious thought. But to Pain's Hill, I think, belong "Geist's Grave" and "Kaiser Dead" and "Poor Matthias;" "Geist's Grave" written for his little son, and "Poor Matthias" for his daughter, perhaps—Matthias, bought at Hastings to please a child, though she, childlike, would have chosen a bigger bird:—

"Behold French canary-merchant old Shepherding his flock of gold In a low dim-lighted pen Scann'd of tramps and fishermen! There a bird, high-coloured, fat, Proud of port, though something squat— Pursy, play'd-out Philistine— Dazzled Nelly's youthful eyne. But, far in, obscure, there stirr'd On his perch a sprightlier bird, Courteous-eyed, erect and slim; And I whisper'd: 'Fix on him!' Home we brought him, young and fair, Songs to trill in Surrey air. Here Matthias sang his fill, Saw the cedars of Pain's Hill; Here he pour'd his little soul, Heard the murmur of the Mole."

And it was while Matthew Arnold was living at Pain's Hill that he chose out his little collection of "selected poems." I like to think of him reading over his work in his Surrey garden, and answering once more the cuckoo calling "from the wet field, through the vext garden-trees"—

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet William with his homely cottage smell, And stocks in fragrant blow: Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open, jasmined-muffled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden trees, And the full moon, and the white evening star."



CHAPTER XXVIII

LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING

The Roman road over the hill.—The Swallows of the Mole.—An imperial draught.—Mickleham.—Fanny Burney.—A Story of letters.—Juniper Hall and its cedars.—Norbury Park.—How to measure trout from the Mole.—Conversation Sharp.—Keats and Endymion.—Mr. George Meredith's poems.—The best known hill in the world.—A Soldier's Whim.

The best way from Leatherhead to Dorking is the longest, and hardly goes by the high road at all. It begins at Ashtead; you can get to Ashtead from Leatherhead or Epsom, but you must start from Ashtead out over Ermyn Street, the old Roman road. One might begin the walk from Epsom; but Epsom downs, with the great empty race-stand, can be depressing, and the best of the old road lies south, nearer Mickleham.

Ashtead is growing towards the railway, but east of the main street there is hardly a cottage. The church stands in Ashtead Park, and shows that it once had Roman walls for neighbours by the quantity of Roman brick and tiling mixed among its flints and stones. It has been elaborately roofed with cedar, but otherwise contains little; the prettiest part is the churchyard and the park beyond it, with its deer which walk by the gates and gaze gently over the paths at strangers.

Ermyn Street or Stane Street of the maps, which English tongues here have named Pebble Lane, skirts Ashtead Park by the south-east, at first a wide green lane, afterwards a narrow path sometimes half-choked by trees, sometimes, in wet weather, impassable with mud, but always driving straight as the Roman roadmaker drove his pick towards the cap of Mickleham Downs. The narrow lane to which the road has shrunk is less than the Roman made it, but Mickleham Downs can look very little different to-day from the downs which the legionary knew. He, too, like the modern traveller tramping by the yews and box trees, saw the sunlight on the dark, shining leaves, and watched the wind ruffle the whitebeams on the shoulder of the hill.



Below the downs lies Mickleham, halfway between Leatherhead and Dorking, and famous in all the guide-books for the "swallows" of the Mole. The "swallows" are described as deep, blue pools, into which the Mole disappears underground, and, except from the most carefully written accounts, you would imagine that the whole river dives completely into the earth and jumps up again at Leatherhead. But if you ask at Mickleham to be directed to the "Swallows," the chances are that you will have to explain that you do not mean birds. The fact is that it is only in seasons of great drought that they would be noticed. In summers when there is very little rain the Mole is said to run dry between Burford Bridge and Thorncroft Bridge near Leatherhead, but I have never happened to see it do so, and had the greatest difficulty in discovering the Swallows, which, when I saw them, were brimming with very muddy water; the stream was as full as possible. The best comment on the legend of the diving Mole is Thomas Fuller's in the Worthies:—

"I listen not to the country people telling it was experimented by a goose, which was put in and came out again with life (though without feathers); but hearken seriously to those who judiciously impute the subsidency of the earth in the interstice aforesaid to some underground hollowness made by that water in the passage thereof."

