The Brighton Road Part 14

When Reigate lost the two members it sent to Parliament, it lost much more than the mere distinction of being represented. It lost free drinks and money to jingle in its pockets, for it was openly corrupt--in fact, neither better nor worse than most other const.i.tuencies. What else, when you consider it, could be expected when the franchise was so limited that the electors were a mere handful, and votes by consequence were individually valuable. In short, the best safeguard against bribery is to so increase the electorate that the purchase of votes is beyond the capacity of a candidate's pockets.

Modern circ.u.mstances have, indeed, so wrought with country towns of the Reigate type that they are merely the devitalised spooks of their former selves, and Reigate would long ere this have been on the verge of extinction, had it not been within the revivifying influence of the suburban area. It is due to the Wen, as Cobbett would call it, that Reigate is still at once so old-world and so prosperous. It is surrounded by semi-suburban estates, but is in its centre still the Reigate of that time when the coaches came through, when royalty and n.o.bility lunched at the still-existing "White Hart," and when fifty miles made a long day's journey.

Reigate town was the property, almost exclusively, of the late Lady Henry Somerset. By direction of her heir, Somers Somerset, it was, in October, 1921, sold at auction in several lots.

There are some in Reigate who dwell in imagination upon old times. Not by any means the obvious people, the clergy and the usual kidney; they find existence there a vast yawn. The antiquarian taste revealed itself by chance to the present inquirer in the person of a policeman on duty by the tunnel, who knew all about Reigate's one industry of digging silver-sand, who could speak of the "Swan" inn having once possessed a gallows sign that spanned the road, and knew all about the red brick market-house or town hall being built in 1708 on the site of a pilgrims' chapel dedicated to St. Thomas a Becket. He could tell, too, that wonderful man, of a bygone militant parson of Reigate, who, warming to some dispute, took off his coat in the street and saying, "Lie there, divinity," handsomely thrashed his antagonist. "I like them old antidotes," said my constable; and so do I.

XX

[Sidenote: REIGATE CHURCH]

Reigate Church has been many times restored, and every time its monuments have suffered a general post; so that scarce an one remains where it was originally placed, and very few are complete.

The most remarkable monument of all, after having been removed from its original place in the chancel to the belfry, has now utterly vanished. It is no excuse that its ever having been placed in the church at all was a scandal and an outrage, for, being there, it should have been preserved, as in some sort an ill.u.s.tration of bygone social conditions. But the usual obliterators of history and of records made their usual clean sweep, and it has disappeared.

It was a heart-shaped monument, inscribed, "Near this place lieth Edward Bird, Esq., Gent. Dyed the 23rd of February, 1718/9. His age 26," and was surmounted by a half-length portrait effigy of him in armour, with a full flowing wig; a truncheon in his right hand, and in the background a number of military trophies.

The especial scandal attaching to the fact of this monument ever having been placed in the church arises from the fact that Edward Bird was hanged for murder. Some particulars are gleaned from one of the many catchpenny leaflets issued at the time by the Ordinary--that is to say, the Chaplain--of Newgate, who was never averse from adding to his official salary by writing the "last dying words" of interesting criminals; but his flaring front pages were, at the best--like the contents bills of modern sensational evening newspapers--indifferent honest, and his account of Bird is meagre.

It seems, collating this and other authorities, that this interesting young man had been given the advantages of "a Christian and Gentlemanlike Education," which in this case means that he had been a Westminster boy under the renowned Dr. Busby, and afterwards a scholar at Eton. This finished Christian then became a lieutenant in the Marquis of Winchester's Horse. He married when twenty years of age, and his wife died a year later, when he plunged into a dissolute life in London.

One evening in September, 1718, he was driven "with a woman in a coach and a bottle of Champain wine" to a "bagnio" in Silver Street, Golden Square, and there "had the misfortune" to run a waiter, one Samuel Loxton, through the body with his sword. "G--d d--n you, I will murder you all," he is reported to have threatened, and a farrier of Putney, called at the subsequent trial, deposed to having once been run through the body by this martial spirit.

Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were in those times very much what German officers became--privileged murderers--and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all.

[Sidenote: AN EXIT AT TYBURN]

At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the Ordinary, saying "He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses." The Ordinary does not tell us in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution, taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that interesting event.

He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree, talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles'

Creed, after which he called for a gla.s.s of wine. No wine being available, he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, "Gentlemen, I wish your health," and then "was ty'd up, turned off, and bled very much at the Mouth or Nose, or both."

The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him.

Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his execution, pa.s.sing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.

The date of the monument's disappearance is not clearly established, but old inhabitants of Reigate have recollections of the laughing workmen, during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.

For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed, the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun in 1701 by the then vicar.

A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a year lived here, in a cottage oddly named "Upper Repentance."

[Ill.u.s.tration: TABLET: BATSWING COTTAGES.]

The road leaving Reigate, by Parkgate and the Priory, pa.s.ses a couple of cottages not in themselves remarkable but bearing a curious device intended to represent bats' wings, and inscribed "J. T. 1815." They are known as "Batswing Cottages," but what induced "J. T." to call them so, and even who he was, seems to be unknown.

Over the rise of c.o.c.kshut Hill and through a wooded cutting the road comes to Woodhatch and the "Old Angel" inn, where the turnpike-gate stood, and where a much earlier gate, indicated in the place-name, existed.

Woodhatch, the gate into the woods, ill.u.s.trates the ancient times when the De Warennes held the great Reigate, or Holm, Castle and much of the woodlands of Holmesdale. The name of Earlswood, significant to modern ears only of the great idiot asylum there, derives from them. Place-names down in these levels ending in "wood" recall the dense forests that once overspread Holmesdale: Ewood, Norwood, Charlwood, Hartswood, Hookwood--vast glades of oak and beech, where the hogs roamed and the prototypes of Gyrth, the swineherd, tended them, in the consideration of the Norman lords of little more value than the pigs they herded. The scattered "leys"--Horley, Crawley, Kennersley, and the like--allude to the clearings or pastures amid the forest. Many other entrances into those old bosquets may be traced on the map--Tilgate, Fay Gate, Monk's Gate and Newdigate among them; but the woodlands have long been nothing but memories, and fields and meadows, flatness itself, stretch away on either side of the level road to, and beyond, Horley, with the river Mole sluggishly winding through them--a scene not unbeautiful in its placid way.

The little hamlet of Sidlow Bridge, with its modern church, built in 1862, marks the point where the road, instead of continuing straight, along the flat, went winding off away to the right, seeking a route secure from the Mole floods, up Black Horse Hill. When the route was changed, and the "Black Horse" inn, by consequence, lost its custom, a newer inn of the same name was built at the cross-roads in the levels; and there it stands to-day, just before one reaches Povey Cross and the junction of routes.

[Sidenote: LOWFIELD HEATH]

Povey Cross, of whose name no man knows the derivation, leads direct past the tiny Kimberham, or Timberham, Bridge over the Mole, to Lowfield Heath, referred to in what, for some inscrutable reason, are styled the "Statutes at Large," as "Lovell" Heath. The place is in these days a modern hamlet, and the heath, in a strict sense, is to seek. It has been improved away by enclosure and cultivation, utterly and without remorse; but the flat, low-lying land remains eloquent of the past, and accounts for the humorous error of some old maps which style it "Level Heath."

The whole district, from Salfords, through Horley, to near Crawley, is at times little more than an inland sea, for here ooze and crawl the many tributaries of the Mole. The memorable floods of October, 1891, following upon a wet summer and autumnal weeks of rain, swelled the countless arteries of the Mole, and the highways became rushing torrents. Along the nut-brown flood floated the remaining apples from drowned orchards, with trees, bushes, and hurdles. Postmen on their rounds were reduced to wading, and thence to horseback and wheeled conveyances; and Horley churchyard was flooded.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Floods at Horley.]

