Highways and Byways in Surrey

Surrey autumns invest the shingled spires of these Wealden churches with a peculiar beauty. Grey and white, black-streaked and shining, weatherbeaten and weather-conquering, there is nothing in architecture lighter or more graceful than the patterned sheaths of native oak surmounting belfries which, sometimes for centuries, have called the villagers to church. But in late autumn, when the swallows and martins are practising starts for their long journey, the shingled spires turn themselves to fresh uses. On a sunny day the birds come about them in scores, pressing their bodies flat against the warm, dry wood, darting out for short flights, hawking gnats and midges, and flitting back again, keeping up through it all the sweetest and gentlest of anxious twitterings, and, when they are clinging to the chequered wood, resembling it so closely in colour and texture as to make it hard to count a dozen birds quickly. Martins near their time for going enter on all kinds of engaging habits, especially just before and just after dusk, when bands of a dozen or so seem suddenly to make up their minds to trial flights of the most amazing speed, utterly unlike their ordinary, quiet flittings. But there is nothing prettier in all the pageant of the migrants' year, than a dozen score martins with the unrest of autumn on them darting round a shingled spire.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Yet Reigate castle and its owners shaped a great deal of English history. It belonged to the great Earls de Warenne, the rival family to the de Clares through all the early wars and intrigues of the kings and the barons. It stood on the ancient British track, the "Way" which runs east and west across the country. Its place on the Way was within reach of the Roman road, the Stone Street that ran from Chichester to London. Its possessor held the strongest strategic position between London and the coastline, or between Canterbury and Winchester, and when there was any fighting forward the lord of the highway cross roads, the ridge gate, was the first person to be taken into account. The curious thing is that there was so little fighting along the ridge. Reigate Castle never saw a pitched battle. When Louis of France was riding by the ridge to Winchester after King John, Reigate surrendered to the French, and de Warenne only got his castle back by changing sides from John to Louis. That was in 1216, and forty-seven years later, when Simon de Montfort took the baron's army by the ridge to Rochester, Reigate could do no more than watch the army march by. The de Warenne of the day was at Lewes with the king, and when the king had lost all in the battle of Lewes that followed, the lord of Reigate castle fled to France. He came back the next year, and when de Montfort fell at Evesham, Reigate was once more de Warenne's.

The kings must have found this particular de Warenne a little difficult to deal with. He was a bit of a swashbuckler as well as a swordsman, and once when he found himself getting the worst of a lawsuit at Westminster with one Alan de la Zouche, he ran him through the body in the king's own chamber and was off to Reigate before anybody could stop him. King Henry was furious, and sent Prince Edward, the great de Clare, and an archbishop to bid him come out of his castle and be punished. He came out at last, and was fined ten thousand marks for the king and two thousand for Alan de la Zouche. But Prince Edward was not done with him. As Edward the First he held a Court of Assize to inquire into the warrants by which the barons held their lands. De Warenne was asked for his warrant for Reigate. He drew a rusty sword and struck it on the council table. "By this instrument," he said, "do I hold my lands, and by the same I intend to keep them." He kept them, but he had to amend his plea into something a little less swaggering.

Of Reigate Castle not a stone remains. But under the great mound which bore the keep you may see what local tradition has named the Baron's caves, where, as the story goes, the Barons met before the signing of Magna Charta. Martin Tupper, indeed, has written a whole chapter in Stephan Langton describing the interesting scene, though as a mere matter of history it never took place. To begin with, the de Warenne of the day was an adherent of King John, and not of the barons, and in the next place the barons marching to Runemede never came near Reigate at all. Mr. Tupper errs. But the passages and chambers hollowed out of the yellow sandstone are interesting, and so are the rough carvings of heads of horses which ornament the walls. Mr. Malden, the Surrey historian, thinks the caves are merely sand-quarries, sand being valuable for making mortar. It is pleasanter, though probably wholly incorrect, to imagine them as dungeons, or homes of early man, or even cellars. The gardener exhibits them with a candle, and in the dark they can be eerie enough for cave-bears.

