One of the minor social changes which has taken place during my lifetime is the method of announcing births in the public press. Nowadays the parents are familiarly mentioned by their Christian names, there then may follow the names of children with which the couple have already been blessed, and to which the new born is to form an agreeable addition, and finally there may appear the Christian names of the new infant which would seem to have been settled at top speed. A short pedigree in fact.
The announcement of my arrival as printed on the outside page of The Times, and no doubt of The Morning Post as well, was a more reserved affair:
On 25th August 1898 at Hinton Ampner House, Hampshire Mrs. Henry Dutton, of a son.
Thus there was no more than an indirect reference to my father, and no indelicate recognition that a union of the sexes had produced this result. Perhaps feeling slighted, my father omitted to register the birth of his son and heir, which had occurred after 10 years of marriage and subsequent to the births of two daughters, for a number of weeks, and when he eventually did so, made a mistake in the month, so that my birth certificate assures me that I appeared in this world on the 25th September, and thus my birthday remains in the official records of Somerset House.
I mention these unimportant details to indicate to the reader the mature age of the author, and also to show the long connection I have had with the village, or rather the principal house in it to which this little book is devoted. Still to live in the place where one was born very many years ago, at least ensures that one knows a small area of the earth's surface tolerably well, and I hope excuses writing about a place which is of minimal historical importance.
The house into which my introduction was announced in such dignified terms was a mid-Victorian building of exceptional hideousness. It was distinctly large, even by the standards of those spacious days, and deserved, I think, to be called a 'mansion'. If this epithet is one of praise, it is probably the only kind word which could have been found for the house. But in fact it had one good feature which could not have been apparent to an observer: behind the plate-glass windows and barge-boarded gables there still stood, engulfed in the flood of Victorian Tudor, the fabric of a simple late Georgian building. This unexpected survival of eighteenth-century decorum was to be of great value to me 37 years after my birth.
The Georgian building was by no means the first on the site. It had been built in 1793 when a Tudor house, standing 60 yards to the north, had baen demolished. And the Tudor manor had replaced a very dimly recorded mediaeval building which was said to have been destroyed by fire early in the sixteenth century. Thus it can be fairly said that the site has been occupied domestically for five centuries, and possibly much longer. But before looking—in so far as sparse records will allow at the various houses which have arisen here during these centuries, it may be as well to provide some description of the general situation, and this may give an indication why the site has remained in domestic occupation although the house standing there has been destroyed or demolished five times in five centuries.
There are, I think, more than fifteen villages named Hinton scattered about England, each distinguished by an additional name as prefix or suffix. The prevalence of the name is not surprising since the meaning is simple: Tun is Old English for homestead, and Hea means on high ground. There is an alternative definition, however. Hin may derive from Higna,, the complete word thus meaning the Tun or homestead belonging to monks or nuns. As it happens either of these derivations would fit the Hinton of this book equally well, for it is not only on a hill, but it also belonged for centuries to the Priory of St. Swithun at Winchester. It is this connection which provided the suffix of Ampner, for this is a corruption of the word Almoner, the manor having been the particular appurtenance of the Almoner of the Priory.
In some old deeds instead of the suffix Almoner or Ampner, it was simply called Prior's Hinton, but in the end the first nomenclature won the day. Now having more or less settled the origin of the name of the parish, one may glance at its physical characteristics. It covers a fairly large area, 2,378 acres to be exact, but it has always been sparsely populated, and civilly it has long been amalgamated with the adjacent parish of Bramdean. Ecclesiastically it retains its individuality, and the scattered group of cottages lying on the east side of the deep road which rises from the main Winchester to Peterfield highway, although in appearance no more than a hamlet, qualifies technically as a village since it boasts a parish church, to which the road leads. The parish also, surprisingly enough, contains two public houses, the Jolly Farmer on its extreme western boundary and apparently in Cheriton, and the Fox a mile away to the east amongst the cottages of Bramdean but within the confines of the parish of Hinton Ampner. Two pubs and a church give this modest parish a certain status even if the clientele of the former is principally drawn from motorists on the high road and the sparse congregation at the latter is slightly strengthened by worshippers from the village of Bramdean.
