At the churchyard gate are the trunks of two ancient but still living elms, to which is fastened a beam beset with hooks, which either hold or once held joints of meat for the butcher's shop behind. The church, which is a strange mixture of old and new, the new being gradually built on to the old, is the resting-place of Gaynesfordes and Ellenbrygges, two of the great old Surrey families, and contains at least one remarkable inscription:

"M.S. Under the middle stone that guards the ashes of a certain fryer, sometime vicar of this place, is raked up the dust of William Quelche, B.D., who ministred in the same since the reformation. His lot was through God's mercy to burn incense here about 30 years, and ended his course Aprill the 10, an. dni 1654, being aged 64 years."

Mr. Quelche was vicar in troublous times, and the distractions of the Civil War led to a hiatus in the parish registers. The fault lay with the parish clerk, but the conscientious Mr. Quelche felt bound to clear himself in the eyes of future ages by a long apology in the Register of baptisms, which begins beseechingly enough:—

"Good Reader tread gently:

For though these vacant yeares may seeme to make me guilty of thy censure, neither will I symply excuse myselfe from all blemishe; yet if thou doe but cast thine eie uppon the former pages and se with what care I have kepte the annalls of mine owne tyme, and rectifyed sundry errors of former times thou wilt beginn to thinke ther is some reason why he that begann to build so well should not be able to make an ende."

But the entries for the years before the war broke out were occasionally a little vague. Here are three full years' records of marriages:—

"1640. A Londoner married mr. Kepps sister of micham on Easter monday.

1641. Mr. Meece married a couple who came from fishsted whose names he could not remember.

1642. Not one marryed woe to y^e vicar."

Some of the names and surnames sound odd:—

Epaphroditus wood. Epaphroditus Wandling. Anne Waweker.

Hevedebar Hill. Wroe. Buttonshere. Dilcock.

Gander. Mustian. Thunderman. Nep. Milfe.

Carshalton House, a massive pile of red brick, was built by Sir John Fellowes, one of the directors of the South Sea Bubble. It stands on the site of a house which belonged to the most famous doctor of his day. He was John Radcliffe, founder of the Radcliffe Library, and so much run after as a physician that he felt able to be intolerably rude to his patients, even if they happened to be kings and queens. William the Third never forgave him for telling him that he would not own his Majesty's dropsical legs for the three kingdoms. Queen Anne refused to make him her court physician, but sent for him when she was dying. He would not leave Carshalton, pleading the gout; and he lived and died in angry remorse. The Queen never recovered, and the doctor did not dare to show his face in London.



Carshalton's greatest man lies in a nameless grave. Admiral Sir Edward Whitaker, leader of the assault which first made Gibraltar a British fortress, used to spend his summers at Carshalton, and was buried in Carshalton churchyard, but the slab which marked his grave was moved and lost when the church was enlarged. He was forty-four when with Captain Jumper and Captain Hicks he led his men against the redoubt, and he was as brilliant a fighter as he was a poor speller. I quote from a letter he wrote describing the siege and assault to his friend Sir Richard Haddock, Comptroller of the Navy, a day or two after the action:—

"There was three small ships in the old mold, one of which annoyed our camp by firing amongst them. One having about 10 guns, lying close to the mold, and just under a great bastion at the north corner of the towne, I proposed to Sir George the burning her in the night. He liked itt: accordingly ordered what boats I would have to my assistance: and about 12 at night I did itt effectually, w^th the loss of but one man, and 5 or 6 wounded.

July 23.—At 4 this morning, adm^l Byng began w^th his ships to cannonade, a Dutch rear-adm^l and 5 or 6 ships of thairs along w^th him, w^ch made a noble noise, being within half shott of the town. My ship, not being upon service, I desired Sir George to make me his aducon to carry his commands, from tyme to tyme, to adm^l Byng, which he did....

P.S. This is rite all in a hurry, sir, y^t I hope you'le excuse me."

The aide-de-camp had not forgotten the concluding formula of the schoolboy complete letter-writer.

Beyond Carshalton is Sutton, not less exuberant than Croydon. The Cock Hotel of coaching days has been rebuilt; the railway is convenient for Epsom or London.



CHAPTER XXXVI

CHALDON TO THE DOWNS

Coulsdon.—A giant Christian prince.—Chaldon.—The Ladder of Life.—The Brig of Whinney Moor.—Chipstead.—Merstham.—A Wizard Rector.—Addington.—The little churches.—Horne Tooke's Diversions.

It is possible to escape from Croydon's railway-stations. You can push out from its ringing streets into green and quiet country, and find little old churches within a mile or two of the railway, as undisturbed as if no railway were yet running. You may leave the line at Purley, and within an hour's walk find yourself in the wind on the downs, among Anglo-Saxon barrows and immemorial yews; you may even be able (though not without thought) to exclude from a generous view of hill and valley the enormous lunatic asylums which fate and County Councils have piled and multiplied in this part of Surrey.

There is a strip of country lying south of Purley in which you cannot get more than a mile and a half or so from the railway, but which contains tiny hamlets and lonely roads. Purley and Kenley will one day come out to Coulsdon, perhaps, but Coulsdon's day is not yet. The village itself is nothing more than a cottage or two with a church. But the road to Coulsdon opens on broad slopes of grass and plough, bordered with a line of yews—an ancient trackway, perhaps. Such a line, or rather lines, for there are several along the sides of the downs a little further south, would certainly be claimed as evidence of a "pilgrims' way" if they ran east and west between Guildford, say, and Dorking. Fields with such noble hedges to define them have their own air of wildness and age; it is easy enough, even with Purley slate roofs hardly a mile away, to fancy partridges calling across those open spaces. Coulsdon, indeed, was once celebrated for its game. Aubrey tells us that in the parish there was "a large coney-warren belonging to the Desbouveries." They, for many years under Stuarts and Georges, were lords of the manor.

From Coulsdon one may walk to Chaldon over Farthing Down. The horizon changes, but Farthing Down itself remains high and free, smooth with short down grass, and dinted with the hoofs of galloping horses. Croydon and Purley send many riders abroad on Saturdays and Sundays. But Farthing Down is peopled with other older forms. Along the ridge, bordering the ancient trackways, lies a line of barrows. They were opened in 1872 by Mr. John Wickham Flower; some were found untouched, and contained perfect skeletons. In one grave lay the bones of a great lady; buried with her was a beautiful wooden drinking-cup, its staves fastened by bronze bands of an intricate Runic pattern of coiled snakes. Another grave held the skeleton of a warrior giant, his sword lying across him and the boss of his shield upon his foot. Mr. Flower thinks he can add a name. Coulsdon is a corruption of Cuthredesdune, and perhaps Cuthred, an Anglo-Saxon prince, lies buried here with his family. Cuthred, son of Cwichelm, and grandson of Cynegils, the first Christian king of Wessex, was baptised in 639 at Dorchester.

Farthing Down stretches for nearly three miles north and south, and under its southern slope lies the little village of Chaldon. Chaldon church holds the most remarkable wall-painting in the country. The "Ladder of Life," or "Ladder of Salvation," is the subject, and it occupies nearly the whole of the west wall of the church. In red and white and yellow ochre paint you are shown the torments of the damned, the salvation of heaven, the trampling of Satan. A ladder rises through the middle; up it the poor souls of men struggle to the joys above; some tumble headlong; a demon picks off others with a pitchfork and sets them aside to burn or boil. An enormous dog eats a woman's hand; in life she had thrown to dogs what she should have given to the poor. A usurer painted without eyes, for usurers could not weep, sits among flames; devils drive pitchforks into his head, moneybags hang round his neck, he counts and swallows red hot coins. Other hapless souls, condemned to walk a bridge of spikes, carry burdens over a thin plank like a saw set on edge. Above is a nimbus of clouds, and above the nimbus, the weighing of souls. The archangel Michael balances the souls in great scales; a fiend tries to make them kick the beam. On the other side is the Harrowing of Hell. Hell is the mouth of a monstrous devil; Christ advances with the cross and banner, and thrusts the wood of the cross into the devil's mouth. The souls rise up delivered from purgatory; above them, a flying angel floats with a scroll. Mr. J.G. Waller, writing in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, explains most of the painting, but has hardly a guess for the scroll. "The heavens depart, as it were a scroll rolled together;" Mr. Waller does not mention the text which to the layman seems obvious but the expert may have reasons against it.

The punishment of the Bridge—the walking over a sharp edge, set with spikes or narrow as a hair—is one of the oldest things of all the religions. The Chinese had it, in the distant Eastern ages, and Mr. Waller, in the Collections, prints verses which show it surviving in Yorkshire in 1624. There was a Yorkshire tradition that a person after death must pass over Whinney Moor; and at a funeral it was the custom for a woman to come and chant verses over the corpse. These are an extract:—

When thou from hence doest pass away, Every night and awle, To Whinney Moor thou com'st at last, And Christ receive thy sawle.

From Whinney Moor that thou mayest pass, Every night and awle, To Brig of dread thou com'st at last, And Christ receive thy sawle. From Brig of dread, na brader than a thread, Every night and awle, To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last, And Christ receive thy sawle.

East of Chaldon is Caterham, west is Chipstead and south-west is Merstham, each two miles or so away as the crow flies and something more as the road runs, and each with a railway station. Caterham once was a valley; Aubrey wrote of it: "In this parish are many pleasant little vallies, stored with wild thyme, sweet marjoram, barnell, boscage, and beeches." I do not know barnell, but the last twenty years have set many houses among the boscage. They have built, too, two new churches, one of them set very finely on a hill; the old church is disused, or used, rather, only for a Sunday school. Upon Sunday scholars, from a Norman wall, looks down a hideous stone corbel. A clown's face stretches a devil's mouth wide open with hands like rat's paws; the sharp teeth grin like rat's teeth; perhaps in the Sunday school they make their own faces at it.