A repet.i.tion of this state of things occurred in February, 1897, when the dedication of the new organ in the church of Lowfield Heath could not be performed, the roads being four feet under water.

XXI

[Sidenote: CHARLWOOD]

The traveller does not see the true inwardness of the Weald from the hard high road. Turn we, then at Povey Cross for a rustic interlude into the byways, making for Charlwood and Ifield.

Few are those who find themselves in these lonely spots. Hundreds, nay, thousands are continually pa.s.sing almost within hail of their slumberous sites, and have been pa.s.sing for hundreds of years, yet they and their inhabitants doze on, and ever and again some cyclist or pedestrian blunders upon them by a fortunate accident, as, one may say, some unconscious Livingstone or Speke, discovering an unknown Happy Valley, and disturbs with a little ripple of modernity their uneventful calm.

The emptiness of the three miles or so of main road between Povey Cross and Crawley is well exchanged for these devious ways leading along the valley of the Mole. A prettier picture than that of Charlwood Church, seen from the village street through a framing of two severely-cropped elms forming an archway across the road, can rarely be seen in these home counties, and the church itself is an ancient building of the eleventh century, with later windows, inserted when the Norman gloom of its interior a.s.sorted less admirably with a more enlightened time. In plan cruciform, with central tower and double nave, it is of an unusual type of village church, and presents many features of interest to the archaeologist, whose attention will immediately be arrested by the fragments of an immense and hideous fresco seen on the south wall. A late bra.s.s, now mural, in the chancel, dated 1553, is for Nicholas Sander and Alys his wife. These Sanders, or, as they spelled their name variously, Saunder, held for many years the manor of Charlwood, and from an early period those of Purley and Sandersted--Sander's-stead, or dwelling. Sir Thomas Saunder, Remembrancer of the Exchequer in Queen Elizabeth's time, bequeathed his estates to his son, who sold the reversion of Purley in 1580. Members of the family, now farmers, still live in the parish where, in happier times, they ruled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Charlwood.]

[Sidenote: NEWDIGATE]

One of the prettiest spots in Surrey is the tiny village of Newdigate, on a secluded winding road leading past a picturesque little inn, the "Surrey Oaks," fronted with aged trees. It is, perhaps, the loneliest place in the county, and is worth visiting, if only for a peep into the curious timber belfry of its little church, which contains a h.o.a.ry chest, contrived out of a solid block of oak, and fastened with three ancient padlocks.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Corner in Newdigate Church.]

But few go so far, and indeed the way by Ifield has its own interests and attractions. Here a primitive pavement or causeway is very noticeable, formed of a row of large flat blocks of stone, along the gra.s.sy margins of the ditches. This is a survival (not altogether without its uses, even now) of the time when

Ess.e.x full of good housewyfes, Middles.e.x full of stryves, Kentshire hoot as fire, Sowseks full of dirt and mire

was a saying with plenty of current meaning to it. In those days the Wealden clay a.s.serted itself so unpleasantly that stepping-stones for pedestrians were necessities.

The stones themselves have a particular interest, coming as they did from local quarries long since closed. They are of two varieties: one of a yellowish-grey; the other, greatly resembling Purbeck marble, fossiliferous and of a light bluish tint. Charlwood Church itself is built of Charlwood stone.

Ifield is just within the Suss.e.x boundary. A beautiful way to it lies through the park, in whose woody drives the oak and holly most do grow. It has been remarked of this part of the Weald, that its soil is particularly favourable to the growth of the oak. Cobbett indeed says, "It is a county where, strictly speaking, only three things will grow well--gra.s.s, wheat, and oak-trees;" and it was long a belief that Suss.e.x alone could furnish forth oak sufficient to build all the navies of Europe, notwithstanding the ravages among the forests made by the forges and furnaces.

[Sidenote: IFIELD]