The village, such as it is, lies on the north slope of a long ridge, with the church and Hinton Ampner House on its summit. To the east the ridge stretches away for 8 or 9 miles till it ends abruptly above the village of Langrish, but to the west the grounds begin to fall gently to a valley within a few hundred yards of church and house, so that both stand on a mild promontory from which slopes descend to the north and south, and a little more distantly to the west. At the base of the west end of the promontory lies the official source of the River Itchen - in a willow-filled dell on the east side of the lane to the village of Kilmeston. In the valley many springs make their contribution to the small trickle which emerges from the 'official source', which, it must be owned, in a dry season hardly deserves its title, although in a wet season it projects a fine clear stream beneath the bridge carrying the Kilmeston lane. During my lifetime the village - for such we will call it - has altered remarkably little. A few new cottages have been built, mostly taking the place of those that were substandard, but there are still a number of highly picturesque buildings of half timber and thatch which may well have stood here since the seventeenth century or before. The majority of these group near the point where the steep road I have already mentioned leaves the highway, and it is this road which gives, I think, a pleasant feeling of antiquity to the place. It rises in a rather wide gentle curve up the hill and for the greater part of its length lies deep below the level of the adjacent land, worn down by centuries of wheeled carts and rainwater. Along the top of the steep banks grow tall trees, many of them ancient oaks, which increase both the sense of depth and age.
The road mounts past the former Rectory, now renamed Hinton Ampner Place, which is a reminder of the spacious days of the country parson. The trim brick front, built during the reign of the first King George, rises on the east side, and the windows look out over the park of Hinton Ampner House which covers the slope to the west. The original steep bank is here converted into a terrace in front of the house, bounded by a wall, and on to which a flight of steps leads through a central gateway.
By good fortune the date of the building of the house is known, for the Rector-builder was not backward in recording his achievements. On the first page of the Parish Registers, opposite the extremely neat entries of 1561, he wrote in a flourishing eighteenth-century hand, with a considerable spluttering of ink from his quill pen, an account of what he had done:
Kenwick Puleston, sometime Fellow of Jesus College, Oxon, and Batchelor of Divinity, Vicar of Corse-Lawn near Glocester, and Rector of this Parish of Hinton (Amner). He re-built ye greater part of ye Parlour new from ye foundations to ye Ridge of ye Roof in June about midsummer in this year of our Lord 1717.
Besides ye new part of ye Parlour of ye Parsonage House. He repaired ye east side of ye old house partly with brick building intirely new and partly with filling up pannels with bricks and bonded well; ye same he did, as it were all new, on ye south side of ye long Gallery-study. Ye same he did on ye east side of ye old back building. And in ye year of Or. Lord God 1712 he new laid ye Roof of ye Kitchen all ye north side with extraordinary good Laths and Tiles.
It is not very easy to follow Mr. Puleston's rebuilding programme for the house now appears to be all of a piece, except for an addition on the north side which was made in the 1880s, but which followed the style of the existing building, and is innocuous.
Returning to the road, Hinton Hill, as it is known, bears to the east as it nears the top of the rise and leads away past Manor Farm and, skirting the park, forms a wide loop southward till it reaches the village of Kilmeston. At the point where it bears east, a private road bordered by clipped box and holly bushes leads straight on through iron gates set between tall stone piers into the garden of Hinton Ampner House, passing close beside the wall of the churchyard within which stands the church. Across a wide extent of lawn, on which rise some large specimens of hardwood trees, lies the house, with a gently sloping forecourt in front of it, while beyond it can be glimpsed the landscape which extends away to the south.
To those interested in geology, Hinton Hill provides more than an agreeable approach to church and house, for in the steep banks can be seen the two materials which form the subsoil for the whole of this part of the county - chalk and clay. Basically this area is a chalk country, but although in places it comes to within a few inches of the surface, there are many others where it is overlain by a deep covering of stiff clay, and it is this clay which forms a cap along much of the Hinton Ampner ridge. Here and there are rare pockets of a good and nearly lime-free loam, rewarding to gardeners, while in the valleys on either side of the ridge are stretches of gravel beds, the disused pits along the north valley showing that gravel digging was here once actively undertaken. This may well have been at the time when the Winchester/ Petersfield road was being improved, and it was natural to use the material which lay so conveniently at hand. It is through the clay which covers the north slope of the ridge that rainwater rushing down to the valley, and aided by the wheels of past centuries, has carved the deep road.
