Rural Rides Read online

November 30. Dorking

  I came over the high hill on the south of Guildford, and came down to Chilworth, and up the valley to Albury. I noticed, in my first Rural Ride, this beautiful valley, its hangers, its meadows, its hop-gardens, and its ponds. This valley of Chilworth has great variety, and is very pretty; but after seeing Hawkley, every other place loses in point of beauty and interest. This pretty valley of Chilworth has a run of water which comes out of the high hills, and which, occasionally, spreads into a pond; so that there is in fact a series of ponds connected by this run of water. This valley, which seems to have been created by a bountiful providence, as one of the choicest retreats of man; which seems formed for a scene of innocence and happiness, has been, by ungrateful man, so perverted as to make it instrumental in effecting two of the most damnable of purposes; in carrying into execution two of the most damnable inventions that ever sprang from the minds of man under the influence of the devil! namely, the making of gunpowder and of bank-notes! Here, in this tranquil spot, where the nightingales are to be heard earlier and later in the year than in any other part of England; where the first bursting of the buds is seen in Spring, where no rigour of seasons can ever be felt; where every thing seems formed for precluding the very thought of wickedness; here has the devil fixed on as one of the seats of his grand manufactory; and perverse and ungrateful man not only lends him his aid, but lends it cheerfully! As to the gunpowder, indeed, we might get over that. In some cases that may be innocently, and, when it sends the lead at the hordes that support a tyrant, meritoriously employed. The alders and the willows, therefore, one can see, without so much regret, turned into powder by the waters of this valley; but, the Bank-notes! To think that the springs which God has commanded to flow from the sides of these happy hills, for the comfort and the delight of man; to think that these springs should be perverted into means of spreading misery over a whole nation; and that, too, under the base and hypocritical pretence of promoting its credit and maintaining its honour and its faith! There was one circumstance, indeed, that served to mitigate the melancholy excited by these reflections; namely, that a part of these springs have, at times, assisted in turning rags into Registers! Somewhat cheered by the thought of this, but, still, in a more melancholy mood than I had been for a long while, I rode on with my friend towards Albury, up the valley, the sand-hills on one side of us and the chalk-hills on the other. Albury is a little village consisting of a few houses, with a large house or two near it. At the end of the village we came to a park, which is the residence of Mr Drummond. – Having heard a great deal of this park, and of the gardens, I wished very much to see them. My way to Dorking lay through Shire, and it went along on the outside of the park. I guessed, as the Yankees say, that there must be a way through the park to Shire; and I fell upon the scheme of going into the park as far as Mr Drummond’s house, and then asking his leave to go out at the other end of it. This scheme, though pretty bare-faced, succeeded very well. It is true that I was aware that I had not a Norman to deal with; or, I should not have ventured upon the experiment. I sent in word that, having got into the park, I should be exceedingly obliged to Mr Drummond if he would let me go out of it on the side next to Shire. He not only granted this request, but, in the most obliging manner, permitted us to ride all about the park, and to see his gardens, which, without any exception, are, to my fancy, the prettiest in England; that is to say, that I ever saw in England.

  They say that these gardens were laid out for one of the Howards, in the reign of Charles the Second, by Mr EVELYN, who wrote the Sylva. The mansion-house, which is by no means magnificent, stands on a little flat by the side of the parish church, having a steep, but not lofty, hill rising up on the south side of it. It looks right across the gardens, which lie on the slope of a hill which runs along at about a quarter of a mile distant from the front of the house. The gardens, of course, lie facing the south. At the back of them under the hill is a high wall; and there is also a wall at each end, running from north to south. Between the house and the gardens there is a very beautiful run of water, with a sort of little wild narrow sedgy meadow. The gardens are separated from this by a hedge, running along from east to west. From this hedge there go up the hill, at right angles, several other hedges, which divide the land here into distinct gardens, or orchards. Along at the top of these there goes a yew hedge, or, rather, a row of small yew trees, the trunks of which are bare for about eight or ten feet high, and the tops of which form one solid head of about ten feet high, while the bottom branches come out on each side of the row about eight feet horizontally. This hedge, or row, is a quarter of a mile long. There is a nice hard sand-road under this species of umbrella; and, summer and winter, here is a most delightful walk! Behind this row of yews, there is a space, or garden (a quarter of a mile long you will observe) about thirty or forty feet wide as nearly as I can recollect. At the back of this garden, and facing the yew-tree row, is a wall probably ten feet high, which forms the breast-work of a terrace; and it is this terrace which is the most beautiful thing that I ever saw in the gardening way. It is a quarter of a mile long, and, I believe, between thirty and forty feet wide; of the finest green sward, and as level as a die.

