THURSLEY
The headstone which was set up to mark the spot where the sailor was murdered has been removed, and placed beside this newer road, where its position renders its legend peculiarly vivid and terrible, although it is couched only in the plainest and least affected of phrases. One side is shown in the illustration, the other repeats the date of its erection, and invokes a curse upon “the man who injureth or removeth this stone”; but whether or no the man who thus invites the wrath of heaven would have included the Ordnance Surveyors, I cannot say. Certainlytheyhave “injured this stone” by carving upon it the Governmental “broad arrow.” The body of the murdered sailor was buried at the little village of Thursley, some two miles distant, and there, in the churchyard, shadowed by dark fir trees, stands a gruesome tombstone, an unconscionable product of local art, with a carving in relief of the three murderers in the act of dispatching their victim. Beneath this melodrama, the circumstances are recounted at great length, and some halting verses conclude the mournful narration.
TOMBSTONE, THURSLEY.
‘THE KING CAN DO NO WRONG!’
Thursley itself is situated on an old road that branches from the newer highway upon entering Witley Common, and rejoins the ordinary route near the “Royal Huts” Hotel. The village is rarely visited by strangers. The old church stands in a commanding position, overlooking a wide tract of country, including the Hog’s Back, by Guildford, and the scattered ponds of Frensham. An old sun-dial on the tower has the inscriptionHora pars vitæ, and, like most of our clocks and watches, perpetuates inthe numeral “IIII” the long-exploded fiction of the infallibility of kings. I wonder if any one remembers the origin of the substitution of “IIII” for “IV” on nearly all the dials, whether sun-dials or clock-faces, of civilization? Here is the story. The first clock that kept anything like accurate time was constructed by a certain Henry Vick, in 1370. It was made to the order of Charles V. of France, who was known as “the Wise.” Wise he certainly was, in some respects; but Roman numerals were not within the sum of his knowledge. When Vick brought the King his clock, he looked at its movements awhile. “Yes,” said he, at length, “it works very well; but you have got the figures on the dial wrong.” “Surelynever, your Majesty,” said Vick. “Yes,” replied the King, “that IV should be IIII.” “But your Majesty is wrong,” rejoined that not very tactful clockmaker. “Wrong!” answered outraged majesty, “I am never wrong! Take it away and correct the error.” Vick did as he was commanded, and so to this day we have IIII where we should really have IV.
THURSLEY CHURCH.
SUN-DIAL, THURSLEY.
There is a certain interest bound up with the name of Thursley, for it affords an excellent example of the lengths to which antiquaries will go, to scent derivatives. Kemble, the learned author of a deep and scholarly book, “The Saxons in England,” derives the name of Thursley from the Scandinavian godThor, whose equivalent in Saxon mythology was Thunor. The name of Thunder Hill, a height near the village, has the same origin; but the clinching argument of the neighbouring “Hammer Ponds,” which Mr. Kemble assumes to have been named after Thor’s hammer, spoils the reasoning of the theory altogether, for the “Hammer Ponds” are nothing but the remains of the old forges that were thickly spread over the surface of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex during a period from three centuries to one hundred years ago.
TYNDALL
Just where the road from Thursley rejoins the highway stands the “Huts” Inn, now enlarged and refurbished, and nothing less, if you please, in these days than the “Royal Huts” Hotel. “Ma conscience!” I wonder what friend Cobbett would have thought,andsaid. But, believe me, nothing less than this would serve the turn of Hindhead district now-a-days, for it fast becoming as suburban as (say) Clapham. Do you want a building-plot, carved out of a waste, where nothing has yet bloomed but the tiny purple bells of the heather or the golden glory of the gorse? Here, then, is your chance, for building-plots fringe the road where, indeed, the trim-built villa has not already risen. Professor Tyndall, who built a house for himself just here, in 1882, selected the situation both for its health-giving air and for its seclusion, but his example served only to advertise the attractions of the place, and the astonishing favour with which Hindhead is now regarded as a residence is directly attributable to him. No one was less pleased than himself at this sudden popularity of a district that had but a few yearspreviously been a more or less “howling” wilderness, for “he was always curiously sensitive to the beauty of scenery,” disliked suburbs, and was also singularly sensitive to being overlooked from any neighbouring house. This preference for reclusion led to the building of the hideous screens which hid from his gaze an ugly house close at hand, and created so much angry controversy a few years ago: screens that to-day remain an unfailing reminiscence of the Professor.Sic monumentum requiris, circumspice, to quote the old tag.
