LEATHERHEAD
The Millpond.--Magic water.--Leatherhead Bridge.--The Running
Horse.--The Tunnyng of Elinour Rumming.--Noppy Ale.--A penny a
coffin.--Deflected chancels.--Judge Jeffreys and his
daughter.--_Emma._--Mr. Woodhouse's gruel.
Leatherhead ought to be entered from the west and left by the south. To
meet the little town on the road from Fetcham is to begin with a stretch
of water, which is always a good introduction; and to leave it and
travel south is to pass through one of the most fascinating valleys of
all Surrey.
The stretch of water lying to the west is the millpond, and is unlike
any other pond I know. It is two or three hundred yards long and perhaps
eighty yards wide, slopes gradually from the sides over a chalky bottom,
and is of an intense clear green. Here and there are open spaces in the
weeds; patches of deeper blue-green, which can be seen, if you look
closely, to be moving--a most uncanny motion. The water wells up
incredibly fast and quiet, and surely incredibly cold, from some
unplumbed, invisible source below. It would be interesting to try to
find the bottom with a plummet, but probably one would be caught by a
policeman. All that I have tried to do is to throw in white stones,
which disappear as if they were swallowed. But the swallowing is a
puzzling thing. The stone strikes the surface and sends out a widening
ripple. Then you watch the stone sinking down slowly against the up-rush
of water, but distinct and white and wavering. Then another ripple--a
mere ring of light, in some way mirroring the real ripple of the
surface--leaps out apparently from the side of the pool a foot or so
under water, touches the white, wavering stone, and the stone vanishes.
There is no stirring of mud, as there would be if it struck the bottom
of an ordinary pond; it merely disappears into an invisible mouth in the
green.
[Illustration: _Leatherhead._]
No frost ever sets ice on the millpond, it is said, and in hard winters
wildfowl flock to it. I never have seen on the water any fowl that were
wild, but it is crowded with swimming and diving birds. You can count
thirty or forty coots, besides moorhens and a dozen dabchicks or so, and
at the end where the mill stands there are fat duck and a bevy of swans.
It is an arresting picture, the long, clear surface, the coots with
their white foreheads dabbling in the weeds or rushing after one another
with loud splashings, the dabchicks diving six at a time out of sight,
and the dignified swans breasting the flowing water under the red brick
and lichens of the mill. The coots, unlike all other coots, too,
actually swim up to be fed. There is a strong spell of magic over all
that strange pool. Some naiad Circe combs her hair far below the weeds,
and has bewitched the wildfowl and the green cold water.
[Illustration: _Ye Olde Running Horse Inn, Leatherhead._]
It would be easy to believe that the rushing springs of the millpond
were in reality the Mole reappearing from her dive below ground at
Mickleham, higher up the stream. But if that is so, the river must pass
through some kind of filter, for it can be thick and cloudy at
Mickleham, but is never anything but clean and pure at the mill. The
mill stream joins the Mole just below Leatherhead Bridge, a fine span of
fourteen arches. The Mole can put on many faces, but I think she is
nowhere in all her journey more fascinating than where she divides her
stream under Leatherhead, and comes dancing down by separate channels to
her broad sheet of ripples at the bridge.
Beyond the bridge on the left, is the site of a very famous old inn. The
present inn, the Running Horse, has been partly rebuilt, and has few
external attractions, but the mistress of the old inn, four hundred
years ago, was the subject of an ode written by the Poet Laureate. She
was Elinour Rumming, ale-wife of a cabaret at "Lederhede in Sothray,"
and John Skelton, perhaps to amuse Henry VIII, and perhaps to please
himself, wrote one of his pungent, tumbling romps of doggerel about her.
"The Tunning of Elinour Rumming, per Skelton Laureate," as one of the
old editions prints it, is an interminable piece of rhyme, mostly an
orgy of coarseness, but with a certain rude vigour of humour and live
truth. Here are a score of lines out of some hundreds:--
THE TUNNYNG OF ELINOUR RUMMING, PER SKELTON LAUREATE.
"Tell you I chill
If that ye wyll
A while be still
Of a comelye gyll
That dwelt on a hyll
But she is not gryll
For she is somewhat sage
And well worne in age
For her visage
It would asswage
A mannes courage.
And this comely dame
I understande her name
Is Elinoure Rumminge
At home in her wonnyng
And as men say
She dwelt in Sothray
In a certain stede
By syde Lederhede
She is a tonnish gyb
The deuell and she be sib
But to take up my tale
She breweth noppy ale
And maketh thereof poorte sale
To travellers, to tinkers
To sweters, to swinkers
And all good ale drynkers
That will nothinge spare
But dryncke till they stare
And bringe them selfe bare
With now away the mare
And let us sley care
As wise as an hare."
The legend is that Skelton was a fisherman, and used to come over from
Nonsuch Palace by Epsom to fish in the Mole. Perhaps he did, and drank
Elinour's "noppy ale"; in any case, a portrait of the Leatherhead
ale-wife found its way into one of his books, with a rhymed couplet
beneath it:--
"When Skelton wore the Laurell Crowne
My Ale put all the Ale Wives downe."
