TH/IMES
WLflGES
*
arces
THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries : To-day and in Days
of Old.
The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
The Bath Road : History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old
Highway.
The Exeter Road : The Story of the West of England Highway.
The Great North Road : The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two
Vols.
The Norwich Road : An East Anglian Highway.
The Holvhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two
Vols.
The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great
Fenland Highway.
The Newmarket, Bur/, Thetfprd, and Cromer Road: Sport
and History on an Kast Anglian Turnpike.
The Oxford. Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road : The
Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.
The Brighton Road : Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic
Highway.
The Hastings Road and the " Happy Springs of Tunbridge."
Cycle Rides Round London.
A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of
Reproduction.
Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.
The IngOldsby Country : Literary Landmarks of " The Ingoldsby
Legends."
The Hardy Country : Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
The Dorset Coast.
The South Devon Coast.
The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.
Love in the Harbour : a Longshore Comedy.
Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).
Haunted Houses ; Tales of the Supernatural.
The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This way to Gretna
Green. Two Vols.
The North Devon Coast.
Half-Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols.
The Autocar Road Book. Four Vols.
The Tower Of London: Fortress, Palace, and Prison.
The Somerset Coast.
The Smugglers : Picturesque Chapters in the Story of an Ancient
Craft.
The Cornish Coast. North.
The Cornish Coast. South.
The Kentish Coast. [In the Press.
The Sussex Coast. (In Hit Press.
THAMES VALLEY
VILLAGES
BY
CHARLES G. HARPER
VOL, II
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS "BY W. S. CAMPBELL
AND FROM DRAWINGS "BY THE AUTHOR
LONDON: CHAPMAN fc? HALL, LTD.
1910
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
v,
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
SONNING — HURST, " IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS
— SHOTTESBROOKE — WARGRAVE
CHAPTER II
HENLEY — THE BRIDGE AND ITS KEYSTONE-MASKS
— REMENHAM — HAMBLEDEN — MEDMENHAM
ABBEY AND THE " HELL FIRE CLUB " —
HURLEY — BISHAM 25
CHAPTER III
GREAT MARLOW — COOKHAM — CLIVEDEN AND ITS
OWNERS — MAIDENHEAD 51
CHAPTER IV
BRAY AND ITS FAMOUS VICAR — JESUS HOSPITAL . 69
CHAPTER V
t
OCKWELLS MANOR-HOUSE — DORNEY COURT — Bov-
ENEY — BURNHAM ABBEY . 82
872647
viii CONTENTS
CHAPTER VI
PAGE
CLEWER — WINDSOR — ETON AND ITS COLLEGIANS
• — DATCHET — LANGLEY AND THE KEDER-
MINSTERS . .';.., 109
CHAPTER VII
DATCHET — RUNNYMEDE — WRAYSBURY — HORTON
AND ITS MILTON ASSOCIATIONS — STAINES Moo....
— STANWELL — LALEHAM AND MATTHEW AR-
NOLD— LITTLETON — CHERTSEY — WEYBRIDGE
— SHEPPERTON 131
CHAPTER VIII
COWAY STAKES - - WALTON-ON-THAMES - - THE
RIVER AND THE WATER COMPANIES — SUNBURY
— TEDDINGTON — TWICKENHAM . . .157
CHAPTER IX
PETERSHAM 185
CHAPTER X
ISLEWORTH — BRENTFORD AND CAESAR'S CROSSING
OF THE THAMES 211
CHAPTER XI
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN - - KEW — CHISWICK —
MORTLAKE — BARNES 236
CHAPTER XII
PUTNEY — FULHAM BRIDGE — FULHAM . . . 258
INDEX 293
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JJP'
SEPARATE PLATES
BISHAM CHURCH Frontispiece
PAGE
SONNINO BRIDGE 5
SHOTTESBBOOKE CHTTBCH 13
WABQBAVE CHURCH 19
UNDER THE WILLOWS : A BACKWATER NEAR WARGRAVE 23
ARCH CARRYING THE ROAD, PARK PLACE . . .27
REMENHAM CHURCH 27
HENLEY-ON-THAMES 31
REGATTA ISLAND 35
MEDMENHAM ABBEY 39
THE BELL INN, HURLEY . . . • .• • .43
BISHAM ABBEY ......... 47
" TOP o' THE TOWN," GBEAT MABLOW .... 47
A THAMES REGATTA 53
COOKHAM LOCK 57
COOKHAM CHURCH . . . . . . . .61
BRAY CHURCH 61
COOKHAM WEIR ......... 65
LYCHGATE, BRAY .71
JESUS HOSPITAL, BRAY 79
x LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE HALL, OCKWELLS 83
DORNEY CHURCH : THE MINSTREL-GALLERY ... 87
THE PALMER SAMPLER, WORKED ABOUT 1620 . . .91
DORNEY COURT ......... 95
DORNEY COURT : THE GREAT HALL, SHOWING THE MODEL
PINE-APPLE ......... 99
PRESENTATION TO CHARLES THE SECOND OF THE FIRST PINE-
APPLE GROWN IN ENGLAND 103
BURNHAM ABBEY 107
AN ENGLISH FARMYARD : BURNHAM ABBEY FARM . .111
BOVENEY . . . . . . . . . .113
THE KEDERMINSTER PEW: INTERIOR . . . .117
THE KEDERMINSTER PEW : EXTERIOR . . . .121
THE KEDERMINSTER LIBRARY . . . . . .125
THE ALMSHOUSES, LANGLEY 129
BACKWATER NEAR WRAYSBURY 133
HORTON CHURCH 139
LALEHAM CHURCH ........ 147
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S GRAVE, LALEHAM .... 147
LITTLETON CHURCH 151
INTERIOR, LITTLETON CHURCH 155
SHEPPERTON ......... 159
GRAVE or THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK'S DAUGHTER,
SHEPPERTON 163
HALLIFORD 171
WATERSPLASH NEAR HALLIFORD . . . . .171
SUNBURY 175
A BUSY DAY, MOLESEY LOCK 179
TEDDINGTON WEIR 183
TWICKENHAM CHURCH . . . . . . .187
PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE . 187
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi
PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE ....... 191
PETERSHAM : THE " Fox AND DUCK," OLD LOCK-UP AND
VILLAGE POUND . .195
PETERSHAM, FROM THE MIDDLESEX SHORE . .199
THE OLD LODGES OF PETERSHAM PARK . . . 203
RIVER LANE, PETERSHAM .... . 207
ISLEWORTH ...... • 213
THE DOCK AT ISLEWORTH ... ; 217
THE " LONDON APPRENTICE," ISLEWORTH . . . 217
" OLD ENGLAND " ........ 223
" OLD ENGLAND " : MOUTH OF THE BRENT, AND BRENTFORD
FERRY .......... 227
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN ....... 239
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN : VIEW UP-RIVER . . . 243
CHISWICK CHURCH ........ 249
MONUMENT TO VISCOUNT MORDAUNT, FULHAM CHURCH . 271
THE TOWER, FULHAM CHURCH ....... 277
THE FITZ JAMES COURTYARD, FULHAM PALACE . . .281
THE GREAT HALL, FULHAM PALACE ..... 287
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT.
Hour-Glass and Wrought-Iron Stand, Hurst ... 8
St. Lawrence Waltham . . . . . . .11
East Window, Shottesbrooke ...... 16
Medmenham ......... 37
From the Monument to Sir Myles Hobart, Great Marlow . 52
Brass to an Eton Scholar, Wraysbury . . . .136
Bradshaw's House, Walton-on-Thames . . . .165
Brass to John Selwyn ........ 167
Walton-on-Thames Church ....... 169
Ferry Lane, Brentford ....... 233
Tomb of Edward Rose, Barnes ...... 255
The Old Toll-House, Barnes Common ..... 261
VOL. II b
THAMES VALLEY
VILLAGES
CHAPTER I
SONNING — HURST, " IN THE COUNTY OF WILTS "
— SHOTTESBROOKE — WARGRAVE
As Reading can by no means be styled a village,
seeing that its population numbers over 72,000,
the fact of its not being treated of in these pages
will perhaps be excused. You cannot rusticate at
Reading : the electric tramways, the great com-
mercial premises, and the crowded state of its streets
forbid ; but Reading, taken frankly as a town
and a manufacturing town at that, is not at all a
place for censure. The Kennet, however, that
flows through it, has here become a very different
Kennet from that which sparkles in the Berkshire
meads between Hungerford and Kintbury, and has
a very dubious and deterrent look where it is received
into the Thames.
The flat, open shores at Reading presently give
place to the wooded banks approaching Sonning,
where the fine trees of Holme Park are reflected in
the waters of the lock — the lock that was tended
for many years, until his death, about 1889, by a
lock-keeper who also kept bees, made beehives,
VOL. II I
2 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
and wrote poetry. Sonning, and its Thames-side
" Parade," certainly invite to poetry.
To say there is no Thames-side village prettier,
or in any way more delightful, than Sonning is
vague praise and also in some ways understates its
peculiar attractiveness, which, strange to say, seems
to increase, rather than decrease, with the years.
It might have been expected that a village but three
miles from the great and increasing town of Reading
would suffer many indignities from that proximity,
and would be infested with such flagrant nuisances
as wayside advertisement-hoardings and street-
loafers, but these manifestations of the Zeitgeist
are, happily, entirely absent.
Let us, however, halt for a moment to give a
testimonial of character to Reading itself, which is
far above the average of great towns in these and
many other matters. Loafers and street-hoardings
are found there, without doubt — and can we find
the modern town of its size where they are not ? —
but they do not obtrude ; and, in short, Reading
is, with all its bustle of business, a likeable place.
There are reasons for Sonning remaining un-
spoiled. They are not altogether sufficient reasons,
for they obtain in other once delightful villages
similarly situated, which have unhappily been ravaged
by modern progress ; but here they have by chance
sufficed. They are found chiefly in the happy
circumstances that Sonning lies three-quarters of a
mile off the main-road — off that Bath road, oh !
my brethren, that was once so delightful, with its
memories of a bypast coaching-age ; and is now
SONNING 3
little better than a race-track for motor-cars, and,
by reason of their steel-studded tyres, cursed with
a bumpy surface full of pot-holes. Time was when
the surface of the Bath road was perfection. Now-
adays, no ingenuity of mortal road-surveyors can
keep it in repair, for the suction of air caused by
pneumatic tyres travelling at great speed tears out
the binding material and leaves only loose grit and
stones. The Bath road on a fine summer's day has
become unendurable by reason of the dust raised
in this manner. If you stand a distance away, in
the fields, out of sight of the actual road, its course
can yet be distinctly traced for a long way by the
billows of dust, rising like smoke from it.
Happily, motor-cars do but rarely come into
Sonning, although at the turning out of the high
road a prominent advertisement of the Bull, the
White Hart, or the French Horn — the three hostelries
that Sonning can boast — invites them hither.
The other prominent reason for this village being
allowed to remain quiet is found in the fact of Twy-
ford, the nearest railway station, being two miles
distant.
There are many branching streams of the Thames
here, and the hamlet of Sonning Eye, on the Ox-
fordshire side, takes its name either from this abun-
dance of water, or from the eyots, or islands, formed
by these several channels, crossed by various bridges.
Sonning Bridge par excellence is a severely un-
ornamented structure of red brick, obviously built
by the very least imaginative of architects, in the
eighteenth century. If it were new it would be
4 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
an offence, but there is now a mellowness of colour
in that old red brick, embroidered richly as it is in
green and gold by the lichens of nearly two cen-
turies, that gives the old bridge a charm by no means
inherent in its originator's design.
Trees, great, noble, upstanding woodland trees,
lovingly enclasp Sonning village and form a back-
ground for its ancient cottages and fine old mansions,
and against the dark green background of them you
see on summer afternoons the blue smoke curling
up lazily from rustic chimneys. In midst of this
the embattled church-tower rises unobtrusively ;
and indeed the church is so hidden, although it is a
large church, that strangers are generally directed
to find it by way of the Bull Inn : a rambling
old hostelry occupying two sides of a square, and
covered in summer with a mantle of roses and creepers.
And it must, by the way, not be forgotten that
Sonning in general displays a very wealth of flowers
for the delight of the stranger.
I would it were possible to be enthusiastic upon
the church, but thorough " restoration," and a
marvellously hideous monument to Thomas Rich,
Alderman of Gloucester, 1613, and his son, Sir
Thomas Rich, Bart., 1667, forbid. There are brasses
on the floor of the nave, to Laurence Fyton, 1434,
steward of the manor of Sonning, and to William
Barber, 1549, bailiff of the same manor ; with others.
Here, too, is a monument of Canon Pearson,
vicar for over forty years, and reverently spoken of—
or is it the monument that is reverenced ? — by the
caretaker, I have sought greatly to discover some-
SONNING 7
thing by which the Canon's career may be illustrated
in these pages, but, upon my soul, the most notable
things available are precisely that he held this ex-
cellent living for that long period, and that he some-
times preached before Queen Victoria. These things
do not in themselves form a title to reverence.
Something of the distinct stateliness of Sonning
is due to the fact that anciently the Bishops of
Salisbury were owners of the manor, and before
them the Bishops of the Saxon diocese of Dorchester.
Their manor-house was in the time of Leland " a
fair old house of stone by the Tamise ripe " ; but of
this desirable residence nothing remains. The Dean-
ery, too, has disappeared, but the fine old stone
and brick enclosing -walls of its grounds remain, and
there a picturesque modern residence has been built.
Those walls, of an immense thickness and solidity,
are indeed a sight to see, for the saxifrage and many
beautiful flowering plants growing in and upon them.
Sonning itself, being a place so delightful, invites
those to whom locality has interest to explore into
the country that lies in the rear of it. In a work
styled Thames Valley Villages we may go very
much where we please, and here the valley broadens
out considerably, for it includes, and insensibly
merges with, that of the river Loddon, which flows
down quite a long way, even from the heights of
northern Hampshire. The Loddon, the loveliest
tributary of the Thames, flows into it by three
mouths, from one mile to two miles and a half below
Sonning, and its various loops and channels make
the four-mile stretch of country in the rear a particu-
8 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
larly moist and water-logged district. Here, cross-
ing the dusty Bath road at Twyford, which takes its
name from the ancient double ford of the Loddon at
this point, the secluded village of Hurst may be found.
Its name of " Hurst," i.e. a woodland, indicates its
situation in what was once the widespreading Windsor
Forest. The village lies
along gravelly roads, scat-
tered about fragments of
village green^and a large
CX_/N
pond ; its church, hidden
three-quarters of a mile
away, forming, with a
country inn and some old
almshouses, a curiously
isolated group. To see
the interesting Norman
and Early English church,
with red-brick tower, dated
HOUB-OLASS AND WBOUGHT-IKON -^o CrOWned with
STAND, HTJRST.
cupola, is worth some
effort ; for it contains a very handsome chancel-
screen, probably placed here circa, 1500. The re-
painting of it in 1876, under the direction of
J. D. Sedding, the architect who then restored
the church, is, if indeed in accordance with the
HURST 9
traces of the original decoration then found, cer-
tainly more curious than beautiful ; but it should
be seen, if only to show that our ancestors were,
after all, not a little barbaric in their schemes of
decoration. The hour-glass, with beautiful wrought-
iron bracket dated 1636, should be noticed. Behind
it, on the wall, is painted " As this Glasse runneth,
so Man's Life passeth." A queer memorial brass
to Alse Harison, representing the lady in a four-
poster bed, is on the north wall. A large grey-and-
white marble monument to others of the Harison
family includes an epitaph on Philip Harison, who
died in 1683. The sorrowing author of it ends
ingeniously :
" A double dissolution there appears,
He into dust dissolves ; she into tears."
Surely a mind capable of such ingenious imagery
on such a subject cannot have been wholly downcast.
The old almshouses by the church were founded,
as appears on a tablet over the entrance, by one
William Barker :
This Hospitall for the
Maintenance of eight poor persons,
Each at 6d. pr diem for euer, was
Erected and Founded in ye year 1664
At the Sole Charge of
WILLIAM BARKER
of Hurst, in the County of
Wilts, Esq.
Who dyed ye 25th of March, 1685
And lies buried in the South
Chancell of this Parish.
io THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Note you that, gentle reader, " the county of
Wilts," we being in the midst of Berkshire ? A
considerable tract of surrounding country is in fact
(or was until comparatively recent years) a detached
portion of Wiltshire, and was invariably shown so
on old maps. Examples of such isolated portions
of counties, and even of detached fragments of
parishes, are by no means rare : Worcestershire in
England and Cromartyshire in Scotland, forming
the most notable examples ; but the reasons for
these things are obscure, and all attempts at ex-
plaining tjiem amount to little more than the un-
satisfying conclusion that they are thus because —
well, because they are, you know ! That is the net
result of repeated discussions upon the subject in
Notes and Queries, in which publication of wholly
honorary and unpaid contributions the majority of
noters, querists, and writers of replies have during
the space of some sixty years past been engaged in
chasing their own tails, like so many puppies. The
process is amusing enough, but as you end where
you began, the net result is no great catch.
Apart from legends and traditions, it would
seem that the explanation of the Berkshire districts
of Hurst, Twyford, Ruscombe, Whistley Green, and
a portion of Wokingham having been accounted in
Wiltshire, may be found in the fact, akeady re-
marked, that Sonning was a manor of the Bishops
of Salisbury. The question appears to have been
largely an ecclesiastical affair. The anomaly of a
portion of Wiltshire being islanded in Berkshire
was, however, ended by Acts of Parliament during
ST. LAWRENCE WALTHAM n
the reigns of William the Fourth and Queen Victoria,
by which the area concerned was annexed to Berk-
shire.
Returning from Hurst to Twyford, expeditions
to Ruscombe, St. Lawrence Waltham, and Shottes-
brooke will amply repay the explorer in these wilds —
for wilds they are in the matter of perplexing roads.
They are good roads, in so far that they are level,
ST. LAWKENCE WALTHAM.
but they would seem to have come into existence
on no plan ; or, if plan there ever were, a malicious
plan, intended to utterly confound and mislead
the stranger. But this is no unpleasant district
in which to wander awhile.
Ruscombe is notable as the place where William
Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, died, in 1718. Its
church stands solitary in the meadows — a red-brick,
eighteenth-century building, as ruddy as a typical
beef-eating and port-drinking farmer of Georgian
VOL. II 2
12 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
days. The neighbouring St. Lawrence Waltham is
entirely delightful. The fine church tower of St.
Lawrence, the ancient brick and plaster and timbered
Bell Inn, and the old village pound, with an aged
elm at each corner of it, composing a rarely-beautiful
picture.
The stone spire of Shottesbrooke church is seen,
not far off, peering up from among the trees of
Shottesbrooke Park, in which it is situated. When
we see a stone church spire in Berkshire, where we
do not commonly find ancient spires, we are apt to
suspect at once a modern church, and our suspicions
are generally well-founded ; but here is a remarkably
fine Decorated building of the mid-fourteenth century
(it was built 1337). It stands finely in a noble
park for many years belonging to the Vansittart
family, and has been well described as " a cathedral
in miniature/' Its origin appears by tradition to
have been due to the unexpected recovery of Sir
William Trussell, the then owner of the estate, who
had been brought to the verge of death by a long-
continued course of drunkenness. He built it by
way of thankoffering, and as he would seem to have
been intemperate in all he did, he not only built this
very large and noble church, but founded a college
for five priests. This establishment went the way
of all such things, hundreds of years ago, and the
great building, standing solitary in the park, except
for the vicarage and the manor-house, now astonishes
the stranger at its loneliness. He wonders where
the village is, and may well continue to wonder,
for village there is none.
SHOTTESBROOKE 15
A versifier in the Ingoldsby manner narrates
the building of it by Trussell :
" An oath he sware
To his lady fair,
' By the cross on my shield,
A church I'll build,
And therefore the deuce a form
Is so fit as a cruciform ;
And the patron saint that I find the aptest
Is that holiest water-saint — John the Baptist.' '
A legend of the building of the spire tells how the
architect, completing it by fixing the weathercock,
called for wine to drink a health to the King, and,
drinking, fell to the ground and was dashed to pieces.
The only sound he uttered, says the legend, was
" 0 ! 0 ! " and that exclamation was the sole in-
scription carved upon his tomb, erected upon the
spot where he fell. Many have been those pilgrims
drawn to Shottesbrooke by this picturesque story,
seeking that tomb. Tombstones of any kind are
few in Shottesbrooke churchyard, and the only
one that can possibly mark the architect's grave is
a coped stone on which an expectant and confiding
person may indeed faintly trace " 0, 0 " ; but as
the stone is probably not so old as the fourteenth
century, and as it is extremely likely that an expectant
person will, if in any way possible, find that which
he expects, it would not be well to declare for the
genuineness of it. But it is at any rate a very old
and cracked and moss-grown stone.
Of a bygone Vansittart, who filled this family
living for forty-four years, we read some highly
i6
THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
eulogistic things upon a monument near by. Born
1779, he died 1847, " the faithful pastor of an attached
flock. Meek, mild, benevolent. In domestic life
tender, kind, considerate. In all relations revered,
respected, beloved/' One is tempted to repeat the
unfortunate architect's exclamation, " 0 ! 0 ! ''
The church, serving no village, and standing in
a park close by the noble country seat of the Van-
sittarts, is for all practical pur-
poses a manorial chapel. That
it has long been used as such is
very evident from the many
tablets to Vansittarts which line
its walls. The remains of the
founder's tomb are seen in the
north transept, in a long stretch
of delicate arcading along the
north wall, beautifully wrought
in chalk.
A singular effigy to William Throckmorton,
Doctor of Laws, " warden of this church," who died
in 1535, is on the north side of the chancel. It is
of diminutive size, and is what archaeologists call
an " interrupted effigy," showing only head and
breast and feet, the middle being occupied by a
brass with Latin inscription.
There are several brasses in the church : the
finest of them, a fourteenth-century example in the
chancel, very deeply and beautifully cut, representing
two men ; one with forked beard, a long gown
and a sword ; the other an ecclesiastic. They stand
side by side, and are reputed to represent the founder
EAST WINDOW,
SHOTTESBROOKE.
THE PATRICK STREAM 17
and his brother, but the inscription has been torn
away, together with most of the canopy.
A brass in the north transept to Richard Gill,
Sergeant of the " Backhouse "—i.e. the Bakehouse—
to Henry the Seventh and Henry the Eighth, de-
scribes him as " Bailey of the Seaven Hundreds of
Cookeham and Bray in the Forest Division." Near
by is a brass to " Thomas Noke, who for his great
Age and vertuous Lyfe was reverenced of all Men,
and was commonly called Father Noke, created
Esquire by King Henry the Eight. He was of
Stature high and comly ; and for his excellency in
Artilery made Yeoman of the Crowne of England
which had in his Lyfe three Wives, and by every
of them some Fruit and Off-spring, and deceased
the 21 of August 1567 in the Yeare of his Age 87,
leaving behind him Julyan his last Wife, two of
his Brethren, one Sister, one only Son, and two
Daughters living."
Thomas Noke is represented with his three wives,
while six daughters and four sons are grouped beneath.
Returning through Twyford to Sonning, the
outlet of the Loddon,
" The Loddon slow, with verdant alders crowned,"
is found in that exquisite backwater, the Patrick
Stream, where a picture of surpassing beauty is
seen at every turn. By a long, winding course,
fringed richly with rushes, and overhung with lovely
trees, the Patrick Stream wanders through meadow
lands and finally emerges into the Thames again,
just below Shiplake Lock. By dint of making this
i8 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
long but delightful detour, and thus avoiding Ship-
lake Lock, it is possible to do the Thames Conservancy
out of one of those many threepences for which it
has so insatiable an appetite.
Shiplake, on the Oxfordshire bank, is the place
where Tennyson was married,^ but the church has
been largely rebuilt since then. The windows are
mostly filled with ancient glass brought from the
abbey of St. Bertin, at St. Omer. Shiplake Mill,
once a picturesque feature, is now, at this time of
writing, a squalid heap of ruins.
Wargrave, on the Berkshire side, is said to have
once been a market-town, and it is now growing
again so rapidly that a town it will soon be once
more. Its houses crowd together on the banks,
where the George and Dragon Inn stands, giving
upon the slipway to the water : all looking out
upon the spacious Oxfordshire meadows. The sign
of the George and Dragon Inn — a double-sided
one — painted by G. D. Leslie, K.A., and J. E. Hodg-
son, K.A., in 1874, shows St. George on one side,
as we are accustomed to see him on the reverse of
coins, engaged in slaying the dragon ; and on the
other, the monster duly slain, the saint is refreshing
himself with a noble tankard of ale.
Wargrave church has been restored extensively,
and its tower is of red brick, and not ancient ; but
it forms, for all that, a very charming picture. Here
we may see a tablet to the memory of that remarkable
prig, Thomas Day, the author of that egregious
work for the manufacture of other prigs, Sandford
and Merton. He was born about 1748, and died
THOMAS DAY 21
1789. Of his good and highly moral life there
can be no doubt ; but moral philosophers are rarely
personce gratce in a naughty and frivolous world.
We fight shy of them, and of all instructive and
improving persons, and make light of their works ;
and if nowadays we read Sandford and Merton at
all, it is for the purpose of extracting some satirical
amusement from the pompous verbiage of the
Reverend Mr. Barlow, and from the respective
" wickedness " and goodness of Tommy and the
exemplary Harry.
Among Thomas Day's peculiar views was that
by a proper method of education (i.e. a method
invented by himself) there was scarcely anything
that could not be accomplished. He certainly began
courageously, about the age of twenty-one, by
choosing two girls, each about twelve years of age,
whom he proposed to educate after his formula, and
then to marry the most suitable of them. He,
however, did not carry this plan so far as the marrying
of either. It is not clear whom we should congratu-
late : the girls or their eccentric guardian, who at
last met his death from the kick of a horse which
resented the entirely novel philosophical principles
on which he was training it.
In the churchyard is the grave of Madame Tussaud,
of the famous waxworks, and here lies Sir Morell
Mackenzie, the surgeon who attended the Emperor
Frederick. He died in 1892. Near by is a quite
new columbarium for containing the ashes of
cremated persons.
A singular bequest left to Wargrave by one
22 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Mrs. Sarah Hill is that by which, every year at
Easter, the sum of £1 is to be equally divided, in
new crown pieces, between two boys and two girls,
who qualify for this reward by conduct that must
needs meet with the approval of all. The five-
shilling pieces are not forthcoming unless the candi-
dates are known never to have been undutiful to
their parents, never to swear, never to tell untruths,
or steal, break windows, or do " any kind of mis-
chief." The good lady would appear either to have
been bent upon finding the Perfectly Good Child,
or to have been a saturnine humorist, with a cynical
disbelief in these annual distributions ever being
made. But they are made ; and we can only suppose
that the vicar and churchwardens allow themselves
just a little charitable latitude in the annual judging.
And, you know, after all, is it worth while being
so monumentally good for the poor reward of five
shillings a year ? Consider how much delightful
mischief you forgo.
Hennerton backwater, below Wargrave, is another
of the delightful side-streams that are plentiful here,
and is now, after a good deal of litigation, pronounced
free. The wooded road between Wargrave and
Henley skirts it, and is carried over a lovely valley
in the grounds of Park Place by a very fine arch of
forty-three feet span, built of gigantic rough stones.
»Mmm
UNDER THE WILLOWS : A BACKWATER NEAR WARGRAVE.
CHAPTER II
HENLEY — THE BRIDGE AND ITS KEYSTONE-MASKS —
REMENHAM — HAMBLEDEN — MEDMENHAM ABBEY
AND THE " HELL FIRE CLUB " —HURLEY — BISHAM
PASSING Marsh Lock, the town of Henley comes
into view, heralded by its tall church tower, with
four equal-sized battlemented turrets ; a quite un-
mistakable church tower. The noble five-arched
stone bridge here crossing the Thames, built in 1789,
at a cost of £10,000, is one of the most completely
satisfactory along the whole course of the river.
The keystone-masks of the central arch show sculp-
tured faces representing Isis and Thames. Isis
appropriately faces up-river, and Thames looks
down-stream. These conventionalised heads of a
river-god and goddess are really admirable examples
of the sculptor's art. They adorn the title-pages
of the present volumes, which display Isis with a
woman's head, and Father Thames, bearded, with
little fishes peeping out of the matted hair, and bul-
rushes decoratively disposed about his temples.
These masks were the work of that very accomplished
lady, the Honourable Mrs. Anne Seymour Darner,
who at the time when Henley bridge was a-building
resided at Park Place. She was cousin to Horace
Walpole, for whom she carved an eagle so exquisitely
VOL. II 25
26 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
that he wrote under it— enthusiastic cousin as he
was— Non Praxiteles sed Anna Darner me fecit. One
terrible thing, however, stamps the lady irrevocably
as a gifted amateur : she gave' her work to the bridge
authorities. Most reprehensible ! The recipients
were duly grateful, as witness the Bridge Minutes.
True, they do but acknowledge one mask : " May 6,
1785. Ordered that the thanks of the Commissioners
be given to the Honourable Mrs. Darner for the
very elegant head of the River Thames which she
has cut and presented to them for the Keystone of
the centre arch of the bridge."