And now, save for the slight rise of Cold Ash Hill, it is all down-hill to Liphook, and excellent going, too, on a fine gravelly road, closely compacted and well kept. The country, though, is still wild and unfertile, and for long stretches, after passing the “eligible plots” of Hindhead, the road is seen narrowing away in long perspectives with never a house in sight. In midst of all this waste stands a lonely roadside inn—the “Seven Thorns” a wayside sign proclaims it to be—which draws its custom the Lord only knows whence. It is frankly an inn for refreshing and for passing on your way: no one, I imagine, ever wants to stay there; and by its cold and cheerless exterior appearance one might readily come to the conclusion that no one even lived there. The sign is singular, and seems either descriptive or legendary. If legend it has, no whisper of it has ever reached me; while as for descriptiveness, the “seven thorns” are simply non-existent; and so the sign is neither more nor less a foreshadowing of the place than the average Clapham “Rosebank” or the Brixton “Fernlea.”
TYNDALL’S HOUSE: SCREENS IN THE FOREGROUND.
Even on a summer’s day one does not find the immediate neighbourhood of the “Seven Thorns” Inn particularly exhilarating or cheerful, for, although the country is open and unspoiled by buildings, yet the scenery lacks the suavity of generous land, prolific of fine timber and graceful foliage. The soil is ungrateful and unproductive; nourishing only the gorse and the hardy grasses that grow upon commons and cover the nakedness of the harsh sand and gravel of the surrounding country-side. Such trees as grow about here are wind-tossed and scraggy, bespeaking the little nutriment the land affords, and the greater number of them are firs and pines, which, indeed, are the chiefest of Hampshire’s sylvan growths.
A MEMORABLE SNOW-STORM
But in winter-time this unsheltered tract is swept with piercing winds that know no bulwark, nor any stay against their furious onslaughts; and here, in the great snow-storm of Yule-tide 1836, the Portsmouth coaches were nearly snowed up. “The snow,” says a writer of local gossip, “was lying deep upon Hindhead, and had drifted into fantastic wreaths and huge mounds raised by the fierce breath of a wild December gale. Coach after coach crawled slowly and painfully up the steep hill, some coming from London, others bound thither. But as the ‘Seven Thorns’ was neared, they one and all cameto a dead stop. The tired, wearied, exhausted cattle refused to struggle through the snow-mountains any longer. Guards, coachmen, passengers, and labourers attacked those masses of spotless white with spade and shovel, but all to no purpose. It seemed as if a way was not to be cleared. What stamping of feet and blowing of nails was there! Women were shivering and waiting patiently; men were shouting, grumbling, and swearing; and indeed the prospect of spending a winter’s night upon the outside of a coach on such a spot was, to say the least of it, not cheerful. At last a brave man came to the rescue. The ‘Star of Brunswick,’ a yellow-bodied coach that ran nightly between Portsmouth and London, came up. The coachman’s name was James Carter, well known to many still living. He made very little to-do about the matter, but, whipping up his horses, he charged the snow-drifts boldly and resolutely, and with much swaying from side to side opened a path for himself and the rest.”
And so the Portsmouth Road was kept open in that wild winter, while most of the main roads in England were hopelessly snowed up. But memories of coaching days on this old road are rather meagre, for, although sea-faring business sent a great many travellers journeying between London and the dockyard town, the Portsmouth Road was never celebrated for crack coaches or for record times, and when coaching was in full swing, men saw as little romance in being dragged down the highways behind four horses as we can discover in railway travelling. With coach-proprietors, the horsing and equippingof a coach were matters of business, and beyond looking shrewdly after that business, the most of them cared little enough for coaching history. With the passengers, too, travelling was an evil to be endured. It irked them intolerably: it was a necessity, a duty,—what you will for unpleasantness,—and so, when the journey was done, the better part of them immediately dismissed it from their minds, instead of dwelling fondly upon the memories of perils overcome and rigours endured—as we are apt to imagine.
