GODSTONE AND BLETCHINGLEY
The White Hart at Godstone.--Cobbett's
violets.--Bletchingley.--Beagles and Foxhounds.--Dr. Nathaniel
Harris.--Begging the Love of Neighbours.--A gratious woman.--Swift
and a gentle prelate.--Bletchingley manor.--The Master of the
Revels.--An English gentleman's Armour.--How to be buried.--Posing
for a tombstone.--Nutfield.--Fuller's earth and its new uses.
The key to the east of Surrey is Godstone. It is true that the village
itself lies more than two miles from the railway station which bears its
name, but which might equally well have been named Tandridge or
Crowhurst. But there is no other centre in East Surrey from which so
many other villages and places of interest are easily reached. To the
west, a mile and a-half away, lies Bletchingley, and another mile
beyond that, Nutfield, which has not yet been absorbed by Redhill, and,
indeed, belongs to Surrey country as surely as Redhill belongs to the
railway and the town. To the north are Caterham and Chaldon, and
Woldingham and Warlingham; Tandridge is two miles away, Oxted a little
more, and Limpsfield not quite four; north of Limpsfield is Titsey, and
east of Limpsfield and Titsey is the Kent border. Crowhurst lies to the
south-east, and beyond that Lingfield; but Lingfield is almost Sussex,
and is perhaps a little too far for a walk from Godstone; it is best
reached by rail.
Godstone begins hospitably, at least to the traveller from the south,
with three old inns, the Bell, the Rose and Crown, and the old White
Hart, now the Clayton Arms. The Bell and the Rose and Crown have not, I
think, won any particular place in history; probably they were always a
little overshadowed by the spacious frontage of the old White Hart. The
Rose and Crown, for all that, displays an imposing board setting out the
numbers and the addresses of the many cycling clubs who have made it
their country headquarters--doubtless it has been the first stage of
many happy, dusty journeys. But the old White Hart has its place in the
classical country books. Cobbett often lunched there, and probably the
inn-parlour where he had his bread and bacon is very much the same as
when he wrote of the village in _Rural Rides_. Perhaps the rooms
upstairs hold more furniture than in the twenties--particularly the fine
dining-room with its oak-beamed ceiling, which is as full of furniture
as a room can very well be, besides serving various public uses as a
place in which audits and meetings are held and county and local account
books inspected. In the yard outside, too, although the great vats of
the brewhouse are gone, and Renault cars run under the arch which used
to echo with the shoes of spanking teams, there can be little changed
since Cobbett saw it. He wrote, in 1822:--
"At and near Godstone the gardens are all very neat; and at the Inn,
there is a nice garden well-stocked with beautiful flowers in the
season. I here saw, last summer, some double violets as large as
small pinks, and the lady of the house was kind enough to give me
some of the roots."
The garden is still gay and full of flowers; though if I were the
landlady I should certainly stock some peculiarly pretty sorts of
violets to keep up the tradition--even if she were to find it a little
difficult to provide the flowers in bloom in high summer. The village
itself has not grown greatly during the past hundred years. Cobbett
describes it as "a beautiful village, chiefly of one street, with a fine
large green before it, and with a pond in the green." There is not much
else to be seen now; the green is as wide and sunny, the geese and
ponies graze as contentedly, and the pond is as bright under the
chestnut trees and limes. If there has been any very noticeable change,
it has been made, perhaps, nearer the church and away towards the
railway station, which lie pretty far apart. From the main road by the
Clayton Arms there runs a gravel path up to the church, which stands on
higher ground, half a mile from the green, and by the path lies a very
fine pond, broad and deep, edged with willows and bulrushes, where wild
duck swim, and on the far side opening into a shallow bay in which you
may watch plovers bathe through the summer afternoons.