Long after the de Warennes' reign was over, Reigate Castle saw more fighting. We met the leaders on both sides at Kingston. It was nearly at the end of the Parliamentary wars, and Lord Holland, commanding the Royalist troops, conceived the idea of a rising near London. There was to be a horse-race on Banstead Downs, to draw the people together, and he was to lead them. Unhappily for his followers, he was a thoroughly incompetent soldier. He hoisted his standard at Kingston, and marched through Dorking to Reigate, where he held the castle and posted his vedettes on Red Hill. Sir Michael Livesey, commanding some Kentish horse for the Parliament, was ordered up from Sevenoaks to meet him; Major Audley, one of Livesey's officers, was moved out from Hounslow, where he had three troops, to clear Banstead Downs. Audley reached Reigate first, and engaged Lord Holland, but found him too strong: he drew off, and Holland, for no soldier's reason, fell back on Dorking. He came on again to Reigate next day, but by that time Livesey and Audley had joined, and when Holland knew who was before him he turned again for Kingston. As we saw, his horse faced the Parliament's troops on Kingston Common, and he died without glory on the scaffold.

Not much remains even of the Reigate which Lord Holland's troops saw on that luckless July day in 1648. The Parliament tumbled the old castle in ruins, and as at Bletchingley, anybody who wanted to build a house or a barn helped himself from the stones. To-day the steadiest modern business fills the High Street and Bell Street, the two roads running west and south along which old Reigate lay. Here and there the quaint slope of a red roof, or the lichen on weather-worn tiles, has a hold on the past, and in Slip Shoe Street, itself echoing the days of pilgrimages, care and good paint have preserved the beams of delightful old cottages. The Swan Inn, which may have liquored Holland's cavaliers, has borne much from later builders, but it stands on the old site. Nearly all the rest of old Reigate has gone. The Red Cross Inn, where thirsty pilgrims dropping down from the chalk highway drank ale and rested, has made way for brand-new brick and rough-cast, painted a bright pink. The market which the pilgrims used to find at the western end of the town was moved to the centre cross-roads at the Reformation, and the little chapel at the cross-roads, where the pilgrims said their Aves, came down in George the First's day to make room for what is now called the old Town Hall. It is only two hundred years old, but even it is not as its Georgian builder left it.

What happened to Reigate Church in the early part of the nineteenth century will never be quite known. There were alterations in 1818, and it was restored in 1845; that is to say, much of its beautiful old work was destroyed. But it has kept a few of its Norman pillars, and a reverent rebuilding of much of the fabric by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1873 has left its noble relics enshrined under a fine tower. The vault holds the dust of two of England's greatest men. The first and second Lords Howard of Effingham lie there, each in his day Lord High Admiral of the English navy. Charles, the second Lord Howard, died at Haling House near Croydon, and was buried at dead of night in the family vault on December 23, 1624. Incredible as it sounds, from that day until 1888, the three-hundredth anniversary of the defeat of the Armada, not a single record of the Admiral who met and destroyed it was to be seen in Reigate Church, except the inscription on the coffin in the Howards' vault. Then, at last, the inscription was copied and placed on a brass in the chancel. Its terseness fits the dead man's name:—

Here in the vault beneath
at midnight the Dec. 23: 1624
lyeth the body of Charles Howarde
Earl of Nottingham
Admyrall of
Englande
Generall of Queen Elizabeth's
Royale Navey at sea
Against the
Spanyards Invinsable
Navye
In the Year of our Lord
1589, who departed this
Life at Haling House the 14
Day of December in the
Year of our Lorde, 1624
Aetatis Suae 87

We saw the Howards at Effingham and Great Bookham, and shall find them again at Lingfield. Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in the Surrey Archæological Collections, has brought together some interesting particulars of the antiquities of the family. The second Duke of Norfolk, who was father of the first Lord Howard of Effingham, and now lies at Lambeth, left a remarkable will. He was, as his epitaph informs us, a "High and Mighty Prince," and he writes of himself in the royal plural. He orders a tomb to be erected before the high altar of Thetford "with pictures of us and Agnes our wife to be set together thereupon." The Lambeth Parish Registers do not read so respectfully. This is the entry recording the passing of the Prince's widow—"Oct. 13, 1545, my Lady Agnes, olde Dutchesse Norf., buried."

