SHALFORD AND WONERSH
Shalford and its Stocks.--The Common.--Vanity Fair.--The Court of
Dusty-Feet.--Unstead in floodwater.--Dog Smith.--Bramley
Mill.--Wonersh, Ignorsh, Ognersh.--A village well cared for.--A
Grisly Barometer.--Tangley Manor.
Eight highroads converge on Guildford, and these are fed, of course, by
many minor roads. Besides the roads, five lines of railways run into and
leave the town, so that it is eminently possible, from Guildford, to do
either of two things, to take a walk in a ring and return to the town by
another road, or, what is perhaps a little more luxurious, but enables
you to cover more country, you can walk in almost any direction, and at
the end of the day take a train back to the town. The highroad runs
north to Woking and Horsell; north-east the Ripley road goes by Cobham
to Kingston and London; eastwards, under Merrow Downs, you can walk by
Clandon and the Horsleys to Leatherhead; a smaller road travels
south-west by St. Martha's Chapel to Chilworth; almost due south a road
runs through Shalford to Wonersh, or breaks off at Shalford to go east
to Dorking; another southern road is to Godalming; the great west road
passes over the Hog's Back to Farnham, and north-west lie Worplesdon
and Bisley. And the railways can be joined north, east, south, and west.
Godalming, four miles away, is a centre in itself, and has its own
chapter. But Guildford is the best centre from which to see some of
Godalming's neighbours. A good ring is by Shalford through Bramley and
Wonersh, returning by Chilworth under St. Martha's. Shalford lies a mile
to the south, and with its old mill, its inn, its white and green
cottages, and its stocks, is a charming survival perilously near the
Guildford builder. The stocks stand by the churchyard gates, side by
side with a curious little shrubbery. Shrubberies are rare ornaments of
a village, but this sets a pretty foreground to the low line of whitened
cottages behind it.
[Illustration: _Shalford._]
Shalford Common is wide and breezy; geese cackle over its grass, and you
may see more than one cricket match being played on holiday afternoons.
Once, in 1877, eleven Mitchells played eleven Heaths on the common; the
Heaths were all of the same family, but the Mitchells, though related,
were not. But the greatest tradition of Shalford Common is its
connection with a Bedfordshire man, John Bunyan. Bunyan is said to have
lived in two houses in Surrey, a cottage on Quarry Hill in Guildford,
and at Horn Hatch, now pulled down, on Shalford Common. Probably the
tradition would not have grown up without good ground; there is one
possible reason, at all events, for connecting Bunyan with this part of
Surrey. The idea of _Pilgrim's Progress_ is said to have been suggested
to him by the very Pilgrims' Way, and Vanity Fair to be the fair held on
the meadow between Shalford and Guildford below St. Catherine's Chapel.
The Rector of Shalford had the privilege of holding a fair from the days
of King John, and undoubtedly Shalford Fair was one of the largest held
on the Way; indeed, it was so popular that the Guildford clergy disputed
the Rector's right to exact fees from the Winchester merchants attending
it. They wanted the money in Guildford. But the Chief Justice of the
King's Bench gave his judgment in the Shalford Rector's favour, and at
the height of the fair's prosperity it actually covered a hundred and
forty acres of ground. If tradition is right, then, it was in the fields
by Shalford Church that Bunyan pictured Christian and Faithful seized
and brought before the Court of the fair, and poor Faithful sentenced by
Lord Hategood "to be led from the place where he was to the place from
whence he came, and there to be put to the most cruel death that could
be invented." No doubt Bunyan's description of the trial of the two
pilgrims at the fair is an exact picture of the methods of the Court of
Pie-powder, or _Pied-puldreaux_, the tribunal which could be summoned at
a moment's notice among the merchants of the fair. The Court of
Dusty-Feet certainly worked with alarming despatch.
If Bunyan really drew his _Pilgrim's Progress_ from his memories of the
pilgrims and their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his
mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been
the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and
Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of
Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting
Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the
Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead Heath. But whether Bunyan
ever saw it there is another matter.
From Shalford Common the road runs almost straight to Bramley. But it is
worth while to leave the main road as it crosses the single railway line
from Shalford to Bramley and Cranleigh, and to turn to the right down
the little road that leads to Unstead Farm, a delightful brick and
timber building, with exceptionally graceful chimney-stacks and latticed
casements, behind which, in summer, there should surely be the largest
bowls of roses. I saw the old house last in a frosty December sunset,
surrounded by floodwater, with farm horses splashing up the road, and
plovers crying round the edges of the stream. It looked desolate enough;
but three hundred years ago it was a fine house, at one time the
property of the Austens of Shalford, and later passing into the hands of
the trustees of Henry Smith, the "Dog Smith" who gave so much to Surrey
charities, and about whom Aubrey heard a quaint legend. "He had the
nickname of Dog-Smyth, because he kept no house, but dined at friends'
houses, and then desired a bit for his dog, which was to refect
himself." Was he merely a crochety old gentleman who always went about
with his dog, or did he keep the dog's dinner for himself? Another story
about him was that once, when he was a poor boy, he was whipped through
one of the Surrey parishes--accounts differ as to whether it was
Chilworth, Tatsfield, or Wanborough--and that he struck that particular
parish out of his will, but left large sums to all the others. He
certainly left a large fortune to Surrey parishes, and no bequests have
found their way to Chilworth, Tatsfield, or Wanborough, but that is the
only foundation for the old story.
