its mutton and Cheam for juicy beef, is more severe than one cares to
quote on Epsom; and, altogether ignoring the mingled fragrances of
Mitcham, declares it the place "for a thief." We need not, however, take
the matter seriously: the rhymester was only at his wit's end for a rhyme
to "beef."
Mitcham station, beside the road, is a curious example of what a railway
company can do in its rare moments of economy; for it is an early
nineteenth-century villa converted to railway purposes by the process of
cutting a hole through the centre. It is a sore puzzle to a stranger in a
hurry.
[Sidenote: SUTTON]
From Mitcham one ascends a hill past the woodland estate of Ravensbury,
crossing the abundantly-exploited Wandle; and then, along a still rural
road, to the modern town of Sutton.
On the fringe of that town, at the discreet "residential" suburb of
Benhilton, is a scenic surprise in the way of a deep cutting in the hilly
road. Spanned by a footbridge, graced with trees, and neighboured by the
old "Angel" inn, "Angel Bridge," as it is called, is a pretty spot. The
rise thus cut through was once known as Been Hill, and on that basis
was fantastically reared the name of Benhilton. One cannot but admire the
ingenuity of it.
[Illustration: THE "COCK," SUTTON 1789. _From an aquatint after
Rowlandson._]
"Sutton for mutton": so ran the old-time rhyme. The reason of that ancient
repute is found in the downs in whose lap the place is situated; those
thymy downs that afforded such splendid pasturage for sheep. Sutton Common
is gone, enclosed in 1810, but the downs remain; and yet that rhyme has
lost its reason, and Sutton is no longer celebrated for anything above its
fellow towns. Even the famous "Cock" is gone--that old coaching-inn kept
by the ex-pugilist, "Gentleman Jackson." Long threatened, it was at last
demolished in 1898, and with the old house went the equally famous sign
that straddled across the road. The similar sign of the "Greyhound" still
remains; the last relic of narrower streets and times more spacious.
Leaving Sutton "town," as we call it nowadays, the road proceeds to climb
steadily uphill to the modern suburb of "Belmont," where stands an old,
but very well cared-for, milestone setting forth that it is distant "XIII.
miles from the Standard in Cornhill, London, 1745," from the Royal
Exchange the same distance, and from Whitehall twelve miles and a half.
The neighbourhood is now particularly respectable, but I grieve to say
that the spot is marked on the maps of 1796 as "Little Hell," which seems
to indicate that the character of the people living in the three houses
apparently then standing here would not bear close inspection. With the
"Angel" placed at one end, and this vestibule into Inferno situated at the
other, Sutton seems to have been accorded exceptional privileges.
"Cold Blow," which succeeds to Little Hell, is a tremendous transition,
and well deserves its name, perched as it is on the shivery, bare, and
windy heights that lead to Burgh Heath and Banstead Downs "famous," says
an annotated map of 1716, "for its wholesome Air, once prescribed by
Physicians as the Patients' last refuge." The feudal-looking wrought-iron
gates newly built beside the road here, surmounted by a gorgeous shield of
arms crested with a helmet and enveloped in mantling, form the entrance to
Nork Park, the seat of one of the Colman family, who have mustered very
strongly in Surrey of late years.
At the right-hand turning, in midst of a group of fir-trees, stands the
prehistoric tumulus known to the rustics as "Tumble Beacon." "Tumble" is
probably the rural version of "tumulus."
Beyond this point, on a site now occupied by a cottage, stood the
once-famed "Tangier" inn. Originally a private residence, the seat of
Admiral Buckle,[10] who named it "Tangier," in memory of his cruises on
the north coast of Africa, it became a house of call for coaches, and
especially for post-chaises. Here, we are told, George the Fourth
invariably halted for a glass of Miss Jeal's celebrated "alderbury"--that
is to say elderberry-wine--"roking hot," to keep out the piercing cold,
and Miss Jeal brought it forth with her own fair hands. Other travellers,
who were merely persons, and not personages, had to be content with the
less fair hands of the waiter.
