The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 2 (of 2)
by Charles G. Harper · English · Gutenberg #43866 · 371,099 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 2 (of 2)
Author: Charles G. Harper
Release date: October 2, 2013 [eBook #43866]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND, VOLUME 2 (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: A MUG OF CIDER: THE “WHITE HART” INN, CASTLE COMBE. _Photo
by Graystone Bird._]
THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND
_A PICTURESQUE ACCOUNT OF THE
ANCIENT AND STORIED HOSTELRIES
OF OUR OWN COUNTRY_
VOL. II
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.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A POSY OF OLD INNS 1
II. THE OLD INNS OF CHESHIRE 58
III. INNS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS 79
IV. INNS WITH RELICS AND CURIOSITIES 109
V. TAVERN RHYMES AND INSCRIPTIONS 130
VI. THE HIGHEST INNS IN ENGLAND 144
VII. GALLOWS SIGNS 150
VIII. SIGNS PAINTED BY ARTISTS 161
IX. QUEER SIGNS IN QUAINT PLACES 184
X. RURAL INNS 210
XI. THE EVOLUTION OF A COUNTRY INN 235
XII. INGLE-NOOKS 240
XIII. INNKEEPERS’ EPITAPHS 245
XIV. INNS WITH ODD PRIVILEGES 255
XV. INNS IN LITERATURE 261
XVI. VISITORS’ BOOKS 291
[Illustration: LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]
SEPARATE PLATES
A MUG OF CIDER: THE “WHITE HART” INN, CASTLE COMBE.
(_Photo by Graystone Bird_) _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE CROMWELL ROOM, “LYGON ARMS” 8
THE DINING-ROOM AT “THE FEATHERS,” LUDLOW 22
COURTYARD OF THE “MAID’S HEAD,” NORWICH, SHOWING THE
JACOBEAN BAR 42
THE “BELL,” BARNBY MOOR: MEET OF LORD GALWAY’S HOUNDS 56
THE “FOUR SWANS,” WALTHAM CROSS 152
SIGN OF THE “PACK HORSE AND TALBOT,” TURNHAM GREEN 194
THE “RUNNING FOOTMAN,” HAY HILL 194
INTERIOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN” 196
“UNCLE TOM’S CABIN,” BLUEPITTS, NEAR ROCHDALE 196
THE “TALBOT,” RIPLEY. (_Photo by R. W. Thomas_) 212
THE “ANCHOR,” RIPLEY, IN THE DAYS OF THE DIBBLES AND THE
CYCLING BOOM. (_Photo by R. W. Thomas_) 214
THE “SWAN,” SANDLEFORD 216
THE “SWAN,” NEAR NEWBURY 216
THE INGLE-NOOK, “WHITE HORSE” INN, SHERE 240
INGLE-NOOK AT THE “SWAN,” HASLEMERE 242
THE INGLE-NOOK, “CROWN” INN, CHIDDINGFOLD 244
INGLE-NOOK, “LYGON ARMS,” BROADWAY 246
THE “VINE TAVERN,” MILE END ROAD 258
YARD OF THE “WHITE HORSE,” MAIDEN NEWTON 288
THE “WHITE HORSE,” MAIDEN NEWTON 288
ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
Vignette, Toby Fillpot _Title-page_
PAGE
List of Illustrations, The “Malt-shovel,” Sandwich vii
The Old Inns of Old England 1
Doorway, the “Lygon Arms” 3
The “Lygon Arms” 5
The “Bear,” Devizes 11
Yard of the “Bear,” Devizes 15
The “George,” Andover 17
The “Feathers,” Ludlow 19
Decorative Device in Moulded Plaster, from Ceiling of Dining-room,
the “Feathers,” Ludlow 25
The “Peacock,” Rowsley 27
The “White Hart,” Godstone 31
The Old Window, “Luttrell Arms” 39
Doorway, “The Cock,” Stony Stratford 43
Yard of “The George,” Huntingdon 45
The “Bell,” Stilton 49
The “Red Lion,” Egham 53
The “Old Hall” Inn, Sandbach 59
Dog-gates at Head of Staircase, “Old Hall” Inn, Sandbach 61
The “Bear’s Head,” Brereton 63
The “Lion and Swan,” Congleton 67
The “Cock,” Great Budworth 71
The “Pickering Arms,” Thelwall 73
The “King Edgar” and “Bear and Billet,” Chester 75
A Deserted Inn: The “Swan,” at Ferrybridge 83
The Old “Raven,” Hook 86
The “Hearts of Oak,” near Bridport 88
The “Bell” Inn, Dale Abbey 90
The “Windmill,” North Cheriton 91
The “Castle” Inn, Marlborough 95
Garden Front, “Castle” Inn, Marlborough 99
“Chapel House” Inn 103
“White Hart” Yard 107
A “Fenny Popper” 111
The “Bell,” Woodbridge 112
The “Red Lion,” Martlesham 113
“Dean Swift’s Chair,” Towcester 115
Boots at the “Bear,” Esher 117
The “George and Dragon,” Dragon’s Green 119
The “White Bull,” Ribchester 120
Boots of the “Unicorn,” Ripon 121
The “Red Lion,” Chiswick 123
The Old Whetstone 125
Hot Cross Buns at the “Widow’s Son” 127
The “Gate” Inn, Dunkirk 132
The “Gate Hangs Well,” Nottingham 133
Tablet at the “George,” Wanstead 141
“Tan Hill” Inn 145
The “Cat and Fiddle,” near Buxton 147
The “Traveller’s Rest,” Kirkstone Pass 149
The “Greyhound,” Sutton 151
The “Fox and Hounds,” Barley 154
The “George,” Stamford 155
The “Swan,” Fittleworth 158
The “Red Lion,” Hampton-on-Thames 159
The “Man Loaded with Mischief” 163
Sign of the “Royal Oak,” Bettws-y-Coed 173
Sign of the “George and Dragon,” Wargrave-on-Thames.
(_Painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A._) 176
Sign of the “George and Dragon,” Wargrave-on-Thames.
(_Painted by J. E. Hodgson, R.A._) 177
The “Row Barge,” Wallingford. (_Painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A._) 178
The “Swan,” Preston Crowmarsh 178
The “Windmill,” Tabley 179
The “Smoker” Inn, Plumbley 179
The “Ferry” Inn, Rosneath 180
The “Ferry” Inn, Rosneath 180
The “Fox and Pelican,” Grayshott 181
The “Cat and Fiddle,” near Christchurch 182
The “Cat and Fiddle,” near Christchurch 182
The “Swan,” Charing 189
Sign of the “Leather Bottle,” Leather Lane. (_Removed 1896_) 191
Sign of the “Beehive,” Grantham 193
Sign of the “Lion and Fiddle,” Hilperton 195
The “Sugar Loaves,” Sible Hedingham 195
Sign of the “Old Rock House” Inn, Barton 197
The “Three Horseshoes,” Great Mongeham 198
Sign of the “Red Lion,” Great Missenden 198
Sign of the “Labour in Vain” 199
The “Eight Bells,” Twickenham 201
Sign of the “Stocks” Inn, Clapgate, near Wimborne 202
The “Shears” Inn, Wantage 202
Sign of the “White Bear,” Fickles Hole 203
The “Crow-on-Gate” Inn, Crowborough 205
The “First and Last” Inn, Sennen 206
The “First and Last,” Land’s End 207
The “Eagle and Child,” Nether Alderley 209
The “White Horse,” Woolstone 211
The “Halfway House,” Rickmansworth 215
The “Rose and Crown,” Mill End, Rickmansworth 216
The “Jolly Farmer,” Farnham 217
The “Boar’s Head,” Middleton 218
The “Old House at Home,” Havant 219
“Pounds Bridge” 221
Yard of the “George and Dragon,” West Wycombe 223
The Yard of the “Sun,” Dedham 225
The “Old Ship,” Worksop 226
The “Old Swan,” Atherstone 227
The “King’s Arms,” Sandwich 229
The “Keigwin Arms,” Mousehole 230
The “Swan,” Knowle 231
Sign of the “Swan,” Knowle 232
The “Running Horse,” Merrow 233
Ingle-nook at the “Talbot,” Towcester 243
Tipper’s Epitaph, Newhaven 251
Preston’s Epitaph, St. Magnus-the-Martyr 253
“Newhaven” Inn 257
House where the Duke of Buckingham died, Kirkby Moorside 265
The “Black Swan,” Kirkby Moorside 267
Washington Irving’s “Throne” and “Sceptre” 270
Yard of the “Old Angel,” Basingstoke 279
The “White Hart,” Whitchurch 281
The “Bell,” Tewkesbury 285
The “Wheatsheaf,” Tewkesbury 287
Henley-in-Arden, and the “White Swan” 301
[Illustration]
THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND
CHAPTER I
A POSY OF OLD INNS
“Shall I not take mine ease at mine inn?”
In dealing with the Old Inns of England, one is first met with the great
difficulty of classification, and lastly with the greater of coming to a
conclusion. There are--let us be thankful for it--so many fine old inns.
Some of the finest lend themselves to no ready method of classifying.
Although they have existed through historic times, they are not historic,
and they have no literary associations: they are simply beautiful and
comfortable in the old-world way, which is a way a great deal more keenly
appreciated than may commonly be supposed in these times. Let those who
will flock to Metropoles and other barracks whose very names are evidence
of their exotic style; but give me the old inns with such signs as the
“Lygon Arms,” the “Feathers,” the “Peacock,” and the like, which you still
find--not in the crowded resorts of the seaside, or in great cities, but
in the old English country towns and districts frequented by the
appreciative few.
