Highways and Byways in Surrey

But these are perhaps enough. Has the crowd on the hill changed much since the forties? The Ring roars no longer round a gibbet, of course; a Grand Stand of vast dimensions overlooks the course from starting-gate to paddock; dukes no longer ride side by side with butchers to make bets. But the crowd itself, and what the crowd does, and what it sees and feels—all that, surely, has changed hardly at all. The gipsies still swarm, and the touts still swindle; the bookmakers, bedizened with belts of silver coin, and outlandish hats, and flaring assertions of personal integrity, still clamour by their blackboards; they still chalk up the odds they offer against horses whose names they mis-spell; the sun still shines on the jockeys' silk jackets; still, down a course cleared empty, distracted dogs rush madly; still, before the start for the great race, there broods over that huge concourse an intense, almost a dreadful silence; still there is the shout as the jackets flash from the starting-gate, still the hum as they sweep down the bend, the roar as they rush for the straight, the yell as the leader drops back, shoots out, thunders past the judge. All that remains, and will remain. But two changes are insistent. One is the motor-cars, which are all over the hill and almost everywhere else; but that is a permanent thing. The other is the advertisements on the kites. In the old days the downs lay under blue sky and white clouds. Now they lie, on Derby day, under strings of kites. You may go to Epsom to see horse-racing, but you will not escape soap, mustard, or pills.

Of Epsom's residents and neighbours, Lord Derby won the race named after him in 1787, and doubtless others have won since. But the best record belongs to the owner of Durdans, who won the Derby in 1894 with Ladas, in 1895 with Sir Visto, and in 1905 with Cicero; and who, in addition to his career as politician, man of letters, and owner of racehorses, has added difficulties to the tasks of other writers by contributing to Mr. Gordon Home's Guide to Epsom a discouragingly brilliant preface.

Another peer has made Epsom history in a different way. At Pit Place lived the second Lord Lyttelton, and at Pit Place he died, leaving behind him a profligate name and a ghost story which Dr. Johnson thought the most extraordinary he had ever heard. It was in November, 1779; Lord Lyttelton had just returned from Ireland, and was seized with suffocating fits. One night he dreamt a dream. A dove hovered over him, changed to a woman in white, and spoke to him. It was a dead face, and he knew who it was; her two daughters were under his roof. Her words were few: "Lord Lyttelton, prepare to die!" "When?" he gasped. "In three days," she answered, and vanished. He called his man, who found him wet with sweat and his whole frame working. The third day came, and he jested with his guests at breakfast—"If I live over to-night, I shall have jockeyed the ghost." He dined at five, went to bed at eleven, called his servant a slovenly dog for not bringing a spoon for his medicine, and sent for a spoon. The man returned, found him in a fit, and roused the house. But Lord Lyttelton was dead. He was thirty-five.

CHAPTER XXV

Ewell almost joins Epsom; Ewell with its old name Etwell, which its historians tell you means At ye Well; the guess looks too easy. The well is plain enough to see; Ewell has pools of the clearest water and springs running fast by the side of the street; it is the most definite beginning of a river that ever attracted a village to its banks, and it runs out of the village as the little Hog's Mill river—a stream with a sparkle in it that deserves a prettier name. But the village which the stream drew to it has changed. The High Street has kept some of its older houses, with upper stories jutting out over the road; but the church which the old houses knew has gone. They pulled it down in the forties—that unhappy decade for anything ancient and quiet in Surrey villages; all they left was the tower, a mighty mass of stone and ivy that stands with its nave reft from it, the forlornest and most meaningless of ruins. If the tower might stand, why not the nave? They pulled the nave down, and left the tower standing, so Mr. C.J. Swete, one of Epsom's historians, tells you, in order that it "should remain to beautify the landscape." They acted, he observes, "with good taste and judgment" in so doing. Theirs is that praise.

