Highways and Byways in Surrey

Few manors in Surrey have passed through more distinguished hands than Bletchingley. At the Conquest it was given to the great Richard de Tonebrige, and perhaps he built Bletchingley Castle. He was pretty well off for land in Surrey, for he held thirty-eight manors in that county alone. He was the head of the de Clares, and they held Bletchingley for eight generations. The most famous of them was the Red Earl who knew how to change sides between Simon de Montfort and Henry III so as to be cursed as a traitor six centuries ago and recognised by later generations as a patriot and a statesman, who could curb the barons as well as resist the King. He was the last but one of the de Clares to hold Bletchingley, and it was during his absence, at the battle of Lewes, that a Royalist party destroyed the Castle. His son died at the head of his horse at Bannockburn, and the manor came by marriage into the Stafford family. They held it for another six generations, until the third Duke of Buckingham, Lord High Constable under Henry VIII, ended the splendours of the Staffords on the scaffold.

Sir Nicholas Carew had the manor next, and followed Buckingham to Tower Hill. Then Anne of Cleves, too plain for Tower Hill, lived there, and Sir Thomas Cawarden managed it for her and succeeded her. He is the fascinating figure. He moves in a royal light of Courts and Kings, of hunting and hawking in the sunshine, and plotting in dark chambers, and guessing the value of a queen's smile. He was Henry VIII's Master of the Revels, and Keeper of the King's tents, hales, and toyles (which were wooden stables and traps for game), and at Bletchingley he entertained Henry and perhaps more than one of his queens. You picture the Master of the Revels riding in velvet by Catherine Howard, and wondering whether her eyes would take her by the same stairway as Anne Boleyn.

When Queen Mary was proclaimed after Edward, and there were risings and rumours of risings in support of Queen Jane, Sir Thomas Cawarden had his difficulties. He had been getting his orders from Jane one day and Mary the next, and suddenly there was an end; he was arrested, and all his arms were ordered to be seized. Bletchingley Castle was searched, and was found to contain a good deal more than the armour of a few retainers and the artillery of a deer park. The inventory showed twenty-four demi-lances, eighty-six horsemen's staves, one hundred pikes, one hundred morris-pikes, one hundred bows, two handguns, and other weapons, besides sixteen heavy pieces of cannon—enough to arm a hundred horse and more than three hundred foot. All were seized and taken to the Tower. Sir Thomas complained bitterly. Might not an English gentleman keep armour in his country house if he pleased to do so? Mary could prove nothing against him, and was obliged to let him go. But she thought his weapons best kept in the Tower; and so, despite his protests, did Elizabeth after her. Sir Thomas's petition for their return and for redress is amongst the Loseley manuscripts. Here is part of his statement:—

When Sir Thomas died, his funeral was prodigious. No expense was spared; the feasting was Gargantuan; the villagers mourned with the best beef and beer. Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in the Surrey Archæological Collections, has obtained from the Loseley MS. a full account of the charges, from which I make extracts. It is headed:—

The black and the bakemeats and the beer cost altogether £149 16s. 11d. But Sir Thomas had foreseen it all. There were estimates obtained for such things in those days. Here is the estimate made by a herald of the funeral charges of Sir Thomas's lady:—

Clarencieulx King of Armes was to manage it, to have five yards of black cloth for his mourning gown, five shillings a day for his services, £3 6s. 8d. for his fee, and to be paid back "his chargys to be boryn to and fro." Men knew how to die then, and how to be buried.

Bletchingley manor, after the Cawardens, came to the Howards of Effingham, and so to an heiress Elizabeth Countess of Peterborough, the richest and loveliest lady of her day. Her son fought for the king against his own father, and the House of Commons fined him £10,000 for turning Roman Catholic. The money had to be found, and the manor was sold to Sir Robert Clayton, Whig, Lord Mayor, plutocrat, and, according to Dryden, extortioner. But Dryden's political satire was not always fair. Ishban, in Absalom and Achitophel is Sir Robert—

Ishban, of conscience suited to his trade
As good a saint as usurer ever made.

There was a suspicion that Sir Robert would have liked to purchase a peerage, and Dryden was furious at the "shame and scandal," though a quieter spirit, John Evelyn, dined more than once with the Mayor, and evidently had some admiration for his hospitality. "He was a discreete Magistrate" Evelyn writes, "and tho' envied, I think without much cause."

