X
From here, where Pitt died, it is a long and gentle descent to Kingston Vale and the Robin Hood Gate. As you go down, the eye ranges over the hills of Surrey, blue in the distance, and the picturesquely-broken waste of Wimbledon Common appears in the foreground, now all innocent of the bustle and turmoil, the business and the pleasure of the Wimbledon Meeting. Alas! for the days, and still more alas! for the nights, of Wimbledon Camp.
At the foot of the hill, going down from the Heath to Kingston, there used to stand, beside the road, a mounting-block for assisting horsemen in alighting from or mounting their horses. On it was carved the name of Thomas Nuthall, Surveyor of Roehampton, 1654, with the curious jingle:—
“From London towne to Portse downe
They say ’tis miles three score.”
This has disappeared, like many another quaint roadside relic, and there comes now nothing but evidence of suburban activity until Kingston is reached, save indeed the ruined Chapel of St. Mary Magdalene, now a school-house, beside the footpath.
KINGSTON-UPON-THAMES
Kingston-on-Thames is still provincial in appearance, though now the centre of a great growth of modern suburbs. Here we are eleven miles from the Borough, and at the end of the first stage out of London in the old days of the mail-coaches. Modern drags, like the “Rocket” Portsmouth coach of some years back, changed at the “Robin Hood,” in Kingston Vale, but the coachmen of coaching times made longer stages.
The story of Kingston is a great deal too long for me to dwell upon in these pages, which are not intended for a topographical dictionary. I am, indeed, not at all sure but that a book might not be written upon this old town, both to the advantage of the writer and the inhabitants of this truly royal borough; and here is the suggestion, generously offered to any one who wishes a subject!
Kingston-upon-Thames is so explicitly named in order to distinguish it from the many other Kingstons which loyalty or snobbery (please to take your choice) has created all over England. There is a Kingston near Portsmouth, and the town of Hull was always known as Kingston-upon-Hull until conveniency and democracy conspired together (much, I should imagine, to the delight of Citizen Carnegie, the Almighty Millionaire and Astounding Autocrat of Homestead) to dock it of two-thirds of its name. But the list of Kingstons is too long for this place, and so you are referred to the “Gazetteer” for the rest, while I proceed to delve amid antiquarian matter in respect of the kings whose coronations took place here.
It seems, then, that before their Saxon majesties had conferred this undying distinction upon the town it was (or what little there was of it) called Moreford, from the ford by which Julius Cæsar and his hosts crossed the Thames; if, indeed, they did not cross at quite a different place, as some antiquaries contend, called Coway Stakes, by Shepperton. When ninth-century Unification prevailed, and the Heptarchy was knocked into a cocked hat, Egbert (only the late Mr. Freeman would have preferred to call him “Ecgbehrt”) held a great council here; but that first great Bretwalda was crowned elsewhere, and the Kingston coronations begin in A.D. 900 with Edward the Elder, who sat upon a big stone in the market-place and received his crown amid the acclamations of the people and the confoundedly rough horse-play of the chiefs, who bore him aloft upon a buckler, and (I assure you it was so) tossed him vigorously in the air until the new king became sick and silly, and was devoutly thankful that a Coronation came only once in a lifetime!