The church has not quite the grace and charm of some of its simpler
neighbours; but it is interesting as containing a number of monuments to
the Evelyns. Church mice are proverbial; but Godstone has a church
robin, or had one when I was there in the autumn of 1907. Bread had been
placed conveniently for him in one of the windows, and he flew about
watching me quietly, and eventually sang a loud solo from beside the
organ--_cantoris_, I think. Outside the church are some of Godstone's
newer buildings, the almshouses erected by Mrs. Hunt of Wonham House in
memory of her daughter; like the additions to the church, they are the
work of Sir Gilbert Scott. Nothing could be more admirable than the
repose and solidity of these delightful houses, with their massive oak
beams and sturdy red chimneys. Sir Gilbert himself lived for a time at
Rokesnest, between Tandridge and Godstone.
A mile and a half to the west of Godstone lies Bletchingley, high on the
ridge that runs parallel to the downs, above Merstham, to the north.
When Mr. Jennings walked into Bletchingley, in his _Field Paths and
Green Lanes_, the population seemed to him "at first sight to be made up
of butchers and beagles." That was more than thirty years ago, but
Bletchingley still keeps up its reputation, in regard to the beagles;
indeed, it has added to its just fame, for the odds are that, in the
summer months at all events, the first animal to catch your eye in
Bletchingley will be a foxhound. The kennels of the Burstow Hunt are at
Smallfields, near Horley, but the puppies introduce themselves to other
lodgings. Another abiding feature of Bletchingley is its cobbled
gutters. The quiet, sunny main street is one of the broadest of all
Surrey village roads, and its gutters drain it admirably. It lies
between low and comfortable old houses, of which the White Hart was the
chief, as becomes an ancient and notable inn. The White Hart when I saw
it last was welcoming a couple of foxhounds; another strolled across the
road careless of a hooting horn; another stood in a shopdoor. But of all
that belongs to the past in Bletchingley the best lies away from the
main road. Brewer Street is the name of an offshoot of Bletchingley to
the north, and contains one of the most perfect small timbered houses in
the county--the gatehouse of the old manor.
[Illustration: _Old Timbered House near Bletchingley._]
Bletchingley has been given a bad character by Cobbett. "The vile rotten
borough of Bletchingley," he calls it, and adds, from a Godstone inn,
that it is "happily for Godstone out of sight." Long before Cobbett the
Bletchingley politicians were in hot water. One of them, Dr. Nathaniel
Harris, was rector of the parish in the early days of the Stuarts, and
took his politics with him, as other clergymen have done, into the
pulpit. A Mr. Lovell was the candidate he wanted in for Bletchingley,
and he did his best for a canvass. He preached a sermon specially
directed against persons who would not vote for Lovell; he took his text
out of Matthew--"Now the chief priest and elders sought false
witnesses"; and he referred generally to his opponents as lying knaves.
It must have been inspiriting to hear him. His candidate got in, but
there was a petition against him for bribery, and Dr. Harris got into
trouble. He had to kneel at the bar of the House of Commons and humbly
confess his fault and pray for pardon, and on the next Sunday he had to
confess again in church, and to beg for the love of his neighbours.
The Reform Act ended Bletchingley as a borough. It had been bought in
the reign of Charles II by Sir Robert Clayton, and was just as flagrant
a job as Gatton or Haslemere; generally a Clayton sat for it. In the
Clayton era there were not many more than a dozen electors, but the
numbers who turned out at an election were remarkable. The inns set out
their barrels in the streets, free to all drinkers; the Bletchingley
cobbles ran beer. As a disfranchised borough, it ended with a flash of
distinction; its last members were Thomas Hyde Villiers and Lord
Palmerston.
Other Rectors of Bletchingley were gentler souls than Dr. Harris. One of
them, William Hampton--he belonged to a remarkable line of Hamptons,
seven generations, and all clergymen--left a pretty passage in his will.
He bequeathed to his granddaughter, Judith Herat, a plot of ground in
Bletchingley, because, as he wrote, "she is very like her mother and
beareth the name of her great-grandmother my mother a gratious woman."
