GODALMING
A country town.--Peter the Great's breakfast.--Pykes in the
Wey.--Dogs and fish-carts.--Off to Botany Bay.--Owen Manning.--A
most malignant priest.--Eashing Bridges.--Peperharow deer.--Loseley
from a distance.--Charterhouse in the future.
The best view of Godalming is from the hill roads above Farncombe. Not
many towns group themselves so well against hills and woods; few have so
spacious and quiet a foreground. The church stands on the Wey; the
churchyard runs down to the very banks, and the noble leaded spire lifts
its chanticleer higher, I think, from the tower than any other church in
Surrey. Between the foot of the hill and the Wey spreads wide
meadowland; the Wey flows tranquilly by willow-herb and alder; beyond
the Wey are the red roofs of Godalming clustered in the trees. It is the
completest little country town; the green fields in front and the woods
beyond set it compact together, clustered as a country town should be
about its church and its High Street, with the river running clear at
its side.
[Illustration: _On the Way to Godalming from Haslemere._]
Godalming High Street has not kept the grace of Guildford, nor had it
ever the width and the air of Epsom or Farnham, but it has more than one
building of distinction, and its links with the past are in old inns,
timbered stories and forgotten courts. The White Hart still juts its
wooden beams over the pavement; the King's Arms, a later building, has a
square-set front which has watched many coaches jangle off to
Portsmouth. The King's Arms has had more than one king as a guest. The
Emperor Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William of Prussia
dined there in the year before Waterloo; a more famous and a more
greedy monarch who knew the King's Arms was Peter the Great in the days
of Queen Anne. He had a suite of twenty with him, and the record of his
bill of fare for the day is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. I have
not seen it, but the historians who have supply abounding details. Peter
and his twenty had for breakfast besides side-dishes, half a sheep, half
a lamb, ten pullets, a dozen chickens, seven dozen eggs and something
over a quart apiece of mulled wine, with a gallon or so of brandy.
Dinner was a better meal; three stone of ribs of beef was the main dish,
with a sheep, a lamb, and a couple of joints of veal to help it out;
capons and rabbits tempted the jaded, and four dozen of sack and wine
made up for what was lacking at breakfast.
[Illustration: _The Town Hall, Godalming._]
Besides the inns, two old houses in particular set their mark on the
High Street. One is dated 1663; both are of rich brickwork, almost
extravagantly ornate with ledges, patterned courses, elaborate parapets
and casements. The unhappy addition is the paint. If they had never been
painted, or if the paint could be done away with, the pattern would take
on twice its charm. But that is the main regret for all Godalming. If
the High Street could have its false fronts pulled down, and all its old
timber and brick shown to the road, it would fascinate as Guildford
does. It would be worth the town's while to spend money to show what it
possesses of older centuries. But that is a frequent reflection in other
towns.
[Illustration: _Timbered House in the Market Place, Godalming._]
One memory of the past has survived the attacks of Godalming's newest
and noisiest citizens. The little Town Hall, built squarely in the
middle of the road at the west end of the High Street on the site of an
older building, has been threatened by a section (I am told) of
Godalming tradesmen for many years, and would tremble still, if it were
not so solidly built of good Georgian brick. It is said to be awkward
for motor traffic, to be not handsome, and generally to be out of date
and in the way. As to its looks, it belongs to 1814, and is plain and
simple enough, but it carries a graceful clock tower and a copper
cupola, and its destruction is not to be thought of. The day has gone
for wanton throwing into the past what the past has left, and the
little Town Hall will continue to slow down the traffic and draw
visitors to the High Street, it is to be hoped, for many years to come.
The town corporation have done better for themselves than to pull down
the old Town Hall. They have set up some modern buildings for town
business, which for good work in good material are as excellent a modern
addition as could have been made to any old town.
Godalming's history, like Guildford's and Wonersh's, has been largely
the history of the wool industry. It was Godalming's careless trust in
the stability of its contractor, Samuel Vassall, which dealt the first
and shrewdest blow at its business, as we saw at Guildford. But
Godalming kept its head higher than the other two for a time. In Bowen's
map of Surrey, drawn in 1749, the printer has put a little side-note
explaining Godalming's capabilities to the curious, and you read that
for the manufacture of clothing, "it is the most considerable town in
the county. The sorts are mixed Kerseys, and Blue ones, for the Canary
Islands, which for their Colours, can't be matched in any other Part of
England." But that is not all; Bowen adds an afterthought--"Here is
plenty of good fish, especially Pykes. Here are two or three Paper
Mills, and three Corn Mills." So Godalming had food and clothing too.