Reigate churchyard holds the gravestones of two neighbours in name and place. A Goose and a Gosling are buried side by side.

When Reigate had a castle, it also had a priory. It was founded for Austin Canons by one of the de Warennes, and its first prior was an Adam. After the Dissolution, the Priory estate saw some strangely different owners and guests. The first Lord Howard of Effingham, Lord High Admiral, had it; Foxe, perhaps meditating his Book of Martyrs, stayed there as tutor to the son of the Earl of Surrey; a century later the manor came to Lord Somers, the great Lord Chancellor of William of Orange; to-day the modern house, built on the site of the old convent, belongs to one of Lord Somers's descendants, Lady Henry Somerset. It holds a famous oak chimney-piece, said to have been brought from Henry VIII's vanished palace of Nonsuch.

Reigate Priory to-day means Reigate cricket, played on the Priory ground. Three of the most famous of all Surrey cricketers belong to the town. Stephen Dingate, first of Surrey players before Beldham, was born there; so was William Caffyn, of the days of the giants Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn, Tom Lockyer and Julius Cæsar; and so, too, was W.W. Read, one of the very few Englishmen familiar to millions by their initials alone. "W.G." and "W.W." belong to the great years of the game.

Politics in Reigate are a mixed memory. Like Gatton, Reigate was a pocket borough, and sent two members to Parliament until 1832, when the two were reduced to one. Even the one disappeared in 1867, when the borough was disfranchised for bribery and treating—a subject of conversation which Mr. Louis Jennings, writing three years later in Field Paths and Green Lanes, notes as dangerous if introduced too suddenly in social circles in the neighbourhood.

But an even more remarkable political record belongs to one of Reigate's neighbours. Gatton, once a borough and now a park, had the privilege granted to its owner in 1451 of sending two members to Parliament. The Copleys of Leigh were lords of the manor in the days of Henry VIII, and Sir Richard Copley was at one time the only inhabitant of the borough, so that his voting power was considerable. When Cobbett was abroad on his Rural Rides, there were Reigate, Gatton, and Bletchingley within a few miles of one another, all of them rotten boroughs, and each of them returning a couple of members. Cobbett, of course, boiled whenever he heard the names; Gatton in particular, was "a very rascally spot of earth." He lived to see a very bad bargain for Gatton's privileges. Lord Monson, in 1830, bought the estate with its votes for two members for £100,000. Two years later, Gatton as a borough was ended by the Reform Bill and all Lord Monson had for his £100,000 was the land.

Lord Monson started with the intention of making Gatton House one of the most superb in the kingdom. He began with the hall, which he built on the lines of the Corsini chapel in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano at Rome, though he did not add the dome. The floor he had laid of coloured marbles, patterned in the most delicate designs; the marble had been designed for Ferdinand VII of Spain, and cost £10,000. The walls and arches are as richly decorated as the floor. There are four frescoes by Joseph Severn; Eleanor of Castile represents Fortitude; Esther, Prudence; Ruth, Meekness; Patience could only be Penelope. The effect of the shining stone and painted arches is of extraordinary brilliance and completeness—the completeness of an unrivalled collection. But there is somewhere something bizarre; perhaps it is the setting. Marble demands marble neighbours, and the setting of these exotic treasures is the simple beauty of English parkland. The little church fits better with the great trees and the green grass. The building is nothing; the interior has the grace and the light of a cathedral chapel. Lord Monson decorated Gatton Church with the magnificence with which he imagined the hall, but his ideal for the church was quieter. He bought carved wood of the most exquisite workmanship and set it wherever the church could hold it; a pulpit and an altar from Nuremberg, said to be by Dürer, but the critics dispute it; the elaborately fitted stalls came from a monastery in Ghent, and altar rails from Tongres. Glass for the windows, of deep and glowing colours, he had from Aerschot, near Louvain; the east window, a strange painting, shows the eating of the Passover. One property the little church lacks; Lord Monson never gave it a wooden ceiling, and the ill-shaped stone vault is too white and cold for the stalls.

