Eric Parker

Slyfields.—A Great Bowl of Silver.—The Heir.—The Danger of Parish Relief.—Stoke D'Abernon Church.—A Knightly Memorial.—Stolen Woad.—Sire Richard le Petit.—Long Sermons.—The Earliest Honeymoon.—Cobham.—A Hermit for £700.—Matthew Arnold at Pain's Hill.

The Mole wanders west away from Leatherhead by Randall's Farm and Randall's Park, and perhaps Miss Austen used to imagine Emma and Mrs. Weston walking along the rather dull road that runs up the valley by the side of the stream. North of the road, about a mile from the town, stands an old Roman camp, now buried in a small wood, with notice-boards loudly forbidding access. Another mile to the west—but you must walk two to get there—is one of the most charming of old Surrey manor-houses, now a farmhouse, but still known by its name of Slyfields.

The Slyfields were essentially a Surrey family. They lived and worked as gentlemen and yeomen and parsons among small Surrey villages, Send and Great Bookham and Byfleet and Pirford and Ripley and the Clandons; one of them, Edmond, was Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex in the time of Elizabeth. He was the greatest of the Slyfields, and left behind him sixteen sons and daughters, four Surrey manors, and a will as careful and studious as himself. Some of the items are quaint reading:—

To his son Walter, "my black velvett dublett and paire of hose of wrought velvet, my best night gowne, my best hatt, fower of my best shirtes and my best riding Cloake."

To his son William, "my coate of Tuftaffatie and a shorte cloke of rashe, laide with parchment lace."

To his son-in-law, Edward Skeete, "one shorte Cloake, called the Dutch cloke, of Black Damaske furred with squirrell, faced with caliber, and garded with velvett."

To Elizabeth, his eldest daughter, £40, "but she not to troble molest or disquiett my saide wyfe, her mother, my executrix."

To his grandson Edmond one of his great bowls of silver.

The last item is one of the most interesting. It ought to be read in conjunction with an earlier item in the same will, in which special directions are left to the executors not to pull down or to deface any manner of wainscot or glass in or about the house of Slyfield. For the end of the Slyfield family as a power in Surrey came with bitter suddenness. Henry, the Sheriff's eldest son, succeeded his father in 1590, and died in 1598. He was succeeded by his son Edmond, who had been left one of the "great bowls of silver." Within sixteen years Edmond Slyfield had sold every stick and stone of the Slyfield manors, the Slyfield house was razed to the ground to make room for a new building, and in the new building and on the old tombstones alone the name of Slyfield remains.

The new manor-house is nearly three hundred years old, and was built for the possessor of another great Surrey name, George Shiers. He was the grandfather of Sir George Shiers, baronet, who was one of the most generous of testators to Surrey villages. Among other bequests, he left a sum of money to the parish of Great Bookham, which was to be thus devoted:—

In preferring in Marriage such Maids born in this Parish as have lived and behaved themselves well for seven Years in any one Service, and whose friends are not able to do it.

To dispose of the surplus to such Poor as by Sickness, Age, a great Family of Children, or otherwise, shall be in Danger of coming under the common relief of this Parish.

The "danger of coming under the common relief" of the parish was evidently felt to be real—a strange dislike forerunning the hatred which the modern English villager feels for "the House." When Louise Michel, the leader of the pÉtroleuses of the French Revolution, was shown over one of the great London Unions not long before her death, she was filled with wonder and admiration. "If we had had that in France," she said, "we should have had no revolution." The Englishman leaves legacies to enable poor parishioners to escape from the danger.

Slyfields Manor, picturesque though it is, is still only a remnant. Only one side of what was once a quadrangular building remains, but the solid symmetry of its red-brick walls and ivied gables, and the hugeness of its ornate and lichened barns and granaries, make it as imposing as any farmhouse well could be. Curiously enough, like the older Crowhurst Place, the other side of the county, a farmhouse it still remains.

The Slyfields and the Shiers lie in Great Bookham church. Another church stands not half a mile away from the house, in a smooth and green garden on the banks of the Mole. Stoke D'Abernon church contains one of the great possessions of Surrey—the oldest brass in England—a monument which, besides being the oldest of its kind, is the very knightliest memorial an English gentleman could have. A plain slab of brass, on which has been elaborately engraved the figure of a soldier in full chain mail, with his six-foot lance and its fringed pennon, his long prick-spurs, and his great two-handed sword, it has lain in an English church for nearly six centuries and a-half. The Lombardic lettering which runs round the brass is half illegible, but the form of the old inscription, perfect in its simple dignity, is clear enough:—

SIRE : IOHAN : DAUBERNOUN : CHIVALER : GIST : ICY : DEV : DE : SA : ALME : EYT : MERCY.

