But the most interesting feature of St. Mary's is the group of wall-paintings in the chapel of St. John, north of the nave. These are second in importance only to the famous painting at Chaldon, and have been admirably explained by Mr. J.G. Waller, writing in the Surrey Archæological Collections. They belong to that curious age when paintings on church walls were used as texts and preached from on Sundays, to be scratched and whitewashed out of recognition in later years by destroyers and "restorers" alike. The subjects chosen by the painter in St. Mary's Church are peculiar and strangely grouped. The centre of the group is a "Majesty," the conventional representation of the second coming of Christ. The head of the Christ has its nimbus; that He is "in his glory" you can see by the mantle of royal purple, and "the holy angels with Him" are represented by two little cramped figures, set apart to make room for other drawings. Altogether there are six medallions besides the "Majesty," and there are also designs in the spandrils above the arch, but these are separate from the subjects of the medallions. The medallions, Mr. Waller explains, represent certain scenes in the lives of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, though only two of the stories depicted belong to the Bible. One of them, next to the "Majesty," shows the Evangelist seated in a caldron of boiling oil, in which he is being held by a hideous tormentor with a pitchfork, while a seated figure of Christ confers protection upon the Saint. In another medallion the Evangelist is seen raising to life the dead Drusiana, a lady of Ephesus who died just before the Apostle came to the city; he is also shown turning sticks and stones into gold and jewels, which he did in illustration of a sermon preached against riches. In a third medallion the Saint drinks harmlessly from a chalice of poison which has just killed two malefactors dead at his feet; and in a fourth the other John, the Baptist, is painted with a rope round his neck, dragged by an executioner before Herod. The executioner next beheads the saint, and evidently sees some terrible portent on doing so, for his hair stands on end, and his hand flies up in horror. The two other medallions are separate subjects. In one, a figure with a rope round his neck is dragged before Christ by demons; other demons, one red and one white, scream and hold out threatening claws; perhaps their question is "Art Thou come hitherto torment us before the time?" The other subject is obscure. A Jew, apparently, is being baptised; and a deed with seals is being examined by another figure, over a stream of water and blood. Mr. Waller thinks that the reference is to a legend of a Jew who desecrated an image of Christ with a spear, in imitation of the story of the crucifixion, when out of the wound there gushed a stream of blood and water. This miracle converted the Jew and his friends, who immediately made over their synagogue to the Christian Church. That would explain the sealed deed.
Other paintings in the spandrils—pictures of Soul-weighing and Punishment—belong to other theologies. St. Michael holds the balance, and a demon tries to press down one of the scales so that the soul being weighed may kick the beam. But the subject of the painting is, of course, older than St. Michael. The doctrine that souls are weighed, and that devils and angels strive for the possession of them, is one of the oldest in the history of the world's religions. It finds a place in all the creeds; it belongs to Brahminism, to Buddhism, to Mahommedanism; it is identical with the Ritual of the Dead of Egyptian mythology, in which the souls of men are weighed before Osiris, and pray for mercy as they are weighed. As at Chaldon, in another part of the painting the condemned souls are being taken away. A demon carries them off, tied up in a bundle, to the fires of hell. Doubtless the Guildford congregations, listening Sunday after Sunday to the exposition of such potent texts, came to have little taste for theology that was not served up hot and strong.
Guildford has had other teachers besides theologians. The school, a grey, venerable building, which fronts on the High Street above Trinity Church, is the oldest in the county. It was founded in 1509, by one Robert Beckingham, a rich London grocer, who owned property in Guildford. But his benefactions did not permit any great latitude in building, and it was not until Edward VI had given the school a charter and a grant, and other great Guildford men had provided funds for building and endowment, that the school, nearly at the end of the sixteenth century, found itself in full working order. Since then it has educated some famous scholars. Guildford's greatest man, George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury; his brother, Robert Abbot, Bishop of Salisbury; another brother, Sir Maurice Abbot, Lord Mayor of London; John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich; Henry Cotton, Bishop of Norwich, and his brother, William Cotton, Bishop of Exeter; Arthur Onslow, Speaker of the House of Commons; Richard Valpy, author of the Greek grammar; and Sir George Grey, the Colonial statesman, Governor in 1846 of New Zealand and in 1855 of the Cape, are among its distinguished pupils. Of late years, perhaps, Charterhouse has drained away some of the supply of future Abbots and Onslows. But the school still flourishes, and the memory of its "great" headmaster, Dr. Merriman, is kept green by middle-aged Guildfordians.
