Highways and Byways in Surrey Part 22

One William Hod, of Normandy, in the year 1265 s.h.i.+pped to Portsmouth ten hogsheads of woad. Robbers seized the woad at Portsmouth and carried it off to Guildford; Hod, pursuing, recaptured his hogsheads and lodged them in Guildford Castle. Immediately appeared Nicholas Picard and others from Normandy, demanding the woad in the name of Stephen Buckarel and others. If the woad was not given up, they threatened to destroy the whole of Guildford by fire the next morning. The under-sheriff, whose family lived in the neighbourhood, at once gave up the woad, whereupon Hod inst.i.tuted proceedings against Sir John D'Abernon the Sheriff, and won his case. Sir John had to pay as damages six score marks--about equivalent to 900 of our money.

Stoke D'Abernon church holds a number of other interesting monuments and bra.s.ses; indeed, for its size, it is fuller of valuable work and memorials than any other Surrey church. One of them, placed to the memory of "Sir Richard the Little, formerly parson of this church," has a haunting note of personal loss. It is a pleasure to puzzle out the old Norman-French:--

SIRE RICHARD LE PEt.i.t IADIS PERSONE DE CEST EIGLISE ICI GIST RECEYVE LA ALME IESU CHRIST.

Another rare form of bra.s.s is that of a little chrysom child, Ellen Bray; another, a curious engraving of Lady Anne Norbury, with four tiny sons and four tiny daughters gathered at her feet in the folds of her gown. There are imposing monuments to Sir Thomas and Lady Vincent, Sir Thomas enormous in trunk hose and his Lady with her hair elaborately frizzed in a Paris hood. In the body of the church, the pulpit is a magnificent piece of early seventeenth century carving, and to the wall near it is fastened a wrought-iron hour-gla.s.s, which must have measured many a weary discourse. Another of Stoke D'Abernon's possessions is one of the finest thirteenth century oak chests in the southern counties.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Stoke D'Abernon Church._]

Outside, the church is interesting in other ways. You can see in the south wall of the chancel a large slice of Roman herringbone brickwork, perhaps brought by pre-conquest builders from some villa or other ruins close at hand; and on the south wall of the nave, high up, is a sundial which before the conquest probably stood above the old south door. With so much that is old and venerable in the building and its monuments it is dismal to add that much, also, that was old and venerable has been destroyed. It is probably the worst restored of all old churches worth restoring.

Stoke D'Abernon has a claim on the attention of those about to marry.

The manor-house is the first which is recorded as having been lent for a honeymoon. So I learn from Mr. J.H. Round, writing in the _Ancestor_.

When William Marshall, in 1189, secured the hand of the heiress of the Earls of Pembroke, who was as good as she was beautiful, he proposed that they should be married on her own estates on the Welsh border. His host, however, a wealthy Londoner, would not hear of such a thing, and insisted on their being married in London and paying the cost of the wedding himself. After the ceremony, as the Society papers of the time might have put it, the young couple left for Stoke D'Abernon in Surrey, the peaceful and delectable country mansion of Sir Enguerrand D'Abernon, kindly lent for the occasion. Mr. Round has extracted this the earliest known reference to an orthodox honeymoon in the country, from the bridegroom's poetical biography, _L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal_:--

"Quant les noces bien faites furent, E richement, si comme els durent, La dame emmena, ce savon, Chies sire Angeran d'Abernon, A Estokes, en liu paisable E aesie e delitable."

The bill for the trousseau of the heiress has also been discovered, entered in the Pipe Roll of the year. It cost 9 12_s._ 1_d._

The road from Stoke D'Abernon runs north-west through the two Cobhams, Church Cobham and Street Cobham. The little Plough Inn, which acts as refreshment-room for Cobham railway station, suggests the proper spirit of village revelry. A spreading yew arbour should shade good ale from the summer suns, and by the side of the garden across the road, gay with geraniums, see-saws and swings, runs a tiny stream, rippling down to the Mole.

Unlike the Wey, the Mole runs by few churches. Only five, Horley, Betchworth, Leatherhead, Stoke D'Abernon, and Cobham, stand near the river, and only Stoke D'Abernon actually on its banks. Stoke D'Abernon, too, has the best view from the churchyard across the stream, over a broad stretch of gra.s.sland on which partridges call and rooks stalk majestically. At Cobham you can scarcely see the Mole when you are in the village, but there are few prettier glimpses of its stream than the br.i.m.m.i.n.g pool by the road outside. A grey mill stands in the stream, double-wheeled and doubly silent; swans oar themselves leisurely about the eddies, and the meadow beyond in May is a sheet of kingcups.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham_, A.D. 1432, _restored_ 1635.]

"Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham, 1432, restored 1635," is the engaging legend painted on a low-roofed timbered house which stands at the churchyard gate. With its square beams, its latticed windows and red curtains, it is a model of what a "Home of Rest for Gentlewomen"--which is its vocation--should be. Cobham has one or two other good houses, Georgian, red and solid, but the best perhaps is the old White Lion posting inn at Cobham Street, half a mile away on the Portsmouth Road.

The White Lion stood by the fourth tollhouse on the highway from London, and its oak-panelled parlours have entertained travellers for four centuries or more--none thirstier, perhaps, than "Liberty" Wilkes, who pa.s.sed that way on a day in 1794, and drank "a large bowl of lemonade."

Pain's Hill, which rises above the Mole a little further on the road, is a name a.s.sociated with a gardener and a poet. The gardener was Charles Hamilton, who burdened his lawns with such an astonis.h.i.+ng variety of temples, chapels, grottos, castles, cascades and ruins--including a hermitage with a real live hermit--that the result was voted one of the greatest achievements in landscape gardening of the Georgian or any other age. The hermit, sad to relate, was a failure. He was offered 700 to live a Nebuchadnezzar-like existence in his cell, sleeping on a mat, never speaking a word, and abandoning all the conveniences of a toilet.

He would gladly have taken the 700, but threw up his post after three weeks.

The poet was Matthew Arnold, who spent most of the last fifteen years of his life at Pain's Hill Cottage. He wrote little poetry there; he came to Pain's Hill in the year after he had published _Literature and Dogma_, when his mind was occupied with his revolution against the sombreness and narrowness of modern English religious thought. But to Pain's Hill, I think, belong "Geist's Grave" and "Kaiser Dead" and "Poor Matthias;" "Geist's Grave" written for his little son, and "Poor Matthias" for his daughter, perhaps--Matthias, bought at Hastings to please a child, though she, childlike, would have chosen a bigger bird:--

"Behold French canary-merchant old Shepherding his flock of gold In a low dim-lighted pen Scann'd of tramps and fishermen!

There a bird, high-coloured, fat, Proud of port, though something squat-- Pursy, play'd-out Philistine-- Dazzled Nelly's youthful eyne.

But, far in, obscure, there stirr'd On his perch a sprightlier bird, Courteous-eyed, erect and slim; And I whisper'd: 'Fix on _him!_'

Home we brought him, young and fair, Songs to trill in Surrey air.

Here Matthias sang his fill, Saw the cedars of Pain's Hill; Here he pour'd his little soul, Heard the murmur of the Mole."

And it was while Matthew Arnold was living at Pain's Hill that he chose out his little collection of "selected poems." I like to think of him reading over his work in his Surrey garden, and answering once more the cuckoo calling "from the wet field, through the vext garden-trees"--

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, Sweet William with his homely cottage smell, And stocks in fragrant blow: Roses that down the alleys s.h.i.+ne afar, And open, jasmined-m.u.f.fled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden trees, And the full moon, and the white evening star."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Bridge over the Mole, Cobham._]

CHAPTER XXVIII

LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING

The Roman road over the hill.--The Swallows of the Mole.--An imperial draught.--Mickleham.--f.a.n.n.y Burney.--A Story of letters.--Juniper Hall and its cedars.--Norbury Park.--How to measure trout from the Mole.--Conversation Sharp.--Keats and Endymion.--Mr. George Meredith's poems.--The best known hill in the world.--A Soldier's Whim.

The best way from Leatherhead to Dorking is the longest, and hardly goes by the high road at all. It begins at Ashtead; you can get to Ashtead from Leatherhead or Epsom, but you must start from Ashtead out over Ermyn Street, the old Roman road. One might begin the walk from Epsom; but Epsom downs, with the great empty race-stand, can be depressing, and the best of the old road lies south, nearer Mickleham.

Ashtead is growing towards the railway, but east of the main street there is hardly a cottage. The church stands in Ashtead Park, and shows that it once had Roman walls for neighbours by the quant.i.ty of Roman brick and tiling mixed among its flints and stones. It has been elaborately roofed with cedar, but otherwise contains little; the prettiest part is the churchyard and the park beyond it, with its deer which walk by the gates and gaze gently over the paths at strangers.

Ermyn Street or Stane Street of the maps, which English tongues here have named Pebble Lane, skirts Ashtead Park by the south-east, at first a wide green lane, afterwards a narrow path sometimes half-choked by trees, sometimes, in wet weather, impa.s.sable with mud, but always driving straight as the Roman roadmaker drove his pick towards the cap of Mickleham Downs. The narrow lane to which the road has shrunk is less than the Roman made it, but Mickleham Downs can look very little different to-day from the downs which the legionary knew. He, too, like the modern traveller tramping by the yews and box trees, saw the sunlight on the dark, s.h.i.+ning leaves, and watched the wind ruffle the whitebeams on the shoulder of the hill.

