CHERTSEY
Through the hayfields.--The Abbey.--John de Rutherwyk.--Cowley in
his garden.--Bill Sikes at Chertsey.--The curfew.--A duel of
hearts.--The Chertsey legend.--St. Anne's Hill.--Digging for
treasure.--St. Paul's like a mushroom.--Charles James Fox.--Sunshine
and turnips.--Triumphant rooks.
Chertsey might well be taken as the centre from which to explore
north-west Surrey, but it is less generally convenient as regards the
railway than Weybridge, which allows exploration north, east, south and
west, whereas Chertsey lies on a branch line. Besides, there is the walk
from Weybridge to Chertsey to be taken, and there are few more
delightful near the Surrey Thames. The high road from the bridge over
the Wey runs between double ribands of water; on one side lies the
sunny, slow canal, edged with iris and forget-me-nots, and banked up
higher than the road; on the other, a shady stream, dun and
bleak-haunted. Before the road turns into Addlestone there is a
field-path, breaking off at right angles, which leads to a wooden bridge
crossing the clear, brown little Bourne, and beyond the bridge lies
Chertsey Mead, one huge hayfield, bounded on the left by wooded slopes,
on the right by the Thames itself. Two or three narrow paths intersect
the level of waving grass; the turf underfoot is as springy as peat, and
the standing crop scents the June wind, rich with daisies and clover.
Beyond Chertsey before you lies St. Anne's Hill, dark and incumbent over
the town; but you do not guess that the Thames edges that shining
hayfield until you catch sight of a boat-sail, leisurely dipping and
nodding under the Lombardy poplars that line the stream. The path leaves
the meadow close to Chertsey Bridge, graceful with seven stone arches.
A thousand years ago Chertsey was the centre of a very large tract
indeed. Chertsey Abbey, up to the Dissolution, was one of the greatest
religious houses in the kingdom, and one of the oldest. It was in
666--the date is suspiciously exact--that Frithwald, viceroy of Surrey
under Wulfer, king of the Mercians, gave the land on which the building
was to stand, and he and Erkenwald, its first abbot, duly founded the
Abbey. Frithwald, since he could not write, made the sign of the Cross
in delivering the deed. But Frithwald's Abbey was short-lived. Perhaps
it was then not much more than a little wooden church, with buildings
for its journeying priests; at all events, the Danes had no trouble in
sacking it two hundred years later, when they made their foray brutally
complete by murdering the Abbot and his ninety monks.
But Chertsey's Abbey was to rise again. Edgar rebuilt it, and his
building was rebuilt again by the Abbot Hugh of Winchester, early in the
twelfth century, and from that date began the great days. The Abbot and
convent were in high favour with the king, and lived as well as good
monks should. They had rights of warren and liberty of the chase, they
had the right to keep dogs, and they might take hares and foxes, the
neighbouring manor of Egham sent them fifty fat hogs a year, Chobham
sent them a hundred and thirty, Byfleet sent them 325 eels, and
Petersham contributed 1,000 eels and 1,000 lampreys.
[Illustration: _Chertsey Bridge._]
Other manors swelled the noble list. Such good living should produce a
good man, and Chertsey's great Abbot has left an abiding name. He was
John de Rutherwyk, an ardent and admirable landlord and a prelate of
enduring energy and wisdom. No squire of modern days ever did more to
improve his property. He built chapels and rebuilt churches; he laid out
roads and had pathways raised from the level of flooded meadows; he set
up mills and threw bridges over streams; he sowed oak plantations and
taught forestry; he planned barns and granges for corn, and dug stews
and ponds for fish, and he was as enthusiastic a churchman as he was
energetic as a farmer. He died in 1347, and two hundred years later,
chiefly owing to his energy and foresight, the manors which had once
been Chertsey's were paying to Henry VIII some L700 a year--perhaps
L14,000 of our money.
Of all that great Abbey there remains scarcely one stone upon another.
An arch and part of an arch, a ruined wall, and the foundations of a
barn; so much and no more can be seen as John de Rutherwyk saw it. A
number of faced and dressed stones are built in haphazard among the
bricks of neighbouring walls; and the rest of the Abbey, unseen and
unknown, drains Chertsey's foundations and paves her streets. Surely
never a great house fell so low and so far.
Chertsey's main street is wide and bright, and at its side lies a pond
through which the carthorses go plunging. But the town's most notable
building stands in the narrower road from the main street to the south.