The "Tangier" was burnt down about 1874. For some years after its
destruction a platform that led from the house to the roadside, on a level
with the floors of the coaches and post-chaises, survived; but only the
cellars now remain. The woods at the back are, however, still locally
known as "Tangier Woods."
Burgh Heath, at the summit of these downs, is a curious place called
usually "Borough" Heath: it is in Domesday "Berge." As its name not
obscurely hints, and the half-obliterated barrows show, it is a place of
ancient habitation and sepulture; but nowadays it is chiefly remarkable
for the descendants of the original squatters of about a century ago, who,
braving the cold of these heights, settled on what was then an exceedingly
lonely heath and stole whatever land they pleased. That was the origin of
the hamlet of Burgh Heath. The descendants of those filibusters have in
most cases rebuilt the original hovels, but it is still a somewhat forlorn
place, made sordid by the tumbledown pigsties and sheds on the heath in
which they have acquired a prescriptive freehold.
[Sidenote: RUSSELL OF KILLOWEN]
Passing Lion Bottom, or Wilderness Bottom, we come to Tadworth Corner,
past the grounds of Tadworth Court, late the seat of Lord Russell of
Killowen, better known as Sir Charles Russell. He was created a Baron in
1894, on his becoming Lord Chief Justice: but the title was--at his own
desire--limited to a life-peerage, and consequently at his death in 1900
became extinct. At Tadworth, in the horsey neighbourhood of Epsom, he was
as much at home as in the Law Courts, and neither so judicial nor
restrained, as those who remember his peppery temper and the objurgatory
language of his "Here, you, where the ---- -- are you ---- -- coming to,
you ---- ----, you!" will admit. There seems, in fact, an especial fitness
in his residence on this Regency Road, for his speech was the speech
rather of that, than of the more mealy mouthed Victorian, period.
At Tadworth Court, where the ways divide, and a most picturesque view of
long roads, dark fir trees, and a weird-looking windmill unfolds itself,
formerly stood a toll-gate. A signpost directs on the right to Headley and
Walton, and on the left to Reigate and Redhill, and a battered milestone
which no one can read stands at the foot of it. The church spire on the
left is that of Kingswood.
From London to Reigate, through Sutton, is, according to Cobbett, "about
as villainous a tract as England contains. The soil is a mixture of gravel
and clay, with big yellow stones in it, sure sign of really bad land." The
greater part of this is, of course, now covered by the suburbs of "the
Wen," as Cobbett delighted to style London; and it is both unknown to and
immaterial to most people what manner of soil their houses are built on;
but the truth of Cobbett's observations is seen readily enough here, on
these warrens, which owe their preservation as open spaces to that
mixture, worthless to the farmer, and not worth the stealing in those
times when land could be stolen with impunity.
[Illustration: KINGSWOOD WARREN.]
[Sidenote: REIGATE HILL]
Past the modern village of Kingswood, almost lost in, and certainly
entirely overshadowed by, the wild heaths of Walton and Kingswood Warren
the road comes at last to Reigate Hill, where, immediately past the
suspension bridge that overhangs the cutting, it tilts very suddenly and
alarmingly over the edge of the Downs. The suddenness of it makes the
stranger gasp with astonishment; the beauty of that wonderful view from
this very rim and edge of the hills compels his admiration. It is the
climax up to which he has been toiling all these long, ascending gradients
from Sutton; and it is worth the toil.
The old writers of road-books do more justice to this view than any modern
writer dare. To them it was "a remarkably bold elevation, from whence is a
delightful prospect of the South Downs in Sussex. But near the road, which
is scooped out of the hill, the declivity is so steep and abrupt that the
spectator cannot help being struck with terror, though softened by
admiration. The Sublime and the Beautiful are here perfectly united;
imagination is fully exercised, and the mind delighted."
How would this person have described the Alps?
