Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 4

Tongham is the only village between Farnham and Guildford north of the Hog's Back and near the ridge, and though there is little in it for antiquarians, the pretty little white inn and the oasthouses have often attracted painters, and the approach to the village from the south is by a road pillared and canopied with lofty elms. The churchyard holds a curious structure. A slender oak tower, recently erected as a memorial, stands apart from the church, riveted to the ground with iron struts, and contains a peal of thirteen small bells. A carillon is rung every Sunday and Wednesday; I have not heard it, but have been told that it sounds "like sheep-bells."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Tongham Church, with Wooden Tower for Bells._]

Not much can have been written about the older days of Tongham, but at least one delightful pa.s.sage in a modern book belongs to it, and should be read under the great elms by the roadside. In Mr. George Bourne's _Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer_, Bettesworth describes an almost incredible feat of carting timber:--

"I see a carter once," said Bettesworth, "get three big elm-trees up on to a timber-carriage, with only hisself and the hosses. He put the runnin' chains on and all hisself."

"And _that_ takes some doing," I said.

"Yes, a man got to understand the way 'tis done ... I never had much hand in timber-cartin' myself; but this man.... 'Twas over there on the Hog's Back, not far from Tongham Station. We all went out for to see 'n do it--'cause 'twas in the dinner-time he come, and we never believed he'd do it single-handed. The farmer says to 'n, 'You'll never get they up by yourself.' 'I dessay I shall,' he says; and so he did, too. Three great elm-trees upon that one carriage.... Well, he had a four-hoss team, so that'll tell ye what 'twas. They _was_ some hosses, too. Ordinary farm hosses wouldn't ha' done it. But he only jest had to speak, and you'd see they watchin' him.... When he went forward, after he'd got the trees up, to see what sort of a road he'd got for gettin' out, they stood there with their heads stretched out and their ears for'ard. 'Come on,' he says, and _away_ they went, _tearin'_ away. Left great ruts in the road where the wheels sent in--that'll show ye they got something to pull."

We got one shrub a little further, Bettesworth grunting to a heavy lift; then, in answer to a question:

"No, none o' we helped 'n. We was only gone out to see 'n do it. He never wanted no help. He didn't say much; only 'Git back,' or 'Git up,' to the hosses. When it come to gettin' the last tree up, on top o' t'other two, I never thought he could ha' done it. But he got 'n up. And he was a oldish man, too: sixty, I dessay he was. But he jest spoke to the hosses. Never used no whip 'xcept jest to guide 'em. Didn't the old farmer go on at his own men, too! 'You dam fellers, call yerselves carters,' he says; 'a man like that's worth a dozen o' you.' Well, they couldn' ha' done it. A dozen of 'em 'd ha' scrambled about, an' _then_ not done it! Besides, their _hosses_ wouldn't. But this feller the old farmer says to 'n, 'I never believed you'd ha' done it.' 'I thought mos likely I should,' he says. But he never had much to say."

A few hundred yards further along the Hog's Back the road drops down south-east to Seale, the first of the three ancient and interesting villages which lie under the ridge between Farnham and Guildford. Seale is a fascinating little place. It consists only of a few cottages, shy and red-roofed, deep among high hedges, bushy dells and reedy meadows, with wheatfields and barleyfields clothing the chalky slopes above. The church has been rebuilt, but has some inscriptions worth looking at. One is an epitaph on a young officer, Edward Noel Long, who was drowned at sea. According to the inscription:--

"On his way to join the British forces in Spain, he, with others of his regiment, perished in the sea near Cape St. Vincent, during the confusion of a fatal accident occasioned by the _Isis_ man-of-war falling on board the transport on which he was embarked on the night of the 6th March, 1809."

That was just after Corunna. A carved bas-relief represents the _Isis_ under full sail "falling on board" the transport.

