Page:The Victoria History of the County of Surrey Volume 3.djvu/138

 A HISTORY OF SURREY

��bases of the sedilia are also peculiarly good, and the two centre ones are of Sussex marble, together with their shafts. The seat levels are stepped up, and the piscina has a credence shelf and an elegantly moulded bowl with two circular basins. 69

Ancient roofs, no doubt coeval with the walls, remain in the nave and transepts, but that of the chancel is of modern deal. Perhaps the most inter- esting feature in the church is the 1 3th-century seating in the nave, in an almost perfect state. The design of the standards, which is nearly alike in the dozen or so ancient benches, is quaint resembling a pair of cows'-horns with balls on the tips ; and round the edges is worked a hollow chamfer. These benches had a narrow plank for seat lately widened and a thick rail to rest the back against, the space between it and the seat being filled with a thin plank. They stood upon a continuous oak plate or curb, which has lately been done away with, and a separate block put under each standard. 60 In the vestry is preserved part of the very graceful fleur-de-lys termination of the quire stalls of the same date the only fragment

���PLAN OF DUNSFOLD CHURCH

��remaining. It resembles others of like pattern at Merrow, Effingham, and Great Bookham in this county. An Elizabethan or Jacobean altar-table is also preserved in the vestry.

The walls of the church appear to have been painted at about the time of the completion of the work with a series of very small subjects, of which copies made at the time they were discovered have been framed and hung up in the nave. They seem to have been executed chiefly in red outline, and on

��round the whole of the nave under the string- course.' 61 On the east wall of the nave and transepts the remains of a hunting-scene, with a hare and stag, suggested the mediaeval allegory of The Three Dead and the Three Living of which subject there is a painting in existence at Charlwood Church, Surrey. 61 St. Christopher and St. George appear to have been painted on the north wall of the nave, probably in the 1 5th century, and an undecipherable painting of this later period still remains within the space occupied by the timber tower, on the south wall of the nave.

Some grisail'e quarries, coeval with the windows, still remain in the chancel, and the bordering of the modern glass in the east window is copied from the old. The font with small circular bowl in Sussex marble is of uncertain date, but probably late 13th- century, although some authorities have placed it as late as the latter part of the lyth century. The only mediaeval monument now visible is a stone slab dug up in the nave and now placed in the south transept, which has moulded edges, and probably once bore a cross. It is a monumental slab and not a coffin-lid. Aubrey mentions a gravestone in the chancel to 'John Ship- say, Dr. of Divinity, Rector of the Parsonage of Dunsfold,' who was ' chaplayn to King Charles the First,' and died in 1665, but this is no longer to be seen.

The registers commence in 1628. The first volume, which ends in 1653, is partly tran- scribed in volume two, which contains baptisms to 1810, burials to 1812, marriages to 1752. The registers of bap- tisms and marriages are com- pleted in volumes three and four. They contain, among other items of interest, a record that Sarah Pick, on 1 8 March 1665, 'did penance in a white sheet,' with the remarkable ad- dendum that ' She was excom-

cated code die': and another notice of the penance in private of one 'J. Barnes and An his wife' in 1667.

There is a silver cup of I 566 and a ewer of 1578 among the church plate ; also an old pewter tankard- shaped flagon, no longer used.

Of the six bells three are modern, added in 1892. One, recast in 1893, was by William Knight of Reading, 1583, inscribed multit annis resonet campana Johannis. Another bears the date 1621, and the inscription ' Our hope is in the Lorde ' : and a third

��the south wall of the nave, immediately westward of of 1 64.9 is by Bryan Eldridge,

��the transept arch, ' the scheme of human redemption was probably set forth, commencing with the Fall of Man, and ending with the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin the last within a quatrefoil ... A band of interlacing, or chain-work, is said to have run

��The advowson of the parish church was at first in the hands of the king, who granted it with that of Shalford to St. Mary Spital without Bishops- gate in 1304-5 ;" it followed the history of Shalford

��59 The range of aedilia and piscina at Preston, Sussex, is a coarse edition of these. Trotton, Lynchmerc, and Sompting, Sussex, have very similar pis- cinae.

Burstow, Chiddingfold and Witley, in Surrey, have one or two seats of some-

��what similar character and date. Did- ling, Sussex, Minstead in the New Forest, Winchfield, Hants, Clapton in Gordano, Somerset, and Churchdown, Gloucester- shire, are other examples of nave seating of the late I3th or early 141)1 cen- tury.

9 6

��" J. L. Andre, F.S.A, Surr. Arch. Coll. xiii, 9.

82 Another was found at Fetcham in this county, and the same subject was formerly to be seen over the chancel arch at Battle, Sussex.


 * Chart. R. 33 Edw. I, no. 49.

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