I shall not attempt the unthankful office of determining which is the
finest among these grand old English inns whose title to notice rests upon
no adventitious aid of history, but upon their antique beauty, combined
with modern comfort, alone, but will take them as they occur to me.
Let us, then, imagine ourselves at Broadway, in Worcestershire, and at the
“Lygon Arms” there. The village, still somewhat remote from railways, was
once an important place on the London and Worcester Road, and its long,
three-quarter-mile street is really as broad as its name implies; but
since the disappearance of the coaches it has ceased to be the busy stage
it once was, and has became, in the familiar ironic way of fortune, a
haven of rest and quiet for those who are weary of the busy world; a home
of artists amid the apple-orchards of the Vale of Evesham; a slumberous
place of old gabled houses, with mullioned and transomed windows and
old-time vanities of architectural enrichment; for this is a district of
fine building-stone, and the old craftsmen were not slow to take advantage
of their material, in the artistic sort.
[Illustration: DOORWAY, THE “LYGON ARMS.”]
Many enraptured people declare Broadway to be the prettiest village in
England, and the existence of its artist-colony perhaps lends some aid to
their contention; but it is not quite that, and although the long single
street of the place is beautiful in detail, it does not compose a picture
as a whole. One of the finest--if not indeed the finest--of those detailed
beauties is the grand old stone front of the “Lygon Arms,” built, as the
“White Hart” inn, so long ago as 1540, and bearing that name until the
early part of the last century, when the property was purchased by the
Lygon family, whose head is now Earl Beauchamp, a title that, although it
looks so mediæval, was created in 1815. In more recent times the house was
purchased by the great unwieldy brewing firm of Allsopp, but in 1903 was
sold again to the present resident proprietor, Mr. S. B. Russell, and so
has achieved its freedom and independence once more. The “Lygon Arms,”
however, it still remains, its armorial sign-board displaying the heraldic
coat of that family, with their motto, _Ex Fide Fortis_.
The great four-gabled stone front of the “Lygon Arms” gives it the air of
some ancient manor-house, an effect enhanced by the fine Renaissance
enriched stone doorway added by John Trevis, an old-time innkeeper, who
flourished in the reigns of James the First and Charles the First, and
whose name, together with that of his wife, Ursula, and the date, 1620,
can still be plainly seen. John Trevis (or “Treavis,” as the name was
sometimes spelled) ended his hostelling in 1641, as appears by a rubbing
from his memorial brass from Broadway old church, prominently displayed in
the hall of the house.
[Illustration: THE “LYGON ARMS.”]
The house has during the last few years been gradually brought back to its
ancient state, and the neglect that befell on the withdrawal of the
road-traffic repaired. But not merely neglect had injured it. The
ancient features had suffered greatly in the prosperous times at the
opening of the nineteenth century, when the stone mullions of nearly all
the windows were removed and modern glass and wooden sashes inserted. The
thing seems so wanton and so useless that it is difficult to understand,
in these days of reversion to type. A gas-lamp and bracket had at the same
time been fixed to the doorway, defacing the stonework, and where
alterations of this kind had not taken place, injury of another sort arose
from the greater part of the inn being unoccupied and the rest degraded to
little above the condition of an ale-house.
All the ancient features have been reinstated, and a general restoration
effected, under the advice of experts, and in the “Lygon Arms” of to-day
you see a house typical of an old English inn of the seventeenth century.
There is the Cromwell Room, so named from a tradition that the Protector
slept in it the night before the Battle of Worcester. It is now a
sitting-room. A great carved stone fireplace is the chief feature of that
apartment, whose beautiful plaster ceiling is also worthy of notice. There
is even a tradition that Charles the First visited the inn on two or three
occasions; but no details of either his, or Cromwell’s, visits, survive.
Quaint, unexpected corners, lobbies and staircases abound here, and
ancient fittings are found, even in the domestic kitchen portion of the
house. In the entrance-hall is some very old carved oak from Chipping
Campden church, with an inscription no man can read; while, to keep
company with the undoubtedly indigenous old oak panelling of the so-called
“Panelled Room,” and others, elaborate ancient firebacks and open grates
have been introduced--the spoil of curiosity shops. Noticeable among these
are the ornate fireback in the Cromwell Room and the very fine specimen of
a wrought-iron chimney-crane in the ingle-nook of a cosy corner by the
entrance.
While it would be perhaps too much to say that Broadway and the “Lygon
Arms” are better known to and appreciated by touring Americans than by our
own people, they are certainly visited very largely by travellers from the
United States during the summer months; the fame of Broadway having spread
over-sea very largely on account of the resident American artist-colony
and Madame de Navarro, who as Mary Anderson--“our Mary”--figured
prominently on the stage, some years since.
Those travellers who in the fine, romantic, dangerous old days travelled
by coach, or the more expensive, exclusive, and aristocratic post-chaise,
to Bath, and selected the Devizes route, came at that town to one of the
finest inns on that road of exceptionally fine hostelries. The “Bear” at
Devizes was never so large or so stately as the “Castle” at Marlborough,
but it was no bad second, and it remains to-day an old-fashioned and
dignified inn, the first in the town; looking with something of a
county-family aloofness upon the wide Market-place and that
extraordinary Gothic cross erected in the middle of it, to the memory of
one Ruth Pierce, of Potterne, a market-woman, who on January 25th, 1753,
calling God to witness the truth of a lie she was telling, was struck dead
on the instant.
[Illustration: THE CROMWELL ROOM, “LYGON ARMS.”]
The “Bear,” indeed, is of two entirely separate and distinct periods, as
you clearly perceive from the strikingly different character of the front
buildings. The one is a haughty structure in dark stone, designed in that
fine architectural style practised in the middle of the eighteenth century
by the brothers Adam; the other has a plastered and painted frontage, fine
in its way, but bespeaking rather the Commercial Hotel. In the older
building, to which you enter up flights of steps, you picture the great
ones of the earth, resting on their way to or from “the Bath,” in a
setting of Chippendale, Sheraton or Hepplewhite furniture; and in the
other the imagination sees the dignified, prosperous “commercial
gentlemen” of two or three generations ago--was there ever, anywhere,
another order of being so supremely dignified as they were?--dining, with
much roast beef and port, in a framing of mahogany sideboards and
monumentally heavy chairs stuffed with horse-hair--each treating the
others with a lofty and punctilious ceremonial courtesy, more punctilious
and much loftier than anything ever observed in the House of Peers.
The “Bear” figures in the letters of Fanny Burney, who with her friend
Mrs. Thrale was travelling to Bath in 1780. They took four days about
that business, halting the first night at Maidenhead, the second at the
“Castle,” Speen Hill, and the third here. In the evening they played
cards, the lively Miss Burney declaring to her correspondent that the
doing so made her feel “old-cattish”: whist having ever been the resort of
dowagers. Engaged upon this engrossing occupation, the strains of music
gradually dawned upon their attention, coming from an adjoining room. Did
they, as many would have done, thump upon the intervening wall, by way of
signifying their disapproval? Not at all. The player was rendering the
overture to the _Buono Figliuola_--whatever that may have been--and
playing it well. Mrs. Thrale went and tapped at the door whence these
sweet sounds came, in order to compliment the unknown musician; whereupon
a handsome girl whose dark hair clustered finely upon a noble forehead,
opened the door, and another invited Mrs. Thrale and Miss Burney to
chairs. These pretty creatures were the daughters of the innkeeper. They
were well enough, to be sure, but the wonder of the family was away from
home. “This was their brother, a most lovely boy of ten years of age, who
seems to be not merely the wonder of their family, but of the times, for
his astonishing skill at drawing. They protest he has never had any
instruction, yet showed us some of his productions that were really
beautiful.”
[Illustration: THE “BEAR,” DEVIZES.]
This marvel was none other than Thomas Lawrence, the future painter of
innumerable portraits of the wealthy and the noble, who rose to be P.R.A.
and to knighthood at the hands of George the Fourth. His father, at this
time landlord of the “Bear,” seems to have been a singularly close
parallel to Mr. Micawber in fiction, and to Mr. John Dickens in real life.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, and articled to a solicitor, he turned
aside from writs and affidavits and practical things of that kind, to the
making of verses; and the verse-making, by a sort of natural declension,
presently led him to fall in love, and to run away with the pretty
daughter of the vicar of Tenbury, in Worcestershire. He tried life as an
actor, and that failed; as a surveyor of excise, with little better
result; and then became landlord of the “White Lion” at Bristol, the house
in which his son Thomas, the future P.R.A., was born, in 1769. In 1772 he
removed to Devizes, and took the “Bear”: not an inconsiderable
speculation, as the description of the house, already given, would lead
one to suspect. Some unduly confiding person must have lent the shiftless,
but engaging and gentlemanly, fellow the capital, and it is to be feared
he lost by it, for although in the pages of _Columella_, a curious work of
fiction published at that time, Lawrence is styled “the only man upon the
road for warm rooms, soft beds, and--Oh, prodigious!--for reading Milton,”
his innkeeping was a failure.
Notwithstanding those “warm rooms and soft beds,” which rather remind you
of Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s lines in _The Mountebanks_--
Excellent eating,
Good beds and warm sheeting,
That never want Keating,
Afford a good greeting
To people who stop at my inn--
Lawrence had to relinquish the “Bear.” He was known as a “public-spirited
landlord, who erected at his own expense signal-posts twelve feet high,
painted white, to guide travellers by night over Salisbury Plain”; but,
although he was greatly commended for that public spirit, no profit
accrued from it. Public spirit in a public-house--even though it be that
higher order of public-house styled an hotel--is out of place.