If Sir Robert Clayton was criticised during his lifetime, he left plenty of matter for dispute behind him when he died. Half Bletchingley church is dominated by his monument. Mr. Jennings was appalled by it; "a fearful neighbour" he calls it, and is of opinion that whatever may have been the misdeeds of the dead, "he never could have done anything bad enough to deserve his terrific monument." As a matter of fact the dead man designed his own memorial, after the serenely contemplative fashion of his time. Is the monument, after all so appalling? It cannot but be interesting, for it is an index to the taste of a bygone age—an age when the survivors of the dead found relief in Latin superlatives, and the living looked into the future with the respectable vanity of an alderman posing before a mirror. No doubt Sir Robert spent many happy hours over his monument. Did he, or did the sculptor suggest the plump cherubs which stand on each side, rolling stony tears from upturned eyes? Did he decide on the particular direction in which he should throw a leg? was it he who selected the disjointed texts which are carved below him? or did the sculptor submit samples? It would be an arresting spectacle; the finality of the whole thing, the weight of the choosing would oppress even a Lord Mayor. A specimen angel would be shown him: no, he could not approve an angel. Had the sculptor no other sizes in cherubs? What texts were being used this season? Stone tears.... The sculptor probably thought of those.

The church once had a fine spire. Aubrey mentions it particularly, as measuring "more than forty feet above the battlements, with five great bells, the tenour weighing 2000 weight, which were melted with the spire and all the timber-work destroyed 1606." It was computed that in the spire were 200 loads of timber. In the tower below the timber is still magnificent and massive, and there is a new peal of bells, cast in 1780. Bletchingley has one of the longest records of church bell ringing in the county. On April 11, 1789, its ringers rang a full peal of 5600 changes—"college exercises"—in three hours thirty-six minutes, as you may read in a record in the belfry. In the record the ages of the ringers are carefully given. They range between 19 and 30. Bell ringing is hard work.

Between Bletchingley and Redhill lies Nutfield, which has not yet been caught into the town. Perhaps its progress into Redhill will be slow, for it stands inconveniently high for wheeled traffic in and out of that huddled basin of bricks, and from its own station a mile to the south the roads up the hill are some of the steepest in east Surrey. Before Redhill brings it more money and more bricks, it ought to be worth an enterprising landlord's while to convert its principal inn to its old methods. The Old Queen's Head is a posting inn with the remains of what was once a spacious parlour, solid with oak beams big enough for a belfry, warmed by a broad open fireplace and offering the hospitality of two great chimney seats. The chimney seats have lapsed into cupboards and a stove stands where once the wealden logs roared up into the night. But if Godstone with its Clayton Arms, or Chiddingfold with its Crown, beckons in the passer-by to look at old oak and old walls, why should not Nutfield?

Nutfield's chief industry, the digging of fuller's earth, dates back to beginnings that are now quite forgotten. The Nutfield pits are still working, and spread over the slope on which they lie a dreary stretch of blue and grey upturned soil as if a giant gamekeeper had been digging out colossal ferrets. The industry is old enough and important enough for the export of fuller's earth to have been prohibited as far back as Edward II, and in 1693 one Edmund Warren was tried in the Exchequer for smuggling a quantity of earth out of the country, though it was proved to be not fuller's earth but potter's clay. But there is no doubt that great quantities were smuggled abroad, with corresponding injury—or so it was thought at the time—to the cloth and woollen industry of Guildford and south-west Surrey. Later days have discovered later methods of scouring cloth of grease, and the trade no longer makes large demands on the pits of Nutfield. But fuller's earth has still its uses at the toilet table, and in America other uses. I have ascertained them exactly. It is employed to dehydrate certain oils with which the pork-packer adulterates lard.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Lingfield is not large enough, nor enough overbuilt and railway-ridden, to dare to the title of capital even of a distant corner of Surrey. But it stands above and apart from the quiet country round it, like a Bible in an old library. Near it, or in its streets, are some of the prettiest and most ancient timber houses in the county; the churchyard with its brick paths, its rose-beds, the red walls round it and its view of the Weald, has the serenity of deep meadowland and sunlit cloisters; the church itself, with its sculptured oak and baronial tombs, belongs to all English history from Creçy. If the churches of the surrounding parishes, with their brasses and their registers, make up an admirable local guide-book, the records of Lingfield church are a chapter of Hume.