But Ewell has a greater ruin. Ewell Castle preserves it in Ewell Park; but when I was at Ewell the Castle and Park were for sale, and I could find no one who could show it me, or even who knew where it was. Few, perhaps, have seen it, and there can be little to see, by all accounts, but what remains is the ruin of Nonsuch Palace—just the foundations of the banquet hall; that is all that remains of the palace which was to be incomparable, like no palace a king ever built before, the royalest building in Christendom. That was what Henry VIII meant to make it, when he began it in 1538, and he had built most of it when he died nine years later. It stood unfinished for ten years more; then Mary sold it to the Earl of Arundell, and he finished it. Elizabeth bought it back, and so it came a royal palace to the Stuarts; even the Parliamentary wars left it untouched, and it was the refuge for Charles II's Exchequer at the fire of London. Pepys has a picture of Nonsuch, just after the Restoration. "A very noble house," he calls it, "and a delicate park about it, where just now there was a doe killed for the King, to carry up to the Court." Two years later he walked in the park and admired the house and the trees; "a great walk of an elm and a walnut set one after another in order. And all the house on the outside filled with figures of stories, and good painting of Rubens' or Holbein's doing. And one great thing is that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts and quarters in the walls, with lead, and gilded. I walked also into the ruined garden." That is Charles II; the doe killed in the park for the King, the ruined garden. An old print shows Nonsuch in 1582; a great quadrangle with towers at the corners, and cupolas, which perhaps were gilt, and bannerets round the cupolas, and countless little windows; along the face of the building are high Tudor windows with bas-reliefs between them; in the foreground of the park a great lady rides in a chariot with gaily caparisoned horses; a greyhound bounds by her side, spaniels in leash drag a huntsman after the carriage; in the far distance, beyond the palace, hounds and men hunt a noble stag, pictured as if the whole airy chase flew round a cupola. It was a great palace, and it should be standing to-day, with its lead and its gilt and its Rubenses and Holbeins. But Charles II gave it to Barbara Villiers, and she knew the right use for a king's gift.

Cheam, east from Ewell by two miles, has kept not the tower of its old church but its chancel. The little building stands apart in the churchyard; you may peep through a grille at the tombs and the pedigree of sixteen generations of Lumleys, and at a palimpsest brass mounted on a screen. But if Cheam's church has gone, in the village there is still the White Hall, a gabled Elizabethan house of painted timber; the daintiest and lightest little place, with tiny ordered lawns under its white wood, and old-fashioned flowers in the garden and in the windows. White Hall has the graces of old books, old ladies, old lace. But its gables and chimneys are not the only happy picture in Cheam. The road that passes by the left of the house leads to an untouched corner of little, white wooden cottages, as lowly and as English as anything in deep Surrey country, and this is nearly town. They will not last long, I am afraid; the new Cheam buildings are staring at them.

All above Cheam and Ewell are Banstead Downs, once as free and open as the downs by the Sussex sea, and even now sunny places where you may walk in fresh winds. But the houses are nearer every year, and they will be lucky if they escape another asylum; the high ground gives an opportunity to asylum architects. On Banstead Downs are Lambert's Oaks, where Lord Derby's roystering guests founded great races with bumpers of claret, and where Lord Stanley, when he married Lady Betty Hamilton, gave his famous Fête Champêtre, which Horace Walpole guessed would cost £5,000; Lord Stanley had "bought all the orange-trees round London," and the haycocks he imagined were to be made of straw-coloured satin. Banstead itself, like Woodmansterne, its neighbour to the east, has not much to show of village buildings. Banstead and Woodmansterne churches have many memorials to the Lamberts, one of the very old Surrey families; and it is from Garratt's Hall, whose grounds border Banstead village, that Colonel F.A.H. Lambert dedicates his Guide to Surrey, a valuable little pocket-book, to Admiral Charles Mathew Buckle, head of another ancient Surrey family. One of the oldest things near Banstead stands in ground once owned by the Buckle family. Nork House has a field in which stands Tumble Beacon, a mound which saw the flares run from the hills of Hampshire to London, when the Armada was breasting the Channel and Hampshire had caught the signal from Dunkerry and the Lizard. Tumble Beacon would not light an alarm now; or if it did, it would burn pine trees and elders and nettles that grow about it, and would scare a hundred rabbits. How did the trees come there? A beacon should not be planted; it should stand open and high and free as when the Spaniards came, and from the same spot where Elizabeth's sailors in the Thames saw its flame, it should wait for jubilees and coronations to send its fires roaring up into the night.

