Great Bookham has grown a good deal since the d'Arblays knew it. But the splendid shell of an ancient elm still shades the churchyard gate; the flint-walled church, with ivy bunched over its buttressed tower, and lichens glowing on the Horsham slabs of its chapel roof, can have changed but little. Two or three of its monuments are interesting. One is a brass plate recounting the virtues and the pedigree of Edmund Slyfield and his wife Elizabeth. They were of Slyfield Place; he was "a stoute Esquire who alwaies set God's feare before his Eyes"; she was a model of all the graces, and descended from the Paulets, Capells, Sydneys, Gainsfords, Finches, Arundels, Whites, and Lamberts—a good long list to bring into an epitaph, but there are twenty-eight lines of honest doggerel to do it in. Another monument is quite as striking, which represents Colonel Thomas Moore in the full uniform of the commanding officer of a regiment of foot in the reign of Queen Anne, which the sculptor's convention has idealised into a mixture of a bathing costume, a kilt, and a plaid. The church, indeed, is a museum of records of different times and tastes to a degree uncommon in far more important buildings. In the east wall of the chancel is a slab commemorating in three Latin hexameters the founding of the building by John de Rutherwyk, the great Abbot whom we meet at Chertsey; and the east window of the Slyfield chapel is dedicated, in a long, biographical inscription in brass, to the memory of Lord Raglan, who as Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, military secretary to the Duke of Wellington, lost an arm at the Duke's side at Waterloo, and forty years later commanded the British army in the East before Sebastopol, where he died. Lord Raglan's connection with Great Bookham is slight: but his niece, Lady Mary Farquhar, who put up the window, lived at Polesden, a mile or two away.
Slyfield Place.
Last of the villages on the road from Guildford to Leatherhead is Fetcham. A park, a road bordered by cottages and a pretty house or two, and a battlemented church-tower deep among yews, and hollies, and ivy-trees—Fetcham is as pleasantly small and quiet as her western neighbours. But what a string of churches it is, along these twelve miles of Surrey roadway; nine villages, each with its grey-walled building and the cool whiteness of the arches, aisles, and chancels. No pilgrim of the old centuries could tire on such a journey. To-day he might. Only four of the church doors give him a welcome.
Above Fetcham's church, which, like Stoke D'Abernon and one or two others, fronts on the flowers and lawns of a private garden, great bunches of mistletoe darken the winter tree-tops. Fetcham is on the border of the mistletoe country, which stretches from Leatherhead to Dorking and Boxhill.
CHAPTER XI
GODALMING
A country town.—Peter the Great's breakfast.—Pykes in the Wey.—Dogs and fish-carts.—Off to Botany Bay.—Owen Manning.—A most malignant priest.—Eashing Bridges.—Peperharow deer.—Loseley from a distance.—Charterhouse in the future.
The best view of Godalming is from the hill roads above Farncombe. Not many towns group themselves so well against hills and woods; few have so spacious and quiet a foreground. The church stands on the Wey; the churchyard runs down to the very banks, and the noble leaded spire lifts its chanticleer higher, I think, from the tower than any other church in Surrey. Between the foot of the hill and the Wey spreads wide meadowland; the Wey flows tranquilly by willow-herb and alder; beyond the Wey are the red roofs of Godalming clustered in the trees. It is the completest little country town; the green fields in front and the woods beyond set it compact together, clustered as a country town should be about its church and its High Street, with the river running clear at its side.