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 papermills which called down Cobbett's curses were probably
originally powdermills, and were turned to their new uses first in the
reign of Queen Anne. The Bank at first issued no notes of smaller value
than L20; ten-pound notes were first issued in 1759, and five pound
notes in 1793, and one and two pound notes four years later. Local
tradition, for an explanation of the name Newlands Corner, has decided
that it must have been called after Abraham Newland, who was chief
cashier of the Bank of England for fifty years till 1807, and whose
name, therefore, would be as familiar to King George's subjects, as is
May or Owen to a later day. But local tradition is mistaken. The name
occurs on Bowen's map of the county, dedicated to Richard, third Baron
Onslow, in 1749, when Newland was an unknown boy of nineteen.

A much greater Surrey industry than paper-making is the manufacture of
gunpowder. Indeed, whenever England was at war, from the days of
Elizabeth to those of the Parliament, the control of the Surrey powder
works was a vital point in the struggle. The first gunpowder manufactory
seems to have been established at Rotherhithe, where Henry Reve had a
mill in 1554. We were then getting a considerable quantity of our
gunpowder from abroad, and that was a state of affairs which continued
till the coming of the Armada. When the Armada came, England was
dangerously unprepared for war. It was lucky that Howard's and Drake's
fireships ended the fleet so quickly, for anything like a prolonged sea
campaign would have been out of the question. We had not enough powder.
Accounts made up in the year 1600 show that up to the day when the
Armada sail was sighted, there was never more than twenty or thirty
lasts (a last was about a ton) of English powder delivered yearly into
the Queen's stores. After the Armada, the Queen's Ministers set to work
to put the gunpowder supply on a proper basis, and it was then that
Surrey and a great Surrey family became inseparably associated with the
making of explosives.

George Evelyn (grandfather of a more famous grandson, John Evelyn of
Wotton) and John, his son, were first licensed in 1589 to dig saltpetre
in Gre