The extensive parish of Mitcham, that stretches away from Merton and Morden to Beddington, Carshalton, and Croydon on the south, and on the east to Streatham and Norwood includes one of the most beautiful commons near London, set in a border of fields planted with lavender bushes and sweet-smelling herbs. It is associated, moreover, with many interesting memories, and at the time of the Conquest was an extremely valuable property, including no less than five manors that were later reduced to three, which changed hands so often that it is almost impossible to trace their history. It is enough to add that Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, owned a house at Mitcham that still bears his name, that Sir Walter Raleigh occupied another for some time that belonged to his wife, Elizabeth Throckmorton, and that in a mansion now pulled down Sir Julius Cæsar received Queen Elizabeth in 1598, an honour that according to his own account cost him considerably more than £700. On the banks of the Wandle, in a villa known as Grove House, lived Sir Thomas More, and two {216} centuries later it was the home of a man of a very different type, Lord Clive, who in 1774, just before he took his own life, gave it to the great lawyer Alexander Wedderburn, the future Lord Chancellor of England, who had defended him at his trial. In 1789 Grove House was bought by the London banker Sir Samuel Hoare, who often showed hospitality in it to Hannah More, the Wilberforces and the Macaulays. Dr. Donne, the famous Dean of St. Paul, who died in 1631, was also at one time a resident at Mitcham; Charles Mathews, who was to make such a great reputation as a comedian, used to ride over on his pony for a gallop on Mitcham Common when he was at school at Clapham; and Dr. Johnson was fond of dining in the neighbourhood when he was the guest of Mrs. Thrale at Streatham. The original village of Mitcham, picturesquely situated on the Wandle, that here works several mills, is now but the nucleus of a rapidly growing town; and it is very much the same with its neighbour Tooting, that retains little except the common, which is now its chief distinction, to recall the days when Queen Elizabeth was the guest of the lord of the manor, Lord Burghley, or those a century later, when the author of _Robinson Crusoe_ lived in a little house on the road that still bears his name and founded the conventicle now replaced by the Defoe Presbyterian chapel. The ancient parish church of Tooting, of which that conventicle soon became a serious rival, was pulled down some eighty years ago to make room for a modern successor; of the beautiful convent of the Holy Cross, that once {217} stood just without the village, and is said to have been connected with the church by a subterranean passage, not a trace remains; whilst a few dignified-looking mansions with wrought-iron entrance-gates, and the two inns known as the Castle and the Angel, are the only houses with any claim to antiquity. {218}