Highways and Byways in Surrey. Eric Parker
Farnham's greatest man was not an ecclesiastic, but a politician. William Cobbett, soldier, farmer, Radical, editor of Peter Porcupine and the Weekly Political Register, and author of a diary unequalled of its kind in English writing, was born at Farnham on March 9, 1762. The house in which he was born, once a farmhouse and now the Jolly Farmer inn, stands on the outskirts of the town near the Wey, conspicuous with a white gable. As a boy, he must have been one of the busiest on any farm in the neighbourhood. His father used to boast that he had four boys, of whom the eldest was only fifteen years old—William Cobbett was the third—and yet that they would do as much work as any three men in Farnham. "When I first trudged a field," you read in the The Life of William Cobbett, by Himself, "with my satchel swung over my shoulder, I was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and at the close of day, to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty." He was taught the beginnings of farming at Farnham, and he first ran away from Farnham to be a gardener. He was employed as a boy in the castle grounds, and there he met a man who was a gardener at Kew. They talked, and the eleven-year-old boy was fired to see for himself what gardening could be. Next day he started off, with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, and walked all day till he came to Richmond. There he should have had supper; he had threepence left to get it with. But threepence was exactly the price of a little book, The Tale of a Tub, which he spied in a bookseller's window. He bought it, took it into a field near Kew Gardens, and sat down to read; read on till it was dark, tumbled to sleep under a haystack, and woke to ask the head gardener for work. He was given work, but the gardener persuaded him to return home. Ten years later he ran away from Farnham again, and for the last time. He was out on the road to meet some friends on the way to Guildford Fair; the London coach swung by, he swung up behind, and by nine that night was in London with half-a-crown in his pocket. He left London for a soldier, and his Farnham boyhood was over.
Riding by Farnham forty years after, Cobbett showed his son the spot where he received his education. It was easily come by, but he was of opinion that if he had not had it, "if I had been brought up a milksop, with a nurserymaid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been this day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster School, or from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities." The spot is a sandy bank above the Bourne, a little stream, dry in summer, which runs a mile south of Farnham, from Holt Forest to the Wey. This is the education, described in Rural Rides:—
"There is a little hop-garden in which I used to work when from eight to ten years old; from which I have scores of times run to follow the hounds, leaving the hoe to do the best that it could to destroy the weeds; but the most interesting thing was a sand-hill, which goes from a part of the heath down to the rivulet. As a due mixture of pleasure with toil, I, with two brothers, used occasionally to disport ourselves, as the lawyers call it, at this sand-hill. Our diversion was this: we used to go to the top of the hill, which was steeper than the roof of a house; one used to draw his arms out of the sleeves of his smock-frock, and lay himself down with his arms by his sides; and then the others, one at head, and the other at feet, sent him rolling down the hill like a barrel or a log of wood. By the time he got to the bottom, his hair, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth were all full of this loose sand; then the others took their turn, and at every roll there was a monstrous spell of laughter."
When will Rural Rides be added to the cheap editions? No other book of the open air and open politics mixes the two with such a breezy grip as Cobbett's. One rides with the sturdy old man over the road which he thought the prettiest in England—the four miles between Guildford and Godalming—or across "the most villainous spot God ever made," which was Hindhead, and listens to him praising the bean fields and the turnips here, and the oaks and acacias there, cursing the Wen-devils and place-men and pensioners, the reptiles, toad-eaters and tax-eaters, and yet the sheer honesty and affection of the man shine from every page. There never was such a mixture of execration and the scent of bean-blossom. But Rural Rides remains a book of the library rather than the bookshelf.
Farnham has two other authors, one a native and one a friend. Miss Ada Bayly, known to her readers as Edna Lyall, made Farnham her holiday home since she was four years old, and set the scenes of two of her novels in the town. Even better known by his work, if not by his name, is Augustus Toplady, the author of the hymn, "Rock of Ages." Toplady was born in a little house in West Street, now pulled down, in 1740. He wrote much that was bitter; all that is remembered is his hymn.
Every town on the Portsmouth road has its old coaching inn, and Farnham's is the Bush. It stands modestly aloof; you must walk under an arch to finds its oldest walls and its wistaria. It was not always the best inn in Farnham. In 1604, in the account of the Borough, the receipts of the Bailiffs are thus recorded:—
"Dewes which hath bene payed accostomly paied to the Baylleffs of the Borrough and Towne of Farneham, beyond the memory of any man that now liveth as Aniale rents always as followeth:—
| For the 4 Inns | 28s | |
| That to saye of the Georg | 7s | |
| of the Whit Hart | 7s | |
| of the Anteolop | 7s | |
| of the Crown | 7s | |
| Of every alhouse within the Borough | 2s | |
| Of every alhouse out of the Borough | 12d | |
| Of every alhouse at the chosing of the Bayleffs, called knowledge money | 1d | |
| Of every alhouse as will unlisensed or licinsed at every ffayr day every on of them | 1d." |
The Bush is not mentioned by name; it was a mere alehouse. Soon it became a full-grown inn, and the Georg, the Whit Hart and the Anteolop paled their ineffectual hearths.
Farnham was once the greatest market in England for wheat. Now the chief industry is hops. Farnham hops are some of the best grown, and have always fetched long prices. In Cobbett's day, Kentish hops averaged five pounds a hundredweight, and Hampshire hops were about the same price; Farnham hops fetched seven pounds. English hops to-day average perhaps less than five pounds a hundred, and the hopgrower is in distress. Eighty years ago he was being ruined. Cobbett makes up his accounts, writing at Chilworth on Sept. 25, 1822:—
"The crop of hops has been very fine here, as well as every where else. The crop not only large, but good in quality. They expect to get six pounds a hundred for them at Weyhill Fair. That is one more than I think they will get. The best Sussex hops were selling in the Borough of Southwark at three pounds a hundred a few days before I left London. The Farnham hops may bring double that price; but that, I think, is as much as they will: and this is ruin to the hop-planter. The tax, with its attendant