Nork, etymologists have guessed, may be corrupted from Noverca—perhaps it once had a Roman owner. There were Romans who lived on the high ground near. Walton Heath, south of Banstead on the chalk plateau, has had the pavement of a Roman villa dug from it; I have been told that you may still find Roman pavements there, if you know where to dig. But Walton's chief possession—the village is Walton-on-the-hill, so named that you may never mistake it for Walton-on-the-Naze or Walton-on-Thames—is in the church. It is a leaden font, the only leaden font which Surrey possesses, though England has thirty; and of the thirty English fonts, Walton's is of as fine workmanship and design as any. Throned apostles circle the bowl, and bless with the right hand, or hold a book in the left. The church has some interesting old glass in a southern window, and, by an oddly deliberate anachronism, a chained Bible dated 1803. The chain is an old and genuine guard of the printed word, taken from Salisbury; but why should it chain Georgian printing? But Walton has long been anachronistic; there is a tomb outside the chancel, in a recess of the north wall, on which some modern Latin scholar has set the inscription, "Johannes de Waltune hujus ecclesiae fundator 1268." The weather has removed part, but the rest is in black paint.

A neighbouring village, Headley, has separated its new and old more definitely. The church has been taken down, all but the porch, which holds a grave and what looks like the sign of an inn; you may just distinguish the royal arms. The pillars of the old church have fallen, but where they stood, little clipped box-trees mark the line—a prettier memorial than a drawn plan to hang in the vestry, but need the old church have fallen? These level heights, perhaps, provoke church-building, but how few spires stand on the horizons. Ranmer spire you may see from half over mid-Surrey, but Ranmer is high on a ridge. Here you are on a plateau, and the heights see each other no more than the low ground. Kingswood's is the best seen of the spires on the plateau; a shining thing, white as the chalk of the ridge.

From Epsom to the north is quiet, empty countryside. Esher is five miles to the north-west as the crow flies; something more by road, but the best roads near Esher are the wild pathways of Esher common. Midway between Epsom and Esher, but among pastures, not in the heather of the common, is Chessington. Chessington Hall and Chessington Church are deep in the fields. The Hall may not be to-day quite the simple little building that Fanny Burney knew, when Samuel Crisp, "Daddy" Crisp, had it, but the garden and the trees, and the avenue to the church where she walked and talked over his music with Dr. Burney can be little changed. It was at Chessington that Fanny Burney took a packet from the postman and found herself famous. Evelina, which not even her father knew she had written, had taken the town. All the talk of the great men was of Evelina. Dr. Johnson was praising it; Sir Joshua Reynolds would not let his meals interrupt him, and took it with him to table. Edmund Burke had sat through the night to finish it. That was in 1778, and a hundred and thirty years after that wonderful morning her delight is as infectious as dance music. "Dr. Johnson's approbation!" she writes in her diary, "—it almost crazed me with agreeable surprise—it gave me such a flight of spirits that I danced a jig to Mr. Crisp, without any preparation, music, or explanation—to his no small amazement and diversion." She danced round the mulberry tree on the Chessington lawn, so she told Sir Walter Scott years afterwards.

She was just twenty-six. The mulberry-tree still stands by the window, and the fields by Chessington are still as green and quiet as when poor Mr. Crisp, a writer whom a careless world did not want to read, retired from his disappointments to a home where none but his friends should find him. He lies in the churchyard, under the shadow of the quaint little spire that sits on its bells like a candle-snuffer; Dr. Burney has written an epitaph for him, in the formal Georgian English that was always somewhere, too, in Fanny Burney's head. It was only the girl in her that kept it out of Evelina; after Evelina the girl survives almost only in her diary and her letters. The books grow dull.

