A FEW miles to the right of the road is a place which no pilgrim of modern times can leave unvisited—Selborne, White’s Selborne, the home of the gentle naturalist whose memory haunts these rural scenes. Here he lived in the picturesque house overgrown with creepers, with the sunny garden and dial at the back, and the great spreading oak where he loved to study the ways of the owls, and the juniper tree, which, to his joy, survived the Siberian winter of 1776. And here{45} he died, and lies buried in the quiet churchyard in the shade of the old yew tree where he so often stood to watch his favourite birds. Not a stone but what speaks of him, not a turn in the village street but has its tale to tell. The play-stow, or village green, which Adam de Gurdon granted to the Augustinian Canons of Selborne in the thirteenth century, where the prior held his market of old, and where young and old met on summer evenings under the big oak, and “sat in quiet debate” or “frolicked and danced” before him; the farmhouse which now marks the site of the ancient Priory itself, founded by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester, in 1232—he has described them all. How the good Canons grew lazy and secular in their ways after a time, how William of Wykeham found certain of them professed hunters and sportsmen, and tried in vain to reform them, and how the estates were finally handed over to the new college of St. Mary Magdalene at Oxford, by its founder, William of Waynflete—Gilbert White has already told us. The Hanger, with its wooded slopes, rising from the back of his garden, and that “noble chalk{46} promontory” of Nore Hill, planted with the beeches which he called the most lovely of all forest trees, how familiar they seem to us! Still the swifts wheel to and fro round the low church-tower, and the crickets chirp in the long grass, and the white owl is heard at night, just as when he used to linger under the old walls and watch their manners with infinite care and love.
JANE AUSTEN’S HOUSE, CHAWTON.
JANE AUSTEN’S HOUSE, CHAWTON.
One of the “rocky hollow lanes” which lead towards Alton will take us back into the road, and bring us to Chawton, a village about a mile from that town. The fine Elizabethan manor-house at the foot of the green knoll, and the grey church peeping out of the trees close by, have been for centuries the home and burial-place of the Knights. On the south side of the chancel a black and white marble monument records the memory of that gallant cavalier, Sir Richard Knight, who risked life and fortune in the Royal cause, and was invested with the Order of the Royal Oak by Charles II. after the Restoration. But it is as the place where Jane Austen, in George Eliot’s opinion, “the greatest artist that has ever written,” composed her novels, that Chawton is memorable.{47} The cottage where she lived is still standing a few hundred yards from the “great house,” which was the home of the brother and nieces to whom she was so fondly attached. She and her sister, Cassandra, settled there in 1809, and remained there until May, 1817, when they moved to the corner house of College Street, Winchester, where three months afterwards she died. During the eight years spent in this quiet home, Jane Austen attained the height of her powers and wrote her most famous novels, those works which she herself said cost her so little, and which in Tennyson’s words have given her a place in English literature “next to Shakespeare.” “Sense and Sensibility,” her first novel, was published two years after the move to Chawton. “Persuasion,” the last and most finished of the immortal series, was only written in 1816, a year before her death. Seldom, indeed, has so great a novelist led so retired an existence. The life at Chawton, so smooth in its even flow, with the daily round of small excitements and quiet pleasures, the visits to the “great house,” and walks with her nieces in the woods, the shopping expeditions{49} to Alton, the talk about new bonnets and gowns, and the latest news as to the births, deaths, and marriages of the numerous relatives in Kent and Hampshire, are faithfully reflected in those pleasant letters of Jane Austen, which her great-nephew, Lord Brabourne, gave to the world. There is a good deal about her flowers, her chickens, her niece’s love affairs, the fancy work on which she is engaged, the improvements in the house and garden—“You cannot imagine,” she writes on one occasion, “it is not in human nature to imagine, what a nice walk we have round the orchard!”—but very little indeed about her books. Almost the only allusion we find to one of her characters is in 1816, when she writes to Fanny Knight of Anne Elliot in “Persuasion.” “You may perhaps like the heroine, as she is almost too good for me!” Anything like fame or publicity was positively distasteful to her. She owns to feeling absolutely terrified when a lady in town asked to be introduced to her, and then adds laughingly, “If I am a wild beast I cannot help it, it is not my fault!”
Curiously enough, the Pilgrims’ Way, in the{50} later course of its path, brings us to Godmersham, that other and finer home of the Knights on the Kentish Downs, a place also associated with Jane Austen’s life and letters, where she spent many pleasant hours in the midst of her family, enjoying the beauty of the spot and its cheerful surroundings. But Chawton retains the supremacy as her own home, and as the scene of those literary labours that were cut short, alas! too soon. “What a pity,” Sir Walter Scott exclaimed, after reading a book of hers, “what a pity such a gifted creature died so early!”