Chipstead, to the west, is on a hill the other side of the railway. It has some pretty modern cottages by a pond and shading elm-trees; a post-office also, with the smallest possible aperture for introducing letters to the notice of the post-mistress within. The church has some quaint features; there are a number of oddly shaped lancet windows, a curiously carved boss in the groining of the tower, and a strange arrangement by which the members of the choir sit facing the east with their backs to the pulpit. In the churchyard lies Sir Edward Banks, perhaps Chipstead's most illustrious native. He was born poor and he died rich; and he built three great bridges, Waterloo, Southwark, and London. Chipstead churchyard, too, has a fine yew; but good yews are common in the churchyards south of Croydon.

The best walk from Chaldon is over the hill to Merstham; the sign-posts show you the path and mark it "The Pilgrims' Way" to Tollsworth Farm with the utmost assurance. From Tollsworth Farm the path drops over a plough down the side of the hill; before the railway and the tunnel came the old Way perhaps went straight across to the church. Merstham itself has little to show except one pretty little side street; but the church is more full of curiosities than any other near. Its builders placed it delightfully on a mound which is all air and sunlight, and though much of the charm of the church was destroyed in 1861, much that is old and curious remains. A queerly placed clock tells the time low down on the tower; inside are ancient monuments, one a stone effigy recovered from use as a pavement, others to the Elinbrygge family. That is only one spelling of the name, and perhaps as good as any other; variations are Elinebrigge, Elyngbrigge, Elinerugge, Ellerug, Elmerugge, Elmebrugge, Elmridge, Elmbrige, Elmebrygge, Ellmbridge, Elinrugge, Ellyngbrugg, Elenbrig, Elingbrig, Ellyngbrigg, and Ellynbrege. An Elinbrygge in those days could spell practically anything. Other memorials are fragments of stone carving, once belonging to the Southcotes and Waldegraves, and built without reason into windows and walls. Over the west chancel arch is a broken piece of carving from old London Bridge; and forlornest possession of all, the north chantry is paved with a tessellated floor which was made in prison, I was told, by an unhappy woman who hoped that forgiveness would take and use her work. Merstham has had some famous rectors. One was the great Thomas Linacre, King's Physician to Henry VII and Henry VIII, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, and friend of Melanchthon and Erasmus. He became a priest when he was fifty-eight, four years before his death, and was only Rector of Merstham for a month. "I much wonder," Fuller writes of him in his Worthies, "at what I find in good authors, that Linacre a little before his death turned priest and began to study the Scriptures with which he was formerly unacquainted, in so much that reading the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of St. Matthew he vowed, 'That either this was not the Gospel or we were not Christians.'"

Another rector, Robert Cole, once was a nonconformist, especially in the matter of ecclesiastical vestments, but eventually got rid of his objections. Ecclesiastical Commissioners then decided to have an object lesson in properly dressed clergymen at Lambeth. Mr. Cole was dressed in full clerical attire, and was then "placed as the front figure at the meeting, while the chancellor of the Bishop of London thus harangued the auditory: 'My masters and the ministers of London, the Council's pleasure is, that ye strictly keep the unity of apparel, like to this man as you now see him; that is, a square cap, a scholar's gown, priestlike, a tippet, and in the church a linen surplice.'" The auditors then had to sign "Volo" or "Nolo," and those who refused were deprived of their livings. Poor Mr. Cole, priestlike in his tippet, cuts a meeker figure than another Merstham rector, James Samborne. This reverend gentleman was actually supposed to possess supernatural powers, and when a thief climbed up a pear-tree in the rectory orchard, Mr. Samborne went in pursuit, fixed his gaze upon the robber from a suitable distance and from where he stood, using dreadful arts, fastened the robber in the tree.

Another walk from Croydon, for those who like a string of little old churches, and an occasional fine view, would be by Addington to the south-east through Sanderstead to Warlingham, or further south to the edge of the chalk ridge at Woldingham. The railway is never very far off. There is nothing imposing among these hillside hamlets; they leave an impression of tiny villages which felt their first need to be a church; the congregations must have been small and poor. They, of the Surrey churches, are nearest in heart to the "little, lost down churches" of Sussex and Mr. Kipling's most magical poem.

Addington, perhaps, could hardly be called lost, for many archbishops have lived at Addington Park, and two lie buried in the churchyard, Archbishop Longley and Archbishop Tait. There are memorials to three others—Manners-Sutton, Howleigh, and Sumner. But the most attractive name on the church walls belongs to the wife of the builder of Addington House. She was Mrs. Grizzel Trecothick. Addington still lies in deep country; Sanderstead, its neighbour three miles to the south-west, is half in the country and half in the town. Old Sanderstead, the Sandy Place, has a large, square red-brick house overlooking a park and a quiet churchyard, where the little church, with sloping roofs over each aisle, looks rather like a hen brooding chickens. In the chancel is a memorial to one of those squires who held strange offices under Tudor kings. He kneels in painted marble, and he was "John Ownsted, esquier, servant to y^e most excellent princesse and our dread soveraigne Queene Elizabeth, and seriant of her ma^ties cariage by y^e space of 40 yeres." South-east of Sanderstead are Farley and Chelsham, each with an old church; Farley's is a tiny building by a fine farmyard, but the peace of the little church is gone; its modest spire, as you walk to the churchyard, is dominated and affronted by the hideous clock-tower of a neighbouring lunatic asylum. Why should such a thing be? County Councils have decreed that in this part of Surrey must be massed together the thousands of poor souls who have lost the reason which county councillors must be supposed to possess; but why insist on their unhappy presence? A building to hold such sadness should be a quiet thing, hidden among trees, silent, alone. But that would suit neither councillors nor architects. For them, asylums must stare, scar, insist that they will be seen and known; and here, in what should be tranquil and lovely country, they violate the hills.

Two other villages, Warlingham and Woldingham, lie east of the railway. Warlingham stands round a pretty green, and has a pleasant inn; the church, which once lay among fields, is at the end of a chestnut avenue which belongs to the future. It is a curious little building, with a sense of wide light and cool stone, and has been beautifully restored by Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, who discovered, and has admirably preserved, a particularly interesting low-side window with a circular niche in the chancel. Woldingham, right on the edge of the chalk ridge, has a tiny church set apart among the fields; nearer the village, a pretty wooden chapel—almost the only pretty wooden chapel I have seen. But the best of Woldingham is the broad and breezy grass plateau on which it stands. On a clear day you may see London; a better view to the south is blocked by new buildings and gardens.

The railway returns to Purley and Croydon; Purley, where Tooke lived, and gave his name to Horne Tooke, with eight thousand pounds, for winning him a lawsuit. From Purley Horne Tooke named his Diversions; they may have diverted him, but if they did, he could be moved to mirth by a very dreary business indeed.



CHAPTER XXXVII

HORLEY AND CHARLWOOD

Restored church windows.—A Cow for an apprentice.—A Horley eleven.—Thunderfield Castle.—Horne.—Outwood Common.—A daring jump.—Over the Green.—Burstow's Astronomer.—Causies.—St. Margaret and the Devil.—A Country Sermon.

"The pretty village and church of Horley" is the opening of a descriptive paragraph in a Surrey guide-book not thirty years old. Horley is more than a village and a little less than pretty to-day. But it has two good old-fashioned country inns, and it is a convenient centre to some interesting country. It contains in itself little of interest except the church, which has a fine tower; but which is one of the unhappiest examples of unintelligent "restoration." The story of the "restoration" is, indeed, hardly credible. In 1877 the Surrey Archaeological Society visited the church, and Major Heales wrote an admirable paper on its architecture, particularly drawing attention to the beauty of the windows in the north aisle, which dated from 1310, and contained some rare deep ruby glass. He described the tracery as the most beautiful in the county. Yet within five years the church was "restored"; the windows, which were in excellent preservation and would have lasted another five hundred years, were destroyed, every stone of them; and the glass had disappeared, either broken up or sold.



Horley parish registers have some pleasant entries. Stray daughters, who ate too much at home and otherwise were hard to look after, used to be apprenticed to persons who would undertake, for a consideration, to keep them until they were twenty-one. The consideration might be in cash or in kind. Thus, Jeremy Shoe, on January 13, 1604, took An Chamley, daughter of Edmund Chamley, deceased, apprentice "until she come to xxj, in consideracon he receives some household stuffe to the valew of vj^s viij^d and is to be eased in not paying to the poore for iiij yeares to come." John Chelsham had a better bargain, for he agreed to take An Williams till she came to twenty-one, and had from her father "one mare and a colte in full satisfaction." Sometimes the apprentices were bound even longer. Susan Washfoord was bound to Bernard Humphry, and he undertook "to keep her sufficient meate, drink, and apparell until she come to the age of fower and twenty yeares." Susan's mother was a widow, and she paid to get rid of her daughter a cow and twenty shillings from the churchwardens.

Not many Surrey towns or villages can boast a family cricket eleven. Horley can. Eleven Watneys of Horley have played frequent matches against local clubs, and against eleven Wigans of Mortlake. Mr. F.S. Ashley-Cooper has collected some other instances of family cricket teams in the county. Eleven Bacons, a father and ten sons, played eleven postmen at Thornton Heath in 1895, but were beaten by the postmen. In 1877 eleven Mitchells played eleven Heaths on Shalford Common. The Heaths all belonged to the same family, but the Mitchells were only relations. Eleven Lovells played a match at Tulse Hill in 1901, but had much the worst of it; and, most famous name of all, twelve Caesars of Godalming, three fathers and their nine sons, once played the Gentlemen of the District. The family luck was no better; they lost by 16 runs.