A mile south-west of Unstead Farm lies Bramley, which has grown up round
the station of the single railway line running to Guildford. The
restored church holds some good glass, but the prettiest thing in
Bramley is an old mill which, with its medlar tree overhanging the
water, its ducks and pigeons, its octagonal brick dovecot and lichened
roofs, and its sweet-water grape vine clambering on the old walls, has
a rich grace of colour and age setting it, in modern Bramley, a thing
apart.
Bramley is almost joined by Wonersh to the east: Wonersh with its quaint
other names, Wogheners, which was perhaps the original form, Wonish,
Ignorsh, and Ognersh. Wonersh was once a very important village. It was
one of the centres of the wool trade in the county, and of Wonersh, as
of Guildford, Aubrey has the same sad story to tell of cheating
clothiers. But, as we have seen, the real cause of the decay of the
Surrey wool industry was something quite different. Perhaps one of
Wonersh's rival clothiers started the story of the stretched cloth;
perhaps it was never a libel.
One of the features of the village is an enormous wall, built by one of
the Lords Grantley who had Wonersh Park, and put up the wall,
apparently, to prevent neighbours and passers-by from gazing with too
great enthusiasm at his lordship's grass and trees. It was a brother of
the third Lord Grantley, George Norton, Recorder of Guildford, who
married the famous Mrs. Norton, one of the three beautiful
granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
Besides Lord Grantley's wall, the village holds some charming old
cottages, several of them carefully restored, and two or three
square-set, solid eighteenth-century houses. There is also a slender
brick chimney of elaborate design of which Wonersh residents are justly
proud. The village, indeed, conveys the impression of being
affectionately cared for, which is not always the case with villages
which belong so much to builders long dead; but nothing, perhaps, is a
better example of the care with which the past is preserved than the
church, which is a perfect piece of restoration and scholarly rebuilding
combined. It is the work of a Surrey architect, Sir Charles Nicholson, a
neighbour at Chilworth, who carried out his difficult task in 1901, and
has since written an interesting little pamphlet on the church's
history. Two or three peculiarities distinguish the interior. One is a
crypt, paved with fourteenth-century encaustic tiles, which Aubrey
describes as "a vault strongly barricaded with iron." Another is a
magnificent Flemish chandelier, not a common adornment of a chancel. A
third is a high tomb of Sussex marble, which bears no inscription. But
the person buried in it must have been of considerable distinction, for
the cassia in which the remains Were embalmed still sweats from the
marble in wet weather--a grisly barometer. Possibly within may rest the
remains of one of the Westons or Carylls, both of which were great
families of the neighbourhood. It was John Caryll, buried in this
church, on whom was written an epitaph quoted by Aubrey, but not now to
be found. The eight lines of rhyme ended with what was perhaps thought
appropriately cheerful resignation:--
"And now, which long before he did desire,
Caryll sings Carrolls in the Heavenly Choire."
North of Wonersh rises Chinthurst Hill, a knoll conspicuous for miles
round, especially in winter, when the bleached grass of its wind-swept,
pine-crowned cap gleams strangely white in the sun. North of Chinthurst
Hill, again, on the far side of the open stretch of Shalford Common,
stands one of the most perfect timbered houses--perhaps it is the most
perfect--in the county. This is the famous Tangley Manor, which
according to the legend was one of King John's hunting boxes, and is now
as delightfully picturesque a country house as is to be seen in the
south of England. Like other old mansions in the county, Crowhurst
Place, for instance, the building of it belongs to two periods. It is a
house, or rather a hall, within a house. The hall is the older part. It
was a feature of English country life previous to the sixteenth century
that the labourers and dependants of the great country estates ate, and
in the earliest days even slept, in the hall of the mansion. When that
system of common hall life ended, it nearly always happened that the
great hall was cut in two, by a floor and bedrooms built in the upper
part. This is what has happened at Tangley and at Crowhurst Place, and
in each case the remains of the hall can be traced in the superb oak
tie-beams which cross the bedrooms from side to side of the house. The
hall is cased by a more modern building, a rich timber framework with
the date 1582 carved sprawling on the wood. The garden has every charm
that can belong to lichened brick walls, loop-holed and many-gated, and
through the garden round the house runs a moat, in which trout swim, or
once swam. John Evelyn of Wotton knew the Tangley manor moat and garden;
possibly some of the daffodils which brighten the grass in April are
descendants of bulbs he planted. On a pane of glass in one of the
bedrooms he has scratched his name and the date "John Euelyn, 1641."
Beyond Tangley Manor to the north the railway runs a loose parallel to
the little Tillingbourne, through Chilworth, Albury, Shere and Gomshall.
But the villages of the Tillingbourne belong to another chapter.