This conventional head of Father Thames is
that made familiar by the eighteenth-century poets,
who personified everything possible. It is that
Father Thames who
" From his oozy bed
. . . advanced his rev'rend head ;
His tresses dropped with dews, and o'er the stream
His shining horns diffused a golden gleam."
Only, as we see, bulrushes here take the place of
his " shining horns." The head of Isis was a portrait
of Miss Freeman of Fawley Court.
Henley is, of course, famed, above all else, for
its Regatta, established as an annual event since
1839, following upon an Oxford and Cambridge
boat-race here in 1837. It is now pre-eminently
the function of the river season, whether we consider
it from the point of view of sport or fashion. Here
every June the best oarsmanship in the world is
displayed over this course of one-and-a-quarter
ARCH CARRYING THE ROAD, PARK PLACE.
REMENHAM CHURCH.
HENLEY 29
miles : indisputably the best for anything up to that
distance, for the regatta is now attended by the
best oarsmen of the New World as well as of the Old.
The regatta is, from a social and hospitable point
of view, very much what the Derby is among horse-
races ; and the house-boat parties and riverside
house-parties for the Henley Week dispense much
hospitality and champagne. There is yet another
side to the regatta : it is, almost equally with
Ascot and Goodwood, recognised as an opportunity
for the display of fine dresses. The Oxfordshire
bank is at such times the most exclusive, and to
the Berkshire shores are principally relegated the
pushing, struggling crowds of humbler sportsmen
and sightseers. But here, where every point is
legally open to all, except where private lawns
reach down to the river, the real exclusiveness of
Goodwood or Ascot is, of course, impossible. Henley
town is at such times anything but exclusive, and
is thronged to excess. In these later times of motor-
cars it is also apt to be a great deal more dusty
than ever it used to be. To see Henley in Eegatta
Week, and again Henley in any other week, affords
an astonishing contrast ; for at all other times it
is, as a town, among the dullest of the dull, and
its broad High Street a synonym for emptiness.
I do not propose in this place to enlarge further
upon Henley, but to mention Henley at all and
not its famous old coaching-inn by the bridge, the
Ked Lion, has never yet been done ; and shall I
be the first to make the omission ? No ! It is a
famous old inn, and of enormous size. Every one
30 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
knows it as the hostelry where Shenstone the poet,
about 1750, scratched with a diamond upon a window
the celebrated stanza about " the warmest welcome
at an inn/' but that window-pane has long been
lost ; and it is really doubtful if the inscription
was not rather at another Henley : i.e. Henley-in-
Arden. I have fully discussed that question else-
where,1 and so will not repeat it in this place.
Mr. Ashby-Sterry is quite right in his description
of the Bed Lion, standing red-brickily by the
bridge :
" 'Tis a finely-toned, picturesque, sunshiny place,
Kecalling a dozen old stories ;
With a rare British, good-natured, ruddy-hued face,
Suggesting old wines and old Tories."
Bemenham, a mile or so along the Berkshire
shore, is typically Berkshire, but with a church still
looking starkly new, as the result of !f thorough
restoration " in 1870. Its semicircular apse, really
ancient, does not look it. The tower is of the Henley
type, though smaller. Henley church tower, in
fact, seems to have set a local fashion in such, for
that of Hambleden conforms to the same design.
Begatta Island, with its effective temple, marks the
old starting-point of the races.
Hambleden is on the Buckinghamshire side ; a
pretty village situated about one mile distant from
the river along the lovely and retired valley of
the Hamble. From it the widow of W. H. Smith,
of the newspaper and library and bookstall business
1 The Old Inns of Old England, vol. ii., pp. 299-303.
W. H. SMITH 33
of W. H. Smith & Son, and of Greenlands, near
Henley, takes her title of Viscountess Hambleden.
Liberal, Radical, and Separatist journals were never
tired of satirically referring to W. H. Smith, when
a member of a Unionist Government, as " Old
Morality/' deriving that term from the stand he
took in the House of Commons upon his " duty to
Queen and country/' His idea of his duty in those
respects was exactly that of an average responsible
business man. He had no axe to grind, no job to
perpetrate ; and that being so, the nickname of
" Old Morality " was in effect a great deal more
honourable than those satirists ever suspected. They,
indeed, conferred upon him a brevet of which any one
might well be proud, and incidentally covered them-
selves with shame, as men to whom a sense of right-
ness and of duty towards one's sovereign and one's
native land was a subject for mirth. But of course
these quips and cranks derived from the party
notoriously friends of every country save their own.
In the very much restored church of Hambleden,
among various tombs, is one in the chancel to Henry,
son of the second Lord Sandys, with a quaint in-
scription, owning some nobility of thought :
" Nature cryeth on me so sore,
I cannot, Christ, be too fervent,
Sith he is gone, I have no more,
And yt, 0 God, I am content.
I believe in the Resurection of Life
To see you again at the last day,
And now, farewell, Elizabeth my wife,
Teach mye children God to obey
34 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
But now let us rejoyce in heart
To trymphe never cease
Sith in this life wee only part
To Joyce agen in heavenly peace.
Parted to God's mercy, 1540."
The elaborate oak screen under the tower, carved
with Kenascence designs, is said to have once been
part of Cardinal Wolsey's bedstead. It bears the
arms of Christ Church and of Corpus Christi, Oxford ;
and those of Castile, with the rose badge of York.
At some little distance downstream is Med-
menham Abbey. The building, that looks so entirely
reverend and worshipful from the opposite shore,
is really, in the existing buildings, little enough
of the original Abbey that was founded towards
the close of the twelfth century by one Hugh de
Bolebec. It was never very much of a place, and
seems to have been something of a dependency of
Bisham Abbey. Just prior to its suppression, Henry
the Eighth's commissioners reported that it had
merely two monks, with no servants, and little
property, but no debts ; but, on the other hand, no
goods worth more than £1 3s. 8d., " and the house
wholly ruinous/'
Nothing remains of whatever church there may
have been, and the only ancient portions are some
fragments of the Abbot's lodgings. The " ruined "
tower, the cloisters, and much else are the work of
those blasphemous " Franciscans " of the Hell Fire
Club who, under the presidency of Francis Dashwood,
Lord le Despencer, established themselves here
about 1758. There were twelve of these reckless
THE HELL-FIRE CLUB
37
" monks," who, having built the " cloisters/' reared
the now ivy-mantled tower, and painted their li-
centious motto, " Fay ce que voudras," over one of
the doors, sat down to a series of orgies and
debaucheries whose excesses have been perhaps ex-
aggerated by the mystery with which these " monks
MEDMENHAM.
of Medmenham " chose to veil their doings. Among
them were Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, Sir
John Dashwood King, John Wilkes,the poet Churchill,
and Sir William Stanhope. Paul Whitehead was
" secretary " to this precious gang of debauchees.
Devil-worship was said to have been among the
impious rites celebrated here ; and one of the party
seems to have played a particularly horrifying
practical joke upon his fellows during the progress
38 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
of these celebrations. He procured an exceptionally
large and hideous monkey and, dressing it in char-
acter, let it down the chimney into the room among
his friends, who fled in terror, and were for long
afterwards convinced that their patron had really
come for them. This incident is said to have broken
up the fraternity.
The explorer by Thames-side could, until quite
recent years, do very much as he liked at Medmen-
ham, and the more or less authentic ruins were
open to him ; but now they are enclosed within the
grounds of a private residence, and a hotel stands
beside the ferry. The very small village at the
back is to be noted for the highly picturesque group-
ing of some ancient gabled houses (restored of late)
with the little church and a remarkable hill crested
by an old red-brick and flint house that looks as
though it owned, or ought to own, some romantic
story. The hilltop is said to be encircled with the
remains of a prehistoric encampment. It is with
sorrow that here also one notes the builder's pre-
judicial activities. Directly in front of the church,
and entirely blocking out the view of it, there has
been built a recent red-brick villa, with the result
that the effective composition illustrated here is
almost wholly destroyed.
The lovely grass-lands over against Medmenham
are glorious in June, before the hay-harvest. One
may walk by them, beside the river, all the way to
Hurley. On the left, or Buckinghamshire, bank,
the ground rises into chalk-cliffs, surmounted by
the great unoccupied house of Danesfield, staringly
HURLEY 41
white, popularly said to contain as many windows
as there are days in the year. This is the handiwork
of Mr. R. W. Hudson, of " Hudson's Soap."
Hurley, to which we now come, is a historic spot.
Here, by the waterside, was founded in 1087, by
Geoffrey de Mandeville, the Benedictine Priory of
Our Lady of Hurley, which remained until 1535,
when, in common with other religious houses, it
was suppressed by Henry the Eighth. To the Love-
lace family came the lands and buildings of this
establishment, and here, on the site of it, Sir Richard
Lovelace built, with " money gotten with Francis
Drake/' a splendid mansion which he called Lady
Place. His descendant, Richard, Lord Lovelace,
was in 1688 one of the somewhat timorous nobles
who met secretly to plot the deposition of James
the Second. They had not the courage, these pusil-
lanimous wretches, to take the field in arms, as Mon-
mouth and his brave peasants had done, three years
earlier, and must needs find cellars to grope in, and
then invite over that cold, disliked Dutchman,
William of Orange, to do for them what they dared
not do for themselves. Macaulay, in his richly-
picturesque language, refers to these meetings, but
it will be observed that he calls those who met
here " daring." They were anything but that.
' This mansion," he says, " built by his ancestors
out of the spoils of Spanish galleons from the Indies,
rose on the ruins of a house of our Lady in this
beautiful valley, through which the Thames, not
yet defiled by the precincts of a great capital, rolls
under woods of beech, and round the gentle hills
VOL. II 4
42 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
of Berks. Beneath the stately saloon, adorned by
Italian pencils, was a subterranean vault, in which
the bones of ancient monks had sometimes been
found. In this dark chamber some zealous and
daring opponents of the Government held many
midnight conferences during that anxious time when
England was impatiently expecting the Protestant
wind."
This Lady Place no longer exists, for the great
house was demolished in 1836, and the house so-
called is of modern build. But the old-time gardens
remain, and the refectory ; and here is the old circu-
lar pigeon-house, with the initials on it, " C.R.,"
and the date, 1642.
A curious story tells how one of the last occupants
of Lady Place was a brother of Admiral Kempenfelt,
and that he and the Admiral planted two thorn-
trees in the garden, in which he took great pride.
One day, returning home, he found that the tree
planted by the Admiral had withered away, and he
exclaimed : "I feel sure this is an omen that my
brother is dead." That evening, August 29, 1782,
he received news of the loss of the Royal George.
Hurley church is a long, low building, of nave
without aisles, of Norman, or some say earlier, origin.
" It was probably ravaged by the Danes towards
the close of the ninth century," say the guide-books.
This may have been so, but it could hardly have
been worse ravaged by them than it was by those
who " restored " it in 1852 " at a cost of £1,500,"
and incidentally also at the cost of all its real interest.
The village of Hurley straggles a long way back
BIS HAM 45
from the river, in one scattered, disjointed line of
cottages, past the picturesque old Bell Inn,
apparently of fifteenth-century date, heavily framed
with stout oaken timbers.
Below Hurley, leaving behind the ancient red-
brick piers of the old-world gardens of Lady Place,
the river opens out to Mario w reach, with Bisham
on the right hand, and the tall crocketed spire of
Marlow church closing the distant view.
" Bisham " is said to have been originally " Bustle-
ham," but the present form will be preferred by
every one. Strangers call it " Bish-am," but for
the natives and the people of Marlow the only way
is by the elision of the letter h— " Bis-am " ; and
thus shall you, being duly informed of this shibboleth,
infallibly detect the stranger in these parts.
Bisham village is quite invisible from the river,
nor need we trouble to seek it, unless it be for climbing
up into the lovely and precipitous Quarry Woods,
in the rear. To those who knew Bisham when
Fred Walker painted his delightful pictures, and
among them, some studies of this village street,
there comes, when they think of the Bisham that
was and the Bisham that is, a fierce but impotent
anger. The humble old red- brick cottages remain,
it is true, and their gardens bloom as of yore, but
what was once the sweet-smelling gravelly street
is now a tarred abomination, smelling evilly, and
wearing a squalid and disreputable look. This is
the result of the coming of the motor-car, for Bisham
is on the well-travelled road between High Wy-
combe, Great Marlow, Twyford, and Eeading, and
46 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
the village has now the unwelcome choice of two
evils : to be half-choked with billows of dust, or
to coat its roads with tar compositions.
Of what was originally a Preceptory of the Knights
Templars, and then an Augustine Priory, and finally
a Benedictine Abbey, nothing is left but the Prior's
lodgings, now the mansion of the Vansittart-Neales,
called " the Abbey." The parish church stands
finely by the waterside, encircled by the trees of
the park, and there remains a monastic barn. Such
are the few relics of the proud home of monks and
priors, enriched during hundreds of years by the
benefactions of the wicked, endeavouring by means
of such gifts to atone sufficiently for their evil lives,
and so escape the damnation that surely awaited
them.
Such complete destruction is melancholy indeed,
when we consider the great historic personages who
were buried here : among them the great Nevill,
' Warwick the Kingmaker," slain at last in the
course of his tortuous ambitions, in the Battle of
Barnet, fought on Easter Day, 1471, and laid at
Bisham, hard by his own manor of Marlow.
When the Abbey was finally dissolved, it was
granted by Henry the Eighth to Anne of Cleves,
his divorced fourth wife, who exchanged it with
the Hoby family for a property of theirs in Kent.
Here the Princess Elizabeth was resident for three
years, during the reign of her half-sister, Mary,
really under surveillance ; and to that period the
greater part of the " Abbey/' as we see it now, is
to be referred.
BISHAM ABBEY.
" TOP O' THE TOWN," GREAT MARLOW.
LADY HOBY 49
Bisham Abbey is, of course, famed above all
other things for the story of the wicked Lady Hoby,
who so thrashed her son for spoiling his copy-books
with blots that he died. A portrait of her, in the
dress of a widow, is still in the house, and her ghost
is yet said to haunt the place.1 She was wife of
Sir Thomas Hoby, Ambassador to France, who
died in 1566, aged 36. The elaborate altar-tomb
in Bisham church to him, and to his half-brother,
Sir Philip, with effigies of the two knights, is worth
seeing ; and the rhymed epitaph written by her
worth reading. The early death of the Ambassador,
in Paris, was not without suspicion of poison. The
sculptured figures of hawks at the feet of the brothers
are " hobby "-hawks, a punning allusion to the
family name.
Lady Hoby was a grief-stricken widow, and
supplicated Heaven, rather quaintly, to " give me
back my husband, Thomas," or that being beyond
possibility, to " give me another like Thomas."
She captured another, eight years later, when
she married John, Lord Kussell ; but whether
Heaven had thus given her one up to sample we
are only left idly to conjecture. At any rate she
outlived him too, by many years, and elected to be
buried beside her Thomas. An elaborate monument
to this fearsome lady discloses her in a wonderful
coif, surmounted by a coronet. Before and behind
her kneeling figure are the praying effigies of her
children. It is recorded that she was particularly
interested in mortuary observances, and that she
1 More fully discussed in Haunted Houses, pp. 36-42.
50 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
even found it possible to be absorbed, as she lay
dying, at the age of 81, in her own funeral rites ;
corresponding with Sir William Dethick as to pre-
cisely the number of mourners and heralds that
were her due.
A little monument to two childern in Bisham
church is the subject of a very old legend to the
effect that Queen Elizabeth was their mother !
More scandal about Queen Elizabeth !
Bisham passed from the Hobys in 1768 to a family
of Mills, who assumed the name ; but in 1780 it
again changed hands and was sold to the Vansittarts,
of whom Sir H. J. Vansittart-Neale is the present
representative. The old belief in disaster befalling
families who hold property taken from the Church
has been curiously warranted here from time to
time, in the untimely death of eldest sons or direct
heirs, and here indeed, upon entering Bisham church,
the stranger is startled by the white marble life-size
effigy confronting him of a kneeling boy, in a Norfolk
jacket-suit ; an inscription declaring it to represent
George Kenneth Vansittart-Neale, who died in 1904,
aged fourteen.
CHAPTER III
GREAT MARLOW — COOKHAM — CLIVEDEN AND ITS
OWNERS — MAIDENHEAD
MARLOW town is well within sight from Bisham. It
is very much more picturesque at a distance than
it is found to be when arrived near at hand ; and
the graceful stone spire of its church is found to be
really a portion of a very clumsy would-be Gothic
building erected in the Batty-Langley style, about
1835. A fine old Norman and later building was
destroyed to make way for this ; and now the present
church is in course of being replaced, in sections,
by another, as the funds to that end come in. An
interesting monument in the draughty lobby of the
present building commemorates Sir Myles Hobart,
of Harleyford, who, when Member of Parliament
for Marlow, in 1628, distinguished himself by his
sturdy opposition to the King's illegal demands ;
and with his own hands, on a memorable occasion,
locked the door of the House of Commons, to secure
the debate on tonnage and poundage from interrup-
tion. For this he suffered three years' imprison-
ment.
The monument, shamefully " skied " on the
wall of this lobby, was removed from the old church.
Hobart met his death in 1652 by accident, the four
51
52 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
horses in his carriage running away down Holborn
Hill, and upsetting it. A curious little sculpture
on the lower part of the monument represents this
happening, and shows one of the wheels broken.
The monument is further interesting as having been
erected by Parliament ; the first to be voted of
any of a now lengthy series.
In the vestry, leading out of this lobby, among
FROM THE MONUMENT TO SIR MYLES HOBART,
GREAT MARLOW.
a number of old prints hung round the walls, is
an old painting of a naked boy, with bow and arrow,
his skin spotted all over, leopard-like, with brown
spots. This represents the once-famous " Spotted
Negro Boy," a supposed native of the Caribbean
Islands, who formed a very attractive feature of
Richardson's Show in the first decade of the nine-
teenth century. We shall probably not be far wrong
'
SHELLEY AT MARLOW 55
in suspecting Mr. William Richardson of a Barnum-
like piece of showman humbug in putting this child
forward as a " Negro Boy." The boy, one cannot
help thinking, was sufficiently English, but was a
freak, suffering from that dreadful skin disease,
ichthyosis serpentina. He lies buried in the church-
yard.
There are a few literary associations in Marlow
town, and by journeying from the riverside and
along the lengthy High Street, to where that curious
building, the old Crown Hotel, stands, facing
down the long thoroughfare, you may come presently
to the houses that enshrine them. Turning here
to the left you are in West Street, otherwise the
Henley road, and passing the oddly named " Quoiting
Square," there in the quaintly pretty old Albion
House next door to the old Grammar School, lived
Shelley in 1817. A tablet on the coping, like a
tombstone, records the fact. He divided his time
between writing the Revolt of Islam, and in
visiting the then degraded, poverty-stricken lower
orders of the town and talking nonsense to them.
As no report of his conversations survives, we can
only wonder if they were as bad as the turgid non-
sense of that poem. Does any one nowadays ever
read the Revolt of Islam, or know why Islam
did it, or if, in so doing, it succeeded ? In short,
it will take a great deal of argument to convince
the world that Shelley was not the Complete Prig
of his age, and in truth the house is much
more delightful and interesting for itself than for
this association. In Shelley's time it was very
VOL. ii 5
56 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
much larger than now, and comprised the two or
three other small houses which have been divided
from it.
At " Beechwood " lived Smedley, author of
Frank Fairleigh and Valentine Vox, and on the
Oxford road resided G. P. R. James, romantic
novelist, whose romances were said, by the satirists
of his methods, generally to commence with some
such formula as —
" As the shades of evening were falling upon
Deadman's Heath, three horsemen might have been
observed," etc.
Marlow Weir is, to oarsmen not intimately
acquainted with this stretch of the river, the most
dangerous on the Thames, so it behoves all to give
the weir-stream a wide berth in setting out again
from Marlow Bridge ; that suspension-bridge, built
in 1831, which, like the neighbouring church, looks
its best at a considerable distance. River-gossipers
will never let die that old satirical query, " Who ate
puppy-pie under Marlow Bridge ? " the taunt being
directed, according to tradition, against the bargees
of long ago, who, accustomed to raid the larder of
a waterside hotel at Marlow, were punished ad-
mirably by the landlord, who, having drowned a
Utter of puppies, caused them to be baked in a
large pie, and the pie to be placed where it could not
fail to attract the attention of the raiders, who
stole it, and consumed it with much satisfaction,
under the bridge.
Two miles below Marlow, past Spade Oak ferry,
is Bourne End, on the Buckinghamshire side ; a
FRED WALKER 59
modern collection of villas clustered around a de-
lightful backwater known as Abbotsbrook, and
by the outlet of the river Wye — the " bourne "
which ends here and gives rise to the place-name.
It comes down from Wycombe, to which also it
gives a name, and Loudwater.
Cookham now comes into view, on the Berkshire
shore. Here the village is grouped around a village
green ; rather a sophisticated green in these days,
and combed down and brushed up smartly since
those times when Fred Walker began his career.
Then the geese and ducks roamed about that open
space, and in the unspoiled village ; and old gaffers
in smock-frocks and wonderful beaver-hats with
naps on them as thick as Turkey carpets sat about
on benches in front of old inns, and smoked extra-
vagantly long churchwarden-pipes. The old gaffers
have long since gone, and the Bel and the Dragon
Inn has become a hotel, and Walker is dead and
already an Old Master. You may see his grave in
the churchyard, and read there how he died, aged
thirty-five, in 1875. There is, in addition, a portrait-
medallion within the church itself, which gives him
a half-drunken, half-idiotic expression that one hopes
did not really belong to him.
Behind the organ a curious mural monument to
Sir Isaac Pocock, Bart., dated 1810, represents
the baronet " suddenly called from this world to a
better state, whilst on the Thames near his own
house." He is seen in a punt, being caught while
falling by a personage intended to represent an
angel, in tempestuous petticoats, while a puntsman
60 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
engaged in poling the craft looks on, in very natural
surprise.
From Cookham, where the lock is set amid
wooded scenery, the transition to Cliveden is easy.
Clieveden, Cliefden, Cliveden — you may suit in-
dividual taste and fancy in the manner of spelling —
looks grandly from the Buckinghamshire heights
down on to the Berkshire levels of Cookham and
Ray Mead. Perhaps the most beautiful view of all
is from Cookham Lock. Ray Mead, that was until
twenty years ago just a mead — a beautiful stretch
of grass-meadows — is now the name of a long line
of villas with pretty frontages and gardens, but
deplorable names—" Frou-Frou," " Sans Souci," and
the like — and inhabited, often enough, as one might
suppose by the Frou-frous of musical comedy and
their admirers.
Cliveden, sometime " bower of wanton Shrews-
bury and of love," and now residence of the highly
respectable and remarkably wealthy Mr. William
Waldorf Astor, looks in lordly fashion upon such.
With the proceeds of his New York rent-roll that
Europeanised American in 1890 purchased the his-
toric place from the first Duke of Westminster, and
has resided here and at other of his English seats
ever since. Those who are conversant with American
newspapers are familiar with the scream every now
and again raised against this and other examples
of American money being taken and spent abroad.
The spectacle of that bird of prey raging because
of the dollars riven from it is amusing, but the
situation may become internationally serious yet,
COOKHAM CHUKOH.
BRAY CHURCH.
CLIVEDEN 63
for when some great financial crisis arises in the
United States and money is scarce, it is quite to
be expected that the question of the absentee land-
lords will become acute, and talk of super-taxing
and expropriation be heard. I believe this parti-
cular Astor is now a naturalised Englishman, and
I don't suppose him to be the only one. Suppose,
then, that the Government of the United States
at some future time seized the property of such,
how would the international situation shape ?
Cliveden, when it was thus sold, had not been
long in the hands of the Grosvenor family ; having
been, a generation earlier, the property of the Duke
of Sutherland, for whom the present Italianate man-
sion was built by Sir Charles Barry in 1851, following
upon a fire which had destroyed the older house,
for the second time in the history of the place. The
original fire was in 1795. In the mansion then
destroyed the air of " Rule, Britannia," had first been
played in 1740, as an incidental song in Thomson's
masque of Alfred, the music composed by Dr. Arne.
Boulter's Lock, the water-approach to Maiden-
head, is the busiest lock on the Thames, and now
busier on" Sundays than on any other day. How
astonishingly times have changed on the river may
be judged from an experience of the late Mr. Albert
Ricardo, who died at the close of 1908, aged eighty-
eight. He lived at Ray Mead all his long life, and
was ever keen on boating. When he was a com-
paratively young man, he brought his skiff round
to the lock one Sunday. His was the only boat
there, and he was addressed in no measured terms
64 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
by a man who indignantly asked him if he knew
what day it was, and telling him, in very plain
language, his opinion of a person who used the
river on Sunday. Since then a wave of High Church-
ism and irreligion (the two things are really the
same) has submerged the observance of the Sabbath,
and aforetime respectable persons play golf on the
Lord's Day.
A quaint incident, one, doubtless, of many,
comes to me here, in considering Boulter's Lock,
out of the dim recesses of bygone reading.
Says Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A., in his entertaining
book, Our River : "I came through the lock
once simultaneously with H.R.H. the Duke of Cam-
bridge. He was steering the boat he was in, and
I am sorry to say I incurred his displeasure by
accidentally touching his rudder with my punt's
nose."
Oh dear !
He does not tell us what H.R.H. said on this
historic occasion ; but a knowledge of the Royal
Duke's fiery temper and of his ready and picturesque
way of expressing it leads the present writer to
imagine that his remarks were of a nature likely to
have been hurtful to the self-respect of the Royal
Academician. But it is something — is it not ? — to
be able to record, thus delicately, by implication,
that one has been vigorously cursed by a Royal
Duke. Not to all of us has come such an honour !
And now we come to Maidenhead town, a town
of 12,980 persons, and yet a place that was, not
so very long ago, merely in the parishes of Cookham
MAIDENHEAD 67
and Bray. (It was created a separate civil parish
only in 1894.) Its growth, originally due to its
situation on that old coaching highway, the Bath
road (which is here carried across the river by that
fine stone structure, Maidenhead Bridge, built in
1772, to replace an ancient building of timber), has
been further brought about by the modern vogue
of the river, and by the convenience of a railway
station close at hand.
" Maidenhead " is, according to some views,
the " mydden hythe," the " middle wharf " between
Windsor and Marlow. Camden assures us that
the name derived from " St. Ursula/' one of the
eleven thousand virgins murdered at Cologne. But
St. Ursula and the eleven thousand maiden martyrs,
who are said to have been shot to death with arrows,
A.D. 451, are as entirely mythical as Sarah Gamp's
" Mrs. Harris."
But there is plenty choice in the origin of this
place-name. There are those who plump for " magh-
dun-hythe," the wharf under the great hill (of Clive-
den). The place is found under quite another
name in Domesday Book. There it is " Elenstone,"
or "Ellington." It is first styled " Maydehuth "
in 1248 ; and it has been thought that the name
is equivalent to " new wharf " ; the wharf, or its
successor, mentioned by Leland in 1538 as the
" grete warfeage of tymbre and fierwood."
We need not, perhaps, expend further space
upon the town of Maidenhead, for it is almost entirely
modern. Its fine stone bridge has already been
mentioned, and another, and a very different, type
68 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
of bridge, a quarter of a mile below it, now demands
attention.
Maidenhead Kailway Bridge, completed in 1839,
one of those greatly daring works for which the
Great Western Railway's original engineer, Isambard
Kingdom Brunei, was famous, is the astonishment
of all who behold it. Crossing the river in two
spans, each of 128 feet, the great elliptical brick
arches are the largest brickwork arches in the world,
and of such flatness that it seems scarcely possible
they can sustain their own weight, even without
the heavy burden of trains running across. Maiden-
head Railway Bridge astonishes me infinitely more
than the great bridge across the Forth, or any other
engineering feats. Yet sixty years have passed,
and the bridge not only stands as firmly as ever,
but nowadays sustains the weight of trains and
engines more than twice as heavy as those originally
in vogue. Moreover, in the doubling of the line,
found necessary in 1892, the confidence of the Com-
pany was shown by their building an exact replica
of Brunei's existing bridge, side by side with it.
Yet the original contractor had been so alarmed that
he earnestly begged Brunei to allow him to relinquish
the contract, and although the engineer proved to
him, scientifically, that it must stand, he went in
fear that when the wooden centreing was removed
the arches would collapse. A great storm actually
blew down the centreing before it was proposed to
remove it, but the bridge stood, and has stood ever
since, quite safely. It cost, in 1839, £37,000 to build.
CHAPTER IV
BRAY AND ITS FAMOUS VICAR — JESUS HOSPITAL
BEYOND this astonishing achievement comes the
delightful village of Bray, whose name is thought
to be a corruption of Bibracte, an obscure Roman
station. Bray is scenically associated with the
eight — or are they ten ? — tall poplars that stand in
a formal row, all of one size, and each equidistant
from the other, and form a prominent feature in the
view as you approach, upstream or down ; and
with the weird shapes of the eel-bucks that occupy
a position by the Berkshire bank. Composing a
pretty view with them comes the square, embattled
church-tower, together with some feathery water-
side trees — and always those stark sentinel poplars
in the background. You see them from almost
every quarter, a long way off ; and even from the
railway, as the Great Western trains sweep on-
wards, towards Maidenhead Bridge, they come
rushing into sight, and you say — and you observe
that the glances of other passengers say also—
" There's Bray ! "
Bray is, of course traditionally, the home of
that famous accommodating vicar who, reproached
with his readiness to change his principles, replied :
VOL. II 69 6
70 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
" Not so ; my principle is unaltered : to live and
die Vicar of Bray."