Esher, beyond Claygate, is three miles to the north-west, and Claremont borders Esher Common. Claremont is a house of happiness and mourning. Queen Victoria spent the brightest days of her childhood there; princes and princesses have lived here and died before their day; a great name darkens its memories, ennobles its history. The first house at Claremont was built by Sir John Vanbrugh; afterwards the Duke of Newcastle had it; on his death Lord Clive bought it, pulled it down, and built the Claremont of to-day. A hundred thousand pounds he spent on the house and garden, and in the serenity of his chosen home he should have ended his days. Envy and persecution prevented that, and Clive of Arcot and Plassey died in London. Forty-two years later, in 1816, Prince Leopold, afterwards King of the Belgians, brought his bride, Princess Charlotte, to Claremont; she died with her baby the next year, a girl of twenty-one. In 1848 Louis Philippe, a refugee from the Revolution, came to Claremont; he died there in 1850. Seven years after, in 1857, Claremont and the countryside were in mourning for the Duchess of Nemours, a princess of glorious beauty. Queen Amélie died at the house in 1866. To-day the Duchess of Albany has Claremont; perhaps, as it lies so near a great highway, it might be worth while to say that it is not shown to the public.

A ruined palace is Claremont's neighbour. The great gateway of the building stands on the bank of the Mole, in the grounds of Esher Place. William of Waynflete built it; Wolsey repaired it, and was sent there in disgrace by his King; the Great Seal had been taken from him. Stow has a story of the fallen Minister's journey to Esher; Wolsey had left the river at Putney, and was riding along sadly enough, when a messenger brought him a kind word from the King. In his joy and relief he looked round for a present to send back; he fixed on Patch, his fool, and ordered him to the Court. Patch was all rage and tears, and stormed his unhappiness at his master. It was no good; he was for Henry, and six yeomen—it took the tallest Wolsey had—carried him struggling back to the King.

The Palace did not keep Wolsey long; he was allowed back at Richmond. After him, in Elizabeth's reign, came Richard Drake, and kept Spanish grandees prisoners there, taken from the Armada by Sir Francis Drake. After the Drakes came the Lattons, one of whom, John, held a remarkable number of offices under William III. Aubrey gives the list:—

Esher Palace as John Latton knew it survives now only in old prints; they show a long wing on each side of William of Waynflete's gateway. Opposite the palace a pleasure-boat, half dinghy, half barge, asks for passengers; on the bank a fashionably dressed lady holds a long fishing rod hopefully over the river, shaded by an enormous parasol.

Esher itself is scattered round a village green and a long broad street. By the green is the modern church, and in the churchyard a strange tomb. Lord Esher, the late Master of the Rolls, lies in white marble with Lady Esher; Lord Esher designed the tomb in his lifetime, and would pass it on his way to church. But the real Esher lies away from the village green, along the main road to Portsmouth—a road edged with trees and strips of grass; behind the trees stand the little, low, one-storied red houses, and Esher's fine inn, the Bear. The Bear has been rebuilt, but it has kept the air of a coaching inn; in the hall there is a vast pair of boots, once worn by the postillion of Louis Philippe.

Esher's old church lies behind the Bear, the saddest little deserted place. Sorrels and grasses wave about its forgotten graves; you open the church door, and you are back in the days of Waterloo. The pews are square and high, the pulpit is a three-decker, the paint is that peculiar yellow dun which belongs to Georgian and early Victorian æsthetics. But the value of the church is that it is untouched. No restorer has laid a hand on the mouldering baize which lines the pews; no one has knocked down the hideous galleries; nobody has broken into the gallery pew in which, warmed by a fireplace and chimney in winter, the little Princess Victoria of Kent used to sit when she was allowed to visit Claremont. You may see at Esher, better than in any other Surrey church, the surroundings in which our Georgian great-grandfathers worshipped; the service might almost have ended yesterday—there should be a forgotten prayer-book somewhere under a seat, praying for the health of his gracious Majesty King William. Or there might be in the body of the church; not in the Queen's pew. I think American visitors have been there.