The portrait is of a hag of such appalling ill-favour as would certainly
"asswage a manne's courage."
An inn of more interest, though never the subject of a Laureate's ode,
is the old coaching hostel, the Swan. It was a famous house in the
seventeenth century, and cooked the Mole trout as well as the Dorking
inns cooked their water-souchy of carp and tench. The Reverend S.N.
Sedgwick, in his ingenious little collection of Leatherhead legends,
adds a strange record to the inn property. He founds one of his stories
on a local tradition that the carrying of a dead body can establish a
right of way, and he says that in quite recent times the sum of one
penny has been charged for permission to bring a corpse through the Swan
Brewery Yard, to prevent a right of way being established.
Whether or not the right of way was established originally by carrying a
dead body over it, there is another Leatherhead tradition of a right of
way which is connected with the church. The church, with the curious
double dedication of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, stands apart from the
southern road out of Leatherhead, above the banks of the Mole. The tower
is strangely out of the axis of the nave--as much as three or four
feet--and the tradition is that it was so built to avoid encroaching on
an established right of way. Probably the explanation is something more
symbolical or superstitious. One of the most learned of all Surrey
archaeologists, Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, holds to the theory that
these deflections of the church axis are connected with legends of the
Crucifixion. The deflected chancel, he thinks, suggests the head bowed
upon the cross. But the deflected tower seems more difficult. The church
is interesting in other ways. It contains a leather-bound Book of
Homilies, chained in its original position to one of the northern
pillars of the nave; and in the porch is an upright gravestone erected
to the memory of Lady Diana Turner, the story being that she chose to be
buried under the very spot where her sedan-chair stood for the Sunday
service. She was paralysed, and listened to the Homilies from the porch.
Leatherhead has two faces. She shows one, which is slate and new, to the
traveller entering the town from Ashtead and Epsom to the north-east;
and another, which is the old bridge and the church road and the best of
her, to those who approach her from Feltham or Mickleham. St. John's
School, founded for the sons of poor clergy, lies on the Ashtead road, a
large modern building of red and grey patterned brick. But the best of
Leatherhead's houses stand about the Mole. One is Thorncroft, which
represents the domain of Tornecrosta in Domesday Book. Another is a fine
early Georgian building now known as Emlyn House, but formerly as "The
Mansion." Alexander Akehurst, M.D., one of the churchwardens who
presented the Book of Homilies to the church, rebuilt this house early
in the eighteenth century, but parts of the older building remain. Once
it belonged to Sir Thomas Bludworth, whose sister married Judge Jeffreys
of the Bloody Assize. According to a local tradition, Jeffreys, when his
worthy master King James had fled to France, slunk in disguise to
Leatherhead. It was one of the many roads he found closed against him in
his attempts to escape. But he did not come to Leatherhead solely
because it lay on the road to the south. His little daughter lay at the
point of death at her uncle's house, and his desire was to see her once
more before she died. The once mighty Lord Chancellor, dressed as a
common sailor with shaven eyebrows and coaldust smeared on his cheeks,
hated with a furious intensity of loathing which has never been felt for
an Englishman before or since, knocked fearfully at dead of night at the
door of the house where his dying daughter lay. So says the legend, and
history does not forbid belief. For the register dates the child's
funeral on December 2, 1688, and it was ten days afterwards that a wild
crowd nearly tore the judge limb from limb at Wapping.
A gentler memory, or rather association, belongs to the Church street
and the houses in the neighbourhood. There have been many attempts made
by Miss Austen's readers to identify Highbury, "the large and populous
village, almost amounting to a town" of _Emma_, with some Surrey town or
village. There is a school of serious students who place it at Esher;
another band of enthusiasts support Dorking. Mr. E.V. Lucas, in his
engaging introduction to a new edition of the novel, has another
suggestion. He recommends the theory that Highbury was Leatherhead,
which satisfies most of the conditions of the book. It is, as he says,
rightly placed as regards London, Kingston and Box Hill; though seven
miles, which was the drive from Hartfield to Box Hill, is surely rather
a generous estimate of the actual distance. But Leatherhead certainly
has a river and a "Randalls," and Mr. Lucas has been told that it has an
"Abbey Farm." That may be a mere coincidence; but, if so, it is the more
striking when one turns to the parish registers, and finds in them the
uncommon name of Knightley. Mr. Knightley, in 1761, raised the pulpit of
the church, and erected a new reading-desk and seat for the clerk, and
it was "hereby ordered that the thanks of this vestry be paid in the
most respectful manner to Mr. Knightley for this fresh mark of his
regard." Surely that is precisely what would have been the attitude of
Mr. Elton's parishioners to Emma's husband. If Miss Austen read the
parish literature, she may also have set eyes on a poem entitled,
"Norbury Park," which was written by a minor bard of the neighbourhood
named Woodhouse. But that is insisting too much; though, to be sure,
from the quality of his verse, Mr. Woodhouse, author of "Norbury Park,"
may well be imagined to have had, like Emma's father, a nice taste in
gruel.
[Illustration: _The Mole at Slyfield Place._]