WOKING HUNDRED
��WEST HORSLEY
��WEST HORSLEY
��Horsaleges (ix cent.) ; Orselei (xi cent.) ; Horslegh (xiii cent.).
West Horsley lies 6 miles north-erst of Guildford and the same distance south-west of Letherhead. It is bounded on the north by Ockham, on the east by East Horsley, on the south by Shere, on the west by- East Clandon and Send and Ripley. Blackmoor Heath, in the north of it, was transferred to Ockham 15 March 1883,' and an outlying fragment of Wisley which bordered on West Horsley was also made part of Ockham at the same time. The parish is over 3 miles from north to south, and over one mile from east to west, and contains 2,672 acres. Like its neighbours east and west it reaches from the top of the Chalk Downs, across the chalk, the Thanet and Woolwich Beds, and part of the London Clay. The church is just upon the edge of the chalk, the scat- tered village on the next soil. Netley Heath, however, which is in the parish, is a bed of sand and gravel lying upon the chalk. There is still seme open ground upon the Downs, but the greater part of the commons has been inclosed. The village is scat- tered about the lanes, but a few houses are clustered together at Horsley Green. The church has very few houses near it, except West Horsley Place, and is close to the border of East Horsley parish.
The road from Guildford to Epsom passes through West Horsley, and the Guildford and Cobham line is in the northern part of the parish.
West Horsley Place (see below) has literary interests connected with it. It was the seat of John Lord Berners, who made the first English translation of Froissart's Chronicle in the reign of Henry VIII. It was shortly afterwards the house of the Earl of Lincoln, whose wife, in whose right he held it, was the widow of Sir Anthony Browne, and was by birth Lady Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of the Earl of Kildare, celebrated by Surrey the poet as the ' Fair Geraldine.' She resided at West Horsley after her husband's death, and corresponded in very unpoetic style with Sir William More at Loseley, where several of her letters are preserved, including an invitation to Sir William to come to her house during the crisis of the Spanish invasion of 1588, dated 30 July, and expressing the consternation in the court at the news that the Spaniards were over against Dover in Calais Roads. Carew Raleigh, son of Sir Walter, was a later owner, and he sold it to Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary of State to Charles I, who died in 1669. Sir Edward's son, Sir John, was Clerk to the Privy Council and died in 1704. His son Edward, who died in 1726, was Treasurer to Queen Mary. Their correspondence was preserved at West Horsley, and a schedule of the papers was drawn up by Edward Nicholas in 1720.' A considerable part of the collection was purchased for the British Museum in 1879, and now forms part of the Egerton MSS. 2533-2562. But it is unfor- tunately only a part of what once existed. The
��whole collection seems to have passed into the posses- sion of Sir John Evelyn of Wotton, after the death of William Nicholas in 1 749. Dr. Thomas Birch made transcripts and a catalogue of the papers in 1 750-1, de- scribing them as in the possession of Sir John Evelyn. Some of them are still at Wotton, and were printed by Bray at the end of his edition of John Evelyn's Diary and Correspondence, 1 8 1 8. The rest are supposed to have been returned to West Horsley, whence they passed to the Museum in 1879, but a great many papers referred to by Birch, whose transcripts are in the British Museum, 3 are now lost. The missing part included a History of the Long Parliament, covering 285 pages in Sir Edward Nicholas's own hand. Only fragments of this and of three letter- books, from 1648 to 1658, survive.
Extracts from the papers have been edited for the Camden Society and the Royal Historical Society in 1886, 1892, 1897, and a fourth volume is in the press. Inferior to the Loseley MSS. in local interest, they are by far the most valuable general historical collection preserved in any Surrey house.
There is a valuable collection of historical portraits at West Horsley of the Nicholas family and 17th- century persons of note, Raleigh, Weston Earl of Portland, Clarendon, Hobbes, Compton Bishop of London, Ben Jonson, Anne of Denmark, Nell Gwynn, and others.
Woodcote Lodge in this parish is the residence of the Rt. Hon. Sir Henry Roscoe. The Rectory house was built by the Rev. C. H. S. Weston in 1819, a mile away from the church, near Horsley Green.
In West Horsley were 362 acres of common fields and 1 6 acres of common meadow. The Inclosure Act was in 1802.* By it 79 acres of common arable and 88 acres of waste on Netley Heath were appro- priated as a glebe. Five acres and a half are assigned for the repairs of the church.
There is a Wesleyan <_hapel in this parish.
Broomhouse on the Epsom road is the property of Lord Rendel, and is used as a convalescent home for Poor Law children.
In 1786* a house and orchard were recorded as left for a school by an unknown donor. In 1813 Mr. Weston Fullerton built and endowed a school. The Rev. C. H. S. Weston further endowed a school with 760 in 1845. The present school (National) was built in 1 86 1. Mr. Weston's endowment is paid to this, and it seems that Mr. Fullerton's school had been previously amalgamated with Mr. Weston's.
The earliest mention of WEST HORS- M4NOR LET occurs in the gth century, when a certain Dux Alfred granted it to Werburg his wife.* Bricsi held it in the time of Edward the Confessor,' and at the time of the Survey it was in the possession of Walter son of Other, 8 from whom the family of Windsor descended.' Hugh de Windsor, grandson of Walter, 10 held a knight's fee in West
��1 Loc. Govt. Bd. Order 14283.
- Not by William his younger brother
as usually stated ; see Introduction by Dr. Warner to vol. i of Nicholat Pafm (Cam- den Series), 1886.
��Add. MSS. 4180.
4 42 Geo. Ill, cap. 4$.
- Return to Par/.
Kemble, Cod. Difl. no. 317.
353
��1 V.C.H. Surr. i, 323.
Ibid.
Collins, Hist. Coll. ofFam. 10 Ibid. 7.
��45
�� �
