CHALDON TO THE DOWNS
Coulsdon.--A giant Christian prince.--Chaldon.--The Ladder of
Life.--The Brig of Whinney Moor.--Chipstead.--Merstham.--A Wizard
Rector.--Addington.--The little churches.--Horne Tooke's
_Diversions_.
It is possible to escape from Croydon's railway-stations. You can push
out from its ringing streets into green and quiet country, and find
little old churches within a mile or two of the railway, as undisturbed
as if no railway were yet running. You may leave the line at Purley, and
within an hour's walk find yourself in the wind on the downs, among
Anglo-Saxon barrows and immemorial yews; you may even be able (though
not without thought) to exclude from a generous view of hill and valley
the enormous lunatic asylums which fate and County Councils have piled
and multiplied in this part of Surrey.
There is a strip of country lying south of Purley in which you cannot
get more than a mile and a half or so from the railway, but which
contains tiny hamlets and lonely roads. Purley and Kenley will one day
come out to Coulsdon, perhaps, but Coulsdon's day is not yet. The
village itself is nothing more than a cottage or two with a church. But
the road to Coulsdon opens on broad slopes of grass and plough, bordered
with a line of yews--an ancient trackway, perhaps. Such a line, or
rather lines, for there are several along the sides of the downs a
little further south, would certainly be claimed as evidence of a
"pilgrims' way" if they ran east and west between Guildford, say, and
Dorking. Fields with such noble hedges to define them have their own air
of wildness and age; it is easy enough, even with Purley slate roofs
hardly a mile away, to fancy partridges calling across those open
spaces. Coulsdon, indeed, was once celebrated for its game. Aubrey tells
us that in the parish there was "a large coney-warren belonging to the
Desbouveries." They, for many years under Stuarts and Georges, were
lords of the manor.
From Coulsdon one may walk to Chaldon over Farthing Down. The horizon
changes, but Farthing Down itself remains high and free, smooth with
short down grass, and dinted with the hoofs of galloping horses. Croydon
and Purley send many riders abroad on Saturdays and Sundays. But
Farthing Down is peopled with other older forms. Along the ridge,
bordering the ancient trackways, lies a line of barrows. They were
opened in 1872 by Mr. John Wickham Flower; some were found untouched,
and contained perfect skeletons. In one grave lay the bones of a great
lady; buried with her was a beautiful wooden drinking-cup, its staves
fastened by bronze bands of an intricate Runic pattern of coiled snakes.
Another grave held the skeleton of a warrior giant, his sword lying
across him and the boss of his shield upon his foot. Mr. Flower thinks
he can add a name. Coulsdon is a corruption of Cuthredesdune, and
perhaps Cuthred, an Anglo-Saxon prince, lies buried here with his
family. Cuthred, son of Cwichelm, and grandson of Cynegils, the first
Christian king of Wessex, was baptised in 639 at Dorchester.
Farthing Down stretches for nearly three miles north and south, and
under its southern slope lies the little village of Chaldon. Chaldon
church holds the most remarkable wall-painting in the country. The
"Ladder of Life," or "Ladder of Salvation," is the subject, and it
occupies nearly the whole of the west wall of the church. In red and
white and yellow ochre paint you are shown the torments of the damned,
the salvation of heaven, the trampling of Satan. A ladder rises through
the middle; up it the poor souls of men struggle to the joys above; some
tumble headlong; a demon picks off others with a pitchfork and sets them
aside to burn or boil. An enormous dog eats a woman's hand; in life she
had thrown to dogs what she should have given to the poor. A usurer
painted without eyes, for usurers could not weep, sits among flames;
devils drive pitchforks into his head, moneybags hang round his neck, he
counts and swallows red hot coins. Other hapless souls, condemned to
walk a bridge of spikes, carry burdens over a thin plank like a saw set
on edge. Above is a nimbus of clouds, and above the nimbus, the weighing
of souls. The archangel Michael balances the souls in great scales; a
fiend tries to make them kick the beam. On the other side is the
Harrowing of Hell. Hell is the mouth of a monstrous devil; Christ
advances with the cross and banner, and thrusts the wood of the cross
into the devil's mouth. The souls rise up delivered from purgatory;
above them, a flying angel floats with a scroll. Mr. J.G. Waller,
writing in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, explains most of the
painting, but has hardly a guess for the scroll. "The heavens depart, as
it were a scroll rolled together;" Mr. Waller does not mention the text
which to the layman seems obvious but the expert may have reasons
against it.