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

Below the downs lies Mickleham, halfway between Leatherhead and Dorking, and famous in all the guide-books for the "swallows" of the Mole. The "swallows" are described as deep, blue pools, into which the Mole disappears underground, and, except from the most carefully written accounts, you would imagine that the whole river dives completely into the earth and jumps up again at Leatherhead. But if you ask at Mickleham to be directed to the "Swallows," the chances are that you will have to explain that you do not mean birds. The fact is that it is only in seasons of great drought that they would be noticed. In summers when there is very little rain the Mole is said to run dry between Burford Bridge and Thorncroft Bridge near Leatherhead, but I have never happened to see it do so, and had the greatest difficulty in discovering the Swallows, which, when I saw them, were br.i.m.m.i.n.g with very muddy water; the stream was as full as possible. The best comment on the legend of the diving Mole is Thomas Fuller's in the _Worthies_:--

"I listen not to the country people telling it was experimented by a goose, which was put in and came out again with _life_ (though without feathers); but hearken seriously to those who judiciously impute the _subsidency_ of the earth in the interstice aforesaid to some underground hollowness made by that water in the pa.s.sage thereof."

The Swallows are really fissures in the chalk bed of the stream, which runs as it were over the top of a long chalk sponge. In rainless summers there is only enough water to fill the bottom of the sponge, and the top channel runs dry. Brayley has some amusing calculations as to the amount of water which the sponge drinks:--

"From calculations made on different days, after measuring the height and velocity of the current received into these pools, it was ascertained, when both were in activity, that the swallows of the outer pool engulphed 72 imperial gallons per second, 4,320 per minute, and 259,200 per hour; and those of the inner pool, 23 imperial gallons per second, 1,380 per minute, and 82,800 per hour."

Seventy-two gallons--a good-sized tankful--of water in a second is very pretty swallowing; an early instance of thinking imperially. To Camden, in the _Britannia_, the disappearing water suggests another image. The inhabitants can boast, like the Spaniards, of having a bridge that feeds several flocks of sheep.

Mickleham is almost the centre of the f.a.n.n.y Burney country. At Mickleham church she was married to General d'Arblay; Juniper Hall is half-a-mile from the church; Norbury Park lies west of the Mole; Camilla Lacey south of Norbury Park at West Humble.

f.a.n.n.y Burney, retired from her post of Maid of Honour and receiving a pension of 100 a year, met M. d'Arblay in January, 1793, when she was staying with her friends the Locks at Norbury Park. He was living at Juniper Hall with other French _emigres_--a brilliant little colony; Madame de Stael was there, and de Narbonne, and de Lally Tollendal, and Talleyrand. The General began as tutor, and the course of f.a.n.n.y Burney's acquaintance with Juniperians, as her sister Mrs. Phillips used to call them, and particularly with her French master, perhaps may be given in a few extracts from her correspondence:--

MADAME DE STAeL HOLSTEIN TO MISS BURNEY,

_Written from_ JUNIPER HALL, DORKING, SURREY, 1793.

"When J learned to read english J begun by milton, to know all or renounce all in once. J follow the same system in writing my first english letter to Miss burney; after such an enterprize nothing can affright me. J feel for her so tender a friends.h.i.+p that it melts my admiration, inspires my heart with hope of her indulgence, and impresses me with the idea that in a tongue even unknown J could express sentiments so deeply felt.

"My servant will return for a french answer. J intreat miss burney to correct the words but to preserve the sense of that card.

"Best compliments to my dear protectress, Madame Phillipe."

MISS BURNEY TO DR. BURNEY (her father).

"MICKLEHAM, _February 29, 1793_.

"There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating than this colony; between their sufferings and their _agremens_ they occupy us almost wholly. M. de Narbonne, alas, has no 1000 a year!

he got over only 4000 at the beginning, from a most splendid fortune; and, little foreseeing how all has turned out, he has lived, we fear, upon the princ.i.p.al....

"M. d'Arblay is one of the most singularly interesting characters that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an ingenuous openness of nature, that I had been unjust enough to think could not belong to a Frenchman. With all this, which is his military portion, he is pa.s.sionately fond of literature, a most delicate critic in his own language, well versed in both Italian and German, and a very elegant poet. He has just undertaken to become my French master for p.r.o.nunciation, and he gives me long daily lessons in reading. Pray expect wonderful improvements! In return I hear him in English."

MISS BURNEY TO MRS. LOCK.