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 secluded 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 dissuaded 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 Chancellor of Great Britian” (sic). Thus, you perceive, that although not the rose, Philip found some satisfaction in kinship with it, and doubtless lived and died happily in the glow of glory radiating from that ennobled elder brother.
BRASS TO AN ETON SCHOLAR, WRAYSBURY.
There are brasses lurking unsuspected under the carpeting of this unpromising 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 represents 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.
This Walter Stonor—or “Water” as the inscription 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 associated 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.