Hardly a mile to the south-east of Horley lies an enigma—Thunderfield Castle. There is no castle; perhaps there never was one. A moat of brown water, splashed with white duck-feathers; an irregular mound beyond, thick with brushwood, and an ordinary set of farm-buildings through a gate to the side—that is all that is to be seen of the castle to-day. Was it an old British camp? Almost certainly not, nor a Roman camp. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian, thinks it may have been one of the numberless castles built by the quarrelsome de Clares to annoy the equally quarrelsome de Warennes. Perhaps it was built in the days when castles sprang up like mushrooms; and perhaps it was demolished when demolitions were so frequent that one more or less was never noticed. It may have had a stone keep, but nobody can tell whether it had or not unless he excavates the ground within the moat, and that is a task which nobody, apparently, desires to try.

Another mile and a half along the west road from Horley leads to Smallfield Place, once the manor-house of the Bysshe family, afterwards a farmhouse, and now a private residence, with the Jacobean part of the old house apparently well worked in with the new. Further, by another mile, is the tiny village of Horne, not much more than a school, a church, and an old cottage or two. In such a simple, open-air little place it was attractive to see, on a hot September day when I was there, a ring of schoolchildren being given their lessons out of doors in the shade. Horne is one of those little villages in which, when the busy, pleasant hum of the children's school first comes down the wind, you wonder where the children spring from. It does not look as if there were enough cottages within walking distance to provide a class, much less four or five standards—if that is the correct expression. Horne is, indeed, one of the most out-of-the-way little places in this part of the county. But it makes a satisfactory objective for a walk from Horley, and its small church contains at least two memorials of interest. One is an elaborate piece of wood-carving, painted to look like marble, which commemorates John Goodwine, who died when James I was king; the other is an ingenious model of the church itself, as it stood before restoration. The restorers altered the interior pretty thoroughly; but the old church must have been a curious building. It had a long, large window on the roof, especially let in to throw light on the hymn-books of the musicians in the gallery. How was such a window cleaned?

Walking in this part of Surrey, which is chiefly pasture, is apt to be a little monotonous, without a good view. One of the prettiest views near Horne is at Outwood, a little more than a mile to the north-west, on the way back to Horley. Outwood Common is delightful. Two great windmills, black and white, spread sails to the blowing air; below them, black and white like the mills, pigs nose quietly over the short grass, and geese strut cackling. To the north, beyond rich and tranquil fields, lie the grey-green wooded hills by Bletchingley and Nutfield.



Horne is pretty near the centre of the country of the Burstow foxhounds, which stretches from Leigh, the other side of Horley, to Edenbridge in Kent. Two good stories are told of White, the Burstow huntsman. One is of an extraordinary jump, singular not for its height or the width of ground covered, but for its daring and adroitness. It was on one of the best days the Burstow ever had, when they killed a fox at Crawley after an hour and ten minutes' run almost without a check; and went on to find another fox near New Chapel Green, which hounds ate in Kent at half-past five, nobody knows quite where, so bad was the light. Nearly at the end of the second run White found himself on the edge of a narrow, deep ghyll, with a stream at the bottom, crossed by an overgrown footpath which went down to the stream and up again by flights of stone steps opposite each other. Riding down two or three of the steps, he took a standing jump over the stream and landed on the top steps the other side. On another occasion his daring was of a different kind; he did not know where he was riding. Hounds had crossed the golf links on Earlswood Common, and White, close behind them, was riding straight for one of the greens. A member of the hunt shouted to warn him, but White, who had not the slightest notion what was meant, galloped straight over the green, turning round to point at the hole and shout to the hunt, "Ware hole! ware hole!"

Burstow itself, hidden among pines, has named the hounds, but has not a large part in Surrey history. One of its rectors, the Rev. J. Flamsteed, who is buried in the church, was the first Astronomer Royal. Charles II made him that, when he was twenty-nine; nine years later he took orders, and went on astronomising till his death. Newton helped him and quarrelled with him over the publication of his observations; but it was something, even in the days of Charles II, to be made Astronomer Royal when Newton was alive.

Three miles on the other side of Horley lies Charlwood, once a wholly restful little village, but of late years stiffened and discoloured by the building contractor. The centre street of the village, near the church, is quaintly arched by a pair of elm trees, cropped and pollarded to meet overhead. Elms are not often selected for experiments in topiary. But Charlwood has more than one feature peculiar to itself, or at all events to the district. The village lies deep in Wealden clay, which can grow luxuriant roses, but which in days when Surrey roads were less well laid made getting about in the winter rains a matter of difficulty for those who could not drive. So those who walked made their own paths, which can be seen running along the side of most of the roads in the neighbourhood. "Causies" is the local name for these causeways, which are single slabs of flat stone set like stepping stones in the clay, sometimes for miles together. The villagers tell you that they have been there since no one knows when. They may be right, but their probable date is the middle of the seventeenth century, when John Gainsford, as we shall see, was making a causeway like these at Crowhurst.



A very curious set of wall paintings portrays, in the south aisle of Charlwood church, the legend of St. Margaret. St. Margaret was a virgin and a martyr, a most popular saint in the middle ages, and the heroine of a remarkable story. She was the daughter of a pagan priest at Antioch, and since she was a weak child, she was sent into the country for fresh air. Her nurse brought her up as a Christian, and when she was older she was sent into the fields to mind sheep. One day the governor of Antioch, whose name was Olibrius, was out hunting, saw the pretty shepherdess, fell in love with her at sight, and offered her his hand in marriage on the spot. St. Margaret refused him; she might not wed with a pagan. Olibrius was furious. He seized the poor shepherdess, beat her cruelly, and threw her into prison; even there she was not safe. The devil himself came after her in the form of a dragon, entered the prison and swallowed the saint whole, as you may see in the picture. However, Providence intervened, and by a miracle she escaped from the dragon's body. Evidently Providence then gave up helping, for Olibrius succeeded where the devil had failed. He ordered her head off at once, and the artist has painted her soul flying to heaven in the form of a dove.

Another painting sets out a commoner story, the allegory of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Three kings ride out hunting in the forest, and are met by three ghastly spectres, who lecture them on the vanity of this world's pomps and pleasures. I should think this used to be a favourite. It must have been vastly comforting to the poor, and pretty easy, too, for the parson. Anybody could make a sermon on the sufferings in store for kings and other rich people, and the way they go out hunting and shooting and not caring for anybody, and then the spectres come at them and they see how empty life is. Even to-day those ruddled drawings can set a spell. Stare at them, and the little church calls back its preacher and his flock; there, in the pulpit, he stood, gesturing at the dragon and St. Margaret; here, below him, sat the quiet-hearted countrymen, wondering in the solemn Sunday sunshine; here, perhaps, a child, hearing the story for the first time. St. Margaret must have been more difficult than the Kings. She begins well enough, and she goes on well—the village maidens would doubt whether they would have the strength to refuse an Olibrius. Then the deliverance from the devil would do admirably; the bumpkins would swallow that as easily as the devil swallowed St. Margaret. But how to go on? How to explain the failure of Providence afterwards? The preacher must have slurred that, and got on quickly to the wings of the dove.

Two great Surrey families belong to Charlwood. One is the line of Sander, or Saunder, settled at Charlwood as early as Edward II, and still surviving, in name at all events, in the neighbourhood. It was Richard Saunder who placed in the church the delicate fifteenth-century oak screen, the most beautiful in the county; but a more famous member of the family was Nicholas Saunder, Regius Professor and Jesuit Divine, over whose writings many good churchmen quarrelled. The other family are the Jordans of Gatwick, almost as old as the Saunders, and like them surviving in cottage life to-day.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

GODSTONE AND BLETCHINGLEY

The White Hart at Godstone.—Cobbett's violets.—Bletchingley.—Beagles and Foxhounds.—Dr. Nathaniel Harris.—Begging the Love of Neighbours.—A gratious woman.—Swift and a gentle prelate.—Bletchingley manor.—The Master of the Revels.—An English gentleman's Armour.—How to be buried.—Posing for a tombstone.—Nutfield.—Fuller's earth and its new uses.

The key to the east of Surrey is Godstone. It is true that the village itself lies more than two miles from the railway station which bears its name, but which might equally well have been named Tandridge or Crowhurst. But there is no other centre in East Surrey from which so many other villages and places of interest are easily reached. To the west, a mile and a-half away, lies Bletchingley, and another mile beyond that, Nutfield, which has not yet been absorbed by Redhill, and, indeed, belongs to Surrey country as surely as Redhill belongs to the railway and the town. To the north are Caterham and Chaldon, and Woldingham and Warlingham; Tandridge is two miles away, Oxted a little more, and Limpsfield not quite four; north of Limpsfield is Titsey, and east of Limpsfield and Titsey is the Kent border. Crowhurst lies to the south-east, and beyond that Lingfield; but Lingfield is almost Sussex, and is perhaps a little too far for a walk from Godstone; it is best reached by rail.

