[Illustration: PYRFORD CHURCH, NEAR WOKING.]
who may well call it a landmark of English architecture, one of the earliest great houses not built with a design of defence.
The house is almost contemporary with some of those exquisite châteaux of the age of Francis which are still preserved on the Loire. Like them, it possesses Italian features of a fancy and grace as remote from the Gothic as from the classical world. Like them, as was every fine work of that age, it is the embodiment of a single idea, of a personal sense of beauty of some creative genius; and thus it stands apart in the history of house-building in Europe, a cinque-cento conception in an English Gothic frame.... The house, too, has had the singular fortune to retain, at least on the outside, its original form, and to be quite free from later additions. Save that one side of the court has been removed, the principal quadrangle, as seen from within, is in every essential feature exactly as the builder left it. Nor, except by the removal or the renewal of some mullions, has the exterior on any side suffered any material change. It is not, like so many of our ancient mansions, a record of the caprice, the ambition, the decay or the bad taste, of successive generations. No Elizabethan architect has added a classical porch; no Jacobean magnate has thrown out a ponderous wing with fantastic gables and profusion of scrolls; no Georgian squire has turned it into a miniature Blenheim, or consulted his comfort by adding a square barrack.... This unity and peace, which seem to rest on the old house almost as on a ruin or a cloister whence modern improvements are shut out, are doubtless due to this: that from its building till to-day the place has remained in the same family, and that a family debarred by adherence to the ancient faith from taking active part in the world of affairs.
The Wey's next turn is round the village of Send, where its navigable branch makes eastward, while vagrant channels stray off a little north to touch Woking. This name may seem familiar to London travellers, yet few of them will know where and what Woking is. The lively new town that has grown up so fast on the heaths about Woking Junction, stands nearly two miles north of the original village, huddled about the tower and tiled roof of its old church, a landmark conspicuous over the river flat. Even when Defoe made his tour, this place lay "so out of all Road, that 'tis very little heard of in England; it claims however some Honour from its being once the Residence of ... the old Countess of Richmond, Mother to King Henry VII., who made her last Retreat here," and who, he might have added, had the singular fortune of being thrice a bride in her teens. The moated royal manor has long disappeared; but this back-water village preserves a Market Hall as token of former dignity.