West Wickham Church, Kent.
West Wickham Church, Kent.
——From Beckenham church we walked about two miles along a nearly straight road, fenced off from the adjoining lands, till we reached West Wickham. It was from a painted window in this church that I made the tracing of St. Catherine engraved in the Every-Day Book, where some mention is made of the retired situation of this village.
“Wickham Court,” the ancient manor-house adjacent to the church, was formerly the residence of Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar, and author of the “Observations on the Resurrection of Christ.” for which the university of Oxford conferred on him the degree of doctor of laws. “He was very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt, who, when they were weary of faction and debates, used, at Wickham, to find books and quiet, a decent table, and literary conversation.”[236] It was in West’s society, at Wickham, that lord Lyttelton was convinced of the truth of Christianity. Under that conviction he wrote his celebrated “Dissertation on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul,” which, until the appearance of Paley’s “Horæ Paulina,” was an unrivalled treatise. Mr. Pitt, (the great earl of Chatham,) during his intimacy with West, formed a walk at Wickham Court. In a summer-house of the grounds, Mr. West inscribed the following lines, in imitation of Ausonius, a Latin poet of the fourth century, “Ad Villam:”—
Not wrapt in smoky London’s sulphurous clouds,
And not far distant stands my rural cot;
Neither obnoxious to intruding crowds,
Nor for the good and friendly too remote.
And when too much repose brings on the spleen,
Or the gay city’s idle pleasures cloy;
Swift as my changing wish I change the scene,
And row the country, now the town enjoy.
The ancient manor of West Wickham was vested in sir Samuel Lennard, bart., from whom it passed to his daughter Mary, the present dowager lady Farnaby, who resides in the manor-house, and with whose permission we were permitted a look at the hall of the mansion, which contains in the windows some painted remains of armorial bearings on glass, removed from the windows of the church. A view in Hasted’s “History of Kent” represents the towers of this mansion to have been surmounted by sextagon cones, terminated at the top with the fleur de lis, a bearing in the family arms; these pinnacles have been taken down, the roofs of the towers flattened, and the walls castellated. By a charter of free warren, in the eleventh year of Edward II., a weekly market was granted to West Wickham, but it is no longer held, and Wickham, as a town, has lost its importance.
The manor-house and church are distant from the village about half a mile, with an intervening valley beautifully pleasant, in which is a road from Hayes Common to Addington and Croydon. The church is on a hill, with an old lich-gate, like that at Beckenham, though not so large. At this spot W. sat down, and made the sketch here represented by his graver. Although I had been in the edifice before, I could not avoid another visit to it. At the north-east corner, near the communion table, are many ancient figured tiles sadly neglected, loose in the pavement; some displaced and lying one upon the other. Worst of all,—and I mean offence to no one, but surely there is blame somewhere,—the ancient stone font, which is in all respects perfect, has been removed from its original situation, and is thrown into a corner. In its place, at the west end, from a nick (not a niche) between the seats, a little trivet-like iron bracket swings in and out, and upon it is a wooden hand-bowl, such as scullions use in a kitchen sink; and in this hand-bowl, of about twelve inches diameter, called a font, I found a common blue-and-white Staffordshire-ware halfpint basin. It might be there still; but, while inveighing to my friend W. against the depravation of the fine old font, and the substitution of such a paltry modicum, in my vehemence I fractured the crockery. I felt that I was angry, and, perhaps, I sinned; but I made restitution beyond the extent that would replace the baptismal slop-basin.