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 established himself at Priory Cottage. Here they so outraged the feelings of the neighbourhood with their fantastic proceedings in the back-garden, in which 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 consists 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, representing 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.”
Returning from this détour, 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. Excavations 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.”
LITTLETON CHURCH.