's worship, and that if he left out
anything he would leave out that." And that, for Mr. Andrewes, was the
end; a man who lost his living because he would rather pray than preach.

[Illustration: _Church Street, Godalming._]

Two women have left records behind them, one strange and the other
cruel, in the parish annals. One was a remarkable person named Mary
Tofts, wife of a clothworker, who in 1726 professed to have had a
lamentable misadventure. She asserted that while she was weeding in a
field she was startled by a rabbit jumping up near her, and that
subsequently, she presented her husband, instead of a fine boy, with
quantities of rabbits. The effect of the announcement was prodigious.
More than one well-known physician believed her implicitly; pamphlets
were published on clinics, Hogarth printed a cut of the Wise Men of
Godlyman; nobody would eat a rabbit; at last Queen Caroline ended the
business by sending her own doctor to investigate, and Mary Tofts was
lodged in Bridewell. Another poor woman deceived less and was punished
more. The parish registers hold the record.

Aprill the 26^th 1658. Heare was taken a vagrant, one Mary Parker,
Widow with a Child, and she was wipped according to law, about the
age of Thirty years, proper of personage; and she was to goo to the
place of her birth, that is in Grauesend in Kent, and she is
limitted to iiij days, and to be carried from Tithing to Tything
tell she comes to the end of the s^d jerney.

A reformer of prison discipline, who was a native of Godalming, would
have read the entry with rage. General Oglethorpe, founder of the colony
of Georgia, and originator of the inquiry into the state of the Fleet
and Marshalsea prisons, was born at Westbrook in Godalming forty years
after Godalming beat the woman through its friendless streets. We meet
General Oglethorpe at Haslemere; perhaps if he had lived earlier he
would have dared to lift his hand against the savage Elizabethan law.

How could a town assent to such shame, and yet maintain on its outskirts
an almshouse? Godalming's almshouse is a long low building of red brick,
standing behind a white gate and some elms on the road by Farncombe. It
was founded by Richard Wyatt, a rich Londoner, three times Master of the
Carpenters' Company, and the inscription over the entrance stands as he
made it:--

"This Oyspitall was given by M^r. Richard Wyatt of London, Esq.: for
tenn poore men w^t