Part 11

Merstham is as pretty a village as Surrey affords, and typically English. Railways have not abated, nor these turbid times altered in any great measure, its fine air of aristocratic and old-time rusticity. At one end of its one clearly-defined street, set at an angle to the high-road, are the great ornamental gates of Merstham Park, setting their stamp of landed aristocracy upon the place. To their right is a tiny gate leading to the public right-of-way through the park, which presently crosses over the pond where rise fitfully the springs of Merstham Brook, a congener of the Kentish "Nailbournes," and one of the many sources of the River Mole. To the marshy ground by this brook, and to its stone-quarries, the place owes its name. It was in Domesday Book "Merstán" = Mere-stan, the stone (house) by the lake.

Beyond the brook, above the tall trees, is seen the shingled spire of the church, an Early English building dedicated to St. Catherine, not yet spoiled, despite restorations and the scraping which its original lancet windows have undergone, in misguided efforts to endue them with an air of modernity.

The church is built of that limestone or "firestone" found so freely in the neighbourhood--a famed speciality which entered largely into the building and ornamentation of Henry the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster. Those wondrously intricate and involved carvings and traceries, whose decadent Gothic delicacy is the despair of present-day architects and stone-carvers, were possible only in this stone, which, when quarried, is of exceeding softness, but afterwards, on exposure to the air, assumes a hardness equalling that of any ordinary building-stone, and has, in addition, the merit of resisting fire, whence its name. From the softer layers comes that article of domestic use, the "hearthstone," used to whiten London hearths and doorsteps.

Merstham Church is even yet of considerable interest. It contains brasses to the Newdegate. Best, and Elmebrygge families, one recording in black letter:

"Hic iacet Johesi Elmebrygge, armiger, qui obiit biij die ffebruarij; Aº Dni Mºccccºlxxij, et Isabella uxor eius quae fuit filia Nichi Jamys quonda Maioris et Alderman London: quae obiit bijº die Septembris Aº Dni Mºccccºlxxijº et Annae uxor ei: quae fuit filia Johes Prophete Gentilman quae obiit ... Aº Dni Mºcccº ... quoru animabus ppicietur Deus."

The date of the second wife's death has never been inserted, showing that the brass was engraved and set during her lifetime, as in so many other examples of monumental brasses throughout the country. The figure of John Elmebrygge is wanting, it having been at some time torn from its matrix, but above his figure's indent remains a label inscribed _Sancta Trinitas_, and from the mouths of the remaining figures issue labels inscribed _Unus Deus--Miserere nobis_. Beneath is a group of seven daughters; the group of four sons is long since lost.

A transitional Norman font of grey Sussex marble remains at the western end of the church, and on an altar-tomb in the southern chapel are the poor remains of an ancient stone figure of the fifteenth century, presumably the effigy of a merchant civilian, as he is represented wearing the _gypcière_. It is hacked out of almost all significance at the hands of some iconoclasts; their chisel-marks are even now distinct and bear witness against the Puritan rage that defaced and buried it face downwards, the reverse side of the stone forming part of the chapel pavement until 1861, when it was discovered during the restoration of the church.

Before that restoration this was an interior of Georgian high pews. Among them the "squire's parlour" was pre-eminent, with its fireplace, its well-carpeted floor, its chairs and tables: a snuggery wherein that good man snored unobserved, or partook critically of his snuff during the parson's discreet discourse. But now the parlour is gone, and the squire must slumber, if he can, with the other sinners.