The Swallows are really fissures in the chalk bed of the stream, which runs as it were over the top of a long chalk sponge. In rainless summers there is only enough water to fill the bottom of the sponge, and the top channel runs dry. Brayley has some amusing calculations as to the amount of water which the sponge drinks:—

"From calculations made on different days, after measuring the height and velocity of the current received into these pools, it was ascertained, when both were in activity, that the swallows of the outer pool engulphed 72 imperial gallons per second, 4,320 per minute, and 259,200 per hour; and those of the inner pool, 23 imperial gallons per second, 1,380 per minute, and 82,800 per hour."

Seventy-two gallons—a good-sized tankful—of water in a second is very pretty swallowing; an early instance of thinking imperially. To Camden, in the Britannia, the disappearing water suggests another image. The inhabitants can boast, like the Spaniards, of having a bridge that feeds several flocks of sheep.

Mickleham is almost the centre of the Fanny Burney country. At Mickleham church she was married to General d'Arblay; Juniper Hall is half-a-mile from the church; Norbury Park lies west of the Mole; Camilla Lacey south of Norbury Park at West Humble.

Fanny Burney, retired from her post of Maid of Honour and receiving a pension of L100 a year, met M. d'Arblay in January, 1793, when she was staying with her friends the Locks at Norbury Park. He was living at Juniper Hall with other French emigres—a brilliant little colony; Madame de Stael was there, and de Narbonne, and de Lally Tollendal, and Talleyrand. The General began as tutor, and the course of Fanny Burney's acquaintance with Juniperians, as her sister Mrs. Phillips used to call them, and particularly with her French master, perhaps may be given in a few extracts from her correspondence:—

MADAME DE STAEL HOLSTEIN TO MISS BURNEY,

Written from JUNIPER HALL, DORKING, SURREY, 1793.

"When J learned to read english J begun by milton, to know all or renounce all in once. J follow the same system in writing my first english letter to Miss burney; after such an enterprize nothing can affright me. J feel for her so tender a friendship that it melts my admiration, inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence, and impresses me with the idea that in a tongue even unknown J could express sentiments so deeply felt.

"My servant will return for a french answer. J intreat miss burney to correct the words but to preserve the sense of that card.

"Best compliments to my dear protectress, Madame Phillipe."

MISS BURNEY TO DR. BURNEY (her father).

"MICKLEHAM, February 29, 1793.

"There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating than this colony; between their sufferings and their agremens they occupy us almost wholly. M. de Narbonne, alas, has no L1000 a year! he got over only L4000 at the beginning, from a most splendid fortune; and, little foreseeing how all has turned out, he has lived, we fear, upon the principal....

"M. d'Arblay is one of the most singularly interesting characters that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an ingenuous openness of nature, that I had been unjust enough to think could not belong to a Frenchman. With all this, which is his military portion, he is passionately fond of literature, a most delicate critic in his own language, well versed in both Italian and German, and a very elegant poet. He has just undertaken to become my French master for pronunciation, and he gives me long daily lessons in reading. Pray expect wonderful improvements! In return I hear him in English."

MISS BURNEY TO MRS. LOCK.

"Thursday, MICKLEHAM.

"Madame de Stael has written me two English notes, quite beautiful in ideas, and not very reprehensible in idiom. But English has nothing to do with elegance such as theirs—at least, little and rarely. I am always exposing myself to the wrath of John Bull, when this coterie come into competition. It is inconceivable what a convert M. de Talleyrand has made of me; I think him now one of the first members, and one of the most charming, of this exquisite set."

DR. BURNEY TO MISS BURNEY.

