The portrait is of a hag of such appalling ill-favour as would certainly "asswage a manne's courage."
An inn of more interest, though never the subject of a Laureate's ode, is the old coaching hostel, the Swan. It was a famous house in the seventeenth century, and cooked the Mole trout as well as the Dorking inns cooked their water-souchy of carp and tench. The Reverend S.N. Sedgwick, in his ingenious little collection of Leatherhead legends, adds a strange record to the inn property. He founds one of his stories on a local tradition that the carrying of a dead body can establish a right of way, and he says that in quite recent times the sum of one penny has been charged for permission to bring a corpse through the Swan Brewery Yard, to prevent a right of way being established.
Whether or not the right of way was established originally by carrying a dead body over it, there is another Leatherhead tradition of a right of way which is connected with the church. The church, with the curious double dedication of St. Mary and St. Nicholas, stands apart from the southern road out of Leatherhead, above the banks of the Mole. The tower is strangely out of the axis of the nave—as much as three or four feet—and the tradition is that it was so built to avoid encroaching on an established right of way. Probably the explanation is something more symbolical or superstitious. One of the most learned of all Surrey archæologists, Mr. Philip Mainwaring Johnston, holds to the theory that these deflections of the church axis are connected with legends of the Crucifixion. The deflected chancel, he thinks, suggests the head bowed upon the cross. But the deflected tower seems more difficult. The church is interesting in other ways. It contains a leather-bound Book of Homilies, chained in its original position to one of the northern pillars of the nave; and in the porch is an upright gravestone erected to the memory of Lady Diana Turner, the story being that she chose to be buried under the very spot where her sedan-chair stood for the Sunday service. She was paralysed, and listened to the Homilies from the porch.
Leatherhead has two faces. She shows one, which is slate and new, to the traveller entering the town from Ashtead and Epsom to the north-east; and another, which is the old bridge and the church road and the best of her, to those who approach her from Feltham or Mickleham. St. John's School, founded for the sons of poor clergy, lies on the Ashtead road, a large modern building of red and grey patterned brick. But the best of Leatherhead's houses stand about the Mole. One is Thorncroft, which represents the domain of Tornecrosta in Domesday Book. Another is a fine early Georgian building now known as Emlyn House, but formerly as "The Mansion." Alexander Akehurst, M.D., one of the churchwardens who presented the Book of Homilies to the church, rebuilt this house early in the eighteenth century, but parts of the older building remain. Once it belonged to Sir Thomas Bludworth, whose sister married Judge Jeffreys of the Bloody Assize. According to a local tradition, Jeffreys, when his worthy master King James had fled to France, slunk in disguise to Leatherhead. It was one of the many roads he found closed against him in his attempts to escape. But he did not come to Leatherhead solely because it lay on the road to the south. His little daughter lay at the point of death at her uncle's house, and his desire was to see her once more before she died. The once mighty Lord Chancellor, dressed as a common sailor with shaven eyebrows and coaldust smeared on his cheeks, hated with a furious intensity of loathing which has never been felt for an Englishman before or since, knocked fearfully at dead of night at the door of the house where his dying daughter lay. So says the legend, and history does not forbid belief. For the register dates the child's funeral on December 2, 1688, and it was ten days afterwards that a wild crowd nearly tore the judge limb from limb at Wapping.
A gentler memory, or rather association, belongs to the Church street and the houses in the neighbourhood. There have been many attempts made by Miss Austen's readers to identify Highbury, "the large and populous village, almost amounting to a town" of Emma, with some Surrey town or village. There is a school of serious students who place it at Esher; another band of enthusiasts support Dorking. Mr. E.V. Lucas, in his engaging introduction to a new edition of the novel, has another suggestion. He recommends the theory that Highbury was Leatherhead, which satisfies most of the conditions of the book. It is, as he says, rightly placed as regards London, Kingston and Box Hill; though seven miles, which was the drive from Hartfield to Box Hill, is surely rather a generous estimate of the actual distance. But Leatherhead certainly has a river and a "Randalls," and Mr. Lucas has been told that it has an "Abbey Farm." That may be a mere coincidence; but, if so, it is the more striking when one turns to the parish registers, and finds in them the uncommon name of Knightley. Mr. Knightley, in 1761, raised the pulpit of the church, and erected a new reading-desk and seat for the clerk, and it was "hereby ordered that the thanks of this vestry be paid in the most respectful manner to Mr. Knightley for this fresh mark of his regard." Surely that is precisely what would have been the attitude of Mr. Elton's parishioners to Emma's husband. If Miss Austen read the parish literature, she may also have set eyes on a poem entitled, "Norbury Park," which was written by a minor bard of the neighbourhood named Woodhouse. But that is insisting too much; though, to be sure, from the quality of his verse, Mr. Woodhouse, author of "Norbury Park," may well be imagined to have had, like Emma's father, a nice taste in gruel.
The Mole at Slyfield Place.