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

Here, under the Hog's Back north and south, nearly all the cottages are old and nearly all have gardens. One perfect little building stands not far from Seale on the road to Puttenham, bowered in vines and quaintly chimneyed, with white-curtained windows opening on a low wall and stone-crop and high box borders, and, when I saw it in July, bunches of pink and white mallows glowing under an old oak door. No cottages count sunnier hours than these that stand about the long strip of green country under the chalk downs. This part of Surrey, perhaps, has changed as little as any part during the last twenty or thirty years, which have added so many miles of brick and slate to Surrey villages and towns; probably the greatest change has been in the roads. Mrs. Henry Ady, for instance, writing of the Pilgrims' Way just fifteen years ago, speaks of the road that runs through Seale, Puttenham, and Compton as being "a gra.s.sy lane, not always easy to follow, and little used in places." The road as it runs here may not take the exact line of the Pilgrims' Way, but no one could call it difficult to follow. Here and there it pa.s.ses through cornfields, and it is by leaving the road to take a footpath through a cornfield that the best view is to be had of Puttenham, whose red roofs and grey church tower are set delightfully among rich elms, with a splash of ploughed chalk blazing white through the trees beyond.

Puttenham has added only a few new cottages to its outskirts; under the church it is still red and mossy and lichened. The cottages are oddly built to suit the sloping ground, for the road to the church rises on a hill, and necessitates different levels for foundations and stone pathways. One of the cottages has an outside staircase to its front door, for what reason there is no guessing.

The next village under the Hog's Back on the way to Guildford is Compton, perhaps the third stage of thirsty pilgrims journeying from Whitewaysend. The main road enters Compton from the north, but the prettiest way to find the village is to drop down on it by a woodland footpath from the west. Icehouse Wood is the name of the few acres of trees through which the path runs; an old brick-lined pocket in the side of the hill suggests the name, but there are remains of another brick building higher up the slope which look nothing like an icehouse. Was the name ever Oasthouse wood, perhaps, and did they grow hops here as at Farnham? If any pilgrims left the beaten track from Puttenham which runs north of Compton they may have come to the church and the inn by this footpath. It is centuries old; it is lined, before it enters the wood, by ordered holly which may once have marked a road, and as it drops down the hill it cuts as deep into the sand as the old trackways north of Anstiebury Camp or west of Albury. Great beeches coil their roots about its edge--younger than the road if ever oasthouses stood by it.

Compton looks like a village presided over by a single mind. The cottages which add themselves to whatever is old in neighbouring buildings are designed to fit with a scheme; the cottage gardens are challenges of roses and phloxes, which shall be brightest. The black beams and jutting stories of an ancient timbered house stand above the road, an example and a guardian; the whole aspect of the village is of the quietest country. When I was walking through Compton I was told of a village festival which had been held in the spring, in which children from Bermondsey--Bermondsey once a Thames-side village itself--dressed in the old dresses and danced the old dances. They had a Queen of the May and they twined a maypole with ribands; and as I went out of Compton there were the Compton village children, six or seven of them, dancing over the dances the Bermondsey children had shown them, in the same field where the festival was held. The first of May would come round again; they would choose their own Queen and twine their own maypole.

Compton church is one of the most interesting in the country. It must be forgiven a hideous organ, whose blue and red pipes block the western arch of the nave; the sanctuary is the beauty of the church. It is the only two-storied sanctuary in England, and the origin of two-storied sanctuaries is unknown. Mr. Lewis Andre, writing in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, is inclined to think that the dedication of the upper sanctuary may have been to St. Michael; there are several altars dedicated to St. Michael in the galleries of continental churches. Another feature of the church is the wooden Norman screen which fences off the upper sanctuary; it is the oldest known in England, and dates back to 1180, according to the archaeologists. Some Jacobean screen work in the pulpit and the altar rails is an interesting contrast.

Half a mile north of Compton are a chapel and a cemetery, the joint gift of the late George Frederick Watts and Mrs. Watts; the chapel, designed by Mrs. Watts, strikes a dominant note of terracotta and red brick.

