To pass from Richmond, Petersham, and Ham, that still bear the unmistakable impress of the past, to modern Kingston and its suburbs Surbiton and Norbiton, is to enter a different world, so completely has the ancient city, which is referred to in a charter of King Edred bearing date 946 as the 'royal town where kings are hallowed,' been transformed since the days when the Saxon kings were crowned in it, sitting on the stone still preserved in a railed-in space opposite the Courthouse. There, as inscribed upon the venerable relic, Athelstan, Edmund, Edred, Edgar, Edward the Martyr, Ethelred II., and Edmund received their crowns; there the national councils assembled; and there took place the tragic scenes between Dunstan and the young king Edwy, whom the archbishop dared to follow to the chamber of his bride, [OE]lgifa, an intrusion the newly wedded wife never forgave, and {266} that had much to do with her bitter hostility to her husband's adviser. In 1200 the reluctant King John was compelled to give the citizens of Kingston their first charter, and in the royal town Henry III. was defied in 1264 by the turbulent barons in the once formidable castle, the very site of which cannot now be determined. Into Kingston, in 1472, marched Falconbridge with fifty thousand men in pursuit of Edward IV., whose tenure of the throne was still insecure, to find the bridge, the only one that then spanned the river above the City of London, broken down, so that he was obliged to return by the way that he had come; and at Kingston many years afterwards, the ill-fated Katharine of Aragon, then a happy-hearted girl of sixteen, halted for a night on her way to be married to Prince Arthur, elder brother of the second husband who was to treat her so cruelly. In 1554 the doomed Sir Thomas Wyatt, in arms against Queen Mary, secured a temporary success by crossing the river at Kingston on a bridge of boats, and in 1647 the old town was for some months the headquarters of General Fairfax in command of the Parliamentarian troops. There a year later the last stand was made under the Earl of Holland of the Royalists, who were cut to pieces, their leader falling after a desperate resistance against fearful odds. Since then Kingston has enjoyed a long spell of peace and security, but it has lost the distinction that belonged to it in those days of unrest, retaining but very few survivals of the past. Its parish church, one of {267} the largest in England, was founded in the early thirteenth century, but it has been almost completely modernised, part of its tower and the southern aisle of the chancel being all that are left of the original structure. It contains, however, some interesting monuments, notably the altar-tomb of Sir Anthony Benn, who died in 1618, and a seated marble statue of the Countess of Liverpool by Chantrey, with several fine brasses, including that to Robert Skern and his wife Joan, daughter of Alice Ferrers, and according to tradition of