Great Bookham has grown a good deal since the d'Arblays knew it. But the
splendid shell of an ancient elm still shades the churchyard gate; the
flint-walled church, with ivy bunched over its buttressed tower, and
lichens glowing on the Horsham slabs of its chapel roof, can have
changed but little. Two or three of its monuments are interesting. One
is a brass plate recounting the virtues and the pedigree of Edmund
Slyfield and his wife Elizabeth. They were of Slyfield Place; he was "a
stoute Esquire who alwaies set God's feare before his Eyes"; she was a
model of all the graces, and descended from the Paulets, Capells,
Sydneys, Gainsfords, Finches, Arundels, Whites, and Lamberts--a good
long list to bring into an epitaph, but there are twenty-eight lines of
honest doggerel to do it in. Another monument is quite as striking,
which represents Colonel Thomas Moore in the full uniform of the
commanding officer of a regiment of foot in the reign of Queen Anne,
which the sculptor's convention has idealised into a mixture of a
bathing costume, a kilt, and a plaid. The church, indeed, is a museum of
records of different times and tastes to a degree uncommon in far more
important buildings. In the east wall of the chancel is a slab
commemorating in three Latin hexameters the founding of the building by
John de Rutherwyk, the great Abbot whom we meet at Chertsey; and the
east window of the Slyfield chapel is dedicated, in a long, biographical
inscription in brass, to the memory of Lord Raglan, who as Fitzroy James
Henry Somerset, military secretary to the Duke of Wellington, lost an
arm at the Duke's side at Waterloo, and forty years later commanded the
British army in the East before Sebastopol, where he died. Lord
Raglan's connection with Great Bookham is slight: but his niece, Lady
Mary Farquhar, who put up the window, lived at Polesden, a mile or two
away.
[Illustration: _Slyfield Place._]
Last of the villages on the road from Guildford to Leatherhead is
Fetcham. A park, a road bordered by cottages and a pretty house or two,
and a battlemented church-tower deep among yews, and hollies, and
ivy-trees--Fetcham is as pleasantly small and quiet as her western
neighbours. But what a string of churches it is, along these twelve
miles of Surrey roadway; nine villages, each with its grey-walled
building and the cool whiteness of the arches, aisles, and chancels. No
pilgrim of the old centuries could tire on such a journey. To-day he
might. Only four of the church doors give him a welcome.
Above Fetcham's church, which, like Stoke D'Abernon and one or two
others, fronts on the flowers and lawns of a private garden, great
bunches of mistletoe darken the winter tree-tops. Fetcham is on the
border of the mistletoe country, which stretches from Leatherhead to
Dorking and Boxhill.
CHAPTER XI
GODALMING
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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