CHAWTON HOUSE
CHAWTON HOUSE
From Chawton it is a short mile to Alton, famous for its breweries and hop gardens, and its church door, riddled with the bullets of the Roundheads. Our way now leads us through the woods of Alice Holt—Aisholt—the Ash wood; like Woolmer, a royal forest from Saxon times. Alice Holt was renowned for the abundance of its fallow deer, which made it a favourite hunting ground with the Plantagenet kings, and on one occasion Edward II., it is said, gave one of his scullions, Morris Ken, the sum of twenty shillings because he fell from his horse so often out hunting,{51} “which made the king laugh exceedingly.” Here, too, after the battle of Evesham, Edward, Prince of Wales, defeated Adam de Gurdon, one of Simon de Montfort’s chief followers. He is said to have challenged the rebel baron to a single combat, in which Gurdon was wounded and made prisoner, but the victor spared his life and afterwards obtained a royal pardon for his vanquished foe. A wild rugged tract of country, Alice Holt was a chosen haunt of robbers and outlaws, the terror of the wealthy London merchants who journeyed to St. Giles’ Fair at Winchester, and in the fourteenth century the wardens of the fair kept five mounted serjeants-at-arms in the forest near Alton, for their protection at that season.
Soon after leaving Alton the pilgrims would catch their first sight of the river Wey, which rises close to the town. Along the banks of this stream, flowing as it does through some of the loveliest Surrey scenery, their road was now to lie, and not until they crossed St. Katherine’s ferry, at Guildford, were they finally to lose sight of its waters. The river itself, more than one{52} writer has suggested, may owe its name to this circumstance, and have been originally called the Way river from the ancient road which followed the early part of its course.
FARNHAM CASTLE.
FARNHAM CASTLE.
Leaving Froyle Park, Sir Hubert Miller’s fine Jacobean house, on our left, we pass Bentley Station, and, still following the river, join the Portsmouth road just before entering Farnham. This town, which takes its name from the commons overgrown with fern and heather still to be seen in the neighbourhood on the Surrey side, is now surrounded with hop gardens. It was among the earliest possessions of the Bishops of Winchester, and formed part of the land granted to St. Swithun, in 860, by Alfred’s elder brother, Ethelbald, King of Wessex. The Castle-palace, which still looks proudly down on the streets of the little town, was first built by that magnificent prelate, Henry of Blois, but little of the original building now remains except the offices, where some round Norman pillars may still be seen. Farnham Castle was partly destroyed by Henry III. during his wars with the barons, and suffered greatly at the hands of the rebels in the time{53} of Charles I., but was afterwards rebuilt by Bishop Morley. Queen Elizabeth paid frequent visits here, and on one occasion, while dining in the great hall with the Duke of Norfolk, who was suspected of planning a marriage with Mary Queen of Scots, pleasantly advised the Duke to be careful on what pillow he laid his head. The lawn, with its stately cedars and grass-grown moat, deserves a visit, but the most interesting{54} part of the building is the fine old keep with its massive buttresses and thirteenth-century arches, commanding a wide view over the elm avenues of the park, and the commons which stretch eastward on the Surrey side. Prominent in the foreground are the picturesque heights of Crooksbury, crowned with those tall pines which Cobbett climbed when he was a boy, to take the nests of crows and magpies.
Farnham, it must be remembered, was the birthplace of this remarkable man, and it was at Ash, a small town at the foot of the Hog’s Back, that he died in 1835. All his life long he retained the fondest affection for these scenes of his youth. In 1825 he brought his son Richard, then a boy of eleven, to see the little old house in the street where he had lived with his grandmother, and showed him the garden at Waverley where he worked as a lad, the tree near the Abbey from which he fell into the river in a perilous attempt to take a crow’s nest, and the strawberry beds where he gathered strawberries for Sir Robert Rich’s table, taking care to eat the finest! Among these hills and commons, where he followed the{55} hounds on foot at ten years old, and rode across country at seventy, we forget the political aspect of his life, his bitter invectives against the Poor-laws and Paper-money, the National Debt and the System, and think rather of his keen love of nature and delight in the heaths, the sandy coppices, and forests of Surrey and Hampshire. And now he sleeps in the church of Farnham, where he desired to be buried, in the heart of the wild scenery which he loved so well.
CROOKSBURY FROM NEWLANDS CORNER.
CROOKSBURY FROM NEWLANDS CORNER.