She still markets woollen goods, but the pykes, I fear, gave out long
ago. Men fish in the Wey at Godalming as they fish at Guildford and
Weybridge, but they seldom catch a pyke, I know, for I have watched
them.
Fish have had other associations with Godalming besides swimming in the
Wey. Miss Gertrude Jekyll, who has written so much of Surrey gardens,
and has her own wonderful garden at Munstead not much more than a mile
away, has described in her fascinating book, _Old West Surrey_, the
carrying of fish for the London market from the seaport towns through
Godalming. It was taken in special fish-vans. "They were painted yellow
and had four horses. But some of it, as well as supplies for other
inland places, was carried in little carts drawn by dogs. The dogs were
big, strong Newfoundlands. Teams of two or four were harnessed together.
The team of four would carry three to four hundredweight of fish,
besides the driver. The man would 'cock his legs up along the sharves,'
as an old friend describes it, and away they would go at a great rate.
They not only went as fast as the coaches, but they gained time when
the coach stopped to change horses, and so got the pick of the market. A
dog-drawn cart used to bring fish from Littlehampton to Godalming, where
oysters were often to be bought for three a penny." Three a penny, fresh
oysters! Fourpence a dozen all alive! The street cries must have been
most encouraging.
Other memories of old Godalming Miss Jekyll has preserved, one of them
her own, of a carrier-cart plying between Bramley and Guildford drawn by
dogs. Then there were the coaches that stopped at the King's Arms and
the Red Lion and other inns; Godalming, on the road to Portsmouth, saw
traffic which was merry and miserable. Sometimes a coach would swing
into the town carrying sixteen sailors, four inside and twelve out, paid
off from a man-of-war and going to London to spend their money. They
would walk back. Sometimes a midnight coach would bring unhappier
passengers; gangs of convicts in chains would be given something to eat
at the Red Lion; or the yard gates of the King's Arms would be closed,
and armed warders would let out their prisoners for a little rest on the
way to Botany Bay. But the sailors were the merry folk. They would
brandish their bottles and cheer, and sometimes, when the coach swayed,
would swing with it as sailors should on a sloping deck; then the coach
turned over.
Restorers in 1840, that unhappy age for beautiful old buildings, did
what they could to spoil Godalming's parish church. They packed it from
floor to roof with pews and galleries, knocked off a porch here, a
chantry there, doubled its accommodation and quartered its charm.
Thirty-nine years later Sir Gilbert Scott and Mr. Ralph Nevill did their
best to repair the injury and show the Norman pillars as they should be,
but some of the injury done was final. Still, the church within and
without is a noble building, and the leaden spire which soars up from
the tower is the finest in the county. The church has had at least three
famous vicars. One was Owen Manning, famous perhaps against his will,
for he asked that no monument for him should be added to the church. His
epitaph should be _Si monumentum requiris_, _perlege_, for he was the
originator and part author of the history of the county which was
finished, as we saw at Shere, by William Bray. Owen Manning's was a
great mind, but he had a great heart as well; for the work he did for
his book sent him blind at seventy-five, and he bore five more years of
life knowing that he had not been suffered to finish what he had begun.
He died in 1801; and there is a curious story that he was nearly buried
alive when he was a boy. He had had the small-pox and was actually laid
out for dead. His father went in to see him, raised him in his arms
saying, "I will give my dear boy another chance," and as he did so, saw
signs of returning life.
Another vicar was Samuel Speed, grandson of the John Speed who made the
maps, and at one time he was chaplain of the fleet when Lord Ossory
fought the Dutch. Sir John Birkenhead immortalised him in a ballad on
the fight:--
His chaplain, he plyed his wonted work,
He prayed like a Christian, and fought like a Turk,
Crying now for the King, and the Duke of York,
With a thump, a thump, thump!
Another of Godalming's clergy was the Reverend Nicholas Andrewes, who
came into severe collisions with his parishioners. They petitioned
Parliament against being compelled to bear with him any longer. They
charged him among other offences with "preachinge but seldom, and then
alsoe but in a verie fruytlesse and unprofitable mann^r." They urged
that he was "a Haunter, and frequenter of tiplinge in Innes, and
tavernes, and useth gameinge both at cards and Table as well uppon the
Lords dayes as others." They accused him of having declined to church
one Mrs. Buckley "when she came to church and sate there all the tyme of
dyvine service, because she was not attyred wi^th an hanginge kerchief."
