PETERSHAM, FROM THE MIDDLESEX SHORE.
Before reluctantly I leave Petersham, let something be said as to its name. And, firstly, let it be 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 Cartulary of Merton Abbey, in 1266, it becomes “Petrichesham.” 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 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 Westminster, 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.”
THE OLD LODGES OF PETERSHAM PARK.
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 waterworks, 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 monastic 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 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 probably 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 picturesque 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 communication 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, 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 indispensable for living in. Otherwise, the lot of the old building has been the common and almost invariable 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 oppressively 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.