At the early age of five the innkeeper’s son Thomas became distinctly an
asset. He was as many-sided as a politician who cannot find place in his
own party and so, scenting opportunities, seeks preferment with former
enemies. Young Lawrence it would, however, be far prettier to compare with
a many-faceted diamond. He shone with accomplishments. A beautiful boy,
his manners, too, were pleasing. He was kissed and petted by the ladies,
and to the gentlemen he recited. He painted the portraits, in curiously
frank and artless profile, of all guests who would sport half a guinea for
the purpose, and between whiles would be found in the yard, punching the
heads of the stable-boys, for he was alike born painter and pugilist!
A less beautiful nature than his would early have been spoiled by so much
notice, but to the end of his long and phenomenally successful career
Lawrence retained a courtly, but natural and frank, personality. As a boy
he was introduced to the guests of the “Bear” by his fond father in this
wise: “Gentlemen, here’s my son; will you have him recite from the poets,
or take your portraits?” and in this way he held forth in such great
presences as those of Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Foote, Burke, Sheridan, and
Mrs. Siddons.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “BEAR,” DEVIZES.]
But the business of the “Bear” languished under the proprietorship of the
elder Lawrence. Probably many of the guests resented what was rightly
styled “the obtrusive pertinacity” of the fond father, and being
interrupted in their talk, or disturbed at the engrossing occupation of
winning and losing money at cards, by the appearance of this _wunderkind_.
By the time the genius was eleven years of age the family had left
Devizes, and were being entirely supported by his growing skill in the
painting of pleasing likenesses!
If the front of the house, with its odd effigy of a black bear eating a
bunch of grapes, is fine, much finer, in the picturesque way, is the back,
where, from the stable-yard, you see a noble range of Ionic columns,
rather lost in that position, and surmounted as they are with gables of a
Gothic feeling, looking as though the projector of some ambitious classic
extension had begun a great work without counting the cost of its
completion, and so had ingloriously to decline upon a humble ending.
The “George” at Andover, whatever importance it once possessed, now
displays the merest slip of frontage. It is, in essentials, a very old
house, with a good deal of stout timber framing in odd corners: all more
or less overlaid with the fittings of a modern market inn. The “George”
figures in what remains probably the most extraordinary solicitor’s bill
on record: the account rendered to Sir Francis Blake Delaval, M.P., by
his attorney, for work done during one of the Andover elections. It is a
document famous in the history of Parliamentary contests, and it was the
subject of an action in the King’s Bench. The most outstanding item of it
was: “To being thrown out of the window of the ‘George’ inn, Andover.--To
my leg being thereby broken.--To Surgeon’s bill and loss of time and
business.--All in the service of Sir Francis B. Delaval----£500.”
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE,” ANDOVER.]
It seems that this unfortunate attorney owed his flight through the window
to his having played a practical joke upon the officers of a regiment
stationed at Andover, to whom he sent invitations for a banquet at the
“George” on the King’s birthday, purporting to come from the Mayor and
corporation, and similar invitations to the Mayor and corporation,
supposed to come from the officers. The two parties met and dined, but,
preparing to depart, and each thanking the others for the hospitality, the
trick was disclosed, and the author of it, who had been rash enough to
attend, to see for himself the success of his joke, was seized and flung
out of the window by the enraged diners.
Turn we now to Shropshire, to that sweet and gracious old town of Ludlow,
where--albeit ruined--the great Castle of the Lords Presidents of the
Council of the Marches of Wales yet stands, and where many an ancient
house belonging to history fronts on to the quiet streets: some whose
antique interiors are altogether unsuspected of the passer-by, by reason
of the Georgian red-brick fronts or Early Victorian plaster faces that
have masked the older and sturdier construction of oaken beams. I love the
old town of Ludlow, as needs I must do, for it is the home of my forbears,
who, certainly since the days of Elizabeth, when the registers of the
Cathedral-like church of St. Lawrence begin, lived there and worked
there in what was their almost invariable handicraft of joining and
cabinet-making, until quite recent years.
[Illustration: THE “FEATHERS,” LUDLOW.]
The finest old timber-fronted, black-and-white house in Ludlow is the
“Feathers” inn, in Corve Street. There are many ancient and picturesque
hostelries in England, but none finer than the “Feathers,” and it is
additionally remarkable for being as exquisite within as without. You see
its nodding gables and peaked roofs among the earliest of the beautiful
things of Ludlow, as you come from the railway-station and ascend the
steep Corve Street, that leads out of the town, into Corve Dale.
Very little is known of the history of the “Feathers.” The earliest deed
relating to the property is dated August 2nd, 1609, when it appears to
have been leased from a member of the Council of the Marches, one Edward
Waties of Burway, by Rees Jones and Isabel, his wife. Ten years later,
March 10th, 1618-9, Rees Jones purchased the fee-simple of the house from
Edward Waties and his wife, Martha: other parties to the transaction being
Sir Charles Foxe, of Bromfield, and his son Francis, respectively father
and brother of Martha Waties. The purchase price of the freehold was £225.
In neither of those transactions is the house called the “Feathers,” or
even referred to as an inn; nor do we know whether Rees Jones purchased
the existing house, or an older one, on this site. It seems probable,
however, that this is the original mansion of some personage connected
with the ancient government of the Welsh marches, or perhaps the “town
house” of the Foxes of Bromfield in those times when every Shropshire
squire of wealth and standing repaired for a season every year with his
family from his country seat to Shrewsbury or Ludlow; the two resorts of
Society in those days when London, in the toils, dangers, and expenses of
travelling, was so far removed that it was a place to be seen but once or
twice in a lifetime.
Rees Jones seems to have remodelled the mansion as an inn, and there is
every likelihood that he named it the “Feathers” in honour of Henry,
Prince of Wales, elder brother of Charles the First, who died in 1612; or
perhaps in celebration of Prince Charles being, in his stead, created
Prince of Wales, in 1616, when there were great rejoicings in Ludlow, and
masques in “The Love of Wales to their Sovereign Prince.” How more loyal
could one be--and how more certain to secure custom at such a
juncture--than to name one’s inn after the triply feathered badge of a
popular Prince?
The door of the “Feathers” appears to be the original entrance of Rees
Jones’ day. No prospect of unwelcome visitors bursting through that
substantial oak, reinforced by the three hundred and fifty or so iron
studs that rather grimly spangle the surface of it, in defensive
constellation. Even the original hinges remain, terminated decoratively by
wrought-iron fleurs-de-lys. The initials of Rees Jones
himself--R.I.--are cut in the lock-plate.
[Illustration: THE DINING-ROOM AT “THE FEATHERS,” LUDLOW.]
The “Feathers” was the local “Grand Hotel” or “Metropole” of that day, and
was the resort of the best, as may be perceived by the ancient fittings
and decorations, carried out in all the perfection possible to that time.
From the oak-panelled hall you proceed upstairs to the principal room, the
Large Dining-Room, looking out, through lozenge-paned windows, upon the
ancient carved-oak balcony overhanging the street.
It is a handsome room, with elaborately decorated ceiling. In the centre
is a device, in raised plaster, of the Royal Arms of the reign of James
the First, surrounded by a star-like design of grapes and vines,
decoratively treated; showing, together with the free repetition of grapes
and vine-tendrils over other portions of the ceiling, that this symbolic
decorative work was executed especially for the inn, and not for the house
in any former existence as a private residence.
The carved oak overmantel, in three compartments, with a boldly rendered
representation of the Royal arms and supporters of Lion and Unicorn, is
contemporary with the ceiling, and there is no reason to doubt it having
been made for the place it occupies, in spite of the tradition that tells
of its coming from the Castle when that historic fortress and palace was
shamefully dismantled in the reign of George the Third. The room is
panelled throughout.
Everything else is in keeping, but it should not--and could not--be
supposed that the Jacobean-style and Chippendale furniture is of any old
local association. Indeed, there are many in Ludlow who remember the time
when the “Feathers” was furnished, neither comfortably nor artistically,
with Early Victorian horse-hair stuffed chairs and sofas of the most
atrocious type. It has been reserved for later days to be more
appreciative of the value and desirability of having all things, as far as
possible, in keeping with the age of the house.
Thus, we are not to think the fireback in this dining-room an old
belonging of the inn. It is, indeed, ancient, and bears the perfectly
genuine Lion and Dragon supporters and the arms of Queen Elizabeth, but it
was purchased at the Condover Hall sale, in 1897.
The Small Dining-room is panelled with oak, dark with age, to the ceiling,
and the Jacobean carved work enriching the fireplace is only less
elaborate than that of the larger dining-room. The old grate and Flemish
fireback, although also genuine antiques, were acquired in London, in
1898; but an old carved panel over the door, bearing the arms of Foxe and
Hacluit, two Shropshire families prominent in the seventeenth century, is
in its original place. The impaled arms are interesting examples of
“canting,” or punning, heraldry: three foxes’ heads indicating the one
family, and “three hatchets proper” that of Hacluit, or “Hackeluit,” as it
was sometimes written. The shield of arms is flanked on either side by a
representation of a “water-bouget.”
Further upstairs, the bedroom floors slope at distinct angles, in sympathy
with the bending gables without.
[Illustration: DECORATIVE DEVICE IN MOULDED PLASTER, FROM CEILING OF
DINING-ROOM, THE “FEATHERS,” LUDLOW.]
