Eric Parker

A chapter of Hume.—The Village Cage.—The Copthorne Poachers.—A shop for three centuries.—The green-faced Soldan.—A griffin's hoof.—Second-best fish.—Eleanor Cobham and the Witch.—Crowhurst.—A tree and a rubbish-heap.—An iron tombstone.—Fifteen daughters running.—Crowhurst Place.

Lingfield is not large enough, nor enough overbuilt and railway-ridden, to dare to the title of capital even of a distant corner of Surrey. But it stands above and apart from the quiet country round it, like a Bible in an old library. Near it, or in its streets, are some of the prettiest and most ancient timber houses in the county; the churchyard with its brick paths, its rose-beds, the red walls round it and its view of the Weald, has the serenity of deep meadowland and sunlit cloisters; the church itself, with its sculptured oak and baronial tombs, belongs to all English history from CreÇy. If the churches of the surrounding parishes, with their brasses and their registers, make up an admirable local guide-book, the records of Lingfield church are a chapter of Hume.

The village itself is the pleasantest mixture of every style of Surrey cottage, brick and timber, weather-tiling, plain brick, plain wood, and a queer row of square white-stuccoed buildings which looks as if it had been dumped inland from opposite shingle and dancing seas. It only lacks tamarisk to be sheer Worthing. The village centres on its pond; not a broad nor a very limpid piece of water, but distinguished by a pair of swans, and by a curious obelisk standing at its head which once may have marked a shrine. Built on to the bole of an old oak by the obelisk is an apartment engagingly labelled "Ye Village Cage." Other Surrey villages have had their cages, but only Lingfield has kept one. The door is massive and threatening, and you get the keys at the chemist's the other side of the road; or rather, a guide politely accompanies you and displays the cage's secrets. The cage not long ago fell into disuse. It was once used as a temporary lock-up for drunk or disorderly persons, or others who had traversed the local by-laws of morality. Local justice descended upon them, and they were cast into durance until morning should bring soberness with a headache, or, in more serious cases, until proper conveyance could be got round for Godstone. The cage has seen at least one exciting rescue. This was some fifty or sixty years ago, when a number of desperate characters vaguely described as the Copthorne poachers were captured and haled into prison. As to the exact number of captives, tradition varies; but the legend which is the most respectful to the powers of the local constable sets it at eleven. The eleven were surrounded, the door of the dungeon closed on them, and the village tried to go to sleep. Darkness came on, and a daring deed. Other poachers stole into the village, got to work with picks and crowbars, took the roof off the dungeon and hauled out their comrades exulting. The village wisely did not attempt a recapture.

The cage saw its last tenant in 1882, and the story of the rescued poachers may still, perhaps, be heard from the mouth of the oldest inhabitant, who was himself at one time a constable. As an expert in suppressing crime, he never liked the plan on which the cage was built. The floor is higher by two steps than the ground outside, and you had to go upstairs to it. In fact, you had to throw your prisoner upstairs—a most perilous business. It ought to have been built so that you could take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs like a Christian.

Caged prisoners at Lingfield were not always treated with the utmost rigour of the law. At one time the door was pierced by a grating, and through the grating kindly souls passed packets of tobacco. Liquor could not be passed in packets, but found its way in somehow. Afterwards in severer days the grating was closed, and prisoners neither drank nor smoked, as became their miserable condition. Nine years after the last captive languished behind the blocked grating the prison was taken over by the village for fresh purposes. Henceforward it was to be the museum, and was duly vested in trustees. Its collection still grows slowly. "Anything to do with village crime—we make that our special subject," the curator informs you with a pleasing urbaneness. The collection includes a man-trap, a pair of handcuffs, a canvas bed which furnishes the museum whenever it is wanted as a mortuary, a pair of farmer's snowboots used a hundred years ago, and a pair of farmer's ordinary boots used more recently.

Of tiny village streets there is no more fascinating byway than the little road which leads up to the south door of Lingfield Church. On the right is the Star inn, taking its sign from the arms of the great lords of Sterborough who lie in the church; and built beside the inn a row of quiet cottages, perhaps once part of the inn. On the left one building stands out from the rest; an early sixteenth century timber house, admirably preserved, and of peculiar interest because after three hundred years it is still carrying on the business for which it was intended. It was built as a shop, and it is a shop still. Modern preference for plate glass and easily opened doors has changed the original plan of the ground floor, but the first floor remains almost as its builder left it, and its heavy girders with their rounded ends jutting out over the pavement below are a happy testimony to the worth of wealden builders and wealden wood. Wealden paint, on the other hand, has not improved. The girders are still dark and stained as oak (or is it chestnut?) should be stained by age and weather. But a yard or two away there are beams as massive and as well-seasoned which flout the lapse of centuries with a flaring and be-varnished buff.

