Eric Parker

Through the hayfields.—The Abbey.—John de Rutherwyk.—Cowley in his garden.—Bill Sikes at Chertsey.—The curfew.—A duel of hearts.—The Chertsey legend.—St. Anne's Hill.—Digging for treasure.—St. Paul's like a mushroom.—Charles James Fox.—Sunshine and turnips.—Triumphant rooks.

Chertsey might well be taken as the centre from which to explore north-west Surrey, but it is less generally convenient as regards the railway than Weybridge, which allows exploration north, east, south and west, whereas Chertsey lies on a branch line. Besides, there is the walk from Weybridge to Chertsey to be taken, and there are few more delightful near the Surrey Thames. The high road from the bridge over the Wey runs between double ribands of water; on one side lies the sunny, slow canal, edged with iris and forget-me-nots, and banked up higher than the road; on the other, a shady stream, dun and bleak-haunted. Before the road turns into Addlestone there is a field-path, breaking off at right angles, which leads to a wooden bridge crossing the clear, brown little Bourne, and beyond the bridge lies Chertsey Mead, one huge hayfield, bounded on the left by wooded slopes, on the right by the Thames itself. Two or three narrow paths intersect the level of waving grass; the turf underfoot is as springy as peat, and the standing crop scents the June wind, rich with daisies and clover. Beyond Chertsey before you lies St. Anne's Hill, dark and incumbent over the town; but you do not guess that the Thames edges that shining hayfield until you catch sight of a boat-sail, leisurely dipping and nodding under the Lombardy poplars that line the stream. The path leaves the meadow close to Chertsey Bridge, graceful with seven stone arches.

A thousand years ago Chertsey was the centre of a very large tract indeed. Chertsey Abbey, up to the Dissolution, was one of the greatest religious houses in the kingdom, and one of the oldest. It was in 666—the date is suspiciously exact—that Frithwald, viceroy of Surrey under Wulfer, king of the Mercians, gave the land on which the building was to stand, and he and Erkenwald, its first abbot, duly founded the Abbey. Frithwald, since he could not write, made the sign of the Cross in delivering the deed. But Frithwald's Abbey was short-lived. Perhaps it was then not much more than a little wooden church, with buildings for its journeying priests; at all events, the Danes had no trouble in sacking it two hundred years later, when they made their foray brutally complete by murdering the Abbot and his ninety monks.

But Chertsey's Abbey was to rise again. Edgar rebuilt it, and his building was rebuilt again by the Abbot Hugh of Winchester, early in the twelfth century, and from that date began the great days. The Abbot and convent were in high favour with the king, and lived as well as good monks should. They had rights of warren and liberty of the chase, they had the right to keep dogs, and they might take hares and foxes, the neighbouring manor of Egham sent them fifty fat hogs a year, Chobham sent them a hundred and thirty, Byfleet sent them 325 eels, and Petersham contributed 1,000 eels and 1,000 lampreys.

Other manors swelled the noble list. Such good living should produce a good man, and Chertsey's great Abbot has left an abiding name. He was John de Rutherwyk, an ardent and admirable landlord and a prelate of enduring energy and wisdom. No squire of modern days ever did more to improve his property. He built chapels and rebuilt churches; he laid out roads and had pathways raised from the level of flooded meadows; he set up mills and threw bridges over streams; he sowed oak plantations and taught forestry; he planned barns and granges for corn, and dug stews and ponds for fish, and he was as enthusiastic a churchman as he was energetic as a farmer. He died in 1347, and two hundred years later, chiefly owing to his energy and foresight, the manors which had once been Chertsey's were paying to Henry VIII some £700 a year—perhaps £14,000 of our money.

Of all that great Abbey there remains scarcely one stone upon another. An arch and part of an arch, a ruined wall, and the foundations of a barn; so much and no more can be seen as John de Rutherwyk saw it. A number of faced and dressed stones are built in haphazard among the bricks of neighbouring walls; and the rest of the Abbey, unseen and unknown, drains Chertsey's foundations and paves her streets. Surely never a great house fell so low and so far.