Just under Crooksbury, that “grand scene” of Cobbett’s “exploits,” lies Moor Park, the retreat{56} of Sir William Temple in his old age, which seemed to him, to quote his own words, “the sweetest place, I think, that I have ever seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad.” There we may still see the gardens which the statesman of the Triple Alliance laid out after the fashion of those which he remembered in Holland, where he enjoyed the companionship of his beloved sister, Lady Giffard, and where his heart lies buried under the sundial. Here Swift lived as his secretary, and learnt from King William III. how to cut asparagus; here he wrote the “Tale of a Tub,” and made love to Mrs. Hester Johnson, Lady Giffard’s pretty black-eyed waiting-maid. The memory of that immortal love-story has not yet perished, and the house where she lived is still known as Stella’s Cottage. Here, too, just beyond Moor Park, on the banks of the Wey, are the ruins of Waverley Abbey, the first Cistercian house ever founded in England, often described as “le petit Cîteaux,” and the mother of many other abbeys.
The more distinguished pilgrims who stopped at Farnham would taste the hospitality of the{57} monks of Waverley, and Henry III. was on one occasion their guest. The Abbot of Waverley, too, was a great personage in these parts, and his influence extended over several parishes through which the pilgrims had to pass, although the privileges which he claimed were often disputed by the Prior of Newark, the other ecclesiastical magnate who reigned in this part of Surrey. Pilgrims of humbler rank would find ample accommodation in the ancient hostelries of Farnham, which was at that time a place of considerable importance, and returned two members to Edward II.’s Parliament.
Their onward course now lay along the banks of the Wey until they reached the foot of the narrow, curiously shaped chalk ridge known as the Hog’s Back. Here, at a place called Whiteway End, the end of the white chalk road, two roads divide. Both lead to Guildford, the one keeping on the crest of the ridge, the other along its southern slope.
The upper road has become an important thoroughfare in modern times, and is now the main road from Farnham to Guildford; the lower{58} is a grassy lane, not always easy to follow, and little used in places, which leads through the parishes of Seale, Puttenham, and Compton, the bright little villages which stud the sides of the Hog’s Back. This green woodland path under the downs was the ancient British and Roman track along which the Canterbury pilgrims journeyed, and which is still in some places spoken of by the inhabitants as the Way. Other names in local use bear the same witness. Beggar’s Corner and Robber’s or Roamer’s Moor are supposed to owe their appellations to the pilgrims: while the ivy-grown manor-house of Shoelands, bearing the date of 1616 on its porch, is said to take its name from the word “to shool,” which in some dialects has the same meaning as “to beg.”
Another trace of the Pilgrimage is to be found in the local fairs which are still held in the towns and villages along the road, and which were fixed at those periods of the year when the pilgrims would be either going to Canterbury or returning from there. Thus we find that at Guildford the chief fair took place at Christmas, when the pilgrims would be on their way to the{59} winter festival of St. Thomas, and was only altered to September in 1312, by which time the original day of the Saint’s martyrdom had ceased to be as popular as the summer feast. Again the great fair at Shalford was fixed for the Feast of the Assumption, the 15th of August, so as to catch the stream of pilgrims which flowed back from Canterbury after the Feast of the Translation in July, and the seven days’ fair there, that went by the name of Becket’s fair. Fairs soon came to be held not only at towns such as Farnham, Guildford, and Shalford, but at the small villages along the Pilgrims’ Road. There was one in the churchyard at Puttenham, and another at Wanborough, a church on the northern side of the hill, which belonged to Waverley Abbey, where the offerings made by the pilgrims formed part of the payments yearly received by the Abbot, while a third was held on St. Katharine’s Hill during five days in September.
Even the churches along the road often owed their existence to the Pilgrimage. The church of Seale was built early in the thirteenth century by the Abbots of Waverley, and that of Wanborough{60} was rebuilt by the same Abbots, and was again allowed to fall into decay when the days of pilgrimages were over. Both the sister chapels of St. Katharine and St. Martha, we shall see, owed their restoration to the pilgrims’ passage, and many more along the Way were either raised in honour of St. Thomas, or else adorned with frescoes and altar-pieces of the Martyrdom.
Along this pleasant Surrey hill-side the old Canterbury pilgrims journeyed, going from church to church, from shrine to shrine, and more especially if their pilgrimage took place in summer, enjoying the sweet country air and leafy shades of this quiet woodland region. They lingered, we may well believe, at the village fairs, and stopped at every town to see the sights and hear the news; for the pilgrim of mediæval days was, as Dean Stanley reminds us, a traveller with the same adventures, stories, pleasures, pains, as the traveller of our own times, and men of every type and class set out on pilgrimages much as tourists to-day start on a foreign trip. Some, no doubt, undertook the journey from devotion, and more in{61} a vague hope of reaping some profit, both material and spiritual, from a visit to the shrine of the all-powerful Saint, while a thousand other motives—curiosity, love of change and adventure, the pleasure of a journey—prompted the crowds who thronged the road at certain seasons of the year. Chaucer’s company of pilgrims we know was a motley crew, and included men and women whose characters were as varied as their rank and trade. With them came a throng of jugglers and story-tellers and minstrels, who beguiled the way with music and laughter as they rode or walked along, so that “every town they came through, what with the noise of their singing, and with the sound of their piping, and with the jangling of their Canterbury bells, and with the barking of the dogs after them, they made more noise than if the king came there with all his clarions.” In their train, too, a crowd of idle folk, of roving pedlars and begging friars and lazy tramps, who were glad of any excuse to beg a crust or coin.
