Eric Parker

The Battle of Ockley.—The Stone Street.—The prettiest green in Surrey.—Sweethearts and Roses.—When the Gentlemen went by.—An engaging family history.—Oakwood: a forest chapel.—Capel quiet.—Newdigate bells.—Martins in September.

Battlefields are not very numerous in Surrey. The Parliamentary wars shed a little military glory on the North and the West, and attacks on London from the Surrey side—its invulnerable side—belong to almost every century of London's history. But the great Surrey battle, which belongs to Ockley under Leith Hill, is of the battles of long ago, dim and hazy in the mist of centuries, fearful with legends of blood in rivers, and warriors laid in swathes like mown corn. Even now, country tradition asserts, the rain that sweeps down Leith Hill sends the rainpools red in the plain below. The great battle of Ockley was fought when the Danes came two hundred and fifteen years before Harold fell at Hastings. They had sailed across to Kent, the historian says, with three hundred and fifty large ships, and had driven in Ethelstan, who was king of Kent, Sussex, Essex, and Surrey, under his father Ethelwulf. They sacked Canterbury, and went up the Thames to London; there they beat in Beorhtwulf, king of the Mercians, and before them lay but one great town, Winchester, unsacked. Down they swept over the Thames, and out of his own country, Ethelwulf, of Wessex, overlord of the beaten Ethelstan and Beorhtwulf, came to meet them. Up the great Stone Street, the Roman road that runs as straight as a die from Chichester, he marched, and lay across the front of his enemy, clear of the deep forest that spread south of Ockley. The Danes came on. Perhaps they rested a night in the old British camp on Anstiebury Hill, perhaps they swept straight on: battle was joined "hard by Ockley wood." Local tradition, always apt to associate notable deeds with easily marked places, makes the scene of the battle Ockley Green; but the armies could not have seen each other on the low ground, which must have been half swamp, half undergrowth. They fought, no doubt, on the higher ground near Leith Hill. The slaughter was prodigious; "blood stood ankle deep," and the day ended with the great body of the Danes dead on the hills, and the rest flying where they could along the roads and through the woods. Probably not a Dane got away alive. It was a wonderful victory.

To-day the peace that broods over Ockley is born of wooded parks and sunlit spaces. Ockley Green must be one of the largest in Surrey, and I think is the prettiest of all. Along its western side runs a row of noble elms, bordering the road, and under the shade of the elms an old inn. This road is actually part of the Stone Street up which Ethelwulf marched against the Danes; and it would be hardly possible to devise a prettier road, as it passes under the Ockley elm trees, or a more tranquil outlook for an inn. Low-roofed cottages edge the grass, warm and sheltered; a drinking fountain on the green level suggests summer games and thirsty cricketers; though I think Ockley has contributed no great cricketers to the game. Beyond the green lie stretches of pasture and rich and smiling woodland.

The church stands nearly a mile from the green, and to its quiet acre belongs one of the prettiest traditions of bygone Surrey—the planting of rose-trees over the graves of betrothed lovers. It was still a custom in Aubrey's time:—

Rose-trees still grow in the churchyard, though perhaps the planting of them does not go back beyond man's memory.

Although so quiet a little village to-day, the neighbourhood of Ockley has seen some wild doings. Holmbury Hill, to the north, was once one of the principal settlements of the "Heathers," or broom squires, who still survive, a more respectable and a weaker folk, under Hindhead and elsewhere. Here one of their chief occupations was smuggling; indeed, the range of hills round Ewhurst and Holmbury Common served as a kind of halfway house for the gentlemen who were riding with silk and brandy from the Sussex seaboard to London. It was a Burwash mother who used to put her child to bed with the injunction, "Now, mind, if the gentlemen come along, don't you look out of the window"; doubtless the text which inspired Mr. Kipling's delightful verses. But there must have been many a Ewhurst and Ockley mother who knew "the gentlemen" by sight, and counselled confiding children to hold their tongues and look in the proper direction as the Burwash woman bids her child in Mr. Kipling's song:—

"If you meet King George's men, dressed in blue and red,
You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.
If they call you 'pretty maid,' and chuck you 'neath the chin,
Don't you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one's been
If you do as you've been told, likely there's a chance,
You'll be give a dainty doll, all the way from France,
With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood—
A present from the Gentlemen, along o' being good!
Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie—
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!"

The memory of smuggling under Leith Hill has, indeed, lasted into the last decade. Mr. H.E. Malden, the Surrey historian to whom all Surrey writers and readers owe so much, tells us in a paper on Holmbury Hill and its neighbourhood that he personally knew an old man, a native of Coldharbour, who had actually seen the game going on. He was born, it is true, in 1802, but he lived to be a hundred years old, and to talk to Mr. Malden discreetly about what he had seen. In his conversation Mr. Malden remarks with proper tranquillity "he indicated this and that respectable neighbour. Well, he said, his grandfather, and his grandfather and so on, knew something about the smuggling. He, of course, had done nothing in that way, but he remembered his father holding open the gate at the end of Crocker's Lane, Coldharbour, for a body of men on horseback, each with a keg of brandy behind him, to ride through. A man with whom he had worked told him how he was witness of a scene when a bold gatekeeper refused to open his turnpike gate to a body of armed men on horseback, who, after threatening him in vain, turned aside across the fields." Relics of the past still remain in the district. Under Holmbury Hill there is a cottage of which the cellars run right back into the hill; tradition has placed kegs of brandy in them. A naval cutlass was picked up some thirty years ago in a field by Leith Hill—possibly it was used in a smugglers' fray with King George's men. Nor was it long ago that a trackway which runs from Forest Green, two miles to the west of Ockley, through Tanhurst over Leith Hill, was known as the Smuggler's Way.