A milestone just short of this drop--one of a series starting at Sutton
Downs and dealing in fractions of miles--says, very curtly: "London 19,
Sutton 8, Brighton 32-5/8, Reigate 1-3/8."
[Illustration: THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE, REIGATE HILL.]
The suspension bridge, carried overhead, spanning the cutting made through
the crest of the hill, is known to the rustics--who will always invent
simple English words of one syllable, whenever possible, to take the place
of difficult three-syllabled words of Latin extraction--as the "Chain
Pier." It does not, as almost invariably is the case with these bridges,
connect two portions of an estate severed by the cutting, but forms part
of a public path which was cut through. It is very well worth the
traveller's attention, for it joins the severed ends of no less a road
than the ancient Pilgrims' Way, and is a very curious instance of
modernity helping to preserve antiquity. The Way is clearly seen above,
coming from Box Hill as a hollow road, crossing the bridge and going in
the direction of Gatton Park, through a wood of beech trees.
The roadway of Reigate Hill is made to wind circuitously, in an attempt to
mitigate the severity of the gradient; but for all the care taken, it
remains one of the steepest hills in England, and is one of the very few
provided with granite kerbs intended to ease the pull-up for horses. None
but a very special fool among cyclists in the old days attempted to ride
down the hill; and many, even in these times of more efficient brakes,
prefer to walk down. Only motor-cars, like the Gadarene swine of the
Scriptures, "rushing violently down a steep place," attempt it; and those
who are best acquainted with the hill live in daily expectation of a
recklessly driven car spilling over the rim.
XIX
Reigate town lies at the foot, sheltered under this great shoulder of the
downs: a little town of considerable antiquity and inconsiderable story.
It is mentioned in Domesday Book, but under the now forgotten name of
"Cherchefelle," and did not begin to assume the name of Reigate until
nearly two hundred years later.
Churchfield was at the time of the Norman conquest a manor in the
possession of the widowed Queen, and was probably little more than an
enclosed farm and manor-house situated in a clearing of the Holmesdale
woods; but it had not long passed into the hands of William de Varennes,
who had married Gundrada the Conqueror's daughter and was one of his most
intimate henchmen at the Battle of Hastings, before it became the site of
the formidable Reigate, or Holm, Castle. The manors granted to William de
Varennes comprehended nearly the whole of Surrey, and included others in
Sussex, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. Such were the splendours that fell to the
son-in-law and the companion-in-arms of a successful invader. He became
somewhat Anglicised under the title of Earl of Warenne, and the ancestor
of a line of seven Earls, of whom the last died in 1347, when the family
became firstly merged in that of the Fitzalans, then of the Mowbrays, and
finally in that of the alternately absorbent and fissiparous Howards.
Holm, or Reigate Castle, had little history of the warlike sort. It
frowned terribly upon its sandstone ridge, but tamely submitted in 1216
when the foreign allies of the discontented subjects of King John
approached: and when the seventh Earl, who had murdered Baron de la Zouche
at Westminster, was attacked here by Prince Edward, he promptly made a
grovelling surrender and paid the fine of 12,000 marks (equal to L24,000)
demanded. In 1550, when Lambarde wrote, only "the ruyns and rubbishe of an
old castle which some call Homesdale" were left, and even those were
cleared away by order of the Parliament in 1648. Now, after many centuries
of change in ownership, the hill on which that fortress stood is
contemptuously tunnelled, to give a more direct road through the town.
[Sidenote: REIGATE HILL]
In this connection, Cobbett, coming to Reigate through Sutton in 1823, is
highly entertaining. The tunnel was then being made, and it did not please
him. "They are," he vociferates, "in order to save a few hundred yards'
length of road, cutting through a hill. They have lowered a little hill on
the London side of Sutton. Thus is the money of the country actually
thrown away: the produce of labour is taken from the industrious and given
to the idlers. Mark the process; the town of Brighton, in Sussex, fifty
miles from the Wen, is on the seaside, and is thought by the stockjobbers
to afford a _salubrious air_. It is so situated that a coach which leaves
it not very early in the morning reaches London by noon; and, starting to
go back in two hours and a half afterwards, reaches Brighton not very late
at night. Great parcels of stockjobbers stay at Brighton with the women
and children. They skip backward and forward on the coaches, and actually
carry on stock-jobbing in Change Alley, though they reside at Brighton.