The presence of these last was by no means always welcome at the inns and religious houses on the road, where doubtful characters often{62} craved admittance, knowing that if the hand of justice overtook them they could always find refuge in one of those churches where the rights of sanctuary were so resolutely claimed and so jealously defended by the Abbot of Waverley or the Prior of Newark.{63}
COMPTON VILLAGE.
COMPTON VILLAGE.
FOLLOWING the Pilgrims’ Way along the southern slopes of the Hog’s Back, we cross Puttenham Heath, and reach the pretty little village of Compton. Here, nestling under the downs, a few hundred yards from the track, is a beautiful old twelfth-century church, which was there before the days of St. Thomas. This ancient structure, dedicated to St. Nicholas, still retains some good stained glass and boasts a unique feature in the shape of a double-storied chancel. The east end of the church is crossed by a low{64} semicircular arch enriched with Norman zigzag moulding, and surmounted by a rude screen, which is said to be the oldest piece of wood-work in England. Both the upper and the lower sanctuaries have piscinas, and there is an Early English one in the south aisle. The massive bases of the chalk pillars, the altar-tomb north of the chancel—probably an Eastern sepulchre—and a hagioscope now blocked up, all deserve attention, as well as the fine Jacobean pulpit and chancel screen, which is now placed under the tower arch.
COMPTON CHURCH.
COMPTON CHURCH.
LOSELEY.
LOSELEY.
A mile to the west of this singularly interesting church is Loseley, the historic mansion of the More and Molyneux family. This manor was Crown property in the reign of Edward the Confessor, and is described in Domesday Book as the property of the Norman Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, on whom it was bestowed by the Conqueror. After passing through many hands it was finally bought from the Earl of Gloucester, early in the sixteenth century, by Sir Christopher More, whose son, Sir William, built the present mansion. The{65} grand old house with its grey-stone gables and mullioned windows is a perfect specimen of Elizabethan architecture. The broad grass terrace along the edge of the moat, the yew hedges with their glossy hues of green and purple, the old-fashioned borders full of bright flowers, and the low pigeon-houses standing at each angle, all remain as they were in the reign of James I.,{66} and agree well with Lord Bacon’s idea of what a pleasance ought to be. Within, the walls are wainscoted with oak panelling throughout, and the ceilings and mantelpieces are richly decorated. The cross and mulberry tree of the Mores, with their mottoes, may still be seen in the stained-glass oriel of the great hall, and on the cornices of the drawing-room. Here too is a fine mantelpiece, carved in white chalk, which is said to have been designed by Hans Holbein. Many are the royal visitors who have left memorials of their presence at Loseley. Queen Elizabeth had an especial affection for the place, and was here three times. The cushioned seats of two gilt chairs were worked by her needle, and there is a painted panel bearing the quaint device of a flower-pot with the red and white roses of York and Lancaster, and the fleur-de-lis, with the words Rosa Electa and Felicior Phœnice, a pretty conceit which would not fail to find favour in the eyes of the Virgin Queen. The hall contains portraits of James I. and his wife Anne of Denmark, painted by Mytens in honour of a visit which they paid to Loseley in the first year of{67} this monarch’s reign; and the ceiling of his Majesty’s bedroom is elaborately patterned over with stucco reliefs of Tudor roses and lilies and thistles. A likeness of Anne Boleyn, and several fine portraits of members of the More family, also adorn the walls, and there is a beautiful little picture of the boy-king, Edward VI., wearing an embroidered crimson doublet and jewelled cap and feather, painted by some clever pupil of Holbein in 1547. This portrait was sent in 1890 to the Tudor Exhibition, which also contained many historical documents relating to different personages of this royal line, preserved among the Loseley manuscripts. There are warrants signed by Edward VI., the Lord Protector, by Queen Elizabeth and the Lord of her Council, including Hatton the Lord Chancellor, Cecil, Lord Burghley, Lord Effingham, and Lord Derby. There is one of 1540, signed by Henry VIII., commanding Christopher More, Sheriff of the County of Sussex, to deliver certain goods forfeited to the crown to “Katheryn Howarde, one of our quene’s maidens,” and another, signed by Elizabeth in the first year of her reign, commanding{68} William More to raise and equip one hundred able men, for the defence of England against foreign invasion. There is also a curious sumptuary proclamation by Queen Elizabeth respecting the dress and ornaments of women, and, what is still more rare and interesting, a warrant from Lady Jane Grey, dated July 19, I. Jane, and signed “Jane the Quene.” Among the more private and personal papers is an amusing letter from Robert Horne, Bishop of Winchester, giving Mr. More, of Loseley, advice as to stocking the new pond with the best kind of carp, “thes be of a little heade, broade side and not long; soche as be great headed and longe, made after the fashion of an herring, are not good, neither will ever be.” Another from Bishop Day informs Sir William More, in 1596, that he intends to fish the little pond at Frensham; while one to the same gentleman from Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s, thanks him for his exertions to recover a stolen nag on his behalf. The treasures of Loseley, in fact, are as inexhaustible as its beauty.
