DATCHET—RUNNYMEDE—WRAYSBURY—HORTON AND ITS MILTON
ASSOCIATIONS—STAINES MOOR—STANWELL—LALEHAM AND MATTHEW
ARNOLD—LITTLETON—CHERTSEY—WEYBRIDGE—SHEPPERTON.
By Datchet meads and the continuously flat shores of Runnymede, the river
runs somewhat tamely, after the scenic climax of Windsor. The Datchet of
Shakespearean fame it is, of course, hopeless to find. There is nothing
Shakespearean in the prettily rebuilt village with suburban villas and
railway level-crossing; and the ditch that used to be identified with
that into which Falstaff was flung, “glowing hot, like a horseshoe,
hissing hot,” has been covered over. At Old Windsor, the site of Edward
the Confessor’s original palace, the little churchyard contains the
tomb of Perdita Robinson, one of George the Fourth’s fair and foolish
friends; and down by the riverside stands the old rustic inn, the Bells
of Ouseley, whose sign puzzles ninety-nine of every hundred who behold
it. Writers of books upon the Thames either carefully avoid doing more
than mentioning the sign, or else frankly add that they do not understand
what it means, or where Ouseley is—and small blame to them, for there is
_not_ any place so-called. What is meant is “Oseney,” the vanished abbey
of that name outside Oxford, whose bells were of a peculiar fame in that
day.
Runnymede is, of course, an exceptionally interesting stretch of
meadow-land, for it was here, “_in prato quod vocatur Runnymede inter
Windelsorum et Stanes_,” that at last the barons brought King John to
book, and it was on what is now called “Magna Charta Island,” on the
Bucks side, that the King signed the Great Charter, June 15, 1215.
There are many disputed etymologies of “Runnymede,” including
“running-mead,” a scene of horseraces; and “rune-mead,” the meadow of
council; but the name doubtless really derived from “rhine” a Saxon
word that did duty for anything from a great river to a ditch. Compare
the river Rhine and the dykes or drains of Sedgemoor, still known as
“rhines.”[4] The meadows on either side of the Thames here have always
been low-lying, water-logged, and full of rills.
The army of the Barons had encamped, five days before the signing of this
great palladium of liberty, on one side of the river, and the numerically
smaller supporters of the King on the other, the island being selected as
neutral ground.
[Illustration: BACKWATER NEAR WRAYSBURY.]
The island is occupied by a modern picturesque cottage in a Gothic
convention, standing amid trim lawns and weeping willows, near the
camp-shedded shore, its gracefulness entirely out of key with those rude
times. A little cottage contains a large stone with an inscription
bidding it to be remembered that here that epoch-making document was
executed, and further, that George Simon Harcourt, Esq., lord of the
manor, erected this building in memory of the great event. It is an
excellent example of a small modern person seeking to wring a modicum of
recognition out of great historic personages and events.
Adjoining this famous isle is Ankerwyke, where are some few remains, in
the form of shapeless walls, of a Benedictine nunnery, founded late in
the twelfth century; and behind that is a village with the very Saxon
name of Wyrardisbury: long centuries ago pronounced “Wraysbury,” and now
spelled so. We hear nothing of the Saxon landowner, Wyrard, who gave his
name to the place, but Domesday Book tells us that one Robert Gernon held
the manor after the Conquest. “Gernon,” in the Norman-French of that age,
meant “Whisker,” a name which would seem to have displeased Robert’s
eldest son, for he assumed that of Montfitchet, from an Essex manor of
which he became possessed.
The river Colne flows in many channels here, crossed by substantial and
not unpicturesque white-painted timber bridges, with here and there a
secluded mill. Wraysbury church, restored out of all interest, stands
in a situation where few strangers would find it, unless they were very
determined in the quest, through a farmyard; and having found it, you
wonder why you took the trouble incidental to the doing so. But that is
just the inquisitive explorer’s fortune, and he must by no means allow
himself, by drawing blank here and there, to be dissuaded from seeking
out other byways. But stay! there is some interest at Wraysbury. Outside
the church is the many-tableted vault of a branch of the Harcourt family,
and among the names here you shall read that of Philip, “youngest brother
of Simon, Viscount Harcourt, sometime Lord High Chancellor of Great
Britian” (_sic_). Thus, you perceive, that although not the rose, Philip
found some satisfaction in kinship with it, and doubtless lived and died
happily in the glow of glory radiating from that ennobled elder brother.