Surrey yeomen come nowhere of better stock than the oldest Ockley families. Aubrey tells a story of one of the Eversheds of Ockley, who, when the heralds made their visitation, was urged to take a coat of arms. "He told them that he knew no difference between gentlemen and yeomen, but that the latter were the better men, and that they were really gentlemen only, who had longer preserved their estates and patrimonies in the same place, without waste or dissipation; an observation very just." Aubrey adds, as examples of yeomen families who had land at the Conquest, the names of Steere, Harpe, Hether, and Aston. Steere, like Evershed, is a name that occurs over and over again in the Registers, both at Ockley and Capel.

Ockley's Parish Account Books, from which Mr. Alfred Bax—one of the oldest of Ockley names—has made some most interesting transcripts in the Surrey ArchÆological Collections, furnish some quaint glimpses into the life and customs of a Surrey village in old days. I make the following extracts, of which the first is noticeable particularly as evidence that a post office existed at Ockley at least as early as 1722:—

How many village families could show so long a written history as that of the Rapleys, or so engaging a record? The entries of 1739 and 1740 are a perfect climax of hopes and fears, ending, it is impossible to doubt, in the enjoyment by Sarah Rapley of every conceivable happiness. But the joys hidden under the cold print of the last Rapley entry are only dimly to be imagined. Henry Rapley's return from the sea, cured of his dog-bite, must have brought out the whole village.

Two miles south-west of Ockley, a short way off the Stone street, stands the lonely little chapel of Oakwood. It is one of the old forest chapels, and dates back to the thirteenth century, but was enlarged in the fifteenth, the happy result of an accident. Sir Edward de la Hale was hunting wild boar with his son in the forest hard by. They had wounded a boar, the boy was thrown from his horse, and the boar charged down. His father spurred forward, too late to save him, when suddenly an arrow whizzed through the trees and the boar fell dead. In his joy, the father vowed on the spot an offering to the service of God, and Oakwood chapel was restored and endowed. The little building lies apart, sequestered in cornfields and deep woods, the quietest treasure of sudden discovery for the stranger walking idly by country lanes.

Beyond the railway to the east of Ockley, approached by quiet oak-shaded roads, lies the little village of Capel, not much more than a half-mile of main street lined with cottages. Capel instils a pleasant restfulness. Almost its chief buildings are the admirably designed almshouses built in memory of Mr. Charles Webb of Clapham Common. In an age when "improvements" generally mean the destruction of something old, and "additions" to village housing accommodation mean yellow brick boxes and slate lids, it is a pleasure to set eyes upon a modern building instinct with the spirit of country places. Capel people have long had proper views as to the right rate of progress through the business of life. They are skilled, or some of them, in topiary, and when the garden of a tiny, red-tiled cottage contains a shaven yew tree recognisable as a fair-sized bird, the tenour of village life must be agreeably even.

Third of the three villages which group themselves south and south-west of Leith Hill is Newdigate, separated from Capel by over two miles of a zig-zagging road, though the distance for a steeplechase cannot be much more than a mile from church to church. Newdigate church is the chief part of the little village. The tower is wholly built of oak, and the beams supporting the belfry are almost as fine as those of the Thursley tower; possibly they are the work of the same craftsmen. Like other Wealden churches, Newdigate has an abiding charm in her peal of bells. They have been re-cast, but the Newdigate bellringers have long records of changes rung in the little tower. Some of the records are painted on wooden panels in the belfry. To the layman who has never rung a bell the names of the changes are stimulating. Colledge Singles, Grandsire Doubles, College Exercise, and College Pleasure are fairly simple; but Without a Dodge provokes thought, and Woodbine Violet must have been named by the village poet.

Surrey autumns invest the shingled spires of these Wealden churches with a peculiar beauty. Grey and white, black-streaked and shining, weatherbeaten and weather-conquering, there is nothing in architecture lighter or more graceful than the patterned sheaths of native oak surmounting belfries which, sometimes for centuries, have called the villagers to church. But in late autumn, when the swallows and martins are practising starts for their long journey, the shingled spires turn themselves to fresh uses. On a sunny day the birds come about them in scores, pressing their bodies flat against the warm, dry wood, darting out for short flights, hawking gnats and midges, and flitting back again, keeping up through it all the sweetest and gentlest of anxious twitterings, and, when they are clinging to the chequered wood, resembling it so closely in colour and texture as to make it hard to count a dozen birds quickly. Martins near their time for going enter on all kinds of engaging habits, especially just before and just after dusk, when bands of a dozen or so seem suddenly to make up their minds to trial flights of the most amazing speed, utterly unlike their ordinary, quiet flittings. But there is nothing prettier in all the pageant of the migrants' year, than a dozen score martins with the unrest of autumn on them darting round a shingled spire.