The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 1 (of 2)
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Title: The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 1 (of 2)
Author: Charles G. Harper
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND, VOLUME 1 (OF 2) ***
THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.
The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.
The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.
The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an
East Anglian Turnpike.
The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South
Wales. Two Vols.
The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”
Cycle Rides Round London.
A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.
Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols. The Ingoldsby Country:
Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”
The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
The Dorset Coast.
The South Devon Coast. [_In the Press._
[Illustration: THE ROADSIDE INN.]
THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND
_A PICTURESQUE ACCOUNT OF THE
ANCIENT AND STORIED HOSTELRIES
OF OUR OWN COUNTRY_
VOL. I
BY CHARLES G. HARPER
[Illustration]
_Illustrated chiefly by the Author, and from Prints
and Photographs_
LONDON:
CHAPMAN & HALL, LIMITED
1906
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
[Illustration: PREFACE]
_It is somewhat singular that no book has hitherto been published dealing
either largely or exclusively with Old Inns and their story. I suppose
that is because there are so many difficulties in the way of one who would
write an account of them. The chief of these is that of arrangement and
classification; the next is that of selection; the last that of coming to
a conclusion. I would ask those who read these pages, and have perhaps
some favourite inn they do not find mentioned or illustrated here, to
remember that the merely picturesque inns that have no story, or anything
beyond their own picturesqueness to render them remarkable, are--let us be
thankful for it!--still with us in great numbers, and that to have
illustrated or mentioned even a tithe of them would have been impossible.
I can think of no literary and artistic work more delightful than the
quest of queer old rustic inns, but two stout volumes will probably be
found to contain as much on the subject as most people wish to know--and
it is always open to anyone who does not find his own especial favourite
here to condemn the author for his ignorance, or, worse, for his perverted
taste._
_As for methods, those are of the simplest. You start by knowing, ten
years beforehand, what you intend to produce; and incidentally, in the
course of a busy literary life, collect, note, sketch, and make extracts
from Heaven only knows how many musty literary dustbins and sloughs of
despond. Then, having reached the psychological moment when you must come
to grips with the work, you sort that accumulation, and, mapping out
England into tours, with inns strung like beads upon your itinerary, bring
the book, after some five thousand miles of travel, at last into being._
_It should be added that very many inns are incidentally illustrated or
referred to in the series of books on great roads by the present writer;
but as those works dealing with Roads, another treating of the History of
Coaching, and the present volumes are all part of one comprehensive plan
dealing with the History of Travel in general, the allusions to inns in
the various road-books have but rarely been repeated; while it will be
found that if, in order to secure a representative number of inns, it has
been, in some cases, found unavoidable to retrace old footsteps, new
illustrations and new matter have, as a rule, been brought to bear._
_The Old Inns of London have not been touched upon very largely, for most
of them are, unhappily, gone. Only the few existing ones have been
treated, and then merely in association with others in the country. To
write an account of the Old Inns of London would now be to discourse, in
the manner of an antiquary, on things that have ceased to be._
CHARLES G. HARPER.
PETERSHAM, SURREY.
_September, 1906._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF INNS 13
III. GENERAL HISTORY OF INNS 28
IV. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 42
V. LATTER DAYS 57
VI. PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS 76
VII. PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS (_continued_) 117
VIII. HISTORIC INNS 144
IX. INNS OF OLD ROMANCE 188
X. PICKWICKIAN INNS 210
XI. DICKENSIAN INNS 265
XII. HIGHWAYMEN’S INNS 303
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
SEPARATE PLATES
THE ROADSIDE INN _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE LAST OF THE OLD GALLERIED INNS OF LONDON: THE “GEORGE,”
SOUTHWARK. (_Photo by T. W. Tyrrell_) 32
THE KITCHEN OF A COUNTRY INN, 1797: SHOWING THE TURNSPIT
DOG. (_From the engraving after Rowlandson_) 48
WESTGATE, CANTERBURY, AND THE “FALSTAFF” INN 86
CHARING CROSS, ABOUT 1829, SHOWING THE “GOLDEN CROSS” INN.
(_From the engraving after T. Hosmer Shepherd_) 218
THE “GOLDEN CROSS,” SUCCESSOR OF THE PICKWICKIAN INN, AS
REBUILT 1828 220
ROCHESTER IN PICKWICKIAN DAYS, SHOWING THE OLD BRIDGE AND
“WRIGHT’S” 224
THE “BELLE SAUVAGE.” (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_) 228
THE DICKENS ROOM, “LEATHER BOTTLE,” COBHAM 230
THE “BULL INN,” WHITECHAPEL. (_From the water-colour drawing
by P. Palfrey_) 246
THE “WHITE HART,” BATH 252
THE “BUSH,” BRISTOL 256
THE “COACH AND HORSES,” ISLEWORTH 276
THE “LION,” SHREWSBURY, SHOWING THE ANNEXE ADJOINING, WHERE
DICKENS STAYED 298
THE “GREEN MAN,” HATTON 318
THE HIGHWAYMAN’S HIDING-HOLE 318
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Vignette, The Old-time Innkeeper _Title-page_
PAGE
Preface v
List of Illustrations xi
The Old Inns of Old England, The “Black Bear,” Sandbach 1
The Oldest Inhabited House in England: The “Fighting Cocks,”
St. Albans 5
The “Dick Whittington,” Cloth Fair 6
“Ye Olde Rover’s Return,” Manchester 7
The Oldest Licensed House in Great Britain: The “Seven Stars,”
Manchester 11
An Ale-stake. (_From the Louterell Psalter_) 15
Elynor Rummyng 21
The “Running Horse,” Leatherhead 25
Facsimile of an Account rendered to John Palmer in 1787 54
The Last Days of the “Swan with Two Necks” 55
Crypt at the “George,” Rochester 83
Sign of the “Falstaff,” Canterbury 88
House formerly a Pilgrims’ Hostel, Compton 91
The “Star,” Alfriston 93
Carving at the “Star,” Alfriston 95
The “Green Dragon,” Wymondham 96
The Pilgrims’ Hostel, Battle 97
The “New Inn,” Gloucester 99
Courtyard, “New Inn,” Gloucester 103
The “George,” Glastonbury 109
High Street, Glastonbury, in the Eighteenth Century (_From
the etching by Rowlandson_) 115
The “George,” St. Albans 119
The “Angel,” Grantham 121
The “George,” Norton St. Philip 125
Yard of the “George,” Norton St. Philip 131
Yard of the “George,” Winchcombe 135
The “Lord Crewe Arms,” Blanchland 139
The “Old King’s Head,” Aylesbury 141
The “Reindeer,” Banbury 145
Yard of the “Reindeer,” Banbury 149
The Globe Room, “Reindeer” Inn, Banbury 153
The “Music House,” Norwich 157
The “Dolphin,” Potter Heigham 159
The “Nag’s Head,” Thame 161
Yard of the “Greyhound,” Thame 163
The “Crown and Treaty,” Uxbridge 165
The “Treaty Room,” “Crown and Treaty,” Uxbridge 167
The “Three Crowns,” Chagford 169
The “Red Lion,” Hillingdon 170
Yard of the “Saracen’s Head,” Southwell 173
King Charles’ Bedroom, “Saracen’s Head,” Southwell 177
The “Cock and Pymat” 181
Porch of the “Red Lion,” High Wycombe 184
The “White Hart,” Somerton 186
The “Ostrich,” Colnbrook 191
Yard of the “Ostrich,” Colnbrook 199
“Piff’s Elm” 203
The “Golden Cross,” in Pickwickian Days 215
The “Bull,” Rochester 223
The “Swan,” Town Malling: Identified with the “Blue Lion,”
Muggleton 226
Sign of the “Bull and Mouth” 227
The “Leather Bottle,” Cobham 229
The “Waggon and Horses,” Beckhampton 233
“Shepherd’s Shore” 235
“Beckhampton Inn” 239
The “Angel,” Bury St. Edmunds 241
The “George the Fourth Tavern,” Clare Market 243
Doorway of the “Great White Horse,” Ipswich 247
The “Great White Horse,” Ipswich 250
Sign of the “White Hart,” Bath 255
“The Bell,” Berkeley Heath 257
The “Hop-pole,” Tewkesbury 259
The “Pomfret Arms,” Towcester: formerly the “Saracen’s Head” 260
The Yard of the “Pomfret Arms” 261
“Osborne’s Hotel, Adelphi” 263
The “White Horse,” Eaton Socon 267
The “George,” Greta Bridge 269
The “Coach and Horses,” near Petersfield 271
“Bottom” Inn 273
The “King’s Head,” Chigwell, the “Maypole” of _Barnaby Rudge_ 279
The “Green Dragon,” Alderbury 283
The “George,” Amesbury 285
Interior of the “Green Dragon,” Alderbury 287
Sign of the “Black Bull,” Holborn 289
The “Crispin and Crispianus,” Strood 293
The “Ship and Lobster” 297
“Jack Straw’s Castle” 301
The “Three Houses Inn,” Sandal 308
The “Crown” Inn, Hempstead 309
“Turpin’s Cave,” near Chingford 311
The “Green Dragon,” Welton 312
The “Three Magpies,” Sipson Green 313
The “Old Magpies” 315
The “Green Man,” Putney 321
The “Spaniards,” Hampstead Heath 323
[Illustration: The Old Inns of Old England]
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
The Old Inns of Old England!--how alluring and how inexhaustible a theme!
When you set out to reckon up the number of those old inns that demand a
mention, how vast a subject it is! For although the Vandal--identified
here with the brewer and the ground-landlord--has been busy in London and
the great centres of population, destroying many of those famous old
hostelries our grandfathers knew and appreciated, and building in their
stead “hotels” of the most grandiose and palatial kind, there are happily
still remaining to us a large number of the genuine old cosy haunts where
the traveller, stained with the marks of travel, may enter and take his
ease without being ashamed of his travel-stains or put out of countenance
by the modish visitors of this complicated age, who dress usually as if
going to a ball, and whose patronage has rung the death-knell of many an
inn once quaint and curious, but now merely “replete with every modern
convenience.”
I thank Heaven--and it is no small matter, for surely one may be thankful
for a good inn--that there yet remain many old inns in this Old England of
ours, and that it is not yet quite (although nearly) a misdemeanour for
the wayfarer to drink a tankard of ale and eat a modest lunch of bread and
cheese in a stone-flagged, sanded rustic parlour; or even, having come at
the close of day to his halting-place, to indulge in the mild dissipation
and local gossip in the bar of an old-time hostelry.
This is one of the last surviving joys of travel in these strange times
when you journey from great towns for sake of change and find at every
resort that the town has come down before you, in the shape of an hotel
more or less palatial, wherein you are expected to dine largely off
polished marble surroundings and Turkey carpets, and where every trace of
local colour is effaced. A barrier is raised there between yourself and
the place. You are in it, but not of it or among it; but something alien,
like the German or Swiss waiters themselves, the manager, and the very
directors and shareholders of the big concern.
At the old-fashioned inn, on the other hand, the whole establishment is
eloquent of the place, and while you certainly get less show and glitter,
you do, at any rate, find real comfort, and early realise that you have
found that change for which you have come.
But, as far as mere name goes, most inns are “hotels” nowadays. It is as
though innkeepers were labouring under the illusion that “inn” connotes
something inferior, and “hotel” a superior order of things. Even along the
roads, in rustic situations, the mere word “inn”--an ancient and entirely
honourable title--is become little used or understood, and, generally
speaking, if you ask a rustic for the next “inn” he stares vacantly before
his mind grasps the fact that you mean what he calls a “pub,” or, in some
districts oftener still, a “house.” Just a “house.” Some employment for
the speculative mind is offered by the fact that in rural England an inn
is “a house” and the workhouse “_the_ House.” Both bulk largely in the
bucolic scheme of existence, and, as a temperance lecturer might point
out, constant attendance at the one leads inevitably to the other. At all
events, both are great institutions, and prominent among the landmarks of
Old England.
Which is the oldest, and which the most picturesque, inn this England of
ours can show? That is a double-barrelled question whose first part no man
can answer, and the reply to whose second half depends so entirely upon
individual likings and preferences that one naturally hesitates before
being drawn into the contention that would surely arise on any particular
one being singled out for that supreme honour. Equally with the morning
newspapers--and the evening--each claiming the “largest circulation,” and,
like the several Banbury Cake shops, each the “original,” there are
several “oldest licensed” inns, and very many arrogating the reputation of
the “most picturesque.”
The “Fighting Cocks” inn at St. Albans, down by the river Ver, below the
Abbey, claims to be--not the oldest inn--but the oldest inhabited house,
in the kingdom: a pretension that does not appear to be based on anything
more than sheer impudence; unless, indeed, we take the claim to be a joke,
to which an inscription,
The Old Round House,
Rebuilt after the Flood,
formerly gave the clue. But that has disappeared. The Flood, in this case,
seeing that the building lies low, by the river Ver, does not necessarily
mean the Deluge.
This curious little octagonal building is, however, of a very great age,
for it was once, as “St. Germain’s Gate,” the water-gate of the monastery.
The more ancient embattled upper part disappeared six hundred years ago,
and the present brick-and-timber storey takes its place.
[Illustration: THE OLDEST INHABITED HOUSE IN ENGLAND: THE “FIGHTING
COCKS,” ST. ALBANS.]
The City of London’s oldest licensed inn is, by its own claiming, the
“Dick Whittington,” in Cloth Fair, Smithfield, but it only claims to have
been licensed in the fifteenth century, when it might reasonably--without
much fear of contradiction--have made it a century earlier. This is an
unusual modesty, fully deserving mention. It is only an “inn” by courtesy,
for, however interesting and picturesque the grimy, tottering old
lath-and-plaster house may be to the stranger, imagination does not
picture any one staying either in the house or in Cloth Fair itself while
other houses and other neighbourhoods remain to choose from; and, indeed,
the “Dick Whittington” does not pretend to be anything else than a
public-house. The quaint little figure at the angle, in the gloom of the
overhanging upper storey, is one of the queer, unconventional imaginings
of our remote forefathers, and will repay examination.
[Illustration: THE “DICK WHITTINGTON,” CLOTH FAIR.]
Our next claimant in the way of antiquity is the “Seven Stars” inn at
Manchester, a place little dreamt of, in such a connection, by most
people; for, although Manchester is an ancient city, it is so modernised
in general appearance that it is a place wherein the connoisseur of
old-world inns would scarce think of looking for examples. Yet it contains
three remarkably picturesque old taverns, and the neighbouring town of
Salford, nearly as much a part of Manchester as Southwark is of London,
possesses another. To take the merely picturesque, unstoried houses
first: these are the “Bull’s Head,” Greengate, Salford; the “Wellington”
inn, in the Market-place, Manchester; the tottering, crazy-looking tavern
called “Ye Olde Rover’s Return,” on Shude Hill, claiming to be the “oldest
beer-house in the city,” and additionally said once to have been an old
farmhouse “where the Cow was kept that supplied Milk to The Men who built
the ‘Seven Stars,’” and lastly--but most important--the famous “Seven
Stars” itself, in Withy Grove, proudly bearing on its front the statement
that it has been licensed over 560 years, and is the oldest licensed house
in Great Britain.
[Illustration: “YE OLDE ROVER’S RETURN,” MANCHESTER.]
The “Seven Stars” is of the same peculiar old-world construction as the
other houses just enumerated, and is just a humble survival of the ancient
rural method of building in this district: with a stout framing of oaken
timbers and a filling of rag-stone, brick, and plaster. Doubtless all
Manchester, of the period to which these survivals belong, was of like
architecture. It was a method of construction in essence identical with
the building of modern steel-framed houses and offices in England and in
America: modern construction being only on a larger scale. In either
period, the framework of wood or of metal is set up first and then clothed
with its architectural features, whether of stone, brick, or plaster.
The “Seven Stars,” however, is no skyscraper. So far from soaring, it is
of only two floors, and, placed as it is--sandwiched as it is, one might
say--between grim, towering blocks of warehouses, looks peculiarly
insignificant.
We may suppose the existing house to have been built somewhere about 1500,
although there is nothing in its rude walls and rough axe-hewn timbers to
fix the period to a century more or less. At any rate, it is not the
original “Seven Stars” on this spot, known to have been first licensed in
1356, three years after inns and alehouses were inquired into and
regulated, under Edward the Third; by virtue of which record, duly
attested by the archives of the County Palatine of Lancaster, the present
building claims to be the “oldest Licensed House in Great Britain.”
There is a great deal of very fine, unreliable “history” about the “Seven
Stars,” and some others, but it is quite true that the inn is older than
Manchester Cathedral, for that--originally the Collegiate Church--was not
founded until 1422; and topers with consciences remaining to them may lay
the flattering unction to their souls that, if they pour libations here,
in the Temple of Bacchus, rather than praying in the Cathedral, they do,
at any rate (if there be any virtue in that), frequent a place of greater
antiquity.
And antiquity is cultivated with care and considerable success at the
“Seven Stars,” as a business asset. The house issues a set of seven
picture-postcards, showing its various “historic” nooks and corners, and
the leaded window-casements have even been artfully painted, in an effort
to make the small panes look smaller than they really are; while the
unwary visitor in the low-ceilinged rooms falls over and trips up against
all manner of unexpected steps up and steps down.
It is, of course, not to be supposed that a house with so long a past
should be without its legends, and in the cellars the credulous and
uncritical stranger is shown an archway that, he is told, led to old
Ordsall Hall and the Collegiate Church! What thirsty and secret souls they
must have been in that old establishment! But the secret passage is
blocked up now. Here we may profitably meditate awhile on those “secret
passages” that have no secrets and afford no passage; and may at the same
time stop to admire the open conduct of that clergyman who, despising such
underhand and underground things, was accustomed in 1571, according to the
records of the Court Leet, to step publicly across the way in his
surplice, in sermon-time, for a refreshing drink.
“What stories this old Inn could recount if it had the power of language!”
exclaims the leaflet sold at the “Seven Stars” itself. The reflection is
sufficiently trite and obvious. What stories could not any building tell,
if it were so gifted? But fortunately, although walls metaphorically have
ears, they have not--even in literary imagery--got tongues, and so cannot
blab. And well too, for if they could and did, what a cloud of witness
there would be, to be sure. Not an one of us would get a hearing, and not
a soul be safe.
But what stories, in more than one sense, Harrison Ainsworth told! He told
a tale of Guy Fawkes, in which that hero of the mask, the dark-lantern and
the powder-barrel escaped, and made his way to the “Seven Stars,” to be
concealed in a room now called “Ye Guy Fawkes Chamber.” Ye gods!
[Illustration: THE OLDEST LICENSED HOUSE IN GREAT BRITAIN: THE “SEVEN
STARS,” MANCHESTER.]
We know perfectly well that he did not escape, and so was not concealed in
a house to which he could not come, but--well, there! Such fantastic
tales, adopted by the house, naturally bring suspicion upon all else; and
the story of the horse-shoe upon one of its wooden posts is therefore,
rightly or wrongly, suspect. This is a legend that tells how, in 1805,
when we were at war with Napoleon, the Press Gang was billeted at the
“Seven Stars,” and seized a farmer’s servant who was leading a horse with
a cast shoe along Withy Grove. The Press Gang could not legally press a
farm-servant, but that probably mattered little, and he was led away; but,
before he went, he nailed the cast horse-shoe to a post, exclaiming, “Let
this stay till I come from the wars to claim it!” He never returned, and
the horse-shoe remains in its place to this day.
The room adjoining the Bar parlour is called nowadays the “Vestry.” It
was, according to legends, the meeting-place of the Watch, in the old days
before the era of police; and there they not only met, but stayed, the
captain ever and again rising, with the words, “Now we will have another
glass, and then go our rounds”; upon which, emptying their glasses, they
all would walk round the tables and then re-seat themselves.
A great deal of old Jacobean and other furniture has been collected, to
fill the rooms of the “Seven Stars,” and in the “Vestry” is the “cupboard
that has never been opened” within the memory of living man. It is
evidently not suspected of holding untold gold. Relics from the New Bailey
Prison, demolished in 1872, are housed here, including the doors of the
condemned cell, and sundry leg-irons; and genuine Carolean and Cromwellian
tables are shown. The poet who wrote of some marvellously omniscient
personage--
And still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew,
would have rejoiced to know the “Seven Stars,” and might have been moved
to write a similar couplet, on how much so small a house could be made to
hold.
CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF INNS
Inns, hotels, public-houses of all kinds, have a very ancient lineage, but
we need not in this place go very deeply into their family history, or
stodge ourselves with fossilised facts at the outset. So far as we are
concerned, inns begin with the Roman Conquest of Britain, for it is absurd
to suppose that the Britons, whom Julius Cæsar conquered, drank beer or
required hotel accommodation.
