Of all the bishops, Bishop Fox left the most enduring mark on the
castle. He built the noble and lofty gateway tower named after him, and
certainly altered the look of the castle as Farnham sees it to-day, more
than any other Bishop, though what it may have looked like when the
boundary walls were all landing can only be guessed. Within, one of the
chief restorers was Bishop Morley. The hall, before he made his
alterations, was a good deal larger than the present room; you can see
the old doorway in the wall of the wide entrance passage. He added the
splendid staircases, with their carved oak newels, the work of Grinling
Gibbons; and he built the chapel, which also has some fine carving. A
later and most princely Bishop, Anthony Thorold, who held the See from
1891 to 1895, laid down a mile and a hundred yards of stair carpet, and
repaired an acre and a fifth of roof. He also fitted up rooms for
ordination candidates, each room with a name. St. Francis and other
saints preside over the slumbers of some; some sleep in Paradise; a
Bishop who is an occasional visitor looks out upon the Castle garden
from the Bull's Eye.
Bishop Morley, who spent so much money on the Castle, spent very little
on himself. A tiny room, almost a cell, is shown as the chamber in which
he spent hours in prayer, and in the extreme corner is a stone couch, on
which he slept when he allowed himself sleep. He had but one full meal a
day, he never warmed himself at a fire, he never married, he was never
ill, and was found dead on his bed one morning, at the ripe age of
eighty-seven. Starved to death, you are told; the hint is almost of
suicide.
Izaak Walton knew Morley, and stayed with him at the castle. He wrote
his Lives of Hooker and Herbert under the Bishop's roof, possibly added
something to his Life of Donne; the room is shown. I like to think of
him sitting through a sunny morning writing gently about the
shortcomings of Mrs. Hooker, how she made her poor husband tend the
sheep and rock the cradle; or setting down the superb last sentences of
the Life, and then taking down his fishing rod and wandering down by the
Wey after trout and chub. Perhaps, indeed, he could get a salmon. Among
the dues collected by the Bailiffs of the Borough early in the
seventeenth century I find the following----
"Of every fishmonger that selleth ffish at his window in the lent to
paye at good ffriday a good lb. of samon or of the beast ffish they
have then leaft."
The salmon, presumably, swam with the other "beast ffish" in the Wey.
[Illustration: _Cobbett's Birthplace at Farnham._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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