Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 9

One memory of the past has survived the attacks of G.o.dalming's newest and noisiest citizens. The little Town Hall, built squarely in the middle of the road at the west end of the High Street on the site of an older building, has been threatened by a section (I am told) of G.o.dalming tradesmen for many years, and would tremble still, if it were not so solidly built of good Georgian brick. It is said to be awkward for motor traffic, to be not handsome, and generally to be out of date and in the way. As to its looks, it belongs to 1814, and is plain and simple enough, but it carries a graceful clock tower and a copper cupola, and its destruction is not to be thought of. The day has gone for wanton throwing into the past what the past has left, and the little Town Hall will continue to slow down the traffic and draw visitors to the High Street, it is to be hoped, for many years to come.

The town corporation have done better for themselves than to pull down the old Town Hall. They have set up some modern buildings for town business, which for good work in good material are as excellent a modern addition as could have been made to any old town.

G.o.dalming's history, like Guildford's and Wonersh's, has been largely the history of the wool industry. It was G.o.dalming's careless trust in the stability of its contractor, Samuel Va.s.sall, which dealt the first and shrewdest blow at its business, as we saw at Guildford. But G.o.dalming kept its head higher than the other two for a time. In Bowen's map of Surrey, drawn in 1749, the printer has put a little side-note explaining G.o.dalming's capabilities to the curious, and you read that for the manufacture of clothing, "it is the most considerable town in the county. The sorts are mixed Kerseys, and Blue ones, for the Canary Islands, which for their Colours, can't be matched in any other Part of England." But that is not all; Bowen adds an afterthought--"Here is plenty of good fish, especially Pykes. Here are two or three Paper Mills, and three Corn Mills." So G.o.dalming had food and clothing too.

She still markets woollen goods, but the pykes, I fear, gave out long ago. Men fish in the Wey at G.o.dalming as they fish at Guildford and Weybridge, but they seldom catch a pyke, I know, for I have watched them.

Fish have had other a.s.sociations with G.o.dalming besides swimming in the Wey. Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who has written so much of Surrey gardens, and has her own wonderful garden at Munstead not much more than a mile away, has described in her fascinating book, _Old West Surrey_, the carrying of fish for the London market from the seaport towns through G.o.dalming. It was taken in special fish-vans. "They were painted yellow and had four horses. But some of it, as well as supplies for other inland places, was carried in little carts drawn by dogs. The dogs were big, strong Newfoundlands. Teams of two or four were harnessed together.

The team of four would carry three to four hundredweight of fish, besides the driver. The man would 'c.o.c.k his legs up along the sharves,'

as an old friend describes it, and away they would go at a great rate.

They not only went as fast as the coaches, but they gained time when the coach stopped to change horses, and so got the pick of the market. A dog-drawn cart used to bring fish from Littlehampton to G.o.dalming, where oysters were often to be bought for three a penny." Three a penny, fresh oysters! Fourpence a dozen all alive! The street cries must have been most encouraging.

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

Restorers in 1840, that unhappy age for beautiful old buildings, did what they could to spoil G.o.dalming's parish church. They packed it from floor to roof with pews and galleries, knocked off a porch here, a chantry there, doubled its accommodation and quartered its charm.

Thirty-nine years later Sir Gilbert Scott and Mr. Ralph Nevill did their best to repair the injury and show the Norman pillars as they should be, but some of the injury done was final. Still, the church within and without is a n.o.ble building, and the leaden spire which soars up from the tower is the finest in the county. The church has had at least three famous vicars. One was Owen Manning, famous perhaps against his will, for he asked that no monument for him should be added to the church. His epitaph should be _Si monumentum requiris_, _perlege_, for he was the originator and part author of the history of the county which was finished, as we saw at Shere, by William Bray. Owen Manning's was a great mind, but he had a great heart as well; for the work he did for his book sent him blind at seventy-five, and he bore five more years of life knowing that he had not been suffered to finish what he had begun.

He died in 1801; and there is a curious story that he was nearly buried alive when he was a boy. He had had the small-pox and was actually laid out for dead. His father went in to see him, raised him in his arms saying, "I will give my dear boy another chance," and as he did so, saw signs of returning life.

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

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

Another of G.o.dalming's clergy was the Reverend Nicholas Andrewes, who came into severe collisions with his parishioners. They pet.i.tioned Parliament against being compelled to bear with him any longer. They charged him among other offences with "preachinge but seldom, and then alsoe but in a verie fruytlesse and unprofitable mann^r." They urged that he was "a Haunter, and frequenter of tiplinge in Innes, and tavernes, and useth gameinge both at cards and Table as well uppon the Lords dayes as others." They accused him of having declined to church one Mrs. Buckley "when she came to church and sate there all the tyme of dyvine service, because she was not attyred wi^th an hanginge kerchief."

