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CHARLWOOD CAUSIES

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running along the side of most of the roads in the neighbourhood. "Causies" is the local name for these causeways, which are single slabs of flat stone set like stepping stones in the clay, sometimes for miles together. The villagers tell you that they have been there since no one knows when. They may be right, but their probable date is the middle of the

seventeenth century, when John Gainsford, as we shall see, was making a causeway like these at Crowhurst.

A very curious set of wall paintings portrays, in the south aisle of Charlwood church, the legend of St. Margaret. St. Margaret was a virgin and a martyr, a most popular saint in the middle ages, and the heroine of a remarkable story.

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SERMONS ON THE WALL

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She was the daughter of a pagan priest at Antioch, and since she was a weak child, she was sent into the country for fresh air. Her nurse brought her up as a Christian, and when she was older she was sent into the fields to mind sheep. One day the governor of Antioch, whose name was Olibrius, was out hunting, saw the pretty shepherdess, fell in love with her at sight, and offered her his hand in marriage on the spot. St. Margaret refused him; she might not wed with a pagan. Olibrius was furious. He seized the poor shepherdess, beat her cruelly, and threw her into prison; even there she was not safe. The devil himself came after her in the form of a dragon, entered the prison and swallowed the saint whole, as you may see in the picture. However, Providence intervened, and by a miracle she escaped from the dragon's body. Evidently Providence then gave up helping, for Olibrius succeeded where the devil had failed. He ordered her head off at once, and the artist has painted her soul flying to heaven in the form of a dove.

Another painting sets out a commoner story, the allegory of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Three kings ride out hunting in the forest, and are met by three ghastly spectres, who lecture them on the vanity of this world's pomps and pleasures. I should think this used to be a favourite. It must have been vastly comforting to the poor, and pretty easy, too, for the parson. Anybody could make a sermon on the sufferings in store for kings and other rich people, and the way they go out hunting and shooting and not caring for anybody, and then the spectres come at them and they see how empty life is. Even to-day those ruddled drawings can set a spell. Stare at them, and the little church calls back its preacher and his flock; there, in the pulpit, he stood, gesturing at the dragon and St. Margaret; here, below him, sat the quiet-hearted countrymen, wondering in the solemn Sunday sunshine; here, perhaps, a child, hearing the story for the first time. St. Margaret must have been more difficult than the Kings. She begins well enough, and she goes on well-the village maidens would doubt whether they would have the strength to refuse an Olibrius. Then the deliverance from the devil would do admirably; the bumpkins would swallow that as easily as the devil swallowed St. Margaret. But how to go on? How to explain the failure of Providence

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afterwards? The preacher must have slurred that, and got on quickly to the wings of the dove.

Two great Surrey families belong to Charlwood. One is the line of Sander, or Saunder, settled at Charlwood as early as Edward II, and still surviving, in name at all events, in the neighbourhood. It was Richard Saunder who placed in the church the delicate fifteenth-century oak screen, the most beautiful in the county; but a more famous member of the family was Nicholas Saunder, Regius Professor and Jesuit Divine, over whose writings many good churchmen quarrelled. The other family are the Jordans of Gatwick, almost as old as the Saunders, and like them surviving in cottage life to-day.

The White Hart at Godstone.-Cobbett's violets.-Bletchingley.-Beagles and Foxhounds.—Dr. Nathaniel Harris.—Begging the Love of Neighbours.-A gratious woman.-Swift and a gentle prelate.-Bletchingley manor.-The Master of the Revels. -An English gentleman's Armour. -How to be buried.-Posing for a tombstone. -Nutfield.-Fuller's earth and its new uses.

It is true that

THE key to the east of Surrey is Godstone. the village itself lies more than two miles from the railway station which bears its name, but which might equally well have been named Tandridge or Crowhurst. But there is no other centre in East Surrey from which so many other villages and places of interest are easily reached. To the west, a mile and

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GODSTONE VIOLETS

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a-half away, lies Bletchingley, and another mile beyond that, Nutfield, which has not yet been absorbed by Redhill, and, indeed, belongs to Surrey country as surely as Redhill belongs to the railway and the town. To the north are Caterham and Chaldon, and Woldingham and Warlingham; Tandridge is two miles away, Oxted a little more, and Limpsfield not quite four; north of Limpsfield is Titsey, and east of Limpsfield and Titsey is the Kent border. Crowhurst lies to the southeast, and beyond that Lingfield; but Lingfield is almost Sussex, and is perhaps a little too far for a walk from Godstone; it is best reached by rail.

Godstone begins hospitably, at least to the traveller from the south, with three old inns, the Bell, the Rose and Crown, and the old White Hart, now the Clayton Arms. The Bell and the Rose and Crown have not, I think, won any particular place in history; probably they were always a little overshadowed by the spacious frontage of the old White Hart. The Rose and Crown, for all that, displays an imposing board setting out the numbers and the addresses of the many cycling clubs who have made it their country headquarters— doubtless it has been the first stage of many happy, dusty journeys. But the old White Hart has its place in the classical country books. Cobbett often lunched there, and probably the inn-parlour where he had his bread and bacon is very much the same as when he wrote of the village in Rural Rides. Perhaps the rooms upstairs hold more furniture than in the twenties-particularly the fine diningroom with its oak-beamed ceiling, which is as full of furniture as a room can very well be, besides serving various public uses as a place in which audits and meetings are held and county and local account books inspected. In the yard outside, too, although the great vats of the brewhouse are gone, and Renault cars run under the arch which used to echo with the shoes of spanking teams, there can be little changed since Cobbett saw it. He wrote, in 1822:

"At and near Godstone the gardens are all very neat ; and at the Inn, there is a nice garden well-stocked with beautiful flowers in the season. here saw, last summer, some double violets as large as small pinks, and the lady of the house was kind enough to give me some of the roots."

I

The garden is still gay and full of flowers; though if I were the landlady I should certainly stock some peculiarly pretty