The village itself is the pleasantest mixture of every style of Surrey cottage, brick and timber, weather-tiling, plain brick, plain wood, and a queer row of square white-stuccoed buildings which looks as if it had been dumped inland from opposite shingle and dancing seas. It only lacks tamarisk to be sheer Worthing. The village centres on its pond; not a broad nor a very limpid piece of water, but distinguished by a pair of swans, and by a curious obelisk standing at its head which once may have marked a shrine. Built on to the bole of an old oak by the obelisk is an apartment engagingly labelled "Ye Village Cage." Other Surrey villages have had their cages, but only Lingfield has kept one. The door is massive and threatening, and you get the keys at the chemist's the other side of the road; or rather, a guide politely accompanies you and displays the cage's secrets. The cage not long ago fell into disuse. It was once used as a temporary lock-up for drunk or disorderly persons, or others who had traversed the local by-laws of morality. Local justice descended upon them, and they were cast into durance until morning should bring soberness with a headache, or, in more serious cases, until proper conveyance could be got round for Godstone. The cage has seen at least one exciting rescue. This was some fifty or sixty years ago, when a number of desperate characters vaguely described as the Copthorne poachers were captured and haled into prison. As to the exact number of captives, tradition varies; but the legend which is the most respectful to the powers of the local constable sets it at eleven. The eleven were surrounded, the door of the dungeon closed on them, and the village tried to go to sleep. Darkness came on, and a daring deed. Other poachers stole into the village, got to work with picks and crowbars, took the roof off the dungeon and hauled out their comrades exulting. The village wisely did not attempt a recapture.

The cage saw its last tenant in 1882, and the story of the rescued poachers may still, perhaps, be heard from the mouth of the oldest inhabitant, who was himself at one time a constable. As an expert in suppressing crime, he never liked the plan on which the cage was built. The floor is higher by two steps than the ground outside, and you had to go upstairs to it. In fact, you had to throw your prisoner upstairs—a most perilous business. It ought to have been built so that you could take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs like a Christian.

Caged prisoners at Lingfield were not always treated with the utmost rigour of the law. At one time the door was pierced by a grating, and through the grating kindly souls passed packets of tobacco. Liquor could not be passed in packets, but found its way in somehow. Afterwards in severer days the grating was closed, and prisoners neither drank nor smoked, as became their miserable condition. Nine years after the last captive languished behind the blocked grating the prison was taken over by the village for fresh purposes. Henceforward it was to be the museum, and was duly vested in trustees. Its collection still grows slowly. "Anything to do with village crime—we make that our special subject," the curator informs you with a pleasing urbaneness. The collection includes a man-trap, a pair of handcuffs, a canvas bed which furnishes the museum whenever it is wanted as a mortuary, a pair of farmer's snowboots used a hundred years ago, and a pair of farmer's ordinary boots used more recently.

Of tiny village streets there is no more fascinating byway than the little road which leads up to the south door of Lingfield Church. On the right is the Star inn, taking its sign from the arms of the great lords of Sterborough who lie in the church; and built beside the inn a row of quiet cottages, perhaps once part of the inn. On the left one building stands out from the rest; an early sixteenth century timber house, admirably preserved, and of peculiar interest because after three hundred years it is still carrying on the business for which it was intended. It was built as a shop, and it is a shop still. Modern preference for plate glass and easily opened doors has changed the original plan of the ground floor, but the first floor remains almost as its builder left it, and its heavy girders with their rounded ends jutting out over the pavement below are a happy testimony to the worth of wealden builders and wealden wood. Wealden paint, on the other hand, has not improved. The girders are still dark and stained as oak (or is it chestnut?) should be stained by age and weather. But a yard or two away there are beams as massive and as well-seasoned which flout the lapse of centuries with a flaring and be-varnished buff.