To racing people Esher is Sandown, and Sandown is what all travellers see from the railway. Of the smaller racecourses few can be prettier; the long flank of a green hill, the white pavilion under dark pines, and the curving course picked out with fresh painted railings and green canvas—it is as spick and span as a lawn. Either in the summer, for the Eclipse Stakes, or in the spring for the steeplechases, most of the great English racehorses go to Sandown. Bendigo won the Eclipse Stakes of £10,000 for Mr. Hedworth Barclay in 1886—the first time any horse won so huge a stake. Bendigo is surely one of the great names. Even those who know least about horse-racing may talk of Bendigo; Bendigo whom the crowd loved, Bendigo who never failed them, Bendigo who carried 9 stone 7 lb., and won the Jubilee Stakes at Kempton in 1887. I have for Bendigo the affection of a schoolfellow.

What is Surrey English? Lord Macaulay heard it at Esher. He was walking from Esher to Ditton Marsh, he writes on September 22nd, 1854, and he listened to it in a public-house:—

"A shower came on. Afraid for my chest, I turned into a small ale-house, and called for a glass of ginger beer. I found there a party of hop-pickers, come back from the neighbourhood of Farnham. They had had but a bad season, and were returning, nearly walked off their legs. I liked their looks, and thought their English remarkably good for their rank of life. It was in truth Surrey English, the English of the suburbs of London, which is to the Somersetshire and Yorkshire what Castilian is to the Andalusian, or Tuscan to Neapolitan. The poor people had a foaming pot before them; but as soon as they heard the price, they rose and were going to leave it untouched. They could not, they said, afford so much. It was but fourpence halfpenny. I laid the money down, and their delight and gratitude quite affected me. Two more of the party soon arrived. I ordered another pot, and when the rain was over, left them, followed by more blessings than ever, I believe, were purchased for ninepence."

Perhaps the English of the Surrey suburbs was different in Macaulay's days. There is little dialect left anywhere to distinguish Surrey English from any other; even the gypsies speak the English of the suburbs of London. There are still gypsies on Esher common; I came across quite a settlement once, walking over the common to Cobham on a sunny morning after late April snow. The common was patched with sparkling white and blue; the snow lay in blue shadows unmelted under the gorse bushes, and among the gorse and sodden bracken twenty ponies snuffed for grass. Three gypsy boys shuffled through the fern near them. What did they do with the ponies? I asked, and the eldest told me they sold them; they were good ponies; he was voluble in suburban English. What did they fetch? That depended. What was that one worth?—it was a small chestnut creature with a child's pink pinafore for a halter. "Ah! That one," he began, and his eyes became inscrutable. He would have sold it well.

CHAPTER XXVI

The stretch of water lying to the west is the millpond, and is unlike any other pond I know. It is two or three hundred yards long and perhaps eighty yards wide, slopes gradually from the sides over a chalky bottom, and is of an intense clear green. Here and there are open spaces in the weeds; patches of deeper blue-green, which can be seen, if you look closely, to be moving—a most uncanny motion. The water wells up incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones, which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a puzzling thing. The stone strikes the surface and sends out a widening ripple. Then you watch the stone sinking down slowly against the up-rush of water, but distinct and white and wavering. Then another ripple—a mere ring of light, in some way mirroring the real ripple of the surface—leaps out apparently from the side of the pool a foot or so under water, touches the white, wavering stone, and the stone vanishes. There is no stirring of mud, as there would be if it struck the bottom of an ordinary pond; it merely disappears into an invisible mouth in the green.