By Sir John D'Abernon's brass lies that of his son, and between the dates of the two brasses are fifty years—1277 and 1327. The D'Abernons were a knightly family, but they never provided an English king with a great soldier, or a great politician, or with anything much more than the quiet services of a country gentleman. The founder of the family in England was Roger de Abernun, who in Domesday Book is a tenant of Richard de Bienfaite, son of Gilbert Count of Brionne. The first Sir John D'Abernon, whose brass lies in Stoke D'Abernon church, was the most distinguished of the family. Like Edmond Slyfield, he was Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex.

Edmond Slyfield, dead three hundred years before our day (we can see his brass in Great Bookham church), perhaps often stared at the brass of Sir John D'Abernon, dead three hundred years before him. Perhaps, little guessing that within thirty years the Slyfield manors would belong to a stranger, and the Slyfield name be half forgotten, he reflected comfortably on the misfortunes of his predecessor in office. For Sir John was a most unlucky Sheriff, and lost a large sum partly by robbery and partly in the law courts. The story of his loss is a strange medley. One William Hod, of Normandy, in the year 1265 shipped to Portsmouth ten hogsheads of woad. Robbers seized the woad at Portsmouth and carried it off to Guildford; Hod, pursuing, recaptured his hogsheads and lodged them in Guildford Castle. Immediately appeared Nicholas Picard and others from Normandy, demanding the woad in the name of Stephen Buckarel and others. If the woad was not given up, they threatened to destroy the whole of Guildford by fire the next morning. The under-sheriff, whose family lived in the neighbourhood, at once gave up the woad, whereupon Hod instituted proceedings against Sir John D'Abernon the Sheriff, and won his case. Sir John had to pay as damages six score marks—about equivalent to £900 of our money.

Stoke D'Abernon church holds a number of other interesting monuments and brasses; indeed, for its size, it is fuller of valuable work and memorials than any other Surrey church. One of them, placed to the memory of "Sir Richard the Little, formerly parson of this church," has a haunting note of personal loss. It is a pleasure to puzzle out the old Norman-French:—

SIRE RICHARD LE PETIT IADIS PERSONE DE CEST EIGLISE ICI GIST RECEYVE LA ALME IESU CHRIST.

Another rare form of brass is that of a little chrysom child, Ellen Bray; another, a curious engraving of Lady Anne Norbury, with four tiny sons and four tiny daughters gathered at her feet in the folds of her gown. There are imposing monuments to Sir Thomas and Lady Vincent, Sir Thomas enormous in trunk hose and his Lady with her hair elaborately frizzed in a Paris hood. In the body of the church, the pulpit is a magnificent piece of early seventeenth century carving, and to the wall near it is fastened a wrought-iron hour-glass, which must have measured many a weary discourse. Another of Stoke D'Abernon's possessions is one of the finest thirteenth century oak chests in the southern counties.

Outside, the church is interesting in other ways. You can see in the south wall of the chancel a large slice of Roman herringbone brickwork, perhaps brought by pre-conquest builders from some villa or other ruins close at hand; and on the south wall of the nave, high up, is a sundial which before the conquest probably stood above the old south door. With so much that is old and venerable in the building and its monuments it is dismal to add that much, also, that was old and venerable has been destroyed. It is probably the worst restored of all old churches worth restoring.

Stoke D'Abernon has a claim on the attention of those about to marry. The manor-house is the first which is recorded as having been lent for a honeymoon. So I learn from Mr. J.H. Round, writing in the Ancestor. When William Marshall, in 1189, secured the hand of the heiress of the Earls of Pembroke, who was as good as she was beautiful, he proposed that they should be married on her own estates on the Welsh border. His host, however, a wealthy Londoner, would not hear of such a thing, and insisted on their being married in London and paying the cost of the wedding himself. After the ceremony, as the Society papers of the time might have put it, the young couple left for Stoke D'Abernon in Surrey, the peaceful and delectable country mansion of Sir Enguerrand D'Abernon, kindly lent for the occasion. Mr. Round has extracted this the earliest known reference to an orthodox honeymoon in the country, from the bridegroom's poetical biography, L'histoire de Guillaume le Marechal:—

"Quant les noces bien faites furent,
E richement, si comme els durent,
La dame emmena, ce savon,
Chies sire Angeran d'Abernon,
A Estokes, en liu paisable
E aesie e delitable."