Godstone begins hospitably, at least to the traveller from the south, with three old inns, the Bell, the Rose and Crown, and the old White Hart, now the Clayton Arms. The Bell and the Rose and Crown have not, I think, won any particular place in history; probably they were always a little overshadowed by the spacious frontage of the old White Hart. The Rose and Crown, for all that, displays an imposing board setting out the numbers and the addresses of the many cycling clubs who have made it their country headquarters—doubtless it has been the first stage of many happy, dusty journeys. But the old White Hart has its place in the classical country books. Cobbett often lunched there, and probably the inn-parlour where he had his bread and bacon is very much the same as when he wrote of the village in Rural Rides. Perhaps the rooms upstairs hold more furniture than in the twenties—particularly the fine dining-room with its oak-beamed ceiling, which is as full of furniture as a room can very well be, besides serving various public uses as a place in which audits and meetings are held and county and local account books inspected. In the yard outside, too, although the great vats of the brewhouse are gone, and Renault cars run under the arch which used to echo with the shoes of spanking teams, there can be little changed since Cobbett saw it. He wrote, in 1822:—

"At and near Godstone the gardens are all very neat; and at the Inn, there is a nice garden well-stocked with beautiful flowers in the season. I here saw, last summer, some double violets as large as small pinks, and the lady of the house was kind enough to give me some of the roots."

The garden is still gay and full of flowers; though if I were the landlady I should certainly stock some peculiarly pretty sorts of violets to keep up the tradition—even if she were to find it a little difficult to provide the flowers in bloom in high summer. The village itself has not grown greatly during the past hundred years. Cobbett describes it as "a beautiful village, chiefly of one street, with a fine large green before it, and with a pond in the green." There is not much else to be seen now; the green is as wide and sunny, the geese and ponies graze as contentedly, and the pond is as bright under the chestnut trees and limes. If there has been any very noticeable change, it has been made, perhaps, nearer the church and away towards the railway station, which lie pretty far apart. From the main road by the Clayton Arms there runs a gravel path up to the church, which stands on higher ground, half a mile from the green, and by the path lies a very fine pond, broad and deep, edged with willows and bulrushes, where wild duck swim, and on the far side opening into a shallow bay in which you may watch plovers bathe through the summer afternoons.

The church has not quite the grace and charm of some of its simpler neighbours; but it is interesting as containing a number of monuments to the Evelyns. Church mice are proverbial; but Godstone has a church robin, or had one when I was there in the autumn of 1907. Bread had been placed conveniently for him in one of the windows, and he flew about watching me quietly, and eventually sang a loud solo from beside the organ—cantoris, I think. Outside the church are some of Godstone's newer buildings, the almshouses erected by Mrs. Hunt of Wonham House in memory of her daughter; like the additions to the church, they are the work of Sir Gilbert Scott. Nothing could be more admirable than the repose and solidity of these delightful houses, with their massive oak beams and sturdy red chimneys. Sir Gilbert himself lived for a time at Rokesnest, between Tandridge and Godstone.

A mile and a half to the west of Godstone lies Bletchingley, high on the ridge that runs parallel to the downs, above Merstham, to the north. When Mr. Jennings walked into Bletchingley, in his Field Paths and Green Lanes, the population seemed to him "at first sight to be made up of butchers and beagles." That was more than thirty years ago, but Bletchingley still keeps up its reputation, in regard to the beagles; indeed, it has added to its just fame, for the odds are that, in the summer months at all events, the first animal to catch your eye in Bletchingley will be a foxhound. The kennels of the Burstow Hunt are at Smallfields, near Horley, but the puppies introduce themselves to other lodgings. Another abiding feature of Bletchingley is its cobbled gutters. The quiet, sunny main street is one of the broadest of all Surrey village roads, and its gutters drain it admirably. It lies between low and comfortable old houses, of which the White Hart is the chief, as becomes an ancient and notable inn. The White Hart when I saw it last was welcoming a couple of foxhounds; another strolled across the road careless of a hooting horn; another stood in a shopdoor. But of all that belongs to the past in Bletchingley the best lies away from the main road. Brewer Street is the name of an offshoot of Bletchingley to the north, and contains one of the most perfect small timbered houses in the county—the gatehouse of the old manor.



Bletchingley has been given a bad character by Cobbett. "The vile rotten borough of Bletchingley," he calls it, and adds, from a Godstone inn, that it is "happily for Godstone out of sight." Long before Cobbett the Bletchingley politicians were in hot water. One of them, Dr. Nathaniel Harris, was rector of the parish in the early days of the Stuarts, and took his politics with him, as other clergymen have done, into the pulpit. A Mr. Lovell was the candidate he wanted in for Bletchingley, and he did his best for a canvass. He preached a sermon specially directed against persons who would not vote for Lovell; he took his text out of Matthew—"Now the chief priest and elders sought false witnesses"; and he referred generally to his opponents as lying knaves. It must have been inspiriting to hear him. His candidate got in, but there was a petition against him for bribery, and Dr. Harris got into trouble. He had to kneel at the bar of the House of Commons and humbly confess his fault and pray for pardon, and on the next Sunday he had to confess again in church, and to beg for the love of his neighbours.

The Reform Act ended Bletchingley as a borough. It had been bought in the reign of Charles II by Sir Robert Clayton, and was just as flagrant a job as Gatton or Haslemere; generally a Clayton sat for it. In the Clayton era there were not many more than a dozen electors, but the numbers who turned out at an election were remarkable. The inns set out their barrels in the streets, free to all drinkers; the Bletchingley cobbles ran beer. As a disfranchised borough, it ended with a flash of distinction; its last members were Thomas Hyde Villiers and Lord Palmerston.

Other Rectors of Bletchingley were gentler souls than Dr. Harris. One of them, William Hampton—he belonged to a remarkable line of Hamptons, seven generations, and all clergymen—left a pretty passage in his will. He bequeathed to his granddaughter, Judith Herat, a plot of ground in Bletchingley, because, as he wrote, "she is very like her mother and beareth the name of her great-grandmother my mother a gratious woman." Another, Thomas Herring, rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Not everybody would have recommended him. Swift abused him. Herring preached a sermon in Lincoln's Inn and condemned Gay's Beggar's Opera, and Swift went to the attack in the Intelligencer. "I should be very sorry that any of the clergy," he wrote "should be so weak as to imitate a Court Chaplain who preached against the Beggar's Opera, which probably will do more good than one thousand sermons of so stupid, so injudicious, and so prostitute a divine." Swift would have quarrelled with his biographer, who gives him an engaging character:—

"His person was majestic; he had a gracefulness in his behaviour and gravity in his countenance, that always procured him reverence. His pronunciation was so remarkably sweet and his address so insinuating that his audience immediately on his beginning to speak were prepossessed in his favour."



Few manors in Surrey have passed through more distinguished hands than Bletchingley. At the Conquest it was given to the great Richard de Tonebrige, and perhaps he built Bletchingley Castle. He was pretty well off for land in Surrey, for he held thirty-eight manors in that county alone. He was the head of the de Clares, and they held Bletchingley for eight generations. The most famous of them was the Red Earl who knew how to change sides between Simon de Montfort and Henry III so as to be cursed as a traitor six centuries ago and recognised by later generations as a patriot and a statesman, who could curb the barons as well as resist the King. He was the last but one of the de Clares to hold Bletchingley, and it was during his absence, at the battle of Lewes, that a Royalist party destroyed the Castle. His son died at the head of his horse at Bannockburn, and the manor came by marriage into the Stafford family. They held it for another six generations, until the third Duke of Buckingham, Lord High Constable under Henry VIII, ended the splendours of the Staffords on the scaffold.

Sir Nicholas Carew had the manor next, and followed Buckingham to Tower Hill. Then Anne of Cleves, too plain for Tower Hill, lived there, and Sir Thomas Cawarden managed it for her and succeeded her. He is the fascinating figure. He moves in a royal light of Courts and Kings, of hunting and hawking in the sunshine, and plotting in dark chambers, and guessing the value of a queen's smile. He was Henry VIII's Master of the Revels, and Keeper of the King's tents, hales, and toyles (which were wooden stables and traps for game), and at Bletchingley he entertained Henry and perhaps more than one of his queens. You picture the Master of the Revels riding in velvet by Catherine Howard, and wondering whether her eyes would take her by the same stairway as Anne Boleyn.

When Queen Mary was proclaimed after Edward, and there were risings and rumours of risings in support of Queen Jane, Sir Thomas Cawarden had his difficulties. He had been getting his orders from Jane one day and Mary the next, and suddenly there was an end; he was arrested, and all his arms were ordered to be seized. Bletchingley Castle was searched, and was found to contain a good deal more than the armour of a few retainers and the artillery of a deer park. The inventory showed twenty-four demi-lances, eighty-six horsemen's staves, one hundred pikes, one hundred morris-pikes, one hundred bows, two handguns, and other weapons, besides sixteen heavy pieces of cannon—enough to arm a hundred horse and more than three hundred foot. All were seized and taken to the Tower. Sir Thomas complained bitterly. Might not an English gentleman keep armour in his country house if he pleased to do so? Mary could prove nothing against him, and was obliged to let him go. But she thought his weapons best kept in the Tower; and so, despite his protests, did Elizabeth after her. Sir Thomas's petition for their return and for redress is amongst the Loseley manuscripts. Here is part of his statement:—

"That on xxv. Jan. I. Mary he was lawfully possessed at Bletchingley of and in certein horses with furnyture armure artillarie and munitions for the warres and divers other goodes to the value of L2000 and that upon certein mooste untrue surmises brutes and Rumers raised against him was brought into divers and sundry vexations and troubles during which time one Sir Thomas Saunders Knight and William Saunders of Ewell on pretence of comande did take into their heads and possession the said armure and eight of his great horses and did convey the same in 17 great waynes thoroughly loaden and at the same time spent no small quantity of his corne hay and strawe and had only restored 4 loades and of the said 8 great horse oon of the best the iii^rd day after died. And the rest are in so evil plite and lykyng and were never since otherwise liable to serve in the carte to his great hindrance and undoing."