"CHELSEA COLLEGE, Tuesday Morning, February 19, 1793.

"Why, Fanny, what are you about, and where are you? I shall write at you, not knowing how to write to you, as Swift did to the flying and romantic Lord Peterborough."

MISS BURNEY TO MRS. PHILLIPS.

"Friday, May 31, CHESSINGTON.

"My dearest Fredy, in the beginning of her knowledge of this transaction, told me that Mr. Lock was of opinion that the L100 per annum might do, as it does for many a curate. M. d'A. also most solemnly and affectingly declares that le simple necessaire is all he requires, and here, in your vicinity, would unhesitatingly be preferred by him to the most brilliant fortune in another sejour.

"If he can say that, what must I be not to echo it? I, who in the bosom of my most chosen, most darling friends——"

DR. BURNEY TO MISS BURNEY.

"May 1793.

"Dear Fanny,—I have for some time seen very plainly that you are eprise, and have been extremely uneasy at the discovery. You must have observed my silent gravity, surpassing that of mere illness and its consequent low spirits. I had some thoughts of writing to Susan about it, and intended begging her to do what I must now do for myself—that is, beg, warn, and admonish you not to entangle yourself in a wild and romantic attachment which offers nothing in prospect but poverty and distress, with future inconvenience and unhappiness...."

FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY TO MRS. ——.

"August 2, 1793.

"Last Sunday (July 28) M^r and M^rs Lock, my sister and Captain Phillips, and my brother Captain Burney, accompanied us to the altar in Mickleham Church; since which the ceremony has been repeated in the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador, that if, by a counter-revolution in France, M. d'Arblay recovers any of his rights, his wife may not be excluded from their participation.

"You may be amazed not to see the name of my dear father upon this solemn occasion; but his apprehensions from the smallness of our income have made him cold and averse: and though he granted his consent, I could not even solicit his presence."

FROM MADAME D'ARBLAY TO DR. BURNEY AFTER HIS FIRST VISIT TO HER AT BOOKHAM.

"BOOKHAM, August '94.

It is just a week since I had the greatest gratification of its kind I ever, I think, experienced:—so kind a thought, so sweet a surprise as was my dearest father's visit! How softly and soothingly it has rested upon my mind ever since!...

"How thankfully did I look back, the 28^th of last month, upon a year that has not been blemished with one regretful moment!"

It was at Bookham that Madame d'Arblay wrote Camilla, and out of the sale of the novel she built her cottage, Camilla Lacey, on a plot of ground at West Humble leased to her by her friend Mr. Lock. Camilla, which Horace Walpole thought deplorable, infinitely worse than Cecilia, which was not so good as Evelina, was an instant success. Within a month Madame d'Arblay had made L2,000, and Macaulay's estimate of her whole profits was over three thousand guineas. There was never a stranger climb down a ladder to fortune than Fanny Burney's. Evelina, her first and incomparably her best novel, brought her L30; Cecilia, her next, L250; then came Camilla; and her last novel, The Wanderer, which she wrote after ten years' absence with her husband in France, actually sold 3,600 copies in six months at two guineas a copy, and was an absolute and hopeless failure.

Camilla Lacey, invisible from the road, has been enlarged and altered to look like nothing the d'Arblays knew. Juniper Hall has also changed, but the splendid cedars which stand round its lawns must have been familiar to Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. They have grown curiously slowly; they do not strike one as larger than many trees which are known to be not more than a hundred and twenty years old—those, for instance, at Farnham Castle; but John Timbs, in his Promenade Round Dorking, written in 1823, speaks of them as "immense," and as "said to be of the finest growth in England."



