Sturdy rogues.--Oxted.--A Rustic Guildford.--Mittens and
corduroys.--Limpsfield.--Self-criticism.--_The Old Oak
Chair._--Titsey Park and the Roman villa.--Tatsfield above the
downs.

East of Godstone five churches stand in a bow stretched to the Kent
boundary. Not each church has a village. Oxted and Limpsfield, in the
middle of the bow, are near by a railway station, and Limpsfield plays
golf on the common: both are little old villages with many new houses
about them. But Tandridge and Titsey, towards each point of the bow, are
churches almost without cottages, but with great parks beside them:
Tatsfield, easternmost of all Surrey villages, has houses and cottages,
but the church stands apart, looking out over the Weald.

Tandridge was once Tanrige, and had a priory, which disappeared, of
course, at the Dissolution. It was quite a little place; its earliest
record, dated somewhere near the end of the twelfth century, describes
it as the Hospital of St. James, in the Ville of Tanregge, with three
priests, in perpetuity there serving God, and Confraters of the said
Hospital. So Odo, son of William de Dammartin, writes of it in his deed
of gift of lands, a windmill, and silver cups to make a chalice. The
establishment was less a priory than a small hospice, in which poor and
needy persons were cared for, and to which wayfarers might come for
refuge; one of those gentle places for the help and refreshment of
sorrowing men that are set so strangely before the days of Tudor
cruelties and tortures. The prior's hospice welcomed and comforted the
tired poor; Elizabeth's age beat them, men and women, for sturdy rogues.

[Illustration: _Tandridge Church._]

Later Tandridge history centres round the church and Tandridge Court.
Tandridge Court has had noble owners, but perhaps the most interesting
is Bostock Fuller, who was a Justice of the Peace in the days of
Elizabeth, and who has left a notebook describing his work and the cases
that came before him, which takes his reader extraordinarily close to
Tudor times and customs. The manuscript, entitled _Note Book of a Surrey
Justice_, is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Mr. Granville
Leveson-Gower in the _Surrey Archaeological Collections_, has made
extracts from the Bodleian transcript. Here are some of them:--

Apryll 1608.

[Sidenote: 4 Rogues whypped]

The 7^th I rode with M^r Evelyn to Sir W. Gaynsfords whoe was sycke,
to have his test