Another, Thomas Herring, rose to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Not
everybody would have recommended him. Swift abused him. Herring preached
a sermon in Lincoln's Inn and condemned Gay's _Beggar's Opera_, and
Swift went to the attack in the _Intelligencer_. "I should be very sorry
that any of the clergy," he wrote "should be so weak as to imitate a
Court Chaplain who preached against the _Beggar's Opera_, which probably
will do more good than one thousand sermons of so stupid, so
injudicious, and so prostitute a divine." Swift would have quarrelled
with his biographer, who gives him an engaging character:--
"His person was majestic; he had a gracefulness in his behaviour and
gravity in his countenance, that always procured him reverence. His
pronunciation was so remarkably sweet and his address so insinuating
that his audience immediately on his beginning to speak were
prepossessed in his favour."
[Illustration: _Bletchingley._]
Few manors in Surrey have passed through more distinguished hands than
Bletchingley. At the Conquest it was given to the great Richard de
Tonebrige, and perhaps he built Bletchingley Castle. He was pretty well
off for land in Surrey, for he held thirty-eight manors in that county
alone. He was the head of the de Clares, and they held Bletchingley for
eight generations. The most famous of them was the Red Earl who knew how
to change sides between Simon de Montfort and Henry III so as to be
cursed as a traitor six centuries ago and recognised by later
generations as a patriot and a statesman, who could curb the barons as
well as resist the King. He was the last but one of the de Clares to
hold Bletchingley, and it was during his absence, at the battle of
Lewes, that a Royalist party destroyed the Castle. His son died at the
head of his horse at Bannockburn, and the manor came by marriage into
the Stafford family. They held it for another six generations, until the
third Duke of Buckingham, Lord High Constable under Henry VIII, ended
the splendours of the Staffords on the scaffold.
Sir Nicholas Carew had the manor next, and followed Buckingham to Tower
Hill. Then Anne of Cleves, too plain for Tower Hill, lived there, and
Sir Thomas Cawarden managed it for her and succeeded her. He is the
fascinating figure. He moves in a royal light of Courts and Kings, of
hunting and hawking in the sunshine, and plotting in dark chambers, and
guessing the value of a queen's smile. He was Henry VIII's Master of the
Revels, and Keeper of the King's tents, hales, and toyles (which were
wooden stables and traps for game), and at Bletchingley he entertained
Henry and perhaps more than one of his queens. You picture the Master of
the Revels riding in velvet by Catherine Howard, and wondering whether
her eyes would take her by the same stairway as Anne Boleyn.
When Queen Mary was proclaimed after Edward, and there were risings and
rumours of risings in support of Queen Jane, Sir Thomas Cawarden had his
difficulties. He had been getting his orders from Jane one day and Mary
the next, and suddenly there was an end; he was arrested, and all his
arms were ordered to be seized. Bletchingley Castle was searched, and
was found to contain a good deal more than the armour of a few retainers
and the artillery of a deer park. The inventory showed twenty-four
demi-lances, eighty-six horsemen's staves, one hundred pikes, one
hundred morris-pikes, one hundred bows, two handguns, and other weapons,
besides sixteen heavy pieces of cannon--enough to arm a hundred horse
and more than three hundred foot. All were seized and taken to the
Tower. Sir Thomas complained bitterly. Might not an English gentleman
keep armour in his country house if he pleased to do so? Mary could
prove nothing against him, and was obliged to let him go. But she
thought his weapons best kept in the Tower; and so, despite his
protests, did Elizabeth after her. Sir Thomas's petition for their
return and for redress is amongst the Loseley manuscripts. Here is part
of his statement:--
"That on xxv. Jan. I. Mary he was lawfully possessed at Bletchingley
of and in certein horses with furnyture armure artillarie and
munitions for the warres and divers other goodes to the value of
L2000 and that upon certein mooste untrue surmises brutes and Rumers
raised against him was brought into divers and sundry vexations and
troubles during which time one Sir Thomas Saunders Knight and
William Saunders of Ewell on pretence of comande did take into their
heads and possession the said armure and eight of his great horses
and did convey the same in 17 great waynes thoroughly loaden and at
the same time spent no small quantity of his corne hay and strawe
and had only restored 4 loades and of the said 8 great horse oon of
the best the iii^rd day after died. And the rest are in so evil
plite and lykyng and were never since otherwise liable to serve in
the carte to his great hindrance and undoing."