Every one knows the rollicking song that sets
forth, with a musical economy of some five notes,
the determination of that notorious person, despite
all changes and chances, to keep his comfortable
living, but not every one knows the facts about him
and that familiar ballad.
Fuller says : " He had seen some martyrs burnt
(two miles off) at Windsor, and found this fire too
hot for his tender temper " ; and further says,
respecting his guiding principle in life — to remain
Vicar of Bray — " Such are many nowadays, who,
though they cannot turn the wind, will turn their
mills and set them so that wheresoever it bloweth,
their grist shall certainly be grinded."
The reputation of being that vicar has been
flung upon Simon Alleyn, or Aleyn, which were,
no doubt, the contemporary ways of trying to spell
" Allen," who appears to have derived from a family
settled at Stevenage, Hertfordshire, and, graduating
at Oxford in 1539, to have been instituted to the
living of Bray in 1551, upon the death of William
Staverton, vicar before him. Two years later he
became also vicar of Cookham. In 1559 he was
made Canon of Windsor, and held all three offices
until his death in June 1565.
If we inquire into the history of Church and
State between 1551 and 1565, we shall not find
that the period covered by those fifteen years was
remarkable for so many great religious changes.
The changes were great, indeed, but not numerous.
LYCHGATE, BRAY.
THE VICAR OF BRAY 73
Edward the Sixth was living, and the Keformed
Church established, when Aleyn first became vicar,
who, when the young King died and the reactionary
reign of Mary began, doubtless " became a Koman " ;
but there is no doubt that many others did the like
at that time.
When Queen Mary died, in 1558, Aleyn naturally
conformed to the Protestant religion, then re-estab-
lished : and, as we see, died comparatively early
in the reign of Elizabeth, while that religion was
yet undisputed. There was thus, supposing him
to have been originally instituted as a Protestant,
only one violation of conscience necessary to his
retaining his post : a small matter ! As he could
scarcely have been more than about twenty years of
age when he graduated, it is seen at once that when
he died, in 1565, he was comparatively young —
some forty-six years of age. By his will, he directed
that he should be buried in St. George's Chapel,
Windsor ; and as there is no reason to suppose
that his wishes in that respect were wantonly dis-
regarded, it follows that the small monumental
brass, now without an inscription, here, in the church
of Bray, cannot mark his resting-place. It has,
indeed, been identified as to the memory of Thomas
Little, his successor, who died so soon afterwards as
1567.
The injustice, therefore, done to Simon Aleyn
by identifying him with the song, the " Vicar of
Bray/' is obvious ; for there were very many men,
born at an earlier date than he, and living to a much
greater age, who certainly did change their official
74 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
beliefs, for professional purposes, several times,
between 1534, when the Reformation was accom-
plished, and the reign of Elizabeth. There would
have been more scope for such a tergiversating
person in the reigns of Charles the Second, James
the Second, William the Third, Queen Anne, and
George the First — in all of which it would have been
easily possible for a not very long-lived clergyman
to flourish — than in Aleyn's time ; and the ballad
in its present form distinctly specifies that period,
long after Aleyn was dead. But the ascription to
Bray at all can clearly be proved a late one, for
the original words, traced back to 1712, when one
Edward Ward published a collection of miscellaneous
works in prose and verse, make no mention of any
particular place. The verses, eighteen in number,
are there entitled, " The Religious Turncoat ; or,
the Trimming Parson." Among them we find a
reference to the troubles under Charles the First,
by which it appears that the trimmer's constitutional,
as well as religious, opinions were moderated according
to circumstances :
" I lov'd no King in Forty-one,
When Prelacy went down,
A cloak and band I then put on
And preached against the Crown.
When Charles returned into the land,
The English Crown's supporter,
I shifted off my cloak and band,
And then became a courtier.
When Royal James began his reign,
And Mass was used in common,
THE VICAR OF BRAY 75
I shifted off my Faith again,
And then became a Roman.
To teach my flock I never missed,
Kings were by God appointed ;
And they are damned who dare resist
Or touch the Lord's anointed."
The familiar refrain was, of course, added later :
" And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, sir,
That, whatsoever King shall reign,
I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir."
The air to which the song is set is equally old,
but originally belonged to quite another set of
verses, called ' The Country Garden." It was,
later, used with the words of a ballad known as
' The Neglected Tar " ; but it certainly appeared
set to the words of " The Vicar of Bray " in 1778,
when it was published in The Vocal Magazine.
Who, then, was he who first associated Bray
with the song, and with what warrant ? and by
what evidence did Fuller advance his statement
that Aleyn was the man ? The question may well
be asked, but no reply need be expected.
It may be worth while in this place to give
another, and perhaps an even better, version of the
famous ballad, which gives the Vicar a run from
the time of Charles the Second to that of George
the First ; thirty years, at least :
" In good King Charles's golden days,
When loyalty had no harm in't,
A zealous High Churchman I was,
And so I got preferment.
76 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
To teach my flock I never miss'd,
Kings were by God appointed,
And they are damned who dare resist,
Or touch the Lord's anointed.
When Koyal James obtained the throne,
And Popery grew in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down,
And read the Declaration.
The Church of Home I found would fit
Full well my constitution,
And I had been a Jesuit.
But for the Kevolution.
When William, our deliverer, came
To heal the nation's grievance,
Then I turned cat-in-pan again,
And swore to him allegiance.
Old principles I did revoke,
Set conscience at a distance ;
Passive resistance was a joke,
A jest was non-resistance.
When glorious Anne became our Queen,
The Church of England's glory,
Another face of things was seen,
And I became a Tory ;
Occasional conformists' case —
I damned such moderation,
And thought the Church in danger was
By such prevarication.
When George in pudding-time came o'er,
And moderate men looked big, sir,
My principles I changed once more,
And so became a Whig, sir,
And thus preferment I procured
From our Faith's great Defender,
And almost every day abjured
The Pope and the Pretender.
ANOTHER VICAR 77
The illustrious House of Hanover,
And Protestant Succession,
By these I lustily will swear,
While they can keep possession,
For in my faith and loyalty
I never once will falter,
But George my King shall ever be —
Until the times do alter."
Another vicar of Bray distinguished himself
in rather a sorry fashion, according to legend, in
the time of James the First. He was dining with
his curate at the Greyhound, or, by another
account, the Bear, at Maidenhead, when there
burst in upon them a hungry sportsman, who ex-
pressed a wish to join them at table. The vicar
agreed, but with a bad grace, but the curate made
him welcome, and entertained him well in conversa-
tion. When the time came to pay, the vicar let it
be seen that, so far as he was concerned, the stranger
should settle for his share, but the curate declared
he could permit no such thing, and paid the sports-
man's score out of his own scanty pocket. Presently,
as they stood taking the air at the window, other
sportsmen came cantering along the street, and
seeing the first, halted, and one, dismounting, dropped
upon one knee, and uncovered. It was the King.
The vicar, too late, apologised, but the King,
turning to him, said : " Have no fear. You shall
always be vicar of Bray, but your curate I will
set over you, and make him Canon of Windsor."
One of the queerest and quaintest of entrances
conducts to the church, beneath a picturesque old
78 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
timbered house : charming on both fronts, each
greatly differing from the other. There are as
many as eight brasses in the church, a fine Early
English and Decorated building, somewhat over-
scraped and renewed in restoration. An early
seventeenth-century brass has some delightful lines :
" When Oxford gave thee two degrees in Art,
And Love possessed thee, Master of my Heart,
Thy Colledge Fellowshipp thow leftst for mine,
And novght but death covld seprate me fro thine."
This is without a name, but has been identified
as to the memory of Little, Aleyn's successor.
Not so delightful are the self-sufficing lines upon
William Goddard, founder of the neighbouring alms-
houses. Let us hope that, although couched in the
first person, he did not write them himself :
" If what I was, thov seekst to knowe
Theis lynes my character shal showe,
These benifitts that God me lent
With thanks I tooke and freely spent.
I scorned what playnesse covld not gett,
And next to treason hated debt.
I lovd not those that stird vp strife
Trve to my freinde, and to my wife.1
The latter here by me I have.
We had one Bed and have one grave.
My honesty was such that 1
When death came, feared not to dye."
In the churchyard lies John Payne Collier, the
Shakespearean critic, who died in 1883. His funeral
was the occasion of a curious mistake in The Standard,
1 But that's of course, surely.
JESUS HOSPITAL, BRAY.
JESUS HOSPITAL 81
of September 21. The newspaper correspondent
had written :
' The remains of the late Mr. John Payne Collier
were interred yesterday in Bray churchyard, near
Maidenhead, in the presence of a large number of
spectators."
This became, at the hands of the sub-editor, who
had never heard of Collier, ''' The Bray Colliery
Disaster. The remains of the late John Payne,
collier," etc.
Jesus Hospital, founded in the seventeenth century
by William Goddard, of the City of London, fish-
monger, and Joyce, his wife, for the housing and
maintenance of forty poor persons, faces the road
outside the village, on the way to Windsor. Fred
Walker, in his most famous picture, The Harbour of
Refuge, exhibited at the Royal Academy, 1872, took
the beautiful courtyard of the Hospital for his
subject, but those who are familiar with that lovely
painting, now in the National Gallery, will feel a
keen disappointment when they find here the original,
for the artist added a noble group of statuary to
the courtyard which does not, in fact, exist here,
and has generally added details which make an
already beautiful place still more lovely than it is.
The courtyard is, indeed, in summer a mass of
beautiful homely flowers, and all the year round
the noble frontage that looks upon the dusty high-
road is inspiring. From an alcove over the entrance
the statue of William Goddard, in cloak and ruff,
looks down gravely upon wayfarers.
VOL.
CHAPTER V
OCK WELLS MANOR-HOUSE — DORNEY COURT — BOVENY
— BURNHAM ABBEY
IN a remote situation, two miles from Bray Wick,
and not to be found marked on many maps, is
situated the ancient manor-house of Ockwells. The
hills and dales on the way to it are of a Devonshire
richness of wooded beauty. The manor was, in
fact, originally that of " Ockholt/' that is to say,
" Oak Wood/' and oaks are still plenteously repre-
sented. Ockholt, as it was then, was granted in
1267 to one Richard de Norreys, styled in the grant
" cook " in the household of Eleanor of Provence,
Queen of Henry the Third. In respect of his manor,
Richard de Norreys paid forty shillings per annum,
quit rent ; but there is nothing to show what his
house was like, the existing range of buildings dating
from the time of John Norreys, first Usher of the
Chamber to Henry the Sixth, Squire of the Body,
Master of the Wardrobe, and otherwise a man of
many important offices, eventually knighted for his
services. He died in 1467. His grandson was that
Sir Henry Norreys who was, with others, executed
in 1536, on what appears to have been a false charge
of unduly familiar relations with Anne Boleyn.
His body rests in the Tower of London, where he
82
THE HALL, OCKWELLS.
OCKWELLS 85
met his untimely end, but his head was claimed by
his relatives, and buried in the private chapel of
Ockwells. The chapel has long since disappeared.
The son of this unfortunate man became Baron
Norreys of Kycote, and the family thence rose to
further honours and riches and left Ockwells for
even finer seats. It then came into the hands of
the Fettiplaces, and thence changed ownership many
times, exactly as old Fuller says of other lands in
this county : " The lands of Berkshire are skittish,
and apt to cast their owners." The old mansion
finally came down to the condition of a farmhouse,
and so remained until some fifty years ago, when it
was restored and made once more a residence. Since
then it has again been carefully overhauled, and is
now a wonderfully well-preserved example of a brick-
and timber-framed manor-house of the fifteenth
century. Oak framing enters largely into the con-
struction, for this was pre-eminently a timber dis-
trict ; and massive doors, much panelling, and
even window mullions in oak testify alike to the
abundance of that building-material, and to its lasting
qualities, far superior, strange though it may seem
to say so, to stone. Even such exceptionally ex-
posed woodwork as the highly enriched barge-
boards to the gables is still in excellent preservation.
With age they have taken on a lovely silver-grey
tone, not unlike that of weathered stone itself.
In the Great Hall the heraldic glass yet remains,
almost perfect, its colours rich and jewel-like, with
the oft-repeated Norreys motto, " Faythfully serve."
It is somewhat singular that another exception-
86 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
ally interesting old manor-house of like type with
that of Ockwells should be found within three miles,
This is the beautiful residence of Dorney Court, on
the opposite side of the river, in Buckinghamshire.
The village of Dorney lies in a very out-of-the-way
situation, and in fact, although the distance from
Ockwells is so inconsiderable, the route by which
you get to it makes it appear more than twice that
length. The readiest way is through Maidenhead,
and over the bridge to Taplow railway station, and
thence along the Bath road in the direction of Lon-
don for over a mile, when a sign-post will be noticed
directing to Dorney on the right hand.
The village is small and scattered, consisting of
the Palmer Arms, some cottages and farmsteads ;
and the little parish church stands in an obscure
byway, divided from Dorney Court only by a narrow
lane leading nowhither. The church has ever been,
and may still be considered, a mere appendage of
the Court, as a manorial chapel. Its red-brick
tower, apparently of early seventeenth-century date,
is added to the west end of a quite humble building,
the greatly altered survival of an early Norman
structure, whose former existence may easily be de-
duced from the remains of a small, very plain window
built up in the south wall of the chancel with later
work in chalk. Entering by a brick archway in
the south porch, you find yourself in one of those
little rural churches of small pretensions which in
their humble way capture the affections much more
surely than do many buildings of more aspiring kind,
It is a church merely of aisleless nave and chancel,
DORNEY 80
with a chapel — the Garrard Chapel — thrown out
on the north side. A great deal of remodelling appears
to have taken place in the early part of the seven-
teenth century, for not only is there the western
tower of that period, and the south porch, but the
interior was evidently plastered and refitted with
pews at the same time. A very quaint and charming
western gallery in oak would seem to fix the exact
date of these works, for it bears the inscription in fine,
boldly cut letters and figures, " Henry Felo, 1634."
That date marked a new era at Dorney, for the
Garrards, who had for some time past owned the
Manor, ended with the death of Sir William Garrard
in 1607. His monument and that of his wife and
their fifteen children is in the north chapel, and is
a strikingly good example of the taste of that period
in monumental art, with kneeling effigies of Sir
William and his wife facing one another, and the
fifteen children beneath, in two rows — the boys on
one side, the girls on the other. The mortality among
this family would seem to have been very great, for
about 1620 Sir James Palmer, afterwards Chancellor
of the Garter, married Martha, the sole survivor and
heiress, and thus brought Dorney into the Palmer
family, in whose hands it still remains. The Pal-
mers themselves were of Wingham, in Kent, and of
Angmering and Parham, Sussex, and have numbered
many distinguished and remarkable men. Tradition
declares them to be of Danish or Viking origin,
while a very curious and interesting old illuminated
genealogy preserved at Dorney declares that the
family name originated in the ancient days of pil-
90 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
grimage, when the original Palmer " went a-palmer-
ing." If that were indeed the case, the old heraldic
coat of the house might be expected to exhibit an
allusive scallop-shell. But we find no badge of the
pilgrim/s way-wending on their heraldic shield,
which bears instead two fesses charged with three
trefoils ; a greyhound courant in chief. The crest
is a demi-panther argent, generally represented " re-
gardant " spotted azure, with fire issuant from mouth
and ears. This terrific beast is shown holding a holly-
branch. An odd, but scarcely convincing attempt
to account for the greyhound declares it to be " in
remembrance, perchance, of their pilgrimage, a dog,
that faithful and familiar creature, being a pilgrim/s
usual companion."
A remarkably large and interesting sampler,
worked probably about 1625, has recently come to
Dorney under rather curious circumstances. It
appears to have been sold so long ago that its very
existence was unknown, and it only came to the
knowledge of the present representative of the
Palmers through a photographic reproduction pub-
lished in an illustrated paper, illustrating the stock
of a dealer in antiques. It was readily identified as
an old family possession by reason of the many
Palmer shields of arms worked into it. On inquiry
being made, a disappointment was experienced.
It was found that the sampler had been sold ; but
in the end the purchaser, seeing that its proper
place was in its old home, with much good feeling
resold it to Major Palmer.
This beautiful piece of needlework, done in col-
AN INTERESTING SAMPLER 93
oured silks, has the unusual feature of presenting,
as it were, a kind of Palmer portrait-gallery of that
period. In the midst is a shield of the Palmer arms
impaling those of Shurley of Isfield, Sussex. This
identifies that particular Palmer as Sir Thomas, of
Wingham, the second Baronet, who married Elizabeth,
daughter and heiress of Sir John Shurley, and suc-
ceeded his grandfather in the title 1625. That
baronetcy became extinct in 1838.
There are eight needlework portraits of men in
this sampler, obviously Palmers, since each holds a
shield of the family arms ; and evidently portraits,
because each one is clearly distinguished from the
others in age, costume, and features, and the first
is easily to be identified by the wounded right arm
he bears in a sling. Among those other quaintly
attired men, who yet are made to seem so very real to
us, one notices a figure with a tilting-lance, another,
in the lower range, holding a weapon probably in-
tended to represent the axe carried by the honour-
able corps of gentlemen pensioners in attendance
upon the Sovereign ; while the last carries a bunch
of keys, in allusion to some official position. The
sampler appears to have been carried out of the Palmer
family by the marriages in the eighteenth century
of the two daughters and heiresses of a Sir Thomas
Palmer with an Earl of Winchilsea and his brother.
But to revert to the figure with the wounded
arm. This personage was Sir Henry Palmer, Knight,
second of the famous triplet sons of Sir Edward
Palmer, of the Angmering family, who were born in
1487, according to tradition, on three successive
94 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Sundays. This remarkable parturition is still
famous at Angmering, where the rustics readily point
out the identical house, now divided into cottages,
near the Decoy. It was this Henry who established
the Wingham line that ascended from knighthood
to a baronetcy and became extinct in 1838, having
in the meanwhile thrown off a branch now represented
at Dorney. Let us take the triplet brothers in their
proper sequence. John, the eldest, who inherited
Angmering, came to a bad end. He was much at
the dangerous Court of Henry the Eighth, and was
particularly intimate with that monarch, not only
playing cards continually with him, but always
winning. A careful courtier in those times did well
to lose occasionally. It was not well to be always
winning from the Eighth Henry, and that fierce
Tudor did in fact hang him on some pretext.
Henry Palmer, the second brother, was a dis-
tinguished soldier, and Master of the Ordnance.
He received a shot-wound in the arm at Guisnes,
of which he eventually died, at Wingham, in 1559.
The sampler clearly shows this wounded soldier,
with his arm bound up, and supporting himself
with a stick. The third brother, Thomas, died on
Tower Hill, by the headsman's axe, as an adherent
of the Lady Jane Grey. He suffered with the Duke
of Northumberland and Sir John Gates, and chroni-
clers tell how the unhappy trio quarrelled to the
last as to whose was the responsibility for the
failure of that rising. But Palmer made the boldest
exit of all, declaring with his last breath on the scaffold
that he died a Protestant.
DORNEY COURT 97
Sir James Palmer, Chancellor of the Garter, who
married the heiress of Sir William Garrard, and thus
founded the Palmer family of Dorney, was a younger
son of the Wingham Palmers. He died in 1657, and
was succeeded by his son, Sir Roger, created Earl
of Castlemaine, who died 1705, without acknow-
ledged children, and left the property to his nephew,
Charles, from whom the present family are descended.
Dorney Court is a picturesque mansion, chiefly
of the period of Henry the Seventh. It was once
much larger, as appears from old drawings preserved
in the house, in which it is shown as groups of build-
ings surrounding two large courts and one smaller.
The construction is largely of oak framing filled with
brick nogging, disposed sometimes in herring-bone
fashion, and in other places in ordinary courses.
There are no elaborate and beautiful verge-boards
to the gables, such as those extremely fine examples
seen at Ockwells, but, if a distinction may be drawn
between the two houses, Dorney Court is especially
attractive in the fine pictures it gives from almost
every point of view. It forms a strikingly pictur-
esque composition seen from the north-east, a group-
ing in which the great gable of the entrance-front
and its two remarkable flaunting chimneys come
well with the three equal-sized gables of the north
front, the church-tower rising in its proper associa-
tion in the background, emphasising the ancient
manorial connection.
A good deal of work has recently been under-
taken, in the direction of correcting the tasteless
alterations made at some time in the eighteenth
VOL. II 8
98 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
century, when sashed windows here and there re-
placed the original leaded lights. The plan adopted
has been that of acquiring such old oak timbering
as could be picked up from houses demolished in
neighbourhoods near and far, and of setting it up in
the reconstructed doors and windows. If it may be
permitted to speak of the interior, it can at any rate
be well said that it does by no means belie the ex-
terior view. The panelled and raftered rooms are in
thorough keeping, and the hall, neglected for genera-
tions, has been brought back to something of its
ancient appearance. From those walls the panelling
had disappeared, but it has now been replaced with
some genuine old work of the same period, acquired
by fortunate chance at Faversham in Kent, from
an old mansion in course of demolition. The hall
greatly resembles that of Ockwells ; but whatever
heraldic glass may have been here has long vanished,
leaving no trace. Here, among the many family
portraits, hangs a fine example of a helmet brought
from the church, an unusually good piece of funeral
armour, removed from the church to prevent its rust-
ing away. The family portraits include some Lelys,
Knellers, and Jamesons, and a number of early-
eighteenth-century pastel portraits, many of them
displaying a facial characteristic of the Palmers,
constant through the successive generations : that
of a somewhat unusually long nose.
It is one of the greatest charms of our long-
settled English social order, that we have in this
England of ours a not inconsiderable number of
ancient homes that have been " home " to one
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THE DORNEY PINEAPPLE 101
family throughout the changes and chances of cen-
turies, and in Dorney Court we see such a house.
Here, on the old woodwork, are painted the heraldic
shields of the Palmers, with their greyhound courant
conspicuous, and the devices of the families with
whom they have intermarried.
An interesting incident in fruit-growing history
belonging to Dorney Court is alluded to in the model
on a gigantic scale of a pineapple, shown in the hall.
It recalls the fact that the first pineapple grown in
England was produced here in the reign of Charles
the Second by the Dorney Court gardener. A panel-
picture at Ham House, the seat of the Earl of Dysart,
near Richmond, illustrates this first English-grown
pineapple being presented to the King in the gardens
of either Ham or Hampton Court, by Rose, the royal
gardener. The rendering of the architecture in the
picture makes it uncertain which of the two places is
intended. It will be observed by the illustration
that there has been a great improvement in the art
of growing hot-house pineapples since that time, for
it is a very small specimen that is being offered to
the King.
Foremost among the thirty or more portraits at
Dorney are the two large Lelys hanging in the hall,
representing Roger Palmer, Baron Limerick, and
Earl of Castlemaine, and his wife Barbara, the beau-
tiful and notorious Barbara Villiers. They are half-
lengths. She is curiously shown, holding what looks
like the model of a church-steeple in her left hand.
Lely intended it for a castle, and thus is seen to be
guilty of painting an Anglo-French pun ; " Castle-
102 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
main." The beautiful Barbara is better known in
history as " Barbara Villiers," her maiden name,
and by the title of Duchess of Cleveland. Born in
1641, she married Palmer in 1659. He was shortly
afterwards raised to the peerage. There were no
children of this marriage, for it was very shortly after-
wards that Lady Castlemaine began that extra-
ordinary career of vice which has made her name
eminent among even the notorious beauties of
Charles the Second's scandalous Court. The first
of her seven children was a daughter, Anne, born in
May 1661, and at first acknowledged by Palmer,
although Lady Castlemaine had undoubtedly been
mistress of Charles the Second since May 1660. There
are three portraits of Anne Palmer, or Anne Palmer
Fitzroy, as she was afterwards known, at Dorney,
the earliest of them exhibiting a romantic hilly
landscape for background, with a beacon or fire-
cresset along the winding road, such as were placed
on the more obscure ways in those times for the
guidance of travellers. She married in 1675 Thomas
Lennard, Lord Dacre and Earl of Sussex.
Castlemaine, shortly after the birth of this putative
daughter, became a pervert to the Roman Catholic
religion, and his wife, seizing upon this as a pretext,
finally left him and lived openly as the King's mistress.
Several of her children were acknowledged by Charles,
and two of them were created dukes, her second
son, Henry Fitzroy, becoming Duke of Grafton, her
third, George, Duke of Northumberland. She was,
with an astounding display of cynical humour, in
1670 created Baroness Nonsuch, " in consideration
PRESENTATION TO CHARLES THE SECOND OF THE FIRST
PINE-APPLE GROWN IN ENGLAND.
From the painting at Ham House.
BURNHA?' ABBEY 105
of her own personal virtues," and Duchess of Cleve-
land ; and as Duke of Cleveland her eldest son suc-
ceeded her. Thus, with Barbara, with Nell Gwynne,
and others, Charles the Second abundantly recruited
the ducal order and other ranks of the peerage ; thus
giving point to the Duke of Buckingham's joke. The
King had been addressed at Court as the " father of
his people."
"Of a good many of them," observed Bucking-
ham behind his hand.
The Earl of Castlemaine lived to see a good many
changes. It was not necessary in those times to
live to a great age to witness many revolutions and
counter-revolutions. He was committed to the
Tower shortly after the accession of William the
Third, and remained a prisoner there from February
1689 until February 10, 1690. He died in 1705.
A little to the north of Dorney, between it and
the Bath road, are the remains of Burnham Abbey,
a house for Benedictine nuns founded in 1265 by
Richard, Earl of Cornwall, and titular King of the
Romans, brother of Edward the Third. There were
an abbess and nine nuns when the establishment
was surrendered to Henry the Eighth's Commis-
sioners. The ruins are now amid the rickyards and
agricultural setting of the Abbey Farm, and although
the church has wholly disappeared, the remains of
the chapter-house and the domestic buildings form
an exquisite picture, untouched by any busybodying
" tidying-up " activities. The seeker after the pic-
turesque, who finds historical evidences destroyed by
well-meaning " restorers " ; the artist, who generally
io6 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
discovers the artistic negligence of his foregrounds
abolished in favour of neatly kept flower-beds and
gravel paths and the feeling of ruin and decay thus
utterly disregarded, will be rejoiced here, and will
find the ruins still put to farming uses, just as Girtin
and Turner and the other roaming artists of a hundred
years ago were accustomed to find the castles and
abbeys of their day. There is more pure aesthetic
delight in such scenes as this, left in their natural
decay and put to the uses to which they in the logical
order of things descended, than in the same place
swept and garnished to be made a show. The Lady
Chapel and the refectory are stables, where the cart-
horses shelter and form a picture so exactly like
Morland's stable interiors that the place might well
have been a model for him. Every detail is complete
in the Morland way, even to the old stable-lantern
hanging on a post. Much of the ruined buildings
is of the Early English period, and the horses
come and go through pointed doorways. Gracious
trees richly surround and overhang the scene.
CHAPTER VI
CLEWER — WINDSOR — ETON AND ITS COLLEGIANS —
DATCHET — LANGLEY AND THE KEDERMINSTERS
BETWEEN Dorney and Eton stretches an out-of-the-
way corner of land devoted chiefly to potato-fields
and allotments bordering the river. Here stands
Boveney church, or " Buvveney," as it is locally
styled, a small building so altered at different periods
as to be quite without interest. The river glides
past, between the alders, that dark, strong current
the subject of allusion by Praed in his " School and
Schoolfellows " :
" Kind Mater smiles again to me,
As bright as when we parted ;
I seem again the frank, the free,
Stout-limbed and simple-hearted :
Pursuing every idle dream,
And shunning every warning ;
With no hard work but Boveney stream,
No chill except Long Morning."
A circle of tall elms closely surrounding the church
casts a perpetual shade upon the building ; Windsor
Castle looking down from the opposite shore in feudal
majesty upon it and the humble activities of these
level fields.
That majestic pile indeed overlooks some remark-
log
no THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
ably mean surroundings which on close acquaintance
derogate strangely from its dignity. Thus, resuming
the road on the Berkshire side, from Bray to Windsor,
the long, straight, uninteresting miles lead directly
to Clewer, a village of disreputable appearance, now,
to all intents, a Windsor slum ; and what was a rustic
churchyard has become something more in the like-
ness of a cemetery. In the roads, strewn with rub-
bish and broken glass, dirty children play.
Besides an inscription to ' ye vertuous Mrs.
Lucie Hobson, 1657," who was, we learn, " a treu
lover of a Godly and a Powerful ministry " — i.e. pro-
bably of a preacher who could bang the pulpit and
punish the cushions — there is little of interest in
Clewer church, with the one exception of a curious
little brass plate, inscribed,
" He that liethe vnder this stone
Shott with a hvndred men him selfe alone.