The church is noble and tranquil without and within. A chained Bible stands on a lectern; another Bible, "bought May the tenth 1683," as the inscription runs on the title-page, "by William Saxby of Surry Esq., for the use and benefitt of all good Christians" is in use to-day. But the chief interest of the church to-day, as it has been its chief glory in the past, is its association with the great family of Cobham. The Cobhams of Sterborough—their castle stood two miles east of Lingfield, but has fallen—came of a line which through two of the most eventful centuries of English history was represented in almost every battle, consulted in the most difficult diplomacy, and allied at last by marriage to an English king. Their family goes back to a Justice itinerant who settled in Kent; but the real founder of the Surrey branch was the Justice's grandson, the first Lord Cobham of Sterborough. He was one of the greatest soldiers of his day, and, from the ransoms he had for the prisoners he took in battle, one of the richest. It was to him, with Sir John Chandos and the Earl of Warwick, that Edward III entrusted the Black Prince at Creçy; at Poictiers he rescued the King of France; he was Lord Admiral of the King's fleet "from the mouth of the Thames westwards"; and to end it all, he died in his bed of the plague. His effigy on his tomb tramples a Soldan, whose face has been duly painted green by the artist—an interesting relic, according to Mr. J.G. Waller, of Crusaders' traditions. There were not enough names for colours in those days, and perhaps the soldiers trying to describe the olive skins of the Arabs, may have called them green. For some obscure reason, too, the Soldan with his green face and his red beard is intended by the artist to be alive. Nobody can say why that should be, but the sculptor doubtless knew. He was a careful and accurate man; you can still trace below Lord Cobham's left knee the fastenings of the Garter.

Lord Cobham's wife, Joan, was the author of one of the longest wills in existence. She remembered everybody, including the prisoners in chains at Southwark and the sick men in the hospitals. Her executor Robert Belknappe was to have "a horn made from a griffin's hoof with a silver core, and the said horn has a silver rim and two silver gilt feet." But she was most anxious, poor lady, about her soul. "Before everything else" there were to be said 7000 masses, immediately upon her death, and the priests were to have £29 3s. 4d. for saying them. A penny a mass, that is, and the priests took the pence. But it was twelve years before they had said the masses.

The second Lord Cobham had mingled experiences of love and war. According to the inscription on his tomb, broken in the church but preserved in the College of Arms, he was "as brave as a leopard, a sumptuous entertainer, handsome, imperturbable, and courteous." He was a soldier, but the great struggle of his life had nothing to do with a battlefield. It was his attempt to secure a dispensation from the Pope for marrying his cousin in defiance of the canon law. Almost a year passed before the Pope gave his decision on the point, and then he ordered the unhappy cousins a horribly tedious penance. For four years they might not eat meat; they might not drink wine on Wednesdays, and at the six fasts they might only eat the second-best kinds of fish, and not those which were most agreeable to them. They had to feed four poor persons daily, and wait upon them themselves; and these poor persons were to have bread and meat or fish, with half a flagon of ale, and were to have new tunics and new russet hoods every year. All this was in addition to various heavy fines. The money part must have been the least exasperating: but it might have been amusing to choose the less agreeable kinds of fish.

The eldest son of this much be-penanced marriage had two distinctions. He was for some years the warden, at Sterborough castle, of the French heir to the throne, the Duke of Orleans who was taken prisoner at Agincourt; and he was the founder of Lingfield College. Lingfield College had a provost, six chaplains, four clerks, and thirteen poor persons, but none of its walls stand to-day. The life of the college farm alone survives, in an inventory of the implements and live stock taken at the Dissolution. Here are some extracts:—

The Laborers Chambre.

Warriors and statesmen though the Cobhams were, one of their women folk has made more history than they. It was Eleanor, daughter of the founder of Lingfield College, who married the Lord Protector, the "good duke Humphrey" of Gloucester, and who was convicted of dire misdemeanours. Edward Hall, the old historian, writing of 1441, tells the story:—

The beautiful duchess's penance is in all the history books. But it is Shakespeare, and not the historians, who makes her walk through the town in a white sheet and barefoot.