There are strengths and splendours which belong to the building and its frescoes, but to me, at all events, it seems to lack the peace and mystery of quieter, duller chapels. A n.o.ble memorial of a master mind is the picture gallery in the grounds of the terracotta designing school founded by the late painter's wife. The gallery contains many of his finest pictures, and in particular the last of all which he painted--_Destiny_, a tremendous figure with a shadowed face; ma.s.ses of filmy light are about it, and power moves in the arm that holds the book; there is a secret hidden which the grey face knows. The gallery is lighted as no London gallery is; the ceiling and walls are washed with old gold, which takes all the hardness from the s.p.a.ces of sunshine playing through the roof. Mrs. Watts, I believe, added this charm to the gallery. Others besides critics owe her grat.i.tude. Outside the gallery stand rows of pottery, the work of her pupils. Urns, vases, basins, cups, pedestals, fountains await translation to flower gardens. The birds of many Surrey lawns owe a debt to Compton for wide splash-baths of water to bathe in and drink at in the heats of summer.

Compton can be seen either from Guildford or from G.o.dalming, and the traveller has the choice at Puttenham either of rejoining the Hog's Back immediately above the village, and so dropping down into Wanborough on the other side, or going on to Compton and perhaps climbing up again to the road on the ridge afterwards. Wanborough, a fascinating little hamlet, is worth the extra climbs up the hill. It is little more, in reality, than a manor house or farm homestead, wealthy with huddled ricks and superb barns, and a simple little church, perhaps the tiniest of all in Surrey; it measures only forty-five feet by eighteen. I found it locked, but a village child with engaging confidence told me to "look under the brick" for the key, and under a loose brick in the porch I found it. It may be lying there to-day. There is little in the church itself; but when I saw it there was a fine nest of honeybees in the roof near the bell that hangs on the wall outside. Why do bees so often swarm in churchyards? Country villagers believe that they like the sound of dinning metal; perhaps they are attracted to a church by Sunday's bell.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Wanborough Church._]

Wanborough sends a rough but pleasant field-road up again to the Hog's Back, which from here runs another four straight miles along the ridge to Guildford. This is certainly the n.o.blest highway in Surrey, and, perhaps, the most characteristic of the county. You may often travel along it and yet not see the finest of the view on either side; in the summer, more frequently than not, the whole countryside north and south of the ridge is swimming in a blue haze which dims and m.u.f.fles the horizon. But there is no other road on which you can walk so far and see so much broad Surrey country open out mile after mile on either side, and from which you can watch so many changes of woodland and common and cultured fields, from the green and golden hops about Farnham to the wheat and oats above Seale and Puttenham, and the long potato drills in the chalk by Wanborough. But the view is not the single beauty of the Hog's Back, though to walk high in the wind along open s.p.a.ces is possible only on a few roads in the county. The Hog's Back has a treble charm belonging wholly to the roadway itself; its width, its s.p.a.cious gra.s.sy rides on each side of the broad hard riband of metal that runs white and unswerving east and west, and most gracious of all, its deep and exuberant hedges. All along the road in a light wind you will get the scent of bed-straw and thyme and clover from the green border of the road, and in the short down gra.s.s find the plants that love chalk-ground, like the little blue milkwort, which spreads like a film over the higher slopes of the ridge in summer. If the roadside is scented with flowers, so are the hedges. Guelder rose and dog rose and privet blossom side by side with elder and spindle wood; above holly and hazel and buckthorn stand up gnarled and wind-driven yews, bent over the road from the south-west. To the south, it is often only through the gate-gaps in the hedge that you can see out over the flank of the hill; on the northern side the hedge is lower--low enough, indeed, to be broken in summer by tall spikes of mullein, yellow against the grey-blue air over the heaths of Pirbright and Worplesdon. The highest point of the road lies a mile beyond Wanborough on the way to Guildford; here you are over five hundred feet up, and the road drops gradually, ending with a sudden slope almost as soon as Guildford, bricky and cheap-looking from this aspect, comes into view.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Barn at Wanborough._]

CHAPTER VI

GUILDFORD

The prettiest High Street in the south of England.--Guilou, Wey, and Wye.--The Castle.--A legend of murder.--Looking at St.