A pleasant walk through the forest trees and{69} grassy glades of the park leads us back to Compton village and the green lanes through which the Pilgrims’ Way now wanders. Skirting the grounds of Monk’s Hatch, with their pine-groves and rose-gardens lying under the chalk hanger, the old road passes close to Limnerslease, the Surrey home of George Frederic Watts. To-day thousands of pilgrims from all parts of the world seek out this sylvan retreat where the great master spent his last years, and visit the treasures of art which adorn its galleries, and the fair chapel and cloister that mark the painter’s grave.
ST. KATHERINE’S, GUILDFORD.
ST. KATHERINE’S, GUILDFORD.
ST. MARTHA’S CHAPEL.
ST. MARTHA’S CHAPEL.
From Compton a path known as “Sandy Lane” leads over the hill past Brabœuf Manor, and the site of the old roadside shrine of Littleton Cross, and comes out on the open down, close to the chapel of St. Katherine. This now ruined shrine, which stands on a steep bank near the road, was rebuilt on the site of a still older one in 1317, by Richard de Wauncey, Rector of St. Nicholas, Guildford, and was much frequented by pilgrims to Canterbury. So valuable were the revenues derived by the parson from their{70} offerings that the original grant made to Richard de Wauncey was disputed, and for some years the Rector of St. Mary stepped into his rights. But in 1329 the Rector of St. Nicholas succeeded in ousting his rival, and the chapel was re-consecrated and attached to the parish of St. Nicholas. An old legend ascribes the building of this shrine and of the chapel on St. Martha’s Hill to two giant sisters of primæval days, who raised the walls with their own hands and flung their{71} enormous hammer backwards and forwards from one hill to the other. Unlike its more fortunate sister-shrine, St. Katherine’s chapel has long been roofless and dismantled, but it still forms a very picturesque object in the landscape, and the pointed arches of its broken windows frame in lovely views of the green meadows of the winding{72} Wey, with the castle and churches of Guildford at our feet, and the hills and commons stretching far away, to the blue ridge of Hindhead.
THE HOSPITAL, GUILDFORD. p. 72
THE HOSPITAL, GUILDFORD. p. 72
The ancient city of Guildford owes its name and much of its historic renown to its situation on the chief ford of the river Wey, which here makes a break in the ridge of chalk downs running across Surrey. Guildford is mentioned in his will by King Alfred, who left it to his nephew Ethelwold, and became memorable as the spot where another Alfred, the son of Knut and Emma, was treacherously seized and murdered by Earl Godwin, who, standing on the eastern slope of the Hog’s Back above the city, bade the young prince look back and see how large a kingdom would be his. For seven centuries, from the days of the Saxon kings to those of the Stuarts, Guildford remained Crown property, and the Norman keep which still towers grandly above the city was long a royal palace. The strength of the castle and importance of the position made it famous in the wars of the barons, and the Waverley annalist records its surrender to Louis VIII. of France, when he marched against{73} King John from Sandwich Haven to Winchester. To-day the picturesqueness of the streets, the gabled roofs and panelled houses, and even more the situation of the town in the heart of this fair district, attract many artists, and make it a favourite centre for tourists.
THE HOG’S BACK.
THE HOG’S BACK.
In mediæval times Guildford was a convenient halting-place for pilgrims on their way from the south and west of England to the shrine of St. Thomas. Many of these, however, as the shrewd parson of St. Nicholas saw, when he{74} thought it worth his while to buy the freehold of the site on which St. Katherine’s chapel stood, would push on and cross the river by the ferry at the foot of the hill, which still bears the name of the Pilgrims’ Ferry. On landing they found themselves in the parish of Shalford, in the meadows where the great fair was held each year in August. When the original charter was granted by King John, the fair took place in the churchyard, but soon the concourse of people became so great that it spread into the fields along the river, and covered as much as one hundred and forty acres of ground. Shalford Fair seems, in fact, to have been the most important one in this part of Surrey, and no doubt owed its existence to the passage of the Canterbury pilgrims.{75}
ST. MARTHA’S FROM THE HOG’S BACK.
