Highways and Byways in Surrey - Eric Parker

Caged prisoners at Lingfield were not always treated with the utmost rigour of the law. At one time the door was pierced by a grating, and through the grating kindly souls passed packets of tobacco. Liquor could not be passed in packets, but found its way in somehow. Afterwards in severer days the grating was closed, and prisoners neither drank nor smoked, as became their miserable condition. Nine years after the last captive languished behind the blocked grating the prison was taken over by the village for fresh purposes. Henceforward it was to be the museum, and was duly vested in trustees. Its collection still grows slowly. "Anything to do with village crime—we make that our special subject," the curator informs you with a pleasing urbaneness. The collection includes a man-trap, a pair of handcuffs, a canvas bed which furnishes the museum whenever it is wanted as a mortuary, a pair of farmer's snowboots used a hundred years ago, and a pair of farmer's ordinary boots used more recently.

Of tiny village streets there is no more fascinating byway than the little road which leads up to the south door of Lingfield Church. On the right is the Star inn, taking its sign from the arms of the great lords of Sterborough who lie in the church; and built beside the inn a row of quiet cottages, perhaps once part of the inn. On the left one building stands out from the rest; an early sixteenth century timber house, admirably preserved, and of peculiar interest because after three hundred years it is still carrying on the business for which it was intended. It was built as a shop, and it is a shop still. Modern preference for plate glass and easily opened doors has changed the original plan of the ground floor, but the first floor remains almost as its builder left it, and its heavy girders with their rounded ends jutting out over the pavement below are a happy testimony to the worth of wealden builders and wealden wood. Wealden paint, on the other hand, has not improved. The girders are still dark and stained as oak (or is it chestnut?) should be stained by age and weather. But a yard or two away there are beams as massive and as well-seasoned which flout the lapse of centuries with a flaring and be-varnished buff.

The church is noble and tranquil without and within. A chained Bible stands on a lectern; another Bible, "bought May the tenth 1683," as the inscription runs on the title-page, "by William Saxby of Surry Esq., for the use and benefitt of all good Christians" is in use to-day. But the chief interest of the church to-day, as it has been its chief glory in the past, is its association with the great family of Cobham. The Cobhams of Sterborough—their castle stood two miles east of Lingfield, but has fallen—came of a line which through two of the most eventful centuries of English history was represented in almost every battle, consulted in the most difficult diplomacy, and allied at last by marriage to an English king. Their family goes back to a Justice itinerant who settled in Kent; but the real founder of the Surrey branch was the Justice's grandson, the first Lord Cobham of Sterborough. He was one of the greatest soldiers of his day, and, from the ransoms he had for the prisoners he took in battle, one of the richest. It was to him, with Sir John Chandos and the Earl of Warwick, that Edward III entrusted the Black Prince at Creçy; at Poictiers he rescued the King of France; he was Lord Admiral of the King's fleet "from the mouth of the Thames westwards"; and to end it all, he died in his bed of the plague. His effigy on his tomb tramples a Soldan, whose face has been duly painted green by the artist—an interesting relic, according to Mr. J.G. Waller, of Crusaders' traditions. There were not enough names for colours in those days, and perhaps the soldiers trying to describe the olive skins of the Arabs, may have called them green. For some obscure reason, too, the Soldan with his green face and his red beard is intended by the artist to be alive. Nobody can say why that should be, but the sculptor doubtless knew. He was a careful and accurate man; you can still trace below Lord Cobham's left knee the fastenings of the Garter.

Lord Cobham's wife, Joan, was the author of one of the longest wills in existence. She remembered everybody, including the prisoners in chains at Southwark and the sick men in the hospitals. Her executor Robert Belknappe was to have "a horn made from a griffin's hoof with a silver core, and the said horn has a silver rim and two silver gilt feet." But she was most anxious, poor lady, about her soul. "Before everything else" there were to be said 7000 masses, immediately upon her death, and the priests were to have £29 3s. 4d. for saying them. A penny a mass, that is, and the priests took the pence. But it was twelve years before they had said the masses.

The second Lord Cobham had mingled experiences of love and war. According to the inscription on his tomb, broken in the church but preserved in the College of Arms, he was "as brave as a leopard, a sumptuous entertainer, handsome, imperturbable, and courteous." He was a soldier, but the great struggle of his life had nothing to do with a battlefield. It was his attempt to secure a dispensation from the Pope for marrying his cousin in defiance of the canon law. Almost a year passed before the Pope gave his decision on the point, and then he ordered the unhappy cousins a horribly tedious penance. For four years they might not eat meat; they might not drink wine on Wednesdays, and at the six fasts they might only eat the second-best kinds of fish, and not those which were most agreeable to them. They had to feed four poor persons daily, and wait upon them themselves; and these poor persons were to have bread and meat or fish, with half a flagon of ale, and were to have new tunics and new russet hoods every year. All this was in addition to various heavy fines. The money part must have been the least exasperating: but it might have been amusing to choose the less agreeable kinds of fish.