Christopher.--Royal hunters.--Stephen Langton.--Cloth and how to stretch it.--Aubrey scents a swindle.--King Monmouth after Sedgmoor.--A pike for a baby.--The keeper at Bramshill.--Mysterious windows.--Admirable calm.--The Queen's.--The Regent and the Apse.--St. Mary's Wall-paintings.--An ancient school.--The Angel.--Pepys at the Red Lion.--Sparagus for supper.--A Vanished Heart.--The undaunted clockmaker.

To arrive at Guildford by train is like walking into a garden over a rubbish heap. In the grace of its building, the charm of its colour, the fascination of the prospects of its hillside High Street, no town in Surrey, and perhaps only Oxford in England, is comparable with it. But between the railway station and the High Street it is desolation and blank walls. A few pretty old cottages jut out over a narrow pavement; beyond a huddled roof or two rises the tower of St. Nicholas' Church, umber and solid; nearly all else is tumbled down ugliness, broken brickwork, mud and s.h.a.ggy gra.s.s. A clear s.p.a.ce, a level green, a bed of flowers--what an introduction that might be to Guildford. But, doubtless, the rubbish heap is, or some day will be, too valuable as building land.

Beyond the turn of the road is the most delightful street in the south of England. It rises from the bridge crossing the Wey steep into blue air over the hill. Each side of it is a stairway of roofs up the slope, a medley of facades, a jumble of architecture astonishing in sheer extravagance and variety. Gabled houses, red-tiled and gay with rough-cast and fresh paint; dull, sad-faced houses with sleepy windows like half-shut eyes; square, solid Georgian houses for doctors with white chokers and snuff-boxes, and prim old ladies with mittened wrists; low, little dolls'-houses, red brick neatly pointed; tall, slim houses graceful with slender cas.e.m.e.nts and light shafts of wood; cas.e.m.e.nts n.o.bly elaborate in wood-carving and heavy with leaded panes; bay windows which should belong to nurseries and high, square-latticed windows which should light a library, delicately fastened with wrought iron; painted pillars supporting window seats for cats and demure young ladies; broad-stepped entrances to hotel halls, and archways under which barrels roll to bursting cellars; Guildford High Street is a model of what the High Street of an English town should be. Has it a single dominating feature, or is its air of distinction merely compact of the grace and old-worldliness of its shops and houses? Perhaps the single extreme impression left by the High Street is its clock, swung far out over the road. Ma.s.sive, black and gilt, and fastened to the face of the old Town Hall with an ingenious structure of steel stays, it has told Guildford the time for two centuries and a quarter.

Guildford High Street has its landmarks of history in its Hospital, its School, and its Town Hall, but its oldest standing record is in one of its churches. The tower of St. Mary's church, indeed, contains the most ancient piece of building in the town, perhaps in the county.

Archaeologists are to be found who will argue that part of it, at least, belongs to the reign of Alfred, though there is little evidence to show that stone was used for building in Surrey before the eleventh century.

Alfred, at all events, mentions Guildford in his will; he spells it "Guldeford," one of the dozen old ways of spelling a name that has always been a puzzle and a pleasure to the etymologists. What does Guildford mean? Naturally "The Ford of the Guild." The town had a guild of merchants, and there was a ford; nothing could be simpler. But the simple explanations are usually wrong; and the most convincing derivation is one which has been suggested by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who discovered a river named Guilou in a.s.ser's _Deeds of Alfred_, and points to several other names along the Wey which may be traced to the same source. There is Willey House, and Willey Mill near Farnham; Wilsham Farm near Alton, and Willey Green on another branch of the river.

Guildford, then, is probably the "ford of the Guilou," which in Welsh is presumably Gwili. Where, then, did the name Wey come from? It may originally have been Wye. The corruption would be easy; indeed, c.o.c.kney boating parties very likely get the right p.r.o.nunciation, by accident, to-day.

