Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 11

Thursley lies nearly three miles north of Hindhead on the edge of the heather, and brings artists all the summer to paint its timbered cottages and glowing hills. Mrs. Allingham sketched as charmingly on Thursley common as by Haslemere; Birket Foster found a background of purple for his cottage gardens. Mrs. Allingham's sketch of Hindhead from Witley common, which runs up to Thursley from the north-east, is all the wild of this part of Surrey on a few inches of paper.

Thursley is Thor's ley or field, and has memories of the Danes. They left other names near: Tuesley, or Tuesco's field, lies towards G.o.dalming, and Thunder Hill, near Elstead, is Thor's or Thunor's. Thor lives in local legends. Three strange conical hills, lying close together two miles or so west of Thursley, have been known since his day as the Devil's Jumps. Tradition draws a frightful picture of the Devil, horns and tail and all, jumping from hill to hill to amuse himself, until one day Thor caught him at it and knocked him over with an enormous stone. You can see the stone on the Devil's Jumps to-day.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Interior of Thursley Church._]

The Devil jumped up again when I was last looking at the Jumps. I had climbed to the top of Kettlebury Hill, a mile away, and was looking out over those strange little lumps of rock and crimson heather, which puzzled Cobbett to the end of his days, when suddenly at my feet there started up a rabbit as black as a cinder, leapt wildly about the heather, and disappeared. There could have been very little doubt what that meant long after Thor's time.

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

Cobbett, riding in from Hamps.h.i.+re or Suss.e.x, used to make Thursley his first stopping-place. But one thing he would not do, and that was to come into Thursley over Hindhead. He detested turnpike roads, and he detested Hindhead. He liked to ride through woods, or along lanes with trees meeting overhead. When he rides from Chiddingford to Thursley, he writes that "the great thing was to see the centre of these woods, to see the stems of the trees as well as the tops of them." Otherwise, the pleasure in riding was to pa.s.s fine turnip-fields, or bean-fields; anything rather than waste land. The heather on the hills might glow to crimson, and the bracken fade from emerald to bronze, without touching a chord in that st.u.r.dy farmer's heart. Hindhead, you read, "is certainly the most villainous spot that G.o.d ever made," and Cobbett will have nothing to do with it.

The last fifty years have altered and enlarged Thursley church, but it still retains the distinction, unique in Surrey, of its timber tower and steeple rising from the centre of the nave. Other churches in the county--Dunsfold and Alfold in the neighbourhood--carry their bell-turrets on ingenious constructions of timber, but there is no such collection in any other Surrey church of such superb beams as are to be seen at Thursley. The effect of these dark and majestic pillars of oak, some of them thirty inches square, with their great crossbeams, and their arches springing from the pillars across the nave, is one of astonis.h.i.+ng splendour and power. Outside, the s.h.i.+ngled turret tells the time with, instead of a clock, a fine old sundial.

To the north of the church stands a thing of terror. The full story of the murder of the "unknown sailor" belongs to Hindhead; but Thursley has his grave. It lies apart, in the centre of a stretch of green gra.s.s; above it, a stone too tall for quietness; no other grave shares that lonely lawn. Here is the queer, mis-spelt epitaph:--

When pitying Eyes to see my Grave shall come, And with a generous Tear bedew my Tomb; Here shall they read my melancholy Fate, With Murder and Barbarity complete.

In perfect Health, and in the Flower of Age, I fell a Victim to three Ruffians Rage; On bended Knees I mercy strove t' obtain, Their Thirst of Blood made all Entreaties vain.

No dear Relation, or still dearer Friend, Weeps my hard Lot, or miserable End; Yet o'er my sad Remains, (my Name unknown,) A generous Public have inscrib'd this Stone.

Above the epitaph a rough carving shows the sailor kneeling to his murderers. Mr. Baring-Gould, in the _Broom Squire_ makes Iver Verstage, the artist, laugh at the crudely drawn figures. But the horror of this grave, from which all the other quieter graves are gathered apart, has very little laughter in it.