Guildford's inns have been famous for centuries. Guildford is the only town in Surrey which Camden mentions in his Britannia, as having good inns; John Aubrey remarks that they are "the best perhaps in England; the Red Lion particularly can make fifty beds, the White Hart is not so big, but has more noble rooms." John Taylor, the Water Poet, in his Catalogue of Taverns in Ten Shires near London, made in 1636, goes out of his way to mention particularly that Guildford "hath very faire Innes and good entertainment at the Tavernes, the Angell, the Crowne, the White hart, and the Lyon"; and Guildford only, of all the towns he mentions, has all its inns either still standing or represented under the same names, wholly or partially rebuilt. The Angel has kept more of what is old than the others, including a panelled hall with a seventeenth century clock, and some fine timber and brickwork best seen from the inn yard. Under the Angel, too, lies one of a pair of vaulted crypts which have puzzled all the archæologists. The two crypts lie on opposite sides of the street, and are beautiful examples of fourteenth century work in chalk; in one of them, too, there was evidently once some fresco work, but that has nearly all been rubbed away. What were the crypts for? No one knows for certain. Mr. Thackeray Turner thinks they were without doubt the undercrofts of merchants' houses; but there is better reason for supposing that they are remains of some religious foundation, perhaps of White Friars. At one time there stood in the centre of the High Street, between the two crypts, the "Fyshe Crosse," which John Russell, the Guildford historian, tells us carried on its summit a flying angel carved in stone, and was erected by the White Friars in 1345. There is no evidence to prove that this was so, though it may have been; in any case, the "Fyshe Crosse" was demolished in 1595 as being abominably in the way of the street traffic. If the White Friars ever had a convent near the cross, possibly the Angel was originally their guest-house, afterwards turned into an inn.
The Red Lion was the best inn, according to Pepys. It was at the Red Lion that he "lay in the room the King lately lay in," which would have pleased Pepys; and it was with the drawers of the inn, one Saturday night, that he and Mr. Creed made merry over the minister of the town, who had a girdle as red as his face, but preached next day a better sermon than Pepys had looked for. The inn had a garden, out of which on another occasion the gossiping little Admiralty official cut "sparagus for supper—the best that ever I ate but in the house last year." Doubtless the host of the Red Lion liked Pepys's recommendation, but Pepys and his wife must have occasionally been rather noisy guests. It was in the same inn garden that he and Mr. Creed "played the fool a great while, trying who could go best over the edge of an old fountain well; and I won a quart of sack of him." Afterwards, at supper, "my wife and I did talk high, she against and I for Mrs. Pierce (that she was a beauty) till we were both angry." Pepys's journeys to Portsmouth, where his Admiralty business took him, seem generally to have been broken at Guildford, which was the first stopping place after leaving "Fox Hall" as he calls Vauxhall. The roads must have been pretty bad, for on one occasion the coach lost its way for "three or four miles" about Cobham. However, they ended as usual at the Red Lion, and "dined together, and pretty merry" and so back to Fox Hall.
A gentler traveller through Guildford used to drive along the Hog's Back in the early morning, breakfast at the Lion or the Angel, and reach Sloane Street at half-past six or so in the evening, when she was glad to get to bed early. That was when Jane Austen was writing at Chawton. One of her letters, very typical of her in its regard for the pleasant little minutiæ of a day's business, describes a drive from Chawton up to London. At Guildford she was "very lucky in my gloves—got them at the first shop I went to, though I went into it rather because it was near than because it looked like a shop, and gave only four shillings for them; after which everybody at Chawton will be hoping and predicting that they cannot be good for anything." She was then at work on Emma, whom we meet again at Leatherhead.