Norbury Park also has its famous trees. The Druids' Walk, a path running under enormous yews, is no longer open to the public. But Louis Jennings, thirty years ago, saw the trees and preserved a memory of them in Field Paths and Green Lanes:—

"As the path descends the shadows deepen, and you arrive at a spot where a mass of yews of great size and vast age stretch up the hill, and beyond to the left as far as the eye can penetrate through the obscurity. The trees in their long and slow growth have assumed many wild forms, and the visitor who stands there towards evening, and peers into that sombre grove, will sometimes yield to the spell which the scene is sure to exercise on imaginative natures; he will half fancy that these ghostly trees are conscious creatures, and that they have marked with mingled pity and scorn the long processions of mankind come and go like the insects of a day, through the centuries during which they have been stretching out their distorted limbs nearer and nearer to each other. Thick fibrous shoots spring out from their trunks, awakening in the memory long-forgotten stories of huge hairy giants, enemies of mankind even as the "double-fatal" yew itself was supposed to be in other days. The bark stands in distinct layers, the outer ridges mouldering away, like the fragments of a wall of some ruined castle. The tops are fresh and green, but all below in that sunless recess seems dead."

In another respect Norbury Park has changed—in the opportunities the Mole running through the park offers to anglers wishing to catch large trout. Mr. C.J. Swete, writing in his Handbook of Epsom, not longer ago than 1853, is pleased to take his reader with him by the banks of the Mole, in which he has obtained "permission from the proprietor to gather some of the finny treasures of its liquid mines." Quite unwarrantably, he assumes that his reader is no fisherman:—

"Well, now, cast out your line, you have a respectable cast, for here the river is broad, you can scarce cast your line across it. Well, you must be a little patient,—You cannot expect to catch a fish the moment you throw in.... I see you are not a great proficient at the piscatory science. Cast out very little line at first, perhaps about the length of your rod, and then increasing by degrees, you will soon be able to throw full across and with precision. Ah! now you have a fine fish; let him down the stream a little. Now bring him close to the shore. Stay! It is safer to land him with the net. For this stream it is a very excellent fish, exactly three pounds weight, I find. How do I know it is just three pounds? I will tell you."

He proceeds to do so. He knows because he has measured the fish and finds him nineteen inches long by ten in girth, and if you do the sum his way, it works out at three pounds. "This is in accordance, as you suppose, with the mathematical law that similar solids are to each other in the triplicate ratio of one of their dimensions." That is the way to measure trout in Norbury Park.

Two quaintly spelt epitaphs can be read on the black marble tombstones in Mickleham Church. Under one lies the body of Peter de la Hay, "Eldest Yeoman of his Majesties Confectionary Office, who Departed this Liee" in 1684, and under the other Thomas Tooth, "Yeaman of his Ma^ties Sculery, who deceased this Life" a year later.

Almost opposite Juniper Hall is Fredley Farm, once the home of "Conversation" Sharp, hat-maker, poet and member of Parliament. Fredley Farm, in the years between 1797 and 1835, when Sharp lived there, must have been visited by more distinguished poets, authors, politicians, wits, scholars and artists than any other house in Surrey. Wordsworth came there, and Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey and Moore; he talked painting with Lawrence, and sculpture with Chantrey; Macaulay talked with him "about everything and everybody," and so did Grote and Mill and Lockhart and Jeffrey; Porson was there, and perhaps had his favourite porter for breakfast; and the politicians were without number—Brougham, Sheridan, Grattan, Talleyrand, Huskisson, and almost a link with to-day, Lord John Russell. Macaulay has left a few sentences which greater men than Sharp might not deserve as an epitaph: "One thing I have observed in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out. He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds his tongue." Yet with all his virtues and all his conversation, Sharp lacks his Boswell.

