But Woking has not always been quiet and old-fashioned and sleepy. Once it was a royal manor, and contained a royal residence. William the Conqueror held Woking in demesne himself, and it passed through the hands of every king until James I, who gave it to one of his foresters, Sir Edward Zouch. Sir Edward had to pay something for his privilege. He held the manor on condition that he was to bring to the king's table, on the Feast of St. James each year, the first dish at dinner, and with the dish the satisfactorily large rent of a hundred pounds in coined gold of the realm. Perhaps he still made something out of his tenants; at all events, a further token of gratitude, he was to wind a call in Woking Forest on Coronation Day. He may have liked the rental, but he could not have liked the old palace, for he knocked down every brick of it. The strangest and most melancholy fate seems to wait on every palace in Surrey built or lived in by an English king,--even by the friend of a king. Of Oatlands, Guildford, Woking, Nonsuch, Sheen, each a king's palace, scarcely a stone remains; Wolsey's palace by the Mole is nothing but a gateway; the Archbishops' palace at Croydon has sunk as low as a wash-house. Kingston owns the stone on which English kings have been crowned; but elsewhere in Surrey the royal hand has touched only to destroy. A persistent association hangs to the name of the town by the station, undeserved but traditional. Woking, like the Duke of Plaza-toro, "likes an interment." Much of the land near the town is owned by a company which, while it builds villas for the living, especially those who find advantages in a fast train service, has named itself Necropolis, which is grim enough for anybody living or dead. But the Necropolis Company, whether it knows it or not, did not found the tradition. That stands to the record of an old grave-digger interviewed by Aubrey. He conversed grimly and with authority on the places and seasons for the proper digging of graves. He "had a rule from his father to know when not to dig a grave." That was "when he found a certain plant about the bigness of the middle of a tobacco-pipe, which came near the surface of the earth, but never above it. It is very tough, and about a yard long; the rind of it is almost black, and tender, so that when you pluck it, it slips off and underneath is red; it hath a small button at the top, not much unlike the top of an asparagus; of these he sometimes finds two or three in a grave." He was "sure it was not a fern-root" and had with diligence traced to its root; and since he had satisfied himself of its grisly origin, he knew better than to dig a grave near where the root grew. [Illustration: _View from the Bridge, Woking._]