The place is, besides, a great resort with the _whiskered_ gentry. There
are not less than about twenty coaches that leave the Wen every day for
this place; and, there being three or four different roads, there is a
great rivalship for the custom. This sets the people to work to shorten
and to level the roads; and here you see hundreds of men and horses
constantly at work to make pleasant and quick travelling for the Jews and
jobbers. The Jews and jobbers pay the turnpikes, to be sure; but they get
the money from the land and labourers. They drain these, from John o'
Groat's House to the Land's End, and they lay out some of the money on the
Brighton roads."
Cobbett is dead, and the Reform Act is an old story, but the Jews and the
jobbers swarm more than ever.
[Sidenote: THE CASTLE CAVES]
The tunnel through the castle hill was made by consent of the then owner,
Earl Somers, as a tablet informs all who care to know. The entrance
towards the town is faced with white brick, in a style supposed to be
Norman. Above are the grounds, now public, where a would-be mediaeval
gateway, erected in 1777, quite illegitimately impresses many innocents,
and below is the so-called Barons' Cave, an ancient excavation in the soft
sandstone where the Barons are (quite falsely) said to have assembled in
conclave before forcing their will upon King John at Runnymede. Unhappily
for that tradition, the then Earl Warenne was a supporter of the tyrant
king, and any reforming barons he might possibly have entertained at
Reigate Castle would have been kept on the chain as enemies, and treated
to the cold comfort of bread and water.
[Illustration: THE TUNNEL, REIGATE.]
There are deeper depths than these castle caves, for dungeon-like
excavations exist beside and underneath the tunnel; but they are not so
very terrible, exuding as they do strong vinous and spirituous odours,
proving that the only prisoners languishing there are hogsheads and
kilderkins.
Reigate, dropping its intermediate name of Cherchefelle on Ridgegate,
became variously Reigate, Riggate, and Reygate in the thirteenth century.
The name obviously indicates a gate--that is to say, a road--over the
ridge of the downs; presumably that road upon which Gatton, the
"gate-town," stood. Strongly supporting this theory, Wray Common and Park
are found on the line of road between Reigate and Gatton. If we select
"Reygate" from the many variants of the place-name, and place it beside
that of Wray Common, we get at once the phonetic link.
When Reigate lost the two members it sent to Parliament, it lost much more
than the mere distinction of being represented. It lost free drinks and
money to jingle in its pockets, for it was openly corrupt--in fact,
neither better nor worse than most other constituencies. What else, when
you consider it, could be expected when the franchise was so limited that
the electors were a mere handful, and votes by consequence were
individually valuable. In short, the best safeguard against bribery is to
so increase the electorate that the purchase of votes is beyond the
capacity of a candidate's pockets.
Modern circumstances have, indeed, so wrought with country towns of the
Reigate type that they are merely the devitalised spooks of their former
selves, and Reigate would long ere this have been on the verge of
extinction, had it not been within the revivifying influence of the
suburban area. It is due to the Wen, as Cobbett would call it, that
Reigate is still at once so old-world and so prosperous. It is surrounded
by semi-suburban estates, but is in its centre still the Reigate of that
time when the coaches came through, when royalty and nobility lunched at
the still-existing "White Hart," and when fifty miles made a long day's
journey.
Reigate town was the property, almost exclusively, of the late Lady Henry
Somerset. By direction of her heir, Somers Somerset, it was, in October,
1921, sold at auction in several lots.