This is the old Porch House, where Abraham Cowley, the poet laureate,
spent the last two years of his life, seeking in the solitudes of his
garden and the fields of his farm the rest and freedom which the
ingratitude of Charles II had forgotten to find for a faithful servant.
It was from Porch House that he wrote to John Evelyn, dedicating to him
his essay _The Garden_ with its pathetic opening:--"I never had any
desire so strong, and so like to covetousness as that which I have had
always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large
garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there
dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and study
of nature." Cowley was no lover of the town. _The Garden_ holds his
philosophy:--
"Who, that has reason, and his smell,
Would not among roses and jasmine dwell,
Rather than all his spirits choke
With exhalations of dirt and smoke
And all the uncleanness which does drown
In pestilential clouds a populous town?"
His simpler pleasures were of the orchard and the farm. The husbandman
of fruit and flowers is king:--
"He bids the ill-natured crab produce
The gentler apple's winy juice;
The golden fruit that worthy is
Of Galatea's purple kiss;
He does the savage hawthorn teach
To bear the medlar and the pear.
He bids the rustic plum to rear
A noble trunk, and be a peach.
Even Daphne's coyness he does mock,
And weds the cherry to her stock,
Though she refused Apollo's suit,
Even she, that chaste and virgin tree,
Now wonders at herself, to see
That she's a mother made, and blushes in her fruit."
[Illustration: _Cowley's Cottage, Chertsey._]
Poor Cowley! The country was too much for him after all. Late on a July
evening, after helping his haymakers to get in their last loads, he was
soaked with a heavy summer dew. He caught cold and died, on July 28,
1667, and the Thames bore his coffin to burial in Westminster Abbey.
Less easy to find, if in some ways more familiar, than Porch House, is
the very house into which the unwilling Oliver Twist was thrust by Bill
Sikes mounted upon the stooping Toby Crackit. You can see the window
through which Mr. Sikes pointed the pistol, and the door from which
burst the valiant Mr. Giles and Mr. Brittles in pursuit. Or, at least,
the more devout of Dickens students are thus privileged; I have been
less fortunate. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, I believe, has identified the
house to the satisfaction of many with Pyrcroft, a dwelling north-west
of the station. But I have gone burgling after Bill Sikes and followed
the road precisely as Dickens describes it, and Pyrcroft I never came
near.
Chertsey still keeps up some fascinating customs. She has two quaintly
named fairs, "Black Cherry Fair" on August 6, and "Goose and Onion Fair"
on September 26, when she presides over the selling of horses and
poultry. But the oldest and best custom is the ringing of the curfew
bell, which still peals out to St. Anne's Hill and over Chertsey Mead
from September 29 to March 25. The Chertsey bells are some of the finest
in the country. The original curfew bell, which is supposed to have hung
in the Abbey, tolled for the funeral of Henry VI, murdered a few hours
before in the Tower of London, and hurried to Chertsey to be buried
"without priest, clerk, torch or taper, singing or saying." According to
the safer chronicles, the dead king's body was ferried to the Abbey by
water. But Shakespeare in _Richard III_ sends the corpse through London
streets "borne in an open coffin; gentlemen bearing halberds to guard
it; and Lady Anne as mourner." It is when Lady Anne, widow of the
murdered king's son, tells the bearers to go "toward Chertsey with your
holy load," that the coffin is stopped by the murderer Gloucester, and
then follows that strange duel of hearts and words between the murderer
and the prince's widow:
GLOSTER. Teach not thy lip such scorn; for it was made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive,
Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword;
Which, if thou please to hide in this true breast,
And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,
I lay it open to the deadly stroke,
And humbly beg the death upon my knee.
[_He lays his breast open. She offers at it with his sword._
Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry,--
But 'twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now despatch; 'twas I that stabb'd young Edward,--
[_She again offers at his breast._
But 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on.
[_She lets fall the sword._
Take up the sword again or take up me.
ANNE. Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be thy executioner.
GLO. Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
ANNE. I have already.
GLO. That was in thy rage;
Speak it again, and, even with the word,
This hand, which for thy love, did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love:
To both their deaths shalt thou be necessary.
ANNE. I would I knew thy heart.
GLO. 'Tis figur'd in my tongue.
ANNE. I fear me both are false.
GLO. Then never man was true.