The colonising Romans themselves, of course, were used to inns, and when
they covered Britain with a system of roads, hostelries and mere
drinking-places of every kind sprang up beside them, for the accommodation
and refreshment alike of soldiers and civilians. There is no reason to
suppose that the Roman legionary was a less thirsty soul than the modern
soldier, and therefore houses that resembled our beer-shops and rustic
inns must have been sheer necessaries. There was then the _bibulium_,
where the bibulous boozed to their hearts’ content; and there were the
_diversoria_ and _caupones_, the inns or hotels, together with the
posting-houses along the roads, known as _mansiones_ or _stabulia_.
The _bibulium_, that is to say, the ale-house or tavern, displayed its
sign for all men to see: the ivy-garland, or wreath of vine-leaves, in
honour of Bacchus, wreathed around a hoop at the end of a projecting pole.
This bold advertisment of good drink to be had within long outlasted Roman
times, and indeed still survives in differing forms, in the signs of
existing inns. It became the “ale-stake” of Anglo-Saxon and middle English
times.
The traveller recognised the ale-stake at a great distance, by reason of
its long pole--the “stake” whence those old beer-houses derived their
name--projecting from the house-front, with its mass of furze, or garland
of flowers, or ivy-wreath, dangling at the end. But the ale-houses that
sold good drink little needed such signs, a circumstance that early led to
the old proverb, “Good wine needs no bush.”
On the other hand, we may well suppose the places that sold only inferior
swipes required poles very long and bushes very prominent, and in London,
where competition was great, all ale-stakes early began to vie with one
another which should in this manner first attract the attention of thirsty
folk. This at length grew to be such a nuisance, and even a danger, that
in 1375 a law was passed that all taverners in the City of London owning
ale-stakes projecting or extending over the king’s highway “more than
seven feet in length at the utmost,” should be fined forty pence and be
compelled to remove the offending sign.
We find the “ale-stake” in Chaucer, whose “Pardoner” could not be induced
to commence his tale until he had quenched his thirst at one:
But first quod he, her at this ale-stake
I will bothe drynke and byten on a cake.
We have, fortunately, in the British Museum, an illustration of such a
house, done in the fourteenth century, and therefore contemporary with
Chaucer himself. It is rough but vivid, and if the pilgrim we see drinking
out of a saucer-like cup be gigantic, and the landlady, waiting with the
jug, a thought too big for her inn, we are at any rate clearly made to see
the life of that long ago. In this instance the actual stake is finished
off like a besom, rather than with a bush.
[Illustration: AN ALE-STAKE. _From the Louterell Psalter._]
The connection, however, between the Roman garland to Bacchus and the
mediæval “bush” is obvious. The pagan God of Wine was forgotten, but the
advertisment of ale “sold on the premises” was continued in much the same
form; for in many cases the “bush” was a wreath, renewed at intervals, and
twined around a permanent hoop. With the creation, in later centuries, of
distinctive signs, we find the hoop itself curiously surviving as a
framework for some device; and thus, even as early as the reign of Edward
the Third, mention is found of a “George-in-the-hoop,” probably a picture
or carved representation of St. George, the cognisance of England, engaged
in slaying the dragon. There were inns in the time of Henry the Sixth by
the name of the “Cock-in-the-Hoop”; and doubtless the representation of
haughty cockerels in that situation led by degrees to persons of
self-sufficient manner being called “Cock-a-hoop,” an old-fashioned phrase
that lingered on until some few years since.
In some cases, when the garland was no longer renewed, and no distinctive
sign filled the hoop, the “Hoop” itself became the sign of the house: a
sign still frequently to be met with, notably at Cambridge, where a house
of that name, in coaching days a celebrated hostelry, still survives.
The kind of company found in the ale-stakes--that is to say, the
beer-houses and taverns--of the fourteenth century is vividly portrayed by
Langland, in his _Vision of Piers Plowman_. In that long Middle English
poem, the work of a moralist and seer who was at the same time, beneath
his tonsure and in spite of his orders, something of a man of the world,
we find the virtuous ploughman reviewing the condition of society in that
era, and (when you have once become used to the ancient spelling) doing so
in a manner that is not only readable to moderns, but even entertaining;
while, of course, as evidence of social conditions close upon six hundred
years ago, the poem is invaluable.
We learn how Beton the brewster met the glutton on his way to church, and
bidding him “good-morrow,” asked him whither he went.
“To holy church,” quoth he, “for to hear mass. I will be shriven, and sin
no more.”
“I have good ale, gossip,” says the ale-wife, “will you assay it?” And so
glutton, instead of going to church, takes himself to the ale-house, and
many after him. A miscellaneous company that was. There, with Cicely the
woman-shoemaker, were all manner of humble, and some disreputable,
persons, among whom we are surprised to find a hermit. What should a
hermit be doing in an ale-house? But, according to Langland’s own showing
elsewhere, the country was infested with hermits who, refusing restriction
to their damp and lonely hermitages, frequented the alehouses, and only
went home, generally intoxicated, to their mouldy pallets after they had
drunk and eaten their fill and roasted themselves before the fire.
Here, then:
Cesse the souteresse[1] sat on the bench,
Watte the warner[2] and hys wyf bothe
Thomme the tynkere, and tweye of hus knaues,
Hicke the hakeneyman, and Houwe the neldere,[3]
Claryce of Cockeslane, the clerk of the churche,
An haywarde and an heremyte, the hangeman of Tyborne,
Dauwe the dykere,[4] with a dozen harlotes,
Of portours and of pyke-porses, and pylede[5] toth-drawers.
A ribibour,[6] a ratonere,[7] a rakyer of chepe,
A roper, a redynkyng,[8] and Rose the dissheres,
Godfrey of garlekehythe, and gryfin the walshe,[9]
An vpholderes an hepe.
All day long they sat there, boozing, chaffering, and quarrelling:
There was laughing and louring, and “let go the cuppe,”
And seten so till euensonge and son gen vmwhile,
Tyl glotoun had y-globbed a galoun and a Iille.
By that time he could neither walk nor stand. He took his staff and began
to go like a gleeman’s bitch, sometimes sideways and sometimes backwards.
When he had come to the door, he stumbled and fell. Clement the cobbler
caught him by the middle and set him on his knees, and then, “with all the
woe of the world” his wife and his wench came to carry him home to bed.
There he slept all Saturday and Sunday, and when at last he woke, he woke
with a thirst--how modern _that_ is, at any rate! The first words he
uttered were, “Where is the bowl?”
A hundred and fifty years later than _Piers Plowman_ we get another
picture of an English ale-house, by no less celebrated a poet. This famous
house, the “Running Horse,” still stands at Leatherhead, in Surrey, beside
the long, many-arched bridge that there crosses the river Mole at one of
its most picturesque reaches. It was kept in the time of Henry the Seventh
by that very objectionable landlady, Elynor Rummyng, whose peculiarities
are the subject of a laureate’s verse. Elynor Rummyng, and John Skelton,
the poet-laureate who hymned her person, her beer, and her customers, both
flourished in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Skelton, whose
genius was wholly satiric, no doubt, in his _Tunning_ (that is to say, the
brewing) of _Elynor Rummyng_, emphasised all her bad points, for it is
hardly credible that even the rustics of the Middle Ages would have rushed
so enthusiastically for her ale if it had been brewed in the way he
describes.
His long, rambling jingles, done in grievous spelling, picture her as a
very ugly and filthy old person, with a face sufficiently grotesque to
unnerve a strong man:
For her viságe
It would aswage
A manne’s couráge.
Her lothely lere
Is nothyng clere,
But vgly of chere,
Droupy and drowsy,
Scuruy and lowsy;
Her face all bowsy,
Comely crynkled,
Woundersly wrynkled,
Lyke a rost pygges eare
Brystled wyth here.
Her lewde lyppes twayne,
They slauer, men sayne,
Lyke a ropy rayne:
A glummy glayre:
She is vgly fayre:
Her nose somdele hoked,
And camously croked,
Neuer stoppynge,
But euer droppynge:
Her skin lose and slacke,
Grayned like a sacke;
Wyth a croked backe.
Her eyen jowndy
Are full vnsoundy,
For they are blered;
And she grey-hered:
Jawed like a jetty,
A man would haue pytty
To se how she is gumbed
Fyngered and thumbed
Gently joynted,
Gresed and annoynted
Vp to the knockels;
The bones of her huckels
Lyke as they were with buckles
Together made fast;
Her youth is farre past.
Foted lyke a plane,
Legged lyke a crane;
And yet she wyll iet
Lyke a silly fet.
* * * *
Her huke of Lincoln grene,
It had been hers I wene,
More than fourty yere;
And so it doth apere.
For the grene bare thredes
Loke lyke sere wedes,
Wyddered lyke hay,
The woll worne away:
And yet I dare saye
She thinketh herselfe gaye.
* * * *
She dryueth downe the dewe
With a payre of heles
As brode as two wheles;
She hobles as a gose
Wyth her blanket trose
Ouer the falowe:
Her shone smered wyth talowe,
Gresed vpon dyrt
That bandeth her skyrt.
[Illustration: ELYNOR RUMMYNG.]
And this comely dame
I vnderstande her name
Is Elynor Rummynge,
At home in her wonnynge:
And as men say,
She dwelt in Sothray,
In a certain stede
Bysyde Lederhede,
She is a tonnysh gyb,
The Deuyll and she be syb,
But to make vp my tale,
She breweth nappy ale,
And maketh port-sale
To travelers and tynkers,
To sweters and swynkers,
And all good ale-drynkers,
That wyll nothynge spare,
But drynke tyll they stare
And brynge themselves bare,
Wyth, now away the mare
And let vs sley care
As wyse as a hare.
Come who so wyll
To Elynor on the hyll
Wyth Fyll the cup, fyll
And syt there by styll.
Erly and late
Thyther cometh Kate
Cysly, and Sare
Wyth theyr legges bare
And also theyr fete.
* * * *
Some haue no mony
For theyr ale to pay,
That is a shrewd aray;
Elynor swered, Nay,
Ye shall not beare away
My ale for nought,
By hym that me bought!
Wyth, Hey, dogge, hey,
Haue these hogges away[10]
Wyth, Get me a staffe,
The swyne eate my draffe!
Stryke the hogges wyth a clubbe,
They haue dranke up my swyllyn tubbe.
The unlovely Elynor scraped up all manner of filth into her mash-tub,
mixed it together with her “mangy fists,” and sold the result as ale. It
is proverbial that “there is no accounting for tastes,” and it would
appear as though the district had a peculiar liking for this kind of brew.
They would have it somehow, even if they had to bring their food and
furniture for it:
Insteede of quoyne and mony,
Some bryng her a coney,
And some a pot wyth honey;
Some a salt, some a spoone,
Some theyr hose, some theyr shoone;
Some run a good trot
Wyth skyllet or pot:
Some fyll a bag-full
Of good Lemster wool;
An huswyfe of trust
When she is athyrst
Such a web can spyn
Her thryft is full thyn.
Some go strayght thyther
Be it slaty or slydder,
They hold the hyghway;
They care not what men say,
Be they as be may
Some loth to be espyd,
Start in at the backesyde,
Over hedge and pale,
And all for good ale.
Some brought walnuts,
Some apples, some pears,
And some theyr clyppying shears.
Some brought this and that,
Some brought I wot ne’re what,
Some brought theyr husband’s hat.
and so forth, for hundreds of lines more.
The old inn--still nothing more than an ale-house--is in part as old as
the poem, but has been so patched and repaired in all the intervening
centuries that nothing of any note is to be seen within. A very old
pictorial sign, framed and glazed, and fixed against the wall of the
gable, represents the ill-favoured landlady, and is inscribed: “Elynor
Rummyn dwelled here, 1520.”
Accounts we have of the fourteenth-century inns show that the exclusive,
solitary Englishman was not then allowed to exist. Guests slept in
dormitories, very much as the inmates of common lodging-houses generally
do now, and, according to the evidence of old prints, knew nothing of
nightshirts, and lay in bed naked. They purchased their food in something
the same way as a modern “dosser” in a Rowton House, but their manners and
customs were peculiarly offensive. The floors were strewed with rushes;
and as guests generally threw their leavings there, and the rushes
themselves were not frequently removed, those old interiors must have been
at times exceptionally noisome.
Inn-keepers charged such high prices for this accommodation, and for the
provisions they sold, that the matter grew scandalous, and at last, in the
reign of Edward the Third, in 1349, and again in 1353, statutes were
passed ordering hostelries to be content with moderate gain. The “great
and outrageous dearth of victuals kept up in all the realm by innkeepers
and other retailers of victuals, to the great detriment of the people
travelling across the realm” was such that no less a penalty would serve
than that any “hosteler or herberger” should pay “double of what he
received to the party damnified.” Mayors and bailiffs, and justices
learned in the law, were to “enquire in all places, of all and singular,
of the deeds and outrages of hostelers and their kind,” but it does not
appear that matters were greatly improved.
[Illustration: THE “RUNNING HORSE,” LEATHERHEAD.]
It will be observed that two classes of innkeepers are specified in those
ordinances. The “hosteler” was the ordinary innkeeper; the “herberger” was
generally a more or less important and well-to-do merchant who added to
his income by “harbouring”--that is to say, by boarding and
lodging--strangers, the “paying guests” of that age. We may dimly perceive
something of the trials and hardships of old-time travel in that
expression “harbouring.” The traveller then came to his rest as a ship
comes into harbour from stormy seas. The better-class travellers, coming
into a town, preferred the herberger’s more select table to the common
publicity of the ordinary hostelry, and the herbergers themselves were
very keen to obtain such guests, some even going to the length of
maintaining touts to watch the arrival of strangers, and bid for custom.
This was done both openly and in an underhand fashion, the more rapacious
among the herbergers employing specious rogues who, entering into
conversation with likely travellers at the entrance of a town, would
pretend to be fellow-countrymen and so, on the understanding of a common
sympathy, recommending them to what they represented to be the best
lodgings. Travellers taking such recommendations generally found
themselves in exceptionally extortionate hands. These practices early led
to “herbergers” being regulated by law, on much the same basis as the
hostelers.
Not many records of travelling across England in the fourteenth century
have survived. Indeed the only detailed one we have, and that is merely a
return of expenses, surviving in Latin manuscript at Merton College,
Oxford, concerns itself with nothing but the cost of food and lodging at
the inns and the disbursements on the road, made by the Warden and two
fellows who, with four servants--the whole party on horseback--in
September, 1331, travelled to Durham and back on business connected with
the college property. The outward journey took them twelve days. They
crossed the Humber at the cost of 8_d._, to the ferry: beds for the entire
party of seven generally came to 2_d._ a night, beer the same, wine
1¼_d._, meat 5½_d._, candles ¼_d._, fuel 2_d._, bread 4_d._, and fodder
for the horses 10_d._
CHAPTER III
GENERAL HISTORY OF INNS
The mediæval hostelries, generally planned in the manner of the old
galleried inns that finally went out of fashion with the end of the
coaching age, consisting of a building enclosing a courtyard, and entered
only by a low and narrow archway, which in its turn was closed at
nightfall by strong, bolt-studded doors, are often said to owe their form
to the oriental “caravanserai,” a type of building familiar to Englishmen
taking part in the Crusades.
But it is surely not necessary to go so far afield for an origin. The
“caravanserai” was originally a type of Persian inn where caravans put up
for the night: and as security against robbers was the first need of such
a country and such times, a courtyard capable of being closed when
necessary against unwelcome visitors was clearly indicated as essential.
Persia, however, and oriental lands in general, were not the only
countries where in those dark centuries robbers, numerous and bold, or
even such undesirables as rebels against the existing order of things,
were to be reckoned with, and England had no immunity from such dangers.
In such a state of affairs, and in times when private citizens were
careful always to bolt and bar themselves in; when great lords dwelt
behind moats, drawbridges, and battlemented walls; and when even
ecclesiastic and collegiate institutions were designed with the idea that
they might ultimately have to be defended, it is quite reasonable to
suppose that innkeepers were capable of evolving a plan for themselves by
which they and their guests, and the goods of their guests, might reckon
on a degree of security.
This was the type of hostelry that, apart from the mere tavern, or
alehouse, remained for so many centuries typical of the English good-class
inns. It was at once, in a sense--to compare old times with new--the hotel
and railway-station of an age that knew neither railways nor the class of
house we style “hotel.” It was the fine flower of the hostelling business,
and to it came and went the carriers’ waggons, the early travellers riding
horseback, and, in the course of time, as the age of wonderful inventions
began to dawn, the stage and mail-coaches. Travellers of the most gentle
birth, equally with those rich merchants and clothiers who were the
greatest travellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, inned at
such establishments. It was at one such that Archbishop Leighton ended. He
had said, years before, that “if he must choose a place to die in, it
should be an inn, it looking like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this
world was an inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion of it.” He
died, that good and gentle man, at the “Bell” in Warwick Lane, in 1684.
London, once rich in hostelries of this type, has now but one. In fine, it
is not in the metropolis that the amateur of old inns of any kind would
nowadays seek with great success; although, well within the memory of most
people, it was exceptionally well furnished with them. It was neither good
taste nor good business that, in 1897, demolished the “Old Bell,” Holborn,
a pretty old-world galleried inn that maintained until the very last an
excellent trade in all branches of licensed-victualling; and would have
continued so to do had it not been that the greed for higher ground-rent
ordained the ending of it, in favour of the giant (and very vulgar)
building now occupying the spot where it stood. That may have been a
remunerative transaction for the ground-landlord; but, looking at these
commercial-minded clearances in a broader way, they are nothing less than
disastrous. If, to fill some private purses over-full, you thus callously
rebuild historic cities, their history becomes merely a matter for the
printed page, and themselves to the eye nothing but a congeries of crowded
streets where the motor-omnibuses scream and clash and stink, and citizens
hustle to get a living. History, without visible ancient buildings to
assure the sceptical modern traveller that it is not wholly lies, will
never by itself draw visitors.
Holborn, where the “Old Bell” stood, was, until quite recent years, a
pleasant threshold to the City. There stood Furnival’s Inn, that quiet
quadrangle of chambers, with the staid and respectable Wood’s Hotel. Next
door was Ridler’s Hotel, with pleasant bay-window looking upon the street,
and across the way, in Fetter Lane, remained the “White Horse” coaching
inn; very much down on its luck in its last years, but interesting to
prowling strangers enamoured of the antique and out-of-date.
The vanished interest of other corners in London might be enlarged upon,
but it is too melancholy a picture. Let us to the Borough High Street,
and, resolutely refusing to think for the moment of the many queer old
galleried inns that not so long since remained there, come to that sole
survivor, the “George.”
You would never by mere chance find the “George,” for it has no frontage
to the street, and lies along one side of a yard not at first sight very
prepossessing, and, in fact, used in these days for the unsentimental
purposes of a railway goods-receiving depot. This, however, is the old
yard once entirely in use for the business of the inn.
The “George,” as it now stands, is the successor of a pre-Reformation inn
that, formerly the “St. George,” became secularised in the time of Henry
the Eighth, when saints, even patron saints, were under a cloud. It is an
exceedingly long range of buildings, dating from the seventeenth century,
and in two distinct and different styles: a timbered, wooden-balustraded
gallery in two storeys, and a white-washed brick continuation. The long
ground-floor range of windows to the kitchen, the bar, and the
coffee-room, is, as seen in the illustration, protected from any accidents
in the manœuvring of the railway waggons by a continuous bulkhead of
sleepers driven into the ground. It is pleasing to be able to bear witness
to the thriving trade that continues to be done in this sole ancient
survivor of the old Southwark galleried inns, and to note that, however
harshly fate, as personified by rapacious landlords, has dealt with its
kind, the old-world savour of the inn is thoroughly appreciated by those
not generally thought sentimental persons, the commercial men who dine and
lunch, and the commercial travellers who sleep, here.
But, however pleasing the old survivals in brick and stone, in timber and
plaster, may be to the present generation, we seem, by the evidence left
us in the literature and printed matter of an earlier age, to have
travelled far from gross to comparatively ideal manners.