The punishment of the Bridge--the walking over a sharp edge, set with
spikes or narrow as a hair--is one of the oldest things of all the
religions. The Chinese had it, in the distant Eastern ages, and Mr.
Waller, in the _Collections_, prints verses which show it surviving in
Yorkshire in 1624. There was a Yorkshire tradition that a person after
death must pass over Whinney Moor; and at a funeral it was the custom
for a woman to come and chant verses over the corpse. These are an
extract:--
When thou from hence doest pass away,
Every night and awle,
To Whinney Moor thou com'st at last,
And Christ receive thy sawle.
From Whinney Moor that thou mayest pass,
Every night and awle,
To Brig of dread thou com'st at last,
And Christ receive thy sawle.
From Brig of dread, na brader than a thread,
Every night and awle,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last,
And Christ receive thy sawle.
East of Chaldon is Caterham, west is Chipstead and south-west is
Merstham, each two miles or so away as the crow flies and something more
as the road runs, and each with a railway station. Caterham once was a
valley; Aubrey wrote of it: "In this parish are many pleasant little
vallies, stored with wild thyme, sweet marjoram, barnell, boscage, and
beeches." I do not know barnell, but the last twenty years have set
many houses among the boscage. They have built, too, two new churches,
one of them set very finely on a hill; the old church is disused, or
used, rather, only for a Sunday school. Upon Sunday scholars, from a
Norman wall, looks down a hideous stone corbel. A clown's face stretches
a devil's mouth wide open with hands like rat's paws; the sharp teeth
grin like rat's teeth; perhaps in the Sunday school they make their own
faces at it.
Chipstead, to the west, is on a hill the other side of the railway. It
has some pretty modern cottages by a pond and shading elm-trees; a
post-office also, with the smallest possible aperture for introducing
letters to the notice of the post-mistress within. The church has some
quaint features; there are a number of oddly shaped lancet windows, a
curiously carved boss in the groining of the tower, and a strange
arrangement by which the members of the choir sit facing the east with
their backs to the pulpit. In the churchyard lies Sir Edward Banks,
perhaps Chipstead's most illustrious native. He was born poor and he
died rich; and he built three great bridges, Waterloo, Southwark, and
London. Chipstead churchyard, too, has a fine yew; but good yews are
common in the churchyards south of Croydon.
The best walk from Chaldon is over the hill to Merstham; the sign-posts
show you the path and mark it "The Pilgrims' Way" to Tollsworth Farm
with the utmost assurance. From Tollsworth Farm the path drops over a
plough down the side of the hill; before the railway and the tunnel came
the old Way perhaps went straight across to the church. Merstham itself
has little to show except one pretty little side street; but the church
is more full of curiosities than any other near. Its builders placed it
delightfully on a mound which is all air and sunlight, and though much
of the charm of the church was destroyed in 1861, much that is old and
curious remains. A queerly placed clock tells the time low down on the
tower; inside are ancient monuments, one a stone effigy recovered from
use as a pavement, others to the Elinbrygge family. That is only one
spelling of the name, and perhaps as good as any other; variations are
Elinebrigge, Elyngbrigge, Elinerugge, Ellerug, Elmerugge, Elmebrugge,
Elmridge, Elmbrige, Elmebrygge, Ellmbridge, Elinrugge, Ellyngbrugg,
Elenbrig, Elingbrig, Ellyngbrigg, and Ellynbrege. An Elinbrygge in those
days could spell practically anything. Other memorials are fragments of
stone carving, once belonging to the Southcotes and Waldegraves, and
built without reason into windows and walls. Over the west chancel arch
is a broken piece of carving from old London Bridge; and forlornest
possession of all, the north chantry is paved with a tessellated floor
which was made in prison, I was told, by an unhappy woman who hoped that
forgiveness would take and use her work. Merstham has had some famous
rectors. One was the great Thomas Linacre, King's Physician to Henry VII
and Henry VIII, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, and friend
of Melanchthon and Erasmus. He became a priest when he was fifty-eight,
four years before his death, and was only Rector of Merstham for a
month. "I much wonder," Fuller writes of him in his _Worthies_, "at what
I find in good authors, that Linacre a little before his death turned
priest and began to study the Scriptures with which he was formerly
unacquainted, in so much that reading the fifth, sixth and seventh
chapters of St. Matthew he vowed, '_That_ either this was not the Gospel
or we were not Christians.'"