There are numerous instances of old manor-houses turned to commercial
account as hostelries: among them the “Peacock” inn at Rowsley, near
Chatsworth. As may be seen from the illustration, it is a building of
fine architectural character, and was, in fact, built in 1652, at a time
when the Renaissance was most vigorous and inspired. The precise date of
the building is carved, plain for all men to see, on the semicircular
stone tympanum over the entrance-doorway, where it appears, with the old
owner’s name, in this curious fashion:
IOHNSTE
16 52
VENSON
But ordinary type does not suffice to render the quaintness of this
inscription; for in the original the diagonal limbs of the N’s are placed
the wrong way round.
John Stevenson, who built the house, was one of an old Derbyshire family
who, in the reign of Elizabeth, were lords of the neighbouring manor of
Elton. From them it passed by marriage, and was for many generations
occupied as a farmhouse by a succession of gentlemen farmers, finally, in
1828, becoming an inn.
The “Peacock” sign, carved in stone over the battlemented front, is in
allusion to the well-known peacock crest of the Manners family, Dukes of
Rutland, whose ancestral seat of Haddon Hall is less than two miles
distant.
[Illustration: THE “PEACOCK,” ROWSLEY.]
Up to the period of its conversion into an inn the house was fronted by a
garden. A roadway, very dusty in summer, now takes its place, but there is
still left at the side and rear of the old house one of the most
delightful of old-world gardens, leading down to the Derwent: a garden of
shady trees, emerald lawns, and lovely flower-beds that loses nothing
of its beauty--and perhaps, indeed, gains an additional charm--from the
railway and Rowsley station adjoining. The garden of the “Peacock,” and
the cool, shady hall and the quiet panelled rooms of the “Peacock,” are in
fact welcome sanctuaries of rest for the weariful sightseer at Rowsley and
the neighbouring Chatsworth: a desirable refuge in a district always
absurdly overrated, and nowadays absolutely destroyed in the touring
months of summer by the thronged brakes and wagonettes from Matlock and
Bakewell, and infinitely more by the hulking, stinking motor-cars that
maintain a continuous haze of dust, a deafening clatter, and an offensive
smell in these once sweetly rural roads.
In the days before the great George, successively Prince of Wales, Prince
Regent, and last monarch of the Four Georges, had reared his glittering
marine palace at Brighton, the only route to that sometime fisher-village
lay by Caterham, Godstone, East Grinstead and Lewes. It was, indeed, not
precisely the road to Brighton, but to that old-world county town of
Sussex, Lewes itself. There were always people wanting to go to Lewes, and
many others who went very much against their inclination; for it was then
the centre of county business, and there were generally misdemeanants in
plenty to be prosecuted or hanged in that grim castle on the hillside. Up
to about 1750, therefore, you travelled in style to Lewes, and if you were
so eccentric as to wish to proceed to “Brighthelmstone” (which was then
the lengthy way of it) you relied of necessity for those last eight or ten
miles upon the most worthless shandrydan that the “Star” inn could
produce; for mine host was not likely to risk his best conveyance upon the
rough track that then stretched between Lewes and the sea.
This primitive condition of affairs gave place shortly afterwards to roads
skilfully and especially engineered, directly towards Brighton itself. The
riotous world of youthful fashion raced along those newer roads, and the
staid, immemorial highway to Lewes was left to its own old respectable
routine. And so it remains to-day. You may reach Brighton by the shortest
route from London in 51½ miles, but by way of Lewes it is some fifty-nine.
Need it be said that the shortest route, here as elsewhere, is the
favourite?
But for picturesqueness, and for quaint old inns, the road by Lewes
should, without doubt, be selected.
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART” GODSTONE.]
The first of these is the famous “White Hart” at Godstone. I say “famous”;
but, after all, is it nowadays famous among many classes? Among cyclists,
yes, for it is well within twenty miles from London, and the pretty little
hamlet of Godstone Green, with its half-dozen old inns, among them the
“Hare and Hounds,” the “Bell,” and the “Rose and Crown,” nearly all
sketchable, has ever been a kind of southern Ripley among clubmen. In
coaching days, however, and in days long before coaching, when you got
upon your horse and bumped in the saddle to your journey’s end, the
“White Hart” was truly famous among all men. The old house, according to a
painted wall-sign inscribed in the choicest Wardour Street English, was
established in “ye reigne of Kynge Richard ye 2nd” and enlarged in that of
Queen Elizabeth; and if there be indeed little of King Richard’s time to
point to, there are many Elizabethan and Queen Annean and Early Georgian
features which make up in pictorial quality what they lack in antiquity.
The “White Hart” sign itself is in some sort evidence of the age claimed
for the original house, for it was of course the well-known badge of King
Richard. At the present day the couchant White Hart himself is displayed
on one side of the swinging sign, and on the other the many-quartered
shield of the local landowners, the Clayton family, and the house has
become known in these latter days indifferently by the old title, or as
the “Clayton Arms.”
The old-world gabled front of the inn would be strikingly beautiful in any
situation, but the peculiarly appropriate old English rural setting
renders it a subject for a painting or a theatrical scene. It is
especially beautiful in spring, when the young foliage still keeps its
freshness and the great horse-chestnut trees opposite are in bloom.
The old “White Hart” is a world too large for these days of easy and
speedy travel. True, Godstone station is incredibly far away, but
conceive anyone save the sentimentalist staying the night, when within
twenty miles of London and home! Hence those echoing corridors, those
empty bedrooms, the tarnished mirrors and utter stillness of the outlying
parts of mine host’s extensive domain. Snug comfort, however, resides in
and near what some terrible lover of the sham-antique has styled, in
modern paint upon the ancient woodwork, “Ye Barre.”
Ye Goddes! the old house does not want _that_, nor any others of the many
such inscriptions, the work, doubtless, of the defunct Smith, who was at
once cook, gardener, artist of sorts, entertainment-organiser and musician
(also of sorts), and ran riot, the matter of a decade or so since, over
the house with pots of Aspinall’s facile enamels and a paintbrush, with
what results we see to this day.
One would by no means like to convey the impression that the “White Hart”
is deserted. Let those who judge by its every-day rustic quiet visit it on
the Saturdays and Sundays of summer and glance at the great oak-raftered
dining-room, crowded with cyclists. Indeed, this fine old hostelry
requires a leisured inspection and a more intimate knowledge than merely
that of a passing visit. Then only shall you peer into the odd nooks of
the long stable-yard, or, adventuring perchance by accident into the
wash-house, see with astonishment and delight the old-world garden beyond.
If it be a wet day, and the traveller stormbound, why then some
compensation for the villainies of the weather may be found in a voyage
of discovery through the echoing rooms, and from the billiard-room that
was the old kitchen you may turn, wearying of billiards, to the long,
dusty and darkling loft, under the roof, to see in what manner of place
our ancestors of Queen Elizabeth’s, and even of Queen Anne’s, days held
revel. For here it was that the players played interludes, and probably
were funnier than they intended, when their heads came into violent
collision with the sloping rafters and made the unfeeling among the
audience laugh. If the essence of humour lie indeed in the unexpected, as
some contend, _how_ humorous those happenings!
In a later age, when the mummers had departed, the loft was used as
Assembly Rooms, for dances and other social occasions; but now it is
solitary, and filled only with memories and cobwebs.
From Godstone, the old road to Brighthelmstone goes by Blindley Heath and
New Chapel, and thence comes into Sussex at East Grinstead, in which
thriving little market-town the “Dorset Arms” is conspicuous, with its
sedately beautiful frontage, brave show of flowers in window-boxes, and
row of dormer windows in the roof. There is a delightful old-world garden
in the rear, sloping down to a rustic valley, and commanding lovely views.
The “Dorset Arms” still displays the heraldic coat of the Dukes of Dorset,
although the last Duke has been dead nearly a hundred years, and though
the memories of their lavishness, their magnificence, and their
impatience as they posted to and from their seat at Buckhurst Park, eight
miles distant, have locally faded away.
But the inn has one arresting modern curiosity. In days before Mr. Alfred
Austin was made Poet Laureate, and became instantly the cockshy and Aunt
Sally of every sucking critic, the landlord of the “Dorset Arms” placed in
gilded letters over his doorway a quotation from the poet’s _Fortunatus
the Pessimist_, telling us that--
There is no office in this needful world
But dignifies the doer, if well done.
And there it still remains; but precisely what it is intended, in that
situation, to convey remains unexplained. Whether the landlord is the
“doer,” or the waiter, or the boots, or if they are all, comprehensively,
to be regarded as dignified doers, is a mystery.
There was no lack of accommodation on this old road. The traveller had
jogged it on but seven miles more when he came at Nutley to a very small
village with a very large hostelry which, disdaining any mere ordinary
sign, proclaimed itself the “Nutley Inn.” It does so still, but although
it is a fine, handsome, four-square mansion-like building, it looks a
little saddened by changed times and at being under the necessity of
announcing, in those weird and wonderful words, “Petrol” and “Garage,” a
dependence upon motor-cars.
Another five miles, and at the little town of Uckfield, we have the
“Maiden’s Head,” an early eighteenth-century inn with Assembly-room
attached and a wonderful music gallery, rather larger than the “elevated
den” at the “Bull,” Rochester. The interior of the “Maiden’s Head” at
Uckfield is a good deal more comfortable than would be suspected from its
brick front, with the semicircular bays painted in a compromise between
white and a dull lead colour. At Lewes the traveller came to the “Star”
inn, a worthy climax to this constellation, with the fine old staircase
brought from Slaugham Place, as its chief feature: but the “Star” has of
late been demolished.
