To arrive at Guildford by train is like walking into a garden over a rubbish heap. In the grace of its building, the charm of its colour, the fascination of the prospects of its hillside High Street, no town in Surrey, and perhaps only Oxford in England, is comparable with it. But between the railway station and the High Street it is desolation and blank walls. A few pretty old cottages jut out over a narrow pavement; beyond a huddled roof or two rises the tower of St. Nicholas' Church, umber and solid; nearly all else is tumbled down ugliness, broken brickwork, mud and shaggy grass. A clear space, a level green, a bed of flowers—what an introduction that might be to Guildford. But, doubtless, the rubbish heap is, or some day will be, too valuable as building land.
Beyond the turn of the road is the most delightful street in the south of England. It rises from the bridge crossing the Wey steep into blue air over the hill. Each side of it is a stairway of roofs up the slope, a medley of façades, a jumble of architecture astonishing in sheer extravagance and variety. Gabled houses, red-tiled and gay with rough-cast and fresh paint; dull, sad-faced houses with sleepy windows like half-shut eyes; square, solid Georgian houses for doctors with white chokers and snuff-boxes, and prim old ladies with mittened wrists; low, little dolls'-houses, red brick neatly pointed; tall, slim houses graceful with slender casements and light shafts of wood; casements nobly elaborate in wood-carving and heavy with leaded panes; bay windows which should belong to nurseries and high, square-latticed windows which should light a library, delicately fastened with wrought iron; painted pillars supporting window seats for cats and demure young ladies; broad-stepped entrances to hotel halls, and archways under which barrels roll to bursting cellars; Guildford High Street is a model of what the High Street of an English town should be. Has it a single dominating feature, or is its air of distinction merely compact of the grace and old-worldliness of its shops and houses? Perhaps the single extreme impression left by the High Street is its clock, swung far out over the road. Massive, black and gilt, and fastened to the face of the old Town Hall with an ingenious structure of steel stays, it has told Guildford the time for two centuries and a quarter.
Guildford High Street has its landmarks of history in its Hospital, its School, and its Town Hall, but its oldest standing record is in one of its churches. The tower of St. Mary's church, indeed, contains the most ancient piece of building in the town, perhaps in the county. Archæologists are to be found who will argue that part of it, at least, belongs to the reign of Alfred, though there is little evidence to show that stone was used for building in Surrey before the eleventh century. Alfred, at all events, mentions Guildford in his will; he spells it "Guldeford," one of the dozen old ways of spelling a name that has always been a puzzle and a pleasure to the etymologists. What does Guildford mean? Naturally "The Ford of the Guild." The town had a guild of merchants, and there was a ford; nothing could be simpler. But the simple explanations are usually wrong; and the most convincing derivation is one which has been suggested by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who discovered a river named Guilou in Asser's Deeds of Alfred, and points to several other names along the Wey which may be traced to the same source. There is Willey House, and Willey Mill near Farnham; Wilsham Farm near Alton, and Willey Green on another branch of the river. Guildford, then, is probably the "ford of the Guilou," which in Welsh is presumably Gwili. Where, then, did the name Wey come from? It may originally have been Wye. The corruption would be easy; indeed, Cockney boating parties very likely get the right pronunciation, by accident, to-day.
Older than St. Mary's tower in associations, if not in stone-work, is Guildford Castle. The Castle stands on a mound, partly natural, perhaps, and almost certainly partly artificial. Originally, perhaps, the mound was used for an early English fortification; it was heightened by scraping up earth from a ditch at its bottom, and round it was built up a palisade of wood; possibly there was a wooden house on the top of it, and then it would have looked precisely like one of the fortified mounds in the Bayeux Tapestry. Later, it was enclosed in a shell keep; later still, a Norman square keep was built inside the shell keep; to-day, except the walls of the square keep, almost all the Castle is gone. It was never a Castle in much more than name. It has no associations of great battles; it never stood a siege; it never even held a royal prisoner. In King John's reign it was already used as a gaol, and a gaol it remained until James I, in 1612, gave it to one Francis Carter of Guildford, who used it as a private residence. Four hundred years before it had seen all its fighting. That was when the French Dauphin, invited by John's angry barons, marched against it and took it from defenders who seem to have cared little whether they kept it or not.
