The best walk from Chaldon is over the hill to Merstham; the sign-posts show you the path and mark it "The Pilgrims' Way" to Tollsworth Farm with the utmost assurance. From Tollsworth Farm the path drops over a plough down the side of the hill; before the railway and the tunnel came the old Way perhaps went straight across to the church. Merstham itself has little to show except one pretty little side street; but the church is more full of curiosities than any other near. Its builders placed it delightfully on a mound which is all air and sunlight, and though much of the charm of the church was destroyed in 1861, much that is old and curious remains. A queerly placed clock tells the time low down on the tower; inside are ancient monuments, one a stone effigy recovered from use as a pavement, others to the Elinbrygge family. That is only one spelling of the name, and perhaps as good as any other; variations are Elinebrigge, Elyngbrigge, Elinerugge, Ellerug, Elmerugge, Elmebrugge, Elmridge, Elmbrige, Elmebrygge, Ellmbridge, Elinrugge, Ellyngbrugg, Elenbrig, Elingbrig, Ellyngbrigg, and Ellynbrege. An Elinbrygge in those days could spell practically anything. Other memorials are fragments of stone carving, once belonging to the Southcotes and Waldegraves, and built without reason into windows and walls. Over the west chancel arch is a broken piece of carving from old London Bridge; and forlornest possession of all, the north chantry is paved with a tessellated floor which was made in prison, I was told, by an unhappy woman who hoped that forgiveness would take and use her work. Merstham has had some famous rectors. One was the great Thomas Linacre, King's Physician to Henry VII and Henry VIII, founder of the Royal College of Physicians, and friend of Melanchthon and Erasmus. He became a priest when he was fifty-eight, four years before his death, and was only Rector of Merstham for a month. "I much wonder," Fuller writes of him in his _Worthies_, "at what I find in good authors, that Linacre a little before his death turned priest and began to study the Scriptures with which he was formerly unacquainted, in so much that reading the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of St. Matthew he vowed, '_That_ either this was not the Gospel or we were not Christians.'"