One of the finest in this posy of old inns is the “Luttrell Arms,” away
down in Somersetshire, in the picturesque village of Dunster, on the
shores of the Severn Sea. Dunster is noted for its ancient castle, for its
curious old Yarn Market in the middle of the broad street, and no less for
the “Luttrell Arms.” A fine uncertainty clings about the origin and the
history of this beautiful house. Because of the Gothic timbered roof of
the “oak room,” with hammer-beams and general construction somewhat
resembling the design of the roof of Westminster Hall, and because of the
very ecclesiastical-looking windows giving upon the courtyard, a vague
tradition still lingers in the neighbourhood that the house was once a
monastery. Nothing has survived to tell us who built this fine
fifteenth-century structure, or for what purpose; but, while facts are
wanting, the most likely theory remains that it was provided as a town
residence for the Abbots of Cleeve, the Abbey whose ruins may still be
found, in a rural situation, three miles away. In the governance and
politics of such an Abbey, an Abbot’s residence in a centre such as
Dunster was would be a highly desirable thing. There, almost under the
shadow of the great feudal castle of the Mohuns, purchased in 1376 by the
Luttrells, who still own the property, the Abbots were in touch with the
great world, and able to intrigue and manage for the interests of the
Church in general and of the Abbey in particular, much better than would
have been possible in the cloistered shades of Cleeve. The Luttrells no
doubt gave the land, and possibly even built the house for the Abbots; and
when the Reformation came and conventual properties were confiscated, they
simply received back what their ancestors had given away.
The front of the “Luttrell Arms” has been very greatly modernised, with
the exception of the ancient projecting stone porch, which still keeps on
either side the cross-slits in the masonry, commanding the length of the
street, whence two stout marksmen with cross-bows could easily defend the
house. Above, the shield of arms of the Luttrells, carved in stone,
displays their black martlets on a gold ground, and serves the inn for a
sign.
The beautiful carved oak windows in the courtyard somewhat resemble the
great window of the “Old King’s Head” at Aylesbury. Here the view extends
beautifully across the gardens of the inn, over the sea, to Blue Anchor.
[Illustration: THE OLD WINDOW, “LUTTRELL ARMS.”]
A curious seventeenth-century plaster fireplace overmantel, moulded in
high relief, is a grotesque ornament to one of the bedrooms. It displays a
half-length of a man with a singular likeness to Shakespeare, and dressed
like a page-boy, in “buttons,” presiding over the representation of a very
thin and meagre Actæon being torn to pieces by his dogs, which, in
proportion to Actæon himself, seem to be about the size of moderately
large cows. Two figures of women, with faces like potatoes, dressed in
Elizabethan or Jacobean costume, flank this device, in the manner of
caryatides. A number of somewhat similar plaster chimney-pieces are to be
found in North Somerset and North Devon, notably a fine one at the
“Trevelyan Arms,” Barnstaple: obviously all the handiwork of one man.
At Norwich, a city of ancient inns that are, in general, more delightful
to sketch and to look at than to stay in, we have the “Maid’s Head,” an
exceptionally fine survival of an Elizabethan, or slightly earlier, house.
It is an “hotel” now, and sanitated and electrically lighted up to
twentieth-century requirements; and has, moreover, an “Elizabethan”
extension, built in late Victorian times. But, in spite of all those
modern frills and flounces, the central portion of the “Maid’s Head” still
wears its genuine old-world air.
That there was an inn on this site so early as 1287 we learn from the
records of the Norwich Corporation, which tell how “Robert the fowler” was
brought to book in that year on suspicion of stealing the goods of one
John de Ingham, then staying at a tavern in the Cook Row, a street
identified with Tombland, the site of the “Maid’s Head.” The reasoning
that presumed the guilt of Robert the fowler seems to the modern mind
rather loose, and the presentment itself is worded with unconscious
humour. By this it seems that he was suspect “because he spends much and
has nothing to spend from, and roves about by night, and he is ill
thought of.” _Ergo_, as the old wording proceeds, “it must have been he
that stole John de Ingham’s goods at his tavern in the Cook Rowe.”
Relics of a building of the Norman period, thought to be remains of a
former Bishop’s Palace, are still visible in the cellars of the “Maid’s
Head.”
The ancient good repute of the inn is vouched for by a passage in the
well-known _Paston Letters_, painted boldly in white lettering on the
great oaken entrance-door of the house. It is from a note written by John
Paston in 1472 to “Mestresse Margret Paston,” in which he advises her of a
visitor, and says, “I praye yow make hym goode cheer, and iff it be so
that he tarye, I most remembre hys costes; thereffore iff I shall be sent
for, and he tery at Norwich there whylys, it were best to sette hys horse
at the Maydes Hedde, and I shalbe content for ther expences.”
The ancient name of the house was the “Molde Fish,” or “Murtel Fish”; but
precisely what species of fish that was, no one has ever discovered. It
was long an article of belief in Norwich that this now inexplicable sign
was changed to the present one as a compliment to Queen Elizabeth on her
first visit to Norwich, in 1578; but, as we see by the _Paston Letters_,
it was the “Maid’s Head” certainly as far back as 1472. A portion of the
carved work on the chimney-piece of the present smoking-room represents a
dubious kind of a fish, said to be intended for the skate, or ray, once
known familiarly in Norwich as “old maid”; but the connection between it
and the old sign (if any) seems remote.
Probably the most interesting item at the “Maid’s Head” is the Jacobean
bar, an exceptionally fine example of seventeenth-century woodwork, of
marked architectonic character, and, as a bar, unique. Now that the
courtyard to which it opened is roofed in, its preservation is assured, at
the expense of the genuine old open-air feature, for which the modern
lounge is a poor exchange.
Journeying from Norwich to the sea at Yarmouth, we find there, among the
numerous hotels of that populous place, that highly interesting house, the
“Star,” facing the river at Hall Quay. The “Star” is older than a first
glance would lead the casual visitor to suspect; and a more prolonged
examination reveals a frontage built of black flints elaborately, and with
the greatest nicety, chipped into cubes: one of the most painstaking kinds
of labour it is possible to conceive. The house, built in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth, has been an inn only since about 1780. It has an
interesting history, having been erected as the combined business premises
and place of residence of one William Crowe, a very considerable merchant
in his day, and High Bailiff of Yarmouth in 1606. The lower part of the
premises was at that time the business portion, while the upper was that
worshipful merchant’s residence; traders, both by retail and by wholesale,
within the kingdom and overseas alike, not then having arrived at being
ashamed of their business. How honestly proud William Crowe was of his
position as a merchant we may still see, in the great and beautiful
oak-panelled room on the first floor of his old house, the fine apartment
now known as the “Nelson Room”; for there, prominently carved over the
generous fireplace, you see the arms of the Merchant Adventurers of
England, a company of traders of which he was a member. The oak-panelling
here, reaching from floor to ceiling, itself beautifully decorated, is
most elaborately designed in the Renaissance way, with fluted Corinthian
pilasters, supporting grotesque male and female terminal figures. This
noble room is now the Coffee-room of the hotel.
[Illustration: COURTYARD OF THE “MAID’S HEAD,” NORWICH SHOWING THE
JACOBEAN BAR.]
[Illustration: DOORWAY, “THE COCK,” STONY STRATFORD.]
It should be said that the name of “Nelson” is purely arbitrary in this
connection, for the “Star” has no historic associations with the Admiral.
The name was given the room merely from the fact that a portrait of Nelson
hangs on its walls.
In this posy of old inns, whose sweet savour reconciles the traveller to
many hateful modern portents, mention must be made of the “George” at
Odiham. At an inn styled the “George” you do expect, more than at any
other sign, to find old-fashioned comfort; and here, at that little
forgotten townlet of Odiham, lying secluded away back from the Exeter
Road, with its one extravagantly broad and singularly empty street, and no
historic memories much later than the reign of King John, you have a
typical cheery hostelry whose white frontage looks coaching age
incarnated, and whose interior surprises you--as often these old houses
do--with oaken beams and Elizabethan panelled coffee-room and Jacobean
overmantel. The fuel-cupboard, with finely wrought hinges, at the side of
the fireplace, is as celebrated in its way, among connoisseurs of these
things, as the Queen Anne angle-cupboard at the “New Inn,” New Romney. Not
least among the attractions of the “George” is the beautiful old-fashioned
garden at the back, looking out towards the meads and the trout-streams,
that make Odiham (whose name, by the way, originally “Woodyham,” is
pronounced locally like “Odium”) a noted place among anglers.
[Illustration: YARD OF “THE GEORGE,” HUNTINGDON.]
Interesting in a less rural--and indeed a very urban way--is the “Cock”
inn, at Stony Stratford, on the Holyhead Road, with its fine red brick
frontage to the busy high road, its imposing wrought-iron sign, and, in
especial, its noble late seventeenth-century ornately carved and highly
enriched oak doorway, brought, it would appear, from the neighbouring
mansion of Battlesden Park. As may be gathered from the illustration, this
exquisite work of art very closely resembles, in general character, the
carved interior doorways of Wren’s City of London churches, often ascribed
to Grinling Gibbons.
In this posy of old hostelries we must at least mention that fine old
anglers’ inn, the “Three Cocks” in Breconshire, which, like the “Craven
Arms,” between Ludlow and Church Stretton, and those more familiar and
vulgar examples in London, the “Bricklayers’ Arms” and the “Elephant and
Castle,” has conferred its name upon a railway-station. And mention must
be made of the cosy, white-faced “Wellington,” at Broadstairs, occupying a
kind of midway place between the old coaching inn and the modern huge
barrack hotel, and, with its lawn looking upon the sea and the beach,
select and quiet in the very midst of the summer crowds of that miniature
holiday resort.