ST. MARTHA’S FROM THE HOG’S BACK.
THE line of the Pilgrims’ Way may be clearly followed from the banks of the Wey up the hill. It goes through Shalford Park, up Ciderhouse Lane, where the ancient Pesthouse or refuge for sick pilgrims and travellers, now called Ciderhouse Cottage, is still standing, and leads through the Chantrey Woods straight to St. Martha’s Chapel.
The district through which it takes us is one{76} of the wildest and loveliest parts of Surrey. “Very few prettier rides in England,” remarks Cobbett, who repeatedly travelled along this track, and the beauty of the views all along its course will more than repay the traveller who makes his way on foot over the hills from Guildford to Dorking. One of the most extensive is to be had from St. Martha’s Hill, where the prospect ranges in one direction over South Leith Hill and the South Downs far away to the Weald of Sussex and the well-known clump of Chanctonbury Ring; and on the other over the commons and moors to the crests of Hindhead and the Hog’s Back; while looking northward we have a wide view over the Surrey plains and the valley of the Thames, and Windsor Castle and the dome of St. Paul’s may be distinguished on clear days.
The ancient chapel on the summit, which gives its name to St. Martha’s Hill, was originally built in memory of certain Christians who suffered martyrdom on the spot, and was formerly dedicated to all holy martyrs, while the hill itself was known as the Martyrs’ Hill, of which, as Grose{77} remarks,[8] “the present name is supposed to be a corruption.” In the twelfth century it became peculiarly associated with the Canterbury pilgrims, and a new chancel was built for their use, and consecrated to St. Thomas à Becket in the year 1186. In 1262 this chapel was attached to the Priory of Newark, an Augustinian convent near Ripley, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury by Ruald de Calva in the reign of Richard Cœur de Lion. The Prior already owned most of the hill-side, and the names of Farthing Copse and Halfpenny Lane, through which the pilgrims passed on their way to St. Martha’s Chapel, remind us of the tolls which he levied from all who travelled along the road. We have already seen how in the earlier portions of the Way the Prior of Newark disputed the rights of the Abbot of Waverley. Here he reigned supreme. A priest from Newark Priory served St. Martha’s Chapel, and is said to have lived at Tyting’s Farm, an old gabled house with the remains of a small oratory close to the Pilgrims’ Way. In latter days a colony of monks{78} from Newark settled at Chilworth, where the present manor-house contains fragments of monastic building, and the fishponds of the friars may still be seen near the terraced gardens. During the troubled times of the Wars of the Roses the Chapel of St. Martha fell into ruins, and owed its restoration to Bishop William of Waynflete, who in 1463 granted forty days’ indulgence to all pilgrims who should visit the shrine and there repeat a Pater Noster, an Ave, and a Credo, or contribute to its repair. After the dissolution of the monasteries both Newark Priory and St. Martha’s shrine fell into ruins, and the chapel was only restored of late years. At Chilworth, south of St. Martha’s Hill, lies the once fair valley which has been defaced by the powder-mills, first established there three centuries ago by an ancestor of John Evelyn, and now worked by steam. This is the place which Cobbett denounces in his “Rural Rides” with a vigour and eloquence worthy of Mr. Ruskin himself:
“This valley, which seems to have been created by a bountiful Providence as one of the choicest{79} retreats of man, which seems formed for a scene of innocence and happiness, has been by ungrateful man so perverted as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes, in carrying into execution two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from the mind of man under the influence of the devil! namely, the making of gunpowder and of bank-notes! Here, in this tranquil spot, where the nightingales are to be heard earlier and later in the year than in any other part of England; where the first budding of the buds is seen in spring; where no rigour of season can ever be felt; where everything seems formed for precluding the very thought of wickedness; here has the devil fixed on as one of the seats of this grand manufactory; and perverse and ungrateful man not only lends his aid, but lends it cheerfully. To think that the springs which God has commanded to flow from the sides of these happy hills for the comfort and delight of man—to think that these springs should be perverted into means of spreading misery over a whole nation!”{80}
One of these “inventions of the devil” has been removed. The paper-mills which made the bank-notes in Cobbett’s time are silent now, but the powder-mills are in full activity, and Chilworth, with its coal-stores and railway-crossing, has a blackened and desolate look which not all the natural beauties of its surroundings can dispel.
ST. MARTHA’S FROM CHILWORTH.