ANNE. Well, well, put up your sword.
GLO. Say, then, my peace is made.
ANNE. That shalt thou know hereafter.
GLO. But shall I live in hope?
ANNE. All men, I hope, live so.
GLO. Vouchsafe to wear this ring.
ANNE. To take, is not to give.
[_She puts on the ring._
King Henry's funeral is history; another tale of the Chertsey curfew
bell is legend. It was first put into the form of a story and dramatised
by a now almost forgotten novelist-poet, Albert Smith, who was born at
Chertsey himself, and wrote books which were illustrated by Leech. He
called his story _Blanche Heriot: a Legend of the Chertsey Church_, and
the play in its outline follows the legend. Blanche's lover, Neville,
the nephew of Warwick the Kingmaker, had been captured by the Yorkists
and condemned to die on Chertsey Mead within twenty-four hours. There
was a hope of reprieve if he could send his ring as a token to the king.
He sent it, but the messenger returning with the pardon was late, and
the twenty-four hours were up while the reprieve was being carried over
Laleham Ferry. But the knell for the death-stroke never sounded; Blanche
had climbed the curfew tower and held the clapper of the great bell. The
story has always been popular locally, but it first reached a really
wide audience, perhaps, when Mr. Clifford Harrison embodied it in his
poem _The Legend of Chertsey_. Since then, reciters' audiences have had
their fill.
About a mile outside the town lies St. Anne's Hill, chiefly notable,
perhaps, to-day because on its southern slope stands a house which was
at one time the residence of Charles James Fox. Its older title to fame
was the magnificence of its view. On the highest point stood St. Anne's
Chapel, of which the half-buried ruin of but a single wall remains. It
is, Aubrey remarks, "a most romancy place, from whence you have the
Prospect over Middlesex and Surrey, London, to Hertfordshire and St.
Albans, Berks, Bucks, Oxfordshire, to Windsor Castle, St. Martha's
Chapel, Hampton Court, Kingston, Hampshire, etc." Eight counties is a
noble stretch of England. But to-day the view has lost most of its
grandeur. The hill has been thickly planted with trees, conifers for the
most part, and the view can only be had in peeps and patches. Forty or
fifty years ago, before the pines were planted, there stood on the hill
three sister elms, a proud mark for all the country round. One alone
remains, fenced in with iron and hollow, and still a splendid tree; but
her shade falls on altered ground. Before the middle of the last century
the level stretch of soil to the south was ploughland: it is now a level
mead of green, glowing with bordering rhododendrons in June, and bitten
close and smooth by rabbits. It is amusing to notice the fineness of the
turf within three or four yards of the rhododendrons all round the
green; the rabbits are "poor men," like Chuchundra, and afraid to come
out into the middle of the room.
Besides the ruins of St. Anne's Chapel, which is not very much to look
at, and at which very few look, there are two other relics on the hill.
One is a spring, welling up under an arch. It is still what Aubrey
describes it to be, "a fine clear spring dressed with squared stones,"
and up to within recent years the country folk round about have been
used to fetch away water from it, in the belief that it has virtues as
an eye lotion. It has a strong taste of iron; would that be good for the
eyes? Another curiosity is the so-called Devil's Stone, or Treasure
Stone. Aubrey calls this "a conglobation of gravel and sand," and says
that the inhabitants know it as "the Devil's Stone, and believe it
cannot be mov'd, and that treasure is hid underneath." There have been
many searchers after the treasure. One of them once dug down ten feet or
more, hoping to come to the base of the huge mass, but his task grew
unkinder as he got deeper, and he gave it up. He might well do so, for
what is pretty certain is that he was trying to dig up St. Anne's Hill.
All over the face of the hill there are masses of this hard pebbly
sandstone cropping up, though they are not so noticeable as the
so-called Devil's Stone because they are flat and occasionally
crumbling, and have not had their sides laid bare by energetic
treasure-seekers.