The great coaching days have many memories of Reigate. The coaches changed horses at the Swan and the White Hart, and at the White Hart to-day's Brighton coach stops, I think, for lunch. But when Shergold wrote his Recollections of Brighton in the Olden Time, he speaks of the inn at which the Brighton coach stopped in the days of the Regency as the King's Arms. Inns have a most confusing habit of changing their names. When John Taylor, the Water Poet, in 1636, made his Catalogue of Taverns in Ten Shires about London, he found some seventy or eighty taverns in Surrey, but out of the forty-nine which he mentions by name, hardly a dozen would answer to their old signboards to-day. The Reigate White Hart in Taylor's day was the Hart.

According to Shergold, Reigate in the old coaching days was the scene of the most romantic episodes imaginable. He is full of comparisons between the easy charm of conversation among riders by coach and the ungracious silences of travelling by rail, and this is what you read about Reigate and the fair who travelled by coach:—

"There was an advantage and an interest in travelling by coach which travelling by rail can never communicate. In the former you saw men and their faces, and acquired some information; in the latter you learn nothing except the number of persons killed or injured by the last accident. A young man who entered the coach at eight o'clock in the morning at Brighton took his seat perhaps opposite a young lady whom he thought pretty and interesting. When he arrived at Cuckfield he began to be in love; at Crawley he was desperately smitten; at Reigate his passion became irretrievable, and when he gave her an arm to ascend the steep ridges of Reigate Hill—a just emblem, by the way, of human life—he declared his passion, and they were married soon after. Nothing of this sort ever occurs on railroads. Sentiment never blooms on the iron soil of these sulky conveyances. A woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach; but on a railway a woman is nothing but a package, a bundle of goods committed to the care of the railway company's servants, who take care of the poor thing as they would take care of any other bale of goods. It is said that matches are made in heaven; it may likewise be said that matches more often begin in the old stage-coaches, and that railroads are the antipodes of love."

The road from Reigate to Crawley, one of the straightest and levellest in the south country, was once the scene of a remarkable horse-race. The beginning of it was a discussion at a shooting party in the autumn of 1890 between Lord Lonsdale and Lord Shrewsbury on the pace of trotting and galloping horses. Lord Lonsdale backed himself to drive galloping horses for twenty miles, single, pair, four-in-hand and riding postillion, inside an hour. Lord Shrewsbury wagered against him, but there were difficulties about weather and the date—March 11, 1891—and eventually Lord Shrewsbury withdrew from the match and paid £100 forfeit. Lord Lonsdale then set himself the task alone, and his headquarters were at Reigate; he had fifteen horses in training, fifteen men and thirteen carriages, and the cost of keeping them at Reigate came to £150 a day. The course, a stretch of five miles of road, over which horses were to be driven in the four different styles was measured from Kennersley Manor, three miles south of the White Hart, nearly into Crawley. Snow fell on the tenth, the day before the match; Lord Lonsdale borrowed a snow plough and sent it over the road. At noon on the day of the race the horses and carriages were taken to the course; at five and twenty minutes to one Lord Lonsdale drove up in a pair-horse brougham; at one o'clock to the second he trotted his single horse, War Paint, to the starting-point, and War Paint bounded down the road. War Paint took 13 minutes 39-1/5 seconds over the five miles; it would have been twenty seconds less, but a brewer's dray had blocked the road. The pair-horse was waiting with Blue and Yellow, two Americans, in it; the change took three seconds, and Blue and Yellow galloped back to the start in 12 minutes 51-2/5 seconds. It was the turn for the coach, and it took 36-3/5 seconds to change across; a groom drove the team to the starting point, a yard before it Lord Lonsdale caught up the reins, and the four horses swept up the rise to Crawley again. Fifteen minutes and nine seconds and two-fifths the four horses took; the leaders were Silk and Everton King, the wheelers Conservative and Whitechapel, and they left their driver something over seventeen minutes to ride postillion back. It took 40-2/5 seconds to change from coat and hat for riding, and exactly at seventeen minutes to the hour Lord Lonsdale rode off on Draper, a chestnut, with a bay mare, Violetta, for the pair. Draper and Violetta went over the last five miles in 13 minutes 55-4/5 seconds, and in 56 minutes 55-4/5 seconds the twenty miles were covered. And so the great race ended.