They said that he kept a curious crucifix "in a Boxe wi^th foldinge windowes." Finally, John Monger and John Tichborne alleged "that the said vicar and M^r. Wayferar, Parson of Compton, in the said Countie of Surry, roade to Southampton, to eate Fishe and to make merrie togeather, and there (dyverse tymes) drank healthes to the Pope calling him that honest olde man." So much, and more, the parishioners had to say against him. He was decided to be a Malignant Priest; White, in his _First Century of Scandalous and Malignant Ministers_, arraigns him, among other offences, for having "expressed himself to be an enemy to frequent preaching, inveighing in his sermons against long Sermons, saying that Peters sword cut off but one eare, but long Sermons like long swords cut off both at once, and that the Surfeit of the Word is of all most dangerous, and that the silliest creatures have longest eares, and that preaching was the worst part of G.o.d's worship, and that if he left out anything he would leave out that." And that, for Mr. Andrewes, was the end; a man who lost his living because he would rather pray than preach.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Church Street, G.o.dalming._]

Two women have left records behind them, one strange and the other cruel, in the parish annals. One was a remarkable person named Mary Tofts, wife of a clothworker, who in 1726 professed to have had a lamentable misadventure. She a.s.serted that while she was weeding in a field she was startled by a rabbit jumping up near her, and that subsequently, she presented her husband, instead of a fine boy, with quant.i.ties of rabbits. The effect of the announcement was prodigious.

More than one well-known physician believed her implicitly; pamphlets were published on clinics, Hogarth printed a cut of the Wise Men of G.o.dlyman; n.o.body would eat a rabbit; at last Queen Caroline ended the business by sending her own doctor to investigate, and Mary Tofts was lodged in Bridewell. Another poor woman deceived less and was punished more. The parish registers hold the record.

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

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

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

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

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

Farncombe is G.o.dalming's suburb, and from above its hilly streets can be had a strangely romantic view of the valley by Guildford, with St.

Martha's chapel crowning the hill. From Farncombe, too, you may take one of the prettiest walks of all by the Wey, through rich fields of gra.s.s enn.o.bled with bordering elms, and with the Wey running here level with you through meadowsweet and iris, and here below the footpath, seen through the trees. If you push up stream, you will come to Eashing Bridge, one of the oldest and strongest of Surrey bridges, and now a national possession, secured from attacks of brick and iron by the Society for Preserving Places of Historic Interest--an admirable Society. Eashing Bridge, or rather Bridges, for it crosses the Wey twice, and has more than five b.u.t.tresses standing in the water, has stood over the Wey for more than seven centuries. The old engineers perhaps built over a stronger Wey than to-day's, for they made the b.u.t.tresses that point up stream to divide the water; on the other side they are round and blunt. The time to stand on Eashing Bridge is when it is quietest, on a Sunday morning. Up stream is the mill, humming out one of the best of all songs of water; to the left is a row of timbered cottages, cream-painted brick and black beams, and gay when I saw them on a blue August morning with sweet peas and dahlias; a villager and his wife gathered fruit in a garden banked above the road, and white-frocked, black-stockinged children sat demurely in the cottage doorways. But there is a patch of corrugated iron by the Eashing cottages and bridge which calls for a Society of Destroyers.

G.o.dalming has two fine parks for neighbours, Peperharow and Loseley.

Peperharow, which became the first Lord Midleton's in 1712, once belonged to Sir Bernard Brocas, who was Master of the Buckhounds to Richard II; afterwards it came to the great family of the Coverts.

Peperharow Park has its own church, but the beauty of the place is in the parkland itself, with its n.o.ble trees and stretches of gra.s.s, and the Wey running through it down to Eashing. Deer wander in the sunshine there, dark and comely under the great cedars, or grazing slowly and sedately by the banks of the stream. One might walk out from G.o.dalming only to watch the Peperharow deer; but a walk beyond the park brings another pleasure. Above Peperharow the Wey is bridged again, by stone as old, I think, as at Eashing: the b.u.t.tress of the main part of the bridge is the same shape as Eashing's. Above the bridge is a fall built across the stream: only a few inches of masonry, but it changes the stream completely. The higher water is a broad, shadowy pool, cooled and darkened by alders meeting overhead and dipping in the water; below, the shallow water ripples over stones, as clear and black as a northern salmon stream. The difference between the Wey here and the Wey at Eashing or Tilford is, of course its bed. The Wey runs over as many beds as any little river in England; here it races over clean ironstone.

