To the north of the church stands a thing of terror. The full story of the murder of the "unknown sailor" belongs to Hindhead; but Thursley has his grave. It lies apart, in the centre of a stretch of green grass; above it, a stone too tall for quietness; no other grave shares that lonely lawn. Here is the queer, mis-spelt epitaph:—
When pitying Eyes to see my Grave shall come,
And with a generous Tear bedew my Tomb;
Here shall they read my melancholy Fate,
With Murder and Barbarity complete.
In perfect Health, and in the Flower of Age,
I fell a Victim to three Ruffians Rage;
On bended Knees I mercy strove t' obtain,
Their Thirst of Blood made all Entreaties vain.
No dear Relation, or still dearer Friend,
Weeps my hard Lot, or miserable End;
Yet o'er my sad Remains, (my Name unknown,)
A generous Public have inscrib'd this Stone.
Above the epitaph a rough carving shows the sailor kneeling to his murderers. Mr. Baring-Gould, in the Broom Squire makes Iver Verstage, the artist, laugh at the crudely drawn figures. But the horror of this grave, from which all the other quieter graves are gathered apart, has very little laughter in it.
Thursley Common once rang with the picks and hammers of an iron mine; it was one of the centres of a great industry of the Weald. The surface of the common is scarred with the pits from which the ironstone was dug; the hammer ponds lie in a string along a tiny tributary of the Wey. John Ray, in his Collection of English Words not generally Used, published in 1672, and printed in the Sussex Archæological Collections, gives an account of the methods of the old iron smelters. A stream, or a pond with a stream running through it, would be dammed, and the fall of water at the lower end would then work two pairs of bellows for the blast for the furnace and a wheel which raised and let fall a hammer. The fuel used was charcoal. Before the ironstone was put into the furnace it was "mollified" or broken up into small pieces by being burnt between layers of charcoal. Then it was put into the furnace, and when melted drawn off in long lumps, called pigs or sows. Then the sows were taken to the forge or hammer, and beaten into square "blooms," two feet long; then the blooms were beaten into "anconies," three feet long; then the "anconies" had their ends nicely shaped, and the iron was ready for market.
A very extensive "collection of English words not generally used" is contained in an inventory of tools supplied to William Yalden, when he took over the Thursley ironworks. Perhaps an ironmaster of to-day might recognise some of those I have chosen:—
Twoe fargons. A beame way anckrues. One turnsowe. One hurdgier. One twewer trole; one twewer hook. Two hursts and brights to them. 2 eyron rackes. A hamer and ane bill and helfe and armes redy placed. Twoe boyghts about the Chafery. One quas to stopp the fyer. A neew locke.
Mr. Baring-Gould has described one of the natives of Thursley Common in the Broom Squire:—
"The natterjack, so rare elsewhere, differing from a toad in that it has a yellow band down its back, has here a paradise. It may be seen at eve perched on a stalk of willow herb or running—it does not hop—round the sundew, clearing the glutinous stamens of the flies that have been caught by them, and calling in a tone like the warning note of the nightingale."