The Pilgrims' Way dropping down like white ribands over the shoulder of the down into Reigate we have already seen. On the other side of the town the high road climbs up again to the crest of the ridge—a road paved and metalled to stand the perpetual wear of shod wheels grating down the hill. At the highest point of the road is one of the finest views in England; one of the finest, Cobbett thought, in all the world. The red roofs of the town cluster among trees below; beyond is all the Weald to the Devil's Dyke and Chanctonbury Ring, best of all landmarks of the Sussex downs. The separate views of the Weald along the chalk ridge have each their own characteristic, from the Hog's Back to the heights above Titsey. For me the view from the hill above Reigate has a double memory; the purple and blue of the downs seen through the stems of the beeches that line the crest, and the shadows thrown by a high summer sun in the parks and fields below. The oaks and elms set themselves in the open grass with little circles of darker green about their feet, like the wooden stands of the trees of a Dutch toy farm.

Redhill joins Reigate to the east, new, red, spreading, a junction of railways, a better sort of Woking. You do not have to wait from nine minutes to three-quarters of an hour every time you come to Redhill. To the schoolboy it has the merit of being a stage on the road from London and the sea.

CHAPTER XXXIV

One is the Archbishop's Palace. An Archbishop's Palace is the very last building which would naturally associate itself with the Croydon tram lines and Croydon up-to-dateness, and it is the last building with which Croydon appears to wish to associate itself. The Palace stands apart from the bustle of the place, unhonoured, unhappy and ignored. Since the last Archbishop left it in the reign of George II it has served its turn as business premises for a bleacher and a calico-printer; it has been a wash-house, and is now a girls' school. One thing it has never been—of sufficient interest to Croydon to be rescued from sacrilege and neglect, and to take the place which is its due among historic national possessions. Perhaps one should be thankful that the palace of Cranmer, Whitgift and Laud is to-day in no rougher hands than the gentle Sisterhood of a children's day-school.

If Croydon Palace were rightly restored, how fine a relic it might be! The great banqueting-hall, with its noble roof of Spanish chestnut, which has even survived the steam and chemistry of a bleacher's vats; the long, panelled gallery where tradition has set Queen Elizabeth dancing; the guard chamber, perhaps built by Archbishop Arundell, who burnt the Lollards; the chapel with its oak stalls, its poppy-head carvings, and the gallery added by the archbishop who stood by Charles the First on the scaffold; if the oak were cleaned and the paint taken from the panels, and if under the mellow brick walls there were set out lawns and flowers; then Croydon might justly boast of its tram lines, its admirable sanitation, and its new Town Hall. It would possess something else.

When Queen Elizabeth lay at Croydon Palace, it was not an easy matter to find room for her train of courtiers. She came in July, 1573, to visit Archbishop Parker, and wished to come again in the following May, with a larger train than before. The steward, entrusted with the task of finding more room where there had never been enough, was in despair, and made out his list of lodgings for the archbishop, or, perhaps, the Queen's chamberlain, to see. The Lord Treasurer was to be "wher he was"; the Lord Admiral "at y^e nether end of the great chamber"; the "maydes of honnor wher they wer"; the "La Stafforde wher she was"; the "gentylmen husshers ther olde" lodging; and so on with a very long list. But the letter ends in a hopeless puzzle:—

Of the great archbishops few, strangely enough, have left memorials behind them at Croydon. Whitgift, Grindal, and Sheldon have their monuments in the church; of the others, Juxon added some carving to the Palace Chapel. Whitgift was the great Croydon archbishop, and did for Croydon what Abbot did for Guildford. He founded a hospital, and endowed a school.

