CHAPTER XIV
THE FOLD COUNTRY
The Wild Garden of Surrey.—Birds and their valentines.—Nightingales at Dunsfold.—Alfold Stocks.—Three yews in a line.—The King's Evil.—Alfold industries.—A dry canal.—Chiddingfold.—Red brick and Madonna lilies.—The Enticknaps.—Hungry scholars.—The Crown Inn.—On Highdown Ball.—A green ride in the woods.—The Chiddingfold Foxhounds.
The "Fold Country" is the wild garden of the Surrey weald, and the month to walk in it is May. Alfold, Ifold, Durfold, Dunsfold, Chiddingfold, and other "folds" lie among oakwoods and ploughlands that once were oakwoods; the railway runs nowhere nearer than seven miles from the heart of the woods, and in the woods the timbered cottages stand apart, old and tranquil. To me, the associations of the "Fold Country" centre round the memory of a First of May hotter and more glorious with flowers than any I can remember. I had started to walk from Baynards Station west among the woods, with the recollection of four days of north-east winds and heavy snow that had brought April to a close. The change was incredible. There, in the roads that ran through the oakwoods and hazel copses, it was the heat of summer. The birds had drawn new valentines. A cock chaffinch, gayest of suitors, danced round his demure hen in the roadway, careless of any pedestrian in that deep country; wrens crept like mice among the stubs of the hedge; the grass by the roadside and the ditch was lighted with primroses. A narrow copse of cut hazel, bordering the road on the Sussex boundary, was a carpet of primroses, anemones, milkmaids, and dog violets; spires of purple orchids stood above shining celandines; there could have been nothing more brilliant in a garden. On the hedge-bank a hen pheasant rustled through the undergrowth, caught sight of me, crept to a rabbit-scratch and crouched on the brown earth within a yard of my hand; for the birds are tamer in the Fold Country than beyond it. Above other hedge-banks, in other copses, the cuckoos called all that morning, from Sussex to Surrey, over the border road.
Two of the Fold Country farmhouses by that road, framed in that sunny setting, belong to the memories of a Surrey May. One is a timbered house twenty yards in Sussex, with white curtains and flower-pots behind its diamond-paned lattices, and clumps of primroses growing about stone causeways up to the very door. The other is Pallinghurst farm, a mile further on the road, whose long, lichened roofs shelter red-tiled walls and masses of ivy round a white doorway; the garden is a cluster of gnarled apple-trees, and over it and about the tall farm chimneys, when I saw it that morning, flew the first swallows of the year. But it was not the swallows that made summer that May-day. Beyond Alfold, on the road that runs out of Sidney Wood up to Dunsfold Common, there are coppices of thick undergrowth, set about orchards of grey-lichened fruit-trees and stretches of low cut hazel sheeted with primroses. There I heard the first nightingale of the year, a single jet of song as the brown tail flickered in the covert; a hundred yards further down the road there were three singing together; Dunsfold Common came in a burst of yellow gorse, and the song of a nightingale thrilled up from the gorse; another bird, beyond Dunsfold, sang high in the hedgerow in full sunlight. That is a Dunsfold lane, for me; a wild plum-tree branching out of the hedge dressed with the whitest of delicate blossom, and in the white blossom, with the hot blue of a May sky beyond and between, a nightingale's throat throbbing with singing.
Alfold almost touches the Sussex boundary, and is perhaps the most out-of-the-way little village in Surrey. I find Mr. Ralph Nevill, writing in 1889, lamenting that it was once charmingly rural, but that "the breath of the pestilence has passed over and vulgarised it." There are new houses in it, and new generally means hideous; but the pestilence has left some old work worth looking at. At the eastern end of the village stands Alfold House, a sixteenth-century timbered building; at the western end is the church, grey with its shingled spire, built like Thursley and Elstead on massive oak beams. A broad stone causeway leads to the door; in May, the springing grass shines with daffodils.
Alfold, like Shalford, Abinger and Newdigate, still has its village stocks. They stand at the churchyard gate, better worth sitting in, so far as appearance goes, than the other three. Alfold, too, has a great old yew-tree, one of a row of three in the Fold churchyards. Has it ever been noticed that the Alfold, Dunsfold, and Hambledon yews stand almost in a mathematically straight line? From Alfold to Hambledon is five miles as the crow flies, and Dunsfold is almost exactly half way between the two.
Three Alfold villagers, perhaps, made the journey to London, or to some halting-place in the royal progress, to seek the grace of King James II. The parish register-book contains the entry of their names on the title-page:—
| 2 May | } | 1687 | { | I gave certificates to Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield, Elizabeth Saker, to be touched for the [King's] Evil. |
| 4 — | ||||
| 19 July |
Whether Jane Puttock, Henry Manfield and Elizabeth Saker were cured of the scrofula by the highly medicinal contact of the royal hands does not appear; but in 1710 another patient, James Napper, was certified to be "a legal inhabitant of our parish of Alfold in the county of Surrey aforesaid and is supposed to have the disease commonly called the Evil." Perhaps not one of the four had much more than the country bumpkin's natural desire to see the King and be able to talk about it afterwards; perhaps they coveted the little gold tokens which royal physicking hung round the sufferer's neck. Not all those who were touched for the Evil were languishing with a fell disease. Charles II operated on nearly a hundred thousand of his lieges, with instant success when there was nothing the matter with them. But Anne, the divines held, did not succeed directly to the throne, and therefore did not succeed to the miraculous powers of the Jameses and Charleses. It was very little good for James Napper to go to London, for, practically speaking, the queen could cure nobody.