REGRETS FOR COACHING DAYS
It was only when the Augustan age of coaching had dawned that travellers began to feel any delight or exhilaration in road-travel; and that age was cut short so untimely by the Railway Era that the young fellows and the middle-aged men whose blood coursed briskly through their veins, and who knew a thing or two about horse-flesh, felt a not unnatural regret in the change, and conceived an altogether natural affection for the oldrégime. Their regret can be the more readily understood when one inquires into the beginnings of railway travel; when conveyance by steammighthave been more expeditious than the coach service (although what with delays and unpunctuality at the inauguration of railways eventhatwas an open question), but certainly was at the same time much more uncomfortable. For, in place of the sheltered inside of a coach, or the frankly open and unprotected outside, the primitive railway passenger was conveyed to his destination in an open truck exposed to the furious rush of air caused by the passage of the train; and, all the way, he employedhis time, not in admiring the landscape, or, as he was wont to do from a coach-top, in kissing his hand to the girls, but fleeted a penitential pilgrimage in scooping out from his eyes the blacks and coal-grit liberally imparted from the wobbly engine, own brother to the “Rocket,” and immediate descendant of “Puffing Billy.”
No wonder they regretted the more healthful and cleanly journeys by coach, and small blame to them if they voted the railway a nuisance; believed the country to be “going to the dogs,” and agreed with the Duke of Wellington, when he exclaimed, upon seeing the first railway train in progress, “There goes the English aristocracy!”
For these men, and for the amateur coachees who during the Regency had occupied the box-seats of the foremost stages, this last period of coaching represented everything that was healthful and manly, and when the last wheel had turned, and the ultimate blast from the guard’s bugle had sounded; when the roadside inn and its well-filled stables became deserted; and when the few remaining coachmen, post-boys, and ostlers had either accepted situations with the railway companies or had gone into the workhouse, a glamour clothed the by-gone dispensation that has lost nothing with the lapse of time. The pity is that these thorough-going admirers of days as dead as those of the Pharaohs were so largely “mute, inglorious Miltons,” and have left so small a record of their stirring times awheel.
AN OLD COACHMAN TALKS
One of the last coachmen on this road was interviewed by a local paper some years ago, and theinclusion here of his reminiscences is inevitable. The “Last of the Old Whips” they called him:—
“He was sitting by a blazing fire, in a cheerful, pleasant room, evidently enjoying a glass of ‘something hot’ in the style that ‘Samivel’s father’ would have thoroughly appreciated. But truth compels us to add that he had evidently seen better days, and that the comforts with which he was now temporarily surrounded had been strangers to him many a long day. Yet there were many still living who remembered ‘young Sam Carter’ as a dashing whip, who knew a good team when he sat behind them, and had handled the ribbons in a most workmanlike fashion. But the old fire and energy are still unquenched, either by the lapse of years or the pressure of hard times, and the veteran gladly gives the rein to memory and spins a yarn of the old coaching days.
REMINISCENCES
“‘The last conveyance of which I had charge,’ said he, ‘was the old “Accommodation.” She was not a road wagon, but a van driven by five horses, three leaders abreast, and reaching London in sixteen hours. We used to start from the “Globe Inn,” Oyster Street, Portsmouth, and finished the journey to London at the “New Inn,” Old Change, or at the “Castle and Falcon,” Aldersgate Street. Yes, I took to the road pretty early. I was only about sixteen or seventeen years of age when I took charge of the London mail for my father. Father used to ride to Moushill and back (that’s seventy-two miles) every night for fifty years. He drove the night “Nelson” for thirty-two years. That was a coach with a yellow body, andabout 1822 its name was altered to that of the “Star of Brunswick.” It ran from the “Fountain” and the “Blue Posts,” Portsmouth, to the “Spread Eagle,” in Gracechurch Street. Its pace was about eight miles per hour, including changes. We only changed once between Portsmouth and Godalming, and that was at Petersfield, but the stages were terribly long, and we afterwards used to get another team at Liphook. The night coaches to London used to do the distance in about twelve hours, and the day coaches did it in nine hours; but the mails were ten hours on the road. The mail-coaches carried four inside and three out, with a “dickey” seat for the guard, who never forgot to take his sword-case and blunderbuss, though in my time we never had any trouble with highwaymen, and I never heard much about them stopping coaches in this neighbourhood. Of course every now and then a sailor would tumble off and break a leg, a head, or an arm, but that was only what you might expect. There were plenty of poachers and smugglers about, but no highwaymen. We did not have key bugles, as the books often say; the horn served our turn. William Balchin, who was guard with me as well as with father, was a good hand with his horn. I was guard for twelve months to the night “Rocket,” which ran to the “Belle Sauvage,” then kept by Mr. Nelson. It was established for the benefit of the people of Portsea, and only ran for six or seven years. The day “Rocket” was much older, and got a good share of the Isle of Wight traffic. Both these “Rockets” were white-bodied coaches. Francis Falconer, who died at Petersfield about 1874, drove the day“Rocket” all the time it ran. Robert Nicholls was the only coachman that I ever knew to save money. He was a post-boy with me, and when he died he left a nice little fortune to each of his four daughters.