Chertsey's main street is wide and bright, and at its side lies a pond through which the carthorses go plunging. But the town's most notable building stands in the narrower road from the main street to the south. This is the old Porch House, where Abraham Cowley, the poet laureate, spent the last two years of his life, seeking in the solitudes of his garden and the fields of his farm the rest and freedom which the ingratitude of Charles II had forgotten to find for a faithful servant. It was from Porch House that he wrote to John Evelyn, dedicating to him his essay The Garden with its pathetic opening:—"I never had any desire so strong, and so like to covetousness as that which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life only to the culture of them and study of nature." Cowley was no lover of the town. The Garden holds his philosophy:—

"Who, that has reason, and his smell,
Would not among roses and jasmine dwell,
Rather than all his spirits choke
With exhalations of dirt and smoke
And all the uncleanness which does drown
In pestilential clouds a populous town?"

His simpler pleasures were of the orchard and the farm. The husbandman of fruit and flowers is king:—

"He bids the ill-natured crab produce
The gentler apple's winy juice;
The golden fruit that worthy is
Of Galatea's purple kiss;
He does the savage hawthorn teach
To bear the medlar and the pear.
He bids the rustic plum to rear
A noble trunk, and be a peach.
Even Daphne's coyness he does mock,
And weds the cherry to her stock,
Though she refused Apollo's suit,
Even she, that chaste and virgin tree,
Now wonders at herself, to see
That she's a mother made, and blushes in her fruit."

Poor Cowley! The country was too much for him after all. Late on a July evening, after helping his haymakers to get in their last loads, he was soaked with a heavy summer dew. He caught cold and died, on July 28, 1667, and the Thames bore his coffin to burial in Westminster Abbey.

Less easy to find, if in some ways more familiar, than Porch House, is the very house into which the unwilling Oliver Twist was thrust by Bill Sikes mounted upon the stooping Toby Crackit. You can see the window through which Mr. Sikes pointed the pistol, and the door from which burst the valiant Mr. Giles and Mr. Brittles in pursuit. Or, at least, the more devout of Dickens students are thus privileged; I have been less fortunate. Mr. Percy Fitzgerald, I believe, has identified the house to the satisfaction of many with Pyrcroft, a dwelling north-west of the station. But I have gone burgling after Bill Sikes and followed the road precisely as Dickens describes it, and Pyrcroft I never came near.

Chertsey still keeps up some fascinating customs. She has two quaintly named fairs, "Black Cherry Fair" on August 6, and "Goose and Onion Fair" on September 26, when she presides over the selling of horses and poultry. But the oldest and best custom is the ringing of the curfew bell, which still peals out to St. Anne's Hill and over Chertsey Mead from September 29 to March 25. The Chertsey bells are some of the finest in the country. The original curfew bell, which is supposed to have hung in the Abbey, tolled for the funeral of Henry VI, murdered a few hours before in the Tower of London, and hurried to Chertsey to be buried "without priest, clerk, torch or taper, singing or saying." According to the safer chronicles, the dead king's body was ferried to the Abbey by water. But Shakespeare in Richard III sends the corpse through London streets "borne in an open coffin; gentlemen bearing halberds to guard it; and Lady Anne as mourner." It is when Lady Anne, widow of the murdered king's son, tells the bearers to go "toward Chertsey with your holy load," that the coffin is stopped by the murderer Gloucester, and then follows that strange duel of hearts and words between the murderer and the prince's widow:

Gloster. Teach not thy lip such scorn; for it was made
For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.
If thy revengeful heart cannot forgive,
Lo, here I lend thee this sharp-pointed sword;
Which, if thou please to hide in this true breast,
And let the soul forth that adoreth thee,
I lay it open to the deadly stroke,
And humbly beg the death upon my knee.

[He lays his breast open. She offers at it with his sword.

Nay, do not pause; for I did kill King Henry,—
But 'twas thy beauty that provoked me.
Nay, now despatch; 'twas I that stabb'd young Edward,—

[She again offers at his breast.

But 'twas thy heavenly face that set me on.

[She lets fall the sword.

Take up the sword again or take up me.