This simplified description of the geology of the area is adequate to account for the landscape which lies above it. It cannot boast grand scenery: there is little of the luxuriance of woodland and hedgerow timber to be found in Sussex, or the dramatic contrast of massive open downs interspersed with deep leafy valleys as in Wiltshire. The central chalk area of Hampshire is indeed a compromise between the two. Several long chalk ridges rising in places to over 700 feet run east and west across this part of the country, and between them lies a complexity of undulations so that a level area of any size is rare. So rare indeed are these areas, that several villages in the locality find it difficult to discover a site suitable for a cricket field. That at Hinton, for example, which is in the park to the west of the house and has served this purpose for many decades, has a distinct tilt to the north and so provides at least an initial advantage to the home team which knows the peculiarities of the ground.
If the landscape lacks grandeur, it at least has a gentle beauty with its low hills covered with spacious arable fields, interspersed with areas of dark woodland which usually indicate a pocket of clay soil. It is a landscape which depends for its beauty on its trees: of hedgerow timber there is not very much but of natural woodland there is a good area, while former landowners have crowned the chalk ridges in their possession with plantations of beech trees, thus agreeably breaking their rather austere outlines. It is a landscape which changes its colouring throughout the year with the growth of the crops, for there is much arable land. The dark umber of plough turns miraculously to jade green as the young corn begins to shoot; the green to a pale yellow, and the yellow to gold as the crop ripens, and so back after harvest to yellow with the stubble until the ground is turned once more by the plough. This rotation is a commonplace, constantly described, and yet the fascination of the changing scene never fails to exercise its charm.
The house stands at the fairly modest elevation of 360 feet, but since the high road in the valley is 100 feet lower, the contrast gives an increased sense of altitude. From the house there is a wide view southward over the placid landscape, with barely a building in sight. In the middle distance lies the village of Kilmeston, but it is completely concealed by trees and the folds of the ground. Beyond these trees the ground rises to the long down-like ridge of the Millbarrow hills which, under various names, stretch from the valley of the Meon in the east to the valley of the Itchen in the west. Away to the east, rising above woodlands and beyond the Meon valley, can be seen the bold outline of Old Winchester Hill, one of the highest downs in the county. How it came by this name is unknown, for as the crow flies, it is 12 miles or more from the City of Winchester, which, with its Roman or pre-Roman origins, is no modern foundation.
On the west the country undulates in gentle contours away to Cheesefoot Head, the last high point of the ridge before it drops gradually to the Itchen valley and to Winchester. No landscape could be more serene and more completely rural, and yet the two great Hampshire ports, Southampton and Portsmouth, lie at no very great distance beyond the Millbarrow hills, respectively about 18 and 25 miles from Hinton. At night, when the cloud formation is favourable, the reflection of their lights shines in the sky, a reminder of the busy world beyond the dark horizon.
It must, I think, have been this peaceful prospect which first led to the building of a house at Hinton, and which persuaded a succession of owners not to abandon the site in spite of the various reverses which occurred. It was certainly the prime influence in my own building operations.
It was across this landscape that William Cobbett passed during the month of November 1822, travelling from the market town of Alresford to the village of Exton in the Meon valley, a journey of 10 miles or so which he described in Rural Rides. His route lay by Cheriton, Beauworth, Kilmeston, then over the Millbarrow ridge, and so down into the river valley. Hinton fortunately lay a mile or so off his path to the north, or it might have earned a few searing animadversions on absentee landlords. However, his general description of the area and the gloomy picture he paints of the condition of farming is interesting:
The whole country that I have crossed is loam and flints upon a bottom of chalk,. . . These counties are purely agricultural; they have suffered most cruelly from the accursed Pitt-system. Their hilliness, bleakness, roughness of roads, render them unpleasant to the luxurious, effeminate, tax-eating, crew who never come near them, and who have pared them down to the very bone. . .. The villages are all in a state of decay, the farm buildings dropping down, bit by bit.
Pitt by that time had been dead for 16 years, but in Cobbett's view the damage done by his policy was still alive and the decay of the countryside was due to the taxes he had imposed. He prophesied that within 40 years the whole farming community would be ruined. In the event the reverse occurred, and the i86os were a period of great prosperity both for farmers and landlords.
When farming was once again in the doldrums in the years between the wars it was assumed that from chalk land a farmer could barely scratch a livelihood, just as it was by many supposed that those living on chalk might as well abandon all effort to have a decent garden. In both cases this defeatism has now very definitely changed, and with new methods these chalk and clay lands can vie with the best corn-growing areas in the country; while for gardeners there is no longer any cause for despair, and they can take heart from the achievements of Sir Edward Stern in his majestic chalkpit near Worthing, and those of Mr. Lewis Palmer on a smaller scale at Headbourne Worthy, near Winchester.
