Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 21

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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Leatherhead._]

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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Ye Olde Running Horse Inn, Leatherhead._]

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 pa.s.s 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 coa.r.s.eness, 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 a.s.swage 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 "a.s.swage 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 superst.i.tious. 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 b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.size. 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 a.s.sociation, 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 att.i.tude 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 ent.i.tled, "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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Mole at Slyfield Place._]

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 Pet.i.t.--Long Sermons.--The Earliest Honeymoon.--Cobham.--A Hermit for 700.--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 Suss.e.x 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, 40, "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 gla.s.s 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 bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s, 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 p.r.i.c.k-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 bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s lies that of his son, and between the dates of the two bra.s.ses 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 bra.s.s lies in Stoke D'Abernon church, was the most distinguished of the family. Like Edmond Slyfield, he was Sheriff of Surrey and Suss.e.x.

Edmond Slyfield, dead three hundred years before our day (we can see his bra.s.s in Great Bookham church), perhaps often stared at the bra.s.s 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.