This is trew that I doe saye
The matche was shott in ovld felde at Bray.
I will tell yov before yov go hence
That his name was Martine Expence."
Local history tells us nothing of this hero, who ap-
parently did not really shoot himself, as the inscrip-
tion states, but seems at some period to have won a
particularly hard archery contest, which was ever
after his title to fame in this locality.
From Glewer the pilgrim of the roads mounts
into Windsor by way of grim and grimy slums, and
therefore those who would come to Windsor had by
far the better do so by water, from which the slums
"THE COBBLER" 115
look picturesque. The view of Windsor, indeed,
from the windings of the Thames (Windsor is the
Saxon " Windlesora," the winding shore) is one of
the half-dozen most supremely grand and beautiful
views in England.
Of Windsor, in Berkshire, and Eton, in Bucks,
joined by a bridge that here spans the Thames, I
here propose to say little or nothing. To treat of them
at all would, within the scope of this book, be inade-
quate, and to deal with them according to their
importance would demand a separate volume. More-
over, to write of them with an airy assurance requires
not a little expert local knowledge of the kind to
be expected only of those who have made them
places of long residence or study.
There was once a man who falsely claimed to have
been educated at Eton, and was stumped first ball.
They asked him if he knew the Cobbler. ' Yes/'
he said, " I know the old fellow very well/' Is it
an unconscious invention of my very own, or did
he further proceed to say that he had often helped
the old fellow when he was in low water ? At any
rate, 'twill serve ; and will doubtless divert those
who know the " old fellow " in question, whom no one
could aid under those circumstances, except perhaps
the Clerk of the Weather and the lock-keepers
above and below, who, between them, might serve him
sufficiently well. Not to further mystify readers
overseas, who know not Eton, let it at once be said
that the " Cobbler " is an island; and that the
famous person who claimed to have known him
must be placed in association with the pretended
VOL. II 9
u6 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
traveller who knew the Dardanelles intimately, had
dined with them often, and had found them jolly
good fellows.
Eton has for centuries been the public school of
all others, where the sons of landed and of moneyed
men have been educated into the belief that they
and theirs stand for England, whereas, if it were not
for the great optimistic, cheerfully hard-working
middle-class folk, who found businesses, and employ
the lower orders on the one hand, while on the other
they pay rents to the landowing and governing classes,
there would not be any England for them to misgovern,
you know.
Eton is now so crowded with the sons of wealthy
foreigners and German and other Jews, learning
to be Englishmen (if that be in any way possible) , that
it is now something of a distinction not to have
been educated there, nor to have learned the " Eton
slouch," nor the charming Eton belief that the
alumni brought up under " her Henry's holy shade "
are thus fitted by Heaven and opportunity, working
in unison, to rule the nation. It is a belief somewhat
rudely treated in this, our day, when the world is
no longer necessarily the oyster of the eldest sons
of peers and landowners. And in these times,
when it is said that Eton boys funk one another and
fights under the wall are more or less " low," it is no
longer possible that Etonians shall have the leader-
ship in future stricken fields — leadership in finance,
possibly, seeing how Semitic this once purely English
foundation is becoming ; but in leadership when the
giving and receiving of hard knocks is toward ; no !
THE KEDERMINSTER PEW : INTERIOR.
LANGLEY MARISH 119
I would, however, this were the worst that is said
of Eton College in these degenerate times. That
it is not, The Eton College Chronicle itself bears
witness. Attention is there called to a custom of
" ragging " shops, now become prevalent among
the young gentlemen. This, we learn, is carried to
such an extent that they will pocket articles found
lying about and walk off with them, " for fun."
One of the most " humorous " of these incidents
was the disappearance of cricket balls to the value
of nearly £1. The assistants at the shop where this
mysterious disappearance occurred had to make
good the loss ; so it will readily be perceived how
completely humorous the incident must have been
from the point of view of those who had to replace
the goods. Were these practices prevalent in such
low-class educational establishments as Board
Schools, a worse term than " ragging," it may be
suspected, would be given them.
Two miles in the rear of Datchet is Langley, a
small and very scattered village which, although
unimportant in itself, has a station on the Great
Western Railway. The full name of it, rarely used,
is Langley Marish, which is variously said to mean
" Marshy Langley," ' Langley Mary's," from the
dedication of the church to the Virgin Mary, or to
derive from the Manor having been held for a short
period in the reign of Edward the First by one Chris-
tiana de Mariscis.
Few would give a second glance to the humble
little church, with its red-brick tower of typically
seventeenth-century type, and with other portions
120 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
of the exterior quite horribly stuccoed ; but to
pass it by would be to miss a great deal, for it con-
tains a most curious family pew and parish library.
This library, originally containing between 500 and
600 volumes, was given by Sir John Kedermister, or
Kederminster, under his will of 1631, to " the town "
of Langley Marish. The worthy knight was also
builder of one of the two groups of almshouses for
four inmates, who were appointed joint custodians
of the books. An ancient deed, reciting the gift,
says : " The said Sir John Kedermister prepared a
convenient place for a library, adjoining to the west
end of the said chapel, and intended to furnish the
same with books of divinity, as well for the perpetual
benefit of the vicar and curate of the parish of Langley
as for all other ministers and preachers of God's
Word that would resort thither to make use of the
books therein."
The Kederminsters first settled at Langley in
the middle of the sixteenth century, when one John
Kederminster, who appears to have been a kinsman
of Richard Kydermynster, Abbot of Winchcombe,
became ranger of the then royal park of Langley
and " master of the games " to Henry the Eighth.
He died at the comparatively early age of thirty-
eight, in 1558, leaving two sons and three daughters.
His son Edmund was father of the John Kederminster
who founded the library and initiated other works
here. He also was ranger of Langley Park, and was
knighted by James the First in 1609, who also con-
ferred upon him the Manor of Langley.
This was a short-lived family, and Sir John died
THE KEDERMINSTER PEW : EXTERIOR.
THE KEDERMINSTERS 123
in 1634, a deeply pious but much stricken man, who
had lived to see his children, except one daughter,
predecease him, and his hopes thus disappointed of
the Kederminster name being continued.
As lord of the manor of Langley, and a knight,
Sir John Kederminster obviously felt it behoved
him to establish himself in considerable state, in the
church as well as at his mansion. He therefore
secured a faculty granting him the right to construct
an " He or Chappell " ; otherwise, as we may see to
this day, a private family pew, in the south aisle,
and a parish library to the west of it.
This family pew is perhaps the most curious re-
maining in England, alike for its construction and
for the instructive light it throws upon the lofty
social heights from which a lord of a manor looked
upon lesser mortals. We have royal pews in St.
George's Chapel at Windsor and elsewhere ; but
their exclusiveness is not greater than this of the
Kederminsters, which is singularly like that of the
latticed casements familiar to all who have visited
Cairo and other Oriental towns. Yet it is obvious
that there was a vein of humility running through
Sir John Kederminster 's apparent arrogance ;
though a rather thin vein, perhaps. Thus he wrote,
for the stone closing the family vault under his
pew : " A true Man to God, his King, and Friends,
prayeth all future Ages to suffer these obscure
Memorials of his Wife, Children and Kindred to
remain in this Place undisturbed."
The pew remains in its original condition, looking
into the church from the south aisle through very
124 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
closely-latticed wooden screen-work, elaborately
painted, and crested with an open-work finial bearing
the arms of the Kederminsters and their connections.
The worshippers within were quite invisible to the
congregation, but could themselves see and hear
everything. Within the pew, the wall-decoration,
in Kenascence designs, includes many panels painted
with the all-seeing eye of God, with the words " Deus
videt " inscribed on the pupil. This scheme of
decoration is continued over the ceiling.
A passage leads out of this singular pew to the
library, on the western side. This is an entirely
charming square room, constructed in what was
formerly the west porch. It is lined throughout
with bookcases with closed cupboard doors, all
richly painted in characteristic Jacobean Renascence
cartouche and strapwork designs, with the exception
of those next the ceiling, which are landscapes of
Windsor and its neighbourhood. The inner side
of one of the cupboard doors has a portrait of the
pious donor : the corresponding door once displayed
a likeness of his wife, but it has been obliterated. An
elaborate fireplace has a fine overmantel with large
central cartouche, semee with the Kederminster arms :
two chevronels between three bezants, marshalled
with those of their allied families. The original
Jacobean table still stands in the centre of the room,
with the old tall-backed chairs, too decrepit now
for use.
Kederminster strictly enjoined the most careful
precautions for the due care of the books, of which
an old catalogue dated 1638, engrossed on vellum,
THE KEDERMINSTER ALMSHOUSES 127
and framed, still hangs on the wall. One, at least,
of his four bedesmen (who are now women) was to
be present when they were in use :
' The said four poor persons should have a key
of the said library, which they should for ever keep
locked up in the iron chest under all their four keys,
unless when any minister or preacher of God's Word,
or other known person, should desire to use the said
library, or to study, or to make use of any books in
the same, and then the said four poor people, or one
of them at the least, should from time to time — unless
the heirs of Sir John Kedermister, being then and there
present, should otherwise direct — attend within the
door of the said library, and not depart from thence
during all the time that any person should remain
therein, and should all that while keep the key of
the said door fastened with a chain unto one of their
girdles, and should also take special care that no
books be lent or purloined out of the said library,
but that every book be duly placed in their room,
and that the room should be kept clean ; and that
if at any time any money or reward be given to the
said poor people for their attendance in the library
as aforesaid, the same should be to the only use
of such of those poor people as should at that time
then and there attend."
Clearly, this care has not been always exercised,
for the books are now reduced to some three hundred,
and those that are left have suffered greatly from damp
and rough handling. The books are chiefly cumbrous
tomes, heavy in more than one sense, and mostly
works on seventeenth-century religious controversies.
128 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Although this library has for long past been either
forgotten or regarded merely as a curiosity, there
was once a time when the books in it were well used,
as would appear from the notes made on the end-
papers of a Hebrew and Latin Bible, printed at the
office of Christopher Plantin, in Antwerp, 1584. It
was one J. C. Werndly, vicar of Wraysbury from
1690 to 1724, who made these notes, and he seems
to have been indeed a diligent reader. Thus he
wrote :
Jan. the 17. I began again the Eeading of this
Hebrew Bible (w" is the sixth time of reading it) may the Spirit
of Holiness help me and graciously Enable me to peruse it again
to the Glory of God, and to the sanctification of my sinful and
im'ortal soul. Amen, Lord Jesus, Amen.
The last record of his reading appears thus :
1701. xxxiii. 8bre the 3rd. I finished the Bairns again by the
mercy of my Savr.
The numerals for " thirty-three " appear to indicate
his thirty- third reading.
The almshouses on the north side of the church-
yard, their front facing the sun, are pleasant with
old-fashioned gardens. They were built by Henry
Seymour, who in 1669 purchased the Kederminster
estates from the son of Sir John Kederminster's
daughter and heiress, who had married Sir John
Parsons, sometime Lord Mayor of London. Thus,
in less than forty years the Kederminster hopes faded
away and the property passed into the hands of
strangers.
THE ALMSHOCSES, LANGLEY.
CHAPTER VII
DATCHET— RUNNYMEDE — WRAYSBURY — HORTON AND
ITS MILTON ASSOCIATIONS — STAINES MOOR -
STANWELL — LALEHAM AND MATTHEW ARNOLD-
LITTLETON — CHERTSEY — WEYBRIDGE — SHEP-
PERTON.
BY Datchet meads and the continuously flat shores
of Runnymede, the river runs somewhat tamely,
after the scenic climax of Windsor. The Datchet of
Shakespearean fame it is, of course, hopeless to find.
There is nothing Shakespearean in the prettily re-
built village with suburban villas and railway level-
crossing ; and the ditch that used to be identified
with that into which FalstafE was flung, " glowing
hot, like a horseshoe, hissing hot," has been covered
over. At Old Windsor, the site of Edward the
Confessor's original palace, the little churchyard
contains the tomb of Perdita Robinson, one of
George the Fourth's fair and foolish friends ; and
down by the riverside stands the old rustic inn, the
Bells of Ouseley, whose sign puzzles ninety-nine
of every hundred who behold it. Writers of books
upon the Thames either carefully avoid doing more
than mentioning the, sign, or else frankly add that
they do not understand what it means, or where
VOL. II J3! 10
132 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Ouseley is — and small blame to them, for there is
not any place so-called. What is meant is " Oseney,"
the vanished abbey of that name outside Oxford,
whose bells were of a peculiar fame in that day.
Runnymede is, of course, an exceptionally inte-
resting stretch of meadow-land, for it was here, " in
prato quod vocatur Runnymede inter Windelsorum
et Btanes," that at last the barons brought King John
to book, and it was on what is now called " Magna
Charta Island," on the Bucks side, that the King
signed the Great Charter, June 15, 1215.
There are many disputed etymologies of " Runny-
mede," including " running-mead/' a scene of horse-
races ; and " rune-mead," the meadow of council ;
but the name doubtless really derived from " rhine "
a Saxon word that did duty for anything from a
great river to a ditch. Compare the river Rhine
and the dykes or drains of Sedgemoor, still known
as " rhines." * The meadows on either side of the
Thames here have always been low-lying, water-logged,
and full of rills.
The army of the Barons had encamped, five days
before the signing of this great palladium of liberty,
on one side of the river, and the numerically smaller
supporters of the King on the other, the island being
selected as neutral ground.
The island is occupied by a modern picturesque
cottage in a Gothic convention, standing amid trim
lawns and weeping willows, near the camp-shedded
shore, its gracefulness entirely out of key with those
rude times. A little cottage contains a large stone
1 The battle of Sedgemoor was fought beside the Sussex Rhine.
WRAYSBURY 135
with an inscription bidding it to be remembered
that here that epoch-making document was executed,
and further, that George Simon Harcourt, Esq., lord
of the manor, erected this building in memory of
the great event. It is an excellent example of a
small modern person seeking to wring a modicum of
recognition out of great historic personages and events.
Adjoining this famous isle is Ankerwyke, where
are some few remains, in the form of shapeless walls,
of a Benedictine nunnery, founded late in the twelfth
century ; and behind that is a village with the very
Saxon name of Wyrardisbury : long centuries ago
pronounced " Wraysbury," and now spelled so. We
hear nothing of the Saxon landowner, Wyrard, who
gave his name to the place, but Domesday Book
tells us that one Robert Gernon held the manor after
the Conquest. " Gernon," in the Norman-French
of that age, meant " Whisker," a name which would
seem to have displeased Robert's eldest son, for he
assumed that of Montfitchet, from an Essex manor
of which he became possessed.
The river Colne flows in many channels here,
crossed by substantial and not unpicturesque white-
painted timber bridges, with here and there a se-
cluded mill. Wraysbury church, restored out of all
interest, stands in a situation where few strangers
would find it, unless they were very determined in
the quest, through a farmyard ; and having found
it, you wonder why you took the trouble incidental
to the doing so. But that is just the inquisitive
explorer's fortune, and he must by no means allow
himself, by drawing blank here and there, to be dis-
136
THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
suaded from seeking out other byways. But stay !
there is some interest at Wraysbury. Outside the
church is the many-tableted vault of a branch of
the Harcourt family, and
among the names here you
shall read that of Philip,
" youngest brother of
Simon, Viscount Harcourt,
sometime Lord High Chan-
cellor of Great Britian "
(sic). Thus, you perceive,
that although not the rose,
Philip found some satis-
faction in kinship with it,
and doubtless lived and
died happily in the glow of
glory radiating from that
ennobled elder brother.
There are brasses lurk-
ing unsuspected under the
carpeting of this unpro-
mising church ; notably a
very small and curious
example on the south side
of the chancel, protected
beneath a square of carpet
about the size of a pocket-handkerchief. It repre-
sents a boy in the costume worn by Eton scholars
in the sixteenth century. The inscription runs :
Here lyeth John Stonor, the sone of Water Stonor
squyer, that departed this worlde ye 29 day of August
in ye yeare of our Lorde 1512.
BRASS TO AN ETON SCHOLAR,
WRAYSBURY.
MILTON 137
This Walter Stonor— or "Water" as the in-
scription has it — squire of Wraysbury, was afterwards
Lieutenant of the Tower of London, and was knighted
in 1545. He died in 1550.
Horton, beyond Wraysbury, and even more
secluded, is at once a charming and an interesting
place : a village made up of old mansions and old
cottages, all scattered widely amid large grounds
and pretty gardens. The church, too, is fine, chiefly
of Norman and Early English work, with a tower
built in chequers of flint and stone ; a fine timber
fifteenth-century north porch, and an exceptionally
good and lavishly-enriched Norman doorway.
Horton has a literary as well as a picturesque
and an architectural interest, for it is closely associ-
ated with Milton, who resided here as a young man.
Milton's father had retired in his seventieth year,
with a not inconsiderable fortune, derived from his
business as a scrivener ; that is to say, the profession
of a public notary, to which was added the making
of contracts and the negotiation of loans. He had
left the cares and the money-making at Bread Street
for the quiet joys of a country life, and had settled
at Horton, a place perhaps even then not more
remote from the world than now.
Hither, on leaving Christ's College, Cambridge,
came his son, John, rather a disappointing son at
this period, a son who had disregarded the dearest
wish of his parents' hearts, that he should enter the
Church ; and proposed, instead, to lead the intellec-
tual life of study and meditation. We may quite
easily suspect that this would seem, to the hard-
138 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
headed man of business, used to placing money out
to usury, and to naturally look in every direction
for an increase, for some tangible result of pains
taken and capital expended, a singularly barren pros-
pect. It might even have appeared to him the ideal
of a lazy, feckless disposition. But the ex-scrivener
and his wife hid their disappointment as best they
could, and suffered their son to take his own course.
They were, after all, wealthy enough for him to do
without a lucrative profession.
Therefore, for a period of nearly six years—
from July 1632 to April 1638, to be exact — the
poet lived with his parents and his books at Horton,
occupying the time from his twenty-fourth to his
thirtieth year with study and music.
Here he composed the companion-poems, U Allegro
and II Penseroso, a portion of a masque entitled
Arcades, the complete masque of Comus, and
Lycidas, a long, sweetly-sorrowing poem to the
memory of a friend and fellow-colleger at Cambridge,
one Edward King, who had lost his life by ship-
wreck in August 1637, on crossing to Ireland. In
April 1637 his mother died. We may still see on
the floor of the chancel in Horton church the plain
blue stone slab simply inscribed : " Here lyeth the
body of Sara Milton, the wife of John Milton, who
died the 3rd of April 1637."
In 1638 Milton left Horton, accompanied by a
man-servant, for a long term of continental travel,
and Horton ceased to be further associated with
him. It would be vain to seek, nowadays, for the
Milton home here, for the house at Horton, where
HORTON CHURCH.
STAINES MOOR . 141
his parents and himself and his younger brother
Christopher lived, was demolished in 1798.
The town of Staines, supposed to be the site of the
Roman station of Ad Pontes, and to derive its present
name from its position on the Roman road to the
west — that is to say on the stones, or the stone-paved
road — stands at the meeting of Middlesex and Bucks.
It is also the western limit of the Metropolitan Police
District, and a stone standing in a riverside meadow
above the bridge, known as " London Stone," properly
and officially " the City Stone," until modern times
marked the limits of the City of London's river juris-
diction. Staines was also a place of importance in
the coaching age, for it stood upon the greatly travelled
Exeter road. To-day it is, in spite of those varied
claims to notice, an uninteresting place.
The neighbourhood of Staines is one of many
waters. They divide Middlesex and Bucks in the
many branches and confluent channels of the Colne,
and they permeate those widespreading levels west-
ward of what was once Hounslow Heath known
broadly as Staines Moor. This watery landscape,
now so beautiful, was once, doubtless, a very dreary
waste. All moors and heaths carry with them, in
their very name, the stigma of dreariness, just as
when Goldsmith wrote. The name of a heath could
only be associated with footpads and highwaymen,
and to style a scene in a play " Crackskull Common "
seemed a natural and appropriate touch. This ill
association of commons long ago became a thing of
the past, but we still couple the title of a " moor "
with undesirable places, generally of an extreme
142 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
sterility and associated in the mind's eye with in-
clement weather of the worst type. The sun never
shines on moors, except perhaps so fiercely as to
shrivel you up. On moors no winds blow but tem-
pests, probably from the north or east, and the only
rams known there are cold deluges. A moor is, in
short, by force of a time-honoured tradition not yet
quite outworn, a place good to keep away from ; or,
being by ill-luck upon it, to be left behind at the
earliest possible moment.
Whatever Staines Moor may once have been, it
no longer resembles those inimical wilds. It is, in
fact, a corner of Middlesex endued with much beauty
of a quiet, pastoral kind. In midst of it and its
pleasant grasslands and fine trees with brooks and
glancing waters everywhere, and here and there a
water-mill, is Stanwell. At Stanwell the many noble
elms of these parts are more closely grouped together
and grow to a greater nobility, and at the very out-
skirts of the village is a finely-wooded park — that
of Stanwell Place. The especially fine water-bearing
quality of those surroundings is notable in the scenery
of that park, and has led of late years to the building
of an immense reservoir, now controlled by the
Water Board. It is unfortunate that it should have
been thought necessary to form this reservoir on a
higher level than that of the surrounding country,
and thus to hide it behind a huge embankment
like that of a railway, for the artificial lake so con-
structed is rather much of an eyesore. It might, if
built upon the level, have proved an additional beauty
in the landscape.
STAN WELL 143
Stairwell is situated in the Hundred of Spelthorne,
an ancient Anglo-Saxon division of Middlesex. It
is still a Petty Sessional division, but no man knows
where the ancient thorn-tree stood that marked
the meeting-place of our remote forefathers — that
" Spele-Thorn," or Speech Thorn, where the open-air
folk-moot was held.
It is a pleasant village, with a very large church,
whose tall, shingled spire rises amid luxuriant elms.
Near by is a seventeenth-century schoolhouse with a
tablet inscribed :
This House and this Free Schoole were founded at
the charge of the Right Honourable Thomas, Lord
Kynvett, Baron of Escricke, and the Lady Elizabeth
his wife. Endowed with a perpetuall revennew of
Twenty Pound Land. By the yeare. 1624.
A stately monument in the singular taste of that
time to Knyvett and his lady is found in the. church.
Against black marble columns are drawn back stony
curtains, disclosing the worthy couple kneeling and
facing one another across a prayer-desk, with the
steadfast glare of two strange cats on a debatable
roof-top. At the same time, although the taste is not
that in favour to-day, the workmanship is very fine.
It is the work of the famous sculptor, Nicholas Stone,
who, it is recorded, received £215 for it.
In the churchyard is a very elaborate tomb,
all scroll, boldly-flung volutes, and cherubs gazing
stolidly into infinity, recording the extraordinarily
many virtues of a person whose name one promptly
forgets. It is melancholy to reflect that only in the
VOL. II II
THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
centuries that are past was it possible to write such
epitaphs, and that such supermen in goodness no
longer exist. Or is it not rather that we have in our
times a better sense of proportion in these mortuary
praises ?
The manor of Stanwell was granted to the then
Sir Thomas Kynvett by James the First, in 1608.
It had been a Crown property since 1543, when
Henry the Eighth took it, in his autocratic way, from
the owner, Lord Windsor. The story is told by
Dugdale, who relates how the King sent a message to
Lord Windsor that he would dine with him at Stan-
well. A magnificent entertainment was accordingly
prepared, and the King was fully honoured. We
may therefore perhaps imagine the disgust and alarm
with which His Majesty's host heard him declare
that he liked the place so well that he was deter-
mined to have it ; though not, he graciously added,
without a beneficial exchange.
Lord Windsor made answer that he hoped His
Highness was not in earnest, since Stanwell had
been the seat of his ancestors for many generations.
The King, with a stern countenance, replied that it
must be ; commanding him, on his allegiance, to
repair to the Attorney-General and settle the business
without delay. When he presently did so, the
Attorney-General showed him a conveyance already
prepared, of Bordesley Abbey in Worcestershire,
in exchange for Stanwell, with all its lands and
appurtenances.
' Being constrained," concludes Dugdale,
" through dread of the King's displeasure, to accept
LALEHAM 145
of the exchange, he conveyed this manor to His
Majesty, being commanded to quit Stanwell immedi-
ately, though he had laid in his Christmas provision
for keeping his wonted hospitality there, saying
that they should not find it bare Stanwell." But the
deed of exchange, still in existence in the Record
Office, is dated nearly three months later, March 14,
1543.
Two and three-quarter miles below the now
commonplace town of Staines, and past Penton Hook
lock, the village of Laleham stands beside the river,
on the Middlesex side, in a secluded district, avoided
alike by railways and by main roads. Laleham — in
Domesday Book " Leleham " —has altered little for
centuries past, and although quite recently the park
of Osmanthorpe, by the riverside, has been cut up
and built upon, the building speculation does not
appear to have been very successful.
The old church, barbarously interfered with, as
most Thames Valley churches within some twenty
miles of London were, in the eighteenth century,
has suffered only in respect of its tower, rebuilt in
monumentally heavy style, in red brick ; and a dense
growth of ivy now kindly mantles it, from ground to
coping. It is a picturesque church, with queer little
dormer windows in the roof, and the interior shows
it to be much more ancient than the casual passer-by
would suppose ; heavy Norman pillars and capitals
with billet mouldings proving it to date from some
period in the twelfth century. It was, in fact, the
mother-church of the district, and Staines and
Ashford were mere chapelries to it, and so they
146 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
remained, in ecclesiastical government, until the
middle of the nineteenth century.
There is little in the way of interesting monu-
ments in the church, except that of George Perrott,
which is perhaps mildly amusing. He died 1780,
" Honourable Baron of H.M. Court of Exchequer."
By his decease, we learn, " the Revenue lost a most
able Assessor of its legal rights." The coat-of-arms
of this able personage shows three pears, in the old
heraldic punning way, for " Perrott," but the joke
was not pressed to its conclusion, for they are shown
as quite sound pears.
Laleham is notable for its literary associations,
for here lived Dr. Arnold for some years, before he
became headmaster of Rugby ; and here was born,
in 1822, Matthew Arnold, who, dying in 1888, lies
buried in the churchyard. Here, too, is the tomb of
Field-Marshal George Charles Bingham, third Earl
of Lucan, who also died in 1888. He was in command
of the Heavy Brigade in the Crimea. It was entirely
due to the personal animosities of the Earls of Lucan
and Cardigan, and of Captain Nolan, that the mis-
take leading to the sacrifice of the Light Brigade at
Balaclava was made.
The quiet of Laleham was sadly disturbed some
years ago, when there descended upon the village that
extraordinary person — a curious compound of mystic
and humbug, who called himself " Father Ignatius."
With some seven or eight of his " monks," he es-
tablished himself at Priory Cottage. Here they so
outraged the feelings of the neighbourhood with their
fantastic proceedings in the back-garden, in which
LALEHAM CHURCH.
MATTHEW ARNOLD'S GRAVE, LALEHAM.
LITTLETON 149
they had established a " Mount of Olives," and other
blasphemous mockeries, that the place was on the
verge of riot, and the aid of a strong force of police
had to be secured to restore order.
Another charming village, more charming and
even much more secluded than Laleham, is Littleton,
not quite two miles distant, across these flat fields
of Middlesex. It is well named " little," for it con-
sists of only a little church, a fine park and manor-
house beside a pretty stream, and some scattered
rustic houses. Nothing in the way of a village street,
or shop, or inn, is to be discovered, and the place is
delightfully retired amid well-wooded byways, all
roads to anywhere avoiding it by some two miles.
The Early English church has been provided with
an Early Georgian red-brick tower, of a peculiarly
monstrous type, and in skeleton, roofless form. The
interior of the church is so plentifully hung with old
regimental colours that it looks almost like a garrison
chapel. There are twenty-four in all, chiefly old
colours of the Grenadier Guards, and were placed here
in 1855 by their commandant, General Wood, who
had served in the Peninsular War, and afterwards
resided at the adjoining Littleton Park.
A tiny window, little, if at all, larger than a
pocket-handkerchief, is filled with stained glass, re-
presenting a fallen, or sleeping, shepherd, with a
lion looking upon a dead sheep and the rest of the
flock running away. An inscription says : " This
panel was designed by Sir John Millais, R.A., and
presented to Littleton church by Effie, Lady Millais,
1898."
150 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Returning from this detour, Chertsey — Anglo-
Saxon " Cearta's ey," or island — next claims our
attention. It is a town, and a dull one, duller now
that suburban London has influenced it. Of the
great Abbey — one of the greatest in the land — that
once stood here, nothing is left except a few moss-
grown stones and bases of pillars, situated in the
garden of a villa that occupies part of the site. Ex-
cavations of the ground in years gone by disclosed
the size and disposition of the Abbey church and
the monastery buildings, and a few relics were then
found, including some remarkably fine encaustic tiles,
now to be seen in the Architectural Museum at
Westminster. That is all Fate and Time have left.
It is an extraordinarily complete disappearance.
Stukeley, a diligent antiquary, writing in 1752, was
himself astonished at it :
" So total a dissolution I scarcely ever saw. Of
that noble and splendid pile, which took up four acres
of ground, and looked like a town, nothing remains.
