omesday Book. Another is a fine
early Georgian building now known as Emlyn House, but formerly as "The
Mansion." Alexander Akehurst, M.D., one of the churchwardens who
presented the Book of Homilies to the church, rebuilt this house early
in the eighteenth century, but parts of the older building remain. Once
it belonged to Sir Thomas Bludworth, whose sister married Judge Jeffreys
of the Bloody Assize. According to a local tradition, Jeffreys, when his
worthy master King James had fled to France, slunk in disguise to
Leatherhead. It was one of the many roads he found closed against him in
his attempts to escape. But he did not come to Leatherhead solely
because it lay on the road to the south. His little daughter lay at the
point of death at her uncle's house, and his desire was to see her once
more before she died. The once mighty Lord Chancellor, dressed as a
common sailor with shaven eyebrows and coaldust smeared on his cheeks,
hated with a furious intensity of loathing which has never been felt for
an Englishman before or since, knocked fearfully at dead of night at the
door of the house where his dying daughter lay. So says the legend, and
history does not forbid belief. For the register dates the child's
funeral on December 2, 1688, and it was ten days afterwards that a wild
crowd nearly tore the judge limb from limb at Wapping.

A gentler memory, or rather association, belongs to the Church street
and the houses in the neighbourhood. There have been many attempts made
by Miss Austen's readers to identify Highbury, "the large and populous
village, almost amounting to a town" of _Emma_, with some Surrey town or
village. There is a school of serious students who place it at Esher;
another band of enthusiasts support Dorking. Mr. E.V. Lucas, in his
engaging introduction to a new edition of the novel, has another
suggestion. He recommends the theory that Highbury was Leatherhead,
which satisfies most of the conditions of the book. It is, as he says,
rightly placed as regards London, Kingston and Box Hill; though seven
miles, which was the drive from Hartfield to Box Hill, is surely rather
a generous estimate of the actual distance. But Leatherhead certainly
has a river and a "Randalls," and Mr. Lucas has been told that it has an
"Abbey Farm." That may be a mere coincidence; but, if so, it is the more
striking when one turns to the parish registers, and finds in them the
uncommon name of Knightley. Mr. Knightley, in 176