  The wall, along at the back of this terrace, stands close against the hill, which you see with the trees and underwood upon it rising above the wall. So that here is the finest spot for fruit trees that can possibly be imagined. At both ends of this garden the trees in the park are lofty, and there are a pretty many of them. The hills on the south side of the mansion-house are covered with lofty trees, chiefly beeches and chesnut: so that, a warmer, a more sheltered, spot than this, it seems to be impossible to imagine. Observe too, how judicious it was to plant the row of yew trees at the distance which I have described from the wall which forms the breastwork of the terrace; that wall, as well as the wall at the back of the terrace, are covered with fruit trees, and the yew-tree row is just high enough to defend the former from winds, without injuring it by its shade. In the middle of the wall, at the back of the terrace, there is a recess, about thirty feet in front and twenty feet deep, and here is a basin, into which rises a spring coming out of the hill. The overflowings of this basin go under the terrace and down across the garden into the rivulet below. So that here is water at the top, across the middle, and along at the bottom of this garden. Take it altogether, this, certainly, is the prettiest garden that I ever beheld. There was taste and sound judgment at every step in the laying out of this place. Every where utility and convenience is combined with beauty. The terrace is by far the finest thing of the sort that I ever saw, and the whole thing altogether is a great compliment to the taste of the times in which it was formed. I know there are some ill-natured persons who will say, that I want a revolution that would turn Mr Drummond out of this place and put me into it. Such persons will hardly believe me, but upon my word I do not. From every thing that I hear, Mr Drummond is very worthy of possessing it himself, seeing that he is famed for his justice and his kindness towards the labouring classes, who, God knows, have very few friends amongst the rich. If what I have heard be true, Mr Drummond is singularly good in this way; for, instead of hunting down an unfortunate creature who has exposed himself to the lash of the law; instead of regarding a crime committed as proof of an inherent disposition to commit crime; instead of rendering the poor creatures desperate by this species of proscription, and forcing them on to the gallows, merely because they have once merited the Bridewell; instead of this, which is the common practice throughout the country, he rather seeks for such unfortunate creatures to take them into his employ, and thus to reclaim them, and to make them repent of their former courses. If this be true, and I am credibly informed that it is, I know of no man in England so worthy of his estate. There may be others, to act in like manner; but I neither know nor have heard of any other. I had, indeed, heard of this, at Alresford in Hampshire; and to say the truth, it was this circumstance, and this alone, which induced me to ask the favour of Mr Drummond t
o go through his park. But, besides that Mr Drummond is very worthy of his estate, what chance should I have of getting it if it came to a scramble? There are others, who like pretty gardens, as well as I; and if the question were to be decided according to the law of the strongest; or as the French call it, by the droit du plus fort, my chance would be but a very poor one. The truth is, that you hear nothing but fools talk about revolutions made for the purpose of getting possession of people’s property. They never have their spring in any such motives. They are caused by Governments themselves; and though they do sometimes cause a new distribution of property to a certain extent, there never was, perhaps, one single man in this world that had any thing to do, worth speaking of, in the causing of a revolution, that did it with any such view. But what a strange thing it is, that there should be men at this time to fear the loss of estates as the consequence of a convulsive revolution; at this time, when the estates are actually passing away from the owners before their eyes, and that too, in consequence of measures which have been adopted for what has been called the preservation of property, against the designs of Jacobins and Radicals! Mr Drummond has, I dare say, the means of preventing his estate from being actually taken away from him; but, I am quite certain that that estate, except as a place to live at, is not worth to him, at this moment, one single farthing. What could a revolution do for him more than this? If one could suppose the power of doing what they liked placed in the hands of the labouring classes; if one could suppose such a thing as this, which never was yet seen; if one could suppose any thing so monstrous as that of a revolution that would leave no public authority any where; even in such a case, it is against nature to suppose, that the people would come and turn him out of his house and leave him without food; and yet that they must do, to make him, as a landholder, worse off than he is; or, at least, worse off than he must be in a very short time. I saw, in the gardens at Albury Park, what I never saw before in all my life; that is, some plants of the American Cranberry. I never saw them in America; for there they grow in those swamps, into which I never happened to go at the time of their bearing fruit. I may have seen the plant, but I do not know that I ever did. Here it not only grows, but bears; and, there are still some cranberries on the plants now. I tasted them, and they appeared to me to have just the same taste as those in America. They grew in a long bed near the stream of water which I have spoken about, and therefore it is clear that they may be cultivated with great ease in this country. The road, through Shire along to Dorking, runs up the valley between the chalk-hills and the sand-hills; the chalk to our left and the sand to our right. This is called the Home Dale. It begins at Reigate and terminates at Shalford Common, down below Chilworth.