[Illustration: THE LAST OF THE OLD GALLERIED INNS OF LONDON: THE “GEORGE,”
SOUTHWARK. _Photo by T. W. Tyrrell._]
The manners common to all classes in old times would scarce commend
themselves to modern folk. We get a curious glimpse of them in one of a
number of Manuals of Foreign Conversation for the use of travellers,
published towards the close of the sixteenth century in Flanders, then a
country of great trading importance, sending forth commercial travellers
and others to many foreign lands. One of these handy books, styled, rather
formidably, _Colloquia et dictionariolum septem linguarum_, including, as
its title indicates, conversation in seven languages, was so highly
successful that seven editions of it, dating from 1589, are known. The
traveller in England, coming to his inn, is found talking on the subject
of trade and civil wars, and at length desires to retire to rest. The
conversation itself is sufficiently strange, and is made additionally
startling by the capital W’s that appear in unconventional places. “Sir,”
says the traveller, “by your leave, I am sum What euell at ease.” To which
the innkeeper replies: “Sir, if you be ill at ease, go and take your rest,
your chambre is readie. Jone, make a good fier in his chambre, and let him
lacke nothing.”
Then we have a dialogue with “Jone,” the chambermaid, in this wise:
_Traveller_: My shee frinde, is my bed made? is it good?
“Yea, Sir, it is a good feder bed, the scheetes be very cleane.”
_Traveller_: I shake as a leafe upon the tree. Warme my kerchif and bynde
my head well. Soft, you binde it to harde, bryng my pilloW and cover mee
Well: pull off my hosen and Warme my bed: draWe the curtines and pinthen
With a pin.
Where is the camber pot?
Where is the priuie?
_Chambermaid_: FolloW mee, and I Will sheW you the Way: go up streight,
you shall finde them at the right hand. If you see them not you shall
smell them Well enough. Sir, doth it please you to haue no other thing?
are you Wel?
_Traveller_: Yea, my shee frinde, put out the candell, and come nearer to
mee.
_Chambermaid_: I Wil put it out When I am out of the chamber. What is your
pleasure, are you not Well enough yet?
_Traveller_: My head lyeth to loWe, lift up a little the bolster, I can
not lie so loWe.--My shee friende, kisse me once, and I shall sleape the
better.
_Chambermaid_: Sleape, sleape, you are not sicke, seeing that you speake
of kissyng. I had rather die then to kisse a man in his bed, or in any
other place. Take your rest in God’s name, God geeue you good night and
goode rest.
_Traveller_: I thank you, fayre mayden.
In the morning we have “Communication at the oprysing,” the traveller
calling to the boy to “Drie my shirt, that I may rise.” Then, “Where is
the horse-keeper? go tell him that hee my horse leade to the river.”
Departing, our traveller does not forget the chambermaid, and asks, “Where
is ye maiden? hold my shee freend, ther is for your paines. Knave, bring
hither my horse, have you dressed him Well?” “Yea, sir,” says the knave,
“he did Wante nothing.”
Anciently people of note and position, with large acquaintance among their
own class, expected, when they travelled, to be received at the country
houses along their route, if they should so desire, and still, at the
close of the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth,
the custom was not unknown. Even should the master be away from home, the
hospitality of his house was not usually withheld. From these old and
discontinued customs we may, perhaps, derive that one by no means
obsolete, but rather still on the increase, of guests “tipping” the
servants of country houses.
This possibility of a traveller making use of another man’s house as his
inn was fast dying out in England in the time of Charles the Second.
Probably it had never been so abused in this country as in Scotland, where
innkeepers petitioned Parliament, complaining, in the extraordinary
language at that time obtaining in Scotland, “that the liegis travelland
in the realme quhen they cum to burrowis and throuchfairís, herbreis thame
not in hostillaries, but with their acquaintance and friendis.”
An enactment was accordingly passed in 1425, forbidding, under a penalty
of forty shillings, all travellers resorting to burgh towns to lodge with
friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the “hostillaries,” unless,
indeed, they were persons of consequence, with a great retinue, in which
case they personally might accept the hospitality of friends, provided
that their “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.
When the custom of seeking the shelter, as a matter of course, of the
country mansion fell into disuse, so, conversely, did that of naming inns
after the local Lord of the Manor come into fashion. Then, in a manner
emblematic of the traveller’s change from the hospitality of the mansion
to that of the inn, mine host adopted the heraldic coat from the great
man’s portal, and called his house the “---- Arms.” It has been left to
modern times, times in which heraldry has long ceased to be an exact
science, to perpetrate such absurdities as the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” the
“Drovers’ Arms,” and the like, appropriated to a class of person unknown
officially to the College of Heralds.
According to Fynes Morison, who wrote in 1617, we held then, in this
country, a pre-eminence in the trade and art of innkeeping: “The world,”
he said, “affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a
passenger comes the servants run to him: one takes his horse, and walks
him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat, but let the master
look to this point. Another gives the traveller his private chamber and
kindles his fire, the third pulls off his boots and makes them clean; then
the host or hostess visits him--if he will eat with the host--or at a
common table it will be 4_d._ and 6_d._ If a gentleman has his own
chamber, his ways are consulted, and he has music, too, if he likes.”
In short, Morison wrote of English inns just anterior to the time of
Samuel Pepys, who travelled much in his day, and tells us freely, in his
appreciative way, of the excellent appointments, the music, the good fare
and the comfortable beds he, in general, found.
But this era in which Morison wrote was a trying time for all innkeepers
and taverners. The story of it is so remarkable that it repays a lengthy
treatment.
In our own age it is customary to many otherwise just and fair-minded
people to look upon the innkeeper as a son of a Belial, a sinner who
should be kept in outer darkness and made to sit in sackcloth and ashes,
in penance for other people’s excesses. On the one side he has the
cormorants of the Inland Revenue plucking out his vitals, and generally,
if it be a “tied” house, on the other a Brewery Company, selling him the
worst liquors at the best prices, and threatening to turn him out if he
does not maintain a trade of so many barrels a month. Always, from the
earliest times, he has been the mark for satire and invective, has been
licensed, sweated, regulated, and generally put on the chain; but he
probably had never so bad a time as that he experienced in the last years
of James the First. Already innkeepers were licensed at Quarter Sessions,
but in 1616 it occurred to one Giles Mompesson, the time-serving Member of
Parliament for the rotten borough of Great Bedwin, in Wiltshire, that much
plunder could be extracted from them and used to replenish the Royal
Exchequer, then at a low ebb, if he could obtain the grant of a monopoly
of licensing inns, over-riding the old-established functions in that
direction of the magistrates.
Giles Mompesson was no altruist, or at the best a perverted one, who put
his own interpretation upon that good old maxim, “Who works for others
works for himself.” He foresaw that while such a State monopoly, under
his own control, might bring a bountiful return to the State, it must
enrich himself and those associated with him. He imparted the brilliant
idea to that dissolute royal favourite, George Villiers, Duke of
Buckingham, who succeeded in obtaining him a patent for a special
commission to grant licenses to keepers of inns and ale-houses. The patent
was issued, not without great opposition, and the licensing fees were left
to the discretion of Mompesson and his two fellow-commissioners, with the
only proviso that four-fifths of the returns were to go to the Exchequer.
Shortly afterwards Mompesson himself was knighted by the King, in order,
as Bacon wrote, “that he may better fight with the Bulls and the Bears and
the Saracen’s Heads, and such fearful creatures.” Much virtue and power,
of the magisterial sort, in a knighthood; likely, we consider, King and
commissioners, and all concerned in the issuing of this patent, to impress
and overawe poor Bung, and therefore we, James the First, most sacred
Majesty by the grace of God, do, on Newmarket Heath, say, “Rise, Sir
Giles!”
The three commissioners wielded full authority. There was no appeal from
that triumvirate, who at their will refused or granted licenses, and
charged for them what they pleased, hungering after that one-fifth. They
largely increased the number of inns, woefully oppressed honest men, wrung
heavy fines from all for merely technical and inadvertent infractions of
the licensing laws, and granted new licenses at exorbitant rates to
infamous houses that had but recently been deprived of them. During more
than four years these iniquities continued, side by side with the working
of other monopolies, granted from time to time, but at last the gathering
storm of indignation burst, in the House of Commons, in February, 1621.
That was a Parliament already working with the leaven of a Puritanism
which was presently to leaven the whole lump of English governance in a
drastic manner then little dreamt of; and it was keen to scent and to
abolish abuses.
Thus we see the House, very stern and vindictive, inquiring into the
conduct and working of the by now notorious Commission. In the result
Mompesson and his associates were found to have prosecuted 3,320
innkeepers for technical infractions of obsolete statutes, and to have
been guilty of many misdemeanours. Mompesson appealed to the mercy of the
House, but was placed under arrest by the Sergeant-at-Arms while that
assembly deliberated how it should act. Mompesson himself clearly expected
to be severely dealt with, for at the earliest moment evaded his arrest
and was off, across the Channel, where he learnt--no doubt with cynical
amusement--that he had been “banished.”
The judgment of the two Houses of Parliament was that he should be
expelled the House, and be degraded from his knighthood and conducted on
horseback along the Strand with his face to the horse’s tail. Further, he
was to be fined £10,000, and for ever held an infamous person.
Meanwhile, if Parliament failed to lay the chief offender by the heels, it
did at least succeed in putting hand upon, and detaining, one of his
equally infamous associates, himself a knight, and accordingly susceptible
of some dramatic degradation, beyond anything to be possibly wreaked upon
any common fellow. Sir Francis Mitchell, attorney-at-law, was consigned to
the Tower, and then brought forth from it to have his spurs hacked off and
thrown away, his sword broken over his head, and himself publicly called
no longer knight, but “knave.” Then to the Fleet Prison, with certainty on
the morrow of a public procession to Westminster, himself the central
object, mounted, with face to tail, on the back of the sorriest horse to
be found, and the target for all the missiles of the crowd: a prospect and
programme duly realised and carried out.
Mompesson we may easily conceive hearing of, and picturing, all these
things, in his retreat over sea, and congratulating himself on his prompt
flight. But he was, after all, treated with the most extraordinary
generosity. The same year, the fine of £10,000 was assigned by the House
to his father-in-law (which we suspect was an oblique way of remitting it)
and in 1623 he is found petitioning to be allowed to return to England. He
was allowed to return for a period of three months, on condition that it
was to be solely on his private affairs, but he was no sooner back than
he impudently began to put his old licensing patent in force again. On
August 10th he was granted an extension of three months, but overstayed
it, and was at last, February 8th, 1624, ordered to quit the country
within five days. It remains uncertain whether he complied with this, or
not, but he soon returned; not, however, to again trouble public affairs,
for he returned to Wiltshire and died there, obscurely, about 1651. He
lives in literature, in Massinger’s play, _A New Way to pay Old Debts_, as
“Sir Giles Overreach.”
CHAPTER IV
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The inns of old time, serving as they did the varied functions of clubs
and assembly-rooms and places of general resort, in addition to that of
hotel, were often, at times when controversies ran high, very turbulent
places.
The manners and customs prevailing in the beginning of the eighteenth
century may be imagined from an affray which befell at the “Raven,”
Shrewsbury, in 1716, when two officers of the Dragoons insisted in the
public room of the inn, upon a Mr. Andrew Swift and a Mr. Robert Wood,
apothecary, drinking “King George, and Damnation to the Jacobites.” The
civilians refused, whereupon those military men drew their swords,
but--swords notwithstanding--they were very handsomely thrashed, and one
was placed upon the fire, and not only had his breeches burnt through in a
conspicuous place, but had his person toasted. The officers then, we
learn, “went off, leaving their hatts, wigs and swords (which were broke)
behind them.”
One did not, it will be gathered from the above, easily in those times
lead the Quiet Life; but that was a heated occasion, and we were then
really upon the threshold of that fine era when inns, taverns, and
coffee-houses were the resort, not merely of travellers or of thirsty
souls, but of wits and the great figures of eighteenth-century literature,
who were convivial as well as literary. It was a great, and, as it seems
to the present century, a curious, time; when men of the calibre of
Addison, of Goldsmith and of Johnson, acknowledged masters in classic and
modern literature, smoked and drank to excess in the public parlours of
inns. But those were the clubs of that age, and that was an age in which,
although the producers of literature were miserably rewarded, their
company and conversation were sought and listened to with respect.
When Dr. Johnson declared that a seat in a tavern chair was the height of
human felicity, his saying carried a special significance, lost upon the
present age. He was thinking, not only of a comfortable sanded parlour, a
roaring fire, and plenty of good cheer and good company, but also of the
circle of humbly appreciative auditors who gathered round an accepted wit,
hung upon his words, offered themselves as butts for his ironic or satiric
humour, and--stood treat. The great wits of the eighteenth century
expected subservience in their admirers, and only began to coruscate, to
utter words of wisdom or inspired nonsense, or to scatter sparkling quips
and jests, when well primed with liquor--at the expense of others. The
felicity of Johnson found in a tavern chair was derived, therefore,
chiefly from the homage of his attendant humble Boswells, and from the
fact that they paid the reckoning; and was, perhaps, to some modern ideas,
a rather shameful idea of happiness.
Johnson, who did not love the country, and thought one green field very
like another green field, when he spoke of a tavern chair was of course
thinking of London taverns. He would have found no sufficient audience in
its wayside fellow, which indeed was apt, in his time and for long after,
to be somewhat rough and ready, and, when you had travelled a little far
afield, became a very primitive and indeed barbarous place.
At Llannon, in 1797, those sketching and note-taking friends, Rowlandson
and Wigstead, touring North and South Wales in search of the picturesque,
found it, not unmixed with dirt and discomfort, at the inns. Indeed, it
was only at one town in Wales--the town of Neath--that Wigstead found
himself able to declare, “with strict propriety,” that the house was
comfortable. Comfort and decency fled the inn at Llannon, abashed. This,
according to Wigstead, was the way of it: “The cook on our arrival was in
the suds, and, with unwiped hands, reached down a fragment of mutton for
our repast: a piece of ham was lost, but after long search was found
amongst the worsted stockings and sheets on the board.”
Then “a little child was sprawling in a dripping-pan which seemed recently
taken from the fire: the fat in this was destined to fry our eggs in.
Hunger itself even was blunted,” and the travellers left those delicacies
almost untouched. Not even the bread was without its surprises. “I devoted
my attention to a brown loaf,” says Wigstead, “but on cutting into it was
surprised to find a ball of carroty-coloured wool; and to what animal it
had belonged I was at a loss to determine. Our table-cloth had served the
family for at least a month, and our sitting-room was everywhere decorated
with the elegant relics of a last night’s smoking society, as yet
unremoved.”
All this was pretty bad, but perhaps even the baby in the dripping-pan,
the month-old table-cloth, and the hank of wool in the loaf were to be
preferred to what they had experienced at Festiniog. They had not at first
purposed to make a halt at that place, having planned to stay the night at
Tan-y-Bwlch, where the inn commanded a view over a lovely wooded vale. The
perils and the inconveniences of the vile road by which they had come
faded into insignificance when they drew near, and they began to reckon
upon the comforts of a good supper and good beds at Tan-y-Bwlch. They even
disputed whether the supper should be chickens or chops, but all such vain
arguments and contentions faded away when they drew near and a stony-faced
landlord declared he had no room for them.
We can easily sympathise here with those travellers in search of the
picturesque, for we have all met with the like strokes of Fate. No doubt
the beauties of the view suddenly obscured themselves, as will happen
when you can get nothing to eat or drink; and probably they thought of Dr.
Johnson, who a few years earlier had held the most beautiful landscape
capable of being improved by a good inn in the foreground. But a good inn
where they cannot or will not receive you, is, in such a situation,
sorrow’s crown of sorrow, an aggravation and a mockery.
It was a tragical position, and down the sounding alleys of time vibrates
strange chords of reminiscence in the breasts of even modern tourists of
any experience. We too, have suffered; and many an one may say, with much
tragical meaning, “_et ego in Arcadia vixit_.”
Alas! for the frustrated purpose of Messrs. Rowlandson and Wigstead,
Tan-y-Bwlch could not, or would not, receive them, and they had no choice
but to journey three more long Welsh miles to Festiniog in the rain. It
sometimes rains in Wales, and when it does, it rarely knows when to leave
off.
Arrived there, they almost passed the inn, in the gathering darkness,
mistaking it for a barn or an outhouse; and when they made to enter, they
were confronted by an extraordinary landlady with the appearance of one of
the three witches in _Macbeth_.
“Could they have beds?”
Reluctantly she said they could, telling them (what we know to be true
enough) that she supposed they only came there because there was no
accommodation at Tan-y-Bwlch.
The travellers made no reply to that damning accusation, and hid their
incriminating blushes in the congenial gloom of the fast-falling night. It
was a situation in which, if you come to consider it, no wise man would
give “back answers.” You have a landlady who, for the proverbial two pins,
or even less, would cast you forth; and when so thrust into the
inhospitable night, you have seventeen mountainous miles to go, in a
drenching rain, before any other kind of asylum is reached.
Wigstead remarks that they “were not a little satisfied at being under any
kind of roof,” and the words seem woefully inadequate to the occasion.
There were no chops that night for supper, nor chickens; and they fed,
with what grace they could summon up, on a “small leg of starved mutton
and a duck,” which, by the scent of them, had been cooked a fortnight. For
sauce they had hunger only.
“Our bedrooms,” says Wigstead, “were most miserable indeed: the rain
poured in at every tile in the ceiling,” and the sheets were literally
wringing wet; so that, in Wigstead’s elegant phrasing, they “thought it
most prudent to sacrifice to _Somnus_ in our own garments, between
blankets”: which may perhaps be translated, into everyday English, to mean
that they slept in their own clothes.
They saw strange sights on that wild tour, and, in the course of their
hazardous travels through the then scarcely civilised interior of the
Principality, came to the “pleasant village” of Newcastle Emlyn,
Carmarthenshire, where they found a “decent inn” in whose kitchen they
remarked a dog acting as turnspit. That the dogs so employed did not
particularly relish the work is evident in Wigstead’s remark: “Great care
must be taken that this animal does not observe the cook approach the
larder. If he does, he immediately hides himself for the remainder of the
day,” acting, in fact, like a professional “unemployed” when offered a
job!
A familiar sight in the kitchen of any considerable inn of the long ago
was the turnspit dog, who, like the caged mouse or squirrel with his
recreation-wheel, revolved a kind of treadwheel which, in this instance,
was connected with apparatus for turning the joints roasting at the fire,
and formed not so much recreation as extremely hard work. The dogs
commonly used for this purpose were of the long-bodied, short-legged,
Dachshund type.
Machinery, in the form of bottle-jacks revolved by clockwork, came to the
relief of those hard-working dogs so long ago that all knowledge of
turnspits, except such as may be gleaned from books of reference, is now
lost, and illustrations of them performing their duties are exceedingly
rare. Rowlandson’s spirited drawing is, on that account, doubly welcome.
[Illustration: THE KITCHEN OF A COUNTRY INN, 1797: SHOWING THE TURNSPIT
DOG. _From the engraving after Rowlandson._]
Turnspits were made the subject of a very illuminating notice, a
generation or so back, by a former writer on country life: “How well do I
recollect,” he says, “in the days of my youth watching the operations of a
turnspit at the house of a worthy old Welsh clergyman in Worcestershire,
who taught me to read! He was a good man, wore a bushy wig, black worsted
stockings, and large plated buckles in his shoes. As he had several
boarders as well as day-scholars, his two turnspits had plenty to do. They
were long-bodied, crook-legged and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy
look about them, as if they were weary of the task they had to do, and
expected every moment to be seized upon, to perform it. Cooks in those
days, as they are said to be at present, were very cross; and if the poor
animal, wearied with having a larger joint than usual to turn, stopped for
a moment, the voice of the cook might be heard, rating him in no very
gentle terms. When we consider that a large, solid piece of beef would
take at least three hours before it was properly roasted, we may form some
idea of the task a dog had to perform in turning a wheel during that time.
A pointer has pleasure in finding game, the terrier worries rats with
eagerness and delight, and the bull-dog even attacks bulls with the
greatest energy, while the poor turnspit performs his task with
compulsion, like a culprit on a tread-wheel, subject to scolding or
beating if he stops a moment to rest his weary limbs, and is then kicked
about the kitchen when the task is over.”
The work being so hard, how ever did the dogs allow themselves to be put
to it? The training was, after all, extremely simple. You first, as Mrs.
Glasse might say, caught your dog. That, it will be agreed, was
indispensable. Then you put him, ignorant and uneducated, into the wheel,
and in company with him a live coal, which burnt his legs if he stood
still. He accordingly tried to race away from it, and the quicker he spun
the wheel round in his efforts the faster followed the coal: so that, by
dint of much painful experience, he eventually learned the (comparatively)
happy medium between standing still and going too fast. “These dogs,” it
was somewhat unnecessarily added, “were by no means fond of their
profession.” Of course they were not! Does the convict love his crank or
treadmill, or the galley-slave his oar and bench?