The church is noble and tranquil without and within. A chained Bible stands on a lectern; another Bible, "bought May the tenth 1683," as the inscription runs on the title-page, "by William Saxby of Surry Esq., for the use and benefitt of all good Christians" is in use to-day. But the chief interest of the church to-day, as it has been its chief glory in the past, is its association with the great family of Cobham. The Cobhams of Sterborough—their castle stood two miles east of Lingfield, but has fallen—came of a line which through two of the most eventful centuries of English history was represented in almost every battle, consulted in the most difficult diplomacy, and allied at last by marriage to an English king. Their family goes back to a Justice itinerant who settled in Kent; but the real founder of the Surrey branch was the Justice's grandson, the first Lord Cobham of Sterborough. He was one of the greatest soldiers of his day, and, from the ransoms he had for the prisoners he took in battle, one of the richest. It was to him, with Sir John Chandos and the Earl of Warwick, that Edward III entrusted the Black Prince at CreÇy; at Poictiers he rescued the King of France; he was Lord Admiral of the King's fleet "from the mouth of the Thames westwards"; and to end it all, he died in his bed of the plague. His effigy on his tomb tramples a Soldan, whose face has been duly painted green by the artist—an interesting relic, according to Mr. J.G. Waller, of Crusaders' traditions. There were not enough names for colours in those days, and perhaps the soldiers trying to describe the olive skins of the Arabs, may have called them green. For some obscure reason, too, the Soldan with his green face and his red beard is intended by the artist to be alive. Nobody can say why that should be, but the sculptor doubtless knew. He was a careful and accurate man; you can still trace below Lord Cobham's left knee the fastenings of the Garter.

Lord Cobham's wife, Joan, was the author of one of the longest wills in existence. She remembered everybody, including the prisoners in chains at Southwark and the sick men in the hospitals. Her executor Robert Belknappe was to have "a horn made from a griffin's hoof with a silver core, and the said horn has a silver rim and two silver gilt feet." But she was most anxious, poor lady, about her soul. "Before everything else" there were to be said 7000 masses, immediately upon her death, and the priests were to have £29 3s. 4d. for saying them. A penny a mass, that is, and the priests took the pence. But it was twelve years before they had said the masses.

The second Lord Cobham had mingled experiences of love and war. According to the inscription on his tomb, broken in the church but preserved in the College of Arms, he was "as brave as a leopard, a sumptuous entertainer, handsome, imperturbable, and courteous." He was a soldier, but the great struggle of his life had nothing to do with a battlefield. It was his attempt to secure a dispensation from the Pope for marrying his cousin in defiance of the canon law. Almost a year passed before the Pope gave his decision on the point, and then he ordered the unhappy cousins a horribly tedious penance. For four years they might not eat meat; they might not drink wine on Wednesdays, and at the six fasts they might only eat the second-best kinds of fish, and not those which were most agreeable to them. They had to feed four poor persons daily, and wait upon them themselves; and these poor persons were to have bread and meat or fish, with half a flagon of ale, and were to have new tunics and new russet hoods every year. All this was in addition to various heavy fines. The money part must have been the least exasperating: but it might have been amusing to choose the less agreeable kinds of fish.

The eldest son of this much be-penanced marriage had two distinctions. He was for some years the warden, at Sterborough castle, of the French heir to the throne, the Duke of Orleans who was taken prisoner at Agincourt; and he was the founder of Lingfield College. Lingfield College had a provost, six chaplains, four clerks, and thirteen poor persons, but none of its walls stand to-day. The life of the college farm alone survives, in an inventory of the implements and live stock taken at the Dissolution. Here are some extracts:—

The Laborers Chambre.

Warriors and statesmen though the Cobhams were, one of their women folk has made more history than they. It was Eleanor, daughter of the founder of Lingfield College, who married the Lord Protector, the "good duke Humphrey" of Gloucester, and who was convicted of dire misdemeanours. Edward Hall, the old historian, writing of 1441, tells the story:—

The beautiful duchess's penance is in all the history books. But it is Shakespeare, and not the historians, who makes her walk through the town in a white sheet and barefoot.

Three miles north of Lingfield is Crowhurst, one of a noble pair of names. Crowhurst in Sussex and Crowhurst in Surrey each has its immemorial yew, a tree of trees. But the yew of the Surrey churchyard—is there no better way of honouring a tree than the Crowhurst way? Who is to look at a tree like this without unhappiness? From the road the first impression to be had of it is nothing very imposing; a mass of deep and shining green, of no great stature, with strong, springy branches brushing the church walls—that is all. But the nearer view! You expect, and find, an enormous gnarled trunk, and then—Your first idea is that someone has thrown a rubbish-heap at the tree, and that most of the rubbish has stuck—old tea-trays, broken kettles, saucepan-lids, the sides of tin trunks. You then perceive that over gaps and wounds in the vast and writhen shell there have been bound, or nailed, or otherwise fastened a number of patches of thin sheet iron, painted a peculiarly ugly red. These patches of paint shriek with the names of a thousand cockneys, and the names suit the method of mending the broken tree. Gus should be the name of the man who fixed that patch; Erb, surely, daubed on that paint; Alf, I think, drove in that nail. Could none of the foresters of the weald have helped a great tree better in its old age? There should be methods of preserving a tree which are not of necessity hideous; else, it would be better for the giant to die as it pleased.

