COBBETT 165 



Conqueror's daughter and was one of his most intimate 

 henchmen at the Battle of Hastings, before it became 

 the site of the formidable Reigate, or Holm, Castle. 

 The manors granted to William de Varennes compre- 

 hended nearly the whole of Surrey, and included 

 others in Sussex, Yorkshire, and Norfolk. Such were 

 the splendours that fell to the son-in-law and the 

 companion-in-arms of a successful invader. He 

 became somewhat Anglicised under the title of Earl 

 of Warenne, and the ancestor of a line of seven Earls, 

 of whom the last died in 1347, when the family became 

 firstly merged in that of the Fitzalans, then of the 

 Mowbrays, and finally in that of the alternately 

 absorbent and fissiparous Howards. 



Holm, or Reigate Castle, had little history of the 

 warlike sort. It frowned terribly upon its sandstone 

 ridge, but tamely submitted in 1216 when the foreign 

 allies of the discontented subjects of King John 

 approached : and when the seventh Earl, who had 

 murdered Baron de la Zouche at Westminster, was 

 attacked here by Prince Edward, he promptly made a 

 grovelling surrender and paid the fine of 12,000 marks 

 (equal to £21,000) demanded. In 1550, when Lam- 

 barde wrote, only " the ruyns and rubbishe of an old 

 castle which some call Homesdale " were left, and 

 even those were cleared away by order of the Parliament 

 in 1618. Now, after many centuries of change in 

 ownership, the hill on which that fortress stood is 

 contemptuously tunnelled, to give a more direct road 

 through the town. 



In this connection, Cobbett, coming to Reigate 

 through Sutton in 1823, is highly entertaining. The 

 tunnel was then being made, and it did not please 

 him. " Thev are," he vociferates, " in order to save 

 a few hundred yards' length of road, cutting through 

 a hill. They have lowered a little hill on the London 

 side of Sutton. Thus is the money of the country 

 actually thrown away : the produce of labour is taken 

 from the industrious and given to the idlers. Mark 

 the process ; the town of Brighton, in Sussex, fifty 