The turnspit was once so well-known an institution that he found an
allusion in poetry, and an orator was likened, in uncomplimentary fashion,
to one:
His arguments in silly circles run,
Still round and round, and end where they begun.
So the poor turnspit, as the wheel runs round,
The more he gains, the more he loses ground.
These unfortunate dogs acquired a preternatural intelligence. A humorous,
but probably not true, story is told, illustrating this. It was at Bath,
and some of them had accompanied their mistresses to church, where the
lesson chanced to be the tenth chapter of Ezekiel, in which there is an
amazing deal about self-propelled chariots, and wheels. When the dogs
first heard the word “wheel” they started up in alarm; on its occurring a
second time they howled dolefully, and at the third instance they all
rushed from the church.
Strangely modern appear the grievances raised against innkeepers in the
old times. The bills they presented were early pronounced exorbitant, and
so, in spite of measures intended for the relief of travellers, they
remained. Indeed, throughout the centuries, until the present day, the
curious in these matters will find, not unexpectedly, that innkeepers
charged according to what they considered their guests would grumble
at--and pay.
The eighteenth-century _locus classicus_ in this sort is the account
rendered to the Duc de Nivernais, the French Ambassador to England, who in
1762, coming to negotiate a treaty of peace, halted the night, on his way
from Dover to London, at the “Red Lion,” Canterbury.
For the night’s lodging for twelve persons, with a frugal supper in which
oysters, fowls, boiled mutton, poached eggs and fried whiting figure, the
landlord presented an account of over £44. Our soldiers fought the
Frenchman; mine host did his humble, non-combatant part, and fleeced him.
This truly magnificent bill has been preserved, not, let us hope, for the
emulation of other hotel-keepers, but by way of a “terrible example.”
Here it is:
£ s. d.
Tea, coffee, and chocolate 1 4 0
Supper for self and servants 15 10 0
Bread and beer 3 0 0
Fruit 2 15 0
Wine and punch 10 8 8
Wax candles and charcoal 3 0 0
Broken glass and china 2 10 0
Lodging 1 7 0
Tea, coffee, and chocolate 2 0 0
Chaise and horses for the next stage 2 16 0
-------
44 10 8
=======
The Duke paid the account without a murmur, only remarking that innkeepers
at this rate should soon grow rich; but news of this extraordinary charge
was soon spread all over England. It was printed in the newspapers, amid
other marvels, disasters and atrocities, and mine host of the “Red Lion,”
like Byron in a later age, woke up one morning to find himself famous.
The country gentlemen, scandalised at his rapacity, boycotted his inn, and
his brother innkeepers of Canterbury disowned him. The unfortunate man
wrote to the _St. James’s Chronicle_, endeavouring to justify himself, and
complaining bitterly of the harm that had been wrought his business by the
continual billeting of soldiers upon him. But it was in vain he protested;
his trade fell off, and he was ruined in six months.
Sometimes, too, there was a difference of opinion as to whether a bill had
or had not actually been paid, as we see by the following indignant
letter:
Normanton near Stamford.
2{d} Sept{r} 1755.
Madam,
My Lord Morton Received a Letter from you of the 5{th} Aug{t}
inclosing a Bill drawn by you on his Lp for £6 1 11, and to make up
this sum p{r} your Account annexed to the above-mentioned Letter, you
charge twelve shillings for his Servant’s eating, for which he is
ready to Swear he paid you in full; then you charge for the Horses Hay
for 35 Nights notwithstanding you was ordered to send the horse out to
grass, and by the by when the horse came to London he was so poor as
if he had been quite neglected which seems probable as he mended soon
after he came here; at any rate you have used my Lord ill in the whole
affair, and if you or your Servants have committed any accidental
mistake either in the Lads Board or the horses hay pray see to rectify
it soon, because things of that sort not cleard up and satisfied are
very hurtfull to People in your publick way especially with those to
whom you have already been obliged, and who at any rate will not be
imposed upon. I am--
Madam--
Your humble sert
JOHN MILNE.
To
M{rs} Beaver
at the Black Bull
Newcastle
upon Tine,
free
Morton.
Then there was Dover, notorious for high prices. “Thy cliffs, _dear_
Dover! harbour and hotel,” sang Byron, who bitterly remembered the “long,
long bills, whence nothing is deducted.” The “Ship,” the hotel probably
indicted by the poet, has long since disappeared, but that gigantic
caravanserai, the “Lord Warden Hotel,” could at one time, in its
monumental charges, have afforded him material for another stanza.
Magnificent as were the charges made by overreaching hosts elsewhere, they
all paled their ineffectual sums-total before the sublime heights of the
account rendered to Louis Napoleon when Prince-President of France. He
merely remarked that it was truly princely, and paid.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF AN ACCOUNT RENDERED TO JOHN PALMER IN 1787.]
If, on the other hand, that famous coaching hostelry, the “Swan with Two
Necks,” in Lad Lane, in the City of London, charged guests for their
accommodation as moderately as the accompanying bill for stabling a horse,
the establishment should have been popular. This bill, printed here in
_facsimile_ from the original, was presented, April 16th, 1787, to John
Palmer, the famous Post Office reformer, and shows that only one shilling
and ninepence a night was charged. Yet he was at that time a famous man.
Three years before he had established the first mail-coach, and was
everywhere well known, and doubtless, in general, fair prey to renderers
of bills.
[Illustration: THE LAST DAYS OF THE “SWAN WITH TWO NECKS.”]
The “Swan with Two Necks,” whence many coaches set out, until the end of
such things, was often known by waggish people as the “Wonderful Bird,”
and obtained its name from a perversion of the “Swan with Two Nicks”:
swans that swam the upper Thames and were the property of the Vintners’
Company being marked on their bills with two nicks, for identification.
Lad Lane is now “Gresham Street,” but, apart from its mere name, is a lane
still; but the old buildings of the “Swan with Two Necks” were pulled down
in 1856.
CHAPTER V
LATTER DAYS
A host of writers have written in praise--and rightly in praise--of that
fine flower of many centuries of innkeeping evolution, the Coaching Inn of
the early and mid-nineteenth century. Hazlitt, Washington Irving, De
Quincey, are all among the prophets; De Quincey, ceasing for the while his
mystical apocalyptic style, mournfully lamenting the beginnings of the end
that came even so long ago as his day, which, after all, ended not so very
long ago, for although he seems so ancient, he died only in 1859. He
writes, in early railway times, of “those days,” the days in question
being that fine period in coaching and innkeeping, the ’20’s of the
nineteenth century.
“What cosy old parlours in those days,” he exclaims, “low-roofed, glowing
with ample fires and fenced from the blasts of the doors by screens whose
folding doors were, or seemed to be, infinite! What motherly landladies!
won, how readily, to kindness the most lavish by the mere attractions of
simplicity and youthful innocence, and finding so much interest in the
bare circumstance of being a traveller at a childish age! Then what
blooming young handmaidens; how different from the knowing and worldly
demireps of modern high roads! And sometimes grey-headed, faithful
waiters, how sincere and attentive by comparison with their flippant
successors, the eternal ‘Coming, sir, coming,’ of our improved
generation!”
They all tell the same tale; those whose privilege it was to witness the
meeting of the old order and the new.
“It was interesting,” says Mr. Locker-Lampson, writing of old times, “as
the post-chaise drew up at the door of the roomy and comfortable hostel
where we were to dine or sleep, to see Boniface and his better half
smilingly awaiting us--Us in particular!--waiter and chamber-lasses
grouped behind them. The landlady advances to the carriage-window with a
cordial, self-respecting, ‘Will you please to alight.’ I remember that the
landlord, who announced dinner, sometimes entered with the first dish and
placed it on the table, bowing as he retired. Why, it all seems as if it
were but yesterday! Now it is gone for ever.”
Yes, irrevocably gone. Most of the old inns are gone too, and in their
place, only too frequently, the traveller finds the modern, company-owned
hotel, with a foreign manager who naturally takes no interest in the
guests he, as a matter of fact, rarely sees, and with whom no guest could
possibly foregather. In the modern barrack hotel the guest must
necessarily be impersonal--one of a number going to swell the returns. No
one quite willingly resigns himself to being a mere number; it is,
indeed, one of the greatest of the convict’s trials that he has lost his
name and become identified only by a letter and a row of figures. Just in
the same way, when we stay at hotels our self-respect is revolted at being
received and dismissed with equal indifference, and there are many who
would gladly resign the innovations of electric light and hydraulic lifts
for that “welcome at an inn” of which Shenstone speaks. The philosophy of
these regrets must, in fact, be sought in that illuminating phrase, “_Us
in particular_.” We travellers are unwilling to be thought of merely as
numbers identical with those of our bedrooms, and we like to believe,
against our own better judgment, that the old-fashioned hosts and
hostesses were pleased to see _us_; which of course, in that special
sense, was not the case. But a little make-believe sometimes goes a great
way, and we need never, unless we have a mind to distress ourselves, seek
the tongue of humbug in the cheek of courtesy.
The landlord of a good coaching house was a very important person indeed.
Not seldom he was a large owner of horses and employer of labour; a man of
some culture and of considerable wealth. He was not only a good judge of
wine and horseflesh, but of men and matters, and not merely the servant,
but the self-respecting and respected friend, of the gentry in his
neighbourhood. He was generally in evidence at his house, and he or his
wife would have scorned the idea of appointing a manager to do their work.
In those days, and with such men along the road, it was an established
rule of etiquette for the coming guest to invite his host to take a glass
of wine with him and to exchange the news. But the type has become quite
extinct, and even their old houses have been either demolished or else
converted into private residences. Such hosts were Mr. and Mrs. Botham, of
the “Windmill” at Salt Hill; or the long succession of notable landlords
of the “Castle” at Marlborough, on the Bath Road; such were Clark, of the
“Bell,” Barnby Moor, and Holt of the “Wheatsheaf,” Rushyford Bridge, on
the Great North Road,--to name but those.
They were men, too, of considerable influence, and, when equipped with
determination, wielded a certain amount of power, and brought great
changes to pass; as when Robert Lawrence, of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, by
dint of great personal exertions, brought the line of travel between
London and Dublin through Shrewsbury and Holyhead, instead of, as
formerly, through Chester. He died in 1806, and the curious may yet read
on his mural monument in St. Julian’s Church how he was “many years
proprietor of the ‘Raven’ and ‘Lion’ inns in this town,” and that it was
to his “public spirit and unremitting exertions for upwards of thirty
years, in opening the great road through Wales between the United
kingdoms, as also for establishing the first mail-coach, that the public
in general have been greatly indebted.”
Almost equally forceful were some of the old-time proprietors of the
“George” at Walsall. In 1781 Mr. Thomas Fletcher, one of an old and
highly respected family in that town, gave up the “Dragon” in High Street
and built the great “George Hotel.” He even procured an Act of Parliament
by which the present road from Walsall to Stafford was made, thereby
bringing Walsall out of a by-road into the direct line of traffic. He also
caused the Birmingham road to be straightened and widened, and gradually
brought coaching and posting through the town. His successors, Fletcher
and Sharratt, were equally energetic. In 1823 they remodelled the
“George,” giving it the classic-columned front that confers a kind of
third-cousin relationship to the British Museum, with unappetising and
gruesome thoughts of dining on fried mummy and kippered parchments. The
columns, which are still very solemnly there--or were, a year ago--came
from the Marquis of Donegall’s neighbouring seat of Fisherwick Hall,
demolished about that time, and the placing of them here was celebrated by
an inaugural feast, “the colonnade dinner,” presided over by Lord
Hatherton, a great patron of the house.
Those wonder-working innkeepers also, in 1831, promoted the Bill by which
the present Birmingham road through Perry Bar was made, superseding the
old route by Hamstead and Handsworth church.
Unfortunately, those fine old innkeepers, whatever else they were, were
not usually cultivators of the art of literary expression, and did not
write their memoirs and reminiscences. Yet they could, had they chosen,
have told an interesting tale of men and matters. Consider! They were in
the whirl of life, and often knew personages and affairs, not merely by
report, but at first hand. What would not the historian of social England
give for such reminiscences? They would open the door to much that is now
sealed, and would clothe the dry bones of mere facts with romance.
One such innkeeper, Mr. J. Kearsley Fowler, who kept the “White Hart,”
Aylesbury, in the last few years of its existence, has, however, left us
something by which we may see, described at first-hand, the life and
surroundings of a first-class old coaching and posting inn between 1812
and those middle years of the ’60’s, when a few branch-road coaches were
yet left, and the Squire and Agriculture were still prosperous.
He tells us, of his own knowledge, that the innkeepers had by far the
largest amount of capital invested in the country towns, where, as men
generally of superior manners and education, from their constant
association with the leading nobility, clergy, and magistracy, they took a
prominent position, both socially and politically, the leading houses
being the head quarters, respectively, of Whigs and Tories.
The “White Hart” at Aylesbury was generally believed to have dated back to
the time of Richard the Second, and in the time of the Wars of the Roses
to have been the rendezvous of the White Rose party, while the “Roebuck”
was affected to the Red Rose.
Until 1812 the “White Hart” retained its fine mediæval, three-gabled
frontage, with first floor overhanging the ground-floor, and the second
overhanging the first. Elaborately carved barge-boards decorated the
gables. In the centre of the front was a great gateway with deeply reeded
oaken posts and heavy double doors, which could be closed on occasion;
but, in the growing security of the land, had scarce within the memory of
man been shut to. Within was a spacious courtyard, partly surrounded by a
gallery supported on stout oaken pillars and reached by a staircase. From
this gallery, as in most other mediæval hostelries, the bedrooms and
principal sitting-rooms opened. The “Coffee Room” and “Commercial Room”
were at either side of the entrance from the street: the “Commercial Room”
itself having, before the days of “commercials,” once been called “the
Change,” and used, as asserted by local tradition, as the place where the
principal business transactions of the town were conducted, over suitable
liquor.
On the side opposite was the room called the “Crown,” where the collectors
of customs and excise, and other officials periodically attended. In the
“Mitre,” an adjoining room, the Chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln, and
the “Apparitor” of the Archdeacon had of old collected, for three hundred
years, the dues or fees of the Church. Another room, the “Fountain,” was
perhaps originally a select bar. Running under the entire frontage of the
house was the extensive cellarage, necessarily spacious in days when every
one drank wine, and many deeply.
At the end of the yard was the great kitchen, and beyond it large gardens
and a beautiful, full-sized bowling-green. Gigantic elms, at least three
centuries old, bordered the gardens, which were further screened from
outside observation by dense shrubberies of flowering shrubs, laburnums,
lilacs, mountain-ash, acacias, and red chestnuts. Ancient walnut-trees and
shady arbours completed this lovely retreat.
But this was not all. Beyond this very delightful, but merely ornamental,
portion was an orchard stocked with fine apple- and pear-trees: codlins,
golden and ribston pippins, Blenheim orange, russets and early
June-eatings, Gansell’s bergamot pear, and others. Three very fine
mulberry-trees, at least three centuries old, and of course a varied and
extensive stock of bush-fruit, were included in this orchard, and in
addition there was the kitchen-garden.
In the orchard were the cow-houses and piggeries, and the hospital for
lame or ailing horses. A mill-stream ran at the bottom, and in the midst
of it was a “stew,” a shallow pond for freshwater fish, in which was kept
an “eel-trunk,” a strong iron box about four feet long and two feet wide
and deep, perforated with holes. The lid of this contrivance was fastened
with lock and key, and was under the charge of the man-cook, who was head
of the servants. When eels were required for table, the trunk would be
hauled up to bank by a strong iron chain, and emptied.
The stables had stalls for about fifty horses, and over them were lofts
for hay, straw, and corn. Harness-rooms, waiting-room for the postboys,
and an “ostry,” _i.e._, office and store-room for the ostler, were
attached, together with chaise and coach-houses. The establishment of the
“White Hart”--and it was typical of many others in the old days--covered
from five to six acres.
The staff of such a house was, of course, large. Besides the innkeeper and
his wife, both of them working hard in the conduct of the business, there
were housekeeper, barmaid, man-cook, waiter and under-waiter, kitchenmaid,
scullerymaid, chambermaid, laundress, housemaid, nurse, boots, ostler,
tap-boy, first-turn postboy, and generally an extra woman: sixteen
persons, whom the innkeeper had to lodge and feed daily, in addition to
his guests.
The “White Hart” was re-fronted in a very plain, not to say ugly, manner
in 1813, and finally demolished in 1863. Not even that most lovely and
most famous feature of it, the celebrated “Rochester room,” was spared.
This was a noble apartment, built as an addition to the back of the house
in 1663 by the Earl of Rochester, as a return for a signal service
rendered by the landlord in that time--perilous to such Cavaliers as
he--the Commonwealth. It seems, according to Clarendon, that the Earl and
Sir Nicholas Armour came riding horseback into the town one night and put
up at the “White Hart,” then kept by a landlord named Gilvy, who was
affected strongly in favour of Cromwell and all his doings. The local
magistrate, hearing of the visit of the Earl, sent secretly to the
innkeeper requesting him to detain the travellers’ horses the next
morning, so that neither of them should be able to leave, pending an
inquiry upon their business; but the thing was not done secretly enough.
Probably one of the servants of the inn told those two guests of something
ominous being afoot; at any rate, the Earl had Gilvy up and questioned
him, and, telling him how probably the lives of himself and friend were in
his hand, gave him forty Jacobuses and suggested that they should, without
a word, depart that night. Clarendon expresses himself as unable to decide
whether the gold or the landlord’s conscience prompted his next action. At
any rate, Gilvy conducted the two fugitives from the inn at midnight “into
the London way.” They reached London and then fled over sea, while the
landlord was left to invent some plausible story to satisfy the Justice of
the Peace, who in his turn was suspected by Cromwell of being a party to
the escape.
At the Restoration, the landlord received a brimming measure of reward. He
was thanked by the King, and the Earl built for him that noble room,
forty-two feet long, by twenty-three wide, that was the pride and glory of
the “White Hart” for just two hundred years. It was panelled from floor
to ceiling in richly carved oak, set off with gilding, and embellished
with the figures of Peace and Concord and the initials C R, while the
ceiling was painted with nymphs and cherubim by Antonio Verrio.
Nothing has more changed from its former condition than the old inn which
has become the modern hotel. The “George,” the “Crown and Anchor,” the
“Wellington,” or the “King’s Head,” had an individuality which was never
lost. There was a personal kind of welcome from the landlord and the
landlady that simulated the hospitality of a friendly host and hostess,
mingled with the attention of a superior sort of body-servant. You were
not handed over to a number and a chambermaid, like a document in a
pigeon-hole tabulated by a clerk; but the hostess herself showed you your
rooms, and begged you to put a name to anything you might fancy. There was
no general coffee-room then, save for commercial travellers and such
social gentlemen as preferred even inferior company to solitude. There was
no table d’hôte dinner other than the ordinary, between twelve and two,
which was chiefly made for the convenience of travellers by the
stage-coach, who halted here for change and refreshment. Even the ladies
who might be on the road were served and kept apart from the, perhaps,
doubtful gents below; and mine host himself brought in the first dish and
set it on the table of the private room, which was as much _de rigueur_
then for ladies as the copper warming-pan and the claret with the yellow
seal, or the thick, deep red luscious port of old, ordered by the knowing
for the good of the house.
In the country the pretty little inn, with its honeysuckled porch and
scrambling profusion of climbing roses up to the bedroom windows, had an
even more home-like character in its methods of dealing with its guests.
Here the servants stayed on for years, till they grew to be as much part
of the establishment as the four-poster hung with red moreen and the
plated sconces for candles. And here everything was of perfect
cleanliness, and as fresh as fragrant. The eggs and milk and butter were
all sweet and new. Generous jugs of cream softened the tartness of the
black-currant pudding or the green-gooseberry tart. The spring chickens
and young ducklings had been well fed; the mutton was home-grown and not
under five years; the beef was home-grown too, and knew nothing of
antiseptic preparations or frozen chambers; and the vegetables came direct
from the garden, and had been neither tinned nor carted for miles in huge
waggon loads, well rammed down and tightly compressed. And all the meat
was roasted before an open fire, diligently basted in the process, till
the gravy lightly frothed on the browned skin, and the appetising scent it
gave out had no affinity with the smell of fat on heated iron, which for
the most part accompanies the modern roast in the modern oven. The linen
invariably smelt of lavender or dried rose-leaves, of which big bags were
kept among the sheets; but the washing apparatus was poor, and the
illumination was scanty. Wax candles in silver or plated branched
candlesticks, that vaguely suggested churches and sacraments, shed a
veritably “dim religious” glimmer in the sitting-room, and appeared
expensively under the form of “lights” in the bill--mistily suggestive of
food for hungry cats.