  December 1, Reigate

  I set off this morning with an intention to go across the Weald to Worth; but the red rising of the sun and the other appearances of the morning admonished me to keep upon high ground; so I crossed the Mole, went along under Box-hill, through Betchworth and Buckland, and got to this place just at the beginning of a day of as heavy rain, and as boisterous wind, as, I think, I have ever known in England. In one rotten borough, one of the most rotten too, and with another still more rotten up upon the hill, IN REIGATE, and CLOSE BY GATTON, how can I help reflecting, how can my mind be otherwise than filled with reflections on the marvellous deeds of the collective wisdom of the nation! at present, however, (for I want to get to bed) i will notice only one of those deeds, and that one yet ‘incohete’ a word, which Mr canning seems to have coined for the nonce (which is not a coined word), when lord castlereagh (who cut his throat the other day) was accused of making a swap, as the horse-jockeys call it, of a writer-ship against a seat. It is barter, truck, change, dicker, as the yankees call it, but as our horse-jockeys call it swap, or chop. The case was this: the chop had been begun; it had been entered on; but had not been completed; just as two jockeys may have agreed on a chop and yet not actually delivered the horses to one another. Therefore, Mr canning said that the act was incohete, which means, without cohesion, without consequence. Whereupon the house entered on its journals a solemn resolution, that it was its duty to watch over its purity with the greatest care; but that the said act being ‘incohete’, the House did not think it necessary to proceed any farther in the matter! It unfortunately happened, however, that, in a very few days afterwards, that is to say on the memorable eleventh of June 1809, Mr maddocks accused the very same castlereagh of having actually sold and delivered a seat to Quintin dick for three thousand pounds. The accuser said he was ready to bring to the bar proof of the fact; and he moved that he might be permitted so to do. Now then what did Mr canning say? why he said, that the reformers were a low degraded crew, and he called upon the house to make a stand against democratical encroachment? and the house did not listen to him, surely? yes, but it did! and it voted by a thundering majority, that it would not hear the evidence. And this vote was, by the leader of the Whigs, justified upon the ground, that the deed complained of by Mr Maddocks was according to a practice, which was as notorious as the sun at noon day. So much, for the word ‘incohete’, which has led me into this long digression. The deed, or achievement, of which I am now about to speak, is, not the Marriage Act;17 for that is cohete enough: that has had plenty of consequences. It is the New Turnpike Act, which though passed, is, as yet ‘incohete’; and is not to be cohete for sometime yet to come. I hope it will become cohete during the time that Parliament is sitting, for otherwise, it will have cohesion pretty nearly equal to that of the Marriage Act. In the first place this act makes chalk and lime every where liable to turnpike duty, which in many cases, they were not before. This is a monstrous oppression upon the owners and occupiers of clay lands; and comes just at the time, too, when they are upon the point, many of them, of being driven out of cultivation, or thrown up to the parish, by thier burdens. But, it is the provision with regard to the wheels which will create the greatest injury, distress and confusion. The wheels which this law orders to be used on turnpike roads, on pain of enormous toll, cannot be used on the cross-roads throughout more than nine-tenths of the kingdom. To make these roads and the drove-lanes (the private roads of farms) fit for the cylindrical wheels described in this Bill, would cost a pound an acre, upon an average, upon all the land in England, and especially in the counties where the land is poorest. It would, in those counties, cost a tenth part of the worth of the fee-simple of the land. And this is enacted, too, at a time, when the wagons, the carts, and all the dead stock of a farm; when the whole is falling into a state of irrepair; when all is actually perishing for want of means in the farmer to keep it in repair! This is the time that the Lord Johns and the Lord Henries and the rest of that honourable body have thought proper to enact that the whole of the farmers in England shall have new wheels to their wagons and carts, or, that they shall be punished by the payment of heavier tolls! It is useless, perhaps to say any thing about the matter; but I could not help noticing a thing which has created such a general alarm amongst the farmers in every part of the country where I have recendy been.