Human bones of abbots, monks, and great personages,
who were buried in great numbers in the church,
were spread thick all over the garden, so that one
might pick up handfulls of bits of bone at a time
everywhere among the garden-stuff."
A fragment of precinct- wall is left, and the " Abbey
Mill of to-day is the direct descendant of that which
occupied the same site in the old times, while the
cut originally made by the monks to feed it still flows
from near Penton Hook to the Thames again, near
by, under the old name of the " Abbey River."
Weybridge, two miles below Chertsey, is a place
WEYBRIDGE 153
of which it is difficult to write with enthusiasm in
pages devoted to villages. It is no longer a village,
and yet not a town ; and is, indeed, like most of the
places to which we shall henceforward come, a
suburban district.
What constitutes such ? The answer is that it
largely depends upon the distance from London.
Here we are some twenty miles from town, and by
reason of that fact, and all it means, the suburban
residences are expensive and imposing, and stand,
many of them, in their own somewhat extensive
grounds. Thus, the original village and village
green, to which these developments of modern times
have been added, remain not altogether spoiled, and
come as a pleasant surprise to that explorer who
first makes acquaintance with Weybridge from the
direction of the railway station, from which a typically
conventional straight suburban road leads, lengthily
and formally. On the village green stands a memorial
column to a former Duchess of York, who died in 1820,
at Oatlands Park, near by, and has another monu-
ment in the church. The column is intrinsically
much more interesting for itself than as a monument
to a duchess whom every one has long since forgotten,
for it is nothing less than the original pillar set up
at Seven Dials in London, about 1694, and thrown
down in 1773. It remained, neglected and in frag-
ments, in a builder's yard, until it was purchased for
its present use, and removed hither in 1822. An-
other memorial of that forgotten duchess is found
in Weybridge church, a great modern building, built
in 1848, and enlarged in 1864, with an additional
154 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
south aisle. It stands on the site of an older church,
is remarkable rather for size than excellence, and
contains some really terrible stained glass. The
sculptured memorial to the Duchess is by Chantery,
but it is not a very good example of his work. She is
represented kneeling, with her coronet flung behind.
This, and other memorials removed from the older
building, are all huddled together in the tower.
Among them is a truly dreadful brass, representing
three skeletons — among the very worst products of
a diseased imagination to be found in the length
and breadth of the land. It ought to be destroyed ;
and it really seems as though some one had enter-
tained the idea, for the head of one of the figures
has disappeared.
The river winds extravagantly at Weybridge,
where it receives the waters of the river Wey and
the Bourne, and is full of islands and backwaters.
Some way downstream, and on the Middlesex shore,
is little Shepperton, one of the most secluded places
imaginable, consisting of a church, a neighbouring
inn — the King's Head — and some old-fashioned
country residences. It forms a pretty scene. In the
churchyard there will be found a stone with some
verses, to
Margaret Love Peacock, Born 1823, Died 1826, one of the
children of Thomas Love Peacock who lived many years at
Lower Halliford, and died there, 1866.
INTERIOR, LITTLETON CHURCH.
CHAPTER VIII
COWAY STAKES — WALTON-ON-THAMES — THE RIVER
AND THE WATER COMPANIES — SUNBURY — TED-
DINGTON — TWICKENHAM.
THERE are some very pleasant places on this Middle-
sex side of the river : Shepperton Green and Lower
Halliford notable among them ; Lower Halliford
fringing the river bank most picturesquely and
rustically. Between this and Walton is the place
known as " Cowey, or Co way, Stakes/' traditionally
the spot where Julius Caesar in 54 B.C. crossed the
Thames, in his second invasion of Britain. Caesar
himself, in his Commentaries, writing, as was his
manner, in the first person, says : " Caesar being
aware of their plans, led his army to the Thames,
to the boundary of the Catuvellauni. The river was
passable on foot only at one place, and that with
difficulty. When he arrived there he observed a
large force of the enemy drawn up on the opposite
bank. The bank also was defended with sharpened
stakes fixed outwards, and similar stakes were placed
under water and concealed by the river. Having
learnt these particulars from the captives and de-
serters, Caesar sent forward the cavalry, and immedi-
ately ordered the legions to follow. But the soldiers
went at such a pace and in such a rush, though only
VOL. II 157 12
158 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
their heads were above water, that the enemy could
not withstand the charge of the legions and cavalry,
and they left the bank and took to flight."
Many of these ancient stakes have been found,
during the centuries that have passed — the last of
them about 1838 — and they have been for many years
the theme of long antiquarian discussions. Formed
of young oak trees, " as large as a man's thigh,"
each about six feet in length, and shod with iron,
their long existence under water had made them
almost as hard as that iron, and as black as ebony.
It was Camden, writing early in the seventeenth
century, who first identified Coway Stakes as the
scene of Caesar's crossing, for Bede, writing in the
eighth century and describing the stakes in the river,
mentions no place. They were said by Bede to be
shod with lead and to be " fixed immovably in the
bed of the river." Camden was quite certain that
here he had found the famous passage by Caesar's
legionaries, and expressed himself positively : 'It
is impossible I should be mistaken in the place."
But later investigators are found to be more than
a little inclined to dispute Camden's conclusions ;
and it is certain that whatever may now be the
possibilities of fording the Thames hereabouts, be-
tween Walton and Halliford or Shepperton, and
however deep the river may now be elsewhere, this
could not, as Camden supposes, have been the only
possible ford. In Caesar's time — it is a truism, of
course, to say it — there were no locks or weirs, and
the Thames, instead of being what it is now, really
to a great degree canalised, flowed in a broader,
COW AY STAKES 161
shallower flood along most of its course, spreading out
here and there into wide-stretching marshes, through
which, however difficult the crossing, the actual
depth of water would tend to be small. But in any
case, arguments for or against Co way Stakes must
needs be urged with diffidence, for the windings of the
Thames must necessarily have changed much in two
thousand years.
There are not now any of the stakes remaining
here, but the disposition of them in the bed of the
river has been fully put upon record. They were
situated where the stream makes a very pronounced
bend to the south, a quarter of a mile above Walton
Bridge, and were placed in a diagonal position across
it, not lining the banks, as might have been ex-
pected. But whether this disposition of them was
original, or due to one of the many changes of direction
the river has undergone, it would be impossible to say.
It seems certain that in the level lands between
Chertsey, Weybridge, and Walton the present course
of the Thames is not identical with that anciently
traced, and that the river has cut out for itself between
Shepperton and Walton a way considerably to the
north. There still exists a lake, very long and very
narrow, in the grounds of Oatlands Park, between
Weybridge and Walton, which is reputed to be a part
of the olden course of the Thames. It has been
pointed out, as a proof of these changes, that there
are in this neighbourhood several instances of detached
portions of parishes, situated, contrary from ex-
pectation, on opposite sides of the river. Thus
Chertsey and Walton, both in Surrey, own respectively
162 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
fourteen and eight acres in Middlesex. Laleham,
in Middlesex, possesses twenty-two acres in Surrey,
and Shepperton twenty-one acres. Eighteen of these
more particularly concern this discussion, since they
are part of the ancient grazing-ground of Coway
Sale. The name " Coway " has been assumed by
some, having reference to the ford, or supposed ford,
at Coway Stakes, to be a corruption of " causeway,"
while others find in it, according to the spelling they
adopt, Cowey = Cow Island, or Coway = Cow Way.
The supporters of the last-named form are those
who refuse to recognise this place as the true site of
Caesar's crossing. They point out — ignoring the
diagonal course of a ford at this point, heading down
river, instead of straight across — that the placing
of the stakes more resembled the remains of an ancient
weir or wooden bridge than the defences described by
Caesar, and say, further, that their being shod with
lead or iron is a proof that they formed part of some
deliberately constructed work and not a hastily
thrown up defence. The position of the stakes,
four feet apart and in a double row, with a passage of
nine feet between, has given rise to an ingenious
speculation that they formed an aid to fording the
river, both for passengers and cattle, instead of being
designed as an obstruction. This, then, according to
that view, was the Cow Way, principally devoted to
the convenience of the cattle belonging to Shepperton,
to go and return between that place and the detached
grazing-grounds of Coway Sale on the Surrey side of
the river.
But that there has been fighting hereabouts is
GRAVE OF THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK'S DAUGHTER, SHEPPERTON
WALTON-ON-THAMES
165
evident enough in the name of a portion of the
grounds of Shepperton Manor House, known from
time immemorial as " War Close." At the time
when Coway Stakes were driven into the bed of the
river, to form a safe passage for the cows, or in the
futile hope of withstanding the advance of the master-
ful Romans, the river must have spread like some
broad lagoon over the surrounding meadows, and
BRADSHAW'S HOUSE, WALTON-ON-THAMES.
would have been much more shallow than now.
Walton Bridge, in its great length, much of it devoted
to crossing those low-lying meadows, gives point to
this contention.
The village of Walton-on-Thames is at the end
of its tether as a village, and the only interesting
things in it are its church, and what is known as the
" Old Manor House." Dark yews form a fine setting
to the old church, whose tower of flint and rubble,
with repairs effected in brick, survives untouched by
166 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
the restorer of recent years. The interior, although
greatly suburbanised, discloses some as yet unspoiled
Transitional-Norman portions. Here, in the stone-
work near the pulpit, is cut the famous non-committal
verse ascribed to Queen Elizabeth, on the sacramental
bread-and-wine :
Christ was the worde and spake it ;
He took the bread and brake it ;
And what the Worde doth make it,
That I believe and take it.
Here is preserved a scold's, or gossip's, bridle, other-
wise " the branks," an old English instrument of
punishment and repression for a scolding or gossiping
woman. On it is, or was, the inscription,
Chester presents Walton with a bridle
To curb women's tongues that talk too idle.
The instrument is now so rusted that it is difficult,
if not impossible, to trace the words. The date of
it, and who this Chester was, are not known ; but
legend has long told that he was a gentleman who
lost a valuable estate in the neighbourhood through
the malevolence and irresponsibility of a lying
woman.
The bridle, originally of bright steel, was made
to pass over the head, and round it, and is provided
with a flat piece of metal, two inches in length and one
in breadth, for insertion in the mouth, the effect
being to press the tongue down and to prevent
speech. It is duly provided with hinges and a
padlock.
THE SELWYN BRASSES
167
For many years it hung by a chain in the vestry,
and thus became injured and rusted ; but in 1884 it
was enclosed in an oaken, glass-fronted cabinet ; so
its further preservation is assured.
BRASS TO JOHN SELWYN.
On a board suspended against the chancel wall are
four small brasses of the Selwyn family, showing John
Selwyn and his wife Susan, and their eleven children.
He was keeper of the royal park of Oatlands, and
died in 1587. On one of them, Selwyn himself, is
168 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
represented mounted on a stag and in the act of
plunging a hunting-knife through the animal's neck.
This traditionally represents an actual occurrence.
It seems that when Queen Elizabeth was once hunting
at Oat lands, a stag stood at bay and made as if to
attack her ; whereupon Selwyn jumped from his
horse on to the stag's back, and killed it in the manner
shown.
Several elaborate monuments are to be seen here,
including that of Richard Boyle, Viscount Shannon,
who died in 1740. The life-size statues of himself
and his wife are by Roubiliac.
The " Old Manor House " has of late years been
rescued from its former condition of slum tenements.
It stands off some bylanes, where there is a good
deal of poor cottage property, and was long subdivided
into small dwellings. A long, low building of timber,
lath, and plaster, it dates back to the time of Henry
the Eighth, and was then probably the residence
of the keeper, or ranger, of Oatlands Park ; and
perhaps the residence one time of that John Selwyn
of whose notable deed mention has just been made.
In after-years it was associated with Ashley Park,
and in Cromwell's time was occupied by Bradshaw,
President of the Council, and one of the signatories of
Charles the First's death-warrant. If one were to
credit the old rustic legends and tales of wonder, this
would be a historic spot indeed ; for the old Surrey
peasantry firmly believed that Bradshaw not only
lived here, and was a party to the King's execution,
but that he executed him with his own hands, on the
premises, and buried him under the flooring. English
WALTON-ON-THAMES CHURCH.
VOL. II
169
HALLIFORD.
WATERSPLASH NEAR HALLIFORD.
WATER COMPANIES 173
history, it will be perceived, written from the rustic
point of view, should be entertaining
Leaving Walton behind, the Thames Valley is
seen to have become the prey of those many water
companies which some few years since were all
merged into the Metropolitan Water Board. Between
them and the spread of London, the once beautiful
scenery of the reaches of the Thames has in long
stretches been completely spoiled. Not sheer neces-
sity, only bestial stupidity, has caused this truly
lamentable condition of affairs. With the immense
modern growth of the metropolis, it is specially desir-
able that the beauty of the river at its gates should
have been jealously safeguarded, but it has been
given over to those true spoilers, the waterworks
engineer and the speculative builder ; and the
interesting and beautiful old-world villages and for-
gotten corners that survive do but increase the
regret felt for those others that have been wantonly
extinguished. The Surrey side of the river between
Walton and Molesey has been made monotonously
formal with the embankments of great reservoirs ;
and it is only when Molesey Lock is reached that their
depressing society is shaken off. On the Middlesex
side, that part of Sunbury where the bizarre semi-
Byzantine modern church of the place stands is the
only unspoiled spot until Hampton Court comes in
sight, and between the two we have perhaps the
very worst exhibition of those outrages of which the
water companies have been guilty. There, on either
side of the road, a long, unlovely line of engine-houses
and pumping-stations stretches ; but hideous though
174 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
it may be from the road, it is worse when seen from
the river. There is always an entirely gratuitous
ugliness in a water company's engine-houses, and
these examples are not by any means exceptions ;
being built in a kind of yellow- white brick, with a long
series of chimneys and water-towers that have already
been proved insufficiently tall and have each in
consequence been lengthened with what look like
exaggerated twin stove-pipes. It is a distressing
and unlovely paradox that the buildings and pre-
cincts of waterworks are invariably dry and husky,
gritty and coaly places, and these bring no variation
to that rule. The roads are blackened with coal-
dust, the chimneys belch black smoke, and the poor
little strips of grounds that run beside the river,
with lawns, and some few anaemic trees, seem parched
up. The Thames Ditton and Surbiton front of the
river is in the same manner denied with engine-houses
and intakes, with coal-wharves and filter-beds, and
with nearly half a mile of ugly retaining- wall. The
especial pity of all these things is that they were not
at all necessary where they are. They would have
been just as efficient if placed in some position out of
sight, away from the river bank, and could so have
been placed, with a small expenditure for additional
piping, instead of being the eyesore they are.
The village of Thames Ditton still keeps its rustic
church, with curious old font, and the Swan by
the waterside stands very much as it did when Theo-
dore Hook wrote enthusiastic verses about it ; but
Surbiton, and Kingston, Hampton Court, Teddington,
and Twickenham — what shall we make of these.
TEDDINGTON 177
now that electric tramways have girded them about
with steel ? Only by the actual riverside is Nature
left very much to herself, and there, where the
water roars over the weir of Teddington, you do find
the river unspoiled. But it is only necessary to walk
a few steps back from the river, into Teddington
village that was, and is, alas ! no longer — for a sad-
ness to take possession of you. There you see not
only a surburbanised village, but even perceive the
original suburbanisation (an ugly word for an ugly
process) of about 1870 to be now down upon its luck,
in the spectacle of the villas of that date offered
numerously to be let, with few takers. What is the
reason of this ? you ask. Electric tramways. They
are the reason. Also, if you do but explore farther
inland, you shall find more reasons, in the discovery
that Teddington is now quite a busy town, and there-
fore offers no longer that charm of comparative
seclusion it possessed when those villas of the
seventies were built.
But there are yet other reasons, chief among
them the very bulky and imposing one of the modern
parish church of St. Alban, which rises like some
great braggart bully, and utterly dwarfs the poor
old parish church opposite, now degraded to the
condition of a mortuary chapel, or the like, and
doubtless to be demolished so soon as ever public
opinion is found to be in an indifferent mood. It
is not a beautiful old church, being indeed an Early
Georgian affair of red brick, but it is representative
of a period, and, with the Peg Woffmgton almshouses
near by, is all that remains of old Teddington.
178 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
The neighbourhood of the great new church,
built handsomely in stone, in a Frenchified variant of
that First Pointed style we are accustomed to name
" Early English/' is sufficient to frighten away any
would-be resident, for it is as large as many a cathe-
dral, and will be larger yet, when foolish people
are found to subscribe toward the completion of its
tower. If all this stood for religion instead of merely
for religiosity — a very different thing — there would
be nothing to say ; but when we perceive the clergy,
all over the country, striving for funds towards
heaping up of stone and brick and mortar, all in-
tended towards the end of aggrandising their own
discredited order, and of again bringing about the
imprisonment of men's consciences, we can only
imagine that the devil laughs and the Saviour
grieves. Meanwhile, the great unfinished building
dominates the place, and its long unbroken roof helps
to spoil the view up-river, nearly two miles away.
If we may call Teddington a town, then, by
comparison, Twickenham, adjoining it, is a metro-
polis. All this Middlesex side of the river is, in fact,
spoiled, but the river itself, and the lawns and parks
fringing it, are, happily, little affected, and none,
wandering along the towing-paths, would suspect
the existence of those great populations on the other
side of quite a narrow belt of trees. The only
inkling of them is when the wind sets from the
streets and brings the strains of a piano-organ, the
cries of the hawkers, or the squeaking of tramcar-
wheels against curves, yelling like damned souls in
torment.
TWICKENHAM 181
The older part of Twickenham centres about the
church, one of those pagan eighteenth-century boxes
of red and yellow and grey brick that are so familiar
along these outer fringes of London. The old church
sank into ruin in 1713, but the tower of it remains.
In the churchwardens' accounts of some two
hundred years ago we gain some diverting glimpses
of an older Twickenham. Thus, in 1698, we find,
" Item : Paid old Tomlins for fetching home the
church-gates, being thrown into ye Thames in ye
night by drunkards, 2s. 6d. " ; and " Item : To Mr.
Guisbey, for curing Doll Bannister's nose, 3s."
The old and shimmy lanes that here lead down
to the waterside are bordered with houses that date
back to the time of those entries.
In the church is a monument to Pope, with an
epitaph written by himself, " For one who would
not be buried in Westminster Abbey " : the last
scornful effort of his bitter spirit. The stone in the
floor that marks his actual resting-place is covered
over, and many therefore seek his grave in vain. I
have, in fact, myself thus vainly sought it ; questing
in the first instance among the tombs in the church-
yard, to the puzzlement of a group of working-men
engaged upon a job there.
' What you looking for, guv'nor ? " asked one.
" I want to find Pope's grave."
" Don't know the name," said he. " 'Ere, Bill "
— raising his voice to one of his mates a little way
ofi — " d'ye know where a bloke named Pope is
berried ? "
0 ! horror.
182 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
An epitaph upon Kitty Olive, the actress, who
died in 1758, may be seen here, among those to
other notabilities.
From the crowded streets of Twickenham let us
escape by means of Twickenham Ferry. Crossing
the river at this point, Twickenham is seen at its
best ; for here the gardens of the three or four great
mansions that yet remain entirely mask the ravages
of late years. But even so, those who have known
the scene from of old cannot look upon it altogether
without regrets for the noble cedars of the estate
known as " Mount Lebanon/' among the very
finest — perhaps the very finest — in the land, wantonly
cut down some few years since.
CHAPTER IX
PETERSHAM
THE most complete oasis in all these developments
is Petersham, on the Surrey side : Petersham, and
Ham, and Ham Common. There railways come
not, nor tramways. At Petersham are few but old
houses and the time-honoured mansions of the great
of bygone centuries, inhabited nowadays by the
small and futile. So, at any rate, I gather them
to be from the sweeping remark made to me some
years ago by an man whom I discovered leaning
meditatively over a fence, contemplating the view
across Petersham meadows.
" Purty place, ain't it ? " said he.
" It is indeed," said I.
" Ah ! " he resumed, " boy and man, I've lived
here forty year. I remember the time when the
people as lived here was people. Now there's nobody
here worth a damn."
The Duke of Buccleuch lived near by in those
halcyon times.
Pleasant hearing, this, for a new-comer who had
just taken over a long lease in this region of souls
so worthless. This shocking old cynic was— But
VOL. II 185 !
186 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
no matter ; suffice it that he was one who ought to
have put it differently.
Yet there are some of the elect, the salt of the
earth, who pleasantly savour the lump. Indeed, I
live at Petersham myself.
But even here there are woeful changes, Instead
of the three inns that formerly graced the village,
there are now but two : the Petersham Arms
went about fifteen years ago, and now there are
but the Dysart Arms and the Fox and Duck. If
you want further variety, you must resort t"o the
Fox and Goose, at Ham, or the New Inn, Ham
Common. Besides this grievous thing, the landscape
is seared by an undesirable novelty, in the shape of
a new, very red, red-brick church, which partakes
in equal parts of the likeness of a pumping-station
and a crematorium. Woodman, spare those trees
that grow around it, and Nature, kindly mother,
do thou add yet more to their height and size, that
we may not, in our going forth and our return, have
it, and all it means, constantly before eyes and mind.
It has, in addition, lately been furnished with bells,
of sorts, that commence early in the morning and
wake one untimeously from sleep, often with an air
associated with the words of that pagan hymn, " A
few more years shall roll." Pagan, I say, because
it tells us that when those few years shall have
rolled
... we shall be with those that rest
Asleep within the tomb.
It is a godless teaching. We shall not be asleep
TWICKENHAM CHURCH.
PETERSHAM POST-OFFICE.
PETERSHAM. 189
within the tomb. Our poor bodies, yes, but they are
not us. In any case, it is not a pleasant reminder,
several times a day, that we shall soon be dead.
Church-bells, whatever the legal aspect of the case,
are in fact licensed nuisances, established without
consulting those who have to hear them, and con-
tinually rung without any necessity, in spite of
indignant protests.
In this rustic spot we have two churches, two
inns, one general shop, a decreasing population, and
a general post-office which will hold, all at once, if
they are not very big people, and if they stand close
together, quite six persons. Exactly what it is
like, let this illustration show. It will be seen at
once, and without any difficulty whatever, that it
is a very humble relation indeed of the General Post-
Office in St. Martin Vle-Grand.
There are some curious survivals at Petersham,
the more curious because they survive at these late
times in such comparatively close proximity to
London. Adjoining the Fox and Duck Inn — one
of the two aforesaid — is a little wooden building
that looks like nothing else than an outhouse for
gardening tools. It is really an old village lock-up
for petty misdemeanants, such as may often be seen
in remote rural places. Behind it is another old
institution, equally disused, although it is not so
very long since a strayed donkey was placed there.
It is the village pound for lost and wandering cattle
found upon the road and placed in the pound —
impounded — until a claimant appears and pays a
shilling to the beadle for release. The present
190 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
condition of the pound is such that no animal placed
in it could well be kept there, for the fence is decayed,
and all attempts at maintaining the old institution
appear to have been given up. A magnificent crop
of nettles and thistles now grows within, and would
make it an ideal place for any donkey that might
chance to be impounded : donkeys being reputedly
fonder of them than of any other kind of food.
" Why does a donkey prefer thistles to corn or grass ?
Because he's an ass."
Close by this quaint corner the two old curiously
gabled Dutch-looking cottages pictured here are
seen. The space between them is now merely a
yard occupied by the Richmond Corporation for
storing carts and road-making materials, but these
were once the lodge-gates to the entrance of Peter-
sham Park, in the old times when it was a private
estate containing old Petersham Lodge, the mansion
of my Lord Harrington, that peer to whom the poet
Thomson, of " The Seasons," alluded in his lines on
the view from Richmond Hill :
" There let the feasted eye unwearied stray ;
Luxurious, there, rove through the pendant woods
That nodding hang o'er Harrington's retreat."
The view in these pages shows a glimpse of those
pendant woods, still flourishing up along the ridge
of Richmond Park, but it is now the better part of
a hundred years since the Commissioners of Woods
and Forests .purchased that peer's old estate, de-
molished the mansion, and added the land as a
BALMY PETERSHAM 193
very beautiful annexe to Richmond Park. The
cottages, with their little gardens, are charming,
and would be even more so were they red bricks
of which they are built, instead of common yellow
stock brick.
I have just now remarked that there are at
Petersham those who are numbered of the elect.
But it must sadly be admitted that not all in the
borough of Richmond, in which we have the doubtful
honour of being included, are of the opinion . that
Petersham is inhabited by the children of light and
grace. Indeed, the following remarks of a deleterious
and poisonous character, lately brought to my notice,
convince me that there exists among some misguided
folk up yonder an idea that this most delightful of
surviving villages within a short distance of London
is inhabited wholly, or at least largely, by the men-
tally afflicted. This desolating and alarming belief
was brought home to me by a friend, who hired a
conveyance at Richmond station, to be brought down
to our idyllic village.
' Where to, sir ? '"' asked the flyman.
' Petersham."
" Ah ! ''' exclaimed the driver — this was entirely
uncalled-for, you know — " you mean balmy Peter-
sham."
* Yes," rejoined the unsuspecting stranger, " the
air there is good, I suppose."
' I don't mean the hair," he was astonished to
be told, " but the people what lives there. Don't
you know that they're all balmy on the crumpet —
what you call 'off it ' ? "
194 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
My poor friend looked a little astonished at this.
I am afraid he is not intimately acquainted with
the language of the streets.
" Oh ! you know ! " continued the man, noticing
this air of bewilderment : " they're dotty, that's
what they are."
' You mean non compos mentis," rejoined my
friend at last, comprehending what was meant, and
heroically and waggishly endeavouring to get a bit
of his own back, and in turn to mystify this
derogatory licensed hackney-driver.
The man, convinced that he had happened upon
a " sanguinary German," said : ' Yus, I suppose
that's what you call it in your country," and mounted
his box, and in silence drove down to this asylum
for the " balmy."
It should be said that we in Petersham, who live
quietly and engage in delightful pursuits — such as
writing books, flower-growing, and criticising our
neighbours — do by no means endorse this opinion
of our surroundings. As we are of the elect, so
also are we exceptionally sane, even among the
level-headed. But there is a reason to be found in
most things, even in the remarks above quoted.
That reason is sought and discovered in the fact
that our village is unique : the only place within
its easy radius from London in which the surround-
ings are unspoiled, the air pure, and the means of
communication with the great neighbouring roaring
world primitive and not readily at command. The
nearest railway station is a mile and a quarter away,
and such services of omnibuses as have run between
RAIN 197
Kingston and Richmond, through Petersham, have
ever been fugitive and evanescent, and have generally
run at intervals of not less than twenty minutes.
The peculiar humour or the peculiar tragedy-
according to point of view — of these omnibus services
is that in fine weather every one wants to walk,
and in rain all want to ride ; so that in the first case
the omnibuses are empty, and in the second cannot
cope with the sudden and unlooked-for demand, and
one has perforce to walk home and get wet through,
or alternatively to wait until the rain ceases.
And during the last remarkable summers there
have been occasions when it has rained in torrents,
without ceasing, for four days !
My pen, entered upon the woes of the would-be
passenger by omnibus, has run away with me, and
I must at once disclaim the dawning conclusion that
the alleged " balminess " of Petersham is due to
rain and the lack of conveyances other than the
comparatively expensive flys. Those are not the
reasons. Petersham, being entirely rural, even
though surrounded by great populations, and yet
being near London, it is found by the medical pro-
fession to be a convenient district for recommending
to patients to whom, for a variety of reasons, it
would be inconvenient to go remotely into the
provinces. Here, then, qualified somewhat of late
years by fleeting irruptions of motor-cars, and by
brake-loads of mischievous and bell-ringing children
who are brought down from London in summer for
school-treats in Petersham Park, invalids may hope
to obtain a happy recovery, even though the air,
198 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
instead of being sharp and bracing, is steamy and
languorous. Thus the expression " balmy Peter-
sham," whether used in the literate sense, or in the
regular way of slang, if duly analysed, is found to be
essentially a proud title to consideration, instead of
a term of reproach. The neighbouring village of
Ham is a co-partner in these things, perhaps even in
a greater degree, for it is equally distant from a
railway station, and fringes a wide common whose
remotest corners are at all times extremely secluded.
I spoke just now of mischievous and bell-ringing
children, but there are others not intentionally mis-
chievous, who are yet, perhaps, apt to be a little
wearing to the nerves of quiet folk who live within
gardens behind tall wooden fences overhung by
flowering shrubs, such as lilac and syringa. These
are a great temptation in their flowering season to all
kinds of persons who ought to be able to enjoy the
sight of them without tearing off branches ; but
the Goth and the Vandal we have always with us
on Bank Holidays and fine Sundays and Saturday
afternoons. We expect them, and our expectations
are commonly realised. But sorrow's crown of
sorrow is reached when, hearing a crash of boards,
you rush out and find a dismayed child standing
among the ruins of a part of your fence, and ex-
plaining that she " didn't mean it, and was only
reaching up to pick a bit of syringa for nyture study."
And to this the modern attempt to inculcate the study
and the love of Nature brings us !