Whitgift's Hospital stands to-day almost as its founder left it. His initials, I.W., worked in patterned brick into a gable, and the motto he chose for the doorway, "Qui dat pauperi nunquam indigebit," face a roaring thoroughfare and flaring shops, but inside the oak doors little can have changed. Weatherbeaten red-brick, mullioned windows looking out over flowers and shaven lawns, tiled roofs and tall chimneys make up a picture of solid goodness which fits well with the archbishop's memory. The chapel stands open, a dark, simple little place. The oak benches are the same on which the first pensioners sat, and down upon them look curious faded pictures, dingy in black and gold. One is a fine portrait of the founder at his writing-table, with his seal, his sandbox, a bell, quill pens and a compass (or is it a watch?). Before him lies an open Latin Bible, and he points to his favourite text—Cast thy bread upon the waters. On another wall hangs a framed poem in manuscript, some forty or fifty lines of extravagance in which the archbishop is compared in turn to a straight sound cedar, a lost gem, a pearl, and a "fairest knotlesse Plant," whose death forces the poet to

"Wish, that with a Sea of teares, my Verse
Could make an Island of thy honour'd Herse."

Another poet writes a prodigious Latin elegy "containing the briefest summary of the miseries and calamities of the human race." A painter adds a picture of Death digging a grave.

Whitgift's School is an old foundation in a modern building, and has added a record to cricket history. Mr. V.F.S. Crawford, one of the hardest hitters of his day, was a Whitgift boy, and has done remarkable batting as a schoolboy and since. But his most remarkable innings was played at Cane Hill, when he scored 180 out of 215 made while he was in, and reached his first 100 in nineteen minutes.

That the school buildings should be modern is inevitable, for the school outgrew itself forty years ago. But the school house which Whitgift built was pulled down in consequence—an act which doubtless sits lightly enough on Croydon's conscience. Four years ago the Hospital nearly followed the school, the argument being that there was insufficient room for the tram-lines.

Croydon church, like nothing else in the town, became modern by accident. It was burnt down in 1867, and Sir Gilbert Scott rebuilt it into the finest church, perhaps, in the county, next to St. Mary's, Southwark. In the fire the tombs of the archbishops almost disappeared. Grindal's is no longer to be seen, though possibly some tumbled stones collected into odd corners may be part of it. Sheldon's is a pile of fragments, heaped together behind a railing, charred and broken, hideous with the sculptured skulls, bones, worms, and winged hour-glasses with which our ancestors grimly decked their graves. Whitgift's monument has been restored and is a striking example of rich and intricate decoration, even if the pomp and colour of it are too garish for a tomb.

One looks at the stern, quiet features of his effigy and wonders what was the truth about the man. Was he what Macaulay has called him—"a narrow-minded, mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power by servility and adulation, and employed it in persecuting those who agreed with Calvin about Church Government, and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of Reprobation." Could he ever have been rightly described—Macaulay so describes the Master of Trinity who was to be Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury—as "in a chrysalis state, putting off the worm and putting on the dragon-fly, a kind of intermediate grub between sycophant and oppressor"? Perhaps Macaulay was naturally unlikely to judge him well. A portrait drawn by one who lived nearer his day is Izaak Walton—another, perhaps a gentler, I.W.:—

Walton thought him a very tactful prelate. He managed Queen Elizabeth admirably, and "by justifiable sacred insinuations, such as St. Paul to Agrippa—'Agrippa, believest thou? I know thou believest,' he wrought himself into so great a degree of favour with her, as, by his pious use of it, hath got both of them a great degree of fame in this world, and of glory in that into which they are now both entered." Queen Elizabeth was devoted to him, and nicknamed him "her little black husband." Without a licence from her little black husband she would not touch flesh in Lent.