“‘The “Independent” ran to the “Spread Eagle,” and to the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street. It was horsed by Mr. Andrew Nance as far as Petersfield, after which the two coachmen, Durham and Parkinson, found horses over the remaining stages. Yes, I knew old Sam Weller very well indeed. He drove the “Defiance” from the “George” and the “Fountain” to the Blue Coach Office, Brighton. The “Defiance” was painted a sort of mottled colour. Sam was a lame man, with a good-humoured, merry face, fond of a bit of fun, and always willing for a rubber. His partner was Neale, for whom I used sometimes to drive. He afterwards became landlord of the “Royal Oak,” in Queen Street, Portsmouth. Do you see that scar, sir? I got that in 1841, through the breaking of my near hind axle as we came down through Guildford town. I was then driving the “Accommodation” between Ripley and Portsmouth. One night we were an hour late in starting. I had the guard on the box with me, and as we were going pretty hard down the High Street at Guildford I heard the wheel “scroop.” The axle broke, and the next thing I remember was finding myself in bed at the “Ram” Hotel, where I had lain without speaking for a week. Whilst I was ill my wife presented me with twins, so that we had plenty of troubles at once. When I was driving the “Wanderer,” a pair-horse coach, my team bolted with me near the “SevenThorns,” and on another occasion a dog-cart got in the way of the “Star of Brunswick,” and we capsized, and a lot of mackerel was spilt all over the road. That was about half-a-mile this side of Horndean. When I was first acting as post-boy my chaise got overturned, but on the whole I have been pretty fortunate. Once during a deep snow there was a complete block of coaches on the road at “Seven Thorns.” My father undertook to lead the way, and he succeeded in opening the road for the rest. My father’s name was James Carter. He was post-boy at the “Royal Anchor” Hotel, Liphook, at the time that the unknown sailor was murdered at the Devil’s Punch Bowl. In fact, all my people belonged to Liphook. The names of the murderers were Michael Casey, James Marshall, and Edward Lonegon. They were captured the same day, in a public-house at Rake Hill, nearly opposite the present “Flying Bull,” where they were offering a blood-stained jacket for sale. The poor fellow who was murdered was buried in Thursley churchyard.
“‘I used to drive the “Tantivy,”—a day and night coach,—which afterwards ran only by day. We drove from Portsmouth to Farnborough station, then put the coach on the train, and drove into town from the terminus at Nine Elms.
“‘Of course I remember the old “Coach and Horses,” at Hilsea. It was afterwards burnt down. There was formerly a guard-house and picket at Hilsea Bridge, where the soldiers’ passes were examined. Hilsea Green we used to reckon the coldest spot between Portsmouth and London. Once somebody-snatchers started from the “Green Posts,” at Hilsea, with the officers in full cry after them, but the rascals had a famous mare, “Peg Hollis” (oh! she was a good ’un to go!), and got clear off.
“‘Yes, I knew Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence well; he was a good friend to me. Many’s the time he has sat beside me on the box, and at the end of the stage slipped a crown-piece into my hand.’”
BY-WAYS
At the “Seven Thorns” Inn the three counties of Sussex, Surrey, and Hants are supposed to meet; but, like so many of the picturesque legends of county and parish boundaries that make one house stand in three or four parishes, this particular legend is altogether unfounded, for the three counties meet in a dell about two miles southward of the road, in Hammer Bottom, where once stood a lonely beer-house called the “Sussex Bell.”
We will not turn aside to visit the site of the “Sussex Bell,” or the remains of the Hammer Ponds that tell of the old iron-foundries and furnaces that were wont to make the surrounding hills resound and despoiled the dense woods of their noblest trees for the smelting of iron ore. We have no present business so far from the road in a place that has harboured no notorious evil-doer, nor has ever been the home of any distinguished man.
But we may well turn aside after passing Cold Ash Hill to explore a singular relic of monkish daysthat still exists, built into a comparatively modern farm-house and forgotten by the world.