When Sir Thomas died, his funeral was prodigious. No expense was spared; the feasting was Gargantuan; the villagers mourned with the best beef and beer. Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, has obtained from the Loseley MS. a full account of the charges, from which I make extracts. It is headed:—

Suche CHARGES as grew the Daye of the OBSEQUIES of Sir THOMAS CAWARDEN, Knight, decessed; viz.—

Fyrste to George Melleshe Mchaunt Taylor for black lxxv^li v^s. It^m two tonne of beare iii^li. It^m iiii quarters wheat iii^li xiiii^s iiii^d. Item ii oxen vi^li xiii^s iiii^d. Item iiii vealls xiii^s iiii^d. Item iiii muttons xvi^s viii^d. Item iiii piggs v^s iiii^d. Item iiii doz. pyghons viii^s. Item vii doz. conyes xvi^s. Item iv doz. checkens vi^s viii^d. Item sugere spyces and frutes v^li. Item wyne v^li. Item to one Garrett for helping in the kitchyne too days ii^s. Item to Richard Leys for monye borowed of him to be dystributed at Horselye when S^r Thom Cawarden dyed for neesorryes iii^li. Item for the lone of black cottons xiii^s 1^d ob. Item for the waste of other cotten iii^s. Item for xxvii yards of black cotten that conveyed the wagon wherein the corse was carried to Blechinglie from Horselye xv^s ix^d.

The black and the bakemeats and the beer cost altogether L149 16s. 11d. But Sir Thomas had foreseen it all. There were estimates obtained for such things in those days. Here is the estimate made by a herald of the funeral charges of Sir Thomas's lady:—

PREPARATION to be made for the BURYALL of the LADY CARDYN.

First the body to be well syred (cered) and chested. Item a place to be appointed wher the body shall be buryed. Item, ordre to be takin for the hangyng of the churche withe blacke. Item, order to be takyn for the raylles wher the morners shall knele, to be hangyd with blacke; and also the churche, and the said raylles, to be garnyshed with scochins. Item, to apoint a gentylman in a blacke gowne to cary the penon of armes. Item, to apoint v women morners, wherof the chiefest to be in the degree of a lady. Item, to apoint a knyght or a squier to lede the chieff morner. Item, to apoint iiii gentylmen to be assystance to the body. Item, yeomen in blacke cottes to carry the body. Item, to appoint a preacher. Item, to appoint a paulle of blacke velvett to laye upon the body during the service. Item, prestes and clarks to by appontyd for the said service.

Clarencieulx King of Armes was to manage it, to have five yards of black cloth for his mourning gown, five shillings a day for his services, L3 6s. 8d. for his fee, and to be paid back "his chargys to be boryn to and fro." Men knew how to die then, and how to be buried.

Bletchingley manor, after the Cawardens, came to the Howards of Effingham, and so to an heiress Elizabeth Countess of Peterborough, the richest and loveliest lady of her day. Her son fought for the king against his own father, and the House of Commons fined him L10,000 for turning Roman Catholic. The money had to be found, and the manor was sold to Sir Robert Clayton, Whig, Lord Mayor, plutocrat, and, according to Dryden, extortioner. But Dryden's political satire was not always fair. Ishban, in Absalom and Achitophel is Sir Robert—

Ishban, of conscience suited to his trade As good a saint as usurer ever made.

There was a suspicion that Sir Robert would have liked to purchase a peerage, and Dryden was furious at the "shame and scandal," though a quieter spirit, John Evelyn, dined more than once with the Mayor, and evidently had some admiration for his hospitality. "He was a discreete Magistrate" Evelyn writes, "and tho' envied, I think without much cause."

If Sir Robert Clayton was criticised during his lifetime, he left plenty of matter for dispute behind him when he died. Half Bletchingley church is dominated by his monument. Mr. Jennings was appalled by it; "a fearful neighbour" he calls it, and is of opinion that whatever may have been the misdeeds of the dead, "he never could have done anything bad enough to deserve his terrific monument." As a matter of fact the dead man designed his own memorial, after the serenely contemplative fashion of his time. Is the monument, after all so appalling? It cannot but be interesting, for it is an index to the taste of a bygone age—an age when the survivors of the dead found relief in Latin superlatives, and the living looked into the future with the respectable vanity of an alderman posing before a mirror. No doubt Sir Robert spent many happy hours over his monument. Did he, or did the sculptor suggest the plump cherubs which stand on each side, rolling stony tears from upturned eyes? Did he decide on the particular direction in which he should throw a leg? was it he who selected the disjointed texts which are carved below him? or did the sculptor submit samples? It would be an arresting spectacle; the finality of the whole thing, the weight of the choosing would oppress even a Lord Mayor. A specimen angel would be shown him: no, he could not approve an angel. Had the sculptor no other sizes in cherubs? What texts were being used this season? Stone tears.... The sculptor probably thought of those.

The church once had a fine spire. Aubrey mentions it particularly, as measuring "more than forty feet above the battlements, with five great bells, the tenour weighing 2000 weight, which were melted with the spire and all the timber-work destroyed 1606." It was computed that in the spire were 200 loads of timber. In the tower below the timber is still magnificent and massive, and there is a new peal of bells, cast in 1780. Bletchingley has one of the longest records of church bell ringing in the county. On April 11, 1789, its ringers rang a full peal of 5600 changes—"college exercises"—in three hours thirty-six minutes, as you may read in a record in the belfry. In the record the ages of the ringers are carefully given. They range between 19 and 30. Bell ringing is hard work.

Between Bletchingley and Redhill lies Nutfield, which has not yet been caught into the town. Perhaps its progress into Redhill will be slow, for it stands inconveniently high for wheeled traffic in and out of that huddled basin of bricks, and from its own station a mile to the south the roads up the hill are some of the steepest in east Surrey. Before Redhill brings it more money and more bricks, it ought to be worth an enterprising landlord's while to convert its principal inn to its old methods. The Old Queen's Head is a posting inn with the remains of what was once a spacious parlour, solid with oak beams big enough for a belfry, warmed by a broad open fireplace and offering the hospitality of two great chimney seats. The chimney seats have lapsed into cupboards and a stove stands where once the wealden logs roared up into the night. But if Godstone with its Clayton Arms, or Chiddingfold with its Crown, beckons in the passer-by to look at old oak and old walls, why should not Nutfield?



Nutfield's chief industry, the digging of fuller's earth, dates back to beginnings that are now quite forgotten. The Nutfield pits are still working, and spread over the slope on which they lie a dreary stretch of blue and grey upturned soil as if a giant gamekeeper had been digging out colossal ferrets. The industry is old enough and important enough for the export of fuller's earth to have been prohibited as far back as Edward II, and in 1693 one Edmund Warren was tried in the Exchequer for smuggling a quantity of earth out of the country, though it was proved to be not fuller's earth but potter's clay. But there is no doubt that great quantities were smuggled abroad, with corresponding injury—or so it was thought at the time—to the cloth and woollen industry of Guildford and south-west Surrey. Later days have discovered later methods of scouring cloth of grease, and the trade no longer makes large demands on the pits of Nutfield. But fuller's earth has still its uses at the toilet table, and in America other uses. I have ascertained them exactly. It is employed to dehydrate certain oils with which the pork-packer adulterates lard.



CHAPTER XXXIX

LINGFIELD AND CROWHURST

A chapter of Hume.—The Village Cage.—The Copthorne Poachers.—A shop for three centuries.—The green-faced Soldan.—A griffin's hoof.—Second-best fish.—Eleanor Cobham and the Witch.—Crowhurst.—A tree and a rubbish-heap.—An iron tombstone.—Fifteen daughters running.—Crowhurst Place.

Lingfield is not large enough, nor enough overbuilt and railway-ridden, to dare to the title of capital even of a distant corner of Surrey. But it stands above and apart from the quiet country round it, like a Bible in an old library. Near it, or in its streets, are some of the prettiest and most ancient timber houses in the county; the churchyard with its brick paths, its rose-beds, the red walls round it and its view of the Weald, has the serenity of deep meadowland and sunlit cloisters; the church itself, with its sculptured oak and baronial tombs, belongs to all English history from Crecy. If the churches of the surrounding parishes, with their brasses and their registers, make up an admirable local guide-book, the records of Lingfield church are a chapter of Hume.



The village itself is the pleasantest mixture of every style of Surrey cottage, brick and timber, weather-tiling, plain brick, plain wood, and a queer row of square white-stuccoed buildings which looks as if it had been dumped inland from opposite shingle and dancing seas. It only lacks tamarisk to be sheer Worthing. The village centres on its pond; not a broad nor a very limpid piece of water, but distinguished by a pair of swans, and by a curious obelisk standing at its head which once may have marked a shrine. Built on to the bole of an old oak by the obelisk is an apartment engagingly labelled "Ye Village Cage." Other Surrey villages have had their cages, but only Lingfield has kept one. The door is massive and threatening, and you get the keys at the chemist's the other side of the road; or rather, a guide politely accompanies you and displays the cage's secrets. The cage not long ago fell into disuse. It was once used as a temporary lock-up for drunk or disorderly persons, or others who had traversed the local by-laws of morality. Local justice descended upon them, and they were cast into durance until morning should bring soberness with a headache, or, in more serious cases, until proper conveyance could be got round for Godstone. The cage has seen at least one exciting rescue. This was some fifty or sixty years ago, when a number of desperate characters vaguely described as the Copthorne poachers were captured and haled into prison. As to the exact number of captives, tradition varies; but the legend which is the most respectful to the powers of the local constable sets it at eleven. The eleven were surrounded, the door of the dungeon closed on them, and the village tried to go to sleep. Darkness came on, and a daring deed. Other poachers stole into the village, got to work with picks and crowbars, took the roof off the dungeon and hauled out their comrades exulting. The village wisely did not attempt a recapture.