Yet the old country inn had, and still has--for it is not wholly
extinct--its charms that weigh against any little defect.
Of all this quasi-home life which belonged to the old inn of the past, the
hotel of the present has not a trace. For certain forms of luxury the
modern hotel is hard to beat. Thick carpets deaden the footsteps of
stragglers through the corridors, and your boots, invariably kicked into
infinities by midnight guests, do not--as they do in the older houses--fly
noisily along the bare boards. The rooms are lighted with electric light,
but usually set so high as to be useless for all purposes of reading or
working. In the drawing-room are luxurious chairs of all shapes and sizes;
in the reading-room papers of all colours, to suit here the red-hot
Radical and there the cooler Conservative. The billiard-room attracts the
men after dinner as--if in the country--the tennis-ground or the
golf-links had attracted them through the day. The telephone does
everything you want. Carriages, theatres, quotations, races, a doctor if
you are ill, a motor-car if you are well--nothing within the range of
human wants that can be ordered and not chosen comes amiss to the
telephone and its manipulators. All the rough edges of life are smoothed
down to satin softness. All the friction is taken away. A modern hotel is
as the isle of Calypso or the Garden of Armida, where all you have to do
is to make known your wants and pay the bill.
But it has not one single strain of Home in it. Home is the place where
the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the
complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you
are a document in a pigeon-hole--a number, not a person--an accident, not
substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You
get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management.
You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not
frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is
cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. Dinner is, of
course, fixed, and you take it in masses together: or so took it, for in
late years, especially in the first hotels of London, a revulsion of
feeling has led to the long tables being abolished, and small ones
installed, where, almost privately amid the throng, you and your little
party may dine. As a rule the waiters are Swiss and the meat is foreign,
the cook is a Frenchman and called a _chef_; and the materials are
inferior. The vegetables are tinned, and oysters, lobsters, salmon, and
hare in May follow suit. The sauces are all exactly the same in one hotel
as in another, and much margarine enters into their composition. Electric
bells emphasise the monotonous ordering of the whole concern, where as
little character is expressed in the ring as in the number it indicates;
and speaking-tubes sound in the corridors, like domestic fog-horns or
railway whistles, calling the chambermaids or waiters of such-and-such a
floor to listen to their orders from below. Wherever you go you find
exactly the same things--the same order, the same management, the same
appliances and methods. You arrive without a welcome, you leave without a
farewell. Your character is determined according to the tips you give on
parting, and an hour after you have gone your personality is forgotten.
But, above all things, Heaven save us from falling ill in the modern
hotel. No one cares for you, and no one even has the decency to make a
pretence of doing so.
Sometimes, however, if you go somewhat out of the season, and before the
rush of visitors begins, you get to a certain degree behind the scenes,
and learn a little of the heart and humanity of the management. The
chambermaid has time to have a little chat with you in the morning, and
the head waiter gives you bits of local information both interesting and
new. The manageress is not too busy for a few minutes’ gossip across the
counter which separates her from the hall, and screens her off in a
sanctuary of her own. And you may find her cheerful, chatty, kindly, and
willing to please for the mere pleasure of pleasing.
In the monster hotels of London and the great cities, while there may yet
be a “season”--a period of extra pressure and overcrowding--there is no
such slack time as the giant caravanserais of holiday resorts experience.
The pioneer of the many-storeyed, “palatial” hotels, gorgeous with marble
pavements, polished granite columns, lifts and gigantic saloons, was the
“Great Western Railway Hotel” at Paddington.[11] Since that huge pile set
the fashion, hundreds of others, huger and more magnificent, have been
built at Charing Cross, Euston, St. Pancras, Marylebone and other London
termini, with big brothers--in every way as big and well-appointed--in
provincial towns. They are the logical outcome of the times, the direct
successors of the coaching and posting inns that originally came into
existence to supply the wants, in food and lodging, of travellers set down
at the places where the coaches stopped. The final expression of the
coaching hostelry is still to be seen in London, in instructive company
with one of the largest of the railway hotels, in the Strand, where the
“Golden Cross,” built in 1832, looks upon the “Charing Cross Hotel” of
the South-Eastern Railway.
The management of a great modern hotel is no easy thing. It demands the
urbanity of an ambassador, the marketing instincts of a good housewife,
the soldier’s instinct for command, the caution of a financier, and a gift
for judging character. All these things--natural endowments, or the result
of training--must go to the making of an hotel-manager who has, perhaps, a
couple of hundred people on his staff, and hundreds of guests, many of
them unreasonable, to keep satisfied.
It has lately become a commonplace to say that cycling and the motor-car
have peopled the roads again. The old coaching inns have entered upon a
new era of prosperity by reason of the crowds of cyclists who fare forth
from London along the ancient highways, or explore, awheel, the
neighbourhoods of provincial towns. The “last” coach-driver, coach-guard,
and post-boy, killed off regularly by the newspapers, still survive to
witness this new cult of the wheel, and the ultimate ostlers of the
coaching era, a bit stiff in the joints, shaky at the knees, and generally
out of repair, have come forth blinking, from the dark and cavernous
recesses of their mouldering stables, all too large now for the horses
that find shelter there, to take charge of the machines of steel and iron
and rubber that will carry you infinite distances without fatigue.
There are elements of both fun and pathos in the sight of an old ostler
cleaning a muddy bicycle in a coach-yard from which the last coach-horses
departed nearly two generations ago. As a boy, he started life in the
place as a stable-help, and had scarce finished his novitiate when the
railway was opened and the coaches dropped off one by one, after vainly
appealing to the old-fashioned prejudices of their patrons to shun the
trains and still travel by the highways. How he has managed to retain his
place all this time goodness only knows. Perhaps he has been useful in
looking after the horses that work the hotel ’bus to and from the station;
and then the weekly market-day, bringing in the farmers with their gigs
and traps from outlying villages, is still an institution. For such
customers old George had, no doubt, the liveliest contempt in the fine old
free-handed days of coaching; but this class of business, once turned over
cheerfully to second- or third-rate inns, has long been eagerly shared
here.
To watch him with a bicycle you would think the machine a sensitive beast,
ready to kick unless humoured, for as he rubs it down with a cloth he
soothes it with the continuous “’ssh-ssh, ’ssh” which has become
involuntary with him, from long usage; while if indeed it can’t kick, it
succeeds very fairly in barking his shins with those treacherous pedals.
All the persuasive hissing in the world won’t soothe a pedal.
As for the motor-cars which are now finding their way into the old
inn-yards, the old ostler stands fearfully aloof from them, and lets the
driver of the motor look after the machine himself. The New Ostler, who
will be produced by the logic of events in the course of a very few more
years, will be an expert mechanic, and able to tittivate a gear and grind
in a valve of a motor-car, or execute minor repairs to a bicycle, just as
readily as an ostler rubs down or clips a horse.
CHAPTER VI
PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS
Inns, or guest-houses for the proper lodging and entertainment of
travellers bent on pilgrimage, were among the earliest forms of
hostelries; and those great bournes of religious pilgrimage in mediæval
times--the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, the tomb of Edward
the Second in Gloucester Cathedral, the relics of St. Dunstan at
Glastonbury, and the more or less holy objects of superstitious reverence
at Walsingham, St. Albans, and indeed, in most of our great abbeys,
attracting thousands of sinners anxious to clear off old scores and begin
afresh--were full of inns for the entertainment of every class of
itinerating sinner; from the Abbot’s guest-house, at the service of the
great, to the hostels for the middle classes, and the barns and outhouses
where the common folk appropriately herded.
The Abbots and other dignified ecclesiastics were thus among the earliest
innkeepers, but they conducted their business on lines that would be
impossible to the modern hotel-keeper, for they commonly boarded and
lodged their guests free of charge, confident, in the religious spirit of
the time, that the offerings to be made at the shrines, which were the
objects of those old-time painful journeys, would amply repay the costs
and charges of their entertaining, and leave a very handsome surplus for
the good of the Abbey.
Chaucer’s description of pilgrimages made to Canterbury gives us a very
good idea of the varied character of the crowds setting forth upon their
journey to that most popular of shrines; and we learn from him and from
many other contemporary sources that the bearing of these crowds was
scarce what we should expect of miserable sinners, not only conscious of
their sins, but humbly seeking that spiritual spring-clean--absolution.
They were gay and light-hearted, reckless, and exceedingly improper, and
rarely failed to deeply scandalise the innkeepers along the roads.
The “Tabard,” whence Chaucer’s pilgrims set out on that April morning in
1383, has long been a thing of the past. It was in 1307, one hundred and
thirty-seven years after Becket’s martyrdom, that the Abbot of Hyde, at
Winchester, built the first house, which seems to have been in two
portions: one a guest-house for the brethren of Hyde and other clergy
coming to London to wait upon that mighty political and religious
personage, my Lord Bishop of Winchester, whose London palace stood close
by, on Bankside; the other a more or less commercially conducted inn. When
Chaucer conferred immortality upon the “Tabard,” in 1383, the lessee of
that hostelry was the “Harry Bailly” of _The Canterbury Tales_, a real
person, and probably an intimate friend whom Chaucer thus delighted to
honour.
This was no mere red-nosed and fat-paunched purveyor of sack and other
quaint liquors of that time, but one who had been Member of Parliament for
Southwark in 1376 and again in 1379,[12] and was a person not only of
considerable property, but a dignified and well-mannered
man--better-mannered and of cleaner speech, we may suspect, than Chaucer’s
pilgrims themselves:
A seemly man our hostè was withal
For to have been a marshal in a hall.
A largè man was he, with eyen steep,
A fairer burgess is there none in Chepe;
Bold of his speech, and wise, and well ytaught;
And of manhóod lackèd righte nought,
Eke thereto he was right a merry man.
Such a host, and no less a person, could have sat at supper with his
guests, even with such gentles as the Knight and his son, the Squire, and
the Lady Abbess; and thus only is he able to take charge of, and to assume
leadership over, the party of twenty-nine on the long four days’
pilgrimage to Canterbury, and to reprove or praise each and all, according
to his mind.
The “Tabard” derived its name from the sleeveless ceremonial heraldic
coat, tricked out with gold and colours, worn by heralds. At a
comparatively early date, however, the “science of fools,” as heraldry has
severely been called, grew neglected, and “tabards” became little
understood by common people. The sign of the house was accordingly changed
to the “Talbot” about 1599; but even that has grown mysterious, and only
folk with very special knowledge now know what a “talbot” was. In those
days the meaning was well understood, and especially at inns, for it was
the name of a fierce breed of dog--the old English hound, something
between a mastiff and a bull-dog--kept chiefly by packmen to mount guard
over their pack-horses and goods.
Both “Tabard” and “Talbot” are now nothing more substantial than memories.
Little could have been left of the historic house in 1676, when the great
fire of Southwark swept away many of the old inns. A newer “Talbot” then
arose on the site, and stood until 1870: itself of so venerable an
appearance that it was not difficult to persuade people of its being the
veritable house whence Chaucer’s pilgrims set forth those many centuries
ago.
The pilgrims only made Dartford the first night, a fifteen-miles’ journey
that would by no means satisfy those inclined nowadays to follow their
trail. We are not, however, vouchsafed any definite information as to
Dartford, and the oldest portions of the existing “Bull” inn there are
not, by perhaps two hundred years, old enough to have housed that
miscellaneous party. But there was an inn, frequented by pilgrims, at that
time upon the same site, and the “Bull” claims to be one of the oldest
licensed houses in Kent--as well it may, for it is known to date back to
1450. In Chaucer’s time the landlord was, we are told, one Urban Baldock,
himself a friend of the poet, and the source whence a great deal of
information respecting pilgrims and their ways was gathered by him for
_The Canterbury Tales_.
The oldest part of the “Bull” is the courtyard, galleried after the
ancient style, but in these practical and in many ways unsentimental times
roofed in with glass and used as a corn-market. Behind the carved wooden
balusters of the gallery are the bedrooms, until late years largely given
up to dust and cobwebs, but now rebuilt and again in use. Those who care
for things that have had their day will think it fortunate that merely
alteration, and not destruction, has been suffered here.
For the rest, the “Bull” at Dartford is Georgian, and its long brick
front, with nine windows in a row, bears a strong family likeness to that
of its namesake at Rochester. The bull himself, in great black effigy,
occupies a monumental position among the chimney-pots, whence he looks
down, like Nelson in Trafalgar Square, upon busy streets.
There have been happenings at the “Bull” in times much later than those of
pilgrimage. On August 17th, 1775, a room off the gallery was the scene of
an affray that led to Joseph Stacpoole, William Gapper, and James Lagier
being indicted for shooting “John Parker, Esq.,” described as an Irish
gentleman of fortune.
It seems that Joseph Stacpoole had lent John Parker and his brother
Francis various sums of money, amounting in all to £3,000, and had very
seriously embarrassed himself in doing so. He could not succeed in getting
payment, and as he had good reason to suspect that the Parkers intended to
abscond over sea, he followed them to Dartford, with his attorney and a
bailiff. Hearing that they were staying with some friends at the “Bull,”
Stacpoole sent Lagier, the bailiff, with a writ into the room they
occupied, himself and Gapper following.
No sooner did the hot-headed Parker see the bailiff than he cried out,
“Zounds! where are my pistols?” and one of his friends dashed out a candle
with his hand and upset the only other. In this dim and dangerous
situation the bailiff, mortally afraid for himself, cried out for help,
and Stacpoole and Gapper came rushing in. Parker’s friends then seized
Stacpoole by the collar, and seem to have shaken him so violently that
they shook off the contents of a carbine he was carrying, with the result
that Parker himself was shot through the body with three bullets. When
that happened Parker’s brother fled to London, a Mr. Masterson ran
downstairs, and a Mr. Bull, who had taken a prominent part in the
collaring, was in so great a hurry that he jumped over the gallery into
the yard.
The trial of Stacpoole and his two co-defendants did not take place until
March 20th, 1777, when all were acquitted.
The last picturesque incident in the history of the “Bull” took place in
1822, when George the Fourth came posting along the road and the post-boy
stopped here to change horses. He had just asked Essenhigh, the landlord,
who that “damned pretty woman” was whom he saw at one of the windows, and
mine host had only just replied that it was his wife, when a hostile
crowd, in sympathy with “the persecuted” Queen Caroline, who had died the
year before, began to “boo” and howl at the King. “When gentlemen meet,
compliments pass,” says the adage, and one Callaghan, a journeyman
currier, thrust forward and roared out, in the face of the “First
Gentleman in Europe,” “You are a murderer!” a remark which possesses the
recommendation neither of truth nor politeness, and resulted, in this
instance, in the outrageous Callaghan being punched on the head and felled
to the ground by one of the King’s faction. The King himself drove off in
such a hurry that the postboy fell off his horse on leaving the town.
The pilgrims’ hostels that once existed at Rochester are things of the
past, but it seems not unlikely that the “George,” in the High Street,
almost opposite the Pickwickian “Bull,” was once something in this nature,
for although the modern frontage is absolutely uninteresting, not to say
distressingly ugly, and although it is now nothing more than a
public-house, the very large and very fine Early English crypt, now used
as a beer-cellar, shows that a building of semi-ecclesiastical nature
once stood on the site. The “George” is an old sign, the present house
being built on the ruins of one destroyed by fire a hundred and twenty
years ago.
The crypt, built of chalk, with ribs and bosses of Caen stone, is roofed
with four-part vaulting, and is in four bays, the whole 54 ft. in length,
by nearly 17 ft. wide, and 11 ft. high.
[Illustration: CRYPT AT THE “GEORGE,” ROCHESTER.]
Beside the Dover Road, which is of course the pilgrims’ road from London
to Canterbury, one mile short of Faversham town, stands the village of
Ospringe, identified by some antiquaries as the site of the Roman station
of _Durolevum_. Time was when those who made pilgrimage to Canterbury came
to Ospringe through a water-splash, a little stream that flowed across
the highway and no one thought worth while bridging. And so it remained,
through the coaching age, until modern times. Now it is covered over, and
Ospringe is at this day a quite remarkably dusty place.
There remain, built into the “Red Lion” inn beside the way, fragments of a
“maison Dieu,” or God’s House, that stood here so early as the time of
Henry the Second: a hostel established for the reception of travellers,
and maintained for many years by the Knights Templars and Brethren of the
Holy Ghost. Here travellers of all classes found a lavish hospitality
awaiting them, and, so sparsely settled was the country in those
centuries, that even kings were glad of this rest-house--and of others
like it elsewhere. King John, who was for ever spoiling the Church, and
bringing upon himself, and the country with him, Papal excommunications
major and minor, and yet was always sponging upon abbots and their kind
for board and lodging, had what is described as a _camera regis_ here,
which seems to modern ears to indicate that he practised photography,
centuries before the invention of it. The _camera_ in this case is,
however, only the mediæval chronicler’s Latin way of saying that a room
was kept for the King’s use.
A landed gentleman of the neighbouring Preston-by-Faversham, one Macknade
by name, who died in 1407, left, among many other bequests, £1 to the
“Domus Dei” of Ospringe, together with £10 for the repair of the highway
between that point and Boughton-under-Blean. In this manner he hoped to be
remembered in the prayers of travellers; and to the same end of bidding
for Aves and paternosters for the repose of his soul, he bequeathed 20
pence to all prisoners in Kentish gaols, 12 pence to all debtors similarly
situated, £23 to the minor religious houses of the county, and a larger
sum to the principal abbeys. In addition to these items we find one of 10
cows, left to Preston church, for the purpose of maintaining a lighted
taper at the Easter Sepulchre there. Let us hope his solicitude for his
soul has not been without its due results.
The “maison Dieu” of Ospringe was disestablished long before the general
ruin of such institutions was ordained, in the time of Henry the Eighth.
In 1479 we find the place inhabited by two brethren, survivors of the
eight who once welcomed and made good cheer for pilgrims; but they forsook
it the next year, and in 1480-81 it was, as a derelict religious house,
escheated to the Crown.
Canterbury itself was, of course, once full of such travellers’ rests.
Chief among these was the inn called “The Chequers of the Hope,” at the
corner of Mercery Lane, leading to the Cathedral; but, although the lower
part of the walls and the mediæval crypt remain, the present aspect of the
building is modern and commonplace. It is, in point of fact, a “Ladies’
Outfitting” shop.
Travellers in those centuries seem to have been in many ways well cared
for. The hospitality of the “houses of God” and pilgrims’ halts, however,
does but show the bright side of the medal, and implies a very dark
reverse.
Good, charitable folks, as we have seen, were rightly sorry for wayfarers,
and gave or bequeathed money for lightening the trials and tribulations of
their lot. The Church itself regarded the succouring of all such as one of
its first duties, and so granted all manner of ghostly privileges to such
persons as would build causeways, improve roads, or establish hostels. The
bargain seemed in those times a fair one, and induced many to give who
would not otherwise have given. To buy absolution for gold, or a few days
less purgatory by charitable bequest was good business; but we may wonder
if those who thus purchased remission of sins or an “early door” into
Paradise sometimes spared a pitying thought for those poor devils who had
not the needful for such indulgences.
[Illustration: WESTGATE, CANTERBURY, AND THE “FALSTAFF” INN.]
Day after day travellers--whose very name comes from “travail” = toil or
trouble--journeyed amid dangers, and, when by mischance they were
benighted, suffered agonies of apprehension. They intended only to
“journey”--to travel by day, as the original sense of that word
indicated--and were afflicted with the liveliest apprehensions when night
came and found them still on the road. Toiling in the hollow roads, deep
in ruts and mud, with terror they saw the sun go down while yet the
friendly town was far away, and came at last, in fear and darkness, to the
walled city, only to find its gates closed for the night. Every
fortified town closed its gates at sunset; else, in those dangerous times,
what use your gates and walls? As reasonably might the modern citizen
leave his street door wide open all night, as the mediæval town not close
its gates when the hours of darkness were come; and so those travellers
and pilgrims who, from much story-telling, praying, or feasting along the
road, arrived late at Canterbury, found the portals of Westgate sternly
closed against them. Originally they were obliged to lie outside, under
the walls or in the fields, instead of being made welcome at the
comfortable hostels within, where a man might find jolly company in the
rush-strewn hall, and for food and drink be free of the best; but, for the
accommodation of such laggards, the suburb of St. Dunstan, without the
walls of Canterbury, sprang up at a very early date, and to the custom
they thus brought we owe the existence of the “Falstaff” inn, itself
containing some fine “linen-pattern” panelling of the time of Henry the
Seventh; but not, of course, the original house that, under some other
name than the “Falstaff,” was early established for the entertainment of
late-comers.