But the Castle still has its legend—a legend only—of cruelty and bloody massacre. In 1036, when Harold Harefoot was king, Alfred the son of Ethelred was travelling from Normandy to join his mother at Winchester. He landed in Kent, and was marching with his Normans along the Way, whether or not with the intention of eventually trying to recover his father's kingdom is uncertain; at all events, at Guildford he was seized and put to death. So much is history; legend supplies a dreadful embellishment. Early in the morning after their capture, Alfred's followers were led out into the street and condemned to death. Nine out of every ten men were butchered, until out of six hundred Normans sixty only were left alive. That was not enough to glut their captors' fury. The sixty were gone through again, and all but six were ferociously tortured to death. Alfred himself was given to Harold, who put out his eyes, loaded him with chains, and threw him into prison, where he died. Fortunately, nobody need believe the story.
The Castle Gate, Guildford.
An environment of meaner modern buildings has spoiled the setting in which the castle should stand. Seen from certain points, especially from below, the keep is not a very imposing structure; you cannot get far enough away from it. Far the best view is to be had from the rising ground to the south-east, where you can set the castle in outline against the sky. Then it takes on something of the romance of a Norman ruin, with its tumbling masses of ivy, its broken battlements, and the mixed greys and ochres of its masonry. The interior is uninteresting, except for the sad little carvings left by prisoners on the walls, among them a crucifix, a hermit, St. Catherine's wheel, and St. Christopher. If St. Christopher was not exactly the patron saint of prisoners, he was the kindliest saint to carve on a dungeon wall. If you looked on St. Christopher you were safe, at least for that day, from sudden death. How many thousand days of "safety" he must have brought to the Guildford prisoners!
The castle enceinte is now laid out as a pleasure ground, with all a public garden's advantages and disadvantages. Public taste demands "bedding out," even though geraniums and calceolarias fit unhappily enough with masonry fourteen feet thick and Saxon earthworks. A bowling green is in its proper place; thorns and old rose-trees have a right to grow round ruined castles; wallflowers belong to stones and mortar. But lobelias do not. Still, something even worse than bedding-out might have befallen the Castle grounds. Dr. G.C. Williamson, in his valuable little book Guildford in the Olden Time, mentions that, when the grounds were bought for the Corporation in 1886, premiums were offered to various landscape gardeners for plans showing the best means of laying out the space. One of the plans which was rejected, although attractive in other ways, "started its schedule of work with a suggestion that the ugly ruin in the centre of the grounds should be removed, and in lieu of it should be erected a light iron bandstand painted green, picked out with gold." What, one wonders, were the other attractions of the "landscape"?
Just possibly Guildford Castle was for some time a royal residence. Nearly all the old kings used to visit the country round for hunting and hawking. Henry II, soon after he came to the throne, enclosed a large tract of land north of Guildown and made it into a royal park, but whether, when he came to hunt, he stayed at the Castle itself or at the palace which was built in the park, none of the chroniclers say. The palace has long since disappeared, though it is said that the outline can be traced when the land on which it stood is under corn. The corn is supposed to turn a different colour along the lines of the foundations. In later days, the kings certainly stayed at the palace, and not at the Castle. John was at Guildford nineteen times in eleven years, and kept Christmas there in 1200 "with uncommon splendour and magnificence." Henry III had his wines stored at Guildford, probably in the caverns near the Castle, and once, with a capital eye for business, ordered that no other wines should be sold in the bailiwick of Surrey until his had found a buyer. Edward I, according to an untrustworthy story, brought Adam Gordon, a highway robber, to Guildford after he had fought and beaten him with his own royal hands, and forgiven him afterwards. The next two Edwards were often at the palace; Henry VI and Edward IV lay there; Henry VII made Sir Reginald Bray, ancestor of Surrey's historian, keeper of the Park and Manor; Henry VIII hunted in the park, and Elizabeth travelled about so frequently between the royal residences at Guildford and elsewhere that the county actually framed a remonstrance against having to pay so much for her carriages and horses. She was probably the last of the sovereigns to ride through the town from north to south, though Charles II was feasted there at the Restoration and presented with a service of plate, a proceeding which swamped the Corporation in debt.