KINGSTON
Kingston Old and New.--The Stone.--The Sexton's Escape.--Throwing
over the Church.--Ducking a Scold.--Aaron Evans's shot at a
Cormorant.--The Dog Whipper.--A Feast of the Church.--Lord Francis
Villiers's fight.
[Illustration: _Kingston._]
Kingston has kept little of the past. An old alehouse, old almshouses,
an old staircase, an old roof or two by the market place, and an old
chapel, Lovekyn's, standing apart--the survivals are the loneliest
things. Lovekyn's, once a chapel, and now a school, is one of the links.
Gibbon was a scholar there, and Gibbon belongs doubly to Surrey; he was
born at Putney. But the changes at Kingston have made it almost all new,
and the changes have come quickly. Only three or four years ago the
quaint, small Harrow Inn had two companions, the Anglers and the Three
Compasses, one with a fireside corner to warm ale and tell grandfathers'
tales in, the other with traditions of highwaymen and the road. They
were pulled down. In Market Place there was once a fine Tudor house, the
Castle Inn. The noble staircase remains, a good, thoroughgoing piece of
carving of Bacchus and full casks; the house has gone. The church is old
enough to have seen these and other losses; but the church is a mixed
building; the tower, or most of it, is eighteenth century brick. Only
one spot in the open streets of the town, I think, keeps an air of
Kingston as the customers of the Castle Inn may have known it, and that
is the little byway through which runs the water splash of the Hogsmill
river. Cart horses standing in the ford, and bare-legged children
fishing for minnows, are what Kingston saw in the old days.
The Stone remains; the Stone on which tradition says that the
Anglo-Saxon kings were crowned. Once it stood in the chapel of St. Mary,
a Saxon building adjoining the church; but St. Mary's Chapel fell in
1730. It was moved to the Market Place; afterwards in 1854, to the open
space where it now stands opposite the Court-house; on the very spot,
they say, where there was once an Anglo-Saxon palace. The railing which
surrounds it has been described as "of Saxon-like design," and perhaps
that should suffice. On the pedestal which bears up the Stone are the
names of the kings who were crowned on it: Edward the Elder, Ethelstan,
Edmund, Edred, Edwig, Edward the Martyr, and Ethelred the Unready. What
is the Kings' Stone? A morasteen, the archaeologists tell you; one of a
circle of stones, on which the chief sat in council with his great men;
the predecessors of the Anglo-Saxon chiefs would have been Arch-Druids,
perhaps, or pontiff kings, acclaimed by ancient Britons centuries before
the Romans set foot in Kent.
[Illustration: _Kingston Bridge._]
Kingston church, if its architecture is confused and much of it modern,
has an imposing solemnity about it, and it contains some strange
memorials. One is a stone fragment, on which the grateful survivor of an
accident and a ruin has painted the words "Life Preserved." She was
Hester Hammerton, daughter of Abram Hammerton, sexton of the church, and
in 1729 she was helping her father to dig a grave in the churchyard
near the Saxon chapel of St. Mary. They dug too near the chapel
foundations, and the chapel fell in upon them. The sexton was killed,
almost on the spot; his daughter was saved through the jamming of a
piece of stone, and survived him as sexton for fifteen years. Another
memorial is a brass kept in the vestry; a long screed begins dismally
enough--"Ten children in one grave--a dreadful sight"; but the verse is
unequal to the opportunity. Another brass shows Robert Skern and his
wife Joan; she, according to Manning and Bray, was a daughter of Alice
Perrers, mistress of Edward III. A fourth monument, said to be in the
chancel (but I did not find it), praises Mrs. Mary Morton, daughter of
the wife of Robert Honeywood, of Charinge, Kent; she was "the Wonder of
her Sex and this Age, for she liv'd to see near 400 issued from her
Loynes." So Aubrey describes it, and so, with variations, the local
historian. Mrs. Mary Morton died in 1620.
Aubrey has another record of the giants of those days. He had heard of
one Wiltshire of the Feathers Inn at Kingston, who was a great thrower.
He would stand in the churchyard and throw a stone over the weathercock;
"he would also throw a stone over the Thames (by the bridge) and struck
the pales on the town side, which (I think) was not so difficult as the
other throw. He was then of middle stature, and about thirty years of
age." But if he had grown to greater stature? The weathercock of those
days is no more, or we might measure the throw.