Thursley Common once rang with the picks and hammers of an iron mine; it was one of the centres of a great industry of the Weald. The surface of the common is scarred with the pits from which the ironstone was dug; the hammer ponds lie in a string along a tiny tributary of the Wey. John Ray, in his _Collection of English Words not generally Used_, published in 1672, and printed in the _Suss.e.x Archaeological Collections_, gives an account of the methods of the old iron smelters. A stream, or a pond with a stream running through it, would be dammed, and the fall of water at the lower end would then work two pairs of bellows for the blast for the furnace and a wheel which raised and let fall a hammer. The fuel used was charcoal. Before the ironstone was put into the furnace it was "mollified" or broken up into small pieces by being burnt between layers of charcoal. Then it was put into the furnace, and when melted drawn off in long lumps, called pigs or sows. Then the sows were taken to the forge or hammer, and beaten into square "blooms," two feet long; then the blooms were beaten into "anconies," three feet long; then the "anconies" had their ends nicely shaped, and the iron was ready for market.

A very extensive "collection of English words not generally used" is contained in an inventory of tools supplied to William Yalden, when he took over the Thursley ironworks. Perhaps an ironmaster of to-day might recognise some of those I have chosen:--

Twoe fargons. A beame way anckrues. One turnsowe. One hurdgier. One twewer trole; one twewer hook. Two hursts and brights to them. 2 eyron rackes. A hamer and ane bill and helfe and armes redy placed.

Twoe boyghts about the Chafery. One quas to stopp the fyer. A neew locke.

Mr. Baring-Gould has described one of the natives of Thursley Common in the _Broom Squire_:--

"The natterjack, so rare elsewhere, differing from a toad in that it has a yellow band down its back, has here a paradise. It may be seen at eve perched on a stalk of willow herb or running--it does not hop--round the sundew, clearing the glutinous stamens of the flies that have been caught by them, and calling in a tone like the warning note of the nightingale."

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

I looked for the natterjack at eve, but did not find him. At Farnham, I am told, he is called a jar-bob. Thursley children like to catch a natterjack to sell.

Elstead is three miles away, on the northern edge of the belt of heather; a happy little village standing round a green, with a mill, a bridge, and a church with a wonderful ladder up to the belfry. This is actually a single vast plank of oak, black and immoveable, sloped up from a crossbeam and notched for steps. There are many magnificent beams in Surrey churches, but this is the finest ladder of all of them. It does not tempt ascent in days of more elaborate staircases; but it would not break under the heaviest set of bellringers that ever rung a change.

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

To the east is Milford, a good half mile from its station, and nothing much besides. There is a good natural centre to the village, with four cross roads and an inn, but no doubt Milford's future is to belong to G.o.dalming. A few half-timbered and weather-tiled cottages, which have served as models for newer neighbours, some pollarded elms, a broad smooth road and dusty jasmine--Milford is the first village on the highway running south from G.o.dalming, and on a summer Sat.u.r.day is less a village than a road.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The White Hart, Witley._]

One of the four roads which branch off from Milford to the south runs to Witley. Witley will look more tranquil and more seasoned fifty years hence. To come into the village in the gathering dusk of a summer evening, as I saw it first, is an enchantment; nothing could throw a quieter spell than the brick and timber and tar and whitewash of the cottages, the flowers climbing up the old inn, and the familiar noises of a neighbouring game of cricket finis.h.i.+ng in half darkness. But only part of Witley will stand the full glare of sunlight. The new cottages are finely designed, but they are too black-and-white and painty to group easily with the older, mossier buildings and the White Hart Inn, with its n.o.bly ugly sign.

The church, bowered in ivy and roses, has some quaint inscriptions. One commemorates a forgotten office:--

"Off yo^r charite pray for the soull^e of Thomas Jonys and his wyfe Jane, which Thomas was one of the Sewers of the Chamber to oure Soverayne lorde Kynge Henry VIII."

A Sewer of the Chamber waited at the table and brought water for the hands of the guests--an office which suggests an obvious rhyme for poets writing of water-jugs. Another epitaph is a s.h.i.+ning example of the proper manner of attributing to the dead an almost crus.h.i.+ng superfluity of virtues. Sara Holney, first in Latin, and then in English, thus is lamented and extolled:--

"A better woman than here sleeps, there's none, Sara, Rebecca, Rahel, three in one: Religious, pious, thrifty, wise, fayre, and chast: Soe many goods in one, who finds in hast?"