A little further towards Dorking the road crosses the Mole at Burford Bridge. The inn at Burford Bridge, a sort of Swindon of the Dorking Road, where everybody stops to have lunch or dinner, perhaps will again welcome a great admiral and finish a great poem. Nelson stayed there before leaving to command at Trafalgar; Keats came there to finish Endymion. His visit, he writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey, is "to change the scene—change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem, of which there are wanting about 500 lines." Night on the hill inspired him; in another letter he shows the way for other poets: "I went up Box Hill this evening after the moon—'you a' seen the moon'—came down and wrote some lines." And it is of the inn at Burford Bridge that the story is told, by Mortimer Collins, in his "Walk through Surrey," of Keats and the waiter. Keats was reciting Endymion:—

"For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree; For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms, And cold mushrooms;"

The waiter heard, and obeyed, bringing mushrooms uncooked on a plate and a decanter of sherry. But that story is a little too artificial.

Still, Endymion owes a good deal to the trees and the solitude of the hill above Burford Bridge. It was with the woods in his memory that Keats wrote something very like a description of Box Hill, with the Mole below it:—

"Where shall our dwelling be? Under the brow Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun Would hide us up, although spring leaves were none; And where dark yew trees as we rustle through, Will drop their scarlet berry cups of dew? O thou wouldst joy to live in such a place; Dusk for our loves, yet light enough to grace Those gentle limbs on mossy bed reclin'd: For by one step the blue sky should'st thou find, And by another in deep dell below, See, through the trees, a little river go All in its midday gold and glimmering."

But the great poet and novelist of Box Hill came later. Mr. George Meredith lived his long life and died at last, on May 18, 1909, at his house, Flint Cottage, near Burford Bridge. It was by Box Hill that he imagined the gayest and wisest of novels and some of the most glorious of all English poetry. Here, in his chalet looking out over the Surrey hills, he wrote The Thrush in February:—

"I know him, February's thrush, And loud at eve he valentines On sprays that paw the naked bush Where soon will sprout the thorns and bines.

Now ere the foreign singer thrills Our vale his plain-song pipe he pours A herald of the million bills; And heed him not, the loss is yours.

My study, flanked with ivied fir And budded beech with dry leaves curled, Perched over yew and juniper, He neighbours, piping to the world:—

The wooded pathways dank on brown, The branches on grey cloud a web, The long green roller of the down, An image of the deluge-ebb:"—

The lines ring with the bird's song; the light of all February evenings is on the hill. But if you are to take the heart of the poem, you must choose the last eight lines:—

"For love we Earth, then serve we all; Her mystic secret then is ours: We fall, or view our treasures fall, Unclouded, as beholds her flowers.

Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, When lowly, with a broken neck, The crocus lays her cheek to mire."

The noblest philosophy of poetry belongs to this Surrey hill, and so does the most wonderful love-song of its century, the long, enchanted cadences of Love in the Valley:—

"Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star. Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle-note unvaried, Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown evejar. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled."

Box Hill must be pretty nearly the best-known hill in the world. It has all the advantages. It is within easy reach of London for school treats, excursions, choir outings, week-ends, and all other journeys in open air; it has a railway station at its foot, and several inns, and a tea-garden at the top, and a hundred Bank holidays have left it unspoiled. The box-trees that name the hill are the finest in England. Box-trees love chalk, and here they drive their roots into the crown and scar of a cliff of chalk, so steep on one side down to the Mole that a stone could almost be thrown from the path round the ridge into the water. On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green; you may speculate as to the beauty of the arc curved in the sunlight, and the deadness with which the ball would lie after an absolutely perpendicular drop—to the extreme danger of those disinterested in the experiment. But the hill is not really steep enough. The contours crowd on the map, but they show that you would have to drive nearly a quarter of a mile.

At a distance, in spring and summer, the trees which mark Box Hill are not box or juniper, but the whitebeams that patch the deeper green of the oaks and beeches with glaucous grey. The box-trees, though their thick, snaky stems look as if they might be any age, are not all of them old. The trees have more than once been cut and sold. Sir Henry Mildmay put them up for auction for L12,000 in 1795 and apparently sold them for L10,000 two years later, with twelve years to cut the wood in. In later days, the wisdom of a War Office cleared a wide space of trees and built a fort there; the wisdom of another War Office abandoned the fort as useless. There it remains, behind spiked railings, the idlest monument of a whim.