Older than St. Mary's tower in a.s.sociations, if not in stone-work, is Guildford Castle. The Castle stands on a mound, partly natural, perhaps, and almost certainly partly artificial. Originally, perhaps, the mound was used for an early English fortification; it was heightened by sc.r.a.ping up earth from a ditch at its bottom, and round it was built up a palisade of wood; possibly there was a wooden house on the top of it, and then it would have looked precisely like one of the fortified mounds in the Bayeux Tapestry. Later, it was enclosed in a sh.e.l.l keep; later still, a Norman square keep was built inside the sh.e.l.l keep; to-day, except the walls of the square keep, almost all the Castle is gone. It was never a Castle in much more than name. It has no a.s.sociations of great battles; it never stood a siege; it never even held a royal prisoner. In King John's reign it was already used as a gaol, and a gaol it remained until James I, in 1612, gave it to one Francis Carter of Guildford, who used it as a private residence. Four hundred years before it had seen all its fighting. That was when the French Dauphin, invited by John's angry barons, marched against it and took it from defenders who seem to have cared little whether they kept it or not.

But the Castle still has its legend--a legend only--of cruelty and b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacre. In 1036, when Harold Harefoot was king, Alfred the son of Ethelred was travelling from Normandy to join his mother at Winchester. He landed in Kent, and was marching with his Normans along the Way, whether or not with the intention of eventually trying to recover his father's kingdom is uncertain; at all events, at Guildford he was seized and put to death. So much is history; legend supplies a dreadful embellishment. Early in the morning after their capture, Alfred's followers were led out into the street and condemned to death.

Nine out of every ten men were butchered, until out of six hundred Normans sixty only were left alive. That was not enough to glut their captors' fury. The sixty were gone through again, and all but six were ferociously tortured to death. Alfred himself was given to Harold, who put out his eyes, loaded him with chains, and threw him into prison, where he died. Fortunately, n.o.body need believe the story.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Castle Gate, Guildford._]

An environment of meaner modern buildings has spoiled the setting in which the castle should stand. Seen from certain points, especially from below, the keep is not a very imposing structure; you cannot get far enough away from it. Far the best view is to be had from the rising ground to the south-east, where you can set the castle in outline against the sky. Then it takes on something of the romance of a Norman ruin, with its tumbling ma.s.ses of ivy, its broken battlements, and the mixed greys and ochres of its masonry. The interior is uninteresting, except for the sad little carvings left by prisoners on the walls, among them a crucifix, a hermit, St. Catherine's wheel, and St. Christopher.

If St. Christopher was not exactly the patron saint of prisoners, he was the kindliest saint to carve on a dungeon wall. If you looked on St.

Christopher you were safe, at least for that day, from sudden death. How many thousand days of "safety" he must have brought to the Guildford prisoners!

The castle enceinte is now laid out as a pleasure ground, with all a public garden's advantages and disadvantages. Public taste demands "bedding out," even though geraniums and calceolarias fit unhappily enough with masonry fourteen feet thick and Saxon earthworks. A bowling green is in its proper place; thorns and old rose-trees have a right to grow round ruined castles; wallflowers belong to stones and mortar. But lobelias do not. Still, something even worse than bedding-out might have befallen the Castle grounds. Dr. G.C. Williamson, in his valuable little book _Guildford in the Olden Time_, mentions that, when the grounds were bought for the Corporation in 1886, premiums were offered to various landscape gardeners for plans showing the best means of laying out the s.p.a.ce. One of the plans which was rejected, although attractive in other ways, "started its schedule of work with a suggestion that the ugly ruin in the centre of the grounds should be removed, and in lieu of it should be erected a light iron bandstand painted green, picked out with gold."

What, one wonders, were the other attractions of the "landscape"?

Just possibly Guildford Castle was for some time a royal residence.

Nearly all the old kings used to visit the country round for hunting and hawking. Henry II, soon after he came to the throne, enclosed a large tract of land north of Guildown and made it into a royal park, but whether, when he came to hunt, he stayed at the Castle itself or at the palace which was built in the park, none of the chroniclers say. The palace has long since disappeared, though it is said that the outline can be traced when the land on which it stood is under corn. The corn is supposed to turn a different colour along the lines of the foundations.

