II.] 



ENCLOSING, LAYING OUT. 



7 



which is found in abundance in the neighbourhood, and it was about 

 three feet through, even at the top. The ground of which the 

 garden consisted had been the sloping foot of a hill, taking in a 

 part of the meadow that came after the hill, and lay between it and 

 the river Wey. A flat of about twenty feet wide had been made 

 on the side of the hill, and, at the back of this flat, the wall was 

 erected. After the flat, towards the south, began the slope ; at the 

 end of the slope began the level ground, which grew more and 

 more moist as it approached the river. At the foot of the garden 

 there ran a rivulet, coming from a fish-pond, and at a little distance 

 from that, emptying itself into the river. The hill itself w as a bed 

 of sand ; therefore, the flat, at the back of which the north wall 

 stood ; that is to say, the wall on the north side of the garden ; 

 this flat must have been made ground. The slope must have been 

 partly made, otherwise it would have been too sandy. 



14. This was the finest situation for a kitchen-garden that I ever 

 saw. It Avas wholly torn to pieces about fifty years ago ; the wall 

 pulled down ; the garden made into a sort of lawn, and the lower 

 part of it, when I saw the spot about three years ago, a coarse, 

 rushy meadow, all the drains which formerly took away the oozings 

 from the hill, having been choked up or broken up ; and that spot 

 where the earliest birds used to sing, and where prodigious quanti- 

 ties of the finest fruits used to be borne, was become just as sterile 

 and as ill-looking a piece of ground, short of a mere common or 

 neglected field, as I ever set my eyes on. That very spot w here I 

 had seen bushels of hautboy strawberries, such as I have never seen 

 from that day to this ; that very spot, the precise locality of w hich 

 it took me (so disfigured was the place !) the better part of an 

 hour to ascertain, was actually part of a sort of swampy meadow, 

 producing sedgy grass and rushes. This most secluded and beau- 

 tiful spot was given away by the ruthless tyrant, Henry the Eighth, 

 to one of the basest and greediest of his cormorant courtiers, Sir 

 William Fitzwilliams ; it became afterwards, according to 

 Grose, the property of the family of Orby Huntee, ; from that 

 family it passed into the hands of a Sir Robert Rich, much 

 about fifty years ago. The monastery had been founded by GlF- 

 FARD, bishop of Winchester, who brought to inhabit it the first 

 community of Cistercian monks that were settled in England, He 

 endowed the convent at his own expense ; gave it the manor and 

 estate, and gave it also the great tithes of the parish of Farnham, 