The “Falstaff” is a prominent feature of the entrance to Canterbury, and
forms, with the stern drum towers of Westgate, built about 1380, as fine
an entrance to a city as anything to be found in England. The present sign
of the house derives from the instant and extraordinary popularity that
Shakespeare’s Fat Knight obtained, from his first appearance upon the
Elizabethan stage. The present “Falstaff” is a very spirited rendering,
showing the Fat Knight with sword and buckler and an air of determination,
apparently “just about to begin” on those numerous “men in buckram”
conjured up by his ready imagination on Gad’s Hill. There is an air about
this representation of him irresistibly reminiscent of that song which
gave British patriots in 1878 the name of “Jingoes.” There are no patriots
now: only partisans and placemen--but that is another tale. This Falstaff
evidently “don’t want to fight; but by Jingo”--well, you know the rest of
it.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “FALSTAFF,” CANTERBURY.]
Not only pilgrims and travellers from London to Canterbury were thus
looked after, but those also coming the other way, and thus we find a
Maison Dieu established at Dover in the reign of King John by that great
man, Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciary of England. A master and a staff of
brethren and sisters were placed there to attend upon the poor priests
and the pilgrims and strangers of both sexes, who applied for food and
lodging. Kings cannot be classed in any of these categories; but they also
are found not infrequently making use of the institution, on their way to
or from France--and departing without a “thank ye.” The only one who seems
to have benefited the Maison Dieu very much was Henry the Third, who
endowed it with the tithe of the passage fare and £10 a year from the port
dues.
It is scarce necessary to say who it was that disestablished the Maison
Dieu. The heavy hand of Henry the Eighth squelched it, in common with
hundreds of other religious and semi-religious institutions. At the time
of its suppression the annual income was £231 16_s._ 7_d._, representing
some £2,500 in our day. The master, John Thompson, who had only been
appointed the year before, was an exceptionally fortunate man, being
granted a pension of £53 6_s._ 8_d._ a year. The buildings were then
converted into a victualling office for the Navy.
At last, in 1831, the Corporation of Dover purchased them, and the ancient
refectory then became the Town Hall and the sacristy the Sessions House,
and so remained until 1883, when a new Town Hall was built.
Similar institutions existed at others of the chief ports. At Portsmouth
was the Hospital of St. Nicholas, or “God’s House,” founded in the reign
of Henry the Third by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester. It is now
the Garrison Church. At Southampton the “Domus Dei” was dedicated to St.
Julian, patron of travellers, and now, as St. Julian’s Hospital and
Church, is in part an almshouse, sheltering eight poor persons, and partly
a French Huguenot place of worship.
The Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury from Southampton and Winchester was never
a road for wheeled traffic, and remained in all those centuries when
pilgrimage was popular, as a track for pedestrians, along the hillsides.
It avoided all towns, and thus precisely what those pilgrims who
wearifully hoofed it all the way did for shelter remains a little obscure:
although it seems probable that wayside shelters, with or without
oratories attached to them, were established at intervals. Such,
traditionally, was the origin of the picturesque timbered house at
Compton, now locally known as “Noah’s Ark.”
Colchester was a place of import to pilgrims in old wayfaring times, for
it lay along the line of the pilgrims’ trail to Walsingham. Among the inns
of this town, and older than any of its fellows, but coyly hiding its
antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries from
sight, behind modern alterations, is the “Angel” in West Stockwell Street,
whose origin as a pilgrims’ inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants, on the
way to, or returning from, the road of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on
the road through and past Norwich, housed here, and misbehaved themselves
in their mediæval way. It would, as already hinted, be the gravest
mistake to assume pilgrims to have been, _quâ_ pilgrims, necessarily
decorous; and, indeed, modern Bank Holiday folks, compared with them,
would shine as true examples of monkish austerity.
[Illustration: HOUSE FORMERLY A PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, COMPTON.]
The shrine at Walsingham, very highly esteemed in East Anglia, drew crowds
from every class, from king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of St.
John of Colchester sheltered some of the greatest of them, while others
inned at such hostelries as the “Angel,” and the vulgar, or the merely
impecunious, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods.
Pilgrims would boggle at nothing, as was well known at the time. That they
could not be trusted is evident enough in the custom of horse-masters, who
let out horses on hire to such travellers, at the rate of twelvepence from
Southwark to Rochester, and a further twelvepence from Rochester to
Canterbury. They knew, those early keepers of livery-stables, that little
chance existed of ever seeing their horses again unless they took
sufficient precautions. They therefore branded their animals in a
prominent and unmistakeable way, so that all should know such, found in
strange parts of the country, to be stolen.
Ill fared the unsuspecting burgess who met any of these sinners on the way
to plenary indulgence, for they would, not unlikely, murder him for the
sake of anything valuable he carried; or, out of high spirits and the
sheer fun of the thing, cudgel him into a jelly; arguing, doubtless, that
as they were presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how
soiled was the old one. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity, and
licence of the grossest kind were, in fact, the inevitable accompaniments
of pilgrimage.
[Illustration: THE “STAR,” ALFRISTON.]
Although East Anglia was in the old days more plentifully supplied with
great monastic houses than any other district in England, the destruction
wrought in later centuries has left all that part singularly poor in the
architectural remains of them: and even the once-necessary guest-houses
and hostels have shared the common fate. That charming miniature little
house, the “Green Dragon” at Wymondham, in Norfolk, may, however, as
tradition asserts, have once been a pilgrims’ inn dependent upon the great
Benedictine Abbey, whose gaunt towers, now a portion of the parish church,
rise behind its peaked roofs.
[Illustration: CARVING AT THE “STAR,” ALFRISTON.]
The beautiful little Sussex village of Alfriston--whose name, by the way,
in the local shibboleth, is “Arlston”--a rustic gem not so well known as
it deserves, possesses a very fine pilgrims’ inn, the “Star,” a relic of
old days when the bones of St. Richard of Chichester led many a foot-sore
penitent across the downs to Chichester, in quest of a clean spiritual
bill of health. Finely carved woodwork is a distinguishing feature of this
inn, whose roof, too, has character of its own, in the heavy slabs of
stone that do duty for slates, and bear witness to the exceptional
strength of the roof-tree that has sustained them all these centuries. The
demoniac-looking figure seen on the left-hand of the illustration is not,
as might perhaps at first sight be supposed, a mediæval effigy of Old
Nick, or an imported South Sea Islander’s god, but the figure-head of some
forgotten ship of the seventeenth century, wrecked on the neighbouring
coast, off Cuckmere Haven. Ancient carvings still ornament the wood-work
of the three upper projecting windows, the one particularly noticeable
specimen being a variant of the George and Dragon legend, where the saint,
with a mouth like a potato, no nose to speak of, and a chignon, is seen
unexpectedly on foot, thrusting his lance into the mouth of the dragon,
who appears to be receiving it with every mark of enjoyment, which the
additional face he is furnished with, in his tail, does not seem to share.
The left foot of the saint has been chipped off. All the exterior woodwork
has been very highly varnished and painted in glaring colours, from the
groups under the windows to the green monkey and green bear contending on
the angle-post for the possession of a green trident.
[Illustration: THE “GREEN DRAGON,” WYMONDHAM.]
[Illustration: THE PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, BATTLE.]
The old pilgrims’ hospice of Battle Abbey still remains outside the great
gateway, and now offers refreshments to those modern pilgrims who flock in
thousands, by chars-à-banc, on cycles, or afoot, to Battle in search of
the picturesque; or merely, in many cases, to complete the conventional
round of sight-seeing prescribed for visitors to Hastings. It is a
typically Sussexian building of domestic appearance, framed in stout oak
timbering, and filled with plaster and rubble, and was probably built
early in the fifteenth century.
The so-called “New” Inn, at Gloucester, when actually new, the matter of
four hundred and fifty years ago, was erected especially for the
accommodation of pilgrims flocking to the tomb of the murdered King Edward
the Second, who, by no means a saintly character in life, was in death
raised by popular sentiment to the status of something very like a holy
martyr. He had been weak and vicious, but those who on September 21st,
1327, put him to a dreadful death in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle acted
on behalf of others worse than he, and the horror and the injustice of it
had the not unnatural effect of almost canonising the slain monarch.
The Abbot of St. Peter’s at Gloucester, John Thokey, when all others,
fearing the vengeance of the murderers, dared not give the King’s body
burial, begged it and buried it, with much reverence, within the Abbey
walls. His Abbey, now the Cathedral of Gloucester, reaped unexpected
benefits from the humane instincts of that good and pitiful man, for
“miracles” were wrought at the “martyr’s” tomb, and abundant
thank-offerings continued to flow in, and at last enabled the great Abbey
to be rebuilt.
[Illustration: THE “NEW INN,” GLOUCESTER.]
It became eventually a pressing need to provide housing outside the
Abbot’s lodgings for the stream of pilgrims, and accordingly the New
Inn was built in the middle of the fifteenth century (1450-1457) by
John Twynning, a monk of that establishment, of whom we know little or
nothing else than that he was, according to the records of his time, a
“laudable man.” It remained until quite recent years the property of the
Dean and Chapter of Gloucester.
The inn is reached through an archway in Northgate Street, and is
arranged, as usual in mediæval inns, around a courtyard. Still the old
gables look down upon the yard and, as of yore, the ancient galleries,
rescued from the decay and neglect of some seventy years ago, run partly
around first and second floors. Existing side by side with those antique
features, the quaint windowed bar of the coaching era is now itself a
curiosity. In short, mediæval picturesqueness, Jacobean carved oak,
commercial and coffee-rooms of the coaching age, and modern comforts
conjoin at the New Inn, so that neither a wayworn pilgrim, were such an
one likely to appear, nor a seventeenth century horseman, nor even a
Georgian coachman, redolent of the rum-punch that was the favourite drink
in coaching days, would seem out of place.
Summer and autumn transfigure the courtyard into the likeness of a rustic
bower, for it is plentifully hung with virginia-creepers, from amidst
whose leaves the plaster lion who mounts guard on the roof of the bar
looks as though he were gazing forth from his native jungle.
I do not know in what way John Twynning--or Twining, as we should no
doubt in modern times call him--was to be reckoned laudable, but if he
were thought praiseworthy for anything outside his religious duties it was
probably by reason of the skill with which he built this pilgrims’ hostel.
You perceive little of his work from the street, for at that extraordinary
period when stucco was fashionable and plaster all the rage, the timbered
front of the building was covered up in that manner, and so remains. But
the great building is still constructionally the house that
fifteenth-century monk left, and how well and truly he built it, let its
sound and stable condition, after four centuries and a half of constant
use, tell.
Such modern touches as there are about this quaintly named “New” inn are
the merest light clothing upon its ancient body, and the sitting-rooms and
forty or so bedrooms, cosy and comfortable to us moderns, are but modern
in their carpets and fittings, and in the paper that decorates their
walls, in between the stout dark timber framing.
The house is built chiefly of chestnut, traditionally obtained from
Highnam, some three miles from the city; and everywhere the enormous
beams, in some places polished, in others rough, are to be seen. In their
roughest, most timeworn condition, they overhang the narrow passage now
called New Inn (formerly Pilgrims’) Lane, where, at the angle, a most
ornately carved corner-post, very much injured, exhibits a mutilated angel
holding a scroll, in the midst of fifteenth-century tabernacle-work.
[Illustration: COURTYARD, “NEW INN,” GLOUCESTER.]
As usual in these ancient inns with courtyards and galleries, plays and
interludes were formerly acted here, and it is said that the accession of
Queen Elizabeth was proclaimed on these flagstones.
That galleries open to the air, with the bedrooms and others giving upon
them, were not so inconvenient as generally nowadays supposed is evident
enough here, where they are still in use, as they were centuries ago. The
only difference is that they are carpeted nowadays, instead of being bare
floors.
A staircase from the courtyard leads up to the first-floor gallery, still
screened off by the old open-lattice gates reaching from floor to ceiling,
originally intended to prevent stray dogs entering.
Portions of the “New Inn” let off in the days of its declining prosperity
have in modern times been taken back again: among them the large
dining-hall overlooking the lane, for many years used as a Sunday school
for the children of St. Nicholas parish, and other rooms looking upon
Northgate Street.
In short, the old “New” inn impresses the beholder with a very insistent
sense of being a live institution, a “going concern.” Most ancient inns of
this character are merely poor survivals; archæologically interesting, but
wan veterans tottering to decay and long deserted by custom. Here,
however, there is heavy traffic down in the yard: the ostler is busy in
his “Ostry” (the name is painted over the door), bells are ringing, people
and luggage coming and going; the big railway parcel-office is as full of
parcels as it could have been when it was a coach-office; appetising
scents come from glowing kitchens, and to and from private rooms are
carried trays of as good things as ever pilgrims feasted upon, at the end
of their pilgrimage.
There existed, until about 1859, another very notable “New” inn, probably
the work of the Abbots of Sherborne, and intended for the reception of
visitors to that beautiful Dorsetshire abbey. That splendid old hostelry,
with a noble front of yellow sandstone, built in the Perpendicular style
of architecture, probably about 1420, was the finest example of an inn of
its period in England, but it was ruthlessly, and with incredible
stupidity, demolished, and the only pictorial record of it appears to be
an entirely inadequate, severe, and unsympathetic little wood-cut in
Parker’s _Domestic Architecture_.[13] It figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s
story of _The Woodlanders_ as the “Earl of Wessex” inn at “Sherton Abbas.”
It was in those “good old days” that are so interesting to read about, and
were so ill to live in, that the ancient hospice flourished most bravely.
When ways were not merely rough and lonely, but were also infested by
“sturdye beggaris,” “maysterless men,” and others who would not hesitate
to do the solitary traveller a hurt, the good abbots or monks who
established wayside houses of entertainment where no secular innkeeper
dared were truly benefactors to their species. The relic of just such a
place, on a road once extremely lonely and dangerous, is to be found along
the present highway between Brecon and Llandovery, in South Wales, some
two miles westward of the town of Brecon. The road runs terraced above the
southern bank of the river Usk, through a rugged country where, in ancient
times, Welsh chieftains and outlaws, alike lawless and beggarly, knocked
the solitary traveller on the head and went over his pockets amid the
appropriately dramatic scenery of beetling crag and splashing waterfall.
At the gate of this lurk of bandits the holy monks of Malvern Priory
founded an hospitium, on the spot where stand to-day the ancient and
picturesque church and the few houses of the village of Llanspyddid: whose
Welsh name, indeed, means the Hospice Church.
Nothing, unfortunately, is left of that “spythy,” or hospice, they so
piously built and maintained, for, its usefulness long overpast, it was
left to decay: but the church they built, in which travellers returned
thanks for the succour vouchsafed them, remains by the roadside. It is a
romantic-looking church, placed in an appropriate setting of extremely
ancient and funereal-looking yews that lead up darkly to the heavy north
porch, beautifully decorated with carved woodwork.
The “George” at Glastonbury presents the finest exterior of all these
pilgrims’ inns, for it stands to-day very much as it did in the time of
Edward the Sixth, when it was built (1475) by Abbot John Selwood for the
accommodation of such pilgrims as were not personages. There has ever been
a subtle distinction between a personage and a mere person. The great
ones, the high and mighty of the land, on pilgrimage were made much of,
and entertained by my lord Abbot in appropriately princely fashion, in the
Abbot’s lodgings: the middle-class pilgrims were lodged at the Abbot’s
inn, and the residue lay where best they might: perhaps in some
guesten-hall, or possibly in the open air.
Pilgrimages to Glastonbury were less numerous and popular than those to
the pre-eminent Shrine of the Blessed St. Thomas at Canterbury, but they
were not few, for the story of this great mitred Somersetshire Abbey is
one of the marvels and legendary wonders that, however greatly they may
stagger the twentieth-century capacity for belief, were of old implicitly
relied upon. Few were those who in mediæval times questioned their
genuineness, and those who did so kept their doubts prudently to
themselves.
This marvellous lore narrates how it was to St. Joseph of Arimathea that
the Abbey owed its origin. In A.D. 63 he came, with eleven companions,
wandering among the bogs and morasses of this western land, and discovered
this elevated ground rising above the marshes, further topped by the
commanding peak of Glastonbury Tor. “Weary all!” they exclaimed, as they
sank down, exhausted, on the spot called Weary All Hill to this day,
although its name is properly “Wirrall.” Here St. Joseph thrust his staff
into the ground, and, taking root and blossoming every Christmas Day for
over fourteen hundred years, it was known in all Christendom as the Holy
Thorn.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE,” GLASTONBURY.]
The Holy Thorn itself was a sight to see, for, whatever its origin, it did
actually blossom on or about Christmas, as descendants from the parent
stock do to this day. The original hawthorn--or what was looked upon in
the time of Queen Elizabeth as the original--was fanatically attacked by
an early Puritan who succeeded in felling one of its two trunks, and was
proceeding to destroy the other, when he struck his leg instead, and had
an eye gouged out by a flying chip: an incident that would have pleased
the old monks, had they not been dead and gone a generation earlier. This
capacity in the Holy Thorn for taking its own part did not avail when a
Cromwellian soldier-saint, a half-century or so later, cut it down.
Nothing in the tragical way appears to have happened to him.
An object of even greater veneration than the Holy Thorn was the body of
St. Dunstan, stolen by the monks of Glastonbury from Canterbury, and for
long centuries a source of great revenue, in the shape of offerings from
the faithful, eager for his spiritual good offices or for the healing
touch of his relics.
That which was too staggering for the belief of old-time pilgrims was
never discovered. At Glastonbury they were shown a part of Moses’ rod,
some milk and some hair of the Virgin, part of the hem of the Saviour’s
garment, a nail from the Cross, and a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. No
one ever questioned those blasphemous mediæval Barnums, who showed a
sample of the manna that fed the children of Israel, and the incredible
item of “the dust of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the three children
sacrificed in the burning fiery furnace, with the bone of one of them”;
and so they humbugged the devout for centuries.
Pilgrims of all kinds, bringing offerings, each one according to his
means, were clearly to be encouraged, and there was from a very early
period an “Abbot’s Inn” at Glastonbury. This stood on the site of the
present “White Hart” until about 1755, when, to prevent it falling, it was
pulled down. It had, however, ceased to be the Abbot’s Inn about 1489, the
newly built “George” then taking its place. How dilapidated was the more
ancient building may be understood from the story which tells of an
auction being held on an upper floor, just before its demolition. “Going,
going!” exclaimed the auctioneer, and then, as he accepted a bid, “Gone!”:
whereupon the entire flooring of the room gave way, and every one and
everything were, with a tremendous crash, precipitated down to the ground
floor.
Abbot Selwood, who ruled from 1456 to 1493, built the “George” for
middle-class pilgrims, and gave them board and lodging free for two days.
He did so from a strictly business point of view; and we may even suspect
that, if his guests made a longer stay, he recompensed himself by
overcharging.
Although a room is shown in which King Henry the Eighth is said to have
slept--heavens! did they treat _him_ as a middle-class pilgrim?--and a
room with oaken beams is termed the “Abbot’s Room,” there is little to be
seen within, save the original stone newel staircase leading upstairs and
a stone bench in the cellar now christened the Penitents’ Seat, on which,
if you please, sinners under conviction sat, with water up to their knees.
For my part, although the perennial spring is there, I remain sceptical of
aught but beer-barrels and hogsheads of wine ever having occupied that
Penitents’ Form. Penitents frequenting the cellars where the booze is kept
are suspect.
The exterior, however, is a very fine example of the late Perpendicular
phase of Gothic architecture, as applied to domestic or semi-domestic
uses. The battlements formerly had stone figures peering from each
embrasure, figures traditionally said to have represented the Twelve
Cæsars, or the Twelve Apostles. Exactly _how_ this was managed can hardly
be seen, for there are but seven openings. Only one figure now remains,
and he looks little like a Cæsar, and very much less like an Apostle.
At the present time the “George” is a “family and commercial” hotel. Its
notepaper would seem to indicate that it is not the house for Dissenters,
for it displays, beneath a mitre and crossed croziers, an aspiration in
Latin to the effect that “May the Anglican Church Flourish.” Our withers
are wrung: we are galled, and wince.
The “Red Lion,” opposite the “George,” with fine stone-embayed window and
frontage dated 1659, was formerly the Porter’s Lodge and gateway of the
Abbey.