[Sidenote: GATTON]

In Merstham village, just beyond the "Feathers" inn, stood Merstham toll-gate, followed by that of Gatton, at Gatton Point, a mile distant, where the old route through Reigate goes off to the right, and the new--the seven miles between Gatton Point and Povey Cross, through Redhill--continues, straight as an arrow, ahead. The way is bordered on the right hand by Gatton Park, a spot the country folk rightly describe as an "old arnshunt place." The history of Gatton, in truth, goes back to immemorial times, and has no beginning: for where history thins out and becomes a mere scatter of disjointed scraps purporting to be facts, tradition carries back the tale into a very fog of legend and conjecture. It was "Gatone" when the Domesday survey was made: the Saxon "Geat-ton," the town in the "gate," passage, or road through the North Downs, just as Reigate is the Saxon "Rige-geat," the road over the ridge. The "ton" or town in the place-name does not necessarily mean what we moderns would understand by the word, and here doubtless indicated an enclosed, hedged, or walled-in tract of land redeemed and cultivated out of the then encompassing wilderness of the Downs.

Who first broke the land of Gatton to the plough? History and tradition are silent. No voice speaks out of the grave of the centuries. But both Reigate and Gatton are older than Anglo-Saxon times, for a Roman way, itself following the course of an even earlier savage trail, came up out of the stodgy clay of Holmesdale, over the chalky hills, to Streatham and London. It was a branch of the road leading from _Portus Adurni_--the present Old Shoreham, on the river Adur--and doubtless, in the long centuries of Romano-British civilisation, it was bordered here and there by settlements and villas. Prominent among them was Gatton. There can scarcely be a doubt of it, for, although Roman relics are not found here now, Camden, writing in the time of Henry the Eighth, tells of "Roman Coynes digged forth of the Ground." It was ever a desirable site, for here unfailing springs well out of the chalk and give an abounding fertility, while another road--the ancient Pilgrims' Way--running west and east, crossed the other highway, and thus gave ready communication on every side.

Gatton has, within the historic period, never been more than a manorial park, but an unexplained something, like the echo of a vanished greatness, has caused strangely unmerited honours to be granted it. Who shall say what induced Henry the Sixth in 1451 to make this mere country park a Parliamentary borough, returning two members? There must have been some adequate reason or excuse, even if only the one of its ancient renown; for there _must_ always be an apology of sorts for corruption; no job is jobbed without at least some shadowy semblance of legality. But no one will ever pluck out the heart of its mystery.

[Sidenote: THE ROTTEN BOROUGH]

A Parliamentary borough Gatton remained until 1832, when the first Reform Act swept away the representation of it, together with that of many another "rotten borough." Rightly had Cobbett termed it "a very rascally spot of earth," for certainly from 1541, when Sir Roger Copley owned the property and was the sole elector of the place, the election was a scandalous farce, and never at any time did the "burgesses" exceed twenty. They were always tenants of the lord of the manor and the mere marionettes that danced to his will.

Gatton, returning its two members to Parliament, as of old, was early in the nineteenth century purchased by Mark Wood, Esq., who was soon after created a Baronet. It was then recorded that in this borough there were six houses and only one freeholder: Sir Mark Wood himself. The other five houses he let by the week; and thus, paying the taxes, he was the only elector of the two representatives. At the election, he and his son Mark were the candidates, and the father duly elected himself and his son! Scandalous, no doubt; but those members must have represented the constituency better than could those of a larger electorate.

The landowner who possessed such a pocket-borough as this, and could send whomsoever he liked to Parliament, to vote as he wished, was, of course, a very important personage. His opposition was a serious matter to Governments; his support of the highest value, both politically and in a pecuniary sense; and thus place, honours, riches, could be, and were, secured. The manor of Gatton actually, in the cynical recognition of these things, was valued at twice its worth without that Parliamentary representation, and Lord Monson, who purchased the property in 1830, gave as much as £100,000 for it, solely as an investment in jobbery and corruption, by which he hoped, in the course of shrewd political wire-pulling, to obtain a cent per cent return.

He was a humorist of a cynical turn who built in front of the great mansion in midst of the park a "Town Hall" for the non-existent town, and inscribed on the urn which stands by this freakish, temple-like structure the motto, satirical in this setting, "_Salus populi suprema lex esto_," together with other sardonic Latin, to the effect that no votes sullied by bribery should be given.

