CHAPTER XL
OXTED AND LIMPSFIELD
East of Godstone.—Tandridge.—The Notebook of a Surrey Justice.—Sturdy rogues.—Oxted.—A Rustic Guildford.—Mittens and corduroys.—Limpsfield.—Self-criticism.—The Old Oak Chair.—Titsey Park and the Roman villa.—Tatsfield above the downs.
East of Godstone five churches stand in a bow stretched to the Kent boundary. Not each church has a village. Oxted and Limpsfield, in the middle of the bow, are near by a railway station, and Limpsfield plays golf on the common: both are little old villages with many new houses about them. But Tandridge and Titsey, towards each point of the bow, are churches almost without cottages, but with great parks beside them: Tatsfield, easternmost of all Surrey villages, has houses and cottages, but the church stands apart, looking out over the Weald.
Tandridge was once Tanrige, and had a priory, which disappeared, of course, at the Dissolution. It was quite a little place; its earliest record, dated somewhere near the end of the twelfth century, describes it as the Hospital of St. James, in the Ville of Tanregge, with three priests, in perpetuity there serving God, and Confraters of the said Hospital. So Odo, son of William de Dammartin, writes of it in his deed of gift of lands, a windmill, and silver cups to make a chalice. The establishment was less a priory than a small hospice, in which poor and needy persons were cared for, and to which wayfarers might come for refuge; one of those gentle places for the help and refreshment of sorrowing men that are set so strangely before the days of Tudor cruelties and tortures. The prior's hospice welcomed and comforted the tired poor; Elizabeth's age beat them, men and women, for sturdy rogues.
Tandridge Church.
Later Tandridge history centres round the church and Tandridge Court. Tandridge Court has had noble owners, but perhaps the most interesting is Bostock Fuller, who was a Justice of the Peace in the days of Elizabeth, and who has left a notebook describing his work and the cases that came before him, which takes his reader extraordinarily close to Tudor times and customs. The manuscript, entitled Note Book of a Surrey Justice, is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower in the Surrey Archæological Collections, has made extracts from the Bodleian transcript. Here are some of them:—
Apryll 1608.