Kingston has other history besides its coronation stone and its
monuments. The Parish Registers have added pictures of its past. Here is
one of two poor women allowed to beg at the church:--
February 1571.
24. Sonday was here ij wemen the mother and dowghter owte of Ireland
she called Elynor Salve to gather upon the deathe of her howsbande a
genllman slayne amongst the wylde Iryshe being Captain of Gully
glasses and gathered xviijd.
Here is a record of a Thames flood, October 9, 1570:--
Thursday at nyght rose a great winde and rayne that the Temps rosse
so hye that they myght row w^t bott^s owte of the Temps a gret waye
in to the market place and upon a sodayne.
In the year 1572 Kingston got a new cucking stool; the Kingston scolds
had become past bearing. It cost L1 3_s._ 4_d._, and as soon as it was
finished there was a very shrewish woman ducked in it.
1572 August. On Tewsday being the xix daye of this monthe of
August ---- Downing wyfe to ---- Downinge gravemaker of this paryshe
she was sett on a new cukking stolle made of a grett hythe and so
browght a bowte the markett place to Temes brydge and ther had iij
Duckinges over hed and eres becowse she was a common scolde and
fyghter.
Here are extracts from the burial registers:--
June 4. 1593. John Akerleye wentte too bathe hymsellfe and was
drownde & buryede.
August 25. 1598. William Hall was bered being shott by thefes when
he was Constabl at Coblers Hol.
September 28. 1623. Richard Ratlive a Londenner which was slayne.
17 January 1623/4 W^m Foster son of W^m a goer about.
This is hardly a burial:--
July 11. 1629. A Bird called a Cormorant light on the top of the
steeple and Aaron Evans shot, but mist it.
Here are items from the churchwarden's accounts. The parish dog whipper
had become an institution:--
1561. To fawcon for di yere (half a year) whyppyng of doggs oute of
the churche. viijd
1578. To wrighte for beating the dogges out of the churche, for half a
yeare. vjd.
But the morris dance--it was the dances that Kingston would spend money
upon. There were two kinds of games which brought gifts to the church,
May-games and the Kyngham. What sort of a game the Kyngham was nobody
knows, but it brought the churchwardens most of their money: four or
five pounds was a good collection. But the expenses could be heavy;
there were shoes for the morris dancers, six pairs at 8_d._ a pair;
there was silver paper for the dance, 8_d._; and there were for the
feast, besides other drinking, a quarter of malt, 4_s._; 5 goce (geese),
15_d._; eggs, 6_d._; lamb, 18_d._; sugar, cloves, and mace, 11_d._;
small raisins, 3_d._; saffern, 2_d._; vinegar and salt, 3_d._; 2 cocks,
18_d._; 2 calves, 5_s._ 8_d._; sheep, 12_d._; lamb, 16_d._; quarter of
veal, 8_d._; quarter of mutton, 6_d._; leg of veal and a neck, 4_d._ The
morris dancers did well, with silver paper and new shoes; but the church
kept a feast.
Kingston has the credit of the first and the last battles in the
Parliamentary wars, but the claim is a little shaky. There was an affair
of outposts between Rupert's cavalry and some Parliamentarian troops
between Oatlands and Kingston bridge in the year 1642--after
Edgehill--but it was not a battle. The real battle of Kingston came six
years later, and ended all the warfare that Surrey saw. That was the
battle which crushed Lord Holland's scheme of raising London for the
King. We shall meet Lord Holland at Reigate; but the fighting belongs to
Kingston. Holland, who had planned a rising on Banstead Downs, and had
hoped to capture and hold Reigate Castle, was in full retreat. At
Reigate he had feared to hold the position he had taken up; he retreated
on Dorking, and from Dorking, pursued by Major Audley of Livesey's
Horse, he fled north. On Kingston Common, a little south-east of where
Surbiton to-day takes train for London, his horse turned on their enemy;
his infantry fell back. From each side a few spurred out, "playing
valiantly," Audley writes. But the Royalists were beaten. Lord Francis
Villiers, younger brother to the Duke of Buckingham, a boy of great
personal beauty, fought alone in their rear. His horse was shot under
him; he backed towards an elm, and fought with six of them. They came up
behind him, pushed off his helmet and cut him to the ground. Report came
to London that he was wounded, and orders were sent out to care for him.
But he was found dead, and his pockets were rifled. The evening was the
end of the war in Surrey.
[Illustration: _The Swan, Thames Ditton._]