Less than two years after Lord Monson's purchase of the estate, Reform had destroyed the value of Gatton Park, for it was disfranchised. We can only wonder that he did not claim compensation for the abolition of his "vested interests."

[Sidenote: MUSTARD]

There is a remarkable appropriateness in Gatton Hall being designed in the classic style, for its marble hall and Corinthian hexastyle colonnade no doubt revive the glories of the Roman villa of sixteen hundred years ago. It is magnificence itself, being indeed designed something after the manner of the Vatican at Rome, and decorated with rare and costly marbles and frescoes; but perhaps, to any one less than an emperor or a pope, a little unhomely and uncomfortable to live in. Since 1888 it has been the seat of Sir Jeremiah Colman, of Colman's Mustard, created a Baronet, 1907:

Mother, get it if you're able, See the trade mark on the label, Colman's Mustard is the Best----[Advt.],

as some unlaurelled bard of the grocery trade once sang, in deathless verse.

XVII

Half a mile short of what is now Redhill town, there once stood yet another toll-gate. "Frenches" Gate took its title from the old manor on which it stood, and the manor itself probably derived its name from the unenclosed or free (_franche_) land of which it was wholly or largely composed.

Redhill town has not existed long enough to have accumulated any history. When the more direct route was made this way, avoiding Reigate, in 1816, Redhill was--a hill. The hill is still here, as the cyclist well enough knows, and we will take on trust that red gravel whence its name comes; but since that time the town of Redhill, now numbering some 16,000 persons, has come into existence, and when we speak of Redhill we mean--not the height up which the coaches laboured, but a certain commonplace town lying at the foot of it, with a busy railway junction where there are always plenty of trains, but never the one you want, and quite a number of public institutions of the asylum and reformatory type.

The railway junction has, of course, created Redhill town, which is really in the parish of Reigate. When the land began to be built upon, in the '40's, it was called "Warwick Town," after the then Countess of Warwick, the landowner, and the names of a road and a public-house still bear witness to that somewhat lickspittle method of nomenclature. But there is, and can be, only one possible Warwick in England, and "Redhill" this "Warwick Town," by natural selection, became.

There could have been no more certain method of inviting the most odious of comparisons than that of naming Redhill after the fine old feudal town of Warwick, which first arose beneath the protecting walls of its ancient castle. Either town has an origin typical of its era, and both _look_ their history and circumstances. Redhill, within the memory of those still living, sprang up around a railway platform, and the only object that may be said to frown in it is the great gas-holder, built on absolutely the most prominent and desirable site in the whole town; and that not only frowns, but stinks as well, and is therefore not a desirable substitute for a castle keep. Here, at any rate, "Mrs. Partington's" remark that "comparisons is odorous" would be altogether in order.

Prominent above all other buildings in the town, in the backward view from that godfatherly hill, is the huge St. Anne's Asylum, housing between four and five hundred children of the poor.

"The Cutting" through the brow of the hill, enclosed on either side by high brick walls, leads presently upon Redhill and Earlswood Commons, where movement is unrestrained and free as air, and the vision is bounded only by Leith Hill in one direction and the blue haze of distance in another.

It is Holmesdale--the vale of holms, or oak woods--upon which you gaze from here; that

Vale of Holmesdall Never wonne, ne never shall,

as the braggart old couplet has it, in allusion to the defeat and slaughter of the invading Danes at Ockley A.D. 851.

In one of its periodic funks, the War Office, terrified for the safety of London more than for that of Holmesdale, purchased land on this hill-top for the erection of a fort, and--in a burst of confidence--sold it again. The time is probably near when the War Office, like another "Sister Anne," will "see somebody coming," when this or another site will be re-purchased at a much enhanced, or scare, price.