Loseley has a longer story than Peperharow, and Loseley House is a very fine old Tudor building, the best, perhaps, in Surrey, after Sutton. Sir William More built most of it, and took much of the stone from Waverley Abbey, for which it would be difficult to forgive him if he had made a less beautiful house. Sir William More was son of Sir Christopher, Sheriff of Surrey and Suss.e.x under Henry VIII. Sir Christopher first had the estate in 1515; at the Domesday Survey the Earl of Arundel had it.

The family history of the Mores is too long for a chapter; so would be a detailed list of the furniture and pictures of the house, some of which are catalogued in the guide-books, though the general public may see them but seldom. The house has had royal visitors; Queen Elizabeth came to see Sir William More there, and King James and his son were both guests of Sir George More, Sir William's son. It was Sir George More who was so furious with his daughter for marrying John Donne, though he lived to be good enough to forgive her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Wey above Peperharow._]

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: _View from Hindhead._]

CHAPTER XII

HASLEMERE AND HINDHEAD

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

Hindhead commands the south-west corner of the county, but Haslemere is the key to it. You cannot walk away from Hindhead and take a train back if you want to, which you ought always to be able to do from a centre.

Besides, to return to Hindhead is to end with a steep hill to climb; coming back to Haslemere, you can either drop down the hill from Hindhead, or the railway will carry you uphill to the little town from Milford or Witley down the line.

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

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

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

The most interesting interior in Haslemere is the museum. It was presented to the town by Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, and teaches history, geology, botany and everything to do with Haslemere's (and other) birds, beasts, and reptiles. You may study the development of the world from the birth of life perhaps thirty-one million years ago--that is the age Haslemere teaches--down to the present day. Skulls of elephants, antelopes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, gorillas and giraffes instruct the zoologist; local vipers and gra.s.s snakes curl in spirits of wine; stuffed quadrupeds, including a large kangaroo, ill.u.s.trate climates foreign to Haslemere; local ornithologists contribute cases of the birds of the neighbourhood. Witley sends a case of crossbills; twenty years ago a pair of hen harriers--or are they Montagu's harriers?--were killed on Hindhead; a blackc.o.c.k guards his grey hen, and was shot not far away.

Are blackc.o.c.k extinct in Surrey? The last Lord Midleton wrote to _The Times_ some years ago to state his belief that they were. At Frensham I was told that the last pair were shot in 1889. But Mr. E.D. Swanton, the curator of the Haslemere Museum, learned in everything that a museum should hold, from Celtic pottery to caterpillars, told me when I was at Haslemere that he had seen a pair (I write in 1908) only two years ago.

He was not at all certain that there were no more blackc.o.c.ks in the county. But I fear the villas have been too much for them.

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

When I last saw the grave--perhaps on an unfortunate day--the heather had somehow collected newspapers and empty jampots; it looked like soon becoming a rubbish heap.

A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ visited Haslemere in 1801 and described the painted gla.s.s in the windows. One of them he catalogued thus:

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

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

Years ago Haslemere had a lion. It was an old beech tree, twenty feet in girth, and the late Louis Jennings, in his _Field Paths and Green Lanes_, tells us that since Murray's _Handbook_ spoke of a lion, he searched for it for long, and when he found it he was disappointed.

To-day it is a stump, or is said to be, but n.o.body could show it me; I am sure I looked for it longer than Louis Jennings, but I never found it. All I found was what will perhaps some day grow into another lion--a beech tree and a holly apparently growing from the same root.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Porch at Haslemere Church._]

Haslemere's history is mostly political, and not always very respectable. Elizabeth, perhaps, made the village a borough; at all events, two members sat for Haslemere first in the Parliament of 1584, and two members represented the borough until it was unkindly abolished by the reforms of 1832. Some of its members came of old Surrey families--Carews, Mores, Oglethorpes, Onslows, Evelyns; and some of its elections were highly irregular. One of the most successful pieces of jobbery stands to the credit of the year 1754, when the Tory sitting members, General Oglethorpe and Peter Burrell, were opposed by two Whigs, James More Molyneux and Philip Carteret Webb, a London lawyer.

Molyneux and Webb were elected by 73 votes to 45, but some at least of the 73 (perhaps also some of the 45) would not have borne strict investigation. Eight of the winning votes were f.a.ggot votes manufactured out of the Cow Inn, of Haslemere, which inspired Dr. William King, Princ.i.p.al of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, to a ballad of forty-two verses, ent.i.tled _The Cow of Haslemere, or The Conjurer's Secretary at Oxford_.

Dr. King liked politics in poetry to be hot and strong, thus:--

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