In any competition as to which old inn had the ugliest frontage, the “Red
Horse” at Stratford-on-Avon, and the “George” at Huntingdon would probably
tie for first place; but the courtyard of the “George” makes amends, and
is one of the finest anywhere in existence, as the illustration serves to
show.
A fine old house, with a still finer old sign, is that old coaching
hostelry, the “Bell,” at Stilton, formerly one of the largest and most
important of the many great and indispensable inns that once ministered to
the needs of travellers along the Great North Road. The “Bell” was the
original inn of Stilton, and the “Angel,” opposite, is a mere modern
upstart of Queen Anne’s time. Queen Anne is a monarch of yesterday when
you think of the old “Bell”; which is, indeed, older than it looks, for,
prying closely into the architecture of its golden, yellow-brown structure
of sandstone, it will be seen that the house is really a Late Gothic
building distressingly modernised. Modernised, that is to say, in a very
necessary reservation, considerably over a century ago. That is the last
note of modernity at the “Bell.” The windows, it will be noticed, were
once all stone-mullioned, and portions of the ancient stonework not cut
away to receive commonplace Georgian wooden sashes, are still distinctly
visible. Looking at the competitive “Angel” opposite, now and for long
since, like the “Bell” itself, sadly reduced in circumstances since that
era of mail- and stage-coaching and expensive posting in chaise and four,
you perceive at once the reason for that alteration in the “Bell.” It was
an effort to become, as an auctioneer might say, “replete with every
modern convenience.”
[Illustration: THE “BELL,” STILTON.]
Now the glory of Stilton, in particular, and of the road in general, is
departed, and the rival inns are alike reduced to wayside ale-houses. At
the “Bell”--the once hospitable--they look at you with astonishment when
you want to stay the night, and turn you away. Doubtless they do so also
at the “Angel,” whose greater part is now a private residence.
The great feature of the “Bell” is its sign, which, with the mazy and
intricate curls and twists and quirks of its wrought-iron supports,
projects far into the road. The sign itself is painted on copper, for sake
of lightness, but it has long been necessary to support it with a crutch
in the shape of a stout post, just as you prop up the overweighted branch
of an apple-tree. The sign-board itself--if we may term that a “board”
which is made of metal--was in the old days a certain source of income to
the coachmen and guards who wagered, whenever possible, with their
passengers, on the size of it. Foolish were those who betted with them,
for, like the cunning bride who took a bottle of the famous water of the
Well of St. Keyne to church, they were prepared; and although bets on
certainties are, contrary to the spirit, and all the laws, of sport, they
were sufficiently unprincipled to receive the winnings that were
inevitable, since they had early taken the measure of it.
The sign, in fact, measures 6 ft. 2¾ inches in height.
The “Bell” is, or should be, famous as the inn where “Stilton” cheese was
first introduced to an appreciative and unduly confiding world. It was an
old-time landlord, the sporting Cooper Thornhill, who flourished, and rode
horseback in record time to London and back to Stilton again, about 1740,
to whom the world was thus originally indebted. He obtained his cheese
from a Mrs. Paulet of Wymondham, who at first supplied him with this
product of her dairy for the use of coach-passengers dining at his table.
Her cheeses at once appealed to connoisseurs, and Thornhill presently
began to supply them to travellers eager to take this new-found delicacy
away with them. He was too business-like a man to disclose the secret of
their origin, and it was long supposed they came from a dairy at Stilton
belonging to him. He did so well for himself, charging half-a-crown a
pound, that others entered the lucrative trade, and you could no more
journey through Stilton without having a Stilton cheese (metaphorically)
thrown at your head than you can halt to-day at Banbury station without
hearing the musical cry of “Ba-anbury Ca-a-akes!”
Then Miss Worthington, landlady of the “Angel” opposite, began also to
supply Stilton cheeses. Rosy, plump, and benevolent-looking--apparently
one in whom there was no guile--she would ask passengers if they would not
like to take away with them a “real Stilton cheese.” All went well for a
while, and Stilton cheeses tasted none the worse because they were not
made there. And then the terrible secret was disclosed.
[Illustration: THE “RED LION,” EGHAM.]
“Pray, sir, would you like a nice Stilton cheese to take away with you?”
asked the unsuspecting landlady one day, as a coach drew up.
“Do you say they are made at Stilton?” asked the passenger.
“Oh yes,” said she.
Then came the crushing rejoinder: “Why, Miss Worthington, you know
perfectly well that no Stilton cheese was ever made at Stilton: they’re
all made in Leicestershire; and as you say your cheeses are made at
Stilton, they cannot be good, and I won’t have one.”
It is the merest commonplace to say that time works wonders. We know it
does: wonders not infrequently of the most unpleasant kind. When we find
time bringing about marvels of the pleasant and desirable sort I think we
should account ourselves fortunate.
There are marvels nowadays being wrought on the Great North Road in
particular, and others in general, in that entirely felicitous manner. I
do not here make allusion to the electric tramways that monopolise the
best part of the roadways out of London for some ten miles or so of the
old romantic highways. Not at all; in fact, far otherwise. The particular
miracles I am contemplating are the works undertaken by the Road Club of
the British Isles, in the re-opening of ancient hostelries long ago
retired into private life, and in bringing back to the survivors a second
term of their old-time prosperity. The Road Club, largely consisting of
motorists, encourages touring, and has set out upon a programme of
interesting all lovers of the countryside in country quarters. The Great
North Road is dotted here and there with the inns it has revived: the “Red
Lion” at Hatfield, the “George” at Grantham, and so forth, and it has
entirely purchased and taken over the management of the “Royal County
Hotel” at Durham and the “Bell” at Barnby Moor.
I am in this place not so greatly concerned to hold forth upon the others,
but the case of the “Bell” is remarkable. Some years since, in writing the
picturesque story of the Great North Road,[1] I discoursed at length upon
the history of that remarkably fine old hostelry, which was then, and for
close upon sixty years had been, a private country residence. Railways had
been too much for it, and the licence had been surrendered, and postboys
and the whole staff dispersed.
And now? Why now the “Bell,” or “Ye Olde Bell,” as I perceive the Road
Club prefers to style it, is an inn once more. I forget how many thousands
of pounds have been expended in alterations, and in re-installing the
establishment; but it has become in three equal parts, as it were, inn,
club-house and farm-house, fully licensed, with golf-links handy. Here
come the motor tourists, and here meet Lord Galway’s hounds, and, in
short, the ancient glories of the “Bell” are, with a modern gloss,
revived. If the spirits of the jolly old landlords can know these things,
surely they are pleased.
Among the old coaching-inns sadly fallen from their former estate, and
now surviving only in greatly altered circumstances, in a mere corner of
the great buildings they once occupied, is the “Red Lion,” Egham; once one
of the largest and finest inns on the Exeter Road.
The “Red Lion” may, for purposes of comparison, be divided into three
parts. There is the old gabled original portion of the inn, probably of
late seventeenth-century date, now used as a medical dispensary, forming
two sides of a courtyard, recessed from the road, and screened from it by
an old wrought-iron railing; and added to it, perhaps eighty years later,
an imposing range of eighteenth-century red-brick buildings, partly in use
as offices for the local Urban District Council and in part a “Literary
Institute,” and a world too large for both. This great building is even
more imposing within; its immense cellarage, large ball-, or
assembly-room, noble staircases, and finely panelled walls, the now
neglected witnesses of a bygone prosperity. Traditions still survive of
how George the Fourth used to entertain his Windsor huntsmen here. In the
rear was stabling for some two hundred horses. Most of it has been cleared
away, but the old postboys’ cottages still remain in the spacious yard.
The remaining part of the “Red Lion,” still carried on as an inn, presents
a white-stuccoed, Early Victorian front to the high road.
[Illustration: THE “BELL,” BARNBY MOOR: MEET OF LORD GALWAY’S HOUNDS.]
Not many inns are built upon crypts. Examples have already been referred
to in these volumes, but another may be mentioned, in the case of the
“Lamb” inn at Eastbourne; while the “Angel” at Guildford is a well-known
instance. No one, looking at the modern-fronted “Angel,” one of the
foremost hotels of Guildford, would be likely to accuse it of owning an
Early English crypt, but it has, in fact, an exceptionally fine one of
three bays, supported by two stone pillars. The ancient history of this
undercroft is unknown, and merely a matter for conjecture.
At the “Angel” itself antiquity and modernity meet, for while fully
equipped for twentieth century convenience, it has good oak panelling of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the fine hall and elsewhere.
CHAPTER II
THE OLD INNS OF CHESHIRE
Cheshire, that great fertile plain devoted almost exclusively to
dairy-farming, is without doubt the county richest in old inns: inns for
the most part built in the traditional Cheshire style--of timber and
plaster: the style variously called “half-timbered,” “magpie,” or “black
and white.” Of these the “Old Hall” at Sandbach is the finest and most
important, having been built originally as the manor-house, about the time
of Queen Elizabeth, the inscription, “16 T.B. 56” on a portion of the long
frontage, probably marking repairs, or an extension of the building, at
that period.