The archbishops left Croydon, in 1758, when Archbishop Hutton died. The line of archbishop tenants of the Palace had been broken in the days of the Commonwealth, when Sir William Brereton, one of the Parliamentary Major-Generals, lived there. He was a soldier of conviction, and was nearly torn in pieces by the mob at Chester, "for ordering a drum to be beat for the parliament." Croydon's historian, Steinman, quotes from a pamphlet of Cavalier days, The Mystery of the Old Cause briefly unfolded, a quaint appreciation of him. He was "a notable man at a thanksgiving dinner, having terrible long teeth, and a prodigious stomach, to turn the archbishop's palace at Croydon into a kitchen, also to swallow up that palace and lands at a morsel." Brereton, as a reward for his military services, had been given several sequestrated properties, a chief forestership, and a seneschalship.

Four hundred years ago, Croydon was the centre of a great Surrey industry. The Croydon colliers were proverbial. They supplied London with coal, that is, charcoal, before the days of "sea-coal," the coal which blackens London smoke to-day. Then it reached London by sea. One Grimes, or Grimme, the greatest of the Croydon colliers, who lived in the reign of Edward VI, was actually sued by an archbishop for creating a nuisance with his smoke. The collier won. He was sufficiently celebrated to become the hero of two sixteenth-century plays, one of which bears his name, Grim, the Collier of Croydon. To be "as black as a Croydon collier," was to be as black as a sweep; and "a right Croydon sanguine" was a deep red-brown.

Once Croydon, always Croydon. The first railway line built in the country and sanctioned by Parliament ran from Croydon to Wandsworth. It was part of an original scheme proposed in 1799 for linking up London with Portsmouth by an iron railroad running through Croydon, Reigate, and Arundel. But it was thought best to begin with the part which ran from Croydon to Wandsworth, and perhaps it was as well that the scheme went no further, for it cost £35,000, and was a complete failure. The shareholders lost every penny. One feels it ought to have succeeded. The carriages or trucks were drawn by horses, and the wheels ran along grooved iron rails. Anybody who had a cart which fitted might put it on the rails and let his horse pull it along, if he paid the tolls, which were not heavy. However, its life was short. The Croydon canal, opened in 1809, robbed it of much of its heavy goods traffic, and the London and Brighton railway demolished it altogether. This is how "Felix Summerley" (his real name was Sir Henry Cole, and he liked a good walk with a good dinner at the end of it) described the change in his Pleasure Excursions in 1846.

Felix Summerley must be suspected of admiring the change. One who knew old Croydon well, and admired its changes less, was John Ruskin, who had relations there and visited them as a boy. Of one he writes in Præterita:—

Of his aunt at Croydon he has a pleasant memory:—

The Old King's Head and the fashionablest house in Market Street have gone. So has much else that Ruskin would have recognised. To guess at what his Croydon was like you may open Steinman's History at a little engraving of Whitgift's Hospital, from a drawing made at the cross-roads. The Hospital stands as it is to-day. Opposite it, a square, two-storied inn stretches over the road a fine carved bracket with a bunch of grapes in iron, proclaiming that here are post horses to be had from Nich: Jayne. A tall-hatted rustic pensively wheels a barrow in the middle of the road opposite the inn; a group of villagers in stout boots, smocks and stockings stands at the street corner; and, precisely on the spot where to-day's tram-lines swing north and west, a lazy-looking person in a straw hat, perhaps a sailor ashore, leans against a post within a yard or two of an imposing parish pump.

Croydon tradition claims John Gilpin. He is said to have lived in a farmhouse, which Croydon pulled down in 1897. It was known as Collier's Water Farm, and stood near what is now Thornton Heath Railway Station. Undoubtedly a John Gilpin lived there; but the author of the local guide-book who asserts that he was Cowper's original refers all inquirers to Dr. Brewer for corroboration; and that admirable sage informs me that Gilpin was Mr. Beyer, an eminent linendraper of Paternoster Row.