They said that he kept a curious crucifix "in a Boxe wi^th foldinge
windowes." Finally, John Monger and John Tichborne alleged "that the
said vicar and M^r. Wayferar, Parson of Compton, in the said Countie of
Surry, roade to Southampton, to eate Fishe and to make merrie togeather,
and there (dyverse tymes) drank healthes to the Pope calling him that
honest olde man." So much, and more, the parishioners had to say against
him. He was decided to be a Malignant Priest; White, in his _First
Century of Scandalous and Malignant Ministers_, arraigns him, among
other offences, for having "expressed himself to be an enemy to frequent
preaching, inveighing in his sermons against long Sermons, saying that
Peters sword cut off but one eare, but long Sermons like long swords
cut off both at once, and that the Surfeit of the Word is of all most
dangerous, and that the silliest creatures have longest eares, and that
preaching was the worst part of God's worship, and that if he left out
anything he would leave out that." And that, for Mr. Andrewes, was the
end; a man who lost his living because he would rather pray than preach.
[Illustration: _Church Street, Godalming._]
Two women have left records behind them, one strange and the other
cruel, in the parish annals. One was a remarkable person named Mary
Tofts, wife of a clothworker, who in 1726 professed to have had a
lamentable misadventure. She asserted that while she was weeding in a
field she was startled by a rabbit jumping up near her, and that
subsequently, she presented her husband, instead of a fine boy, with
quantities of rabbits. The effect of the announcement was prodigious.
More than one well-known physician believed her implicitly; pamphlets
were published on clinics, Hogarth printed a cut of the Wise Men of
Godlyman; nobody would eat a rabbit; at last Queen Caroline ended the
business by sending her own doctor to investigate, and Mary Tofts was
lodged in Bridewell. Another poor woman deceived less and was punished
more. The parish registers hold the record.
Aprill the 26^th 1658. Heare was taken a vagrant, one Mary Parker,
Widow with a Child, and she was wipped according to law, about the
age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the
place of her birth, that is in Grauesend in Kent, and she is
limitted to iiij days, and to be carried from Tithing to Tything
tell she comes to the end of the s^d jerney.
A reformer of prison discipline, who was a native of Godalming, would
have read the entry with rage. General Oglethorpe, founder of the colony
of Georgia, and originator of the inquiry into the state of the Fleet
and Marshalsea prisons, was born at Westbrook in Godalming forty years
after Godalming beat the woman through its friendless streets. We meet
General Oglethorpe at Haslemere; perhaps if he had lived earlier he
would have dared to lift his hand against the savage Elizabethan law.
How could a town assent to such shame, and yet maintain on its outskirts
an almshouse? Godalming's almshouse is a long low building of red brick,
standing behind a white gate and some elms on the road by Farncombe. It
was founded by Richard Wyatt, a rich Londoner, three times Master of the
Carpenters' Company, and the inscription over the entrance stands as he
made it:--
"This Oyspitall was given by M^r. Richard Wyatt of London, Esq.: for
tenn poore men w^th sueficient lands to it for y^ier mayntenance for
eve^r, 1622."
[Illustration: _Eashing._]
Farncombe is Godalming's suburb, and from above its hilly streets can be
had a strangely romantic view of the valley by Guildford, with St.
Martha's chapel crowning the hill. From Farncombe, too, you may take one
of the prettiest walks of all by the Wey, through rich fields of grass
ennobled with bordering elms, and with the Wey running here level with
you through meadowsweet and iris, and here below the footpath, seen
through the trees. If you push up stream, you will come to Eashing
Bridge, one of the oldest and strongest of Surrey bridges, and now a
national possession, secured from attacks of brick and iron by the
Society for Preserving Places of Historic Interest--an admirable
Society. Eashing Bridge, or rather Bridges, for it crosses the Wey
twice, and has more than five buttresses standing in the water, has
stood over the Wey for more than seven centuries. The old engineers
perhaps built over a stronger Wey than to-day's, for they made the
buttresses that point up stream to divide the water; on the other side
they are round and blunt. The time to stand on Eashing Bridge is when it
is quietest, on a Sunday morning. Up stream is the mill, humming out one
of the best of all songs of water; to the left is a row of timbered
cottages, cream-painted brick and black beams, and gay when I saw them
on a blue August morning with sweet peas and dahlias; a villager and his
wife gathered fruit in a garden banked above the road, and
white-frocked, black-stockinged children sat demurely in the cottage
doorways. But there is a patch of corrugated iron by the Eashing
cottages and bridge which calls for a Society of Destroyers.
