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.

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.

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:

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.”

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:

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.

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.”

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

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