Sandbach is a place famous among antiquaries for its remarkable
ninth-century sculptured monolith crosses, and thus the traveller comes to
it with a mental picture, evolved entirely out of his own inner
consciousness, of some sweet and quiet old country town, left long ago
outside the range of modern things. But Sandbach is not in the least like
that. It is a huddled-together little town, very busy, very roughly paved
with stone setts, rather dirty and untidy, and apparently possessed with
an ambition for new buildings, both public and private, which shall be
as much as possible unlike the old Cheshire style. These are surprises for
the pilgrim, whose life-long illusions are finally squelched when he is
told, gently but firmly, and with a kind of pity for his ignorance, that
the place-name is not pronounced “Sandback,” with a “k,” but “Sandbach,”
with an “h,”--“as it is spelt,” the inhabitants crushingly add.
[Illustration: THE “OLD HALL” INN, SANDBACH.]
The poor old crosses stand in the market-place. They have suffered many an
injury in their time, and now are islanded amid a sea of market-litter,
and are black and grimy. Close by them stands the “Black Bear” inn, a
nodding old half-timbered and thatched “Free” house, with the inscription,
“16 R K 34.” The lower part is merely brick, but this has been painted
white with black stripes, in a more or less laudable attempt to imitate
the genuine timber and plaster of the upper storey.
Just off this market-place, opposite the church, stands the “Old Hall”
inn, facing the road in a long range of imposing panelled and gabled
building, partly fronted by a beautiful lawn. No changes have spoiled the
“Old Hall,” which, save for the fact that it has long been an inn, remains
very much as it was built. It is the property of the Earl of Crewe.
Stout oaken floors and dark oak panelling furnish the old house
throughout. You enter the capacious bar through a Jacobean screen and
drink mellow home-brewed in the appropriately mellow light that comes
between oaken Elizabethan mullions and through leaded casements. It is not
by any fanciful figure of speech that the traveller quenches his thirst
here at the “Old Hall” in a tankard of home-brewed. The house, in fact,
brews its own ale, and supplies it largely to the farm-houses of the
neighbourhood; and a very pretty tipple it is, too.
[Illustration: DOG-GATES AT HEAD OF STAIRCASE, “OLD HALL” INN, SANDBACH.]
There are at least three very fine carved oak Jacobean fire-places and
overmantels in the house, the finest that in the public parlour; and at
the head of the broad staircase remains a curious relic of old times--the
“dog-gates” that formerly shut out the domestic pets of the establishment
from the bedrooms--and in fact do so still.
Not so large, but in some respects finer even than the “Old Hall,” the
“Bear’s Head” at Brereton, five miles from Sandbach, shows most of its
beauty on the outside. It was built in 1615, as the date carved on the
lovely old timbered porch declares, and in days when the Breretons of
Brereton Hall still ruled; as their bear’s-head crest, their shield of
arms, and the initials “W. M. B.,” prove. Their old home, Brereton Hall,
close by, is traditionally the original of Washington Irving’s
“Bracebridge Hall.”
Brereton village is among the smallest of places, and the inn, itself as
noble as many an old manor-house, is neighboured only by a few scattered
cottages. But, however insignificant the village, the inn was once, and
long continued to be, a very busy posting-house on a frequented route
between London and Liverpool, as the eighteenth-century additions to the
house bear witness. The additional wing, built at that period, is by no
means an attractive feature, and fortunately does not obtrude itself in
general views of the inn from the best points of view; but the magnificent
range of stables added at the same date, on the opposite side of the road,
although, of course, not in keeping with the black-and-white timbering of
the original building, compose well, artistically, with it, and form in
themselves a very fine specimen of the design and the brickwork of that
time.
[Illustration: THE “BEAR’S HEAD,” BRERETON.]
The “Lion and Swan” at Congleton is one of the best and most picturesque
features of that old-time manufacturing town, more remarkable for its huge
old factory buildings, and its narrow, sett-paved streets in which the
clogs of the work-folk continually clatter, than for its beauty. The “Lion
and Swan,” therefore, is a distinct asset in the picturesque way, with its
beautiful black-and-white gables and strongly emphasised entrance-porch.
Within it is all timbered passages and raftered rooms, pleasantly
irregular.
One of the most striking of the natural features of Cheshire is the
isolated hill rising abruptly from the great plain near Alderley, and
known as Alderley Edge. So strange an object could hardly fail to impress
old-time imaginations, or be without its correspondingly strange legends,
and the Edge is, in fact, the subject of a legend well known as the
“Wizard of Alderley,” which in its turn has given its title to the
“Wizard” inn.
According to this mystical tale, which is of the same order as the
marvellous legends of King Arthur and the wise Merlin, a farmer, “long
years ago,” was going to Macclesfield Fair to sell a fine milk-white
horse, when, on passing the hill, a “mysterious stranger” suddenly
appeared before him and demanded the horse. Not even in those times of
“long years ago,” when all manner of odd things happened, did farmers give
up valuable animals on demand, and (although the story does not report it)
he probably said some extremely rude and caustic things to the stranger;
who, at any rate, told him that the horse would not be sold at the fair.
He added that when the farmer returned in the evening, he would meet him
on the same spot, and would receive the horse.
The Wizard, for it was none other, had spoken truly. Many people at the
fair admired the milk-white steed, but none offered to buy, and the farmer
wended his way home again. In most cases, with the prospect of such a
meeting, a farmer--or any one else--would have gone home some other way;
but, in that case, there would have been no legend; so we are to imagine
him come back at eventime, under the shadow of the Edge, with the Wizard
duly awaiting him.
Not a word was spoken, but horse and farmer were led to the hillside,
where, with a sound like that of distant thunder, two iron gates opened,
and a magic cave appeared, wherein he saw many milk-white steeds, each
with an armed man sleeping by its side. He was told, as a metrical version
of the legend has it:
These are the caverned troops, by Fate
Foredoomed the guardians of our State.
England’s good genius here detains
These armed defenders of our plains,
Doomed to remain till that fell day
When foemen marshalled in array
And feuds internecine, shall combine
To seal the ruin of our line!
Thrice lost shall England be, thrice won,
’Twixt dawn of day and setting sun.
Then we, the wondrous caverned band,
These mailèd martyrs for the land,
Shall rush resistless on the foe.
[Illustration: THE “LION AND SWAN,” CONGLETON.]
From the crystal cave where these wonders were seen, the farmer was
conducted to a cave of gold, filled with every imaginable kind of wealth,
and there, in the shape of “as much treasure as he could carry,” he
received better payment for his horse than he would ever have obtained at
Macclesfield, or any other, fair. We may imagine him (although the legend
says nothing on that head) at this point asking the Wizard how many more
milk-white steeds he could do with, at the same price; but at this
juncture he was conducted back to the entrance, and the gates were slammed
to behind him. Strange to say, the “treasure,” according to the story,
seems to have been genuine treasure, and did not, next morning, resolve
itself into the usual currency of dried sticks and yellow leaves in which
wizards and questionable old-time characters of that nature usually
settled their accounts.
There are caves and crannies to this day in the wonderful hill, but the
real genuine magic cave has never been re-discovered.
That odd early eighteenth-century character, “Drunken Barnaby,” is
mentioned elsewhere in these pages. One of his boozy journeys took him out
of Lancashire into Cheshire, by way of Warrington and Great Budworth:
Thence to the Cock at Budworth, where I
Drank strong ale as brown as berry:
Till at last with deep healths felled,
To my bed I was compelled:
I for state was bravely sorted,
By two porters well supported.
The traveller will still find the “Cock” at Budworth, and will notice,
with some amusement, that the landlord’s name is Drinkwater. The house is
looking much the same as in Barnaby’s day, and has a painting, hanging in
the bar, picturing a very drunken Barnaby indeed being carried up to bed.
A sundial, bearing the date, 1851, and the inscription, “_Sol motu gallus
cantu moneat_,” has been added, together with a well-executed picture-sign
of a gamecock: both placed by the late squire of Arley, Rowland Eyles
Egerton Warburton, who seems to have occupied most of his leisure in
writing verses for sign-posts and house-inscriptions all over this part of
Cheshire. The gamecock himself, it will be noted, has an oddly Gladstonian
glance.
From Budworth, by dint of much searching and diligent inquiry, the pilgrim
on the borders of Cheshire and Lancashire at length discovers the hamlet
of Thelwall, a place situated in an odd byway between Warrington, Lymm,
and Manchester, in that curious half-picturesque and half-grimly
commercial district traversed by the Bridgewater and the Manchester Ship
Canals.
Thelwall, according to authorities in things incredibly ancient, was once
a city, but the most diligent antiquary grubbing in its stony lanes and
crooked roads, will fail to discover any evidences in brick or stone of
that vanished importance, and is fain to rest his faith upon county
historians and on the lengthy inscription in iron lettering in modern
times fixed upon the wooden beams of the old “Pickering Arms” inn that
stands in midst of the decayed “city.” By this he learns that, “In the
year 920, King Edward the Elder founded a cyty here and called it
Thelwall.” And that is all there is to tell. It might have been a
Manchester or a Salford, had the situation been well chosen; but as it is,
it teaches the lesson that though a king may “found” a city, not all the
kingship, or Right Divine of crowned heads, will make it prosper, if it be
not placed to advantage.
[Illustration: THE “COCK,” GREAT BUDWORTH.]
Chester itself is, of course, exceptionally rich in old inns, but Chester
has so long been a show-place of antiquities and has so mauled its
reverend relics with so-called “restorations” that much of their interest
is gone. The bloom has been brushed off the peach.
One of the oldest inns of Chester is the little house at the corner of
Shipgate Street and Lower Bridge Street, known as the “King Edgar”; the
monarch who gives his name to the sign being that Anglo-Saxon “Edgar the
Peaceable” who reduced the England of his day to an unwonted condition of
law and order, and therefore fully deserves the measure of fame thus given
him.