The cage saw its last tenant in 1882, and the story of the rescued poachers may still, perhaps, be heard from the mouth of the oldest inhabitant, who was himself at one time a constable. As an expert in suppressing crime, he never liked the plan on which the cage was built. The floor is higher by two steps than the ground outside, and you had to go upstairs to it. In fact, you had to throw your prisoner upstairs—a most perilous business. It ought to have been built so that you could take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs like a Christian.

Caged prisoners at Lingfield were not always treated with the utmost rigour of the law. At one time the door was pierced by a grating, and through the grating kindly souls passed packets of tobacco. Liquor could not be passed in packets, but found its way in somehow. Afterwards in severer days the grating was closed, and prisoners neither drank nor smoked, as became their miserable condition. Nine years after the last captive languished behind the blocked grating the prison was taken over by the village for fresh purposes. Henceforward it was to be the museum, and was duly vested in trustees. Its collection still grows slowly. "Anything to do with village crime—we make that our special subject," the curator informs you with a pleasing urbaneness. The collection includes a man-trap, a pair of handcuffs, a canvas bed which furnishes the museum whenever it is wanted as a mortuary, a pair of farmer's snowboots used a hundred years ago, and a pair of farmer's ordinary boots used more recently.

Of tiny village streets there is no more fascinating byway than the little road which leads up to the south door of Lingfield Church. On the right is the Star inn, taking its sign from the arms of the great lords of Sterborough who lie in the church; and built beside the inn a row of quiet cottages, perhaps once part of the inn. On the left one building stands out from the rest; an early sixteenth century timber house, admirably preserved, and of peculiar interest because after three hundred years it is still carrying on the business for which it was intended. It was built as a shop, and it is a shop still. Modern preference for plate glass and easily opened doors has changed the original plan of the ground floor, but the first floor remains almost as its builder left it, and its heavy girders with their rounded ends jutting out over the pavement below are a happy testimony to the worth of wealden builders and wealden wood. Wealden paint, on the other hand, has not improved. The girders are still dark and stained as oak (or is it chestnut?) should be stained by age and weather. But a yard or two away there are beams as massive and as well-seasoned which flout the lapse of centuries with a flaring and be-varnished buff.

The church is noble and tranquil without and within. A chained Bible stands on a lectern; another Bible, "bought May the tenth 1683," as the inscription runs on the title-page, "by William Saxby of Surry Esq., for the use and benefitt of all good Christians" is in use to-day. But the chief interest of the church to-day, as it has been its chief glory in the past, is its association with the great family of Cobham. The Cobhams of Sterborough—their castle stood two miles east of Lingfield, but has fallen—came of a line which through two of the most eventful centuries of English history was represented in almost every battle, consulted in the most difficult diplomacy, and allied at last by marriage to an English king. Their family goes back to a Justice itinerant who settled in Kent; but the real founder of the Surrey branch was the Justice's grandson, the first Lord Cobham of Sterborough. He was one of the greatest soldiers of his day, and, from the ransoms he had for the prisoners he took in battle, one of the richest. It was to him, with Sir John Chandos and the Earl of Warwick, that Edward III entrusted the Black Prince at Crecy; at Poictiers he rescued the King of France; he was Lord Admiral of the King's fleet "from the mouth of the Thames westwards"; and to end it all, he died in his bed of the plague. His effigy on his tomb tramples a Soldan, whose face has been duly painted green by the artist—an interesting relic, according to Mr. J.G. Waller, of Crusaders' traditions. There were not enough names for colours in those days, and perhaps the soldiers trying to describe the olive skins of the Arabs, may have called them green. For some obscure reason, too, the Soldan with his green face and his red beard is intended by the artist to be alive. Nobody can say why that should be, but the sculptor doubtless knew. He was a careful and accurate man; you can still trace below Lord Cobham's left knee the fastenings of the Garter.

Lord Cobham's wife, Joan, was the author of one of the longest wills in existence. She remembered everybody, including the prisoners in chains at Southwark and the sick men in the hospitals. Her executor Robert Belknappe was to have "a horn made from a griffin's hoof with a silver core, and the said horn has a silver rim and two silver gilt feet." But she was most anxious, poor lady, about her soul. "Before everything else" there were to be said 7000 masses, immediately upon her death, and the priests were to have L29 3s. 4d. for saying them. A penny a mass, that is, and the priests took the pence. But it was twelve years before they had said the masses.

The second Lord Cobham had mingled experiences of love and war. According to the inscription on his tomb, broken in the church but preserved in the College of Arms, he was "as brave as a leopard, a sumptuous entertainer, handsome, imperturbable, and courteous." He was a soldier, but the great struggle of his life had nothing to do with a battlefield. It was his attempt to secure a dispensation from the Pope for marrying his cousin in defiance of the canon law. Almost a year passed before the Pope gave his decision on the point, and then he ordered the unhappy cousins a horribly tedious penance. For four years they might not eat meat; they might not drink wine on Wednesdays, and at the six fasts they might only eat the second-best kinds of fish, and not those which were most agreeable to them. They had to feed four poor persons daily, and wait upon them themselves; and these poor persons were to have bread and meat or fish, with half a flagon of ale, and were to have new tunics and new russet hoods every year. All this was in addition to various heavy fines. The money part must have been the least exasperating: but it might have been amusing to choose the less agreeable kinds of fish.

The eldest son of this much be-penanced marriage had two distinctions. He was for some years the warden, at Sterborough castle, of the French heir to the throne, the Duke of Orleans who was taken prisoner at Agincourt; and he was the founder of Lingfield College. Lingfield College had a provost, six chaplains, four clerks, and thirteen poor persons, but none of its walls stand to-day. The life of the college farm alone survives, in an inventory of the implements and live stock taken at the Dissolution. Here are some extracts:—

THE LABORERS CHAMBRE.

Itm a mattres ii bolsters A cou'lett a payer of Shets iiii^s Itm iii Axes & iii hedgying bylls ii^s Itm ii Augurs a whymble a chesell a horsecombe x^d Itm a Share a culter & a Towe (chain) xviii^d Itm a pycheforke iii^d Itm iii payer of new Trayes (? traces) vi^d Itm an old sleyng rope ii hempon alters & a spade vi^d

Husbondry.

Itm ii wenes (wains) w^t weyles unshod xiii^s iiii^d Itm donge pott w^t wheles xvi^d Itm iii barrowes ii good & one bad xld^d Itm a grynstone xx^d

Cattell.

fyrst viii Oxen price the yoke 1^s x^li Itm iiii Steres price the yoke xl^s xl^d iiii^li vi^s viii^d Itm xi bolocks whereof ix be yerelyngs and ii be ii } yerelyngs price } l^s Itm iii Steres of iii yeres of age price xl^s Itm ten kene (kine) & a bull vii^li vi^s viii^d Itm vi sukkyng Calves x^s Itm v wenyers (weaning calves) x^s Itm iiii yewes & iii lambes vi^s viii^d Itm ii old geldyns pry^d (priced for) saddell xxvi^s viii^d Itm an old horse v^s Itm a lame horse to go to myll v^s Itm iii mares ii grey & i bay xx^s Itm a grey ii yere colt gelded price vi^s viii^d Itm ii sowes and a bore vii^s

Corne.

Itm whete in the mowe price xvi^s Itm old Barley in the chaff v^s iiii^d Itm xii acres of whete price the acre vi^s viii^d Itm xxxiiii acres of ots price the acre ii viii^d iiii^li viii^d

The Garnard.

Itm di (half) a quart of Barley xvi^d Itm halff a quart of Ots xvi^d Itm a busshell & a shald (sholl, scoop) iiii^d Itm in the barn a pfan and a Shald iiii^d Itm xx^c of hertlatth (? heart of oak laths) vi^s viii^d.

Warriors and statesmen though the Cobhams were, one of their women folk has made more history than they. It was Eleanor, daughter of the founder of Lingfield College, who married the Lord Protector, the "good duke Humphrey" of Gloucester, and who was convicted of dire misdemeanours. Edward Hall, the old historian, writing of 1441, tells the story:—

"For first this yere, Dame Elyanour Cobham, wife of the said duke, was accused of treason, for that she, by sorcery and enchantment entended to destroy the kyng, to thentent to aduance and to promote her husbande to the crowne: upon thys she was examined in St. Stephen's Chappel before the Bisshop of Canterbury; and there by examinacion convict and judged to do open penance, in iij open places, within the city of London, and after that adjudged to perpetuall prisone in the Isle of Man, under the kepyng of Sir Jhon Stanley, Knyght. At the same season were arrested, as ayders and counsailers to the sayde duchesse, Thomas Southwel, preiste and chanon of St. Stephen's, in Westminster, Jhon Hum, preist, Roger Bolyngbroke, a conyng nycromancier, and Margerie Jourdayne, surnamed the witche of Eye, to whose charge it was laied y^t thei, at the request of the duchesse, had devised an image of waxe, representing the kyng, which by their sorcery, a litle and litle consumed, entendyng thereby in conclusion to waist, and destroy the kynges person, and so to bring him to death; for the which treison they wer adjudged to dye, and so Margery Jourdayne was brent in Smithfelde, and Roger Bolyngbroke was drawn and quartered at Tiborne, takyng upon his death, that there was neuer no such thing by theim ymagined; Jhon Hum had his pardon, and Southwel died in the toure before execution."