ST. MARTHA’S FROM CHILWORTH.
Once more upon the hills, we can follow the line of yews which are seen at intervals along the ridge from St. Martha’s Chapel by Weston Wood and the back of Albury Park, turning a few steps out of our path to visit Newland’s Corner, the highest point of Albury Downs, and one of the most beautiful spots in the whole of Surrey. The view is as extensive as that from St. Martha’s Hill, and is even more varied and picturesque. Over broken ridges of heathery down and gently swelling slopes, clad with beech and oak woods, we look across to Ewhurst Mill, a conspicuous landmark in all this country, and farther westward to the towers of Charterhouse and the distant heights of Hindhead and Blackdown; while immediately in front, across the wooded valley, rises St. Martha’s Hill, crowned{81} by its ancient chapel. Here we can watch the changes of sun and shower over the wide expanse of level country, and see the long range of far hills veiled in the thin blue mists of morning, or turning purple under the gold of the evening sky. Some of the oldest and finest yew trees in all Surrey are close to Newland’s Corner—the ancient yew grove there is mentioned in Domesday—and their dark foliage offers a fine contrast to the bright tints of the neighbouring woods and to the snowy masses of blossom which in early summer clothe the gnarled old hawthorn trees that are studded over the hill-side. We can follow the track over the springy turf of the open downs and up glades thick with bracken, till it becomes choked with bushes and brambles, and finally loses itself in the woods of Albury.
Here, in the middle of the Duke of Northumberland’s park, is the deep glen, surrounded by wooded heights, known as the Silent Pool. A dark tale, which Martin Tupper has made the subject of his “Stephen Langton,” belongs to this lonely spot. King John, tradition says, loved a fair woodman’s daughter who lived here,{83} and surprised her in the act of bathing in the pool. The frightened girl let loose the branch by which she held, and was drowned in the water; and her brother, a goat-herd, who at the sound of her scream had rushed in after her, shared the same fate. And still, the legend goes, at midnight you may see a black-haired maiden clasping her arms round her brother in his cowhide tunic under the clear rippling surface of the Silent Pool.
A little farther on is the old church of Albury—Eldeburie, mentioned in Domesday, and supposed to be the most ancient in Surrey. The low tower, with its narrow two-light windows, probably dates back to very early Norman times, but the rest of the church is considerably later. The south chapel was richly decorated by Mr. Drummond, who bought the place in 1819, and is now used as a mortuary chapel for his family. Albury formerly belonged to the Dukes of Norfolk. The gardens were originally laid out by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, the accomplished collector of the Arundel marbles, and whose fine portrait by Vandyck was exhibited{84} at Burlington House in the winter of 1891. His friend and neighbour, Mr. Evelyn, helped him with his advice and taste, and designed the grotto under the hill, which still remains. “Such a Pausilippe,” remarks the author of “The Sylva,” “is nowhere in England besides.” But the great ornament of Albury is the famous yew hedge, about ten feet high and a quarter of a mile long, probably the finest of its kind in England. So thick are the upper branches of the yew trees that, as William Cobbett writes, when he visited Albury in Mr. Drummond’s time, they kept out both the rain and sun, and alike in summer and winter afford “a most delightful walk.” The grand terrace under the hill, “thirty or forty feet wide, and a quarter of a mile long, of the finest green-sward, and as level as a die,” particularly delighted him; and the careful way in which the fruit trees were protected from the wind, and the springs along the hill-side collected to water the garden, gratified his practical mind. “Take it altogether,” he goes on, “this certainly is the prettiest garden that I ever beheld. There was taste and sound judgment at every step in the{85} laying out of this place. Everywhere utility and convenience is combined with beauty. The terrace is by far the finest thing of the sort that I ever saw, and the whole thing altogether is a great compliment to the taste of the times in which it was formed.” The honest old reformer’s satisfaction in these gardens was increased by the reflection that the owner was worthy of his estate, seeing that he was famed for his justice and kindness towards the labouring classes—“who, God knows, have very few friends amongst the rich;” and adds, that he for one has no sympathy with “the fools” who want a revolution for the purpose of getting hold of other people’s property. “There are others who like pretty gardens as well as I, and if the question were to be decided according to the laws of the strongest, or, as the French call it, droit du plus fort, my chance would be but a very poor one.”
ALBURY OLD CHURCH.
ALBURY OLD CHURCH.
THE MILL, GOMSHALL.
THE MILL, GOMSHALL.