Anne. Arise, dissembler: though I wish thy death,
I will not be thy executioner.
Glo. Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.
Anne. I have already.
Glo.That was in thy rage;
Speak it again, and, even with the word,
This hand, which for thy love, did kill thy love,
Shall, for thy love, kill a far truer love:
To both their deaths shalt thou be necessary.
Anne. I would I knew thy heart.
Glo. 'Tis figur'd in my tongue.
Anne. I fear me both are false.
Glo. Then never man was true.
Anne. Well, well, put up your sword.
Glo. Say, then, my peace is made.
Anne. That shalt thou know hereafter.
Glo. But shall I live in hope?
Anne. All men, I hope, live so.
Glo. Vouchsafe to wear this ring.
Anne. To take, is not to give.

[She puts on the ring.

King Henry's funeral is history; another tale of the Chertsey curfew bell is legend. It was first put into the form of a story and dramatised by a now almost forgotten novelist-poet, Albert Smith, who was born at Chertsey himself, and wrote books which were illustrated by Leech. He called his story Blanche Heriot: a Legend of the Chertsey Church, and the play in its outline follows the legend. Blanche's lover, Neville, the nephew of Warwick the Kingmaker, had been captured by the Yorkists and condemned to die on Chertsey Mead within twenty-four hours. There was a hope of reprieve if he could send his ring as a token to the king. He sent it, but the messenger returning with the pardon was late, and the twenty-four hours were up while the reprieve was being carried over Laleham Ferry. But the knell for the death-stroke never sounded; Blanche had climbed the curfew tower and held the clapper of the great bell. The story has always been popular locally, but it first reached a really wide audience, perhaps, when Mr. Clifford Harrison embodied it in his poem The Legend of Chertsey. Since then, reciters' audiences have had their fill.

About a mile outside the town lies St. Anne's Hill, chiefly notable, perhaps, to-day because on its southern slope stands a house which was at one time the residence of Charles James Fox. Its older title to fame was the magnificence of its view. On the highest point stood St. Anne's Chapel, of which the half-buried ruin of but a single wall remains. It is, Aubrey remarks, "a most romancy place, from whence you have the Prospect over Middlesex and Surrey, London, to Hertfordshire and St. Albans, Berks, Bucks, Oxfordshire, to Windsor Castle, St. Martha's Chapel, Hampton Court, Kingston, Hampshire, etc." Eight counties is a noble stretch of England. But to-day the view has lost most of its grandeur. The hill has been thickly planted with trees, conifers for the most part, and the view can only be had in peeps and patches. Forty or fifty years ago, before the pines were planted, there stood on the hill three sister elms, a proud mark for all the country round. One alone remains, fenced in with iron and hollow, and still a splendid tree; but her shade falls on altered ground. Before the middle of the last century the level stretch of soil to the south was ploughland: it is now a level mead of green, glowing with bordering rhododendrons in June, and bitten close and smooth by rabbits. It is amusing to notice the fineness of the turf within three or four yards of the rhododendrons all round the green; the rabbits are "poor men," like Chuchundra, and afraid to come out into the middle of the room.

Besides the ruins of St. Anne's Chapel, which is not very much to look at, and at which very few look, there are two other relics on the hill. One is a spring, welling up under an arch. It is still what Aubrey describes it to be, "a fine clear spring dressed with squared stones," and up to within recent years the country folk round about have been used to fetch away water from it, in the belief that it has virtues as an eye lotion. It has a strong taste of iron; would that be good for the eyes? Another curiosity is the so-called Devil's Stone, or Treasure Stone. Aubrey calls this "a conglobation of gravel and sand," and says that the inhabitants know it as "the Devil's Stone, and believe it cannot be mov'd, and that treasure is hid underneath." There have been many searchers after the treasure. One of them once dug down ten feet or more, hoping to come to the base of the huge mass, but his task grew unkinder as he got deeper, and he gave it up. He might well do so, for what is pretty certain is that he was trying to dig up St. Anne's Hill. All over the face of the hill there are masses of this hard pebbly sandstone cropping up, though they are not so noticeable as the so-called Devil's Stone because they are flat and occasionally crumbling, and have not had their sides laid bare by energetic treasure-seekers.

