Eric Parker

East of Godstone.—Tandridge.—The Notebook of a Surrey Justice.—Sturdy rogues.—Oxted.—A Rustic Guildford.—Mittens and corduroys.—Limpsfield.—Self-criticism.—The Old Oak Chair.—Titsey Park and the Roman villa.—Tatsfield above the downs.

East of Godstone five churches stand in a bow stretched to the Kent boundary. Not each church has a village. Oxted and Limpsfield, in the middle of the bow, are near by a railway station, and Limpsfield plays golf on the common: both are little old villages with many new houses about them. But Tandridge and Titsey, towards each point of the bow, are churches almost without cottages, but with great parks beside them: Tatsfield, easternmost of all Surrey villages, has houses and cottages, but the church stands apart, looking out over the Weald.

Tandridge was once Tanrige, and had a priory, which disappeared, of course, at the Dissolution. It was quite a little place; its earliest record, dated somewhere near the end of the twelfth century, describes it as the Hospital of St. James, in the Ville of Tanregge, with three priests, in perpetuity there serving God, and Confraters of the said Hospital. So Odo, son of William de Dammartin, writes of it in his deed of gift of lands, a windmill, and silver cups to make a chalice. The establishment was less a priory than a small hospice, in which poor and needy persons were cared for, and to which wayfarers might come for refuge; one of those gentle places for the help and refreshment of sorrowing men that are set so strangely before the days of Tudor cruelties and tortures. The prior's hospice welcomed and comforted the tired poor; Elizabeth's age beat them, men and women, for sturdy rogues.

Later Tandridge history centres round the church and Tandridge Court. Tandridge Court has had noble owners, but perhaps the most interesting is Bostock Fuller, who was a Justice of the Peace in the days of Elizabeth, and who has left a notebook describing his work and the cases that came before him, which takes his reader extraordinarily close to Tudor times and customs. The manuscript, entitled Note Book of a Surrey Justice, is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower in the Surrey ArchÆological Collections, has made extracts from the Bodleian transcript. Here are some of them:—

So went village life for Tandridge in the golden days. Few cottages have been added since Mr. Bostock Fuller used to ride to the assizes. He would see little change, perhaps, in the church, with the glorious oak beams that bear up its belfry, and little, too, in the mighty yew whose branches brush its tower. Over one gravestone he might be puzzled. It has been placed in the grass, I think since his day, near the south door, and is an ancient monument of hard sandstone with a cross carved on it. Legend says that it was brought from Tandridge Priory, but there are others like it at Oxted and Titsey which belong to an older date than the priory.

Oxted is north-east of Tandridge; but there are two Oxteds. One is the new village near the station, with new shops, a new inn, and the old church. The other is the old village, set apart from the railway; a little village clustered about a main street running up the hillside—a rustic Guildford, a main street with cottage fronts for Guildford house fronts, and an ancient timbered inn hanging out a golden bell instead of Guildford's clock. Guildford's houses should hold Kate Greenaway maidens and prim ladies with mittens: Oxted should have corduroys and aprons, brown children and sunbonnets. So Oxted has; and it has also, I think, more little inns than any Surrey village near its size. Each has its sign; the street holds out a gallery of signs: stone steps and raised alleys run to the cottage doorways, and the children play curious village games with chalk squares and knucklebones, safe in the doorways and on the pavement. There is a corner by the road crossing the main street which is the prettiest in east Surrey. Weatherbeaten, brick-and-timber cottages frame it: the Bell Inn, with its beams like letters of a big black alphabet, hangs out its gold bell; beyond, the road slopes to dim country greennesses and the hill of the downs.

Oxted church tower is noble and massive; a great content is about its quiet, solid battlements. Once it had a spire, and I wish I had never read that the spire was destroyed; now when I see it I am always wondering what the church was like with a spire. In the churchyard are two ancient tombstones, like the single stone at Tandridge; they, too, are far older than the church.

Other strange monuments are in the church. One is to the memory of Ann, wife of Charles Hoskins, who thus mourned her in 1651:—

LET THIS
PATTERNE OF PIETY
MAPP OF MISERY
MIRROUR OF PATIENCE
HERE REST

In another memorial you may trace the history of an extremely large family. John Aldersey "haberdas^hr and m'chant ventoror of London" died in 1616, aged seventy-five, "and had ysue 17 childeren." The whole seventeen are represented in marble accompanying, and from their dress and different sizes you may guess what happened to them. There are ten sons and seven daughters; of the ten sons, six are bearded men, who grew up, perhaps, and were men like their father: three are younger, just ordinary sons, and one is a baby—I suppose died as a baby. Of the seven daughters, two are babies, and the five that wear caps you may imagine to be girls who grew up and were married and lived happily.

In Barrow Green House, an admirable building, perhaps more Georgian than Jacobean, once lived Grote, the historian. He lies in Westminster Abbey; his widow, as we saw, is buried in Shere churchyard. Barrow Green Farm, close by, is all that an old farmhouse should be, complete with barns, an oasthouse, and a fascinating front to the road. Oasthouses begin here, near the Kent border. Surrey grows few hops; only at Farnham and near Oxted, I think. In the west Hampshire encourages her, and here she takes heart from Kent.

Limpsfield is the other side of the railway. The centre is unlike old Oxted, for it is the church; but you cannot get a picture of Limpsfield as separate and self-contained as of old Oxted. Oxted sets itself on its hillside more charmingly than any village of the Surrey weald; you get the picture from halfway up the road to the station, and you should look at it when the sun is setting. Then the white ricks in the foreground loom larger, and the huddled roofs and gables age into another century; the blue smoke of wood fires drifts in the wind across the hill. But you cannot hold Limpsfield at such a pleasant distance; you must come into the village street close to the old cottages, and close too, to a large house with a noble frontage on the roadway; great houses are seldom set so near to cottages and the road. But Limpsfield, with all its attractive antiquities of timber and gables, somehow strikes a modern note. Detilens is the name—a name one vaguely tries to scan for a Latin verse—of a little, hidden house of great age, in the village street. But it is the common, not Detilens or neighbouring roofs, which marks Limpsfield, and on the common are golf links and the huge red-brick buildings of a school.

A century ago Limpsfield held an author and a critic. He was the author of a tiny book, Lympsfield and its Environs, which was republished in 1838 with an introduction by a friend, who signs himself "H.G." and dates his preface from Westerham. At Westerham, too, the curious little republication was issued. It is illustrated by George Cruikshank and with pleasant prints of old pencilled drawings, and besides a poem, contains a number of descriptions of the chief houses of the neighbourhood. Here is one of them:—

"Chart's Edge.

On inquiring of a native, we were told that this place was the residence of "Mr. Antiquary Streatfeild." We doubt, however, if he has any just pretensions to that designation, a divine across the border assuring us that he is skilled in glamoury, and illustrating his account by stating that 'where there was a hill, there he would have a hollow, where there was a dell, there we should find a mound'; and, indeed, we ourselves experienced the delusion, for the spot which we had known for many years as a bleak desert, appeared sheltered and decorated with thriving plantations, a house new from the kiln, cheated us with its Elizabethan air; neither was the spell broken when we found ourselves in the interior; there we saw, or thought we saw, one of Raphael's loveliest easel pictures, one of Rembrandt's deep toned yet brilliant interiors, and a goodly row of ancestors in flowing wigs and ample ruffles; whilst, in fact, the former were no more than a foxy Italian copy of the divine Urbino, and a modern English attempt to mimic the glorious Fleming, and the latter, Cockneys and Kentish Yeomen."