[Sidenote: EARLSWOOD]

Earlswood Common is a welcome change after Redhill. It gives sensations of elbow-room, of freedom and vastness, not so much from its own size as from the expanse of that view across the Weald of Surrey and Sussex. The road across Earlswood Common is an almost perfect "switchback," as the cyclist who is not met with a southerly wind will discover. You can see it from this view-point, going undulating away until in the dim woody perspective it seems to end in some tangled and trackless forest, so densely grown do the trees look from this distance.

It was here, at a wayside inn, that the present historian fell in with a Sussex peasant of the ancient and vanishing kind.

He was drinking from a tankard of the pea-soup which they call ale in these parts, sitting the while upon a bench whose like is usually found outside old country inns. Ruddy of face, with clean-shaven lips and chin, his grizzled beard kept rigidly upon his wrinkled dewlap, his hands gnarled and twisted with toil and rheumatism, he sat there in smock-frock and gaiters, as typical a countryman as ever on London stage brought the scent of the hay across the footlights. That smock of his, the "round frock" of Sussex parlance, was worked about the yoke of it, fore and aft, with many and curious devices, whose patterns, though he, and she who worked them, knew it not, derived from centuries of tradition and precept, had been handed down from Saxon times, aye, and before them, to the present day, when, their significance lost, they excite merely a mild wonder at their oddity and complication.

He was, it seemed, a "hedger and ditcher," and his leathern gauntlets and billhook lay beside him on the ale-house bench.

"I've worked at this sort o' thing," said he, in conversation, "for the last twenty year. Hard work? yes, onaccountable hard, and small pay for't too. Two and twopence a day I gets, an' works from seven o'marnings to half-past five in the afternoon for that. You'll be gettin' more than two and twopence a day when you're at work, I reckon."

To evade that remark by an opinion that a country life was preferable to existence in a town was easy. The old man agreed with the proposition, for he had visited London, and "a dirty place it was, sure-ly." Also he had been atop of the Monument, to the Tower, and to the resort he called "Madame Two Swords": places that Londoners generally leave to provincials. Thus, the country cousin within our gates is more learned in the stock sights of town than townsfolk themselves.

From here the road slopes gently to the Weald past Petridge Wood and Salfords, where a tributary of the Mole crosses, and where the last turnpike-gate was abolished, with cheers and a hip-hip-hooray, at the midnight of October 31st, 1881.

At Horley, the left-hand road, forming an alternative way to Brighton by Worth, Balcombe, and Wivelsfield, touches the outskirts of Thunderfield Castle.

[Sidenote: THUNDERFIELD CASTLE]

Thunderfield Castle should--if tremendous names go for aught--be a stupendous keep of the Torquilstone type, but it is, sad to say, nothing of the kind, being merely a flat circular grassy space, approached over the Mole and doubly islanded by two concentric moats. It stands upon the estate of Harrowslea--"Harsley," as the countryfolk call it--supposed to have once belonged to King Harold.

There seems to be no doubt whatever that the Anglo-Saxons _did_ name the place after the god Thunor. It was known by that name in the time of Alfred the Great, but no one knows what it was like then; nor, for that matter, what the appearance of it was when the Norman de Clares owned it. It seems never to have been a castle built of stone, but an adaptation of the primitive savage idea of surrounding a position with water and palisading it. Thunderfield was a veritable stronghold of the woods and bogs, and the defenders of it were like Hereward the Wake, who could often remain a "passive resister" and see the invaders struggling with the sloughs, the odds overwhelmingly in favour of the forces of nature.

The history of Thunderfield will never be written, but if a guess may be hazarded, the final catastrophe, which was the prime cause of the half-burnt timbers and the many human remains discovered here long ago, was a storming of the place by the forces of the neighbouring de Warennes, ancient and bitter enemies of the de Clares; probably in the wars of the twelfth century, between King Stephen and the Empress Maud.

It is an eminently undesirable situation for a residence, however suitable it may have been for defence; and the Saxons who occupied it must have known what rheumatism is. Dark woods now enclose the place, and cluttering wildfowl form its garrison.