Three miles north of Lingfield is Crowhurst, one of a noble pair of names. Crowhurst in Sussex and Crowhurst in Surrey each has its immemorial yew, a tree of trees. But the yew of the Surrey churchyard—is there no better way of honouring a tree than the Crowhurst way? Who is to look at a tree like this without unhappiness? From the road the first impression to be had of it is nothing very imposing; a mass of deep and shining green, of no great stature, with strong, springy branches brushing the church walls—that is all. But the nearer view! You expect, and find, an enormous gnarled trunk, and then—Your first idea is that someone has thrown a rubbish-heap at the tree, and that most of the rubbish has stuck—old tea-trays, broken kettles, saucepan-lids, the sides of tin trunks. You then perceive that over gaps and wounds in the vast and writhen shell there have been bound, or nailed, or otherwise fastened a number of patches of thin sheet iron, painted a peculiarly ugly red. These patches of paint shriek with the names of a thousand cockneys, and the names suit the method of mending the broken tree. Gus should be the name of the man who fixed that patch; Erb, surely, daubed on that paint; Alf, I think, drove in that nail. Could none of the foresters of the weald have helped a great tree better in its old age? There should be methods of preserving a tree which are not of necessity hideous; else, it would be better for the giant to die as it pleased.

The church stands commandingly on a hill, overlooking level pastures and woodlands. But the view to the west, with all its breadth and quiet, is not more happy than the nearer picture to the east. Church gates stand opposite few more charming medleys than the multiplied gables, tumbled triangles, and oblongs of red tiles belonging to the roofs of the house on the other side of the road. This fine old brick building, with its formal garden path and clipped yews is now, like the Gainsfords' manor-house a mile away, merely a farmhouse. But it was once the family residence of the Angells, the other great family of Crowhurst after the Gainsfords. Like the Gainsfords, the Angell family has disappeared. The last John Angell died in 1784, and left a very curious will. His property was to go to anyone who could prove himself (not herself) descended from an ancestor of his who lived in the reign of Henry VI. Many claims followed; none were proved.

The house has one record at least of unrequited hospitality. This is an extract from the parish registers:—

Inside the church is a strange monument—a slab of Sussex iron, let into the floor near the altar, and commemorating Anne Forster, the granddaughter of a patriarchal neighbour, Sir John Gainsford. It is odd in more than one way; it is the only iron tombstone in the county, though it is a tombstone that has often been copied. There are still several reproductions of it scattered about the country in the form of firebacks; evidently the founders considered the design convenient. Perhaps they might have made a better job if they had been severer scholars; for some of the lettering on it is quaint and topsy-turvy, the S's being twisted the wrong way round and the F's lying unhappily feet uppermost. Yet it fits well with the other old Gainsford and Angell monuments, and is also a memorial of a dead and gone industry, the iron-smelting of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent.

Leisured churchgoers should choose a service at Crowhurst at sunset: September drives the sun at the right angle to light its dark oak and the great beams of the belfry. Many churches have windows built high in the west end, through which part of the splendour of the setting sun can filter; but this window is set low, and the red sky floods the church.

From the church to Crowhurst Place a mile away runs an interesting byway, the only one in Surrey, so far as I know, built by a private gentleman of permanent material, extending for a mile from his house to his place of worship. In the year 1631 the John Gainsford of the day, at the fine old age of 76, determined he would walk wet to church no more. He had a stone-flagged causeway laid from the manor-house to the churchyard, "it being before," as the Parish Register informs you, "a loathsom durtie way every stepp." He paid two workmen fifty pounds for the job, and the causeway is still to be picked out across the meadows.

The Gainsfords were one of the best, though not the greatest of the old Surrey families. They are first heard of in the reign of Edward III, when John and Margery Gaynesford had the manor of Crowhurst from John de Stangrave and Joan his wife—a delightful gathering of English names. One of them, in Tudor days, was Sheriff of Surrey, and well in the Tudor fashions: he had six wives. But he must have found them disappointing in their family duties, for the first five of them brought him fifteen daughters running, and it was only from the sixth and last that he got a son and heir. He was one of a long succession of Johns and Erasmuses, but the line failed at the end. There were never enough boys in the Gainsford families, and when at last the manor went to a daughter the spell was broken; the house was sold.