[Illustration: BRASS TO AN ETON SCHOLAR, WRAYSBURY.]
There are brasses lurking unsuspected under the carpeting of this
unpromising church; notably a very small and curious example on the south
side of the chancel, protected beneath a square of carpet about the size
of a pocket-handkerchief. It represents a boy in the costume worn by Eton
scholars in the sixteenth century. The inscription runs:
Here lyeth John Stonor, the sone of Water Stonor squyer, that
departed this worlde ye 29 day of August in ye yeare of our
Lorde 1512.
This Walter Stonor—or “Water” as the inscription has it—squire of
Wraysbury, was afterwards Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and was
knighted in 1545. He died in 1550.
Horton, beyond Wraysbury, and even more secluded, is at once a
charming and an interesting place: a village made up of old mansions
and old cottages, all scattered widely amid large grounds and pretty
gardens. The church, too, is fine, chiefly of Norman and Early English
work, with a tower built in chequers of flint and stone; a fine
timber fifteenth-century north porch, and an exceptionally good and
lavishly-enriched Norman doorway.
Horton has a literary as well as a picturesque and an architectural
interest, for it is closely associated with Milton, who resided here as a
young man. Milton’s father had retired in his seventieth year, with a not
inconsiderable fortune, derived from his business as a scrivener; that is
to say, the profession of a public notary, to which was added the making
of contracts and the negotiation of loans. He had left the cares and the
money-making at Bread Street for the quiet joys of a country life, and
had settled at Horton, a place perhaps even then not more remote from the
world than now.
Hither, on leaving Christ’s College, Cambridge, came his son, John,
rather a disappointing son at this period, a son who had disregarded the
dearest wish of his parents’ hearts, that he should enter the Church; and
proposed, instead, to lead the intellectual life of study and meditation.
We may quite easily suspect that this would seem, to the hard-headed man
of business, used to placing money out to usury, and to naturally look
in every direction for an increase, for some tangible result of pains
taken and capital expended, a singularly barren prospect. It might even
have appeared to him the ideal of a lazy, feckless disposition. But the
ex-scrivener and his wife hid their disappointment as best they could,
and suffered their son to take his own course. They were, after all,
wealthy enough for him to do without a lucrative profession.
Therefore, for a period of nearly six years—from July 1632 to April 1638,
to be exact—the poet lived with his parents and his books at Horton,
occupying the time from his twenty-fourth to his thirtieth year with
study and music.
Here he composed the companion-poems, _L’Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, a
portion of a masque entitled _Arcades_, the complete masque of _Comus_,
and _Lycidas_, a long, sweetly-sorrowing poem to the memory of a friend
and fellow-colleger at Cambridge, one Edward King, who had lost his
life by shipwreck in August 1637, on crossing to Ireland. In April 1637
his mother died. We may still see on the floor of the chancel in Horton
church the plain blue stone slab simply inscribed: “Here lyeth the body
of Sara Milton, the wife of John Milton, who died the 3rd of April 1637.”
[Illustration: HORTON CHURCH.]
In 1638 Milton left Horton, accompanied by a man-servant, for a long
term of continental travel, and Horton ceased to be further associated
with him. It would be vain to seek, nowadays, for the Milton home here,
for the house at Horton, where his parents and himself and his younger
brother Christopher lived, was demolished in 1798.
The town of Staines, supposed to be the site of the Roman station of
_Ad Pontes_, and to derive its present name from its position on the
Roman road to the west—that is to say on the stones, or the stone-paved
road—stands at the meeting of Middlesex and Bucks. It is also the western
limit of the Metropolitan Police District, and a stone standing in a
riverside meadow above the bridge, known as “London Stone,” properly
and officially “the City Stone,” until modern times marked the limits
of the City of London’s river jurisdiction. Staines was also a place of
importance in the coaching age, for it stood upon the greatly travelled
Exeter road. To-day it is, in spite of those varied claims to notice, an
uninteresting place.
The neighbourhood of Staines is one of many waters. They divide
Middlesex and Bucks in the many branches and confluent channels of the
Colne, and they permeate those widespreading levels westward of what
was once Hounslow Heath known broadly as Staines Moor. This watery
landscape, now so beautiful, was once, doubtless, a very dreary waste.