CHAPTER XXXV

A later Sir Nicholas Carew rebuilt much of the house, but retained the hall. He was an exact and particular person, and never let his careful dissipation prevent him from keeping a precise record in his account book. One of his pocket-ledgers has found its way into the British museum. Here are some extracts of his expenses:—

Sept. ye 25th 1706. I bought a P^r of Coach Horses 4 years old come five and gave four and thirty pounds for y^m.—N. Carew.

He had a nice taste in wines and tea, and was properly generous to musicians and servants:—

I have met with occasional difficulties in trying to enter Surrey churches, but Beddington, which is one of the most finely decorated, offered the most prolonged opposition of all. I arrived there about three o'clock in the afternoon, and finding the doors locked, inquired of one who emerged from a stoke-hole where I might get the keys. I might not get them, he replied; the church was being cleaned. But might I not just look round, having come a long way to see the church? I might not: she was cleaning the reredos. Might not one who wished to write about the church enter while she was cleaning the reredos? One might not; much had been written of the church already. Would he be so good as to direct me to the rectory? He would, and did; and as I walked away shouted after me that the rector was certainly out. But I found him in, and very courteous to a stranger; and I learned that, as I had hoped, the rule was that the church should be opened every day. He gave me his card, and wrote a message on it, and with the card I went back to the church. The verger had disappeared. He was neither in the churchyard nor the stoke-hole. A stonemason working in the churchyard came to my assistance. The verger was in the church and would doubtless open the door if I knocked. I knocked. Nothing happened. The stonemason knocked; indeed, he knocked a great deal. I begged him to stop knocking, for passers-by stayed to see what this thing might be, but he was thoroughly interested, and went on knocking. Perhaps he knocked for a quarter of an hour. A young girl came up to tell us that the door would certainly open before half-past four, for that was tea-time. Just then the door opened, and before it was shut again in our faces I just had time to brandish the card. He replied at once—he would let me in by another door. He did so; he never asked to see the card, but went on industriously with his sweeping.

Perhaps no building in Surrey has been more carefully restored than Beddington church, nor more richly decorated. The chancel with its frescoes and mosaics, and the carved and painted roof are probably as fine as anything of the kind in any parish church. But is the result attained the result aimed at? The richness, the glamour of gold and purple and rare woods and stones are there, as they must have been in Solomon's temple. But to me the simplicity and cool quiet of aisles and white pillars sometimes seem to forsake such gorgeousness and glow.

There are many interesting monuments and brasses in the church, especially in the Carew chapel, where Carews of Beddington have lain since the fifteenth century. The strangest memorial is the punning epitaph on the steward to Sir Nicholas Carew. He died in 1633, and his name was Greenhill, which inspired his commemorator with a motto for his brass, "Mors super virides montes," and ten curious lines:—

"Vnder thy feate interrd is here
A native born in Oxfordsheere,
First, Life and Learning Oxford gaue;
Surry to him his death, his graue.
He once a HILL was, fresh and GREENE;
Now wither'd is not to bee seene.
Earth in Earth shovel'd up is shut,
A HILL into a Hole is put.
But darkesome earth by powre divine
Bright at last as ye Sonne may shine."

A mile further west, beyond Wallington, which in spite of embracing villadom still keeps an old inn and a pretty, shaded green, is Carshalton. Carshalton begins magnificently. In the spacious days of King George the First there was designed for Carshalton Park a superb dwelling, which Leoni was to have built for the lord of the manor (he built the Onslow house in Clandon Park). But the house was never built. The gates remain. They formerly guarded the green glades of a deer park. Now they stand forlornly cheek by jowl with new yellow brick. Actaeon, from one great pillar, gazes on less divine pictures than a goddess bathing; Artemis, on the other pillar, drapes herself for unseeing eyes. A papered notice-board lolls against the superb ironwork of the gates. Hunter and huntress, pillars and wrought iron, are for sale.

Few villages in Surrey are prettier to-day than they were forty years ago. Carshalton is hardly a village, but is it less pretty than it used to be? Let Ruskin decide, from the opening of The Crown of Wild Olive.