One more name attracts. Mehetabel, daughter of John Leech of Lea, died in 1816. She was doubtless a friend of Cobbett, who often rode by Lea, and greatly admired her father's trees. The first Mehetabel was the wife of the king of Edom, and the last, possibly, is the heroine of the _Broom Squire_.

Witley has perhaps been a little overshadowed by the tragedy of a late owner of Lea Park. I have heard descriptions of the new features of Lea Park, the lakes and fountains and a billiard-room, I believe, under water, but I have not seen them.

Before Hindhead drew authors and artists up the hill, Witley had its own settlement of workers living deep in Surrey country. George Eliot was at Witley Heights; J.C. Hook, who could not bear to be watched while he was painting, sketched Witley gorse and heather; Birket Foster long lived among the Witley pines; and Mrs. Allingham, who was at Sandhills, a house near by, has painted few more interesting pictures than her _Lessons_, _Pat-a-cake_, and _The Children's Tea_. At Witley she painted most of her studies of children indoors, in the nursery and the schoolroom; after she left Witley, she liked to set her cottage girls and boys among bluebells and apple-blossom out of doors.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _A corner in the White Hart, Witley, known as George Eliot's corner._]

CHAPTER XIV

THE FOLD COUNTRY

The Wild Garden of Surrey.--Birds and their valentines.--Nightingales at Dunsfold.--Alfold Stocks.--Three yews in a line.--The King's Evil.--Alfold industries.--A dry ca.n.a.l.--Chiddingfold.--Red brick and Madonna lilies.--The Enticknaps.--Hungry scholars.--The Crown Inn.--On Highdown Ball.--A green ride in the woods.--The Chiddingfold Foxhounds.

The "Fold Country" is the wild garden of the Surrey weald, and the month to walk in it is May. Alfold, Ifold, Durfold, Dunsfold, Chiddingfold, and other "folds" lie among oakwoods and ploughlands that once were oakwoods; the railway runs nowhere nearer than seven miles from the heart of the woods, and in the woods the timbered cottages stand apart, old and tranquil. To me, the a.s.sociations of the "Fold Country" centre round the memory of a First of May hotter and more glorious with flowers than any I can remember. I had started to walk from Baynards Station west among the woods, with the recollection of four days of north-east winds and heavy snow that had brought April to a close. The change was incredible. There, in the roads that ran through the oakwoods and hazel copses, it was the heat of summer. The birds had drawn new valentines. A c.o.c.k chaffinch, gayest of suitors, danced round his demure hen in the roadway, careless of any pedestrian in that deep country; wrens crept like mice among the stubs of the hedge; the gra.s.s by the roadside and the ditch was lighted with primroses. A narrow copse of cut hazel, bordering the road on the Suss.e.x boundary, was a carpet of primroses, anemones, milkmaids, and dog violets; spires of purple orchids stood above s.h.i.+ning celandines; there could have been nothing more brilliant in a garden. On the hedge-bank a hen pheasant rustled through the undergrowth, caught sight of me, crept to a rabbit-scratch and crouched on the brown earth within a yard of my hand; for the birds are tamer in the Fold Country than beyond it. Above other hedge-banks, in other copses, the cuckoos called all that morning, from Suss.e.x to Surrey, over the border road.

Two of the Fold Country farmhouses by that road, framed in that sunny setting, belong to the memories of a Surrey May. One is a timbered house twenty yards in Suss.e.x, with white curtains and flower-pots behind its diamond-paned lattices, and clumps of primroses growing about stone causeways up to the very door. The other is Pallinghurst farm, a mile further on the road, whose long, lichened roofs shelter red-tiled walls and ma.s.ses of ivy round a white doorway; the garden is a cl.u.s.ter of gnarled apple-trees, and over it and about the tall farm chimneys, when I saw it that morning, flew the first swallows of the year. But it was not the swallows that made summer that May-day. Beyond Alfold, on the road that runs out of Sidney Wood up to Dunsfold Common, there are coppices of thick undergrowth, set about orchards of grey-lichened fruit-trees and stretches of low cut hazel sheeted with primroses. There I heard the first nightingale of the year, a single jet of song as the brown tail flickered in the covert; a hundred yards further down the road there were three singing together; Dunsfold Common came in a burst of yellow gorse, and the song of a nightingale thrilled up from the gorse; another bird, beyond Dunsfold, sang high in the hedgerow in full sunlight. That is a Dunsfold lane, for me; a wild plum-tree branching out of the hedge dressed with the whitest of delicate blossom, and in the white blossom, with the hot blue of a May sky beyond and between, a nightingale's throat throbbing with singing.