The view from the hill has not, of course, been wholly lost. To the south the trees shut it out almost entirely, so that part of Hampshire and all Sussex disappear. Looking to the west you can see the pines on Chobham Common, and perhaps Bagshot Heath beyond, but you can no longer get a sight of Windsor Castle, for the trees have grown up on Cooper's Hill, which lies between. To the north the church spire on the hill at Harrow stands beautifully up from the horizon; the Wembley Tower, which used to scar the distance, has gone. Eastward lie two familiar towers; and you are reminded of Mr. Max Beerbohm's reflective observation that "the great danger of travelling on the South Eastern Railway is that you might put your head out of the window and catch sight of the Crystal Palace." So much the greater by contrast is the loss of Windsor Castle to the north-west. I have never yet, by the way, had the good fortune to get to the top of St. Anne's Hill on a really clear day. I have been informed by the lodge-keeper that the best time to get a view is in the summer immediately the sun is up and before the London fires are lighted. You can then see all the big London buildings, the Clock Tower, and the Houses of Parliament, and "the dome of St. Paul's as plain as a mushroom in the field."

Fox lived at the house at St. Anne's Hill in his quieter old age. Samuel Rogers in his Table Talk draws a pleasant picture of his life among his books and farm buildings:—

In his later life, Fox's chief delight was almost wholly in his garden, and in country sights and sounds. It was with the greatest difficulty that he could be dragged to London. On one occasion, in the throes of a political crisis, he was induced to leave St. Anne's Hill on the understanding that he would have to remain only two nights in town. When he heard that the debate was postponed owing to Pitt's indisposition, he was, Lord Holland relates, "silent and overcome, as if the intelligence of some great calamity had reached his ears. I saw tears steal down his cheeks; so vexed was he at being detained from his garden, his books, and his cheerful life in the country." On another occasion, begged to go to town, Fox answered that he would do so if he thought his going would be serviceable to the public, but the idea greatly troubled him. "Never did a letter," he wrote, "arrive at a worse time than yours this morning. A sweet westerly wind, a beautiful sun, all the thorns and elms just budding, and the nightingales just beginning to sing; though the blackbirds and thrushes would have been quite sufficient to have refuted any arguments in your letter. Seriously speaking, I cannot conceive what you mean by everybody agreeing that something may be now done. I beg, at least, not to be included in the holders of that opinion."

Fox's favourite bird was the nightingale; and he used to sit for hours on a particular seat listening to its song. The St. Anne's Hill garden is still very much as he left it; the Temple of Peace, in which Ariosto was his most intimate companion, stands undisturbed, a quaint testimony to the love of summerhouses in the form of temples which Fox inherited from his father. Another summerhouse, lined with shells and quartz, is so like the monstrosity built by the Duke of Newcastle in Oatlands Park at Weybridge that probably Fox copied it, on a smaller scale; and near by stands the inscription, carved on stone, of Fox's favourite verses from Dryden:

"The painted birds, companions of the Spring,
Hopping from spray to spray were heard to sing.
Both eyes and ears received a like delight,
Enchanting music, and a charming sight.
On Philomel I fixed my whole desire,
And listened for the queen of all the quire.
Fain would I hear her heavenly voice to sing,
And wanted yet an omen to the Spring.
** ** *
So sweet, so shrill, so variously she sung
That the grove echoed, and the valleys rung."

It must remain a problem to discover why such verse should be associated with the singing of nightingales. Perhaps the nightingales dislike the association; at all events, I am told that they have deserted St. Anne's Hill. If they have, it is a strange conclusion to the years of close protection which a former owner of St. Anne's Hill extended to her birds. The late Lady Holland would never have a singing bird killed nor a nest touched in all her grounds, and if one of them was found dead in any of the shrubberies, her orders were that it was to be given a prompt and respectable burial. Jays and magpies, however, she could not abide, nor crows and rooks, and a curious story is told of a rookery which these birds tried to establish near the house. Every year they decided to build in a particular tree, and every year they were shot or otherwise driven away. At last Lady Holland died, and the gardeners gladly laid aside their guns. The very next spring the rookery was firmly established, and has cawed its pÆans ever since.