All moors and heaths carry with them, in their very name, the stigma of
dreariness, just as when Goldsmith wrote. The name of a heath could only
be associated with footpads and highwaymen, and to style a scene in a
play “Crackskull Common” seemed a natural and appropriate touch. This
ill association of commons long ago became a thing of the past, but we
still couple the title of a “moor” with undesirable places, generally of
an extreme sterility and associated in the mind’s eye with inclement
weather of the worst type. The sun never shines on moors, except perhaps
so fiercely as to shrivel you up. On moors no winds blow but tempests,
probably from the north or east, and the only rains known there are cold
deluges. A moor is, in short, by force of a time-honoured tradition not
yet quite outworn, a place good to keep away from; or, being by ill-luck
upon it, to be left behind at the earliest possible moment.
Whatever Staines Moor may once have been, it no longer resembles those
inimical wilds. It is, in fact, a corner of Middlesex endued with much
beauty of a quiet, pastoral kind. In midst of it and its pleasant
grasslands and fine trees with brooks and glancing waters everywhere, and
here and there a water-mill, is Stanwell. At Stanwell the many noble elms
of these parts are more closely grouped together and grow to a greater
nobility, and at the very outskirts of the village is a finely-wooded
park—that of Stanwell Place. The especially fine water-bearing quality of
those surroundings is notable in the scenery of that park, and has led of
late years to the building of an immense reservoir, now controlled by the
Water Board. It is unfortunate that it should have been thought necessary
to form this reservoir on a higher level than that of the surrounding
country, and thus to hide it behind a huge embankment like that of a
railway, for the artificial lake so constructed is rather much of an
eyesore. It might, if built upon the level, have proved an additional
beauty in the landscape.
Stanwell is situated in the Hundred of Spelthorne, an ancient Anglo-Saxon
division of Middlesex. It is still a Petty Sessional division, but no man
knows where the ancient thorn-tree stood that marked the meeting-place
of our remote forefathers—that “Spele-Thorn,” or Speech Thorn, where the
open-air folk-moot was held.
It is a pleasant village, with a very large church, whose tall, shingled
spire rises amid luxuriant elms. Near by is a seventeenth-century
schoolhouse with a tablet inscribed:
This House and this Free Schoole were founded at the charge of
the Right Honourable Thomas, Lord Kynvett, Baron of Escricke,
and the Lady Elizabeth his wife. Endowed with a perpetuall
revennew of Twenty Pound Land. By the yeare. 1624.
A stately monument in the singular taste of that time to Knyvett and his
lady is found in the church. Against black marble columns are drawn back
stony curtains, disclosing the worthy couple kneeling and facing one
another across a prayer-desk, with the steadfast glare of two strange
cats on a debatable roof-top. At the same time, although the taste is not
that in favour to-day, the workmanship is very fine. It is the work of
the famous sculptor, Nicholas Stone, who, it is recorded, received £215
for it.
In the churchyard is a very elaborate tomb, all scroll, boldly-flung
volutes, and cherubs gazing stolidly into infinity, recording the
extraordinarily many virtues of a person whose name one promptly forgets.
It is melancholy to reflect that only in the centuries that are past was
it possible to write such epitaphs, and that such supermen in goodness
no longer exist. Or is it not rather that we have in our times a better
sense of proportion in these mortuary praises?
The manor of Stanwell was granted to the then Sir Thomas Kynvett by James
the First, in 1608. It had been a Crown property since 1543, when Henry
the Eighth took it, in his autocratic way, from the owner, Lord Windsor.
The story is told by Dugdale, who relates how the King sent a message
to Lord Windsor that he would dine with him at Stanwell. A magnificent
entertainment was accordingly prepared, and the King was fully honoured.
We may therefore perhaps imagine the disgust and alarm with which His
Majesty’s host heard him declare that he liked the place so well that he
was determined to have it; though not, he graciously added, without a
beneficial exchange.
Lord Windsor made answer that he hoped His Highness was not in earnest,
since Stanwell had been the seat of his ancestors for many generations.