The "Chequers" at Horley is not quite half way to Brighton, but in default of another it is the halfway house. Its name derives from the old chequy, or chessboard, arms of the Earls of Warren, chequered in gold and blue. They were not only great personages in this vale, but enjoyed in mediæval times the right of licensing ale-houses: hence the many "Chequers" throughout the country. The newer portions of the house are typically suburban, but the old-world front, with its quaint portico, the whole shaded by a group of ancient oaks, remains untouched.

Horley--the "Hurle" of old maps--is very scattered: a piece here, another there, and the parish church standing isolated at the extreme southern end of the wide parish. It is situated on an extensive flat, reeking like a sponge with the waters of the Mole, but, although so entirely undesirable a place, is under exploitation for building purposes. A stranger first arriving at Horley late at night, and seeing its long lines of lighted streets radiating in several directions, would think he had come to a town; but morning would show him that long perspectives of gas-lamps do not necessarily mean houses to correspond. Evidently those responsible for the lamps expect a coming expansion of Horley; but that expectation is not very likely to be realised.

Much of Horley belongs to Christ's Hospital, which is said to be under obligation to educate two children of poor widows, in return for the great tithes long since bequeathed to it, and is additionally accused of having consistently betrayed that trust.

The parish church, chiefly of the Early English and Decorated periods of Gothic architecture, contains some brasses and a poor old stone effigy of a bygone lord of the manor, broken-nosed and chipped, but not without its interest. The double-headed eagle on his shield is still prominent, and the crowded detail of his mailed armour and the lacings of his surcoat are as distinct as when sculptured six centuries ago. He wears the little misericorde, or dagger, at his belt, the "merciful" instrument with which gentle knights finished off their wounded enemies in the chivalric days of old.

Many years ago some person unknown stole the old churchwardens' account-book, dating from the sixteenth century. After many wanderings in the land, it was at length purchased at a second-hand bookseller's and presented to the British Museum, in which mausoleum of literature, in the Department of Manuscripts, it is now to be found. It contains a curious item, showing that even in the rigid times that produced the great Puritan upheaval, congregations were not unapt for irreverence. Thus in 1632 "John Ansty is chosen by the consent of y{e} minister and parishioners to see y{t} y{e} younge men and boyes behave themselves decently in y{e} church in time of divine service and sermon, and he is to have for his paines ij{s.}"

The nearest neighbour to the church is the almost equally ancient "Six Bells" inn, which took its title from the ring of bells in the church tower. Since 1839, however, when two bells were added, there have been eight in the belfry.

The stranger, foregathering with the rustics at the "Six Bells," and missing the old houses that once stood near the church and have been replaced by new, very quickly has his regrets for them cut short by those matter-of-fact villagers, who declare that "ye wooden tark so ef ye had to live in un." A typical rustic had "comic brown-titus" acquired in one of those damp old cottages, and has "felt funny" ever since. One with difficulty resisted the suggestion that, if he could be as funny as he felt, he should set up for a humorist, and oust some of the dull dogs who pose as jesters.

Opposite Horley church is Gatwick Park, since 1892 converted into a racecourse, with a railway station of its own. Less than a mile below it, at Povey Cross, the Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton joins the main road.

XVIII

The Sutton and Reigate route to Brighton, instead of branching off along the Brixton Road, pursues a straight undeviating course down the Clapham Road, through Balham and Upper and Lower Tooting, where it turns sharply to the left at the Broadway, and in half a mile right again, at Amen Corner. Thence it goes, by Figg's Marsh and Mitcham, to Sutton.

[Sidenote: MITCHAM COMMON]

It is not before Mitcham is reached that, in these latter days, the pilgrim is conscious of travelling the road to anywhere at all. It is all modern "street"--and streets, to this commentator at least, have a strong resemblance to rows of dog-kennels. They are places where citizens live on the chain. They lack the charm of obviously leading elsewhere: and even although electric tramcars speed multitudinously along them, to some near or distant terminus, they do but arrive there at other streets.