There are two unmistakable signs that in past centuries this was not prosperous farming land - there are almost no great and famous country houses within the area, and with very few exceptions the parish churches are modest in scale. The few outstanding houses in Hampshire lie near its boundaries and away from the chalk country: Bramshill, The Vyne, Stratfield Saye, Hackwood in the extreme north, Braemare to the west. The Grange near Alresford is perhaps an exception, but the money which transformed in the early nineteenth century a moderate-sized house into a mansion of magnificence came from banking and not from the land.
The old churches in the area bear no comparison with the splendid parish churches of Norfolk, for example, or those in the limestone country of Gloucestershire; and those fine churches, of which there are a few in the county, will with rare exceptions be found to be away from the chalk subsoil. The average Hampshire church is a humble building with little claim to interest beyond a respectable antiquity. A nave without aisles, a small chancel, and at the west end a low weather-boarded belfry: that was the general style of church in small parishes, and they were well suited to the worship of a sparse community. The Church of All Saints at Hinton Ampner was just such a simple little building until the passion for improvement which pervaded the nineteenth century led to its transformation into something more in accord with the taste of the period.
The site of the church is impressive standing as it does on the very crest of the ridge. When the first church was raised here in pre-Conquest times the site must have been quite dramatic, and the little church would have been visible to those working in the fields for a long way round. Now, surrounded by trees, it is not visible until one is in its close proximity at the summit of the hill. It stands comfortably within its well-kept churchyard, now no longer in use; and is only separated from the garden of Hinton Ampner House by a wall on the south side and a holly hedge on the west.
The parish registers date back to the year 1561 and form a useful and accurate record of the baptisms, marriages and deaths of the inhabitants of the parish. Only rarely, unfortunately, did an incumbent follow the example of the Rev. Kenrick Puleston and break away from the simple statement of names and dates and insert some scrap of information about the parish or the church.
It is surprising how the population of the parish must have decreased in four centuries. In 1563, for example, which admittedly was rather a bumper year, there were six christenings, three marriages and seven burials. Only in one case, that of Christian Woods, did the infant who was baptized hurry out of this world three days later. In 1963 there was only one of each of the first two, and two of the third; and this also was something of a bumper year. No doubt families were much larger in the sixteenth century, but they must also have lived in infinitely more crowded conditions than now, for there is no indication that the number of cottages in the village was ever greater than today. In fact my grandfather built ten cottages, and I have added five but nevertheless the total of the population would appear to have decreased.
About the alterations to the structure of the church the parish registers remain tantalizingly mute; except for one entry which I will shortly mention. A photograph taken I think soon after 1860 by my grandmother, who was an early and keen photographer, shows the west end of the church with the porch and wooden belfry. From this it would appear that a good deal had survived from the Saxon building but that various windows, purely domestic in style, had been inserted in Tudor times to supplement the dim daylight that filtered through the narrow lancets, and that the porch had been added at the same period.
The chancel, which does not appear in the photograph, had already undergone two transformations. Perhaps the original church had none. If so this lack was remedied in the thirteenth century when a spacious and well-built chancel was erected with a vault beneath it. It contained a rather elaborate two-storied double piscina, a sedilia, a squint and a small north doorway. All features still survive but were so thoroughly rechiselled at the next alteration in the early nineteenth century that they now bear a singularly spurious air. The exact date of this work is unknown, but it must have been before 1822, the date which appears at the base of the two long east windows which are filled with glass of exceptional crudity.
On the whole, however, this early nineteenth-century work was rather well carried out. The squared flintwork with which the exterior is faced presumably dates from this period, and is impressive if one considers the amount of time and work entailed in cutting flints to the size of small bricks, varying in length, but all of an almost uniform 3 inches in depth so that they can be set in even lines, and form a fairly smooth general surface.
The other agreeable feature of the chancel is the wooden roof of the interior. It is a tradition that it is made from timber supplied by the last Lord Stawell, and brought from his estate in the West Indies. If there is any truth in this, the wood must be some sort of Caribbean cedar. But as with many traditions the story seems unlikely as the woodwork would appear to date from much earlier than the beginning of the nineteenth century. It may have been one of Mr. Puleston's improvements, for once again, modestly blowing his own trumpet, he wrote in the Register:
In ye year 1713 new Roofed ye Chancel all over, with new laths and Tiles extraordinary strong and good as ever were laid on a church.
The design would seem to be a more likely product of the reign of George I than George IV, and indeed with its boldly moulded ribs between sunken panels it could date from the latter part of the previous century. But fashion changed slowly in country districts, and 1713 would seem a quite probable date.