Before reluctantly I leave Petersham, let some-
thing be said as to its name. And, firstly, let it be
"PATRICEHAM" 201
duly borne in mind that we who reside here are
perhaps a little concerned that the place-name shall
be properly pronounced. Petersham, we like to
think, is the real thing, with no sham about it at all.
Hence the particularity with which " Peters-ham "
is enunciated by the nice in these things ; even as
the villagers of Bisham, near Marlow, say " Bis-
ham," or (the tongue being ever at odds with the
letter H) " Bis-sam."
Petersham obtained its name as long ago as
those dim Saxon times when the great mitred Abbey
of Chertsey was founded and dedicated to St. Peter.
In charters of those times the land here is noted as
the property of that Abbey, and the place is called
' Patriceham " and " Patricesham." In the Car-
tulary of Merton Abbey, in 1266, it becomes " Pet-
richesham." It thus would appear fairly conclusive
that the name originated with the land becoming
the property of St. Peter's Abbey at Chertsey, and
in no other way. But none of those who delve deeply
into the origins of place-names is ever satisfied with
things as they are ; and it would now appear that
an effort has been made to derive " Petersham "
from a supposititious early Saxon landowner, a
certain — or as we find no real documentary or other
evidence of his existence here, it would be better to
say an uncertain— " Beadric," whose " ham " it is
thus assumed to have been. This is a heroic attempt
to argue from the old original name of the town
we now call " Bury St. Edmunds," which was in its
beginning " Beadric's-worth." Although the Saxon
name of " Beadric " was not uncommon, it is surely
VOL. ii 15
202 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
something of an effort to drag this East Anglian
example out of Suffolk arbitrarily to fit a place in
Surrey ; even though, in the course of the same
argument, in citing the well-known parallel derivation
of " Battersea " from the land there having anciently
been the property of the Abbey of St. Peter at West-
minster, it is found that in the original charter of
A.D. 693 the place-name is spelled " Batricesege."
This becomes, in a charter of 1067, " Batriceseie "
or " Patriceseia."
One somewhat speculative blocked-up lancet
window of the Early English period is the remotest
thing that remains to Petersham old church ; which
is, for the rest, chiefly of George the First's time.
It is, of course, dedicated to St. Peter. Nowhere
do we find the slightest real trace of the ancient
cell of Chertsey Abbey which is supposed to have
existed here, on the Abbey lands. The curious mass
of brickwork along the footpath leading out of
River Lane and between the gardens of Church
Nursery and the filter-beds of the Richmond water-
works, is commonly said to have been a portion of
those ancient ecclesiastical buildings, but no one has
ever discovered the slightest hint of church or mon-
astic architecture about that problematical fragment,
nor has its purpose been hinted at. The footpath
rises sharply between somewhat high walls, and is
indeed carried over an arch. The old village folk
long knew the spot as " Cockcrow Hill " ; but
during the last two years, in course of the works
undertaken for the neighbouring filter-beds, the
brickwork has been patched and the pitch of the
A GAZEBO 205
lane leading over the arch lowered ; so, doubtless,
the name of " Cockcrow Hill " will become among
the things forgot. If a theory may be entertained
where no facts are available, this building was pro-
bably a bridge across some long- vanished or diverted
stream which at one time flowed from the high
ground of what is now Richmond Park, across these
level meadows, and so into the Thames.
But if there be indeed no architectural features
in this brickwork, there is an almost monastic air
of seclusion about the rather grim and very pictur-
esque old seventeenth-century gazebo that stands
beside this self -same lane. There is some speculative
interest in it, for no one can certainly declare to
what this old four-square two-storeyed building of
red brick, with the queer peaked roof, belonged.
The presumption is that it was at one time a gazebo,
or garden-pavilion, attached to the walled garden
of Rutland Lodge, adjoining, an early seventeenth-
century mansion, the oldest house in Petersham.
Presumably, when it was built, its upper windows,
some of them long since blocked, had a clear look-out
across the unenclosed meadows to the river. The
meadows are still there, but a fenced-in garden and
an orchard now intervene, and by some unexplainable
changes, the building, although at the angle of the
walled garden of Rutland Lodge, has no communica-
tion with it, and is in fact included within the grounds
of Church Nursery and the garden of the modern
house called since 1907 " Rosebank," presumably
for the usual contradictory reasons that roses have
ever been conspicuously absent from that garden,
206 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
and that the site is a dead level. Much patching and
altering has been done at times to the old gazebo,
and attempts have been made to convert it into a
cottage. Hence the added fireplaces and the chimney,
not requisite in a garden summer-house, but indis-
pensable for living in. Otherwise, the lot of the
old building has been the common and almost in-
variable fate of such — neglect, and a surrender to
spiders. The cult of the gazebo came in originally
with the Renascence from Italy, and as it was not
an indigenous, so it was neither a hardy growth in
this land of ours, where the sunshine is never op-
pressively hot for the house, and chills all too often
are the portion of the garden-dweller. Thus the
numerous, and often highly picturesque, gazebos and
pavilions to be found attached to old English gardens
are most often seen to be deserted and in the
last stages of disrepair. The gallant fight against
climatic conditions has had to be abandoned.
Another hopeless fight against overpoweringly ad-
verse conditions ended here in 1907, when the famous
Star and Garter Hotel on Richmond Hill was
closed. We who make Petersham our home know
well that the " Star and Garter " is closed, if only
for the reason that, it being situated in the parish,
the loss to the local rates incidental to the closing
meant a sudden rise of ninepence in the pound.
We are thus hoping, without in the least expecting
it, that some greatly daring person or corporation
will be good enough to take and open it again. This
increased demand, added to the hungry re-assess-
ments recently made, and to the other increase^
THE "STAR AND GARTER" 209
caused by the extravagant proceedings of the Rich-
mond Corporation, which would appear to carry on
the business of the town on behalf of the tradesmen
instead of the residents, is rendering the neighbour-
hood an increasingly costly one to live in. Every one
would now seem to share the fallacious belief that
to live in Richmond one must necessarily be rich.
True, one will presently need to be if things continue
on the lines of recent developments.
Meanwhile, will no one take the poor old " Star
and Garter " ? It really seems as if no one would,
for at least two unsuccessful attempts have been
made to dispose of it at auction. The property
was stated by the auctioneer to have cost £140,000.
He described it in a phrase which sounds like a
quotation, as "a far-famed hostelry, a palace of
pleasure on a hill of delight/' He also declared the
view from it to be •" the finest prospect in England,
perhaps in the world." But he was not prepared,
it seems, to assure the purchaser of a much finer
prospect still : that of a dividend from the purchase,
and so the result was a bid of only £20,000. The
second attempted sale resulted in no bid being made
at all.
The " Star and Garter " was ever noted for its
high charges, framed to match its lofty situation
and the exalted station of many of the guests who
of old patronised it. Louis Philippe, King of the
French, and Queen Amelie resided there for months
at a time, and were frequently visited by Queen
Victoria and the Prince Consort. The unhappy
Napoleon the Third, the ill-starred Emperor Maxi-
210 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
milian of Mexico, the equally ill-fated Prince Im-
perial, and other crowned, or prospectively crowned,
heads were the merest every-day frequenters ; but
the " Star and Garter " long since discovered that
there were not enough crowned heads to go round.
Nor did the enterprising Christopher Crean, sometime
cook to the old Duke of York, who took it and re-
opened it after an old-time disastrous interval of
five years, in 1809, find that he could secure constant
relays of visitors to pay him, as some were stated to
have done, half a guinea for the mere privilege of
looking out from the windows upon the beauties of
the Thames Valley.
It would seem, in conclusion, that the coming of
motor-cars has finally rendered the huge " Star and
Garter " impossible. Time was when the drive to
Richmond was a delightful and leisurely affair,
occupying in the coming and the going a considerable
part of the day. Motor-cars and taxicabs have
rendered it a matter of minutes only, and those
who used to lunch or dine at Richmond now do the
like, just as luxuriously, and almost as quickly by
modern methods of travel, at Brighton, Hastings,
or Eastbourne.
I have written much elsewhere of Petersham,
in a little book called Rural Nooks round London,
and so will now leave the subject for the last Thames-
side nooks that can by any means claim to preserve
to this day any relics of their old village life. The,
first of these is Isleworth, in Middlesex.
CHAPTER X
ISLEWORTH — BRENTFORD AND (LESAR*S
CROSSING OF THE THAMES
TSLEWORTH, an ancient and almost forgotten village
overlooking the Thames, is not by any manner of
means to be confounded with the station of that
name, or with the better-known outlying portion of
the parish known as Old Isleworth. The reason of
this popular ignorance of Isleworth is easily to be
found in the pronounced bend of the river by which
it stands, the great roads in the neighbourhood going
approximately direct, and leaving Isleworth in a
very rarely travelled nook, not often penetrated,
except by those who have some especial reason for
calling at Isleworth itself. It is thus a singularly
old-world place, and, strangely enough, it is more
often seen from afar, from the towing-path on the
Surrey side, than at hand.
The village, however little known it may be to-day,
was sufficiently well known to the compilers of
Domesday Book, in whose pages it appears in the
grotesque spelling, " Ghistelworde." Afterwards it
is found written Yhistleworth, Istelworth, Yssels-
worth, and at last, before the present formula was
found for it, " Thistleworth." A vast deal of con-
212 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
tention has raged around the meaning of the place-
name, and with such an orthographic choice you
could give it almost any meaning you chose ; but
there can be little question but that it comes from
two words, the Celtic uisc for water, and the Saxon
worth for village. It is, indeed,, distinctly a water-
village, for not only does the Thames flow by it, but
here the Crane, rising near Northolt, and coming
down through Cranford, falls into the Thames, near
by a little nameless brook that rises on Norwood
Green. It is indeed the confluence of the Crane and
the Thames that contributes so largely to the
picturesqueness, the somewhat squalid waterside
picturesqueness, of Isleworth ; for the outlet of the
smaller into the larger river is closed by little dock-
gates, and the space thus shut in is presided over by
the huge, and in themselves unbeautiful, flour mills
of Messrs. Samuel Kidd & Sons. There is, however,
always a something attractive about flour-mills, let
the builders of them build never so prosaically ; and
here, where the little stream comes sliding out beneath
the massive buildings, and where the road passes
over the little dock, the sight of the barges coming
up, each laden with their thousand or so quarters of
wheat for the mills, is found generally interesting,
especially to boys sent about some urgent business ;
the more immediate and pressing the errand, the more
attractive the mills ; which have their historical
interest to the well-read in local story, for they are
the successors; on this same spot, of the ancient
water-mills of the Abbey of Sion.
Most of the houses at Isleworth are old brick
ISLEWORTHj 215
structures, with heavily sashed windows, and the
humbler houses and cottages are very much out of
repair. There is a look of the passive mood and of
the past tense about the place, and you expect (and
probably would find if you inquired) holes in the
stockings of every other inhabitant, patches on their
posteriors, and mere apologies for soles on their
footgear ; while shocking bad hats are the only wear. .
The artist who knows what's what will already have
perceived that Isleworth is a place likely to have
pictorial qualities, and in his supposition he will be
quite correct. It would certainly have captivated
Whistler. Imagine the parish church on the river-
bank, at the end of this rather feckless street of
houses ; imagine a very large old inn, the London
Apprentice, almost dabbling in the water, and then
conceive two large islands, or eyots, or aits, as they
may with equal correctitude be called, off-shore,
dividing the stream of Thames in two. They are
extremely interesting eyots, for they grow to this
day abundance of osiers, whose periodical harvesting,
for the making of baskets, is a by no means negligible
local industry. Lately I walked through Isleworth
on the day before Christmas, and there, stepping
down between two rows of little tenements forming
Tolson's Almhouses, and looking down upon the
river from the railed wall at the farther end, could
be seen lying six or eight great barges that had come,
not from foreign climes, but from the creeks and
ports of the Essex and the Kentish coasts, from the
Swale, the Medway, the Blackwater, or the Crouch.
Each and all of them had at their mastheads a
VOL. ii 16
216 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
bundle of holly fastened to a spar, in honour of the
coming Day. Beyond them rose the ivy-clad tower
of the church, and an occasional pallid gleam of
sunshine broke upon the river. It was a pretty and
a touching scene.
A great deal of very unreliable and really un-
veracious " history " has been written about the
inn, the London Apprentice, said to have been a
favourite haunt of highwaymen, among whom our
ubiquitous old friend, Dick Turpin, of course figures ;
but we may disregard such tales. It was once, how-
ever, a favourite resort for water-parties from
London.
The tower of the church is a really beautiful and
sturdy pinnacled stone Gothic building, but the body
of the church was rebuilt in 1705, from designs left,
so it is said, by Sir Christopher Wren ; and it is,
within and without, typical of the style then pre-
valent : that well-known type of exterior of red brick,
pierced with tall, factory-like windows, and an interior
modelled after a " classic " type, with galleries, and
painted and gilded more like a place of amusement
than a place of worship.
A few much-worn brasses remain from an older
building, notably one to Margaret Dely, a Sister of
Sion during the brief revival of the Abbey under
Queen Mary.
But the most interesting monument is one of ornate
design, in marble, placed in the west entrance lobby,
under the tower. This is partly to the memory of
Mrs. Ann Tolson, and partly to Dr. Caleb Cotesworth,
and narrates, in the course of a very long epitaph, a
THK DOCK AT ISLEWORTH.
THE ' LONDON APPRENTICE," ISLEWORTH.
ISLE WORTH 219
romantic story. Ann Tolson was the donor of the
group of almshouses already mentioned, for six poor
men and an equal number of poor women. She
married, as the epitaph very minutely tells us, firstly
Henry Sisson and then one John Tolson. When he
died "she was reduced to Narrow and Confined
Circumftances, and fupported herfelf by keeping
School for the Education of Young Ladies, for which
She was well Qualified by a Natural Ingenuity. A
ftrict and Regular Education, and mild and gentle
Difposition. By the lofs of Sight She became unfit
for her Employment, and a proper object to receive
that Charity, She was Sollicitous to Dif tribute."
In the midst of these misfortunes, Dr. Caleb Cotes-
worth, a connection of hers by marriage, died. As
the epitaph, with meticulous particularity goes on
to report, he " had By a long and Succefsful practice
at London " amassed a fortune of " One Hundred
and Fifty Thousand Pounds and upwards." A part
he distributed by his will among relatives, " and the
residue, One Hundred and Twenty Thousand Pounds
and upwards he gave to his Wife.
They both died on the 2nd May, 1741
BUT SHE SURVIVED,
and Dying Inteftate, her Perfonal Eftate became
Diftributable among her three next Of Kin, one of
whom was the above Ann Tolson. With a sense
of this Signal Deliverance and unexpected Change
from a State of Want, to Riches and Affluence, She
forthwith appointed the Sum of Five Thousand
Pounds to the eftablishment of Almfhoufes for Six
220 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
men and six women," and then the giddy old thing
went and married a third time, although over eighty
years of age, one Joseph Dash, merchant, of London.
She died, aged 89, in 1750 ; and this monument, for
which she had left £500, for the narration of her
interesting story, was soon afterwards duly placed
here.
Opposite the monument of this lady is that of Sir
Orlando Gee, a factotum of Algernon, Duke of North-
umberland and Registrar of the Admiralty, who died
in 1705. It is a very fine marble monument, with a
half-length portrait effigy of Sir Orlando himself, in
the costume and the elaborate wig of his period.
He is represented in the act of reading some document
unspecified.
The Middlesex shore, when once past Sion Park,
now grows thickly cumbered with buildings, and the
view of the Surrey side from Middlesex is distinctly
preferable to that of Middlesex from Surrey. For
on the opposite shore stretch the long reaches of
Kew Gardens, whose beauties no one, I suppose,
has ever yet exhausted ; the grounds are so extensive
and their contents so varied, so rich and rare.
But, after all, I see, the extent of Kew Gardens
is not so great, measured by acreage instead of
their riches. I detest mere facts, and love impres-
sions ; but here is a fact, for once in a way books of
reference give the size of Kew Gardens as some 350
acres only.
The Director and his colleagues in botany and
arboriculture look across to the factory chimneys
of Brentford with dismay, and write alarming things
KEW GARDENS 221
in annual reports about the effects of the noxious
fumes from those chimneys upon the trees and plants
of the gardens, so Brentford, we may take it, is a
menace, and since the Brentford Gas Company is a
highly prosperous and expanding business, and is
certainly in the front rank as a fume-producer, the
menace we may further suppose to be increasing.
The end of these things no man can foresee, but the
passing away of Kew Gardens would be a thing too
grievous to contemplate.
Brentford, it is true, cannot by any means be styled
a village, and it owns indeed the dignity of the
county town of Middlesex. Thus it would find no
place in these pages, were it not that Brentford sets
up as the rival of Coway Stakes near Walton, for
the honour of being that historic spot where Julius
Caesar crossed the Thames. It is only of recent years
that this claim has been put forward, and until
then Coway Stakes scarcely knew a competitor. But
at different times during dredging operations in the
bed of the river, and in the course of building new
wharves and other waterside structures, great num-
bers of ancient oak stakes have been discovered,
extending with intervals, from about four hundred
yards below Isleworth ferry down to the upper
extremity of Brentford eyot. Near Isleworth
ferry they were found in 1881, in a threefold line,
interlaced with wattles and boughs, and continue,
generally in a single line, at intervals, under the
river banks, with advanced rows in the bed of the
river, past the places where the river Brent falls
into the Thames in two branches. The stakes, that
222 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
have been numerously extracted in these last thirty
years, are in fairly good preservation, and measure
in general fifteen inches in circumference.
The criticism, of course, arises here, How could
the Britons at such necessarily short notice have
executed so extensive a work to impede the passage
of the Romans, who came swiftly up from Kent and
who could not have been confidently expected at
any one point ? The stakes extend for about two
miles and appear to have been thoroughly and metho-
dically arranged. The wattling, too, is evidence of
care and deliberation. Doubts must arise. They
may have been already long in existence before
Caesar came, and have been intended for defence
against rival tribes ; or again, they may not really
be so ancient as supposed ; and their object merely
for the protection of the banks from being eroded by
the current.
The name, Brentford, refers of course to a ford
across the Brent near its confluence with the Thames,
which is broad and deep here ; but there was also,
doubtless, a ford across the Thames, at this place,
for the present depth of the river has been produced
in modern times by the industrious dredging works
of the 'Thames Conservancy. But still at low tide
between Brentford ferry and Kew bridge the river
has normally only three feet depth of water, and in
summer sometimes much less. Children can at such
times often be seen wading far out into the bed of
the stream. There must evidently have been a ford
across the Thames here in ancient days, as well as
across the Brent, and we know from later historic
CESAR'S CROSSING ±2$
events that undoubtedly took place here that this
junction of rivers was always an important point.
Thus much may be said in support of the modern
contention that it was here Caesar crossed on his way
to Verulam, and it may be conceded to those who
hold this view that the delta formed by the two
outlets of the Brent is curiously named " Old
England/' It will be found so called on large Ord-
nance maps, and by that name it has been known
from time immemorial. Much significance may be
found in that title in such a place as this. Nothing
is known as to the origin of it. It has just come
down to us from the old, dim ages of oral tradition,
and is now fixed by printed maps. The significance
of the name is, however, strangely supported by that
of a spot far indeed removed from it, but (if we
accept the theory that Brentford is really the scene
of Caesar's crossing) most intimately correlated in
history. This second name has also been handed
down in like manner out of the misty past. We
need not wonder at it. Tradition was everywhere
strong in times before the people could read, but
their memory has become gradually atrophied since
they have become literate, and the wisdom and the
legends of our forefathers are fading away. Fortu-
nately, the art of printing, which, in conjunction with
the widespread ability to read, has destroyed much
oral tradition, has at the same time fixed and per-
petuated many floating legends and memories.
This fellow traditional name is " Old England's
Hsle," the title given by many generations of rustics
to a hillock on the summit of Bridge Hill, beside
226 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
the Dover road between Canterbury and Dover,
and adjoining Barham Downs, where Caesar fought
with and defeated the Britons, July 23, 54 B.C. It
is a hillock with a crater-like hollow in the crest,
and was one of the forts in which the Britons long
held out. Caesar himself, in his Commentaries, de-
scribes these forts and the storming of them by his
soldiers ; and the rustics of the neighbourhood have
fixed upon this particular spot, and say in effect
" This is Old England's Hole, and here a last stand for
freedom was made by your British forefathers."
" Old England," on the banks of Brent and
Thames, is partly included within Syon Park and in
part extends over the squalid canal outlet and the
sidings, docks, and warehouses the Great Western
Railway has established here ; but the name more
particularly attaches to the meadow just within the
park. It forms from the Surrey shore a charming
picture not at all injured by those commercial
activities of docks and railways adjoining : perhaps
even gaining by contrast. There the earthy banks
of the Thames, in general hereabouts steep and some
ten or twelve feet high, are lower and shelve gradu-
ally ; and in the meadows a noble group of bushy
poplars stands behind a few willows that look upon
the stream. There are trees, too, in the background,
and the spire of the modern church of St Paul, Brent-
ford, forms a not unpleasing feature on the right.
Brentford Ferry, down below " Old England/'
commands an extensive view down river, towards
Kew Bridge and along the northern channel of the
Thames, divided here into two channels by the long
BRENTFORD FERRY 229
and narrow Brentford Eyot, thickly grown with
grass and underwood, and planted with noble trees.
It is acutely pointed out by Mr. Montagu Sharpe that
the boundary-Line dividing the counties of Middlesex
and Surrey is not at this point made to follow the
stream midway, as customary elsewhere, but is
traced along the northern channel ; and he sees in this
fact a hint that the original course of the river was
along that branch, and assumes that the main stream
is of later origin ; that the river at some time later than
the era of the Eomans made this new way for itself.
On the steep bank above Brentford Ferry there
was placed in May 1909 a sturdy granite pillar
with inscriptions setting forth the historical char-
acter of the spot. The events known to have taken
place at Brentford, and the crossing here by Caesar,
now boldly assumed, form a very remarkable list, as
this copy of those inscriptions will sufficiently show :
54 B.C.
At this ancient fortified ford the British tribesmen under
Cassivellaunus bravely opposed Julius Caesar on his
march to Verulamium.
A.D. 780-1
Near by, Offa, King of Mercia, with his Queen, the
bishops, and principal officers, held a Council of the
Church.
A.D. 1016
Here Edmund Ironside, King of England, drove Cnut
and his defeated Danes across the Thames.
A.D. 1642
Close by was fought the Battle of Brentford, between
the forces of King Charles I. and the Parliament.
VOL. II 17
230 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
A.D. 1909
To commemorate these historical events this stone
was erected by the Brentford Council.
This memorial has certainly been placed in a
most prominent position, and challenges the atten-
tion of the passer-by along the footpath past Kew
Gardens, on the opposite shore. As you approach by
the ferry-boat, the crazy old stone and brick stairs
leading steeply up, beside the broad and easy in-
cline of the shingly ferry-slip, look most imposing,
and group well with their surroundings.
Where the old original ford across the Brent
was situated no man knows, but perhaps near to
its junction with the Thames, at a spot where the
waters from the greater tidal river rendered the ford
impassable except at the ebb. That was the awkward
situation of Old Brentford, and one not for very
long to be endured by travellers along the great
West of England road that runs through this place.
Thus it gave way at a very early period to a new
ford, somewhat higher up the Brent ; and around it
in the course of time rose the town of New Brentford,
whose being and name in this manner derived
directly from the needs of travellers for a ford passable
at all hours. The ford was replaced by a bridge
in 1280, and that by later stone bridges, or patchings
and enlargements of the original. The present
representative of them is a quite recent and com-
modious iron affair, built over the stone arch : very
much more convenient for the traffic, but not at all
romantic. New Brentford church stands near by ;
OLD BRENTFORD 231
that of Old Brentford is a good quarter of a mile
along the road, back towards London, but there is
nothing old or interesting about it, seeing that it
was entirely rebuilt a few years ago.
The Brent, as it flows through the town, is not
easily to be distinguished amid the several canal
cuts, where the close-packed barges lie, but it may
with some patience be traced at the western end
of the broad and retired road called " The Butts/'
an ancient name significant of a bygone Brentford,
very different from the present aspect of the place.
" The Butts " is a broad open space, rather than a
road, and the houses, old and new, in it are of a
superior residential character that would astonish
those — and they are far the greater number — who
know Brentford only by passing through its narrow
and squalid and tramway-infested main street. " The
Butts " would appear to have been an ancient practice-
ground in archery.
The Brent appears at the extremity, down below
a very steep bank, and barges lie in it, on the hither
side of a sluice. It goes thenceforward in a pro-
nounced curve, to fall into the docks, and passes by
the backs of old houses and some still surviving
gardens, with the church-tower of St. Leonard's,
New Brentford, peering over old red roofs and
clustered gables.
In an old-world town such as this there are many
charming village-like corners and strange survivals,
when once you have left the main arteries of traffic.
Brentford is, of course, a byword for its narrow,
congested, squalid High Street, down which the
232 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
gasworks send a quarter-of-a-mile of stink to greet
the inquiring stranger ; but it is a very long High
Street, and the gasmaking is in Old Brentford ; and
at the westward end, New Brentford, you are far
removed from those noisome activities and among
the barges instead. It is largely a bargee population
at this end ; and the bargee himself, the cut of his
beard (when he has one it is generally of the chin-
tuft fashion affected by the Pharaohs, as seen by the
ancient statues in the British Museum), the style
of his clothes, and his manner of living his semi-
amphibious life are all interesting. It would need a
volume to do justice to the history, the quaintnesses,
and the anomalies of Brentford, which, although
the " county town " of Middlesex, and thus invested
with a greater if more nebulous dignity than London
— merely the capital of the Empire — is not even a
corporate town. If I wanted to justify myself for
including it in a book on villages, I should feel in-
clined to advance this fact, and to add that, although
the traditional " two Kings of Brentford," with only
one throne between them, are famous in legend,
no one ever heard of a Mayor of Brentford, either
in legend or in fact. When it is added that Old
Brentford owns all the new things, such as the gas-
works, the brewery, and the waterworks, and that
the old houses are mostly in New Brentford, the
thing is resolved into an engaging and piquant
absurdity. It is to be explained, of course, in the
fact of Old Brentford being so old that it has had
to be renewed.
The very names of Brentford's streets tell a tale of
OLD STREET-NAMES
233
eld. It is only in these immemorially ancient places
that such names as " Town Meadow," ' The Butts,"
"The Hollows" "Old Spring Gardens," "New
Spring Gardens," " The Ham," " Ferry Lane," or
" Half Acre " are met with. They are names that
tell of a dead and gone Brentford little suspected
by the most of those who pass by. No unpleasing
place this waterside town when the " Town Meadow,"
that is now a shimmy close, was really a piece of
FERRY LANE, BRENTFORD.
common land green with grass and doubtless giving
pleasantly upon the river. And when Old and New
Spring Gardens first acquired their name, perhaps
about the age when Herrick wrote his charming
poems, or that era when Pepys gossiped, they were
no doubt idyllic spots where the springs gushed
forth amid shady bowers. To-day they are old-
world alleys, with houses declining upon a decrepit
age that invites the attention of improving hands.
There was an ancient congeries of crooked alleys and
234 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
small cottage property near the corner of Half Acre
known as " Troy Town." It stood hard by where
the District Council offices are now placed, but tall
hoardings facing the road now disclose the fact
that Troy Town is in process of being abolished.
The name is curious, but not unique. It is found
frequently in England, and seems generally to occur
as the name of an old suburb of a much older town ;
some place of picnicking and merry-making, where
there were arbours, and above all, a maze, either
cut in the turf or planted in the form of a hedge,
like that most glorious of mazes at Hampton Court.
Such were the original " Troy Towns " ; and whatever
once were the clustered alleys in Brentford that
were called by that name, certainly they have carried
out to the full, and to the last, the mazy, uncharted
idea.
But this old suburb of Old Brentford must at
an early date have been swallowed up in the growth
of New Brentford and at a remote time have lost
everything of its original character except its old
traditional name. Names, we know, survive when
all else has vanished or been utterly changed.
Ferry Lane is one of Brentford's many quaint
corners. There is an old inn there, the " Waterman's
Arms," and a stately old mansion, " Ferry House."
And there is a curious old malthouse, too, which,
in the artistic way, simply makes the fortune of Ferry
Lane, so piquant are the outlines of its roofs and its
two ventilating shafts, like young lighthouses. Build-
ings of such simple, yet such picturesque lines do not
come into existence nowadays.
FAREWELL, BRENTFORD 235
And so to leave Brentford, with much, of its
story untold. To tell it were a long business that
would lose the sense of proportion which to some
degree, let us hope, distinguishes these volumes.
So nothing shall be said of those two mysterious
" Kings of Brentford " who shared, according to
tradition, the throne ; nothing, that is, but to note
that a brilliant idea has of late occurred to antiquaries,
puzzled beyond measure by these indefinite kings.
It is now conceived that the legend originally was of
the two kings at Brentford, and that so far from
sharing one throne happily together, they were
Edmund Ironside, the Saxon king, and Canute the
invading Dane (or Cnut, as it seems we are expected
to style him now), who was severely defeated here
by Edmund, and driven out of Brentford across the
river.