Guildford High Street has kept its main features for centuries. But the town has lost one of its chief buildings, which only survives in the name of Friary Street, and in one or two other names, such as Walnut Tree Close. This was the old Dominican Friary probably founded by Black Friars in the first half of the thirteenth century. Not a stone of the old Friary remains in its place, but the building saw in its time a good deal of Guildford history. Prince Henry, the eldest son of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile, died there of an illness which not even the skill of the friars could abate, though they tried their utmost and sent messengers riding to London for syrups and candies. The friars had a good deal to do with royalty, and had many presents from the kings. Edward I gave them oak trees for fuel and timber; Edward II gave them eight shillings; Henry IV and his family lodged with them and gave them forty shillings; Henry VII let them gather fallen wood in his park, but never gave them a penny; Henry VIII gave them many presents, of which the largest were two of five pounds, and his daughter, Princess Mary, gave them seven shillings and sixpence. But the friary fell, of course, at the Dissolution and after that, apparently, Henry used the building, which he enlarged, for his own purposes when he came to Guildford to hunt. Later, probably before the time of James I, the old friary buildings were demolished and another house built which went with the Guildford Park estate through several families. One of its owners was Daniel Colwall, a founder of the Royal Society, who conferred on its annals the dismal distinction of a suicide. He pistolled himself in an armchair, and the chair is still shown, black with blood, in the master's quarters of the Abbot's Hospital. Later still, the house was used as cavalry barracks, and three years after Waterloo, when perhaps barracks seemed less necessary than before, the buildings were pulled to pieces.
Guildford once had nine "gates"; eight have disappeared. They are marked on an old map of the borough, classically described as the "Ichnography or ground plan of Guildford." Of six "gates" or streets south of the High Street, Ratsgate, Bookersgate, Tunsgate, Saddlersgate, Bakersgate, and Shipgate, only Tunsgate remains; and on the north side Swangate, Bull's Head Gate, and Coffeehouse Gate have vanished. The charm of the chief buildings remains, but here and there modern needs have spoiled the smaller houses. In the High Street, for instance, Number 25, not much more than a hundred years ago, must have been a quite perfect little house, with its large casements and their curious iron fastenings, its noble staircase, and its delightful doorway. It was once the private residence of the Martyr family, who were hereditary town clerks of Guildford, but unfortunately it has now been turned into a shop. The proprietor very courteously allows visitors to examine the interior, but much of the fascination of the ground floor, with its panels under the windows and its delicate iron railing, has vanished altogether, and can only be recovered in imagination with the help of an old drawing. This house, by the way, a century ago contained a strange relic, strangely lost. When Peter de Rupibus, the great Bishop of Winchester, died at his castle at Farnham, his body was buried in Winchester Cathedral, but the heart was taken to Waverley Abbey. About 1730 it was accidentally dug up among the Abbey ruins, and brought to Guildford, where Mr. John Martyr kept it at Number 25, safe in its original lead case. A hundred years later the heart disappeared. No one knows how it vanished, or where it lies.
One building has altered very little. That is the old town hall, whose clock swings out over the road, and has been sketched more often, perhaps, than any clock in Surrey. The original town hall belongs to the time of Elizabeth, and was probably built into the present structure, which dates from 1683. It is in some ways the chief feature of the High Street, with its heavy balcony, supported by monstrous black oak brackets, and its cupola and bell-turret. The clock has a separate history. In the year when the town hall was built, one John Aylward, a clockmaker, came to Guildford and asked leave to set up in business. He was a "foreigner," that is, he came from another part of England, and the Gild-merchant refused permission. Undaunted, he retired and set up his shop outside the borough, made a great clock, presented it to the governing body, and so obtained the freedom of the town.