There are also in the chancel two charming monuments to children of the Stewkeley family. The earlier, which is quite small, is to Thomas, who was born on the 10th October 1601 and died ten days later. The body of the infant is portrayed lying on a sarcophagus wrapped in a crimson shroud edged with gold and beneath an arch intended, no doubt, to represent a vault. On either side decorated pilasters support a cornice, and are an agreeable early essay in Renaissance design.
The other is to another Thomas of the following generation who died 30th March 1638 aged three years. It is far more elaborate, and in its uncontrolled flamboyance is more typical of a rather earlier age. Although not large in scale it manages to incorporate in its composition not only a recumbent figure of the child, but also an angel flying amongst clouds sounding the Last Trump, in company with the heads of a number of winged putti, a flaming heart, a celestial crown supported by angels, a sun, moon and stars. The whole tumult of heavenly paraphernalia is framed in Corinthian pillars supporting a pediment and decorated with a lavish display of heraldry, A third monument to the last male Stewkeley, Sir Hugh, who died in 1719, shows admirable restraint both in design and colouring.
There are several seventeenth-century brasses to members of the Stewkeley family, one handsomely heraldic to the first Sir Hugh who died in 1642, while a simple plate embellished with a verse more outstanding for ingenuity than poetic feeling commemorates the death of Elizabeth, daughter of the 2nd Sir Hugh at the age of 37 weeks in 1667:
Reader within this little vault lies pent
The ashes of a female innocent,
Whose early whiter soule as yet hath not
From the defileing world contracted spott.
The day she lived, she dyed, yet having spent
some few moneths so to Abram's bossome went,
Where now her happy soule enjoys that Blisse
Which unto little infants promised is :
Now who this harmless St. was wouldst thou know,
Look down and read th' inscription here below.
At a period when infant mortality was so usual it seems strange that these babies should have been so carefully, indeed expensively, commemorated.
These monuments fortunately survived my grandfather's enthusiasm for destroying memorials from the past, but many others he removed and put in the vault when he rebuilt the nave in the 1870s. At the same time as the nave was rebuilt the pews in the chancel were replaced with the solid pitch pine which seems to have found such grace in nineteenth-century eyes, while the floor was raised and laid with many-coloured Doulton tiles, and massive brass altar rails (now removed) guarded the Sanctuary. The builders of the last century were convinced they could improve by adding, nowadays we believe we can improve by taking away: it is difficult to foresee what the next movement will be.
The chancel on the whole escaped lightly: the ancient nave on the other hand, which had stood for centuries, was demolished to the foundations. This was due to the combined enthusiasm of my grandfather and the Rector. When the former had completed the rebuilding of his house, which lay less than 100 yards away across the laurel bushes, the Rector had said to him: 'Now that you have rebuilt your own house, won't you rebuild the house of God?' Whether it was due to his piety or to his sadly undiscriminating passion for building it is impossible to say, but the appeal fell on fertile ground, and within a year or two a solid and severe flint structure had replaced the old nave in which villagers, farmers and squires - some of the last in distinct need of spiritual uplift - had gathered over centuries for their weekly devotions.
Given my grandfather's complete lack of taste, the result might well have been worse, and it would seem that he must have been guided by a sensible architect or a capable builder. A church which he erected on his property at Kingsley near Alton was considerably less innocuous. A few remnants from the pre-Conquest building were incorporated - shafts of long and short stonework were re-used amongst the flintwork on both the north and south sides, and the south doorway with its semicircular arch and stout stone reveals was re-erected as an entrance to the new vestry on the north side. The date of the robust oak door which fills the doorway is known, for on it is carved 'Nicholas Lacey gave this Door February 1643'. The donor was buried at Hinton in the same month, so no doubt he left a bequest for a new outer door for the church, the position where this was until the rebuilding.
In addition to the Stewkeleys there are three families whose names constantly appear in the Registers: Lacey, Earwacker and Gamis. The first two were farmers, and are sometimes so designated, but the last, who were extremely prolific, seem to have been smallholders or farm labourers. The Laceys must have lived at Manor Farm, and the Earwackers - a strange name, not unusual in Hampshire - were certainly at the adjacent farm for it bore their name until this century when it came to be called by the simpler name of Godwin's Farm after a subsequent tenant. The two first names disappear from the Registers about 1820, but the Gamises do not vanish till 1862, by which time they must have lived at least three centuries in the parish, but without raising their status in the world for in the last entry Robert Camis is described as'Labourer'.