A very spirited view of Glastonbury, including the “George,” in the
eighteenth century was executed, as an etching, by Rowlandson, and shows
us, in his inimitable manner, the life and bustle of an old English
country town on market-day. There you see a post-chaise and four being
driven at top speed through the town, bringing disaster to a woman dealer
in crockery, whose donkey, lashing out with his hind-legs, is upsetting
the contents of his panniers; and there at the town-pump, in those days
before house-to-house water-supply, are the gossipping servants, very
beefy about the ankles, filling their pitchers and pipkins.
[Illustration: HIGH STREET, GLASTONBURY, IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. _From
the etching by Rowlandson._]
CHAPTER VII
PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS (_continued_)
At St. Albans we have still something in the way of a pilgrim’s inn. St.
Albans was, of course, the home of the wonder-working shrine of St. Alban,
the proto-martyr of Britain, and by direct consequence a place of great
pilgrimage and a town of many inns. Here is the “George,” one of the
pleasantest of the old inns remaining in the place, with an old, but
scarce picturesque frontage, relieved from lack of interest by a quaint
sundial, inscribed _Horas non numero nisi serenas_, and a more than
usually picturesque courtyard.
The house is mentioned so early as 1448 as the “George upon the Hupe.” In
those times it possessed an oratory of its own, referred to in an ancient
licence, by which the Abbot authorised the innkeeper to have Low Mass
celebrated on the premises, for the benefit of “such great men and nobles,
and others, as shall be lodged here.”
Let us try to imagine that inn, licensed for the sale of wine and
spirituous liquors and for religious services! It seems odd, but after all
not so odd as these mad times of our own, when public-houses are converted
into missions, and ordained clergymen of the Church of England become
publicans and serve drinks across the counter in the interest of
temperance and good behaviour.[14]
No traces of that oratory now remain in the “George.” It is one of the
most comfortable of old houses, and full of old panelling and old prints
and furniture, but the “great men and nobles” have long ceased to lodge
here, and it is now only frequented by “others.” The chapel was desecrated
at the time of the Reformation, and was afterwards in use as part of the
stables.
The carving seen in the illustration over the archway is no integral part
of the inn, but was brought from old Holywell House in 1837, on the
destruction of that mansion, of which it formed the decorative pediment.
The Church, as already shown, was the earliest innkeeper in those days
when travellers travailed in difficulties and dangers; and semi-religious
bodies often acted the same hospitable part. The Knights Templars and the
Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem kept hostelries at various
places, prominent among them the old house which is now the “Angel” at
Grantham.
The “Angel,” in common with other inns of the same name, derived its sign
in the far-off thirteenth century from a religious picture-sign of the
Annunciation, and we may readily see how, in the fading of the picture,
the rest of the group gradually sank out of sight, leaving only that
bright announcing messenger visible to passers-by. Undoubtedly the “Angel”
at Islington obtained its name in this way: staggering though the thought
may be to those who know that merely secular public-house, in that roaring
vortex of London traffic.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE,” ST. ALBANS.]
The attitude of greeting in the pose of the angelic figure led in course
of time to such a sign being often called the “Salutation”: hence the
various old inns of that name in different parts of the country were
originally “Angels.”
The “Angel” at Grantham is a quaint admixture of ancient and modern. It
was a hostel, and bore this name even so early as the reign of King John,
for beneath its roof that monarch held his Court in the February of 1213.
We do not, however, find anything nowadays so ancient in the “Angel,” for
every vestige of the building in which that shifty and evasive monarch
lodged has disappeared. This is by no means to say that the “Angel” is of
recent date. It belongs in part to the mid-fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries--a more than respectable age. From the midst of the town of
Grantham it looks out upon the Great North Road, and in truth, facing a
highway of so great and varied historic doings, no building can have
witnessed more in the way of varied processions. History, made visible,
has passed by, in front of these windows, for at least five hundred years,
beginning with the gorgeous cavalcades of kings and courts and armies
going or coming on missions of peace or war to and from Scotland, and at
last--what a contrast!--ending with the hotel omnibus to or from the
railway-station, with the luggage of “commercials.”
[Illustration: THE “ANGEL,” GRANTHAM.]
A very tragical incident in history was enacted in the great room, now
divided into three, that once extended the whole length of the frontage on
the first floor. Perhaps it was in the bay of the beautiful Gothic oriel
window lighting this room that Richard the Third signed the death-warrant
of the Duke of Buckingham, October 19th, 1483. That it was signed in this
room we know. What was his manner when he put his hand to that deed? Did
he declaim anything in the “off with his head; so much for Buckingham,”
dramatic way, as we are led by Colley Cibber’s stage-version of
Shakespeare’s _Richard the Third_ to suppose he did? Or did he silently
treat it as a matter of stern, imperious necessity of statecraft? Had he
possessed the dramatic sense, he certainly would have mouthed some such
bloodthirsty phrase, and, turning on his heel in the self-satisfied
attitude of triumphant villainy we know so well, would have made a
striking exit, as per stage directions, curling a villainous and
contemptuous lip, in the manner that never yet failed to bring down the
heartfelt hatred, and the hisses, of the gallery.
It is, however, to be sadly supposed that the King did nothing of that
sort. He could not play to the gallery--for it was not there; he probably
did not turn upon his heel, nor curl his lip, for the Stage, whence you
learn the trick of these things, had not yet come into existence. And if
you do but consider it, most of the great doings of the world, bloody or
legislative, or what not, have been done--not, if it please you,
“enacted”--without a due sense of their dramatic and spectacular
possibilities. They all came in the day’s work, and the issues were too
tremendous, the risks too great and impending, for the personages involved
in them to enjoy the leisure for posing.
The old embayed stone frontage of the “Angel” has survived many a shock
and buffet of Time, and, although the mullions of most of its windows have
long since been removed, in the not unnatural demand for more light, the
antiquity of the house is manifest to the most commercial, and least
antiquarian, traveller. On either side of the Gothic archway by which you
enter, the carved heads of Edward the Third and his heroic Queen Philippa
still appear, and at the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a
supporting corbel to the beautiful oriel window above, is a sculptured
angel supporting a shield of arms.
The historic “Angel,” scene of so many centuries of conviviality, has long
been made to foster the cause of temperance. Indeed, for two hundred years
past, ages before Temperance became a Cause with capital letters and
capital endowments, the rent of the house went towards this object, under
the will of one Michael Solomon, who, dying in 1706, directed that a
sermon should be annually preached in Grantham church, “strongly
denouncing drunkenness,” the cost to be met out of the rental of the
“Angel.” But the most cynical stroke of chance befell in November, 1905,
when the preacher of this counterblast against drink, paid for out of the
profits of a licensed house, was the Reverend Gerald Goodwin, son of the
chief proprietor of a prominent Newark brewery.
The “George,” at Norton St. Philip, claiming to have been licensed in
1397, has stirring history, as well as antiquity and beauty, to recommend
it. You who are curious as to where the village of Norton stands may take
the map of Somerset and presently, scanning the county to the south of
Bath, discover it set down about seven miles to the south of that ancient
city, in a somewhat sequestered district. The reason of so large and so
grand a hostelry being in existence since the Middle Ages in so small a
village is not, at the first blush, evident, and it is only when the
ancient history of Norton itself is explored that the wherefore of it is
found.
It seems, then, that the land hereabout was in those far-off times the
property of the old Priory of Hinton Charterhouse--that old Carthusian
house whose brethren were the best farmers, wool-growers, and
stock-raisers of their time in the West Country. As early as the reign of
Henry the Third the monastery was licensed to hold a fair here in May, on
the vigil, the feast, and the morrow of the festival of SS. Philip and
James; and again, in 1284, secured a charter conferring the right of
holding a market at “Norton Charterhouse” every Friday, instead of, as
formerly, at the bleak and much-exposed Hinton. In 1345 the Priory was
further empowered to annually hold a fair on the feast of the Decollation
of St. John at Norton: an institution that, although the Priory went the
way of all its kind over five hundred and fifty years ago, remained a
yearly fixture on August 28th and 29th until quite recent times. It was
known locally, for some reason now undiscoverable, as “Norton Dog Fair.”
The fair in its last years degenerated into the usual thing we understand
nowadays as a fair: a squalid exhibition of Fat Women and Two-headed
Calves; a gaudy and strepitous saturnalia of roundabouts and mountebanks;
but it was--or they were, for, as we have already seen, there were at one
time two--originally highly important business conventions. The principal
business then transacted was the selling of wool and cloth, and it was for
the purpose of helping their trade as wool-growers, and for the benefit
generally of their very lucrative fairs, that the monks of Hinton
Charterhouse in the fourteenth century built as a hostel that which is
to-day the “George” inn.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE,” NORTON ST. PHILIP.]
For generations the merchants and wool-staplers exposed their wares and
did their business in the street, or in a large upper room of the house,
and long continued to do so when in course of time the whole thing had
been altogether secularised.
The cyclist who comes to Norton St. Philip from Bath has a weary time of
it, among the hills, by Odd Down, Midford, and Freshford; and only when he
has come uphill to windy Hinton Charterhouse are his toils over, and the
rest of the way easy. It is a broad, modern road, but the observant may
yet see the disused Abbot’s Way going, narrow, and even more steep, over
the fields, to the left hand; and we may well imagine the joy of the old
travellers along it when they saw the grey church tower in the village,
nestling in a fold of the hills, and heard those sweet-toned bells of
Norton that still sound so mellow on the ear, and are the identical “very
fine ring of six bells” that Pepys heard on June 12th, 1668, and
pronounced “mighty tuneable.”
The “George” keeps unmistakable evidences of its semi-ecclesiastical
origin, and the Gothic character of the solid stonework in the lower
storey points to the latter half of the fourteenth century. The curious
and exceedingly picturesque contrast between the massive masonry below and
the overhanging timbered upper part has led, without any other evidence,
to the conjecture that the house must at some time have suffered from
fire, or otherwise been injured and partly rebuilt; but such instances of
mixed methods in ancient building are numerous.
History of a romantic kind has been enacted here, for it was in the street
of Norton St. Philip, that a furious skirmish was fought, June 26th, 1685,
between the untrained and badly armed rustics of the rebel Duke of
Monmouth, and the soldiers of King James, under command of the weak and
vacillating Lord Feversham. The rebel peasantry, armed only with pikes,
scythes, and billhooks, that day withstood and routed their enemies, and
they held the village that night, Monmouth himself sleeping in one of the
front bedrooms of the “George.” It was while dressing at this window the
following morning that he was fired at by some unknown person desirous of
earning the reward offered by James for the taking of his nephew’s life.
The bullet, however, sped harmlessly by that preserver and champion of the
Protestant liberties of the country: hence the invincible anonymity of the
firer of that shot. Had Monmouth died thus, it is conceivable he would
have come down to us a more manly historic figure.
The interior of the “George” is woefully disappointing, after the
expectations raised by the noble exterior. It was obviously never ornately
fitted, and long generations of neglect and misuse have resulted in the
house being, internally, little better than a mere wreck, with the
installation of a vulgar bar to insult the Gothic feeling of the place.
The property now belongs to the Bath Brewery Company, and is not merely
that abomination, a “tied house,” but is maintained in a barely habitable
condition, the Company being reported of opinion that the Somersetshire
Archæological Society--interested, as all archæologists must be, in a
house so architecturally and historically interesting--should restore the
building. If that report be true, it is a striking example of colossal
impudence.
On the ground-floor, the present Tap-room keeps a large fire-place with
old-fashioned grate. Above, mounting by a stone spiral staircase to the
first floor, is the room used by Monmouth (the one to the right hand in
the view), and known as the “King’s Room.” Its door, floor, and walls are
of the roughest, as also are those of the adjoining room. On the floor
above, running the whole length of the building, under the roof, is the
long room used by the old wool-merchants as their market: and a darksome
and makeshift place, under the roof-timbers, it is, and must have been at
the best of times. To-day the floor is rotten, and you must go delicately,
lest you fall through to the next floor, and then through that to the
ground, where only the explorer can feel secure.
It is the same tale of far-gone decay in the yard, to which you enter, as
also to the house itself, by the great archway in the village street. It
was always a small yard, but was partly galleried. The tottering remains
of the gallery, with brewhouse below, are left, still filled with the
enormous casks built in the brewhouse itself, and only to be removed by
demolishing them. The rooms are mere ruins. If ever the interior and the
yard of the “George” are restored it will be a great and an expensive
work; but it is to be feared that, Norton St. Philip being an unlikely
place for lengthened resort--visitors coming from curiosity from Bath for
merely an hour or so--such a work will never be undertaken.
In even worse case, from an archæologist’s point of view, is the “George”
at Winchcombe, in Gloucestershire; for it stands in the High Street of a
busy little town, and has been disastrously altered in recent years by the
brewers who own it. Brewers have no undue leanings toward historic or
architectural sentiment, and in this instance their object was to fit
their house for use as a commercial hotel. Accordingly, they caused the
ancient stone face to be pulled down and have replaced it by an imitation
timbered gabled front. Something of what the old front was like may be
discovered at the back, where the date, 1583, may be seen on the
stonework, together with an inscription to the effect that it was restored
in 1706.
The “George” was originally built as a pilgrims’ inn by the Abbots of
Winchcombe and Hayles, whose noted West Country shrines attracted many
thousands of the pious and the sinful in days gone by. At Winchcombe they
had the body of St. Kenelm, the Saxon boy-king who succeeded to the
throne of Mercia in A.D. 822, and, according to legendary lore, was
murdered at the instigation of his sister Cwoenthryth, who desired his
place. Kenelm was but seven years of age, but already so pious, if we are
to believe the story, that the poisons at first administered to him
refused their customary effects, and there was nothing for it but to
strike his head off. Piety, therefore, was not proof against cold steel.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “GEORGE,” NORTON ST. PHILIP.]
His tutor, the treacherous Askobert, was induced to perform this act, in
the lonely forest of Clent. To the astonishment of Askobert, a white dove
flew from the severed neck and soared away into the sky. Naturally
surprised by such a marvel, he nevertheless was not unnerved, and buried
the body under a thorn-bush and went his way. Cwoenthryth in due course
succeeded, and reigned for some two years, when the inevitable vengeance
fell. It came about in a curious way--as do all these retributions in
monastic legends. The Pope was celebrating Mass in his Cathedral of St.
Peter when a dove that had been observed there poised itself over the high
altar and dropped from its beak a piece of parchment inscribed, “In Clent
in Cowbach Kenelm Kynge’s child lieth under a thorn, his head taken from
him.”
This strange message was conveyed to England, and an expedition, formed of
the monks of Winchcombe and Worcester, set off to the forest of Clent.
Arrived there, the expeditionary force was guided to the thorn-tree by a
white cow, and duly found the body. After disputing whose property it was
to become, they decided that, as they were all wearied with the journey
and their exertions, they should, every one, lie down and rest, the body
to become the possession of those who should first arise. The Winchcombe
men were first awake, and were well away over the hills with their prize
before the monks of Worcester ceased from their snoring, yawned, opened
their eyes, and found the treasure gone.
The miraculous power of St. Kenelm manifested itself on the way, for the
men of Winchcombe, fainting on their journey for lack of water, prayed,
for the love of him, to be guided to some spring; when immediately a gush
of water burst forth from the hillside. Thus refreshed, they came into
Winchcombe, where the wicked Cwoenthryth, whom later generations have
agreed to name, in more simple fashion, Quenride, was reading that very
comminatory Psalm, the 109th, wherein all manner of disasters are invoked
upon the Psalmist’s enemies. There has ever been considered some especial
virtue in reciting prayers and invocations backwards, and Quenride, having
gone through the Psalm in the ordinary way, was proceeding to take it in
reverse when the procession came winding along the street. At that moment
her eyes fell out; and, to bear witness to the truth of the story, the
Abbey of Winchcombe long exhibited, among the greatest of its treasures,
the blood-stained psalter on whose pages they fell--which, of course, was
convincing.
Can we wonder that, in those credulous ages, pilgrimage to Winchcombe
should have been a popular West Country practice? And if not to St.
Kenelm’s shrine, there was the peculiarly holy relic of the neighbouring
Abbey of Hayles, where the monks treasured nothing less tremendous than a
bottle of Christ’s blood. This in after years--as was to be supposed--was
discovered to be a blasphemous imposture, the precious phial being
declared by the examining Commissioners in the time of Henry the Eighth to
contain merely “an unctuous gum, coloured.”
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “GEORGE,” WINCHCOMBE.]
A pilgrims’ inn at Winchcombe was, in view of the crowds naturally
resorting to either or both of these Abbeys, a very necessary
institution, and for long the “George” so remained.
The ways of the brewers with the old house have been already in part
recorded and the destruction of much of interest deplored, but there still
remains a little of its former state. There is, for instance, the great
archway at the side, with the oaken spandrels carved with foliage and the
initials R. K.; standing for Richard Kyderminster, Abbot of Winchcombe at
some period in the fifteenth century. Through this archway runs the yard,
down to the back of the town, and there is what is still called the
“Pilgrims’ Gallery,” on one side. One scarcely knows which of the two
courses adopted by the brewers with this old inn was the most disastrous:
the actual demolition of the old frontage, or the “restoration” of the
Pilgrims’ Gallery in so thorough a manner that it is, in almost every
respect, a new structure. Nor does it, as of old, conduct to bedrooms, for
that part of the house giving upon it has been reconstructed as a large
room, available for entertainments or public dinners.
There is something peculiarly appropriate in the refectory of a monastic
house becoming an inn. Such is the history of the “Lord Crewe Arms,” at
Blanchland.
It is a far cry to that picturesque and quiet village, in stern and rugged
Northumberland; but you may be sure that, however wild and forbidding the
surrounding country, the site and the immediate neighbourhood of an
ancient abbey will prove to be fertile, sheltered, and beautiful; and
Blanchland, the old home of an Abbey of Præmonstratensian canons, is no
exception to this rule.
Whichever way the traveller comes into Blanchland, he comes by hills more
or less precipitous, and by moors chiefly remarkable for their savage and
worthless nature, and it is a welcome change when, from the summit of a
steep hill, he at last looks down upon the quiet place, nestling in a
hollow on the Northumbrian side of the little river Derwent, that here
separates the counties of Northumberland and Durham.
Down there, still remote from the busy world, the village is slowly but
surely fading out of existence, as we learn from the cold, dispassionate
figures of the Census returns, which record the fact that in 1811 the
inhabitants numbered 518, while in 1901 they were but 232.
It is a compact little place. There is the ancient bridge, built by the
monks, across the Derwent, still, in the words of Froissart, “strong and
rapid and full of large stones and rocks”; and there are the church-tower,
the old Abbey gatehouse, the “Lord Crewe Arms,” and some few houses,
forming four sides of a square. “The place,” as Walter Besant truly says
in his novel, _Dorothy Forster_, “has the aspect of an ancient and decayed
college.”
Blanchland owes everything to its old abbey, conducted under the rules of
the original brethren of Prémonté, and even derived its name of Blanche
Lande from the white habits of the monks; just as Whitland in
Carmarthenshire, took its name from a similar history.
The Abbey of Blanchland was founded here, at “Wulwardshope,” as the place
was originally named, in 1163, and, rebuilt and added to from time to
time, flourished until the heavy hand of Henry the Eighth and his
commissioners ended it, in 1536. In all those long centuries it had
remained obscure, both in its situation and its history; and was indeed so
difficult to come to that tradition tells a picturesque story of mediæval
Scottish raiders failing to find the place and so returning home, when its
situation was revealed to them by the bells the monks were ringing, to
express joy at their deliverance. Alas! it was their own funeral knell the
brethren rang; for, guided by the sound, those Border ruffians entered
Blanchland, burnt its Abbey and slew the monks.
Shortly after the suppression of the Abbey under Henry the Eighth, the
monastic lands became the property, and the domestic buildings of the
Abbey the home, of the Radcliffe family, and afterwards of the Forsters,
who, according to the wholly irreverent, and half-boastful, half-satirical
local saying, were older than the oldest of county families, for “the
Almighty first created the world and Adam and Eve, and then He made the
Forsters.”
Blanchland was at last lost to that long-descended race by the treason of
General Forster, who was concerned in the rising of 1715, and so
forfeited his estates; and in 1721 the property was purchased by Nathaniel
Crewe, Bishop of Durham, who at the age of sixty-seven had married Dorothy
Forster, at that time twenty-four years of age.
[Illustration: THE “LORD CREWE ARMS,” BLANCHLAND.]