The beautiful duchess's penance is in all the history books. But it is Shakespeare, and not the historians, who makes her walk through the town in a white sheet and barefoot.

Three miles north of Lingfield is Crowhurst, one of a noble pair of names. Crowhurst in Sussex and Crowhurst in Surrey each has its immemorial yew, a tree of trees. But the yew of the Surrey churchyard—is there no better way of honouring a tree than the Crowhurst way? Who is to look at a tree like this without unhappiness? From the road the first impression to be had of it is nothing very imposing; a mass of deep and shining green, of no great stature, with strong, springy branches brushing the church walls—that is all. But the nearer view! You expect, and find, an enormous gnarled trunk, and then—Your first idea is that someone has thrown a rubbish-heap at the tree, and that most of the rubbish has stuck—old tea-trays, broken kettles, saucepan-lids, the sides of tin trunks. You then perceive that over gaps and wounds in the vast and writhen shell there have been bound, or nailed, or otherwise fastened a number of patches of thin sheet iron, painted a peculiarly ugly red. These patches of paint shriek with the names of a thousand cockneys, and the names suit the method of mending the broken tree. Gus should be the name of the man who fixed that patch; Erb, surely, daubed on that paint; Alf, I think, drove in that nail. Could none of the foresters of the weald have helped a great tree better in its old age? There should be methods of preserving a tree which are not of necessity hideous; else, it would be better for the giant to die as it pleased.

The church stands commandingly on a hill, overlooking level pastures and woodlands. But the view to the west, with all its breadth and quiet, is not more happy than the nearer picture to the east. Church gates stand opposite few more charming medleys than the multiplied gables, tumbled triangles, and oblongs of red tiles belonging to the roofs of the house on the other side of the road. This fine old brick building, with its formal garden path and clipped yews is now, like the Gainsfords' manor-house a mile away, merely a farmhouse. But it was once the family residence of the Angells, the other great family of Crowhurst after the Gainsfords. Like the Gainsfords, the Angell family has disappeared. The last John Angell died in 1784, and left a very curious will. His property was to go to anyone who could prove himself (not herself) descended from an ancestor of his who lived in the reign of Henry VI. Many claims followed; none were proved.



The house has one record at least of unrequited hospitality. This is an extract from the parish registers:—

"1653. July 24.—William Hillyer sonne to —— Hillyer of Bingfield in Barkshire whoe coming as a stranger to M^r. Angell's house in Crowhurst dyed: by whom being carefully attended by physiteans and others in his sicknes and decently and in good fashion buried, the father of the sayd William Hillyer refused to paye one farthing for his physitean and buriall like an unnatural father."

Inside the church is a strange monument—a slab of Sussex iron, let into the floor near the altar, and commemorating Anne Forster, the granddaughter of a patriarchal neighbour, Sir John Gainsford. It is odd in more than one way; it is the only iron tombstone in the county, though it is a tombstone that has often been copied. There are still several reproductions of it scattered about the country in the form of firebacks; evidently the founders considered the design convenient. Perhaps they might have made a better job if they had been severer scholars; for some of the lettering on it is quaint and topsy-turvy, the S's being twisted the wrong way round and the F's lying unhappily feet uppermost. Yet it fits well with the other old Gainsford and Angell monuments, and is also a memorial of a dead and gone industry, the iron-smelting of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent.



Leisured churchgoers should choose a service at Crowhurst at sunset: September drives the sun at the right angle to light its dark oak and the great beams of the belfry. Many churches have windows built high in the west end, through which part of the splendour of the setting sun can filter; but this window is set low, and the red sky floods the church.

From the church to Crowhurst Place a mile away runs an interesting byway, the only one in Surrey, so far as I know, built by a private gentleman of permanent material, extending for a mile from his house to his place of worship. In the year 1631 the John Gainsford of the day, at the fine old age of 76, determined he would walk wet to church no more. He had a stone-flagged causeway laid from the manor-house to the churchyard, "it being before," as the Parish Register informs you, "a loathsom durtie way every stepp." He paid two workmen fifty pounds for the job, and the causeway is still to be picked out across the meadows.



The Gainsfords were one of the best, though not the greatest of the old Surrey families. They are first heard of in the reign of Edward III, when John and Margery Gaynesford had the manor of Crowhurst from John de Stangrave and Joan his wife—a delightful gathering of English names. One of them, in Tudor days, was Sheriff of Surrey, and well in the Tudor fashions: he had six wives. But he must have found them disappointing in their family duties, for the first five of them brought him fifteen daughters running, and it was only from the sixth and last that he got a son and heir. He was one of a long succession of Johns and Erasmuses, but the line failed at the end. There were never enough boys in the Gainsford families, and when at last the manor went to a daughter the spell was broken; the house was sold.



Crowhurst Place was originally a timber house built in or near the reign of Henry VII, and according to tradition Henry VIII used to stay there on his way to visit Anne Boleyn at Hever Castle over the border. It was, and still is in some respects, an admirable example of the masonry and carpentry of the fifteenth century, but the destroying hand of later builders has removed part of the timber and filled up the gaps with brick and weather-tiling, so that its full character has been taken away. The great hall, with its glorious beams, was too much for the utilitarian. The waste of space distressed him. He therefore cut it in two by running a floor across the length of it halfway up, and subdivided his floor into bedrooms to accommodate the resident farmer's numerous family. It would be difficult to ruin a fine hall more completely.

But the house still has its own beauty, though it is the wild beauty of poverty and neglect. It stands half a mile from the road to the south-west of the church, approached by a rough bridle path. The first glimpse through the trees is of gables striped white and dark; a moat, befeathered and noisy with ducks, and a little wooden bridge crossing the moat to a side-door. Beyond lie great barns, a flagged courtyard and flagged paths, and round the corner a second bridge over the moat, brickbuilt and massive; and by the garden gate a mounting-stone, which it would be pleasant to think gave Anne Boleyn's royal wooer an easy step into the saddle. But it came later, perhaps.

Is it not possible that Crowhurst Place may be rescued as Tangley Manor was? It has the hall, and the kitchen and the oak panelling, and the great fireplaces for which we search all the house-agents' catalogues; it is moated, it has dined a king; there should be a ghost somewhere. But it rests apart, a farmhouse only. Brambles grow about it, such as should fence in a castle of sleep; above them timbered gables and tall chimneys to fit the cold and spacious hearths within. The fires that lit those hearths wait their rekindling.



CHAPTER XL

OXTED AND LIMPSFIELD

East of Godstone.—Tandridge.—The Notebook of a Surrey Justice.—Sturdy rogues.—Oxted.—A Rustic Guildford.—Mittens and corduroys.—Limpsfield.—Self-criticism.—The Old Oak Chair.—Titsey Park and the Roman villa.—Tatsfield above the downs.

East of Godstone five churches stand in a bow stretched to the Kent boundary. Not each church has a village. Oxted and Limpsfield, in the middle of the bow, are near by a railway station, and Limpsfield plays golf on the common: both are little old villages with many new houses about them. But Tandridge and Titsey, towards each point of the bow, are churches almost without cottages, but with great parks beside them: Tatsfield, easternmost of all Surrey villages, has houses and cottages, but the church stands apart, looking out over the Weald.

Tandridge was once Tanrige, and had a priory, which disappeared, of course, at the Dissolution. It was quite a little place; its earliest record, dated somewhere near the end of the twelfth century, describes it as the Hospital of St. James, in the Ville of Tanregge, with three priests, in perpetuity there serving God, and Confraters of the said Hospital. So Odo, son of William de Dammartin, writes of it in his deed of gift of lands, a windmill, and silver cups to make a chalice. The establishment was less a priory than a small hospice, in which poor and needy persons were cared for, and to which wayfarers might come for refuge; one of those gentle places for the help and refreshment of sorrowing men that are set so strangely before the days of Tudor cruelties and tortures. The prior's hospice welcomed and comforted the tired poor; Elizabeth's age beat them, men and women, for sturdy rogues.



Later Tandridge history centres round the church and Tandridge Court. Tandridge Court has had noble owners, but perhaps the most interesting is Bostock Fuller, who was a Justice of the Peace in the days of Elizabeth, and who has left a notebook describing his work and the cases that came before him, which takes his reader extraordinarily close to Tudor times and customs. The manuscript, entitled Note Book of a Surrey Justice, is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, has made extracts from the Bodleian transcript. Here are some of them:—

Apryll 1608.

[Sidenote: 4 Rogues whypped]

The 7^th I rode with M^r Evelyn to Sir W. Gaynsfords whoe was sycke, to have his testymonye versus George Turner & that day we tooke iiij Rogues 2 men and ij women on Blyndlye heath & had them to Godstone they had stolen ij duckes and accused eche other of other ffacts, & the 8^th daye I went to M^r Evelyns & there we sawe them whipped and made them pasports to Devonshire & Somersetshire.

[Sidenote: 2 Rogues whipped]

The 15^th daye I caused to stoute Rogues called Marye Rendoll a wydow, & Anne Marks a wyfe to be whipped at Tanrydg & sent to Rawlyns in Essex.