CHAPTER XXIX

DORKING

Mr. Stiggins at the Marquis of Granby—A Ruin.—The battle of Dorking.—Real fighting.—The Table and Cellar.—Water-souchy, a delicious dish.—Wild cherries.—Dorking snails.—Sandy kine.—Women without roses.—Shrove Tuesday football.—Dorking's glory.—Jupp at Cotmandene.—An earthquake.—Giant and Dwarf.

Dorking has twice had history made for it, and travellers come to visit the scenes. It was in the bar of the Marquis of Granby at Dorking that Sam Weller met his mother-in-law, and watched the reverend Mr. Stiggins make toast and sip the pineapple rum and water, and advised Mr. Weller senior as to the best method of treating Shepherds with cold water. Pilgrims cross the Atlantic to visit the Marquis of Granby. No Dorking inn bears the name, nor ever has; but Americans will tell you that the Marquis is only a name Dickens invented to cover the identity of the White Horse, which fronts the cobbles of Dorking High Street with its gables and white and green paint much as it must have done in the time of Dickens. Dickens himself, in All the Year Round—he did not sign the article, but in that paper none but he might have written of that inn—conceived "the Markis" to be the King's Head, in the old days a great coaching house on the Brighton Road. It stood at the corner of High Street and South Street, and in South Street to-day you may still gaze at its unhappy walls and windows. The old lattices are boarded up, smashed with stones; the rooms are empty. When the post office came to stand at the corner, the King's Head became a tenement house; afterwards a ruin.

The Battle of Dorking took place on the ridge north of the town in 1871, and resulted, after the invasion, in the conquest of Great Britain by Germany. It all came about perfectly simply. A rising in India had taken away part of our army; war with the United States over Canada had taken another 10,000 troops, and half of what were left were dealing with a Fenian revolution in Ireland. Germany put to sea and sank our fleet with torpedoes, a new and dreadful engine of war; then the German army landed and the end came at once. At least, it would have come, if Sir George Chesney, who described the battle of Dorking in Blackwood's Magazine, had prophesied truly. He lived till 1895, to see more than twenty years after his battle pass without an invasion; but the battle, for some of his readers, became a very real thing. The late Louis Jennings, in his Field Paths and Green Lanes, tells us that he had a friend who, believing most people to have very hazy notions of history, was in the habit of saying, "Of course you remember the battle of Dorking? Well, this was the very place where it was fought!" He was seldom contradicted.

The real history of Dorking has traditions of the table and the cellar. Dorking fowls perhaps first came to the neighbourhood with the Romans, and poultry and Dorking have been associated ever since. The true Dorking fowl is a large, well-feathered bird, and walks on five toes instead of lesser fowls' four. He has always been a great fowl for the table and historians have written about him since the days of Columella. Thus a contributor to the Gentleman's Magazine, in 1763:—

"An incredible quantity of poultry is sold in Dorking, and it is well known to the lovers of good eating for being remarkably large and fine. I have seen capons about Christmas which weighed between seven and eight pounds each out of their feathers, and were sold at five shillings apiece; nor are the geese brought to the market here about Michaelmas less excellent in their kind. The town is supplied with sea-fish from Brighthelmstone and Worthing, in Sussex."



The Dorking cooks knew well what to do with the sea-fish when they got them from Brighton. Dorking was famous for a particular way of making water-souchy, a delicious dish of various fishes, of which Mr. J.L. Andre in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, has preserved the recipe rescued from an 1833 cookery book 'by a Lady':—

"Stew two or three flounders, some parsley roots and leaves, thirty peppercorns, and a quart of water, till the fish are boiled to pieces; pulp them through a sieve. Set over the fire the pulped fish, the liquor that boiled them, some perch, tench, or flounders, and some fresh roots or leaves of parsley; simmer all till done enough, then serve in a deep dish. Slices of bread and butter are to be sent to table to eat with the souchy."