Crowhurst Place was originally a timber house built in or near the reign of Henry VII, and according to tradition Henry VIII used to stay there on his way to visit Anne Boleyn at Hever Castle over the border. It was, and still is in some respects, an admirable example of the masonry and carpentry of the fifteenth century, but the destroying hand of later builders has removed part of the timber and filled up the gaps with brick and weather-tiling, so that its full character has been taken away. The great hall, with its glorious beams, was too much for the utilitarian. The waste of space distressed him. He therefore cut it in two by running a floor across the length of it halfway up, and subdivided his floor into bedrooms to accommodate the resident farmer's numerous family. It would be difficult to ruin a fine hall more completely.

But the house still has its own beauty, though it is the wild beauty of poverty and neglect. It stands half a mile from the road to the south-west of the church, approached by a rough bridle path. The first glimpse through the trees is of gables striped white and dark; a moat, befeathered and noisy with ducks, and a little wooden bridge crossing the moat to a side-door. Beyond lie great barns, a flagged courtyard and flagged paths, and round the corner a second bridge over the moat, brickbuilt and massive; and by the garden gate a mounting-stone, which it would be pleasant to think gave Anne Boleyn's royal wooer an easy step into the saddle. But it came later, perhaps.

Is it not possible that Crowhurst Place may be rescued as Tangley Manor was? It has the hall, and the kitchen and the oak panelling, and the great fireplaces for which we search all the house-agents' catalogues; it is moated, it has dined a king; there should be a ghost somewhere. But it rests apart, a farmhouse only. Brambles grow about it, such as should fence in a castle of sleep; above them timbered gables and tall chimneys to fit the cold and spacious hearths within. The fires that lit those hearths wait their rekindling.

CHAPTER XL

Tandridge was once Tanrige, and had a priory, which disappeared, of course, at the Dissolution. It was quite a little place; its earliest record, dated somewhere near the end of the twelfth century, describes it as the Hospital of St. James, in the Ville of Tanregge, with three priests, in perpetuity there serving God, and Confraters of the said Hospital. So Odo, son of William de Dammartin, writes of it in his deed of gift of lands, a windmill, and silver cups to make a chalice. The establishment was less a priory than a small hospice, in which poor and needy persons were cared for, and to which wayfarers might come for refuge; one of those gentle places for the help and refreshment of sorrowing men that are set so strangely before the days of Tudor cruelties and tortures. The prior's hospice welcomed and comforted the tired poor; Elizabeth's age beat them, men and women, for sturdy rogues.

Later Tandridge history centres round the church and Tandridge Court. Tandridge Court has had noble owners, but perhaps the most interesting is Bostock Fuller, who was a Justice of the Peace in the days of Elizabeth, and who has left a notebook describing his work and the cases that came before him, which takes his reader extraordinarily close to Tudor times and customs. The manuscript, entitled Note Book of a Surrey Justice, is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower in the Surrey Archæological Collections, has made extracts from the Bodleian transcript. Here are some of them:—

So went village life for Tandridge in the golden days. Few cottages have been added since Mr. Bostock Fuller used to ride to the assizes. He would see little change, perhaps, in the church, with the glorious oak beams that bear up its belfry, and little, too, in the mighty yew whose branches brush its tower. Over one gravestone he might be puzzled. It has been placed in the grass, I think since his day, near the south door, and is an ancient monument of hard sandstone with a cross carved on it. Legend says that it was brought from Tandridge Priory, but there are others like it at Oxted and Titsey which belong to an older date than the priory.

Oxted is north-east of Tandridge; but there are two Oxteds. One is the new village near the station, with new shops, a new inn, and the old church. The other is the old village, set apart from the railway; a little village clustered about a main street running up the hillside—a rustic Guildford, a main street with cottage fronts for Guildford house fronts, and an ancient timbered inn hanging out a golden bell instead of Guildford's clock. Guildford's houses should hold Kate Greenaway maidens and prim ladies with mittens: Oxted should have corduroys and aprons, brown children and sunbonnets. So Oxted has; and it has also, I think, more little inns than any Surrey village near its size. Each has its sign; the street holds out a gallery of signs: stone steps and raised alleys run to the cottage doorways, and the children play curious village games with chalk squares and knucklebones, safe in the doorways and on the pavement. There is a corner by the road crossing the main street which is the prettiest in east Surrey. Weatherbeaten, brick-and-timber cottages frame it: the Bell Inn, with its beams like letters of a big black alphabet, hangs out its gold bell; beyond, the road slopes to dim country greennesses and the hill of the downs.