The present inn, the “Lord Crewe Arms,” is a portion of the old refectory
buildings on the west side of the cloister garth, but many alterations and
additions have been made since those times, and the actual oldest part is
the ancient monastic fireplace, very much disguised by later generations,
and in the fact that it is now in use as the fireplace of the modern
kitchen.
In the fine drawing-room of the inn, formerly the ball-room of the Forster
mansion, hangs a portrait of Lord Crewe, that time-serving reactionary
sycophant under James the Second and would-be toady to William the Third.
His public life was a version, on a higher plane, of that of the
celebrated Vicar of Bray, and he succeeded admirably in his determination
to stick to his principles--to live and die Bishop-Palatine of Durham; for
as Lord Bishop he remained until his death, aged eighty-nine, in 1722, in
the reign of George the Second.
But he well deserves the honour of the inn being named after him, for he
left his wealth in various charities, the rent of the inn itself forming a
portion of the income of the Crewe trustees.
Our ultimate example of a monastic hostel is found at Aylesbury, a town
whose name would, to imaginative persons, appear at the first blush to
indicate a happy hunting-ground for old inns; but although--Shakespeare to
the contrary--there is usually very much in a name, the meaning is not
always--and in place-names not often--what it would seem to be. Thus,
Aylesbury is not the town of ale, but (a very different thing),
Aeglesberge, _i.e._ “the Church Town,” a name it obtained in Saxon times,
when the surrounding country was godless, and this place exceptionally
provided.
At the same time, Aylesbury--the place also of ducks and of dairies--_was_
once notable for an exceedingly fine inn: none other than the great
galleried “White Hart,” first modernised in 1814, when its gabled,
picturesque front was pulled down and replaced by a commonplace red-brick
front, in the style, or lack of style, then prevalent; and finally cleared
away in 1863, to make room for the existing Corn Exchange and Market
House.
[Illustration: THE “OLD KING’S HEAD,” AYLESBURY.]
Coming into Aylesbury, in quest of inns, one looks at that building with
dismay. Was it really to build such a horrific thing they demolished the
“White Hart”? How deplorable!
Aylesbury is a town where, late at night, the police foregather in the
reverberative Market Square, instead of going their individual beats; and
there, through the small hours, they talk and laugh, hawk and spit, and
make offensive noises, until the sleepless stranger longs to open his
window and throw things at them. Happy he whose bedroom does not look upon
their rendezvous! But this is merely incidental. More germane to the
matter under consideration is the fact that, although the “White Hart” be
gone, Aylesbury still keeps a remarkably fine inn, of the smaller sort, in
the “Old King’s Head,” which, if not indeed a pilgrims’ inn, seems to have
been originally built by some religious fraternity as a hospice or
guest-house for travellers. Of its history and of the original building
nothing is known, the present house dating from 1444-50. You discover the
“Old King’s Head” in a narrow street off the market-place, and at the
first glimpse of it perceive that here is something quite exceptionally
fine. A sketch is, if it be any good at all, always worth a page of
description, and so we will let the accompanying illustration take the
place of mere verbiage. Only let it be observed that the larger gable and
the window in it are new, having been rebuilt in 1880.
The great window, entirely constructed of oak, is the chief feature of the
exterior, just as the noble room it lights is the principal object of
interest in the house itself. The point most worthy of consideration here
is that in this remarkably fine window, and in the room itself, you have
an unaltered and unrestored work of the fifteenth century. In early ages
the house was an inn with some ecclesiastical tie, and when it passed from
the hands of the brotherhood (whoever they may have been) that once owned
it, and became a secularised hostelry, it seems to have continued its
career with very little alteration beyond that of adopting as a sign the
“King’s Head”: that king doubtless originally Henry the Eighth himself.
The house was, in the seventeenth century, one of the Aylesbury inns that
issued tokens, for in museums and private collections are still to be
found copper pieces inscribed “At ye King’s Head In Aillsburey, W.E.D.
1657.” There still existed, until comparatively recent times, traces of
old galleries in the extensive yard, but modern changes have at last
completely abolished them.
The fine room of which the great window forms one complete side was no
doubt originally the common-room of the hostel. It is now the tap-room. A
fine lofty hall it makes: oaken pillars, black with age, springing from
each corner, based upon stone plinths and supporting finely moulded beams
that, crossing in the ceiling, divide it into nine square compartments.
The great window, divided by mullions and a transom into twenty lights, is
of course seen to best advantage from within, and still keeps much of the
original armorial stained glass.
CHAPTER VIII
HISTORIC INNS
It can be no matter for surprise that many inns have historic
associations. Indeed, when we consider that in olden times the hostelries
of town and country touched life at every point, and were once the centre
of local life, it becomes rather surprising that not more tragic events,
more treaties and conferences, and more plots and conspiracies are
associated with such places of public resort.
Strange, mysterious plotters, highwaymen, and great nobles resorted to
them, and, coming to things more domestic, there, under the inn’s
hospitable roof, town councils not infrequently met in those times before
ever “municipal buildings” were dreamed of, and conducted their business
over a cheering, and inebriating, cup. Your inn was, in short, then at
once your railway-station, club, hotel, reading-room and mart. There were
distinct advantages, in the social sense, in all this. It meant
good-fellowship when respectable townsfolk were not ashamed to spend a
winter evening in the parlour of a representative inn, or play a game of
bowls in summer on the bowling-green with which most such houses were once
furnished, and the man who now glowers in unneighbourly and solitary way
over his hearthstone, would expand, with such opportunities, into as
good-natured a fellow as any of the olden time.
[Illustration: THE “REINDEER,” BANBURY.]
The inns of Banbury make some historic figure. It was in one of them--the
chronicler says not which--that the dispute took place between the two
Yorkist commanders, which led to the battle of Danesmoor being lost by
their side, in July, 1469.
The occasion was the revolt of the great Earl of Warwick against Edward
the Fourth. To intercept Warwick at Northampton the Earl of Pembroke was
marching with a force from Gloucestershire, and was joined on the
Cotswolds by Lord Stafford of Southwick, newly raised a step in the
peerage by being created Earl of Devon. Lord Stafford’s troops numbered
six thousand good archers: a very welcome reinforcement; but, even so, the
combined forces dared not at once risk an engagement with the rebels at
Daventry, and fell back upon Banbury. There a quarrel took place between
Lord Stafford and the Earl of Pembroke, all on account of a pretty girl.
Says Hall: “The earle of Pembroke putt the Lorde Stafforde out of an Inne,
wherein he delighted muche to be, for the loue of a damosell that dwelled
in the house: contrary to their mutuall agrement by them taken, which was,
that whosoeaver abteined first a lodgyng should not be deceaved nor
remoued. After a greate many woordes and crakes, had betwene these twoo
capitaines, the lord Stafford of Southwyke, in greate dispite departed
with his whole compaignie and band of Archers, leauynge the erle of
Pembroke almost desolate in the toune.”
Accordingly, so weakened, the next day the Earl of Pembroke was defeated.
He took refuge in Banbury church, but, according to Hall, was dragged
forth by the fierce John Clapham, who beheaded him in the porch with his
own hands.
Possibly it was at the “Red Lion,” in the High Street, that the damosell
lived who caused all the strife between those great lords. If so, it
renders that fine old house the more interesting. Modern needs, and a not
unreasonable desire to keep incoming guests and their belongings dry, have
caused the picturesque courtyard to be roofed in with glass, thus hiding
many of its pictorial qualities; but you still enter from the street by a
fifteenth-century oaken portal, much blunted by wear and tear and many
successive coats of paint and varnish in all those succeeding centuries;
yet indubitably still fifteenth-century work.
But the most picturesque inn at Banbury is the “Reindeer.” History is
silent as to the why or the how of its acquiring that name, and is indeed
dumb in almost every other respect concerning the old house. The
“Reindeer,” both in itself and in its situation, is scarcely like the “Red
Lion,” an hotel. You look in at the “Reindeer” for a drink and for
curiosity only; for the house does not precisely invite guests, and
probably does most business on market days, when country folk from
neighbouring villages throng the strait and crooked streets of Banbury and
put up their traps in its yard and insist on liberally drinking the health
of one another. Parson’s Street, indeed, the situation of the “Reindeer,”
is a market-street and crowded shopping centre, where brazen-tongued
salesmen exhort housewives to “buy, buy, buy”; or indulge in rhapsodical,
exclamatory passages in praise of their goods. You are gazing, let us say,
outside the “original” Banbury-cake shop, opposite, upon the magpie black
and white of the “Reindeer” frontage, when a parrot-like voice is heard
exclaiming, in ecstatic rapture, “O what loverly heggs!” and, turning, you
perceive, not a grey parrot in a gilded cage, but a white-aproned
provision-dealer’s assistant, unfortunately at large. Fleeing into the
courtyard of the inn, you still hear faint cries of “_There’s_ ’am!” “O
mother! what butter!”
The neighbourhood, it will be perceived, does not in these days lend
itself to quiet residence, and although, by the evidence of its
architecture, the “Reindeer” was doubtless at one time one of the chief
hotels of the town, it has long ceased to hold anything like that
position.
The old oaken gates and the black-and-white timbering above appear to be
the oldest portions of the house: the gates themselves inscribed with the
date “1570” on one side, and on the other
“IHON · KNIGHT ◈ IHONE · KNIGHT ◈ DAVID HORN.”
The great feature of the inn is, however, the noble oak-panelled chamber
known, for whatever inscrutable reason, as the “Globe Room.” Exterior and
interior views of it are the merest commonplaces in Banbury. There are, in
fact, three things absolutely necessary, nay, almost sacramental, for the
stranger to do in Banbury, without having performed the which he is a
scorn and a derision. The first of these indispensable performances is the
eating, or, at any rate, the buying of Banbury cakes. And here let me add
that the Banbury cakes of Banbury have a lightness and a toothsomeness
entirely lacking in the specious impostors made elsewhere. Just as
there are no other such pork-pies as those of Melton Mowbray, and as
Shrewsbury cakes can apparently only be made at Shrewsbury, so the
“Banburys” made in other towns are apt to lie as heavy on your chest as a
peccadillo upon a tender conscience. But in their native town they
disappear, to the accompaniment of cups of tea, with a rapidity alarming
to the pocket, if not to the stomach; for they cost “tuppence” apiece, and
a hungry pedestrian or cyclist finds no difficulty in demolishing half a
dozen of them.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “REINDEER,” BANBURY.]
The second of these necessary observances is the viewing of Banbury Cross:
not the old original famous Banbury Cross of the nursery rhyme, to which
many generations of children have been invited to “ride a cock-horse” to
see the tintinnabulatory lady with bells on her fingers and bells on her
toes; _that_ cross was destroyed by the Puritans, and the modern one is
not even a copy of it, for no man knoweth what the original was like.
The third of these necessary rites is the viewing of the “Globe Room” at
the “Reindeer.” What the exterior of that room is like, let the
illustration of the courtyard show. The date of its building is still
faintly traceable in the figures “1637” on the masonry of the gable. They
charge you threepence to view the interior, and if so be you cannot frame
to admire the richly decorated plaster ceiling for yourself, the printed
notice that a cast has been taken from it, and is to be seen in South
Kensington Museum, is calculated to impress the intellectually snobbish.
For our own part, seeing things with our own eyes and judging of them
comparatively, there seems no very adequate reason for South Kensington
acquiring such a cast, unless, indeed, (which is unthinkable) the
Department of Science and Art is bent upon copies of all the old ceilings
in the country. This is, in short, to say that although the plaster
decoration of the “Globe Room” is fine, it is neither so intrinsically
fine, nor so original above all others, that it deserves so great an
honour. The really supremely fine feature of the room is the beautiful
Jacobean panelling in oak, now almost coal-black with age, covering the
walls from floor to ceiling, and designed and wrought in unusually
thorough and bold style. There is not a finer room of its period in the
country, and it may even be questioned (leaving the mere matter of size
alone) if there is even another quite so fine or in every detail so
perfect.
The reason of this magnificently panelled apartment being added to the
older and very much less ornate portion of the inn is obscure; and it will
be noted, as a matter of curiosity, that, entered as it is only by a
doorway from the open courtyard, the room is not, structurally a part of
the house. The name of the “Globe Room” given to it is not explained in
any way by the decorations or by its history, which is as obscure as its
origin. Tradition says Cromwell “held a council” here, and accordingly,
although history does not tell us anything specifically about it, a
picture, reproduced in a variety of ways, showing a number of stern and
malignant Roundheads interrogating an elegant and angelic-looking Royalist
clad in white, and bearing a very strong likeness to Charles the First
himself, is one of the commonplaces of the town.
[Illustration: THE GLOBE ROOM, “REINDEER” INN, BANBURY.]
For one of the most entertaining examples of history enacted at an inn, we
must shift the scene to Chester.
Among the ancient inns of that city, long since retired from the
innkeeping business is the “Blue Posts,” a house in its day historic by
reason of one dramatic incident: an incident so dramatic that it would
almost seem to have been borrowed from the stage. It was the year 1558,
the last of the reign of Queen Mary, of bloody memory, and Dr. Henry Cole,
Dean of St. Paul’s, was come to Chester on his way to Ireland, where he
had work to do, in the persecution of the Irish Protestants. He lodged for
the night at the “Blue Posts,” in Bridge Street, and in the evening the
Mayor of Chester called upon him there.
The Dean made no secret of his mission. To him it was a labour of love to
bring imprisonment and torture, fire and stake, to correct the religious
errors of those Protestants over sea. Had he not already distinguished
himself by a revolting and bloodthirsty sermon, on the occasion of
Cranmer’s sentence of martyrdom?
In conversation with the Mayor, he drew from his travelling valise the
Royal commission for his errand. “Here,” he exclaimed, with exultation,
“here is that will lash the heretics of Ireland!”
Now, whether the landlady was in the room at the time, or listening at the
keyhole--in a manner traditional among landladies--does not appear; but
she overheard the conversation, and, having a brother, a Protestant, in
Dublin, was alarmed for his safety in particular, and, let us hope, for
that of Protestants in general. So, that night, when the Dean was
doubtless dreaming of the shackles and gyves, the faggots and the rackings
he was bringing to the heretics of Ireland, Mrs. Mottershead, the landlady
with the sharp ears, abstracted the fateful commission, and in its stead
placed a pack of cards, with the knave of clubs showing satirically at the
top. O! daring and witty Mrs. Mottershead!
We may, if gifted with anything like a due sense of humour, well chuckle
at the outraged feelings of the Lord President of the Council of Ireland
when the Dean, all unconscious, presented him with this unconventional
authority. My Lord, however, summoned some humour of his own, wherewith to
meet the situation. “Let us,” said he, “have another commission, and we
will meanwhile shuffle the cards.”
Crestfallen, the emissary returned, and did actually obtain a new
commission, but when again arrived at Chester, and awaiting a fair wind
for Ireland, he heard of the Catholic Queen’s death and the accession of
her Protestant sister; and so found his way back to London once more.
[Illustration: THE “MUSIC HOUSE,” NORWICH.]
The episode would fitly end in the Dean being flung, loaded with chains,
into some loathsome dungeon; but although he was, in fact, committed to
the Tower in 1560, after having been deprived of all his preferments, such
dramatic completeness was lacking. But, at any rate, he was transferred to
the Fleet Prison, and, after a long captivity, seems to have died there in
1580.
Meanwhile, virtue was rewarded, in the person of Mrs. Mottershead, who was
granted a pension of £40 a year, representing perhaps £500 a year in our
own day.
The former “Blue Posts,” where this historic interlude was played, was
long since refronted in respectable, but dull, red brick, and is now, or
was recently, a boot-shop. But although no hint of its former self is
given to the passer-by, those who venture to make a request, are shown a
fine upstairs room, with elaborately pargeted ceiling, still known as the
“Card Room.”
The “Music House” inn, King Street, Norwich, situated in what is now a
poor and densely populated part of that city, has a vaulted cellar of
Norman masonry, a vestige of the time when the Norwich Jews were very rich
and numerous. The house of which it formed part was then the residence of
one Moyses, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew, who in the reign of King
John seems to have come, like many of his race, to some mysterious and
uncomfortable end, probably in the dungeons of Norwich Castle. In the
course of time the famous Paston family came into possession of the house,
and in 1633 the great lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, resided here. Shortly
afterwards it became the meeting-place of the “city music,” ancestors of
modern town bands, who seem to have practised the waits and other
performances within, until they had their parts sufficiently perfect to
dare inflict them on the city. Hence the sign of the “Music House.”
In the same neighbourhood we have the “Dolphin” inn at Potter Heigham, a
place sadly changed in modern times.
Potter Heigham is no longer rural, and the long, long and narrow street
leading to it, out of Norwich, is crowded with the waggons and
railway-lorries of the old city’s expanding commerce. In midst of all this
rumbling of wheels over uneven pavements stands the “Dolphin” inn, the
home in his declining days of Bishop Hall, who rented it for some ten
years, until his death there, in 1656, in his eighty-second year.
[Illustration: THE “DOLPHIN,” POTTER HEIGHAM.]
It was a comparatively new house then, for while you see the date, 1587,
over the entrance door and a merchant’s mark and the initials R B on
either side, a prominent gable shows the date 1629 done, very large, in
vitrified brick.
Still you come grandly into the house, though it be a humble tavern now,
between an old pillared entrance, and across a courtyard, and in the house
are Jacobean fireplaces, with a fine newel staircase carved in the manner
of an old church bench-end, with an heraldic lion and the Gothic foliage
known as a “poppy head.” The “Dolphin” would be capable, if it were
differently situated, of being converted into a handsome old-world hotel,
but the poor and crowded neighbourhood of Potter Heigham forbids anything
of that kind, and so it remains humble and unassuming.
A tragical little story belongs to the humble old “Nag’s Head” inn at
Thame, formerly the “King’s Head.” The old sign of it was used as a
gallows for a Parliamentary rebel who had deserted his side and joined the
King, and was so unlucky as to be captured. Those Puritans had a grim
humour. One of the condemned man’s executioners, before turning him off,
turned his face, bound with a handkerchief, to the sign, with the words:
“Nay, sir, you must speak one word with the King before you go. You are
blindfold, and he cannot see, and by and by you shall both come down
together.” And then he was hoisted up.
There is another historic house at Thame, for it was into the yard of the
“Greyhound” in that town that John Hampden came, lying mortally wounded
upon the neck of his horse, from the skirmish of Chalgrove Field, on June
18th, 1643. He had unwillingly taken arms against oppression and
iniquitous taxation, and was thus at the outset killed. No enemy’s bullet
laid him low: it was his own pistol, overloaded by a careless servant,
that, exploding, shattered his hand. He died, on the 24th, of lockjaw.
The front of the house has been rebuilt, and the yard somewhat altered,
since the patriot rode in at that tragical time; but the house is in
essentials the inn of his day. Long since ceased to be an inn, it is now
occupied as a furnishing ironmonger’s shop and warehouse.
[Illustration: THE “NAG’S HEAD,” THAME.]
The “Crown and Treaty House” inn at Uxbridge, long known to would-be beery
rustics by the affectionately wistful name of the “Crown and Treat Ye,” is
a genuinely historic house. It stands away beyond the tramway terminus,
facing the road at the very extremity of Uxbridge town, as you cross
canal and river and so leave Middlesex for Buckinghamshire; and although
very much of its real antiquity is disguised by modern paint and plaster,
it is in fact the surviving portion of the great mansion built in 1575 by
one of the Bennet family, and, at the opening of the war between King and
Parliament, in the occupation of one “Mr. Carr.”
The meeting here of leading spirits on either side of the contending
forces was well meant. It began January 20th, 1645, and was convened for
the purpose of “taking into consideration the grievances of which each
party complained, and to propose those remedies which might be mutually
agreeable.” Unfortunately, little sincerity attended the actual meeting.
The King’s party were unyielding, and the military successes of the
Parliament rendered the leaders of that side ill-disposed to give away in
talk that which they had won in the field. Moreover, like most conferences
in which religious as well as political questions were the subjects of
discussion, those debates only further inflamed mutual hatreds and further
sundered the already wide points of disagreement.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “GREYHOUND,” THAME.]
There were sixteen commissioners on either side, and for three weeks they
argued without coming to any settlement. Neither side would give way, for
either was convinced of its ability to finally crush the other by force of
arms. Much blood had already been shed, indecisively, and passions ran
high. Uxbridge was selected as a kind of half-way house between London,
held strongly by the Parliament, and Oxford, as strongly held for the
King; and when the empty verbiage was done, the propositions put forth
scouted, and the pretensions disallowed, the parties separated, falling
back respectively to London and to Oxford, to recommence those hostilities
for which they were spoiling. Treaty, therefore, there was not: only an
ominous truce
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