No frost ever sets ice on the millpond, it is said, and in hard winters wildfowl flock to it. I never have seen on the water any fowl that were wild, but it is crowded with swimming and diving birds. You can count thirty or forty coots, besides moorhens and a dozen dabchicks or so, and at the end where the mill stands there are fat duck and a bevy of swans. It is an arresting picture, the long, clear surface, the coots with their white foreheads dabbling in the weeds or rushing after one another with loud splashings, the dabchicks diving six at a time out of sight, and the dignified swans breasting the flowing water under the red brick and lichens of the mill. The coots, unlike all other coots, too, actually swim up to be fed. There is a strong spell of magic over all that strange pool. Some naiad Circe combs her hair far below the weeds, and has bewitched the wildfowl and the green cold water.

It would be easy to believe that the rushing springs of the millpond were in reality the Mole reappearing from her dive below ground at Mickleham, higher up the stream. But if that is so, the river must pass through some kind of filter, for it can be thick and cloudy at Mickleham, but is never anything but clean and pure at the mill. The mill stream joins the Mole just below Leatherhead Bridge, a fine span of fourteen arches. The Mole can put on many faces, but I think she is nowhere in all her journey more fascinating than where she divides her stream under Leatherhead, and comes dancing down by separate channels to her broad sheet of ripples at the bridge.

Beyond the bridge on the left, is the site of a very famous old inn. The present inn, the Running Horse, has been partly rebuilt, and has few external attractions, but the mistress of the old inn, four hundred years ago, was the subject of an ode written by the Poet Laureate. She was Elinour Rumming, ale-wife of a cabaret at "Lederhede in Sothray," and John Skelton, perhaps to amuse Henry VIII, and perhaps to please himself, wrote one of his pungent, tumbling romps of doggerel about her. "The Tunning of Elinour Rumming, per Skelton Laureate," as one of the old editions prints it, is an interminable piece of rhyme, mostly an orgy of coarseness, but with a certain rude vigour of humour and live truth. Here are a score of lines out of some hundreds:—

The Tunnyng of Elinour Rumming, Per Skelton Laureate.

"Tell you I chill
If that ye wyll
A while be still
Of a comelye gyll
That dwelt on a hyll
But she is not gryll
For she is somewhat sage
And well worne in age
For her visage
It would asswage
A mannes courage.

And this comely dame
I understande her name
Is Elinoure Rumminge
At home in her wonnyng
And as men say
She dwelt in Sothray
In a certain stede
By syde Lederhede
She is a tonnish gyb
The deuell and she be sib
But to take up my tale
She breweth noppy ale

And maketh thereof poorte sale
To travellers, to tinkers
To sweters, to swinkers
And all good ale drynkers
That will nothinge spare
But dryncke till they stare
And bringe them selfe bare
With now away the mare
And let us sley care
As wise as an hare."

The legend is that Skelton was a fisherman, and used to come over from Nonsuch Palace by Epsom to fish in the Mole. Perhaps he did, and drank Elinour's "noppy ale"; in any case, a portrait of the Leatherhead ale-wife found its way into one of his books, with a rhymed couplet beneath it:—

"When Skelton wore the Laurell Crowne
My Ale put all the Ale Wives downe."

The portrait is of a hag of such appalling ill-favour as would certainly "asswage a manne's courage."

An inn of more interest, though never the subject of a Laureate's ode, is the old coaching hostel, the Swan. It was a famous house in the seventeenth century, and cooked the Mole trout as well as the Dorking inns cooked their water-souchy of carp and tench. The Reverend S.N. Sedgwick, in his ingenious little collection of Leatherhead legends, adds a strange record to the inn property. He founds one of his stories on a local tradition that the carrying of a dead body can establish a right of way, and he says that in quite recent times the sum of one penny has been charged for permission to bring a corpse through the Swan Brewery Yard, to prevent a right of way being established.