The King, with a stern countenance, replied that it _must_ be;
commanding him, on his allegiance, to repair to the Attorney-General
and settle the business without delay. When he presently did so, the
Attorney-General showed him a conveyance already prepared, of Bordesley
Abbey in Worcestershire, in exchange for Stanwell, with all its lands and
appurtenances.
“Being constrained,” concludes Dugdale, “through dread of the King’s
displeasure, to accept of the exchange, he conveyed this manor to His
Majesty, being commanded to quit Stanwell immediately, though he had laid
in his Christmas provision for keeping his wonted hospitality there,
saying that they should not find it _bare Stanwell_.” But the deed of
exchange, still in existence in the Record Office, is dated nearly three
months later, March 14, 1543.
Two and three-quarter miles below the now commonplace town of Staines,
and past Penton Hook lock, the village of Laleham stands beside the
river, on the Middlesex side, in a secluded district, avoided alike
by railways and by main roads. Laleham—in Domesday Book “Leleham”—has
altered little for centuries past, and although quite recently the park
of Osmanthorpe, by the riverside, has been cut up and built upon, the
building speculation does not appear to have been very successful.
The old church, barbarously interfered with, as most Thames Valley
churches within some twenty miles of London were, in the eighteenth
century, has suffered only in respect of its tower, rebuilt in
monumentally heavy style, in red brick; and a dense growth of ivy now
kindly mantles it, from ground to coping. It is a picturesque church,
with queer little dormer windows in the roof, and the interior shows it
to be much more ancient than the casual passer-by would suppose; heavy
Norman pillars and capitals with billet mouldings proving it to date from
some period in the twelfth century. It was, in fact, the mother-church
of the district, and Staines and Ashford were mere chapelries to it, and
so they remained, in ecclesiastical government, until the middle of the
nineteenth century.
There is little in the way of interesting monuments in the church,
except that of George Perrott, which is perhaps mildly amusing. He died
1780, “Honourable Baron of H.M. Court of Exchequer.” By his decease,
we learn, “the Revenue lost a most able Assessor of its legal rights.”
The coat-of-arms of this able personage shows three pears, in the old
heraldic punning way, for “Perrott,” but the joke was not pressed to its
conclusion, for they are shown as quite sound pears.
Laleham is notable for its literary associations, for here lived Dr.
Arnold for some years, before he became headmaster of Rugby; and here
was born, in 1822, Matthew Arnold, who, dying in 1888, lies buried in
the churchyard. Here, too, is the tomb of Field-Marshal George Charles
Bingham, third Earl of Lucan, who also died in 1888. He was in command
of the Heavy Brigade in the Crimea. It was entirely due to the personal
animosities of the Earls of Lucan and Cardigan, and of Captain Nolan,
that the mistake leading to the sacrifice of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava was made.
[Illustration: LALEHAM CHURCH.]
[Illustration: MATTHEW ARNOLD’S GRAVE, LALEHAM.]
The quiet of Laleham was sadly disturbed some years ago, when there
descended upon the village that extraordinary person—a curious compound
of mystic and humbug, who called himself “Father Ignatius.” With some
seven or eight of his “monks,” he established himself at Priory Cottage.
Here they so outraged the feelings of the neighbourhood with their
fantastic proceedings in the back-garden, in which they had established
a “Mount of Olives,” and other blasphemous mockeries, that the place was
on the verge of riot, and the aid of a strong force of police had to be
secured to restore order.
Another charming village, more charming and even much more secluded than
Laleham, is Littleton, not quite two miles distant, across these flat
fields of Middlesex. It is well named “little,” for it consists of only
a little church, a fine park and manor-house beside a pretty stream, and
some scattered rustic houses. Nothing in the way of a village street, or
shop, or inn, is to be discovered, and the place is delightfully retired
amid well-wooded byways, all roads to anywhere avoiding it by some two
miles. The Early English church has been provided with an Early Georgian
red-brick tower, of a peculiarly monstrous type, and in skeleton,
roofless form. The interior of the church is so plentifully hung with old
regimental colours that it looks almost like a garrison chapel. There are
twenty-four in all, chiefly old colours of the Grenadier Guards, and were
placed here in 1855 by their commandant, General Wood, who had served in
the Peninsular War, and afterwards resided at the adjoining Littleton
Park.
