Highways and Byways in Surrey. Eric Parker
history of letters. Quite unnecessarily, he had taken up the task of comparing modern writers with ancient, to the disadvantage of the modern, and he cannot be said to have been well equipped for the business. He had never read a word of Greek, and he achieved the distinction of criticising modern writing without a single reference to the works of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, Molière, Racine, Corneille, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare. The extraordinary thing is that the book was welcomed, and when a quarrel was struck over his claim that the Letters of Phalaris (which he could not read) were the best Letters in the world, he found ready champions. They were hopelessly defeated by Bentley, but Sir William Temple fortunately died before the defeat.
Better books were written at Moor Park by Sir William's secretary. Jonathan Swift, angry and rebellious, hating the authority and restraint of his Irish University, came to England an uncouth, ill-balanced, extravagant creature of twenty-one, and settled, or half-settled, to his work as amanuensis. He threw up his post in a rage, went over to Ireland and was ordained priest, made up his quarrel with his patron and came back to Moor Park to write The Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. But the books were almost incidents. The mainspring of his life was his melancholy devotion to the pretty girl who waited on Lady Giffard, Sir William Temple's sister. She was Esther Johnson, daughter of Sir William's steward, but as Swift's Stella she lives in the story of sad and mysterious passions with Héloise and Laura.
Sir William Temple died in 1699, and was buried by his wife's side in Westminster Abbey; all but his heart, and that was laid in a silver box under the sundial in his garden. He left his papers to Swift, who wrote that there had died "with him all that was good and amiable among men," and to prove it quarrelled acrimoniously with the family.
Of another, gentler inmate of Moor Park we hear very little. Her fame was assured her when, as Dorothy Osborne, she had waited seven years to marry William Temple, and had sent to him, without an idea that they would reach an English public, some of the most graceful girlish letters ever written. After her marriage she leaves the scene, or we see her seldom. She corresponded with Queen Mary, but Swift has little to tell us about her. She, at least, could never have enraged him.
Moor Park lies along the banks of the Wey, and through it runs a drive open to foot passengers, but not to bicycles or dogs. Nearly at the end of the drive going towards Waverley Abbey is a curious cave, lined and roofed at the entrance with stone, and barred and gated and spiked with iron, evidently a fit habitation, once upon a time, for a very witch-like old woman. The gates, or rather railings which do not open, must have been placed there many years ago, for no initials have been carved, or at least none are visible, on the stone within. The cave runs back, some way from the road, into pleasantly dubious darkness. In this case, according to the tradition of the place, lived the witch, Mother Ludlam, whose caldron lies in the tower of Frensham Church. Another excavation in the ground a few yards away has also its own tradition, or rather two traditions. One is that it was the regular abode of a hermit named Foote, who starved to death in it; another, that Foote was a lunatic who was found dying in the hole, but actually died in the workhouse. The details are precise. "Foote was a gentleman. He came one day to the Unicorn Inn at Farnham. Next day he hired a man to wheel a heavy portmanteau to Moor Park gate, when he told the man to put it down. Foote was taken very ill, was found by old Hill the keeper and taken to Swift's cottage where Hill lived. The union officials took Foote and his heavy portmanteau to the Union. 'It's only buttons inside,' said they. 'It's gold! gold!' exclaimed Foote with his dying breath." So runs the local version.
At the gates of the entrance of Moor Park stands a charming cottage, brick and timber embowered in roses. It has been known at different times as "Dean Swift's Cottage" and "Stella's Cottage." Perhaps neither lived there. Outside the park the Wey broadens out into a wide pool, shaded by magnificent sycamores, and then drops through sluices to a lower level, to twist back to the north-west under the walls of Waverley Abbey.
Waverley Abbey is the greatest of the ruins in a county where ruins are few. Once the Abbey precinct covered sixty acres of ground; to-day nothing remains but tumbled walls and broken gates. It was not the oldest nor the richest of Abbeys in the county, but in some ways it was the noblest foundation of all. It was the earliest house of Cistercian monks in England; it inherited the spirit and the traditions of one of the finest of the monastic orders, the stricter sect of the monks of St. Benedict; its brethren were simple, kindly men with few wants and little money, who yet were generous hosts and the most skilful farmers of their day; it was the elder sister of Tintern Abbey, the mother of the Abbeys of Garendon, Ford, Combe and Thame, and the grandmother of seven others; and its abbots had precedence in the chapters of abbots throughout the order of Cistercians.
The White Monks, as the Cistercians were called, used to choose wild and lonely places for their churches, and Waverley Abbey, which stands in fields even now sometimes flooded, in its early days was more than once in difficulties through rain and bad seasons. It was founded in 1128 by William Giffard, the second Bishop of Winchester after the Conquest, and the buildings were still unfinished when, in 1201, a great storm inundated the Abbey, almost carried away its walls, and ruined all its crops, wheat, hay, and flax. Two years later, from the failure of the harvest after the flood, corn was so scarce that the monks had to scatter themselves among other Convents till they could thresh another summer's corn. In 1215 the spring from which they got all the water suddenly failed, and the monks were without water for their wine till one of them found a fresh spring and took it by pipes to the admiring Abbey. Eighteen years later came another storm and vast floods; the water rushed through the Abbey grounds, carrying away walls and bridges, and was eight feet deep in the buildings. There were other floods; in 1265 the monks had to sleep where they could out of the water, and it took days to clean away the silted mud. Those were some of the penalties of being so conveniently near to a river.
Round the buildings accumulated the traditional virtues. The Annals of Waverley record that in 1248 a youth fell by accident from the very parapet of the church tower to the ground without receiving the smallest injury. He was stupefied, and was thought to be dead, but after a little while began to speak and to be sensible, and soon completely recovered. On an earlier occasion, Aubrey tells us that "a boy of seven or eight years of age, standing near the Abbey gate, fell into the river, on the Feast of the Invention of the Cross, and by the rapidity of the stream was drove through four of the bridges, and was afterwards found on the surface of the water, dead to all outward appearance; but being taken out and carefully attended, he was brought to life, and came to his post at the gate from whence he had not been missed nor inquired after."
When the church was dedicated in 1278—it had taken seventy-five years to build—there was great rejoicing and a superb banquet. Nicholas de Ely, Bishop of Winchester, to make the occasion splendid, supplied feasting at his own expense for nine days to all who attended; abbots, lords, knights and noble ladies came to the dedication, and on the first day seven thousand and sixty-six guests sat down to meat. That is Waverley's greatest record of hospitality. Another record belongs to a guest. King John spent four days at the Abbey in Holy Week, 1208, and on that occasion one R. de Cornhull was ordered to be paid five marks for "two tons of wine" carried from Pagham.
At the Dissolution Waverley's end came quickly. The Abbey was one of the first of the smaller monasteries to fall. The obsequious adventurer whom Thomas Cromwell sent to Waverley to report on the Abbey establishment was Doctor Layton, and evidently he