Whether or not the right of way was established originally by carrying a dead body over it, there is another Leatherhead tradition of a right of way which is connected with the church. The church, with the curious double dedication of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, stands apart from the southern road out of Leatherhead, above the banks of the Mole. The tower is strangely out of the axis of the nave—as much as three or four feet—and the tradition is that it was so built to avoid encroaching on an established right of way. Probably the explanation is something more symbolical or superstitious. One of the most learned of all Surrey archæologists, Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, holds to the theory that these deflections of the church axis are connected with legends of the Crucifixion. The deflected chancel, he thinks, suggests the head bowed upon the cross. But the deflected tower seems more difficult. The church is interesting in other ways. It contains a leather-bound Book of Homilies, chained in its original position to one of the northern pillars of the nave; and in the porch is an upright gravestone erected to the memory of Lady Diana Turner, the story being that she chose to be buried under the very spot where her sedan-chair stood for the Sunday service. She was paralysed, and listened to the Homilies from the porch.

Leatherhead has two faces. She shows one, which is slate and new, to the traveller entering the town from Ashtead and Epsom to the north-east; and another, which is the old bridge and the church road and the best of her, to those who approach her from Feltham or Mickleham. St. John's School, founded for the sons of poor clergy, lies on the Ashtead road, a large modern building of red and grey patterned brick. But the best of Leatherhead's houses stand about the Mole. One is Thorncroft, which represents the domain of Tornecrosta in Domesday Book. Another is a fine early Georgian building now known as Emlyn House, but formerly as "The Mansion." Alexander Akehurst, M.D., one of the churchwardens who presented the Book of Homilies to the church, rebuilt this house early in the eighteenth century, but parts of the older building remain. Once it belonged to Sir Thomas Bludworth, whose sister married Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assize. According to a local tradition, Jeffreys, when his worthy master King James had fled to France, slunk in disguise to Leatherhead. It was one of the many roads he found closed against him in his attempts to escape. But he did not come to Leatherhead solely because it lay on the road to the south. His little daughter lay at the point of death at her uncle's house, and his desire was to see her once more before she died. The once mighty Lord Chancellor, dressed as a common sailor with shaven eyebrows and coaldust smeared on his cheeks, hated with a furious intensity of loathing which has never been felt for an Englishman before or since, knocked fearfully at dead of night at the door of the house where his dying daughter lay. So says the legend, and history does not forbid belief. For the register dates the child's funeral on December 2, 1688, and it was ten days afterwards that a wild crowd nearly tore the judge limb from limb at Wapping.

A gentler memory, or rather association, belongs to the Church street and the houses in the neighbourhood. There have been many attempts made by Miss Austen's readers to identify Highbury, "the large and populous village, almost amounting to a town" of Emma, with some Surrey town or village. There is a school of serious students who place it at Esher; another band of enthusiasts support Dorking. Mr. E.V. Lucas, in his engaging introduction to a new edition of the novel, has another suggestion. He recommends the theory that Highbury was Leatherhead, which satisfies most of the conditions of the book. It is, as he says, rightly placed as regards London, Kingston and Box Hill; though seven miles, which was the drive from Hartfield to Box Hill, is surely rather a generous estimate of the actual distance. But Leatherhead certainly has a river and a "Randalls," and Mr. Lucas has been told that it has an "Abbey Farm." That may be a mere coincidence; but, if so, it is the more striking when one turns to the parish registers, and finds in them the uncommon name of Knightley. Mr. Knightley, in 1761, raised the pulpit of the church, and erected a new reading-desk and seat for the clerk, and it was "hereby ordered that the thanks of this vestry be paid in the most respectful manner to Mr. Knightley for this fresh mark of his regard." Surely that is precisely what would have been the attitude of Mr. Elton's parishioners to Emma's husband. If Miss Austen read the parish literature, she may also have set eyes on a poem entitled, "Norbury Park," which was written by a minor bard of the neighbourhood named Woodhouse. But that is insisting too much; though, to be sure, from the quality of his verse, Mr. Woodhouse, author of "Norbury Park," may well be imagined to have had, like Emma's father, a nice taste in gruel.