In later days, the kings certainly stayed at the palace, and not at the Castle. John was at Guildford nineteen times in eleven years, and kept Christmas there in 1200 "with uncommon splendour and magnificence."

Henry III had his wines stored at Guildford, probably in the caverns near the Castle, and once, with a capital eye for business, ordered that no other wines should be sold in the bailiwick of Surrey until his had found a buyer. Edward I, according to an untrustworthy story, brought Adam Gordon, a highway robber, to Guildford after he had fought and beaten him with his own royal hands, and forgiven him afterwards. The next two Edwards were often at the palace; Henry VI and Edward IV lay there; Henry VII made Sir Reginald Bray, ancestor of Surrey's historian, keeper of the Park and Manor; Henry VIII hunted in the park, and Elizabeth travelled about so frequently between the royal residences at Guildford and elsewhere that the county actually framed a remonstrance against having to pay so much for her carriages and horses. She was probably the last of the sovereigns to ride through the town from north to south, though Charles II was feasted there at the Restoration and presented with a service of plate, a proceeding which swamped the Corporation in debt.

One other distinction Guildford owes to its a.s.sociations with kings. It has been selected as the scene of a remarkable novel by a remarkable writer. Martin Tupper, in his preface to _Stephan Langton_, takes a devoted public into his confidence as to the manner in which such a book should be, and indeed actually was, completed. He set out to write a historical novel dealing with Guildford in the days of King John, weaving into it various local legends and a love-story of an abbess and an archbishop; he "began the book on November 26, 1857, and finished it in exactly eight weeks, on January 21, 1858, reading for the work included." The list of books which he consulted in Mr. Drummond's library at Albury must be read in full for the mere physical labour of the business to be appreciated; but after such abstruse searchings, to have crammed into ninety thousand words of solid print such a concatenation of murders, arsons, slayings, swoonings, drownings and burnings must always remain a considerable achievement. The story itself is sad stuff.

Apart from palaces, Guildford's history, until comparatively recent times, has been the history of the wool trade and cloth manufacture. The beginnings of the industry go back to the settlement in the south of England, in the reign of Edward III, of Flemish weavers and dyers.

Guildford naturally attracted the trade, for sheep could be successfully farmed on the downs, water-power for the fulling-mills could be had from the Wey, and the best fuller's earth in the country was to be had from Nutfield and elsewhere, only a few miles away. The fuller's teazle, and woad for dyeing, also grew, and still grow, I learn from Dr. Williamson, though I have not found either, in the neighbourhood. Before the end of the fourteenth century the cloth industry had come to the dignity of legislation. n.o.body might buy cloth before it had been "fulled and fully performed in its nature"; this was to prevent dishonest people from stretching the cloth and so giving the public short measure. Later, under the Tudors, n.o.body might manufacture cloth except in a market-town where cloth had been manufactured for ten years past. This was no doubt for the convenience of the ulnagers, officers deputed to measure and seal all cloth brought to market. It was highly illegal to stretch cloth in any way. Thomas West, of Guildford, in 1607, was charged with having used "a certain instrument (a tenter) and other engines wherewith 100 cloths of white wool called kerseys, rough and unwrought and made for sale at Guildford, were stretched and strained in breadth and length."

On another occasion five clothiers were summoned to answer a charge of having used "a certaine engine called a rope" to stretch their cloth. So important a part of Guildford's life had clothmaking become under Elizabeth that the Corporation required special acknowledgment of the fact from the innkeepers, doubtless because prosperity in the town meant full tankards emptied at the inns. Every alehouse keeper had to have a signboard hung above his door with a woolsack painted on it, under a fine of six-and-eightpence; he had to buy the sign from the hall warden at the Town Hall, and pay two shillings for it. Woolsacks were added to the borough arms. Yet the prosperity of the trade was short-lived, after all. The pride of Guildford's industry fell. Less than fifty years after the alehouse signs swung woolpacks to guide thirsty clothiers, the business came down with a run. G.o.dalming, Farnham, and Wonersh were other flourishing centres of the trade, and in 1630 one Samuel Va.s.sall, the merchant who took the G.o.dalming and Wonersh cloth for shipment abroad, failed his customers. He was under arrest, and no one else could be found to take up his contracts. All the G.o.dalming eggs were in one basket, and Guildford and Farnham suffered in sympathy. Three thousand workers were in distress; it was the beginning of the end. It could not have happened, of course, if Samuel Va.s.sall's failure had been the only difficulty. That would have been got over somehow. But there was another agent at work. The real cause of the destruction of the Surrey cloth industry was the fact that for years the Company of Merchant Adventurers and the London Drapers' Company had been working to get the cloth trade into their own hands, and they had practically succeeded. G.o.dalming held on for a time; but Guildford, Wonersh, and Farnham went under.