The bill for the trousseau of the heiress has also been discovered, entered in the Pipe Roll of the year. It cost £9 12s. 1d.

The road from Stoke D'Abernon runs north-west through the two Cobhams, Church Cobham and Street Cobham. The little Plough Inn, which acts as refreshment-room for Cobham railway station, suggests the proper spirit of village revelry. A spreading yew arbour should shade good ale from the summer suns, and by the side of the garden across the road, gay with geraniums, see-saws and swings, runs a tiny stream, rippling down to the Mole.

Unlike the Wey, the Mole runs by few churches. Only five, Horley, Betchworth, Leatherhead, Stoke D'Abernon, and Cobham, stand near the river, and only Stoke D'Abernon actually on its banks. Stoke D'Abernon, too, has the best view from the churchyard across the stream, over a broad stretch of grassland on which partridges call and rooks stalk majestically. At Cobham you can scarcely see the Mole when you are in the village, but there are few prettier glimpses of its stream than the brimming pool by the road outside. A grey mill stands in the stream, double-wheeled and doubly silent; swans oar themselves leisurely about the eddies, and the meadow beyond in May is a sheet of kingcups.

"Ye Old Church Stile House, Cobham, 1432, restored 1635," is the engaging legend painted on a low-roofed timbered house which stands at the churchyard gate. With its square beams, its latticed windows and red curtains, it is a model of what a "Home of Rest for Gentlewomen"—which is its vocation—should be. Cobham has one or two other good houses, Georgian, red and solid, but the best perhaps is the old White Lion posting inn at Cobham Street, half a mile away on the Portsmouth Road. The White Lion stood by the fourth tollhouse on the highway from London, and its oak-panelled parlours have entertained travellers for four centuries or more—none thirstier, perhaps, than "Liberty" Wilkes, who passed that way on a day in 1794, and drank "a large bowl of lemonade."

Pain's Hill, which rises above the Mole a little further on the road, is a name associated with a gardener and a poet. The gardener was Charles Hamilton, who burdened his lawns with such an astonishing variety of temples, chapels, grottos, castles, cascades and ruins—including a hermitage with a real live hermit—that the result was voted one of the greatest achievements in landscape gardening of the Georgian or any other age. The hermit, sad to relate, was a failure. He was offered £700 to live a Nebuchadnezzar-like existence in his cell, sleeping on a mat, never speaking a word, and abandoning all the conveniences of a toilet. He would gladly have taken the £700, but threw up his post after three weeks.

The poet was Matthew Arnold, who spent most of the last fifteen years of his life at Pain's Hill Cottage. He wrote little poetry there; he came to Pain's Hill in the year after he had published Literature and Dogma, when his mind was occupied with his revolution against the sombreness and narrowness of modern English religious thought. But to Pain's Hill, I think, belong "Geist's Grave" and "Kaiser Dead" and "Poor Matthias;" "Geist's Grave" written for his little son, and "Poor Matthias" for his daughter, perhaps—Matthias, bought at Hastings to please a child, though she, childlike, would have chosen a bigger bird:—

"Behold
French canary-merchant old
Shepherding his flock of gold
In a low dim-lighted pen
Scann'd of tramps and fishermen!
There a bird, high-coloured, fat,
Proud of port, though something squat—
Pursy, play'd-out Philistine—
Dazzled Nelly's youthful eyne.
But, far in, obscure, there stirr'd
On his perch a sprightlier bird,
Courteous-eyed, erect and slim;
And I whisper'd: 'Fix on him!'
Home we brought him, young and fair,
Songs to trill in Surrey air.
Here Matthias sang his fill,
Saw the cedars of Pain's Hill;
Here he pour'd his little soul,
Heard the murmur of the Mole."

And it was while Matthew Arnold was living at Pain's Hill that he chose out his little collection of "selected poems." I like to think of him reading over his work in his Surrey garden, and answering once more the cuckoo calling "from the wet field, through the vext garden-trees"—

"Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?
Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweet William with his homely cottage smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow:
Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
And open, jasmined-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening star."