There are some in Reigate who dwell in imagination upon old times. Not by
any means the obvious people, the clergy and the usual kidney; they find
existence there a vast yawn. The antiquarian taste revealed itself by
chance to the present inquirer in the person of a policeman on duty by the
tunnel, who knew all about Reigate's one industry of digging silver-sand,
who could speak of the "Swan" inn having once possessed a gallows sign
that spanned the road, and knew all about the red brick market-house or
town hall being built in 1708 on the site of a pilgrims' chapel dedicated
to St. Thomas a Becket. He could tell, too, that wonderful man, of a
bygone militant parson of Reigate, who, warming to some dispute, took off
his coat in the street and saying, "Lie there, divinity," handsomely
thrashed his antagonist. "I like them old antidotes," said my constable;
and so do I.
XX
[Sidenote: REIGATE CHURCH]
Reigate Church has been many times restored, and every time its monuments
have suffered a general post; so that scarce an one remains where it was
originally placed, and very few are complete.
The most remarkable monument of all, after having been removed from its
original place in the chancel to the belfry, has now utterly vanished. It
is no excuse that its ever having been placed in the church at all was a
scandal and an outrage, for, being there, it should have been preserved,
as in some sort an illustration of bygone social conditions. But the usual
obliterators of history and of records made their usual clean sweep, and
it has disappeared.
It was a heart-shaped monument, inscribed, "Near this place lieth Edward
Bird, Esq., Gent. Dyed the 23rd of February, 1718/9. His age 26," and was
surmounted by a half-length portrait effigy of him in armour, with a full
flowing wig; a truncheon in his right hand, and in the background a
number of military trophies.
The especial scandal attaching to the fact of this monument ever having
been placed in the church arises from the fact that Edward Bird was hanged
for murder. Some particulars are gleaned from one of the many catchpenny
leaflets issued at the time by the Ordinary--that is to say, the
Chaplain--of Newgate, who was never averse from adding to his official
salary by writing the "last dying words" of interesting criminals; but his
flaring front pages were, at the best--like the contents bills of modern
sensational evening newspapers--indifferent honest, and his account of
Bird is meagre.
It seems, collating this and other authorities, that this interesting
young man had been given the advantages of "a Christian and Gentlemanlike
Education," which in this case means that he had been a Westminster boy
under the renowned Dr. Busby, and afterwards a scholar at Eton. This
finished Christian then became a lieutenant in the Marquis of Winchester's
Horse. He married when twenty years of age, and his wife died a year
later, when he plunged into a dissolute life in London.
One evening in September, 1718, he was driven "with a woman in a coach and
a bottle of Champain wine" to a "bagnio" in Silver Street, Golden Square,
and there "had the misfortune" to run a waiter, one Samuel Loxton, through
the body with his sword. "G--d d--n you, I will murder you all," he is
reported to have threatened, and a farrier of Putney, called at the
subsequent trial, deposed to having once been run through the body by this
martial spirit.
Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not
only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The
historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were
in those times very much what German officers became--privileged
murderers--and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all.
[Sidenote: AN EXIT AT TYBURN]
At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the
Ordinary, saying "He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected
Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses." The Ordinary does not tell us
in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go
to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not
even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the
rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution,
taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that
interesting event.
He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of
poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning
coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by
the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the
threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree,
talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so
swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines
prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles'
Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available,
he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, "Gentlemen, I wish your
health," and then "was ty'd up, turned off, and bled very much at the
Mouth or Nose, or both."
The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is
explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both
patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was
once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him.
Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his
execution, passing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.
The date of the monument's disappearance is not clearly established, but
old inhabitants of Reigate have recollections of the laughing workmen,
during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of
the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.
For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed,
the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen
hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun
in 1701 by the then vicar.
A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a
year lived here, in a cottage oddly named "Upper Repentance."
[Illustration: TABLET: BATSWING COTTAGES.]
The road leaving Reigate, by Parkgate and the Priory, passes a couple of
cottages not in themselves remarkable but bearing a curious device
intended to represent bats' wings, and inscribed "J. T. 1815." They are
known as "Batswing Cottages," but what induced "J. T." to call them so,
and even who he was, seems to be unknown.