The eldest son of this much be-penanced marriage had two distinctions. He was for some years the warden, at Sterborough castle, of the French heir to the throne, the Duke of Orleans who was taken prisoner at Agincourt; and he was the founder of Lingfield College. Lingfield College had a provost, six chaplains, four clerks, and thirteen poor persons, but none of its walls stand to-day. The life of the college farm alone survives, in an inventory of the implements and live stock taken at the Dissolution. Here are some extracts:—

The Laborers Chambre.

Itm a mattres ii bolsters A cou'lett a payer of Shets		iiii^s
Itm iii Axes & iii hedgying bylls		ii^s
Itm ii Augurs a whymble a chesell a horsecombe		x^d
Itm a Share a culter & a Towe (chain)		xviii^d
Itm a pycheforke		iii^d
Itm iii payer of new Trayes (? traces)		vi^d
Itm an old sleyng rope ii hempon alters & a spade		vi^d
Husbondry.
Itm ii wenes (wains) w^t weyles unshod		xiii^s iiii^d
Itm donge pott w^t wheles		xvi^d
Itm iii barrowes ii good & one bad		xld^d
Itm a grynstone		xx^d
Cattell.
fyrst viii Oxen price the yoke 1^s		x^li
Itm iiii Steres price the yoke xl^s xl^d		iiii^li vi^s viii^d
Itm xi bolocks whereof ix be yerelyngs and ii be ii	}	l^s
yerelyngs price	}	l^s
Itm iii Steres of iii yeres of age price		xl^s
Itm ten kene (kine) & a bull		vii^li vi^s viii^d
Itm vi sukkyng Calves		x^s
Itm v wenyers (weaning calves)		x^s
Itm iiii yewes & iii lambes		vi^s viii^d
Itm ii old geldyns pry^d (priced for) saddell		xxvi^s viii^d
Itm an old horse		v^s
Itm a lame horse to go to myll		v^s
Itm iii mares ii grey & i bay		xx^s
Itm a grey ii yere colt gelded price		vi^s viii^d
Itm ii sowes and a bore		vii^s
Corne.
Itm whete in the mowe price		xvi^s
Itm old Barley in the chaff		v^s iiii^d
Itm xii acres of whete price the acre		vi^s viii^d
Itm xxxiiii acres of ots price the acre ii viii^d		iiii^li viii^d
The Garnard.
Itm di (half) a quart of Barley		xvi^d
Itm halff a quart of Ots		xvi^d
Itm a busshell & a shald (sholl, scoop)		iiii^d
Itm in the barn a pfan and a Shald		iiii^d
Itm xx^c of hertlatth (? heart of oak laths)		vi^s viii^d.

Warriors and statesmen though the Cobhams were, one of their women folk has made more history than they. It was Eleanor, daughter of the founder of Lingfield College, who married the Lord Protector, the "good duke Humphrey" of Gloucester, and who was convicted of dire misdemeanours. Edward Hall, the old historian, writing of 1441, tells the story:—

"For first this yere, Dame Elyanour Cobham, wife of the said duke, was accused of treason, for that she, by sorcery and enchantment entended to destroy the kyng, to thentent to aduance and to promote her husbande to the crowne: upon thys she was examined in St. Stephen's Chappel before the Bisshop of Canterbury; and there by examinacion convict and judged to do open penance, in iij open places, within the city of London, and after that adjudged to perpetuall prisone in the Isle of Man, under the kepyng of Sir Jhon Stanley, Knyght. At the same season were arrested, as ayders and counsailers to the sayde duchesse, Thomas Southwel, preiste and chanon of St. Stephen's, in Westminster, Jhon Hum, preist, Roger Bolyngbroke, a conyng nycromancier, and Margerie Jourdayne, surnamed the witche of Eye, to whose charge it was laied y^t thei, at the request of the duchesse, had devised an image of waxe, representing the kyng, which by their sorcery, a litle and litle consumed, entendyng thereby in conclusion to waist, and destroy the kynges person, and so to bring him to death; for the which treison they wer adjudged to dye, and so Margery Jourdayne was brent in Smithfelde, and Roger Bolyngbroke was drawn and quartered at Tiborne, takyng upon his death, that there was neuer no such thing by theim ymagined; Jhon Hum had his pardon, and Southwel died in the toure before execution."