CHAPTER XI
STRAND-ON-THE- GREEN — KEW — CHISWICK—
MORTLAKE — BARNES
THERE is a waterside walk from Brentford to Kew
Bridge, commanding a full view of that new and
solid, perhaps also stolid, structure of stone, opened
May 20, 1903. The old bridge was a more satis-
factory affair to the eye, although its roadway was
steep, rising sharply as it did from either end to
an apex over the middle arch. The arches, boldly
and beautifully semicircular, were delightful to look
upon, not like the flattened-out segmental spans of
the new bridge, which have a heavy and ungraceful
appearance, looking for all the world as though they
had settled heavily in the making upon their haunches
and would presently fall, flop, into the river.
Things change, after all, but slowly here. Much
has gone of late years, but much is still left. Here,
for example, stands a riverside inn the " Oxford and
Cambridge," with a delightful little lawn, exquisitely
green, behind a low wall that gives upon the towing-
path. It has a very rural look, amid urban sur-
roundings, and at the rear you may yet see a range
of old malthouses, with cowled ventilators upon
their old richly-red tiled roofs, in every way re-
sembling their fellows far down in Kent. But they
236
KEW GARDENS 237
are to be let or sold, and for long past the side of
them giving upon the road has served the purpose of
an advertising station ; so the end of these things
is at hand.
Kew — called on some old maps "Cue" — across
the bridge into Surrey, stands grouped around its
green, as of old ; the curious church, which is half
Byzantine and half of the Queen Anne method,
presenting an outline so remarkably suggestive of
an early type of locomotive engine that one would
scarce be surprised to find some day that it had
steamed off.
Kew Green is charming, but there is a dirty
little slum down by the riverside, with labyrinthine
alleys and corners where children make dust- and
mud-pies and women in aprons stand at doorways
with arms akimbo and gossip. Here is a street of
modern cottages with an odd old name : " Westerly
Ware."
I do not think Kew can be condemned as being
go-ahead and ultra-modern. Time was, somewhere
about 1880, when a tramway was laid along the Kew
Gardens road from the foot of Kew Bridge into
Richmond. It was regarded when new as a very
rash and deplorable and innovating thing, and the
tinkle of its horse-bells was anything but pleasing
to the ears of the wealthy residents of the mostly
peculiarly ostentatious villas on the way. But
" circumstances alter cases," as the old adage tritely
tells us, and now that few provincial towns of any size
are without their electric tramways, this little single-
line horsed tramway is come to be regarded almost
VOL. ii 18
238 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
in the nature of a genuine antique. You take your
seat upon one of the little cars and wait and wait,
and still wait. It is very pleasant and drowsy in
summer to wait until the next tram down has left
the way clear at one of the occasional sidings, but
if you are in a hurry, it is quicker to walk. I do not
think any one really wants electric tramways into
Richmond, though, no doubt, they will come.
When they do, there will be introduced an alto-
gether undesirable element of hurry into a road that
at present veritably exhales leisure. There is a
certain aesthetic pleasure in lingering along this road,
for although the architecture of those villas is per-
haps not the last word in art, their gardens are
beautiful and are easily to be seen. Would that Kew
Gardens were so readily visible. But the churlish
Government department that formerly had the
management of the gardens built a high and ugly
brick wall the whole length of the road, so only the
tree-tops are visible over it, even to travellers on
tramcar roofs ; and no one has yet had the public
spirit to demolish the useless thing and to substitute
an iron railing in place of it. One opening, indeed,
was made, about 1874, when a charming red-brick
building by Eden Nesfield was erected, just inside
the grounds, and the peep it gives into Paradise, so
to speak, only makes one the more inclined to ask
why any of the wall should be allowed to remain.
Strand-on- the-Green is the name of the picturesque
waterside row of houses of many shapes and sizes
that extends along the Middlesex foreshore from Kew
Bridge towards Chiswick. It is a kind of home-
STRAND ON-THE-GREEN 241
grown Venice, and sometimes, when the Thames is
in flood, its feet are dabbled in the water, and in-
genious ways with planks and clay are resorted to
for the keeping of the river out of ground floors.
But since the Thames has become more and more
curbed and regulated, these occasions have grown
and are still growing fewer. I do not know where
is the " Green " of Strand-on- the-Green, and the
" strand " itself that stretches down to the river at
low tide from the brick-and-asphalted walk in front
of the village, or hamlet — by whichever name we are
rightly to entitle the place — is mostly mud, where
the rankly-growing grass ceases. Old boats and
barges that long since grew beyond any more patch-
ing and mending, and were not worth even breaking
up, have been left here to lie about, half in mud and
half in water, grass growing in them.
And an island lies in mid-stream ; an island on
which, for many years past, men may have been
observed wheeling barrows to and fro and engaged
in other apparently aimless activities that certainly
during the last thirty years have had no beginning
and no end. It is a picturesque island, with flourish-
ing trees, and it looks a most desirable Kobinson
Crusoe kind of a place, especially when viewed from
the trains, that just here cross the river on an ugly
lattice-girder bridge. A timber gantry projects from
one side, and things are done with old boilers and
launches. Repairs are occasionally made to the
banks of this island, and they have at last resulted
in making it a very solid and substantial place, faced
upstream and down and round about with bags of
242 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
concrete ; so that no conceivable Thames flood that
ever was, or can be, could possibly wash it away.
There is half a mile of Strand-on-the-Green. It is
a fairly complete and representative community,
comprising in its one row of houses those of an almost
stately residential class, including Zoffany House,
where the painter of that name lived and died at last
in 1810 ; some lesser houses, a number of cottages
housing a waterside population, three inns, the
" Bull's Head," the " City Barge," and the " Bell
and -Crown " ; and some shops of an obscure kind,
such as one might expect to see only in remote
villages. A highly-sketchable old malthouse or two
and a row of almshouses complete the picture. As
to the almshouses, they are going on for the comple-
tion of their second century, as a tablet on them
declares :
Two of thefe Houfes built by R. Thomas Child, one
by M. Soloman Williams, and one by William Abbott,
Carpinter, at his own Charge for ye ufe of ye Poor of
Chiswick for Ever, A.D. 1724.
Also the Port of London Authority has an office
overlooking the river, and a firm of motor-boat
builders has established works here, amid the ancient
barges — a curious modern touch.
Strand-on-the-Green is a hamlet of Chiswick, long
a delightful retreat of the Dukes of Devonshire,
whose stately mansion of Chiswick House in its
surrounding park dignified the old village. But when
a suburban population grew up around the neighbour-
hood of that lordly dwelling-house the owners left
STRAND-ON-THE-GREEN 245
it. There is an antipathy between dukes and
democracy comparable only to oil and water. Even
the neighbourhood of a highly-respectable (and
highly-rented) suburb renders the air enervating to
ducal lungs, even though the ducal purse be inordin-
ately enriched by the ground-rents of it. It seems
that when a man becomes a duke the sight of
other men's chimney-pots grows unendurable ; unless
indeed they be the chimney-pots of another duke ;
and so he is fain to seclude himself in the middle of
his biggest park, in the most solitary part of the
country he can find. The higher his rank in the
peerage, the more cubic feet of air he requires.
What I should like to see — but what no one ever
will see — would be a duke graciously continuing to
reside in the midst of the suburb that has grown up
around him, and to which he owes a good part of his
living, and being quite nice to his neighbours. Not
only patronising and charitable to the poor, but
just as human and accessible as middle-class snobbery
would allow him to be.
It cannot be said that the local developments
have been at all swift, or more than very moderately
successful. For example, as you proceed from
Strand-on-the-Green to Chiswick, you come first of
all to Grove Park, where there is a railway station of
that name which, together with an ornate public -
house and a few shops and houses, wears a look as
though left in the long ago to be called for, and
apparently not wanted. I have known Grove Park
for forty years, and it is just the same now as then.
' The last place made " was the description of it
246 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
long ago given me by a railway official there, pleased
to see a human being ; and although many places have
come into existence since then, it still wears that
ultimate look.
In the long ago, when I went to school in the
Chiswick high road at Turnham Green, at a boarding-
school that occupied an old mansion called " Belmont
House," we fronted almost directly opposite Duke's
Avenue, which still remained at that date just an
avenue of trees, with never a house along the whole
length of it, until you came to the noble wrought-
iron gates leading into the awful ducal sanctities
themselves. One might freely roam along the
delightful avenue, but the great iron gates were, it
seemed, always jealously shut ; and even had they
not been, one's vague ideas of a something terrible
in unknown ducal shape would have prevented
trespass. I have seen not a few dukes since then,
and haven't been in the least frightened, strange to
say.
Nowadays the needs or the greed, I know not
which, of their successive Graces have caused the
land along either side of Duke's Avenue to be let
for building upon ; and although, as already
remarked, the trees remain, and are indeed finer
than of yore, numerous very nice villas may be
found there ; a little dank perhaps in autumn and
in wet weather generally, when those trees hold
much moisture in suspense, but still, quite desirable
villas.
The wonderfully fine old wrought-iron gates
were really much finer in the artistic way than one
CHISWICK HOUSE 247
ever suspected, as a schoolboy, and they were flanked
by rusticated stone piers surmounted by sphinxes.
Exactly what they were like you may see any day
in London, for they were removed in recent years
to Piccadilly, there to ornament the entrance to
the Duke's town house, and to render the exterior
of that hideous building, if it might be, a thought
less hideous. They have had their adventures,
having originally formed the chief entrance to
Heathfield House, Turnham Green, inhabited about
the middle of the eighteenth century by Viscount
Dunkerron. A Duke of Devonshire acquired them
in 1837.
There were very frequent grand spreads and
entertainments of various gorgeous kinds at Chiswick
House in the distant days when one went to school
at Turnham Green. His late Majesty Edward the
Seventh, of blessed memory, occasionally, as Prince
of Wales, had Chiswick House in summer-time
between 1866 and 1879. He was not perhaps so
universally popular then ; for those were the days
when Sir Charles Dilke was posing as a red-hot
Radical, and furious persons of that kidney talked
of republics and all that kind of nonsense. But at
anyrate, rank and fashion were to be observed
flocking to the princely garden-parties here ; and
very stunning the carriages and the horses, the
harness and the liveries looked ; and very beautiful,
it seemed, the ladies with their sunshades and dainty
toilettes. Those were days long before any one
could have predicted the present motor-car era,
and no one could ever have imagined that the
248 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
daughters of those daintily attired ones would be
content to drive along amid dust and stinks, and to
tie up their countenances with wrappings that
sometimes look like fly-papers, and at others like
dishclouts. And those, too, were the days not
only before electric tramways, but also before even
horsed trams, along the Chiswick high road ;
and Turnham Green (the worthy proprietor of our
school called it " Chiswick," because it looked
better) was a quite rustic place, and the distance
of five miles to home in London seemed to one
person at least a very far cry.
These be tales of eld, and now Turnham Green
is, to all intents and purposes, London, and shops
have long been built where the school stood, and
that dark high road — upon whose infrequent pedes-
trians, certain schoolboys, packed off to bed all too
early, and not in the least tired, were used to expend
all the available soap and other handy missiles,
from lofty windows — has become a highway even
more than a thought too brilliantly lit at night.
What remains of the park and gardens around
Chiswick House now looks sorry enough. The
place came into the hands of the Dukes of Devonshire
in 1753, when William Cavendish, the fourth duke,
who had married the daughter and heiress of the
third and last Earl of Burlington, succeeded on
that nobleman's death. It was this Earl of Bur-
lington who had created the glories of Chiswick.
A princely patron of the arts, especially those of
architecture and sculpture, he had brought home
with him from his travels in Italy a taste for the
" BURLINGTON " 251
grand exotic manner in the building of mansions
and the planning of gardens ; and built the house
here in 1729, after the Palladian model. It has
been somewhat altered since, but the general idea
remains, and sufficiently proves that the grand
manner, learned abroad under summer skies, is
not the comfortable manner as evolved by the
necessities of a less ardent clime. English architects
have been slow to unlearn the classic fallacy, but
the home-grown architecture wins in the end, not
from any appreciation of the artistic merits or
demerits of the many methods, but on the score
of sheer comfort or discomfort in living.
The gardens of Chiswick House abounded in
formal walks and long vistas, with conventional
" ruins " and groups of antique statuary, but most
of these are now gone
Chiswick House, deserted by its owners, became
a lunatic asylum, and stands at last more than a
little forlorn, with new streets and roads everywhere
around its grounds, and a newer suburb with the
projected name of " Burlington " arising by piece-
meal, instead of being created ad hoc, as the intention
originally was. Burlington is an excellent name ;
substantial people, with good bank balances should
surely reside at such. It radiates respectability ; no
one could be ashamed of it. I can easily imagine
confiding tradesfolk giving unlimited credit to resi-
dents at Burlington ; but it has not yet come into
being, and the vast wilderness-like expanse of
Duke's Meadows, projecting far southward, like a
great cape between two bends of the river, remains
VOL. II 19
252 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
a tussocky place of desolation, looking over to
Mortlake.
In Burlington Lane, which is an old name, is a
new length of villas, " The Cresent," its name so
misspelled, and kept so with the valiance of ignorance,
unconnected, for at least five years past.
What remains of the old village of Chiswick lies
considerably to the east of all these developments,
and beside the river. There, past Hogarth House,
where that famous painter lived and worked — now
a museum and showplace at sixpence a head, in
memory of him — stands old Chiswick church. Re-
storations and additions have left really very little
of the original building, but it wears a very plausible
appearance of age. The weather-vane exhibits a
figure of St. Nicholas, to whom the church is dedicated,
standing in a boat and holding a staff surmounted
by a cross.
A strange inscription may be seen on the church-
yard wall, at the east end. It seems to tell of a
time when Chiswick was a village in every rustic
circumstance :
This wall was made at ye charges of
Ye right honourable and Truly pious
Lorde Francis Russell, Earle of Bedford,
out of true zeale and care for ye keeping of this church yarde and
ye wardrobe of godds saints whose
bodies lay theirin buryed from violating by swine and other
prophanation so witnesseth
William Walker V. A.D. 1623.
Rebuilt 1831. Refaced 1884.
No one appears to know who was William Walker
MORTLAKE 253
the Fifth, and history is equally silent on the subject
of the others of that dynasty.
The neighbourhood is now one of remarkably
striking contrasts. By the church stands the " Bur-
lington Arms," an old inn claiming a remote origin,
early in the fifteenth century, and with obvious
honesty, for the ancient oaken timbers remain to
bear witness to the fact. It is a quite humble, but
cosy, little inn, astonishingly dwarfed by a great
towering fortress-like brewery at the back ; as
though Beer had withdrawn itself into a final strong-
hold, there to defend itself to the last vat. Opposite
the inn and this Bung Castle stands a stately red-brick
mansion of early in the eighteenth century, with
fine wrought-iron garden-gates. Up the street are
other fine old mansions, mingled with squalid streets ;
and round by the riverside is Chiswick Mall, with
other noble houses of the olden times. Osiers are
cut even to this day on Chiswick Eyot, the reedy
island opposite.
Such are the contrasts of Chiswick, one of the
last outposts of rural things in these parts. To find
the last we must travel on through the Mall and on
to the more sophisticated Mall of Hammersmith ;
thence proceeding across the bridge and along the
Hammersmith Bridge Road to Barnes. That is the
very last village. Near by is Mortlake. No one
has ever satisfactorily explained that place-name,
nor attempted to define the mortuus lacus — the dead,
or stagnant lake — that would seem to have originated
it. Nowadays it is rather to a dead level of common-
place that Mortlake is descending, in the surrounding
254 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
jerry-building activities. All that is left of the old
church is the tower, apparently restored in the time
of Henry the Eighth, for a tablet on the western
face is inscribed " Vivat K.H. 8, 1543."
To speak of Barnes in these days of suburban
expansion as a " village " may at the first mention
appear to be unduly stretching a point, but although
Suburbia spreads for miles in every direction, and
although Barnes is completely enfolded by modern
developments, the ancient village is still where it
used to be. It is true that a frequent service of
motor-omnibuses does by no means tend to the pre-
servation of the old-time rural amenities of Barnes, nor
do those who remember the Barnes of thirty or forty
years ago welcome the sudden irruption of modern
shops and flats opposite the old parish church ; but
very much of old Barnes is left embedded within
these twentieth-century innovations ; and while
Barnes Common remains, it is not likely that the
place will decline to the common characterless con-
dition of an ordinary suburb. Of the original Barnes
—the " Berne " of Domesday Book — the place
owned by the canons of St. Paul's, before the
Eeformation, nothing, of course, is left ; and we may
but dimly picture that rural riverside manor, then
considered remote from London, with its great
spicaria, or barns (the barns that were so much
larger, or more numerous, than the usual type that
they gave the place its name) ;' but there is a half
squalid, half quaint appearance in the narrow, winding
streets and lanes that hints, not obscurely, of the
eighteenth or even of the seventeenth century. The,
BARNES
255
church, too, although an examination of the interior
proves it to have been, in common with most other
once rural churches round London, swept almost
TOMB OF EDWARD ROSE, BARNES.
entirely bare of ancient features, is picturesquely
placed, and its sixteenth- century red-brick tower,
partly clothed with ivy, looks venerable. There is
little of interest within the church, beyond the some-
256 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
what curiously- worded epitaph to a former parson,
which deserves the tribute of quotation :
Merentissimo Conjugi
Coniux Moerentissima.
To the best of hvsbands lohn Sqvier the
Late Faithfvll Rector of This Parish ; the only
Son to That most strenvovs Propvgnator of Pietie
and loyaltie (both by Preaching and Svffering) John
Sqvier, sometime Vicar of St. Leonards, Shoreditch near
London : Grace Lynch (who bare vnto him one only
Davghter) Consecrated This (such as it is) small
Monvment of Theyr mvtvall Affection.
He was invested in This Care An : 1660 Sept : 2,
He was devested of all Care An : 1662, Jan. 9,
Aged 42 yeares.
The really most sentimentally interesting thing here
is something that might well be overlooked by ninety-
nine of every hundred whose curiosity prompts them
to enter the churchyard ; and it is probably so over-
looked. This is the not at all striking tomb of one
Edward Rose, citizen of London, who died in 1653,
and lies buried in the churchyard, against the south
wall of the church, by the great yew tree. He left
£20 for the purchase of an acre of land, from the rent
of which he ordained that his grave should be main-
tained in decent order, and bequeathed " £5 for
making a frame or partition of wood " where he
had appointed his burying-place ; and further ordered
three rose-trees, or more, to be planted there. The
bequests were to the minister, churchwardens, and
overseers for the time being, so long as they should
cause the wooden partition to be kept in repair and
BARNES
the rose-trees preserved or others planted in their
places from time to time, as they should decay.
Thus it is that, duly honouring his sentimental
fancy, rose-trees are to this day to be seen here,
enclosed within a low wooden railing.
CHAPTER XII
PUTNEY — FULHAM BRIDGE — FULHAM
THE way from Barnes into Putney is now, when
once you have passed the Common, wholly cut up
into a suburb of streets originally mean, and at last,
by contact with the stern squalors of life in a striving
quarter of London town, become little removed above
the level of slums. But Barnes Common remains
something considerable in the way of an asset, and
through it still runs the Beverley Brook along the
last mile or two of its nine-miles course from Cheam
to its outlet into the Thames at Barnes Elms. I
should say it would be a sorry business attempting
to fish nowadays in the Beverley Brook ; but regrets
on that score are the sheerest futilities, and it should
rather be a matter for congratulation that the
brook has not been piped, and so altogether hidden
from the eye of day. One, to be sure, regrets many
things within this sphere of change ; notably the
very considerable slices the London and South-
Western Railway has been allowed to appropriate
from the very middle of the Common, not only for
the purpose of running the line through it, which,
it might possibly be argued, was a geographical
necessity, but also for the building of its Barnes
258
PUTNEY 259
station there, which was nothing less than a. sublime
piece of impudence. What is left of Barnes Common
is particularly beautiful in the way of towsled gorse
and some pretty clumps of silver-birches. On a
byroad leading off it into Putney — a route called
Mill Hill road — is something very much in the
nature of a surprise in these parts, nothing less than
an old toll-house ; a queer little building picturesquely
overhung by bushy poplars. Its unexpected presence
here (it must be now the nearest survival of its kind
to London) hints that the days when Putney was
really a village are not, after all, so long gone by.
Presently we come into Putney, and to the tram-
way terminus hard by the bridge and under the
shadow of the church-tower, whose great sundial
warns all and sundry that " Time and Tide Wait for
no Man." Is it a result of laying to heart this maxim,
truism, self-evident proposition, or whatever else
you choose to call it, that the tramway-cars and the
motor-omnibuses hustle so impatiently round the
corners of the bridge ?
Those two church-towers, that stand so pro-
minently here on either side of the river and seem to
bear one another close company, although divided,
as a matter of fact by a quarter of a mile, with the
broad river running between, belong to the churches
of Putney and Fulham, both now to be regarded as
parts of London.
Putney Church, standing with its churchyard
actually on the river bank, was almost wholly rebuilt
about 1856, the exterior disclosing walls built of what
was once white brick, reduced now to a subdued
VOL. II 20
260 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
neutral tint. The old tower is left, and some few
small and late and much-battered brasses, now
preserved on the walls of a little north-eastern
chancel chapel, which is a survival from an earlier
building, and has a fine, though small, vaulted ceiling.
The usual absurd legends that seek to explain
place-names to the ignorant and the credulous are,
of course, not lacking here. The names of Putney
and Fulham, and their situation directly opposite
one another, on the Surrey and the Middlesex sides
of the river, both so prominently marked by their
church-towers, seem to the popular mind to need
some story. The writer on places becomes tired in
course of time at meeting those familiar rival " sisters"
of legend, who are always found, in these strictly
unveracious tales, to have been the competitive
builders of the two churches occasionally found in
one churchyard, of the twin towers possessed by some
few parish churches, and indeed of most buildings
which, for no very immediately apparent reason,
have been duplicated within sight of one another.
Here, therefore, we learn of two strange sisters
of gigantic stature who, in the conveniently vague
period of " once upon a time," lived on these oppo-
site banks of the Thames. One is almost ashamed
to repeat the stupid tale of their having agreed to
build the towers of the respective churches, and
having only one hammer between them, being
accustomed to throw it across from one to the other
when required. When the sister on the Fulham side
needed the hammer, she asked the other to throw it
over " full home." When it was returned, it was
PUTNEY BRIDGE 263
flung with a will, in response to the request " put
nigh ! '' The flinging back and forth with every
stone bedded must have been very wearing, and the
shouting terrific. At last the hammer got broken,
and had it not been for the help of a blacksmith up-
river, who promptly mended it, the building must
have ceased. Of course you guess where this kindly
craftsman lived. Where else than at the place ever
after called, in memory of him, " Hammersmith " ?
The expansion of Putney from the likeness to a
country village which it wore until quite recent times
well within the memory of many who do not yet call
themselves old, dates from the completion of the new
and commonplace bridge that spans the river here in
five flattened arches, and is seven hundred feet in
length, and cost over £240,000. Handbooks and
guides of various sorts will tell those who know
nothing about it that the old wooden bridge which
this replaced in 1886 was " ugly and inconvenient."
The inconvenience we may readily enough grant, but
no artist who ever knew old Putney Bridge will agree
to its having been ugly. Indeed, so picturesque was
it, in its maze of timbering, that every one who knew
it, and at the same time owned the artistic sense,
bitterly regretted its clearing away to give place to
the present commonplace, though convenient, stone
structure. Old Putney Bridge was the first to span
the river between Fulham and Putney, and was
originally projected in 1671. The proposal to build
a bridge here was in the first stage discussed in
Parliament, and there met with such opposition and
ridicule that the scheme failed and was not revived
264 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
until 1722, finally meeting with the approval of the
House and receiving the Royal sanction in the early
part of 1726. It is well worth while, after that space
of time, to recover some of the discussion in 1671
respecting the providing of a bridge in place of the
immemorially old ferry. It was not only honest
ridicule, but also a good deal of the fear and jealousy
felt by "vested interests," that at first prevented
a bridge being built here. And what person, or
what corporate body, think you, was threatened so
seriously by a bridge between Putney and Fulham ?
The owner of the ferry ? the local watermen ? my
Lord Bishop of London, whose palace was and still
is, on yonder bank ? None of these were in such near
prospect of being overwhelmed ; but it would appear
that the great, ancient, and prosperous City of London,
more than five miles downstream, was in that perilous
state, on the mere threatening of a bridge at Putney.
It was a Mr. Jones, representative of the City of
London in that honourable House, who caught the
Speaker's eye and thus held forth, in mingled appeal,
warning, and denunciation :
' It is impossible to contemplate without feelings
of the most afflictive nature the probable success of
the Bill now before the House. I am sensible that
I can hardly do justice by any words of mine to the
apprehensions which not only I myself personally
feel upon the vital question, but to those which are
felt by every individual in the kingdom who has
given this very important subject the smallest share
of his consideration. I am free to say, Sir, and I
say it with the greater freedom, because I know that
LONDON IN DANCER 265
the erection of a bridge over the river Thames at
Putney will not only injure the great and important
city which I have the honour to represent, not only
jeopardise it, not only destroy its correspondence
and commerce, but actually annihilate it altogether/*
It might be thought that this ludicrous extrava-
gance of language would have aroused derisive
laughter ; but no, the House appears to have taken
him seriously, for, " Hear, hears " are reported at
this stage. Apparently fortified by them, he con-
tinued in the same strain :
" I repeat, in all possible seriousness, that it will
question the very existence of the metropolis ; and
I have no hesitation in declaring that, next to pulling
down the whole borough of Southwark, nothing can
destroy more certainly than building this proposed
bridge at Putney. (Hear, hear.) Allow me, Sir, to
ask, and I do so with the more confidence because
the answer is evident and clear, How will London be
supplied with fuel, with grain, or with hay if this
bridge is built ? All the correspondences westward
will be at one blow destroyed. I repeat this fact
boldly, because, as I said before, it is incontrovertible.
As a member of this honourable House, I should not
venture to speak thus authoritatively unless I had
the best possible ground to go upon, and I state,
without the least fear of contradiction, that the water
at Putney is shallow at ebb, and assuming, as I do,
that the correspondences of London require free pas-
sage at all times, and knowing, as I do, that if a
bridge be built there not even the common wherries
will be able to pass the river at low water, I do say
266 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
that I think the Bill one which only tends to promote
a wild and silly scheme, likely to advantage a few
speculators, but highly unreasonable and unjust in
its character and provisions ; because independently
of the ruin of the City of London, which I consider
inevitable in the event of its success, it will effect an
entire change in the position and affairs of the water-
men— a change which I have no hesitation in saying
will most seriously affect the interests of His Majesty's
Government, and not only the interests of the* Govern-
ment, but those of the nation at large."
Mr. Jones was followed by a member arguing
with almost equal extravagance and vehemence in
favour of the proposed bridge. It appeared to him
that, if built, it " could not fail to be of the greatest
utility and convenience to the whole British nation."
Then presently arose Sir William Thompson,
who considered this project " romantic and vision-
ary." He added, " If a bridge be built at Putney,
London Bridge may as well be pulled down. (Hear,
hear !) Yes, Sir, I repeat it — because this bridge,
which seems to be a favourite scheme of some honour-
able gentleman whom I have in my eye — if this
bridge be permitted, the rents necessary to the
maintenance of London Bridge will be annihilated ;
and therefore, as I said before, the bridge itself must
eventually be annihilated also. But, Sir, this is not
all. I speak affectionately of the City of London,
and I hope I shall never be forgetful of its interests
(' Hear, hear/ from Mr. Jones) ; but I take up the
question on much more liberal principles, and assume
a higher ground, and I will maintain it. Sir, Lon-
LONDON IN DANGER 267
don is circumscribed— I mean the City of London.
There are walls, gates, and boundaries, the which no
man can increase or extend ; those limits were set
by the wisdom of our ancestors, and God forbid they
should be altered. But, Sir, though these landmarks
can never be removed — I say, never, for I have no
hesitation in stating that when the walls of London
shall no longer be visible and Ludgate is de-
molished, England itself shall be as nothing ; yet it is
in the power of speculative theorists to delude the
minds of the people with visionary projects of in-
creasing the skirts of the City so that it may even
join Westminster. When that is the case, Sir, the
skirts will be too big for our habits ; the head will
grow too big for the body, and the members will get
too weak to support the constitution. But what of
this ? say honourable gentlemen ; what have we to
do to consider the policy of increasing the town while
we are only debating a question about Putney
Bridge ? To which I answer, Look at the effects
generally of the important step you are about to
sanction : ask me to define those effects particularly,
and I will descend to the minutiae of the mischief
you appear prone to commit. Sir, I, like my honour-
able friend the Member for the City of London, have
taken opinions of scientific men, and I declare it to
be their positive conviction, and mine, that if the
fatal bridge (I can find no other suitable word) be
built, not only will quicksands and shelves be created
throughout the whole course of the river, but the
western barges will be laid up high and dry at Ted-
dington, while not a ship belonging to us will ever
VOL. n 21
268 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
get nearer London than Woolwich. Thus, not only
your own markets, but your Custom House, will be
nullified ; and not only the whole mercantile navy of
the country be absolutely destroyed, but several
west-country bargemen actually thrown out of
employ. I declare to God, Sir, that I have no feeling
on the subject but that of devotion to my country,
and I shall most decidedly oppose the Bill in all its
stages/'
All this reads sufficiently absurdly nowadays, but
it is surpassed in curious interest by the remarks
added by a Mr. Boscawen, who, after declaring that,
before he had come down to the House he could not
understand what possible reason there could be for
building a bridge at Putney, went on to say that
" now he had heard the reasons of honourable gentle-
men, he was equally at a loss to account for them."