When Sir Thomas died, his funeral was prodigious. No expense was spared;
the feasting was Gargantuan; the villagers mourned with the best beef
and beer. Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in the _Surrey Archaeological
Collections_, has obtained from the Loseley MS. a full account of the
charges, from which I make extracts. It is headed:--
Suche CHARGES as grew the Daye of the OBSEQUIES of Sir THOMAS
CAWARDEN, Knight, decessed; viz.--
Fyrste to George Melleshe Mchaunt Taylor for black lxxv^li v^s.
It^m two tonne of beare iii^li.
It^m iiii quarters wheat iii^li xiiii^s iiii^d.
Item ii oxen vi^li xiii^s iiii^d.
Item iiii vealls xiii^s iiii^d.
Item iiii muttons xvi^s viii^d.
Item iiii piggs v^s iiii^d.
Item iiii doz. pyghons viii^s.
Item vii doz. conyes xvi^s.
Item iv doz. checkens vi^s viii^d.
Item sugere spyces and frutes v^li.
Item wyne v^li.
Item to one Garrett for helping in the kitchyne too days ii^s.
Item to Richard Leys for monye borowed of him to be dystributed at
Horselye when S^r Thom Cawarden dyed for neesorryes iii^li.
Item for the lone of black cottons xiii^s 1^d ob.
Item for the waste of other cotten iii^s.
Item for xxvii yards of black cotten that conveyed the wagon wherein
the corse was carried to Blechinglie from Horselye xv^s ix^d.
The black and the bakemeats and the beer cost altogether L149 16_s._
11_d._ But Sir Thomas had foreseen it all. There were estimates obtained
for such things in those days. Here is the estimate made by a herald of
the funeral charges of Sir Thomas's lady:--
PREPARATION to be made for the BURYALL of the LADY CARDYN.
First the body to be well syred (cered) and chested.
Item a place to be appointed wher the body shall be buryed.
Item, ordre to be takin for the hangyng of the churche withe blacke.
Item, order to be takyn for the raylles wher the morners
shall knele, to be hangyd with blacke; and also the churche, and the
said raylles, to be garnyshed with scochins.
Item, to apoint a gentylman in a blacke gowne to cary the penon of
armes.
Item, to apoint v women morners, wherof the chiefest to be in the
degree of a lady.
Item, to apoint a knyght or a squier to lede the chieff morner.
Item, to apoint iiii gentylmen to be assystance to the body.
Item, yeomen in blacke cottes to carry the body.
Item, to appoint a preacher.
Item, to appoint a paulle of blacke velvett to laye upon the body
during the service.
Item, prestes and clarks to by appontyd for the said service.
Clarencieulx King of Armes was to manage it, to have five yards of black
cloth for his mourning gown, five shillings a day for his services, L3
6s. 8d. for his fee, and to be paid back "his chargys to be boryn to and
fro." Men knew how to die then, and how to be buried.
Bletchingley manor, after the Cawardens, came to the Howards of
Effingham, and so to an heiress Elizabeth Countess of Peterborough, the
richest and loveliest lady of her day. Her son fought for the king
against his own father, and the House of Commons fined him L10,000 for
turning Roman Catholic. The money had to be found, and the manor was
sold to Sir Robert Clayton, Whig, Lord Mayor, plutocrat, and, according
to Dryden, extortioner. But Dryden's political satire was not always
fair. Ishban, in _Absalom and Achitophel_ is Sir Robert--
Ishban, of conscience suited to his trade
As good a saint as usurer ever made.
There was a suspicion that Sir Robert would have liked to purchase a
peerage, and Dryden was furious at the "shame and scandal," though a
quieter spirit, John Evelyn, dined more than once with the Mayor, and
evidently had some admiration for his hospitality. "He was a discreete
Magistrate" Evelyn writes, "and tho' envied, I think without much
cause."