June 1608

The 22th I rode to Kyngston Assyses and there I stayed 23th and 24th dayes. Botley and Renfyld whom I sent to the Gaole were there hanged and Burges whom M^r Evelyn & I bayled was burnte in the hande.

January 1608

John Berrye whom I sent to the goale for stealing Colcocks and Whites henns was arrayned & whipt....

Bartholomew Gander being accessarye & ... Roaker, were put into the Byll with the principal....

1612. 23 Dec.

I sent a warrant for Richard Mathewe of Reygate for hunting my lord admyralls Conyes.

1613. The 4^th of June

Amias Gullock brought to me by the offycers of Gatton the 4^th daye of June for stealing of a petycote which was taken with him; but the partie would not accuse him of ffelonye, & he said he boughte it. I caused him to be whipte and sent to the place of byrth at Combe by Chard in Somersetshire.

Julye 19. 1613

... the abouebounden John Lambe is accused by Tho. Dennys for shooting in a gunne & vnlawfullie killing of his conyes....

Julye 1616

The xi^th I sent Eliz. Edsall seruant to Richard Greene to the house of Correction for stryking her dame and threatning her after and for departing from her seruice.

19 deg. Nov.

... they broughte ... Toller with a goose which he said he stole from Rose Harling, & I charged the Constable to laye him by the heeles all night & to bring him again next morning.

He brake the stocks and ran away.

So went village life for Tandridge in the golden days. Few cottages have been added since Mr. Bostock Fuller used to ride to the assizes. He would see little change, perhaps, in the church, with the glorious oak beams that bear up its belfry, and little, too, in the mighty yew whose branches brush its tower. Over one gravestone he might be puzzled. It has been placed in the grass, I think since his day, near the south door, and is an ancient monument of hard sandstone with a cross carved on it. Legend says that it was brought from Tandridge Priory, but there are others like it at Oxted and Titsey which belong to an older date than the priory.



Oxted is north-east of Tandridge; but there are two Oxteds. One is the new village near the station, with new shops, a new inn, and the old church. The other is the old village, set apart from the railway; a little village clustered about a main street running up the hillside—a rustic Guildford, a main street with cottage fronts for Guildford house fronts, and an ancient timbered inn hanging out a golden bell instead of Guildford's clock. Guildford's houses should hold Kate Greenaway maidens and prim ladies with mittens: Oxted should have corduroys and aprons, brown children and sunbonnets. So Oxted has; and it has also, I think, more little inns than any Surrey village near its size. Each has its sign; the street holds out a gallery of signs: stone steps and raised alleys run to the cottage doorways, and the children play curious village games with chalk squares and knucklebones, safe in the doorways and on the pavement. There is a corner by the road crossing the main street which is the prettiest in east Surrey. Weatherbeaten, brick-and-timber cottages frame it: the Bell Inn, with its beams like letters of a big black alphabet, hangs out its gold bell; beyond, the road slopes to dim country greennesses and the hill of the downs.



Oxted church tower is noble and massive; a great content is about its quiet, solid battlements. Once it had a spire, and I wish I had never read that the spire was destroyed; now when I see it I am always wondering what the church was like with a spire. In the churchyard are two ancient tombstones, like the single stone at Tandridge; they, too, are far older than the church.

Other strange monuments are in the church. One is to the memory of Ann, wife of Charles Hoskins, who thus mourned her in 1651:—

LET THIS PATTERNE OF PIETY MAPP OF MISERY MIRROUR OF PATIENCE HERE REST

In another memorial you may trace the history of an extremely large family. John Aldersey "haberdas^hr and m'chant ventoror of London" died in 1616, aged seventy-five, "and had ysue 17 childeren." The whole seventeen are represented in marble accompanying, and from their dress and different sizes you may guess what happened to them. There are ten sons and seven daughters; of the ten sons, six are bearded men, who grew up, perhaps, and were men like their father: three are younger, just ordinary sons, and one is a baby—I suppose died as a baby. Of the seven daughters, two are babies, and the five that wear caps you may imagine to be girls who grew up and were married and lived happily.

In Barrow Green House, an admirable building, perhaps more Georgian than Jacobean, once lived Grote, the historian. He lies in Westminster Abbey; his widow, as we saw, is buried in Shere churchyard. Barrow Green Farm, close by, is all that an old farmhouse should be, complete with barns, an oasthouse, and a fascinating front to the road. Oasthouses begin here, near the Kent border. Surrey grows few hops; only at Farnham and near Oxted, I think. In the west Hampshire encourages her, and here she takes heart from Kent.

Limpsfield is the other side of the railway. The centre is unlike old Oxted, for it is the church; but you cannot get a picture of Limpsfield as separate and self-contained as of old Oxted. Oxted sets itself on its hillside more charmingly than any village of the Surrey weald; you get the picture from halfway up the road to the station, and you should look at it when the sun is setting. Then the white ricks in the foreground loom larger, and the huddled roofs and gables age into another century; the blue smoke of wood fires drifts in the wind across the hill. But you cannot hold Limpsfield at such a pleasant distance; you must come into the village street close to the old cottages, and close too, to a large house with a noble frontage on the roadway; great houses are seldom set so near to cottages and the road. But Limpsfield, with all its attractive antiquities of timber and gables, somehow strikes a modern note. Detilens is the name—a name one vaguely tries to scan for a Latin verse—of a little, hidden house of great age, in the village street. But it is the common, not Detilens or neighbouring roofs, which marks Limpsfield, and on the common are golf links and the huge red-brick buildings of a school.

A century ago Limpsfield held an author and a critic. He was the author of a tiny book, Lympsfield and its Environs, which was republished in 1838 with an introduction by a friend, who signs himself "H.G." and dates his preface from Westerham. At Westerham, too, the curious little republication was issued. It is illustrated by George Cruikshank and with pleasant prints of old pencilled drawings, and besides a poem, contains a number of descriptions of the chief houses of the neighbourhood. Here is one of them:—

"CHART'S EDGE.

On inquiring of a native, we were told that this place was the residence of "Mr. Antiquary Streatfeild." We doubt, however, if he has any just pretensions to that designation, a divine across the border assuring us that he is skilled in glamoury, and illustrating his account by stating that 'where there was a hill, there he would have a hollow, where there was a dell, there we should find a mound'; and, indeed, we ourselves experienced the delusion, for the spot which we had known for many years as a bleak desert, appeared sheltered and decorated with thriving plantations, a house new from the kiln, cheated us with its Elizabethan air; neither was the spell broken when we found ourselves in the interior; there we saw, or thought we saw, one of Raphael's loveliest easel pictures, one of Rembrandt's deep toned yet brilliant interiors, and a goodly row of ancestors in flowing wigs and ample ruffles; whilst, in fact, the former were no more than a foxy Italian copy of the divine Urbino, and a modern English attempt to mimic the glorious Fleming, and the latter, Cockneys and Kentish Yeomen."

Such a concatenation of studied insults might be supposed to have finished with a libel action. But it is the only description of a neighbouring house which has a hint of raillery, and a pencilled note in a copy I found of the little old book adds the explanation. Chart's Edge belonged to the author of Lympsfield and its Environs. I imagine, also, that Mr. Antiquary Streatfeild was the author of The Old Oak Chair, republished in the same volume by his friend "H.G.," and described as a ballad "sung at an anniversary dinner of the Westerham Amicable Benefit Society, to which the author has proved a steady friend." This is the ballad of The Old Oak Chair:—

My good sire sat in his old oak chair, And the pillow was under his head, And he raised his feeble voice, and ne'er Will the memory part From my living heart Of the last few words he said.

"When I sit no more in this old oak chair, And the green grass has grown on my grave, And like armed men, come want and care, Know, my boys, that God's curse Will not make matters worse, How little soever you have.

"The son that would sit in my old oak chair, And set foot on his father's spade, Must be of his father's spirit heir, And know that God's blessing Is still the best dressing, Whatever improvements are made."

And he sat no more in his old oak chair; And a scape-thrift laid his hand On his father's plough, and he cursed the air, And he cursed the soil, For he lost his toil, But the fault was not in the land.

And another set in his father's chair, And talked, o'er his liquor, of laws, Of the tyranny here and the knavery there, 'Till the old bit of oak And the drunkard broke, But the times were not the cause.

But I have redeemed the old ricketty chair, And trod in my father's ways; Have turned the furrow with humble prayer To profit my neighbours, And prosper my labours; And find my sheaves with praise.

Cruikshank draws the scape-thrift roystering over punch and churchwardens' pipes. The careful and thrifty farmer is in another picture. He has no pipe, and he talks kindly to his wife, and dandles his son on his knee. There is a large ale-jug on the table, and he has had a capital dinner.

Titsey, a mile and a half away under the downs, is not a village at all; just a modern church outside Titsey Park, and a cottage opposite the church which was once an inn, and could swing a sign now if it wished; the frame is there. Once the church stood inside the park. That was when Titsey Place belonged to the Greshams, the ancestors of its later owners, the Leveson-Gowers. Sir John Gresham, looking one day in 1776 at the old church, decided that it was too near his house: it was only thirty-five feet distant. With the insolence of the day, he knocked it down, and the modern church stands obediently outside the gates. But Titsey Park has made amends. When the late Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower was at Titsey he brought to light, and described in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, the foundations of a Roman villa discovered in the Park, almost touching the old road used by the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. The foundations were interestingly complete, and from the ground near were dug coins, pottery, and a bronze mask. To-day the villa may be visited, but it is overgrown by weeds and elder bushes, and the visible remains are of scanty walls and tumbled pillars; rabbits, I think, see most of it.