  December 2, Worth (Sussex)

  I set off from Reigate, this morning, and after a pleasant ride of ten miles, got here to breakfast. – Here, as every where else, the farmers appear to think that their last hour is approaching. – Mr Charles B——s farms:18 I believe it is Sir Charles B——; and I should be sorry to withhold from him his title, though, being said to be a very good sort of a man, he might, perhaps, be able to shift without it: this gentleman’s farms are subject of conversation here. The matter is curious, in itself, and very well worthy of attention, as illustrative of the present state of things. These farms were, last year, taken into hand by the owner. This was stated in the public papers about a twelve month ago. It was said, that his tenants would not take the farms again at the rent which he wished to have, and that therefore, he took the farms into hand. These farms lie somewhere down in the west of Sussex. In the month of August last I saw (and I think in one of the Brighto
n newspapers) a paragraph stating that Mr B——, who had taken his farms into hand the Michaelmas before, had already got in his harvest, and that he had had excellent crops! This was a sort of bragging paragraph; and there was an observation added, which implied that the fanners were great fools for not having taken the farms! We now hear that Mr B—— has let his farms. But, now, mark how he has let them. The custom in Sussex is this: when a tenant quits a farm, he receives payment, according to valuation, for what are called the dressings, the half-dressings, for seeds and lays, and for the growth of underwood in coppices and hedge-rows; for the dung in the yards; and, in short, for whatever he leaves behind him, which, if he had staid, would have been of value to him. The dressings and half-dressings include, not only the manure that has been recently put into the land, but also the summer ploughings; and, in short, every thing which has been done to the land, and the benefit of which has not been taken out again by the farmer. This is a good custom; because it ensures good tillage to the land. It insures, also, a fair-start to the new tenant; but then, observe, it requires some money, which the new tenant must pay down before he can begin, and therefore this custom presumes a pretty deal of capital to be possessed by farmers. Bearing these general remarks in mind, we shall see, in a moment, the case of Mr B——. If my information be correct, he has let his farms: he has found tenants for his farms; but not tenants to pay him any thing for dressings, half-dressings and the rest. He was obliged to pay the out-going tenants for these things. Mind that! He was obliged to pay them according to the custom of the country; but he has got nothing of this sort from his in-coming tenants! It must be a poor farm, indeed, where the valuation does not amount to some hundreds of pounds. So that here is a pretty sum sunk by Mr B——; and yet even on conditions like these, he has, I dare say, been glad to get his farms off his hands. There can be very little security for the payment of rent where the tenant pays no in-coming; but even if he get no rent at all, Mr B—— has done well to get his farms off his hands. Now do I wish to insinuate, that Mr B—— asked too much for his farms last year, and that he wished to squeeze the last shilling out of his fanners? By no means. He bears the character of a mild, just and very considerate man, by no means greedy, but the contrary. A man very much beloved by his tenants; or, at least, deserving it. But the truth is, he could not believe it possible that his farms were so much fallen in value. He could not believe it possible that his estate had been taken away from him by the legerdemain of the Pitt-system, which he had been supporting all his life: so that, he thought, and very naturally thought, that his old tenants were endeavouring to impose upon him, and therefore resolved to take his farms into hand. Experience has shown him that farms yield no rent, in the hands of the landlord, at least; and therefore he has put them into the hands of other people. Mr B——, like Mr Western, has not read the Register. If he had he would have taken any trifle from his old tenants, rather than let them go. Buthe surely might have read the speech of his neighbour and friend Mr HUSKISSON, made in the House of Commons in 1814, in which that gentleman said, that, with wheat at less than double the price that it bore before the war, it would be impossible for any rent at all to be paid. Mr B—— might have read this; and he might, having so many opportunities, have asked Mr HUSKISSON for an explanation of it. This gentleman is now a great advocate for national faith; but may not Mr B—— ask him whether there be no faith to be kept with the landlord? However, if I am not deceived, Mr B—— or Sir Charles B—— (for I really do not know which it is) is a Member of the Collective! If this be the case he has had something to do with the thing himself; and he must muster up as much as he can of that ‘patience’ which is so strongly recommended by our great new state doctor Mr Canning.