Some three miles south of the road, reached by a turning below the “Seven Thorns” Inn, lies the little-visited village of Lynchmere, a rural parish, embowered in foliage and picturesquely situated amid hills; and in the immediate neighbourhood stand the remains of Shulbrede Priory, now chiefly incorporated with farm-buildings. The place is well worthy a visit, for the farm-house contains a room, called the Prior’s Room, still decorated with monkish frescoes of a singular kind. These probably date almost as far back as the foundation of this Priory of Augustinian Canons, in the time of Henry III., and are unfortunately very much defaced. But sufficient can be discerned for the grasping of the idea, which seems to be a representation of the Nativity. The design introduces the inscription:—Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium; et vocabitur nomen Jesus; while a number of birds and animals, rudely drawn and crudely coloured, appear, with Latin legends issuing from their mouths. Uppermost stands the cock, as in the act of crowing, while from his beak proceeds the announcement, “Christus natus est.” Next follows a duck, from whose bill issues another label, inscribed “Quando, quando?” a query answered appropriately by a raven, “In hac nocte.” “Ubi, ubi?” asks a cow of a lamb, which rejoins, bleating “In Bethlems.”
PRIORS AND PORKERS
But few other relics of this secluded priory are visible. Some arcading; a vaulted passage; fragments of Early English mouldings: these are all.Somewhere underneath the pig-sties, cow-houses, and rick-yards of the farm rest the forgotten priors and the nameless monks of that old foundation. Haply this worn slab of stone has covered the remains of some jolly Friar Tuck or ascetic Augustine; this battered crocket, maybe, belonged to the tomb of some pious benefactor for whose benefit masses were enjoined to be said or sung for ever and a day; and I dare swear this obscure stone trough, filled with hog-wash, at which fat swine are greedily drinking, was once a coffin. Imperial Cæsar’s remains had never so foul an insult offered them.
I lean across the fence and moralize; a most unpardonable waste of time at thisfin de siècle, and I regret those old fellows whom Harry the Eighth in his reforming zeal sent a-packing, to beg their bread from door to door. I regret them, that is to say, from purely sentimental reasons, being, all the while, ready to allow the policy and the state-craft that drove them hence, and willing to acknowledge that the greasy cassocks and filthy hair-shirts of the ultimate occupants of these cloistral shades covered a multitude of sins.
I poke the porkers thoughtfully with a stick in the place where their ribs should be, but they are of such an abbatical plumpness that my ferrule fails to discover any “osseous structure.” (I thank thee, Owen, for that phrase!) They respond with piercing cries that recall the shrieks and the yells of a witches’ sabbath on the Brocken, as presented before a quailing Lyceum audience,—and their horrid chorus brings the farmer on the scene. “Who drives fat oxen shouldhimself be fat,” to quote the famous classicalnon sequitur; and how much more should it apply to him who fattens pigs to unwieldy masses of unconverted lard and pork! To do justice to the quotation, he is fleshy and of a full habit.
“Fine creeturs, them,” says he. “Aye,” say I. “Thirty score apiece, if they’re a pound,” he continues. They might be a hundred score for all I know; but no man likes to acknowledge agricultural ignorance, and so I agree with him, heartily, and with much appearance of wisdom. “Pooty creeturs,Isay,” continues the farmer, smacking a broad-bellied beast, with white bristles and pink flesh covered with black splotches. That dreadful creature looks up a moment from the trough, with ringed snout dripping liberally with hog-wash, and gazes pathetically at me for acquiescence. “Yes: fine animals,” I say, in a non-committal voice.
“Pictures, they are,” says their owner decisively. That settles the matter, and I am off, to seek the road to Liphook.
If the excellence of the great highways of England is remarkable, the tangled lanes and absolute rusticity of the roads but a stone’s throw from the main routes call no less for remark. Here, just a little way from Liphook, and in the immediate vicinity of a railway, I might have been in the deepest wilds of Devon, so meandering were the lanes, so untamed the country. An old pack-horse trail, still distinct, though unused these many generations past, wandered along, amid gorse and bracken, and footpaths led in perplexingly-different directions.
A STRANGE RENCOUNTER
Amid this profusion of wild life, with the dark foliage of the fir trees, the lighter leaves of the beech, and the gaily-flowered hedgerows on either hand, there appeared before me the most incongruous wayfarer: a Jingle-like figure, tall and spare, with a tightly-buttoned frock-coat, and a silk hat of another era than this, set well back upon his head—one who might have wandered here from Piccadilly in the ’50’s and lost his way back. I should not have been surprised had he asked news of the Great Exhibition; of Prince Albert, or the Emperor of the French. However, he merely said it was a fine day. “Yes, it was,” I said; “but could he direct me to Liphook?” “Liphook?” said he, as though he had never heard the name; “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m a stranger in these parts.” And then he walked away. I believe he was a ghost!
“CONSIDERING CAP.”
