Fireplace in White Horse, Shere.
The road runs eastward a mile from Sherborne ponds to Shere. Who first named the Shirebourne pond the Silent Pool? The old name is the best, and the water of the pond ought to be added to the beauties of Shere. If Shere is to be counted the prettiest Surrey village of all, I think it is the Tillingbourne which decides the choice. Six or seven other villages occur, each with its own fascination; Alfold, deep among the primroses of the Fold Country; Chiddingfold, with its old inn and the red cottages set round the green; Compton, with its flower gardens and old timber; Thorpe, quiet among the elms; Oxted, lining the hill road under the downs, and the Bell inn at the cross-ways; Betchworth and its cottage roses; Coldharbour dotted over the sandstone; Friday Street, hardly a village, on the banks of the tarn among the pines; but each fails compared with Shere. Friday Street shows the reason plain. Without the water Friday Street would pass unnoticed; it is the water which decides for Shere. The village groups itself with the little brook running through the middle: a low bridge crosses the stream, villagers sit on the bridge, white ducks paddle about the current and stand upside down among the weeds: beyond the brook are the tiny village green and the shade of elms; on one side of the village green is the old inn, the White Horse; and on the other the grey tower and the quiet of the churchyard. But it is the sparkle and the chatter of the Tillingbourne which are the first charm of all.
The White Horse is a pattern of an old village inn, with panelled rooms and dark beams over its ceilings, and a parlour hung with oil paintings, with the air of the Surrey countryside blowing through them. Your host is the artist, and fellow artists come to the White Horse to sketch with him. It is the only inn in Surrey I know which also sells a guide to the neighbourhood, and a good guide too, so far as directions for finding walks among the hills and woods can make a guide-book. Mr. Marriott Watson has written an introduction to it, of which the sum is that all walks start from the White Horse, and all walkers come back to it.
Shere Church.
Shere church is a medley of alterations; perhaps its most interesting connection is its link with the old Surrey family of Bray. The Brays have lived at Shere for more than four hundred years. The first Sir Robert Bray was a knight of Richard I, and one of his descendants, Sir Reginald, was granted the manor of Shere, in 1497. Sir Reginald was one of the most distinguished of all the long line; he was a Knight of the Garter, and the Bray Chapel in St. George's, Windsor, is his work; his emblem the bray, or seed-crusher, is on the ceiling. But the member of the family who had most to do with the country was William Bray, the second of the two classical writers of the county history. William Bray was born in 1736, and was a scholar whose learning was only equalled by his astonishing vitality. He began his main work at an age when most men's work is done. When the Rev. Owen Manning, after years of labour at the history of Surrey, went blind and had to give up the hope of a lifetime, William Bray finished the book. He was untiring. The first volume appeared in 1804, when he was sixty-eight, and when the second volume was published, five years latter, he wrote in his preface "that there was not a parish described in it which he had not visited, and only two churches the insides of which he had not seen, and the monuments in which he had not personally examined, once at least, but to many he made repeated visits." The third volume came out in 1814, and then, at the age of seventy-eight, he edited John Evelyn's Memoirs from the original MSS. at Wotton. He was to live nearly twenty years after that, and he died at Shere at the age of ninety-seven; a tablet stands to his memory in the chancel of the church.
Shere.
Mr. Granville Leveson-Gower, in a paper on "Shere and its Rectors" in the Surrey Archæological Collections, gives the items of a will he discovered by accident, interesting as showing the amount of stock kept upon his farm by a yeoman of the sixteenth century. The will is dated 27th October, 1562, and the testator is John Risbridger—one of the good old Surrey yeoman names, like Evershed and Whapshot and Enticknap. He describes himself as "John Risbridger of Shere, yeoman, sicke of bodie and yet walkinge. His body to be buried in Parish Church of Shere, 'without my seats ende.' 1 calf and 2 shepe, with sufficient breade and drinke thereunto to be bestowed and spent at his burial towards the reliefe of the poore there assembled. To every man and maid servant, 1 ewe shepe; to Alice Stydman his maid, one herfore (i.e. heifer) bullocke, of two years and 15s: to his son William all his lease or terme of years in lands called Stonehill, and to him 4 oxen, 2 steares of 3 yeres, 2 horse beastes, a weane (wagon) yoke, cheynes to draw withal, 2 keyne, half a hundreth of shepe. Children, John, William, and Edward. To daughter Dorothie, £6. 13s. 4d.; all residue to wife Katherine. Proved 3rd May, 1654, by William Risbridger."
Some extracts made by Mr. Leveson-Gower from the Parish Registers have an interest which is not peculiar to Shere, but the Registers are a good example of village history written in the names of its inhabitants. You begin with the simplicity, almost the affection, of the early entries, the Johns and Anns and Marys repeated year after year, and the few words describing the older people; then comes the Georgian day when Fielding and Richardson were on the bookshelves, and children were named after the heroines of the novels. Here are a dozen entries out of hundreds:—