It looks rather vague, but the "Gentlemen's Dorking Club" used to assemble every other Thursday from June to November to discuss the tench and flounders at the Red Lion, and the King's Head used even to attract diners-out from London, especially Dutch merchants, who were particularly fond of the admirable dish. Wine, too, was grown in the town. There was a particular kind of wild cherry, of which Aubrey was told by John Evelyn that it made a most excellent wine, little inferior to the French claret; it would even keep longer. With the cherry wine, perhaps, you would have eaten Dorking snails. They were large, white snails, which some said were brought to the Downs by the pilgrims, others thought were introduced from Italy by the Earl of Arundel, Lord Marshal of England; Lady Arundel used to cook and eat them. They roamed the Downs by Box Hill and other chalky places, and are still to be found there. Perhaps the Romans brought them, but they are not peculiar to Surrey and Sussex; I have found them on chalk in Hertfordshire, and I have heard of them on the Cotswolds.

Such good fare should have built up the constitutions of Dorking people. But it was not so in Aubrey's time, for he picks out the Dorking men and women as weaker and paler than others. He liked to see women with rosy faces:—

"Handsome women (viz. sanguine) as in Berks, Oxon, Somerset, &c. are rare at this market; they have a mealy complexion, and something hail like the French Picards; light grey eyed, and the kine hereabout are of sandy colour, like those in Picardy. None (especially those above the hill) have roses in their cheeks. The men and women are not so strong or of so warm a complexion as in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, &c."



One, at least, of the old customs of the town survived until very recent memory. Now it has died out with the rest. From Mr. J.S. Bright's History of Dorking I learn that the office of constable has lapsed; the places of the 'Beggar-poker' and the 'Ale Taster' have been taken by the local police. Parish funds are no longer dispensed at the close of church service. The poor on St. Thomas's Day used to go out 'Gooding'; to-day they plead no more. The Ditchling Singers, which were the Dorking Waits, no longer keep Christmas. On the 29th of May, sacred to King Charles II of blessed memory, an oak bough used to hang from the church tower; the tower is bare throughout the year. Guy Fawkes has been burned for the last time; the Jack in the Green dances no longer in cowslips and buttercups on the first of May. One ancient rite alone persisted until the other day. Every Shrove Tuesday, in dim remembrance of the great carnival which in ancient, pre-Reformation days, preceded the rigours of Lent, mummers made the circuit of the town. In the afternoon all the shops were shut and boarded up, and a game of football, started at the church gates, rioted up and down the main street. In the Southern Weekly News, an account describing the game of 1888 says that just before midday a procession of men grotesquely attired was formed, headed by a man bearing three footballs on a triangular frame, over which was the motto:—

"Kick away both Whig and Tory, Wind and water Dorking's glory."

The Town Crier started the game, kicked off the first ball at two o'clock, and stopped it at six. But that was in 1888. Twenty years have changed the Crier's duties. Fines and the police have stopped the old custom altogether.

Fifty years ago the Dorking cricket ground at Cotmandene was hardly less well known than the Oval. Two Dorking cricketers belong to the glorious days of Cotmandene. Henry Jupp was born in the town, and Tom Humphrey at Mitcham, but both kept public-houses in Dorking, and both played great cricket for the county. Many stories are told of Jupp, who was a favourite with the crowd, but one of the oldest belongs to Cotmandene. The match was for his benefit, and he was batting. Playing back at a ball, he trod on his wicket, and a bail fell. He picked up the bail, replaced it, and was reminded that he was out. "Out! At Dorking! Not me!" Nor did he go out, but made a hundred instead.

Another of Dorking's inhabitants made history in a different way. Brayley's History of Surrey was printed throughout in Dorking, and Ede, the printer, is said to have spent over L10,000 in the printing. What he made out of it is doubtful; he had made the L10,000 by his three businesses as printer, chemist, and perfumer.