And now the road brings us to the borders of Hants. It is no mere pose to assert that every English county has its own especial characteristics, an unmistakable and easily recognizable individuality: the fact has been so often noted and commented upon that it is fast becoming a truism. But of a county of the size of Hampshire, which ranks eighth in point of size among the forty English divisions, it would be rash to generalize too widely. One is apt to sum up this county as merely a slightly more gracious, and generous variant of the forbidding downs and uplands of Wiltshire, but, although quite three-quarters of the area of Hants is poor, waterless, and inhospitable, yet there are fertile corners, nooks, and valleys, covered with ancient alluvial soil, that yield nothing to any other part of England.
Still, Fuller is a little more than just to Hampshire when he calls it “a happy countrey in the foure elements, if culinaryfirein courtesie may pass for one, with plenty of the best wood for the fuel thereof; most pure and piercing theaireof this shyre; and none in England hath more plenty of clear and fresh rivulets of troutfulwater, not to speak of the friendly sea, conveniently distanced from London. As for theearth,” he continues, “it is both fair and fruitful, and may pass for an expedient betwixt pleasure and profit, where by mutual consent they are moderately accommodated.”
HANTS
If old Fuller could revisit the scenes to which thisdescription belongs, he would indeed find profit but moderately accommodated, if at all; for as the greater proportion of the soil of Hampshire has always been notoriously poor, so now the farming of it has decayed from the moderately profitable stage to a condition in which the tenant farmer sits down in despair, and the landlord has to meet the changed conditions of the times with heavier reductions of rents than his contemporaries of more fertile counties are called upon to make. And even so, and despite the fifteen and twenty-five per cent. deductions that are constantly being made, innumerable farms have gone, or are going, out of cultivation in Hampshire, whose bare chalk downs and unkindly levels of sand are growing lonelier and more desolate year by year.
But a grateful and profitable feature of Hampshire are the water-meadows that border the fishful streams of the Itchen, the Test, and the Avon. They merit all the commendation that Fuller gives them, and more; but, so far as the Portsmouth Road is concerned, Hampshire exhibits its most barren, ill-watered, and flinty aspects; from the point where it enters the county, near Liphook, past the chalky excrescence of Butser Hill, through the bare and barren downs of Chalton, to Portsmouth itself.
Cobbett has not very much to say in praise of Hampshire soil, but he found a considerable deal of prosperity within its bounds in his day, when agricultural folk still delved, and rural housewives still kept house in modest fashion. Still! Yes, but already modern luxury and progress had appeared to leaven the homely life of the villager, when thatindignant political and social censor was riding about the country and addressing the farmers on the State of Politics, the Price of Wheat, and the advantages of American Stoves.
Cobbett, writing in 1825, was particularly severe upon the farmers of his time, who were changing from the race he had known who sat with their carters and labourers at table; who, with their families, dined at the same board off fat bacon and boiled cabbage as a matter of course. “When the old farm-houses are down,” he says, “(and down they must come in time), what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is so stuck-up in a place she calls theparlour” (note, by the way, the withering irony of Cobbett’s italics), “with, if she have children, the ‘young ladies and gentlemen’ about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (asofaby all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up; some swinging bookshelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps better ‘educated’ than she; two or three nick-nacks to eat instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there is here a constant anxiety to make ashownot warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too clever towork; they are all to begentlefolks. Go to plough! Good God! What! ‘young gentlemen’ go to plough! They becomeclerks, or some skimmy-dish thing orother. They flee from the dirtyworkas cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What a mass of materials for proclaiming that general anddreadful convulsionthat must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms!”
One only wonders, after reading all this, what Cobbett would have said at this time, when things have advanced another stage towards the millennium; when nick-nackery is abundant in almost every farm-house; when every other farmer’s wife has her drawing-room (“parlour,” by the way, being vulgar and American), and every farmer’s daughter reads,—not tracts, my friend Cobbett,—but novelettes of the pseudo-Society brand.
Hampshire cottages remain practically the same, only the dear, delightful old thatches are gone that afforded pasturage for all sorts of parasitic plants and mosses; harboured earwigs and other insects too numerous to mention, and divided the artist’s admiration equally with the rich red tiling of the more pretentious houses.