Alfold almost touches the Suss.e.x boundary, and is perhaps the most out-of-the-way little village in Surrey. I find Mr. Ralph Nevill, writing in 1889, lamenting that it was once charmingly rural, but that "the breath of the pestilence has pa.s.sed over and vulgarised it." There are new houses in it, and new generally means hideous; but the pestilence has left some old work worth looking at. At the eastern end of the village stands Alfold House, a sixteenth-century timbered building; at the western end is the church, grey with its s.h.i.+ngled spire, built like Thursley and Elstead on ma.s.sive oak beams. A broad stone causeway leads to the door; in May, the springing gra.s.s s.h.i.+nes with daffodils.

Alfold, like Shalford, Abinger and Newdigate, still has its village stocks. They stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way between the two.

Three Alfold villagers, perhaps, made the journey to London, or to some halting-place in the royal progress, to seek the grace of King James II.

The parish register-book contains the entry of their names on the t.i.tle-page:--

2 May } { I gave certificates to Jane Puttock, Henry 4 -- } 1687 { Manfield, Elizabeth Saker, to be touched 19 July } { for the [King's] Evil.

Whether Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield and Elizabeth Saker were cured of the scrofula by the highly medicinal contact of the royal hands does not appear; but in 1710 another patient, James Napper, was certified to be "a legal inhabitant of our parish of Alfold in the county of Surrey aforesaid and is supposed to have the disease commonly called the Evil."

Perhaps not one of the four had much more than the country b.u.mpkin's natural desire to see the King and be able to talk about it afterwards; perhaps they coveted the little gold tokens which royal physicking hung round the sufferer's neck. Not all those who were touched for the Evil were languis.h.i.+ng with a fell disease. Charles II operated on nearly a hundred thousand of his lieges, with instant success when there was nothing the matter with them. But Anne, the divines held, did not succeed directly to the throne, and therefore did not succeed to the miraculous powers of the Jameses and Charleses. It was very little good for James Napper to go to London, for, practically speaking, the queen could cure n.o.body.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Surrey Byway._]

Alfold, which in Aubrey's day was Awfold--variant spellings of "old fold"--was not always purely rustic and agricultural. There is a slab of Suss.e.x marble in the churchyard which is declared to cover the remains of the last of the Surrey gla.s.s manufacturers--the "French gla.s.s men"

who are supposed to have carried on an illicit factory in the depths of Sidney Wood. Another Alfold industry was smuggling, or a.s.sistant-smuggling.

"The gentlemen" ran their tobacco and brandy by way of some of the Alfold farmhouses; the farmer left out "bread and beef" for the gentlemen, and the gentlemen left kegs behind for the farmer.

Sidney Wood lies between Alfold and Dunsfold, and grows hazel and oak for various industries, besides acres of the purest and palest primroses. Through it runs a curious trackway, marked "disused" on the Ordnance maps. It is a section of the Wey and Arun Junction Ca.n.a.l, now a dry bed studded with hazel stubs and clumps of flowers. Dunsfold Common joins the wood, and beyond it, round a wide green, stand the Dunsfold cottages, seventeenth century mixed with twentieth. In the churchyard, when I was there in May, I once saw a curious sight. From inside the church the great yew seemed to be alive with bees; the noise was of twenty swarms. I went out to find that they were not bees, but flies.

The western wall of the tower was black with them; so were the gravestones and the gravel. There must have been millions, hatched, no doubt, in the heat of the wooden belfry.