Godalming has two fine parks for neighbours, Peperharow and Loseley.
Peperharow, which became the first Lord Midleton's in 1712, once
belonged to Sir Bernard Brocas, who was Master of the Buckhounds to
Richard II; afterwards it came to the great family of the Coverts.
Peperharow Park has its own church, but the beauty of the place is in
the parkland itself, with its noble trees and stretches of grass, and
the Wey running through it down to Eashing. Deer wander in the sunshine
there, dark and comely under the great cedars, or grazing slowly and
sedately by the banks of the stream. One might walk out from Godalming
only to watch the Peperharow deer; but a walk beyond the park brings
another pleasure. Above Peperharow the Wey is bridged again, by stone as
old, I think, as at Eashing: the buttress of the main part of the bridge
is the same shape as Eashing's. Above the bridge is a fall built across
the stream: only a few inches of masonry, but it changes the stream
completely. The higher water is a broad, shadowy pool, cooled and
darkened by alders meeting overhead and dipping in the water; below, the
shallow water ripples over stones, as clear and black as a northern
salmon stream. The difference between the Wey here and the Wey at
Eashing or Tilford is, of course its bed. The Wey runs over as many beds
as any little river in England; here it races over clean ironstone.
Loseley has a longer story than Peperharow, and Loseley House is a very
fine old Tudor building, the best, perhaps, in Surrey, after Sutton. Sir
William More built most of it, and took much of the stone from Waverley
Abbey, for which it would be difficult to forgive him if he had made a
less beautiful house. Sir William More was son of Sir Christopher,
Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex under Henry VIII. Sir Christopher first had
the estate in 1515; at the Domesday Survey the Earl of Arundel had it.
The family history of the Mores is too long for a chapter; so would be a
detailed list of the furniture and pictures of the house, some of which
are catalogued in the guide-books, though the general public may see
them but seldom. The house has had royal visitors; Queen Elizabeth came
to see Sir William More there, and King James and his son were both
guests of Sir George More, Sir William's son. It was Sir George More who
was so furious with his daughter for marrying John Donne, though he
lived to be good enough to forgive her.
[Illustration: _The Wey above Peperharow._]
I like to look at these great houses from a distance. When one enters a
house that has been used by an historic family for generations, the
first thing that demands attention is far more often than not something
new, an alteration, an adaptation of old means to new methods. The mark
set on the house is of the living, and the fascination of it belongs to
other years gone. But distance blots out all the innovations; the haze
of half a mile sets it in the landscape as it has stood for centuries. I
like to look at Loseley from the dusty, forgotten places of the old
pilgrims' road passing at the boundary of the park; not that the
pilgrims ever saw Loseley, but the old countrymen still using the road
would have seen it first, perhaps, from that ancient trackway, and have
wondered what manner of man its master might be, and how much he paid
for the building of it, and whether the King or the Queen would be
coming to Loseley again soon. That is the Loseley they would have seen;
a noble dwelling of grey gables and spacious windows, looking over broad
parkland and wide water with red cattle standing in it, flicking at the
flies with their tails. So, perhaps, would Henry Wriothesley, second
Earl of Southampton, have looked at Loseley from a distance, when
Elizabeth sent him there, the Papist prisoner of Sir William More. He
would have glanced doubtfully up and down the old road and wondered over
the hopelessness of escape.
Godalming's nearest, and in point of size, its greatest neighbour is
Charterhouse. Charterhouse is the name; the buildings are not yet forty
years old. The school moved from Aldersgate to the hill above Godalming
in 1872, and took the memories of Addison, Steele, and Thackeray with it
in its museum and library. The Charterhouse buildings belong to the
future. Centuries will add the grace of dulness to its new stone; trees
will grow round its cricket ground, distance will set a haze round the
names of its Surrey schoolboys; it will have venerable wood, there will
be legends of the passages and the stairs; the doors will have been
darkened by great men; there will be a film and a glory of years about
its chapel. To-day it is admirably arranged, hygienic beyond praise:
then it will be an old building as well as an old school.
[Illustration: _View from Hindhead._]