HAMPSHIRE ARCHITECTURE
Hampshire cottage architecture is peculiarly characteristic of the county. The wayside villages and the scattered hamlets that nestle between the folds of its chalky hills are made up of cottages built with chalk rubble, or with black flints and red brick mixed. The flints being readily obtained, they form by far the greater portion of Hampshire walls; the red brick being used for dressings and for binding the long, flinty expanses together, or occupying the place taken by stone quoins, in counties wherebuilding-stone is freely found. Thus, the homely architecture of the greater part of Hants is mean and uninteresting, for black flint is not beautiful and has never been used with good effect in modern times, although in ancient days the mediæval builders and architects of East Anglia—notably in Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds—contrived some remarkably effective work in this unpromising material. Some old work in the larger Hampshire towns, notably at Hyde Abbey, Winchester, shows an effective use of black flint in squares alternating with squared stone,—a method known as diaper work,—but the elaborate flint panelling of Norfolk and Suffolk is unknown in Hampshire.
And this brings me to Liphook, a roadside village perhaps originally sprung from the near neighbourhood of the old deer-forest of Woolmer, when half-forgotten Saxon and Norman kings and queens, earls and thanes, hunted here and made the echoes resound with the winding of their horns—“made the welkin ring,” in fact, as the fine romantic writers of some generations ago said, in that free and fearless way which is, alas! so discredited now-a-days. And this is so much more a pity, because along this old road, upon whose every side the hallooing and the rumour of the hunting-field were wont to be heard so often and so loudly, one could have worked in that phrase about “the welkin” with such fine effect, had it not been altogether so battered and worn-out a literarycliché. This it is to be born a hundred years later than Sir Walter Scott!
FOREST FIRES
The Royal Forest of Woolmer lies partly in thisparish. It is a tract of land about seven miles in length by two and a half in breadth, running nearly north and south. In the days of William and Mary the punishments of whipping and confinement in a house of correction were awarded to all them that should “burn on any waste land, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath, and furze, goss or fern”; yet in this forest, about March or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath-fires were lighted up that they frequently became quite unmanageable, and burnt the hedges, woods, and coppices for miles around. These burnings were defended on the plea that when the old and coarse coating of heath was consumed, young and tender growths would spring up and afford excellent browsing for cattle; but where the furze is very large and old, the fire, penetrating to the very roots, burns the ground itself; so that when an old common or ancient underwoods are burnt, nothing is to be seen for hundreds of acres but smother and desolation, the whole extent of the clearance looking like the cinders of an active volcano.
One of these great fires broke out on May 22, 1881, and consumed over 670 acres. It was originated by the keepers of the Aldershot Game Preserving Association, for the purpose of obtaining a belt of burnt land around the Forest, to prevent the straying of the pheasants; but the fire, fanned by a wind, grew entirely out of hand and quite uncontrollable. Great damage was occasioned by this outbreak, and the Earl of Selborne’s plantations were destroyed, together with those of the vicar, whose very houseand stabling had a narrow escape. The Forest was the picture of desolation for a long time afterwards. The oaks were either dead or dying, and the whole district had an inexpressibly blasted and weird appearance.
“I remember,” says Gilbert White, of a fire that occurred in his time, “that a gentleman who lives beyond Andover, coming to my house, when he got on the downs between that and Winchester, at twenty-five miles distance, was surprised with much smoke, and a hot smell of fire, and concluded that Alresford was in flames, but when he came to that town, he then had apprehensions for the next village, and so on to the end of his journey.”
When the forest was enclosed, in 1858, about one thousand acres were allotted to the Crown.
LOCAL CELEBRITIES
Liphook is the centre of a tract of country thickly settled with “men of light and leading.” From Hindhead and Haslemere on one side, to Rake and Petersfield on the other, are the country homes of men well known to fame. Away towards Haslemere, on the breezy heights of Blackdown, stands the picturesque modern house of Aldworth, the home, in his later years, of Tennyson; and on the very ridge of Hindhead is the obtrusive and still more modern house built by the late Professor Tyndall, with his hideous screens of turf and woodwork, setup by the Professor with the object of shielding his privacy from the curious gaze of the vulgar herd. Near by is a house lately built by Mr. Grant Allen, while Professor Williamson, the well-known professor of chemistry, resides close at hand, and conducts experiments with chemical fertilizers over some forty acres of wilderness and common land, which his care and long-enduring patience have at last made to “blossom like the rose.” At Blackmoor, towards Selborne, Sir Roundell Palmer, Q.C., afterwards Lord Chancellor and Earl of Selborne (“the mildest-mannered man that ever helped to pass a Reform Bill or disestablish a Church”), has created a fine estate out of a waste of furze-bushes and heather; while he had for many years a neighbour at Bramshott in that eminent lawyer, Sir William Erle, who died at the Grange in 1880. Professor Bell, a natural historian after Gilbert White’s own heart, and the editor of a scholarly edition of the “Natural History of Selborne,” lived for many years at that village, in White’s old home, the Wakes; and at Hollycombe, down the road, Sir John Hawkshaw, the well-known engineer and designer of the Victoria Embankment, had a beautiful demesne. Artists in plenty, including Vicat Cole, R.A., Mr. Birket Foster, and Mr. J. S. Hodgson, have delighted to make their home where these three counties of Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire meet; and among literary men, the names of G. P. R. James and of Anthony Trollope occur. Some years ago, one who was familiar with the country-side said, while standing on the tower of Milland new church:—“Within a circle of twelve milesfrom here there are more brains than within any other country district in England,” and if we readqualityfor quantity, I think he was right.
