Kingston Bridge.
Kingston church, if its architecture is confused and much of it modern, has an imposing solemnity about it, and it contains some strange memorials. One is a stone fragment, on which the grateful survivor of an accident and a ruin has painted the words "Life Preserved." She was Hester Hammerton, daughter of Abram Hammerton, sexton of the church, and in 1729 she was helping her father to dig a grave in the churchyard near the Saxon chapel of St. Mary. They dug too near the chapel foundations, and the chapel fell in upon them. The sexton was killed, almost on the spot; his daughter was saved through the jamming of a piece of stone, and survived him as sexton for fifteen years. Another memorial is a brass kept in the vestry; a long screed begins dismally enough—"Ten children in one grave—a dreadful sight"; but the verse is unequal to the opportunity. Another brass shows Robert Skern and his wife Joan; she, according to Manning and Bray, was a daughter of Alice Perrers, mistress of Edward III. A fourth monument, said to be in the chancel (but I did not find it), praises Mrs. Mary Morton, daughter of the wife of Robert Honeywood, of Charinge, Kent; she was "the Wonder of her Sex and this Age, for she liv'd to see near 400 issued from her Loynes." So Aubrey describes it, and so, with variations, the local historian. Mrs. Mary Morton died in 1620.
Aubrey has another record of the giants of those days. He had heard of one Wiltshire of the Feathers Inn at Kingston, who was a great thrower. He would stand in the churchyard and throw a stone over the weathercock; "he would also throw a stone over the Thames (by the bridge) and struck the pales on the town side, which (I think) was not so difficult as the other throw. He was then of middle stature, and about thirty years of age." But if he had grown to greater stature? The weathercock of those days is no more, or we might measure the throw.
Kingston has other history besides its coronation stone and its monuments. The Parish Registers have added pictures of its past. Here is one of two poor women allowed to beg at the church:—
February 1571.
24. Sonday was here ij wemen the mother and dowghter owte of Ireland she called Elynor Salve to gather upon the deathe of her howsbande a genllman slayne amongst the wylde Iryshe being Captain of Gully glasses and gathered xviijd.
Here is a record of a Thames flood, October 9, 1570:—
Thursday at nyght rose a great winde and rayne that the Temps rosse so hye that they myght row wt botts owte of the Temps a gret waye in to the market place and upon a sodayne.
In the year 1572 Kingston got a new cucking stool; the Kingston scolds had become past bearing. It cost £1 3s. 4d., and as soon as it was finished there was a very shrewish woman ducked in it.