Another rector, Robert Cole, once was a nonconformist, especially in the
matter of ecclesiastical vestments, but eventually got rid of his
objections. Ecclesiastical Commissioners then decided to have an object
lesson in properly dressed clergymen at Lambeth. Mr. Cole was dressed in
full clerical attire, and was then "placed as the front figure at the
meeting, while the chancellor of the Bishop of London thus harangued the
auditory: 'My masters and the ministers of London, the Council's
pleasure is, that ye strictly keep the unity of apparel, like to this
man as you now see him; that is, a square cap, a scholar's gown,
priestlike, a tippet, and in the church a linen surplice.'" The auditors
then had to sign "Volo" or "Nolo," and those who refused were deprived
of their livings. Poor Mr. Cole, priestlike in his tippet, cuts a meeker
figure than another Merstham rector, James Samborne. This reverend
gentleman was actually supposed to possess supernatural powers, and when
a thief climbed up a pear-tree in the rectory orchard, Mr. Samborne went
in pursuit, fixed his gaze upon the robber from a suitable distance and
from where he stood, using dreadful arts, fastened the robber in the
tree.
Another walk from Croydon, for those who like a string of little old
churches, and an occasional fine view, would be by Addington to the
south-east through Sanderstead to Warlingham, or further south to the
edge of the chalk ridge at Woldingham. The railway is never very far
off. There is nothing imposing among these hillside hamlets; they leave
an impression of tiny villages which felt their first need to be a
church; the congregations must have been small and poor. They, of the
Surrey churches, are nearest in heart to the "little, lost down
churches" of Sussex and Mr. Kipling's most magical poem.
Addington, perhaps, could hardly be called lost, for many archbishops
have lived at Addington Park, and two lie buried in the churchyard,
Archbishop Longley and Archbishop Tait. There are memorials to three
others--Manners-Sutton, Howleigh, and Sumner. But the most attractive
name on the church walls belongs to the wife of the builder of Addington
House. She was Mrs. Grizzel Trecothick. Addington still lies in deep
country; Sanderstead, its neighbour three miles to the south-west, is
half in the country and half in the town. Old Sanderstead, the Sandy
Place, has a large, square red-brick house overlooking a park and a
quiet churchyard, where the little church, with sloping roofs over each
aisle, looks rather like a hen brooding chickens. In the chancel is a
memorial to one of those squires who held strange offices under Tudor
kings. He kneels in painted marble, and he was "John Ownsted, esquier,
servant to y^e most excellent princesse and our dread soveraigne Queene
Elizabeth, and seriant of her ma^ties cariage by y^e space of 40 yeres."
South-east of Sanderstead are Farley and Chelsham, each with an old
church; Farley's is a tiny building by a fine farmyard, but the peace of
the little church is gone; its modest spire, as you walk to the
churchyard, is dominated and affronted by the hideous clock-tower of a
neighbouring lunatic asylum. Why should such a thing be? County Councils
have decreed that in this part of Surrey must be massed together the
thousands of poor souls who have lost the reason which county
councillors must be supposed to possess; but why insist on their unhappy
presence? A building to hold such sadness should be a quiet thing,
hidden among trees, silent, alone. But that would suit neither
councillors nor architects. For them, asylums must stare, scar, insist
that they will be seen and known; and here, in what should be tranquil
and lovely country, they violate the hills.
Two other villages, Warlingham and Woldingham, lie east of the railway.
Warlingham stands round a pretty green, and has a pleasant inn; the
church, which once lay among fields, is at the end of a chestnut avenue
which belongs to the future. It is a curious little building, with a
sense of wide light and cool stone, and has been beautifully restored by
Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, who discovered, and has admirably
preserved, a particularly interesting low-side window with a circular
niche in the chancel. Woldingham, right on the edge of the chalk ridge,
has a tiny church set apart among the fields; nearer the village, a
pretty wooden chapel--almost the only pretty wooden chapel I have seen.
But the best of Woldingham is the broad and breezy grass plateau on
which it stands. On a clear day you may see London; a better view to the
south is blocked by new buildings and gardens.
The railway returns to Purley and Croydon; Purley, where Tooke lived,
and gave his name to Horne Tooke, with eight thousand pounds, for
winning him a lawsuit. From Purley Horne Tooke named his _Diversions_;
they may have diverted him, but if they did, he could be moved to mirth
by a very dreary business indeed.