The church stands commandingly on a hill, overlooking level pastures and woodlands. But the view to the west, with all its breadth and quiet, is not more happy than the nearer picture to the east. Church gates stand opposite few more charming medleys than the multiplied gables, tumbled triangles, and oblongs of red tiles belonging to the roofs of the house on the other side of the road. This fine old brick building, with its formal garden path and clipped yews is now, like the Gainsfords' manor-house a mile away, merely a farmhouse. But it was once the family residence of the Angells, the other great family of Crowhurst after the Gainsfords. Like the Gainsfords, the Angell family has disappeared. The last John Angell died in 1784, and left a very curious will. His property was to go to anyone who could prove himself (not herself) descended from an ancestor of his who lived in the reign of Henry VI. Many claims followed; none were proved.

The house has one record at least of unrequited hospitality. This is an extract from the parish registers:—

Inside the church is a strange monument—a slab of Sussex iron, let into the floor near the altar, and commemorating Anne Forster, the granddaughter of a patriarchal neighbour, Sir John Gainsford. It is odd in more than one way; it is the only iron tombstone in the county, though it is a tombstone that has often been copied. There are still several reproductions of it scattered about the country in the form of firebacks; evidently the founders considered the design convenient. Perhaps they might have made a better job if they had been severer scholars; for some of the lettering on it is quaint and topsy-turvy, the S's being twisted the wrong way round and the F's lying unhappily feet uppermost. Yet it fits well with the other old Gainsford and Angell monuments, and is also a memorial of a dead and gone industry, the iron-smelting of Surrey, Sussex, and Kent.

Leisured churchgoers should choose a service at Crowhurst at sunset: September drives the sun at the right angle to light its dark oak and the great beams of the belfry. Many churches have windows built high in the west end, through which part of the splendour of the setting sun can filter; but this window is set low, and the red sky floods the church.

From the church to Crowhurst Place a mile away runs an interesting byway, the only one in Surrey, so far as I know, built by a private gentleman of permanent material, extending for a mile from his house to his place of worship. In the year 1631 the John Gainsford of the day, at the fine old age of 76, determined he would walk wet to church no more. He had a stone-flagged causeway laid from the manor-house to the churchyard, "it being before," as the Parish Register informs you, "a loathsom durtie way every stepp." He paid two workmen fifty pounds for the job, and the causeway is still to be picked out across the meadows.

The Gainsfords were one of the best, though not the greatest of the old Surrey families. They are first heard of in the reign of Edward III, when John and Margery Gaynesford had the manor of Crowhurst from John de Stangrave and Joan his wife—a delightful gathering of English names. One of them, in Tudor days, was Sheriff of Surrey, and well in the Tudor fashions: he had six wives. But he must have found them disappointing in their family duties, for the first five of them brought him fifteen daughters running, and it was only from the sixth and last that he got a son and heir. He was one of a long succession of Johns and Erasmuses, but the line failed at the end. There were never enough boys in the Gainsford families, and when at last the manor went to a daughter the spell was broken; the house was sold.

Crowhurst Place was originally a timber house built in or near the reign of Henry VII, and according to tradition Henry VIII used to stay there on his way to visit Anne Boleyn at Hever Castle over the border. It was, and still is in some respects, an admirable example of the masonry and carpentry of the fifteenth century, but the destroying hand of later builders has removed part of the timber and filled up the gaps with brick and weather-tiling, so that its full character has been taken away. The great hall, with its glorious beams, was too much for the utilitarian. The waste of space distressed him. He therefore cut it in two by running a floor across the length of it halfway up, and subdivided his floor into bedrooms to accommodate the resident farmer's numerous family. It would be difficult to ruin a fine hall more completely.

But the house still has its own beauty, though it is the wild beauty of poverty and neglect. It stands half a mile from the road to the south-west of the church, approached by a rough bridle path. The first glimpse through the trees is of gables striped white and dark; a moat, befeathered and noisy with ducks, and a little wooden bridge crossing the moat to a side-door. Beyond lie great barns, a flagged courtyard and flagged paths, and round the corner a second bridge over the moat, brickbuilt and massive; and by the garden gate a mounting-stone, which it would be pleasant to think gave Anne Boleyn's royal wooer an easy step into the saddle. But it came later, perhaps.

Is it not possible that Crowhurst Place may be rescued as Tangley Manor was? It has the hall, and the kitchen and the oak panelling, and the great fireplaces for which we search all the house-agents' catalogues; it is moated, it has dined a king; there should be a ghost somewhere. But it rests apart, a farmhouse only. Brambles grow about it, such as should fence in a castle of sleep; above them timbered gables and tall chimneys to fit the cold and spacious hearths within. The fires that lit those hearths wait their rekindling.