Aubrey is not content with so simple an explanation. He scents a swindler. The trade of Wonersh, he writes, "chiefly consisted in making blue cloth for the Canary Islands; the decay and indeed ruin of their trade was their avaricious method of stretching their cloth from 18 yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business compet.i.tion. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a vanished trade. There still lingers a superst.i.tion at Guildford that Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate prisoners (perhaps the Jews whom Martin Tupper describes as suffering agonies of enforced dentistry and other tortures) were stretched upon the rack. It is, of course, the plot of ground on which were set up the wooden racks, or frames, on which the Guildford blue cloth was stretched and dried in the wind and sun.

Guildford was singularly happy in its lack of history during the Parliamentary wars. The battles over Farnham Castle we have seen.

Guildford Castle was not thought worth holding. Surrey gentlemen and Surrey towns had been as backward as the rest of England in supplying Charles with his ship-money; but during the whole of the war not a shot was fired within hearing of the county capital. There was a question of safeguarding the powdermills at Chilworth, and these were secured for the Parliamentary Army. Otherwise, Guildford heard nothing more of the war than the rattle of accoutrements; there were a few levies stationed in the town, and a troop or two of horse rode through it. Perhaps Guildford's unhappiest memory of war is an echo of Sedgmoor, forty years later. The Duke of Monmouth, leaving his colliers and ploughmen to do their best against the King's cannon, had ridden off the field into Hampshire, turned his horse loose at Cranbourne Chase, and tried to hide himself in some rough ground near Ringwood. Lord Lumley and Sir William Portman were after him with the Militia; there was a reward of five thousand pounds on his head, and for a day and a night he was hunted through undergrowth and standing crops. Dogs were run through the high oats and peas, and except oats and peas he had nothing to eat. He was caught in the morning, shivering and grey-bearded, in a ditch; two days later, he was on his way from Ringwood to London, his coach guarded by strong bodies of troops, and sitting opposite him in the coach an officer whose orders were to stab him if there was an attempt at rescue.

So they rode into Guildford on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, and that night the terrified prisoner lay under the roof of Abbot's Hospital. Perhaps he slept; perhaps he could only stride about the room feverishly scribbling letters of abject entreaty to the King and the great courtiers; staring wild-eyed at the early July sunlight beyond the hospital chimneys, and wondering whether he should see another Sunday dawn. It was his last; on the Wednesday morning his head was hacked from his shoulders.

Abbot's Hospital has pleasanter memories. Foremost must be the memory of its founder, Guildford's greatest citizen, the stern, kindly old Archbishop Abbot, son of a poor clothworker of the town, scholar of Balliol College, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, and predecessor to Laud in the See of Canterbury. It was a great career, and, according to an old family story, it had a curious beginning. Aubrey gives this version:--

"His mother, when she was with child of him, dreamt, that if she should eat a _Jack_ or _Pike_, her son in her womb would be a great man, upon this she was indefatigable to satisfy her longing, as well as her dream: she first enquired out for the fish; but accidentally taking up some of the river water (that runs close by the house) in a pail, she took up the much desired banquet, dress'd it, and devour'd it almost all: This odd affair made no small noise in the neighbourhood, and the curiosity of it made several people of quality offer themselves to be sponsors at the baptismal fount when she was delivered; this their poverty accepted joyfully, and three were chosen, who maintained him at school, and at the university afterwards."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Abbot's Hospital, Guildford._]