THE Pilgrims’ Way ran through Albury Park, passing close to the old church and under the famous yew hedge, and crossed the clear trout stream of the Tillingbourne by a ford still known as “Chantry Ford.” Here a noble avenue of lime trees brings us to Shere church, a building as remarkable for the beauty of its situation as for its architectural interest. The lovely Early{88} English doorway, the heavy transitional arches of the nave and the fourteenth-century chancel are still unhurt, and among the fragments of old glass we recognise the flax-breaker, which was the crest of the Brays, one of the oldest families in the county, who are, we rejoice to think, still represented here. Shere itself is one of the most charming villages in all this lovely neighbourhood. For many years now it has been a favourite resort of artistic and literary men, who find endless delight in the quiet beauty of the surrounding country. Subjects for pen and pencil abound in all directions; quaint old timbered houses, picturesque water-mills and barns, deep ferny lanes shaded by overhanging trees, and exquisite glimpses of heather-clad downs meet us at every turn. Fair as the scene is, travellers are seldom seen in these hilly regions; and so complete is the stillness, so pure the mountain air, that we might almost fancy ourselves in the heart of the Highlands, instead of thirty miles from town. Here it was, in the midst of the wild scenery of these Surrey Hills, that a sudden end closed the life of a great prelate of our own days,{89} Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester. A granite cross at Evershed’s Rough, just below Lord Farrer’s house at Abinger Hall, now marks the spot where his horse stumbled and fell as he rode down the hill towards Holmbury on that summer afternoon.
SHERE.
SHERE.
CROSSWAYS FARM, NEAR WOTTON.
CROSSWAYS FARM, NEAR WOTTON.[9]
About a mile beyond Abinger we reach the home of John Evelyn, and see the grey tower of the church where he is buried. This is Wotton—the town of the woods, as he loved to call it—“sweetly environed” with “venerable woods and delicious streams;” Wotton where, after all his wanderings and all the turmoil of those troublous times, Evelyn found a peaceful haven wherein to end his days. There are the terraces, the “fountains and groves,” in which he took delight; there, too, are the pine-woods which he planted, not only for ornament, and because they “create a perpetual spring,” but because he held the air to be improved by their “odoriferous and balsamical emissions.” Not only these trees, but the oak and ash, and all the different species which he studied so closely and has written about so well, were dear to him as his own children, and he{91} speaks in pathetic language of the violent storm which blew down two thousand of his finest trees in a single night, and almost within sight of his dwelling, and left Wotton, “now no more Woodtonn, stripped and naked, and almost ashamed to own its name. Methinks that I still hear, and I am sure that I feel, the dismal groans of our{92} forests, when that late dreadful hurricane, happening on the 26th of November, 1703, subverted so many thousands of goodly oaks, prostrating the trees, laying them in ghastly postures, like whole regiments fallen in battle by the sword of the conqueror, and crushing all that grew beneath them.” Evelyn’s descendants have bestowed the same care on the woods and plantations, and in spite of the havoc wrought by wind and tempest, Wotton is still remarkable for the beauty of its forest-trees and masses of flowering rhododendrons.
WOTTON.
WOTTON.
The red-brick house has been a good deal altered during the present century, but is still full of memorials of Evelyn. His portrait, and that of his wife and father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne, are there, and that of his “angelic friend,” Mistress Blagge, the wife of Godolphin, whose beautiful memory he has enshrined in the pages of the little volume that bears her name. The drawings which he made on his foreign travels are there too; and better still, the books in which he took such pride and pleasure, carefully bound, bearing on their backs a device and motto which he chose,{93} a spray of oak, palm, and olive entwined together, with the words, “Omnia explorate; meliora retinete.” But the most precious relic of all is the Prayer Book used by Charles I. on the morning of his execution. It was saved from destruction by a devoted loyalist, Isaac Herault, brother of a Walloon minister in London, and afterwards given by him to Evelyn’s father-in-law, Sir Richard Browne. The fly-leaf bears a Latin inscription with this note:—This is the Booke which Charles the First, Martyr beatus, did use upon the Scaffold, XXX Jan., 1649, being the Day of his glorious martyrdom.”
The exact course of the Pilgrims’ Way here is uncertain. After leaving Shere church it disappears, and we must climb a steep lane past Gomshall station, to find the track again on Hackhurst Downs. The line of yews is to be seen at intervals all along these downs, and as we descend into the valley of the Mole, opposite the heights of Box Hill, we pass four venerable yew trees standing in a field by themselves. One of the group was struck by lightning many years ago, but still stretches its gaunt, withered arms{95} against the sky, like some weather-beaten sign-post marking the way to Canterbury.
BOX HILL AND DORKING CHURCH SPIRE.
BOX HILL AND DORKING CHURCH SPIRE.
The town of Dorking lies in the break here made in the chalk hills by the passage of the river Mole; Milton’s “sullen Mole that windeth underground,” or, as Spenser sings in his “Faërie Queen,”—