If Sir Robert Clayton was criticised during his lifetime, he left plenty
of matter for dispute behind him when he died. Half Bletchingley church
is dominated by his monument. Mr. Jennings was appalled by it; "a
fearful neighbour" he calls it, and is of opinion that whatever may have
been the misdeeds of the dead, "he never could have done anything bad
enough to deserve his terrific monument." As a matter of fact the dead
man designed his own memorial, after the serenely contemplative fashion
of his time. Is the monument, after all so appalling? It cannot but be
interesting, for it is an index to the taste of a bygone age--an age
when the survivors of the dead found relief in Latin superlatives, and
the living looked into the future with the respectable vanity of an
alderman posing before a mirror. No doubt Sir Robert spent many happy
hours over his monument. Did he, or did the sculptor suggest the plump
cherubs which stand on each side, rolling stony tears from upturned
eyes? Did he decide on the particular direction in which he should throw
a leg? was it he who selected the disjointed texts which are carved
below him? or did the sculptor submit samples? It would be an arresting
spectacle; the finality of the whole thing, the weight of the choosing
would oppress even a Lord Mayor. A specimen angel would be shown him:
no, he could not approve an angel. Had the sculptor no other sizes in
cherubs? What texts were being used this season? Stone tears.... The
sculptor probably thought of those.
The church once had a fine spire. Aubrey mentions it particularly, as
measuring "more than forty feet above the battlements, with five great
bells, the tenour weighing 2000 weight, which were melted with the spire
and all the timber-work destroyed 1606." It was computed that in the
spire were 200 loads of timber. In the tower below the timber is still
magnificent and massive, and there is a new peal of bells, cast in 1780.
Bletchingley has one of the longest records of church bell ringing in
the county. On April 11, 1789, its ringers rang a full peal of 5600
changes--"college exercises"--in three hours thirty-six minutes, as you
may read in a record in the belfry. In the record the ages of the
ringers are carefully given. They range between 19 and 30. Bell ringing
is hard work.
Between Bletchingley and Redhill lies Nutfield, which has not yet been
caught into the town. Perhaps its progress into Redhill will be slow,
for it stands inconveniently high for wheeled traffic in and out of that
huddled basin of bricks, and from its own station a mile to the south
the roads up the hill are some of the steepest in east Surrey. Before
Redhill brings it more money and more bricks, it ought to be worth an
enterprising landlord's while to convert its principal inn to its old
methods. The Old Queen's Head is a posting inn with the remains of what
was once a spacious parlour, solid with oak beams big enough for a
belfry, warmed by a broad open fireplace and offering the hospitality of
two great chimney seats. The chimney seats have lapsed into cupboards
and a stove stands where once the wealden logs roared up into the night.
But if Godstone with its Clayton Arms, or Chiddingfold with its Crown,
beckons in the passer-by to look at old oak and old walls, why should
not Nutfield?
[Illustration: _Nutfield Church._]
Nutfield's chief industry, the digging of fuller's earth, dates back to
beginnings that are now quite forgotten. The Nutfield pits are still
working, and spread over the slope on which they lie a dreary stretch of
blue and grey upturned soil as if a giant gamekeeper had been digging
out colossal ferrets. The industry is old enough and important enough
for the export of fuller's earth to have been prohibited as far back as
Edward II, and in 1693 one Edmund Warren was tried in the Exchequer for
smuggling a quantity of earth out of the country, though it was proved
to be not fuller's earth but potter's clay. But there is no doubt that
great quantities were smuggled abroad, with corresponding injury--or so
it was thought at the time--to the cloth and woollen industry of
Guildford and south-west Surrey. Later days have discovered later
methods of scouring cloth of grease, and the trade no longer makes large
demands on the pits of Nutfield. But fuller's earth has still its uses
at the toilet table, and in America other uses. I have ascertained them
exactly. It is employed to dehydrate certain oils with which the
pork-packer adulterates lard.
[Illustration: _Lingfield._]