CHAPTER XXVII

The Slyfields were essentially a Surrey family. They lived and worked as gentlemen and yeomen and parsons among small Surrey villages, Send and Great Bookham and Byfleet and Pirford and Ripley and the Clandons; one of them, Edmond, was Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in the time of Elizabeth. He was the greatest of the Slyfields, and left behind him sixteen sons and daughters, four Surrey manors, and a will as careful and studious as himself. Some of the items are quaint reading:—

The last item is one of the most interesting. It ought to be read in conjunction with an earlier item in the same will, in which special directions are left to the executors not to pull down or to deface any manner of wainscot or glass in or about the house of Slyfield. For the end of the Slyfield family as a power in Surrey came with bitter suddenness. Henry, the Sheriff's eldest son, succeeded his father in 1590, and died in 1598. He was succeeded by his son Edmond, who had been left one of the "great bowls of silver." Within sixteen years Edmond Slyfield had sold every stick and stone of the Slyfield manors, the Slyfield house was razed to the ground to make room for a new building, and in the new building and on the old tombstones alone the name of Slyfield remains.

The new manor-house is nearly three hundred years old, and was built for the possessor of another great Surrey name, George Shiers. He was the grandfather of Sir George Shiers, baronet, who was one of the most generous of testators to Surrey villages. Among other bequests, he left a sum of money to the parish of Great Bookham, which was to be thus devoted:—

The "danger of coming under the common relief" of the parish was evidently felt to be real—a strange dislike forerunning the hatred which the modern English villager feels for "the House." When Louise Michel, the leader of the pétroleuses of the French Revolution, was shown over one of the great London Unions not long before her death, she was filled with wonder and admiration. "If we had had that in France," she said, "we should have had no revolution." The Englishman leaves legacies to enable poor parishioners to escape from the danger.

Slyfields Manor, picturesque though it is, is still only a remnant. Only one side of what was once a quadrangular building remains, but the solid symmetry of its red-brick walls and ivied gables, and the hugeness of its ornate and lichened barns and granaries, make it as imposing as any farmhouse well could be. Curiously enough, like the older Crowhurst Place, the other side of the county, a farmhouse it still remains.

The Slyfields and the Shiers lie in Great Bookham church. Another church stands not half a mile away from the house, in a smooth and green garden on the banks of the Mole. Stoke D'Abernon church contains one of the great possessions of Surrey—the oldest brass in England—a monument which, besides being the oldest of its kind, is the very knightliest memorial an English gentleman could have. A plain slab of brass, on which has been elaborately engraved the figure of a soldier in full chain mail, with his six-foot lance and its fringed pennon, his long prick-spurs, and his great two-handed sword, it has lain in an English church for nearly six centuries and a-half. The Lombardic lettering which runs round the brass is half illegible, but the form of the old inscription, perfect in its simple dignity, is clear enough:—

SIRE : IOHAN : DAUBERNOUN : CHIVALER : GIST : ICY : DEV : DE : SA : ALME : EYT : MERCY.

By Sir John D'Abernon's brass lies that of his son, and between the dates of the two brasses are fifty years—1277 and 1327. The D'Abernons were a knightly family, but they never provided an English king with a great soldier, or a great politician, or with anything much more than the quiet services of a country gentleman. The founder of the family in England was Roger de Abernun, who in Domesday Book is a tenant of Richard de Bienfaite, son of Gilbert Count of Brionne. The first Sir John D'Abernon, whose brass lies in Stoke D'Abernon church, was the most distinguished of the family. Like Edmond Slyfield, he was Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex.

Edmond Slyfield, dead three hundred years before our day (we can see his brass in Great Bookham church), perhaps often stared at the brass of Sir John D'Abernon, dead three hundred years before him. Perhaps, little guessing that within thirty years the Slyfield manors would belong to a stranger, and the Slyfield name be half forgotten, he reflected comfortably on the misfortunes of his predecessor in office. For Sir John was a most unlucky Sheriff, and lost a large sum partly by robbery and partly in the law courts. The story of his loss is a strange medley. One William Hod, of Normandy, in the year 1265 shipped 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 instituted 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 brasses; 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:—