The bell tower at the west end is topped by a wooden structure which is clearly intended to emulate the belfry which it replaced, but owing to the Victorian partiality for improving on original designs, it has a Swiss rather than a Hampshire air.
The bells survived the rebuilding, and all three are dated, two 1603 and the third 1719. The two first, which are inscribed 'Serv God' and 'Fere God', bear also the initials of the caster, J. W. for John Wallis of the Salisbury Bell Foundry. The third, the tenor bell, has the following words on it: 'My hope in God is'. This was a motto often used by John Higden, so it seems likely to be his work, and is probably a mediaeval bell recast. All three bells have an agreeable tone.
Almost as sad as the loss of the original nave is the loss of the monuments, of which I believe there were many. The entrance to the vault, into which they were thrust, was so carefully sealed that I have no clue to its whereabouts and I have so far been unable to examine them, or the coffins of the generations of owners, with their spouses and children which lie there. A number of names and dates were gathered on to a mutilated tablet which is set above the font at the west end, while below it are two finely carved features from other monuments.
The walls of the nave are not, however, absolutely bare, for in 1952 I transported here two interesting monuments from the church of St. Mary at Laverstoke near Whitchurch. By chance I read in the county weekly, the Hampshire Chronicle, an account of the last service held in that little church before its demolition. Many years earlier I had visited the church and seen the monument to the first wife of the last Sir Hugh Stewkeley, who had died in 1679. She was the heiress of the Laverstoke estate and had been buried there, rather than at Hinton with the other members of her husband's family. The rather equivocal lines on the monument, which I will quote later when we look at the Stewkeley family, might indicate that the bonds between her and Sir Hugh were not of the closest.
I learnt from the incumbent of Laverstoke that as no one wished to take the monument to Lady Stewkeley, it had been decided to dismantle it and seal it up in the vault, just as my grandfather had done at Hinton in unenlightened Victorian times. The Rector's search for a home for the monument cannot have been very exhaustive since it was shown on the inscription that the lady was the wife of Sir Hugh Stewkeley of Hinton Ampner.
I at once agreed to take the monument and also one to her parents which was likewise doomed to oblivion, and to re-erect them at Hinton, and there they now are on the south wall of the nave. The disappearance of Lady Stewkeley's monument would have been unfortunate for it is of unusual design, and according to the late Rupert Gunnis is almost certainly the work of that highly individual sculptor, John Bushnell. It consists of a bust of Katherine Stewkeley set in a niche draped with marble curtains and flanked by a pair of marble urns; below is the inscription carved on the leaves of an open book. For a monument of moderate size it achieves a considerable sense of the dramatic. The monument to Katherine's parents which dates from 1672 is conventional, and has of course no real connection with Hinton, but the workmanship is good. On the north wall is a monument designed by Trenwith Wills, which I erected to my parents. In the pediment are the Button arms quartered with those of the families from whom my father was descended and who had in turn owned the Hinton estate - Stewkeley, Stawell and Legge. At the base of the tablet a space awaits the insertion of my name and dates.
When I was very young the church was invariably well filled for Matins on Sunday mornings. We as a family occupied a pew and a half, the Rector's family did likewise. There were seldom any other gentry, since indeed there were hardly any others in the parish, but the gardeners and their wives, and the farm labourers with their families, made up a congregation of respectable size. There were also three benches at the back of the church given up to the children from the village school who sat under the severe eye of the school mistress. In front of the children the maids and men-servants from the house filled a couple of benches. The upper maids wore toques and the underlings small black bonnets. I remember how this custom broke down. During the Four Years War, in 1915 I think, when the men-servants had joined the army, a parlour-maid was engaged, a tall, handsome young woman. On the first Sunday morning after her arrival she came to church in large hat. In a HAT, if you please! Consternation. But after some anxious discussion it was decided in view of the general situation - German's second great struggle for Ypres and the Channel ports had just begun, and poison gas had been loosed for the first time on to the British troops - to let it pass. But the rot was setting in and traditions were crumbling: soon bonnets and toques disappeared from the back of the church and hats took their place. I have perhaps said too much about this unimportant church, which at least to a superficial glance is little more than a commonplace nineteenth-century building, and we will now leave it and cross the narrow strip of churchyard to the iron gate, which originally guarded the entrance to the porch, and so pass into the garden of the house which is the hero -or heroine - of these pages.