A tiny window, little, if at all, larger than a pocket-handkerchief, is
filled with stained glass, representing a fallen, or sleeping, shepherd,
with a lion looking upon a dead sheep and the rest of the flock running
away. An inscription says: “This panel was designed by Sir John Millais,
R.A., and presented to Littleton church by Effie, Lady Millais, 1898.”
Returning from this _détour_, Chertsey—Anglo-Saxon “Cearta’s ey,” or
island—next claims our attention. It is a town, and a dull one, duller
now that suburban London has influenced it. Of the great Abbey—one of
the greatest in the land—that once stood here, nothing is left except a
few moss-grown stones and bases of pillars, situated in the garden of a
villa that occupies part of the site. Excavations of the ground in years
gone by disclosed the size and disposition of the Abbey church and the
monastery buildings, and a few relics were then found, including some
remarkably fine encaustic tiles, now to be seen in the Architectural
Museum at Westminster. That is all Fate and Time have left. It is an
extraordinarily complete disappearance. Stukeley, a diligent antiquary,
writing in 1752, was himself astonished at it:
“So total a dissolution I scarcely ever saw. Of that noble and splendid
pile, which took up four acres of ground, and looked like a town, nothing
remains. Human bones of abbots, monks, and great personages, who were
buried in great numbers in the church, were spread thick all over the
garden, so that one might pick up handfulls of bits of bone at a time
everywhere among the garden-stuff.”
A fragment of precinct-wall is left, and the “Abbey Mill” of to-day is
the direct descendant of that which occupied the same site in the old
times, while the cut originally made by the monks to feed it still flows
from near Penton Hook to the Thames again, near by, under the old name of
the “Abbey River.”
[Illustration: LITTLETON CHURCH.]
Weybridge, two miles below Chertsey, is a place of which it is difficult
to write with enthusiasm in pages devoted to villages. It is no longer a
village, and yet not a town; and is, indeed, like most of the places to
which we shall henceforward come, a suburban district.
What constitutes such? The answer is that it largely depends upon the
distance from London. Here we are some twenty miles from town, and by
reason of that fact, and all it means, the suburban residences are
expensive and imposing, and stand, many of them, in their own somewhat
extensive grounds. Thus, the original village and village green, to which
these developments of modern times have been added, remain not altogether
spoiled, and come as a pleasant surprise to that explorer who first makes
acquaintance with Weybridge from the direction of the railway station,
from which a typically conventional straight suburban road leads,
lengthily and formally. On the village green stands a memorial column to
a former Duchess of York, who died in 1820, at Oatlands Park, near by,
and has another monument in the church. The column is intrinsically much
more interesting for itself than as a monument to a duchess whom every
one has long since forgotten, for it is nothing less than the original
pillar set up at Seven Dials in London, about 1694, and thrown down in
1773. It remained, neglected and in fragments, in a builder’s yard, until
it was purchased for its present use, and removed hither in 1822. Another
memorial of that forgotten duchess is found in Weybridge church, a great
modern building, built in 1848, and enlarged in 1864, with an additional
south aisle. It stands on the site of an older church, is remarkable
rather for size than excellence, and contains some really terrible
stained glass. The sculptured memorial to the Duchess is by Chantery, but
it is not a very good example of his work. She is represented kneeling,
with her coronet flung behind. This, and other memorials removed from the
older building, are all huddled together in the tower. Among them is a
truly dreadful brass, representing three skeletons—among the very worst
products of a diseased imagination to be found in the length and breadth
of the land. It ought to be destroyed; and it really seems as though some
one had entertained the idea, for the head of one of the figures has
disappeared.
The river winds extravagantly at Weybridge, where it receives the waters
of the river Wey and the Bourne, and is full of islands and backwaters.
Some way downstream, and on the Middlesex shore, is little Shepperton,
one of the most secluded places imaginable, consisting of a church,
a neighbouring inn—the King’s Head—and some old-fashioned country
residences. It forms a pretty scene. In the churchyard there will be
found a stone with some verses, to
Margaret Love Peacock, Born 1823, Died 1826, one of the
children of Thomas Love Peacock who lived many years at Lower
Halliford, and died there, 1866.
[4] The battle of Sedgemoor was fought beside the Bussex Rhine.
[Illustration: INTERIOR, LITTLETON CHURCH.]