The view from the hill has not, of course, been wholly lost. To the
south the trees shut it out almost entirely, so that part of Hampshire
and all Sussex disappear. Looking to the west you can see the pines on
Chobham Common, and perhaps Bagshot Heath beyond, but you can no longer
get a sight of Windsor Castle, for the trees have grown up on Cooper's
Hill, which lies between. To the north the church spire on the hill at
Harrow stands beautifully up from the horizon; the Wembley Tower, which
used to scar the distance, has gone. Eastward lie two familiar towers;
and you are reminded of Mr. Max Beerbohm's reflective observation that
"the great danger of travelling on the South Eastern Railway is that you
might put your head out of the window and catch sight of the Crystal
Palace." So much the greater by contrast is the loss of Windsor Castle
to the north-west. I have never yet, by the way, had the good fortune to
get to the top of St. Anne's Hill on a really clear day. I have been
informed by the lodge-keeper that the best time to get a view is in the
summer immediately the sun is up and before the London fires are
lighted. You can then see all the big London buildings, the Clock Tower,
and the Houses of Parliament, and "the dome of St. Paul's as plain as a
mushroom in the field."
Fox lived at the house at St. Anne's Hill in his quieter old age. Samuel
Rogers in his _Table Talk_ draws a pleasant picture of his life among
his books and farm buildings:--
"When I became acquainted with Fox, he had given up that kind of
life (gambling, etc.) entirely, and resided in the most perfect
sobriety and regularity at St. Anne's Hill. There he was very happy,
delighting in study, in rural occupations and rural prospects. He
would break from a criticism on Porson's _Euripides_ to look for the
little pigs. I remember his calling out to the Chertsey hills, when
a thick mist, which had for some time concealed them, rolled away:
'Good morning to you! I am glad to see you again.' There was a walk
in his grounds which led to a lane through which the farmers used to
pass; and he would stop them, and talk to them, with great
interest, about the price of turnips, etc. I was one day with him in
the Louvre, when he suddenly turned from the pictures, and, looking
out at the window, exclaimed, 'This hot sun will burn up my turnips
at St. Anne's Hill.'"
In his later life, Fox's chief delight was almost wholly in his garden,
and in country sights and sounds. It was with the greatest difficulty
that he could be dragged to London. On one occasion, in the throes of a
political crisis, he was induced to leave St. Anne's Hill on the
understanding that he would have to remain only two nights in town. When
he heard that the debate was postponed owing to Pitt's indisposition, he
was, Lord Holland relates, "silent and overcome, as if the intelligence
of some great calamity had reached his ears. I saw tears steal down his
cheeks; so vexed was he at being detained from his garden, his books,
and his cheerful life in the country." On another occasion, begged to go
to town, Fox answered that he would do so if he thought his going would
be serviceable to the public, but the idea greatly troubled him. "Never
did a letter," he wrote, "arrive at a worse time than yours this
morning. A sweet westerly wind, a beautiful sun, all the thorns and elms
just budding, and the nightingales just beginning to sing; though the
blackbirds and thrushes would have been quite sufficient to have refuted
any arguments in your letter. Seriously speaking, I cannot conceive what
you mean by everybody agreeing that something may be now done. I beg, at
least, not to be included in the holders of that opinion."
Fox's favourite bird was the nightingale; and he used to sit for hours
on a particular seat listening to its song. The St. Anne's Hill garden
is still very much as he left it; the Temple of Peace, in which Ariosto
was his most intimate companion, stands undisturbed, a quaint testimony
to the love of summerhouses in the form of temples which Fox inherited
from his father. Another summerhouse, lined with shells and quartz, is
so like the monstrosity built by the Duke of Newcastle in Oatlands Park
at Weybridge that probably Fox copied it, on a smaller scale; and near
by stands the inscription, carved on stone, of Fox's favourite verses
from Dryden:
"The painted birds, companions of the Spring,
Hopping from spray to spray were heard to sing.
Both eyes and ears received a like delight,
Enchanting music, and a charming sight.
On Philomel I fixed my whole desire,
And listened for the queen of all the quire.
Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing,
And wanted yet an omen to the Spring.
* * * * *
So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung
That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung."
It must remain a problem to discover why such verse should be associated
with the singing of nightingales. Perhaps the nightingales dislike the
association; at all events, I am told that they have deserted St. Anne's
Hill. If they have, it is a strange conclusion to the years of close
protection which a former owner of St. Anne's Hill extended to her
birds. The late Lady Holland would never have a singing bird killed nor
a nest touched in all her grounds, and if one of them was found dead in
any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt
and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide,
nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which
these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided
to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or
otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners
gladly laid aside their guns. The very next spring the rookery was
firmly established, and has cawed its paeans ever since.
[Illustration: _A Byway near Weybridge._]