THE ‘ROYAL ANCHOR’
But if the neighbourhood of Liphook is the favoured home of so many distinguished men of our own time, the annals of that famous old hostelry, the “Royal Anchor,” in Liphook village, can boast quite a concourse of royal visitors, from the first dawn of its history until the childhood of Queen Victoria; while as for historic people of less degree (although very great folk indeed in their own way), why, they are to be counted in battalions. In fact, had I time to write it, and you sufficient patience to read, I might readily produce a big book of bigwigs who, posting, or travelling by stage or mail to Portsmouth, have slept over-night under this hospitable roof. As for the royalties, one scarce knows where to begin: indeed, almost every English sovereign within the era of history has had occasion to travel to Portsmouth, and most of them appear to have been lodged at the “Anchor,” as it was called before Mr. Peake very rightly, considering the distinguished history of his house, affixed the “Royal” to his old sign.
Records are left of a sovereign as early as the unfortunate Edward II. having visited Liphook, although we are not told by the meagre chronicles of his remote age whether the King, who came here for sport in his Royal Forest of Woolmer, stayed at an inn, nor, indeed, if there was any early forerunner of the “Anchor” here in those times. Edward VI. passed down the road to Cowdray, and Elizabeth, who was always “progressing” about the country,and, like the Irishman, never seemed so much at home as when she was abroad, halted here on her way to that princely seat, and put in a day or so hunting in the Forest.
Beyond the fact that the “Merry Monarch” journeyed to Portsmouth and stayed once at the “Castle” Inn, at Petersfield, we have no details of his hostelries. He was in a hurry when he came thus far, and troubled the Woolmer glades but little at any time. Queen Anne, who, after all, seems rather less of a sportswoman than any other of our Queens, came to Liphook and Woolmer for the express purpose of seeing the red deer whom her remote ancestor, the Conqueror, “loved like a father”; and after her time royal personages came thick and fast, like swallows in summer, and we find them conferring a deathless fame upon the old inn by the feasts they ordered, the pretty things they said, and the number of equipages they hired for the conveyance of themselves and their trains towards the sea-coast. But never was there in the history of the “Anchor” a more august company than that assembled here in 1815, after Waterloo, when the Prince Regent, journeying to Portsmouth to take part in the rejoicings and the reception of the Allied Sovereigns, entertained at luncheon these crowned heads, together with the Duchess of Oldenburg and Marshal Blucher. Afterwards came William IV., who, when Duke of Clarence and Lord High Admiral, had frequently stayed in the old house and taken his meals in the kitchen, sitting sometimes, with commendable and endearingbonhomie, on the edge of the kitchentable, gossiping with the landlord, and eating bread-and-cheese with all the gusto and lack of ceremony of a hungry plough-boy. The last royal personages to stay at the old inn were the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria, who walked in the garden or showed themselves at the windows before the crowds who never failed to obstruct the roads, eager for a glance at their future Queen.
I must confess, however, staunch Tory of the most crusted and mediæval type though I be, that all this array of sovereignsin esseorin posseseems very dull, and bores me to yawning-point. With the exception of those two royal brothers, George IV. and the Fourth William, they seem not so much beings of flesh and blood as clothes-props and the deadly dull and impersonal frameworks on which were hung so many tinselled dignities and sounding titles. I turn with a sigh of relief to a much larger and a great deal more interesting class of travellers who have found beneath the hospitable roof of the “Royal Anchor” both a hearty welcome and the best of good cheer; travellers who, however much we may like or dislike them, were men of character who did not owe everything to the dignities to which they were born; who, for good or ill, carved their own careers and have left a throbbing and enduring personality behind them, while a king or a queen is usually remembered merely by a Christian name and a Roman numeral.