And then, with concentrated satire, he proceeded :
' If there were any advantage derivable from a
bridge at Putney, perhaps some gentleman would
find that a bridge at Westminster would be a
convenience/'
It should be remembered here that the first bridge
at Westminster was not opened until 1750. Until
that date there was not any bridge between London
Bridge and Putney. Hence the true inwardness of
the sarcasm in Mr. Boscawen's remarks already
quoted, and of those now about to be set forth.
Thus he continued : " Other honourable gentle-
men might dream that a bridge from the end of
Fleet Market into the fields on the opposite side of
the water would be a fine speculation ; or who knew
OLD PUTNEY BRIDGE 269
but at last it might be proposed to arch over the
river altogether and build a couple more bridges ;
one from the Palace at Somerset House into the
Surrey marshes, and another from the front of
Guildhall into South wark (great laughter). Perhaps
some honourable gentlemen who are interested in
such matters would get up in their places and propose
that one or two of these bridges should be built of
iron. (Shouts of laughter.) For his part, if this Bill
passed, he would move for leave to bring in half a
dozen more Bills for building bridges at Chelsea,
and at Hammersmith, and at Marble Hall Stairs, and
at Brentford, and at fifty other places besides."
Bridges at all those places have long since been
built, and, of course, many of them in iron ; so the
foolishness of one generation becomes the sober
commonplace fact of the next.
The bridge thus hotly debated and rejected and
at last permitted to be built, was eventually begun
in 1729. It was wholly a commercial speculation.
The Company interested in it had at the beginning
to satisfy the claims of the Duchess Dowager of
Marlborough, Lady of the Manor of Wimbledon, and
of the Bishop of London, Lord of the Manor of
Fulham, for the extinction of their respective rights
in the ancient ferry. The Duchess received £364 10s.,
and the Bishop the meagre amount of £23. The
three tenants of the ferry, however, received alto-
gether as much as £8,000 ; and at the same time the
Bridge Act provided for £62 per annum to be paid by
the Company, in perpetuity, to the churchwardens
of Putney and Fulham ; to be divided between the
270 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
watermen, their widows and children, for the loss of
the Sunday ferry.
On November 27, 1729, the bridge was fully
opened. The cost was remarkably small. Including
Parliamentary expenses and the amounts paid to
persons interested in the ferry, it totalled only
£23,084 14s. Id. The old building, narrow, and
patched, and crazy-looking, but strong enough to
have stood for many more long years, remained to
the last in all essentials the bridge of 1729. It had
twenty-nine openings, and at the top of the cut-
waters of every pier a sanctuary for foot-passengers
to step into when wheeled traffic occupied the narrow
road. The modest sum of one halfpenny freed the
pedestrian, except on Sunday, when the discourage-
ment to gadding about on the Sabbath was a doubled
toll. In 1880 the Metropolitan Board of Works
purchased the bridge for £58,000, and on June 26
of the same year it was declared free of toll. The
last chapter of its long story was concluded on May
29, 1886, when, upon the opening of the new
bridge, it was closed.
Putney Bridge is found sometimes referred to
as " Fulham " Bridge, but those references are few,
and there has never been any general disposition
to style it other than the name it bears by common
usage. Yet it is as much Fulham Bridge as Putney.
The present costly structure, built at such great
expense in 1886, is already of insufficient width for
.conveniently carrying the great press of traffic that
now uses it, especially since electric tramways
have been laid across. The cynical indifference
-
MONUMENT TO VISCOUNT MOKDAUNT, FULHAM CHURCH.
FULHAM CHURCH 273
to the comfort and even the safety of other users
of the road often displayed by public bodies and by
the engineers who lay tram-rails, is shown markedly
here, where the London County Council's lines run
for a considerable distance within two feet of the
kerb. It is already so evident that the width of
the bridge is insufficient that the ordinary observer
would not be surprised to find the necessary widening
works soon begun.
Fulham Church was rebuilt in 1881, and only
the ancient tower of the former building remains.
It is in the Perpendicular style of architecture, of a
quite common type, and greatly resembles in general
style that of Putney Church, at the other end of the
bridge ; but is on a much larger scale. It contains
a peal of ten bells, of which the Fulham people
used to be very proud, but an inordinate fondness
for ringing them in crashing peals has destroyed
any liking ; and, in any case, Fulham of to-day,
as a part of London, has lost that sense of individu-
ality which used to take a proud interest in local
possessions.
The interior of the church, which has weathered
so greatly in the few years of its existence that it
resembles an ancient building, is rich in momiments,
but at one time possessed many more. The oldest
is a lozenge-shaped Flemish brass dated 1529 to
one Margaret Svanders, with a curious head-and-
shoulders representation of the lady herself ; but
the oddest of all the memorials here is that to John,
Viscount Mordaunt, including a statue of that
nobleman, rather larger than life-size, in white
274 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
marble. It has now been banished to the tower,
from the prominent position it formerly occupied
in the south aisle, and is not a little startling, seen
suddenly and unexpectedly in a half light. The
weird-looking figure is like that of a lunatic police-
man standing on a dining-room table in his socks,
and pretending to direct the traffic, with a sheet
wound partly round his nakedness, and something
like a rolling-pin in his hand.
It stands on a raised slab of polished black
marble, with a black background throwing it into
further relief. This extraordinary effigy was sculp-
tured by Bird, author of the original statue of Queen
Anne in front of St. Paul's Cathedral, of which
an exact replica by Richard Belt now occupies the
same spot.
The mad-policeman idea is due, of course, to
the sculptor having chosen to represent that dis-
tinguished nobleman as a Roman, with a truncheon,
which he is seen to be wielding with a mock-heroic
gesture. The truncheon typifies the official position
he held as Constable of Windsor Castle.
Lord Mordaunt was a younger son of the first
Earl of Peterborough. Born in 1627, he was active
among the younger Royalists, and figured at last
in the restoration of Charles the Second, who created
him Viscount Aviland, a title which seems to have
been somewhat thrust into the background. He
died of a fever in 1675, and appears to have led
an active and an honourable life, which ought to
have excused him from this posthumous grotesquery.
The whole monument is indeed a prominent example
LORD RANELAGH 275
of the fantastic taste of its period, and is set about
with marble pedestals bearing epitaph and family
genealogy, and sculptured gauntlets and coronets.
A number of very distinguished personages lie
in the great churchyard. Prominent among the
later monuments, as you enter along Church Row
and past the Powell almshouses, is that of the fifth
and last Viscount Ranelagh and Baron Jones, who
died November 13, 1885, in his seventy-third year.
There are still very many who well recollect the
distinguished-looking figure of Lord Ranelagh : a
tall, slim, bearded man, with his hair brushed in
front of his ears in an old-world style, a silk hat
rakishly poised at an angle, a tightly buttoned frock-
coat, in which always appeared a scarlet geranium,
throughout the year, and light-tinted trousers. He
gave the general impression of one who had seen
life in circles where it is lived rapidly ; and to this
his broken nose, which he had acquired in thrashing
a coal-heaver who had been rude to him in the
street, picturesquely contributed. He looked in
some degree like a survival from the fast-living age
of the Regency, although, as a matter of fact, he
was born only when that riotous period was nearly
over. The very title " Ranelagh " has something of
a reckless, derring-do sound. He was one of the early
Volunteers, and raised the Second (South) Middle-
sex corps, of which he remained colonel until his
death. The military funeral given him by his men
would have been of a much more imposing, and
even national, character, befitting the important
part he took in the Volunteer movement, had it
276 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
not been that a general election was in progress
at the time. At such times the military and
auxiliary forces are by old statutes not allowed
to assemble. The theory is the old one of possible
armed interference with the free choice of electors.
Numerous monuments to long-dead and for-
gotten Bishops of London are found here. A group
of them, eight in number, chiefly of the eighteenth
century, is found to the east of the church. They
are a grim and forbidding company. Amid them
is found the meagre headstone and concise inscrip-
tion to a humorist of considerable renown : '" Theo-
dore Edward Hook, died 24th August, 1841, in the
53rd year of his age." Efforts to provide a better
monument have failed to secure support. Perhaps
it is thought by those who withhold their subscrip-
tions that the reading his books is the best memorial
an author can be given.
Immediately to the west of the church extend
the grounds of Fulham Palace, which run for some
distance alongside the river, where a strip has been
modernised and provided with an embankment
wall, and opened to the public as the " Bishop's
Park " ; Fulham Palace and its wide-spreading lands
forming the " country seat " of the Bishops of
London, whose " town house " is in St. James's
Square. The Bishops of London have held their
manor of Fulham continuously for about nine cen-
turies, and are said in this respect to be the oldest
landed proprietors in England. Here they have
generally maintained a considerable degree of state
and secluded dignity, hidden among the luxuriant
THE TOWER, FULHAM CHURCH.
FULHAM PALACE 279
trees and enclosed within the dark embrace of a
sullen moat, which to this day encircles their demesne,
as it probably has done since the time when a body
of invading Danes wintered here in A.D. 880-1.
This much-overgrown moat is a mile round, and,
together with the surrounding ancient muddy con-
ditions which were remarkable enough to have given
Fulham its original name of the " foul home," or
miry settlement, must have proved a very thorough
discouragement to visitors, both welcome and un-
welcome.
Fulham Palace does not look palatial, and its
parts are very dissimilar. The two principal fronts
of the roughly quadrangular mass of buildings face
east and west. That to the east was built by Bishop
Howley in 1815, and has the appearance of the
usual modest country mansion of that period ;
while the west front, which is the oldest part of
the Palace, and dates from 1502-1522, when the
then dilapidated older buildings were cleared away,
is equally typical of the less pretentious country-
houses of tne age. It was Bishop Fitzjames who
rebuilt this side, and his approach gateway and the
tower by which the Palace is generally entered,
remain very much the same as he left them. A
modest, reverend dignity of old red brick, patterned,
after the olden way, with lozenges of black, pervades
this courtyard, upon which the simply framed win-
dows still look, unaltered. The sculptured stone
arms under the clock upon the tower are those of
Bishop Juxon, more than a century later than the
date of these buildings, and have no connection
VOL. II 22
280 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
with the position given them here in modern
times.
The Great Hall is immediately to the left of
this entrance. It is in many ways the most im-
portant apartment in Fulham Palace. Here, while
it was yet a new building, the ferocious Roman
Catholic Bishop Bonner sometimes sat to examine
heretics, while on other occasions they would appear
to have been questioned in the old chapel, a structure
that seems to have been situated in the eastern,
rebuilt, portion of the groups of offices. The bold-
ness of those sturdy men, many of whom became
martyrs and confessors for righteousness" sake, reads
amazingly. They were brought here in custody to
the enemy's own precincts, and questioned for their
lives, with preliminary tastes, in the shape of burning
on the hands, of greater torments to come if their
answers were deemed unsatisfactory. Yet we do
not find that they often faltered. On September 10,
1557, there were brought before Bonner, in his private
chapel here, Ralph Allerton and three other religious
suspects. To one of these Bonner propounded the
singular question, " Did he know where he was ? ''
The answer came swiftly, " In an idol's temple."
This was bold indeed, but awfully injudicious,
according to modern ideas. But expediency and
time-serving were cast aside then, and men were
earnest though they died for it. I do not know
what happened to the person who made that bitter
repartee, but I suspect he suffered for it.
In the Great Hall occasionally used by Bonner
in his examination of those who were not of his way
THE WHETSTONE 283
of thinking in religious matters, Thomas Tomkins
had his hand burned over the flame of a candle.
He perished at Smith field in February 1555.
This hall, after various changes, was converted
into a domestic chapel by Bishop Howley, who had
demolished the old chapel in the course of his re-
building works. And so it remained until Bishop
Tait had completed his modern chapel, in 1867 ;
when it became again the Hall, and the marble
flooring in black and white squares, with which it
was paved, was replaced by oak.
Among the several changes that followed upon
Bishop Howley 's rebuilding of a portion of the
Palace was that by which the old dining-parlour
was converted into a kitchen. In the time when
Beilby Porteous was Bishop of London, 1787-
1809, there hung over the mantelpiece an object
that aroused the curiosity of all the Bishop's visitors ;
not because they did not know what it was — for it
was nothing more than a whetstone, a sufficiently
common object outside the dining-room of a Bishop
—but because they could not understand its being
here. And when the Bishop further mystified his
guests by telling them it had been given to him on
one of his journeys as a prize for being an accom-
plished liar, they gave up wondering, and waited
for the story obviously belonging to it.
The particular journey on which he accomplished
these supposed prodigious feats of lying and prize-
winning took him to Coggeshall, in Essex, which
appears at that time to have rejoiced in the possession
of a "Liars' Club." The tale is well told in the
284 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
old New Quarterly Magazine : " There is a story
that Bishop Porteous once stopped in this town
to change horses, and, observing a great crowd in
the streets, put his head out of the window to inquire
the cause. A townsman standing near by replied
that it was the day upon which they gave the whet-
stone to the biggest liar. Shocked at such depravity,
the good Bishop proceeded to the scene of the com-
petition, and lectured the crowd upon the enormity
of the sin, concluding his discourse with the em-
phatic words : ' I never told a lie in my life/ where-
upon the chief umpire exchanged a few words with
his fellows, and, approaching the carriage, said :
' My Lord, we unanimously adjudge you the prize,"
and forthwith the highly objectionable whetstone
was thrust in at the carriage window."
This inimical article in course of time disappeared
from these walls, later Bishops being less appreciative
of the peculiar humour of the situation, or perhaps
feeling themselves to be unworthy of the exceptional
honour ; for, after all, if Bishop Porteous " never
told a lie in his life," surely he must have ranked
with the only other personage reputed to have
been naturally truthful, George Washington. But
it is to be remarked that we have these statements
from suspect sources — from the personages them-
selves. The Bishop said he had never done such a
thing, and Washington as a boy declared he " could
not." Now, it has been declared on eminent author-
ity which no one will care to dispute that " all
men are liars," and it would seem, therefore, that
these two were superhuman. They were not, on
PAGEANTS 285
account of that alleged natural truthfulness, one
whit the better than their fellow-men, for there is
more joy in one sinner that sees the error of his
ways and repents than in a hundred just men.
On the north side of the old courtyard are the
rooms especially associated, according to tradition,
with Bonner, whose ghost is said to haunt the corridors
and the apartment still known as his bedroom.
This part of the Palace is appropriately dark, and
the passages narrow. These rooms are now occupied
by the servants, as also are those on two other sides
of the quadrangle, generally known as Bishop Laud's
rooms. Until a few years ago — and perhaps even
yet — the servants were wakened in the morning
by a man known as the " knocker-up/' who went
round the courtyard with a long wand, and tapped
sharply with it at the upper windows.
In these days of pageants, the picturesque
wooded grounds of Fulham Palace have witnessed
some striking reconstructions of the brave and the
terrible days of old. There was, for example, the
Church Pageant, in which numbers of participants
enjoyed themselves immensely as in a long bout of
private theatricals, all in aid of some deserving
charity. The charity did not, it would appear,
benefit after all, for those doings resulted in a deficit,
and a Military Pageant was held the following year
to make up the loss. What was done to abolish the
loss that probably resulted from this is not within
my knowledge.
The Bishops of London, or the Ecclesiastical
Commissioners, are now making some profit by
286 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
letting or selling land for building upon, around the
outskirts of the park. If any kind friend can help
an overburdened Bishop who cannot without diffi-
culty make two ends meet, let him remember the
occupant of Fulham Palace. His bitter cry has
appeared in the newspapers, so that there can be
no breach of delicacy in mentioning the subject
here.
Not the least of his burdens is the large sum it
is necessary to disburse before he can finally style
himself " London." Thus, the Reverend Winnington
Ingram, when installed Bishop of London, found his
accession to the Episcopal Bench and his coming
to Fulham Palace a little expensive. Other newly
made Bishops had ever found the like, but they
had never before taken the public into their con-
fidence, nor raised a howl of despair at the fees
customarily payable by new-made Right Reverend
Father in God. But this is an age of publicity,
in which very few unexplored or secret corners
survive ; and Dr. Ingram is essentially at one with
an epoch which has produced General Booth and
the Reverend Wilson Carlile. We should, however,
be grateful for this, for by favour of it we learn
some curious ecclesiastical details that beset those
unhappy enough to have obtained high preferment
in the Church.
Thus, on filling up a vacancy on the Bench of
Bishops, the first step, it seems, is that taken by
the Crown Office, which confers upon Dean and
Chapter the Sovereign's conge d'elire, or leave to
elect ; not, be it said, the leave to elect whom they
COSTS AND CHARGES 289
please, but permission to elect whomsoever it shall
please the Sovereign (or the Prime Minister at the
head of the Government at the time in power) to
select, in place of the right reverend prelate recently
gathered to Abraham's bosom. The warrant for
this humorous " leave " to elect is paid for by the
Bishop who is presently elected. It costs £10, and
is but the first of a series of complicated costs
that come out of his pocket, and in the end total
£423 195. 2d.
The initial warrant is followed by a certificate,
costing £16 10s., and that by letters patent,
costing another £30, with 2s. for the " docquet."
So far, your Bishop is only partly made. He is
" elected by Dean and Chapter." Thereupon,
through the Crown Office, the assent of the Sovereign
to the choice himself has made through his Prime
Minister, is graciously signified, and the original
costs are reimposed, plus 10s. The chapter-clerk
of the Bishop's own cathedral then requests fees
totalling £21 6s. Sd.
A technical form of procedure, known as " resti-
tution of temporalities," has then to be enacted,
not without its attendant fees, which include £10
for a warrant, £31 10s. Qd. for a certificate, £30 for
letters patent, and 2s. for another " docquet."
Next comes the Home Office, clamouring for
Exchequer fees : £7 13s. 6d. for the original conge
d'elire, and the like for letters recommendatory,
Royal assent, and restitution of temporalities.
The oath of homage costs £6 6s. 6d.
The new Bishop has then to reckon with the
290 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
Board of Green Cloth, with its homage fees to the
Earl Marshal and the heralds, totalling £15 Os. 2d.
Your Bishop is not yet, however, out of the
wood of expenditure. When he takes his seat in
the House of Lords the Lord Great Chamberlain's
Office wants £5 — and gets it. When he is enthroned
the precentor pockets £10 10s., and the chapter-
clerk £9 14s. Sd., the bell-ringers of the Cathedral
ring a merry peal — fee £10 10s. The choir then
chorify at a further expense of £6 17s. 4d.
Have we now done ? Not at all. The clerk
of the Crown Office is tipped half a guinea, plus
two guineas for " petty expenses " ; and takes £14
when the Bishop takes his place among his brethren
in the House of Lords.
When all these various officers of Church and
State are busily picking the new Bishop's pockets,
in advance of their being filled, as an Irishman
might say, the Archbishop himself is not behind-
hand. His turn comes when the archiepiscopal fees
for confirmation are demanded ; and they are heavy,
costing in all £68 4s. lOcL These imposts are made
up of the following items : Secretary, with Arch-
bishop's fiat for confirmation, £17 10s., Vicar-General,
£31 Os. 10^., fees at church where confirmation is
made, £10 5s., and to Deputy Registrar, for mandate
of induction, £9 9s. To the Bishop's own secre-
taries a sum of £36 5s. is then payable. The
Bishop may then, surveying these devastations, at
last consider himself elected, and in every way
complete.
Let us hope that although the spreading tentacles
THE MOAT
of London town have enfolded Fulham and abolished
its old market-gardens and numerous stately man-
sions in favour of commonplace streets, the evident
episcopal wish to be rid of Fulham Palace will not
lead to it being alienated. It remains one of the
very few things that connect this now populous
suburb with the village that many still remember ;
and the romantic-looking moat, often threatened
to be filled up, is a relic of remote antiquity it would
be vandalism to destroy. " No one," as Sir Arthur
Blomfield remarked in 1856, " could say that the
Bishops of London had constructed that defence.
We may well hesitate to believe that any prelate,
however rich and powerful, would have in any age
undertaken to dig round his house a moat of such
extent that, if intended as a means of defence, it
would require a very large force to render it effective ;
still less can we believe that it was ever dug with
any other object than that of defence." The Danes
constructed it, and the bishops found it here when
they came. It is fed by a sluice communicating
with the river, and was until recent times a stagnant,
malodorous place, owing to the sluice being rarely
raised, the ditch cleansed, or the water changed.
On the rare occasions when the mud was cleared
away, the cost varied from £100 to £150, owing to
the great accumulation of it. Those were the times
when lilies grew in the moat. The Fulham people
called them " Bishops' wigs." In 1886 the then
Bishop of London received a communication from
the Fulham Vestry, requiring him to fill up the evil-
smelling moat, or to cleanse it. He had it cleaned
VOL. ii 23
292 THAMES VALLEY VILLAGES
out, and it looks no less a place of romance than
before. It is too greatly overgrown with trees and
brushwood to make a picture for illustration, but
while it lasts, with the woodland park it encloses,
Fulham will still keep some vestige of its olden
condition of a Thames-side village.
INDEX
ABINGDON, i. 159, 216-33
Ashton Keynes, i. 22-30
Augustine, St., i. 47
BABLOCKHYTHE, i. 161
Bampton, i. 121-4
Barnes, ii. 253-8
Basildon, i. 295
Benson, i. 268
Besselsleigh, i. 157-60
Beverley Brook, ii. 258
Binsey, i. 190-92
Bisham, ii. 45-50, 201
Bourne End, ii. 56
Boveney, ii. 109
Bray, ii. 69-81
Brentford, ii. 220-36
Brightwell, i. 268
— Salome, i. 268
Buckland, i. 118-21
Burford, i. 105-7
" Burlington," ii. 251
Burnham Abbey, ii. 105
Buscot, i. 89-92
C.ESAR, JULIUS, ii. 157, 221-9
Cambridge, H.R.H. Duke of, ii.
Carfax Conduit, i. 215
Castle Eaton, i. 50-58
Caversham, i. 304-7
Charney Brook, i. 124
Chertsey, ii. 150, 161, 201
Chiswick, ii. 245-53
Cholsey, i. 293
Churn, River, i. 17-19, 45, 94
Cirencester, i. 9-13, 18
Clanfield, i. 107-9
Clewer, ii. 110
Clifton Hampden, i. 247, 252-6
Cliveden, ii. 60-64
Coin, River, i. 66, 73, 74
Colne, River, ii. 141
Cookham, ii. 59
Cote, i. 124-7
Coway Stakes, ii. 157-65, 221
Cricklade, i. 30-46, 69
Crowmarsh Gifford, i. 283
Cumnor, i. 161-85
DAMEB, AXNE SEYMOUR, ii. 25
Datchet, ii. 131
Day's Lock, i. 256, 259
Dorchester, i. 259-68
Dorney, ii. 86-105 /
Down Ampney, i. 47
Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester,
i. 171-85
EATON WEIR, i. 92
Eisey Chapel, i. 50
Eton, ii. 115-19
Ewen, i. 21
293
294 INDEX
Eynsham, i. 186-9
FAIRFORD, i. 66, 73-85
" Fair Rosamond," i. 193-6
Faringdon, i. 102, 110-17
Folly Bridge, i. 197-9
Fulham, ii. 259, 273-92
- Palace, ii. 276-92
GATHAMPTON, i. 290
Gaunt's House, i. 141-5
Godstow, i. 193-6
Goring, i. 284-90
Great Faringdon, i. 102, 110-17
— Mario w, ii. 51-6
Grove Park, ii. 245
HALLIFORD, ii. 158
Ham, ii. 185
Hamble, River, ii. 30
Hambleden, ii. 30-4
Harcourt family, The, i. 146-9,
155, 186 ; ii. 136
Harcourt, Sir William, i. 207, 212
Hart's Weir, i. 92
Hell-Fire Club, The, ii. 34-8
Henley, ii. 22-30
Hennerton Backwater, ii. 22
Hoby, Lady, ii. 49
Horton, ii. 137-41
Hurley, ii. 41-5
Hurst, ii. 8-10
IFFLEY, i. 200-7
- Mill, i. 22, 203
Inglesham, i. 64-6
Round House, i. 64-6
Isis, River, i. 16, 69 ; ii. 5
Isleworth, ii. 210-20
JESUS HOSPITAL, ii. 81
KEDERMINSTER family, The, ii.
120-8
Kelmscott, i. 66, 93
Kemble' i. 19-21
Kempsford, i. 58-64, 91-8
Kew, ii. 237
Kew Gardens, ii. 220, 230, 237
Kit's Quarries, i. 106
LALEHAM, ii. 145-9, 162
Langley Marish, ii. 119-28
Latton, i. 47
Leach, River, i. 66, 94
Lechlade, i. 66-73, 85
" Lertoll Well," i. 47-9
Leslie, G. D., R.A., ii. 64
Little Wittenham, i. 247, 251
Littleton, ii. 149
Loddon, River, ii. 7, 17
Long Wittenham, i. 241, 251
MAIDENHEAD, ii. 64-8
Mapledurham, i. 300-4
Marlow, ii. 51-6
Marsh Lock, ii. 25
Medley, i. 190, 196
Medmenham, ii. 34-8
Milton, John, ii. 137-41
Mongewell, i. 268, 283
Morris, William, i. 94-8
Mortlake, ii. 253
Moulsford, i. 293
NEW BRIDGE, i. 138-41
Newnham Murren, i. 283
Norreys family, The, ii. 82-5
North Stoke, i. 283
Northmoor, i. 124, 145
Nuneham Courtney, i. 207-15
OAKLADE BRIDGE, i. 29, 94
INDEX
295
Oatlands, ii. 161,167
Ockwells, ii. 82-6
" Old England," ii. 225
" Old Man's Bridge," 1. 117
Old Windsor, ii. 131
Osiers, i. 132-6
PALMEB FAMILY, THE, ii. 89-105
Pangbourne, i. 5 ; ii. 296-9
Patrick Stream, The, ii. 17
Pen ton Hook, ii. 150
Petersham, ii. 185-211
Pope, Alexander, i. 151, 304
Purley, i. 307-11
Putney, ii. 259-63
- Bridge, ii. 263-73
Pye, Henry James, Poet Laureate,
i. 113-15
RADCOT BRIDGE, i. 101-7, 117
Ray, River, i. 50
Reading, i. 304, 307 ; ii. 1
Richmond, ii. 193, 209, 210, 237
Robsart, Amy, i. 172-85
Runnymede, ii. 132
Ruscombe, ii. 11
Rushes, i. 137
Rushey Lock, i. 118
ST. AUGUSTINE, i. 47
St. Frideswide, i. 190, 192
St. John's Lock, i. 89
St. Lawrence Waltham, ii. 11
Seacourt, i. 190
Seven Springs, i. 17
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ii. 55
Shepperton, ii. 154, 158, 162
Shifford, i. 127
Shillingford, i. 268
Shiplake, ii. 17
Mill. i. 25
Shottesbrooke, ii. 11-17
Sinodun, i. 247-251, 256
Smith, Rt. Hon. W. H., ii. 30
Somerford Keynes, i. 21
Sonning, ii. 1-7, 10
Sotwell, i. 268
South Stoke, i. 283
Staines, ii. 141, 145
Standlake, i. 141
Stanton Harcourt, i. 146-56
Stanwell, ii. 142-5
Steventon, i. 234
Strand-on-the-Green, ii. 238-45
Streatley, i. 290-5
Sutton Courtney, i. 234-41
Swillbrook, The, i. 29, 94
Swinford Bridge, i. 186
TADPOLE BRIDGE, i. 118, 121
Thame, River, i. 16
Thames and Severn Canal, i. 14,
45, 59, 64
Thames Head, i. 8, 14-18
Thames, River, i. 16-18 ; ii. 25
" Torpids," i. 199 '
Trewsbury Mead, i. 15
Turnham Green, ii. 246-8
Twickenham, ii. 178
Twyford, ii. 8
UPPER SOMEHFORD MILL, i. 21
VICAK OF BRAY, ii. 69-77
Villiers, Barbara, Duchess of
Cleveland, ii. 101-5
WALKER, FREDERICK, ii. 45, 59
Wallingford, i. 272
Walton, ii. 158, 161, 165
War borough, i. 268-83
296
Wargrave, ii. 18-22
Water Eaton, i. 50-3
Water Hay, i. 29
Wey, River, ii. 154
Weybridge, ii. 150-4, 161
Whitchurch, i. 5 ; ii. 290
Willows, i. 128-32
INDEX
Windrush, River, i. 141
Windsor, ii. 110-15
Wittenham, Little, i. 247, 251
- Long, i. 241, 251
Wraysbury, ii. 135-7
Wye, River, ii. 59
Wytham, i. 166, 186-90
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