We are told by Roger of Wendover and other ancient chroniclers how, in the
year 962, King Edgar, coming to Chester in the course of one of his annual
progresses through the country he ruled, was rowed in a state barge upon
the river Dee by eight tributary kings; and one is a little puzzled to
know whence all these kings could have come, until the old monkish
accounts are fully read, when it appears that they were only kings in a
comparatively small way of business. According to Roger of Wendover, they
were Rinoth, King of Scots, Malcolm, King of the Cumbrians, Maco, King of
Mona and numerous islands, and five others: Dusnal of Demetia, Siferth and
Huwal of Wales, James, King of Galwallia, and Jukil, King of Westmoreland.
The sign of the inn, a very old and faded and much-varnished painting,
displays that historic incident, and, gazing earnestly at it, you may
dimly discern the shadowy forms of eight oarsmen, robed in red and white,
and with golden crowns on their heads, rowing an ornate but clumsy craft,
while King Edgar stands in the stern sheets. Another figure in the bow
supports a banner with the sign of the Cross. The whole thing looks not a
little like a giant black-beetle crawling over a kitchen-table.
[Illustration: THE “PICKERING ARMS,” THELWALL.]
Until quite recently the “King Edgar” inn was the most picturesquely
tumble-down building in Chester, a perfect marvel of dilapidation that no
artist could exaggerate, or any one, for that matter, care to house in.
But it has now not only been made habitable, but so “restored” that only
the outlines of the building, and that faded old sign, remain recognisably
the “King Edgar.” It is now rather a smart little inn, displaying notices
of “Accomodation for Cyclists”--spelled with one “m”--and thus, so
renovated and youthful-looking, as incongruously indecent as one’s
grandmother would be, were she to let her hair down and take to short
frocks again.
Separated from it by only one house, and that as commonplace a building as
possible, suppressed so far as may be in the accompanying illustration, by
the adventitious aid of “artistic licence,” is the “Bear and Billet” inn,
at this time, although repaired, in the most satisfactorily conservative
condition of any old inn at Chester. Its front is a mass of beautifully
enriched woodwork, under one huge, all-comprising gable. The “Bear and
Billet” was not always an inn. It has, in fact, declined from private
mansion to public, having originally been the town mansion of the Earls of
Shrewsbury, and remaining their property until 1867. Adjoining is the
Bridge Gate of the city, associated with the “Bear and Billet” by reason
of the fact that the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury, were hereditary
Sergeants of the Gate. Long after they had ceased to occupy the house as a
residence, they continued to reserve a suite of rooms in it, for use on
those state occasions when they resorted to Chester to act their
hereditary part.
[Illustration: THE “KING EDGAR” AND “BEAR AND BILLET,” CHESTER.]
The “Falcon” inn, until recent years an unspoiled house whose nodding
gables and every time-worn timber were eloquent of the sixteenth century,
and the delight of artists--who, however eager they were to sketch it,
were not so ready to stay there--has been so extravagantly renovated,
in the worst sense of that word, when dealing with things ancient and
venerable, that although, during that work of renovation, much earlier
stonework and some additional old timbering were revealed and have been
preserved, their genuine character might well be questioned by a stranger,
so lavish with the scraping and the varnish were those who set about the
work. In short, the “Falcon” nowadays wears every aspect of a genuine
Victorian imitation of an Elizabethan house, and, while made habitable
from the tourist’s point of view, is, artistically, ruined.
In the same street we have the “Old King’s Head” “restored” in like
manner, but so long since that it is acquiring again, by sheer lapse of
time and a little artistic remissness in the matter of cleaning, a hoary
look. Near by, too, is a fine house, now styling itself “Wine and Spirit
Stores,” dated 1635.
In Watergate Street is the “Carnarvon Castle,” with one of the famed
Chester “rows” running in front of the first floor; while, opposite, the
“Custom House” inn, dated 1636 and in its unrestored original state,
recalls the far-distant time when Chester was a port. Indeed, at the
extremity of this street still stands the old “Yacht” inn, where Dean
Swift was accustomed to stay when he chose the Chester and Parkgate route
to Ireland.
A catalogue of all the, in some way, odd inns of Chester would of
necessity be lengthy; but mention may here be made of the exquisitely
restored little “Boot” inn, dated 1643, in Eastgate Street, with a
provision-shop below and a “row” running above, and of the red-brick “Pied
Bull” and the adjoining stone-pillared “Old Bell”--“licensed 1494”--at the
extreme end of Northgate Street.
CHAPTER III
INNS RETIRED FROM BUSINESS
That striking feature of the last few years, the voluntary or the
compulsory extinction of licences, with its attendant compensation, has
created not a little stir among people with short memories, or no
knowledge of their country, who cherish the notion, “once an inn, always
an inn,” and forget the wholesale ruin that befell inns all over the land
upon the introduction of railways, causing hundreds of hostelries to close
their doors. The traveller with an eye for such things may still identify
these inns retired from business, chiefly by their old archways and
entries into stable-yards, but to the expert, even when those features are
absent, there is generally some indefinable air about a house once an inn
that singles it out from others. Such an one is the immense, four-square,
red-brick farm-house midway between Lichfield and Burton-on-Trent, once a
coaching- and posting-house famous in all that countryside as the “Flitch
of Bacon”; such was the exclusive “Verulam Arms” at St. Albans, where mere
plebeian coach-passengers wore not suffered, and only the high and mighty
who could afford post-chaises were condescended to. The “Verulam Arms”
had, however, the briefest of careers. Built in 1827, railways ruined it
in ten years, and, shorn of its vast stables, on whose site a church has
been built, it has ever since been in private occupation. In short, along
the whole course of the Holyhead Road the inns retired from business are
an especial feature, the village of Little Brickhill being little else
than a place of old hostelries and taverns of every class, whose licences
have long ago been surrendered, for lack of custom. Thus you may travel
through to Anglesey and be continually passing these evidences of the ruin
caused by railways, once so distressing to many interests, and a pitiful
commentary upon the activity of inventors; but long ago fallen back into
that historical perspective in which ruin and wrong become the sign-posts
of “progress.” The chief inns that are inns no longer on this
north-western road through England are numerous; the minor taverns and
ale-houses that have closed their doors innumerable. Among others, we
have--speaking merely at a venture--the aristocratic “Bull’s Head,”
Meriden, the “Haygate” inn, near Wellington, the “Talbot,” Atcham,
“Talbot,” Shrewsbury, and “Prince Llewelyn,” Cernioge--all establishments
of the first order; and if we turn to the Great North Road, a very similar
state of things is found. On that great highway the famous “Haycock” inn
at Wansford bravely kept its doors open until recent years, but could
endure no longer and is now a hunting-box belonging to Lord Chesham. The
“New Inn” at Allerton is now a farm-house; the celebrated “Blue Bell” on
Barnby Moor became a country seat, and the very moor itself is enclosed
and cultivated. The “Swan” and “Angel,” both once great and prosperous
coaching-houses at the busy town of Ferrybridge, have ceased their
hospitality, and the “Swan” itself, once rather oddly kept by a Dr.
Alderson, who combined the profession of a medical man with the business
of innkeeping, has been empty for many years past, and stands mournfully,
falling into ruin, amid its gardens by the rive Aire.
Quite recently, after surviving for over sixty years the coming of the
railway and the disappearance of the coaches from the Brighton Road, the
old “Talbot” at Cuckfield has relinquished the vain struggle for
existence, and old frequenters who come to it will find the house empty,
and the hospitable invitation over the doorway, “You’re welcome, what’s
your will?” become, by force of circumstances, a mockery.
There is a peculiar eloquence in the Out-of-Date, the Has Been.
Institutions and ancient orders of things that have had their day need not
to have been intrinsically romantic in that day to be now regarded with
interest. Whether it be a road much-travelled in the days before railways,
and now traced only by the farm-labourer between his cottage and his daily
toil, or by the sentimental pilgrim; or whether it be the wayside inn or
posting-house retired from public life and now either empty or else
converted into a farm-house, there is a feeling of romance attaching to
them really kin to the sentiment we cherish for the ruined abbeys and
castles of the Middle Ages.
Scouring England on a bicycle to complete the collection of old inns for
this book, I came, on the way from Gloucester to Bath, upon such a
superseded road, studded with houses that had once been coaching
hostelries and posting-houses and are now farmsteads; and others that,
although they still carry on their licensed trade, do so in strangely
altered and meagre fashion, in dim corners of half-deserted and
all-too-roomy buildings. It is thirty-four miles of mostly difficult and
lonely road between those two cities: a road of incredible hills and, when
you have come past Stroud and Nailsworth, of almost equally incredible
solitudes. You climb painfully up the north-westerly abutments of the
Cotswolds, to the roof of the world at a place well named Edge, and there
in a bird’s-eye view you see Painswick down below, and thenceforward go
swashing away steeply, some three miles, down into the crowded
cloth-weaving town of Stroud, where most things are prosperous and
commonplace, and only the “Royal George Hotel” attracts attention, less
for its own sake than by reason of the lion and unicorn over its portico:
the lion very golden and very fierce, apparently in the act of coming down
to make a meal of some temerarious guest; the unicorn more than usually
milk-white and mild-mannered.
[Illustration: A DESERTED INN: THE “SWAN,” AT FERRYBRIDGE.]
Beyond Nailsworth begin the hills again, and the loneliness intensifies
after passing the admirably-named Tiltups End. “How well the name figures
the gradient!” thinks the cyclist who comes this way and pauses, after
walking two miles up hill, to regain his breath. He has here come to the
very ideal of what we learned at school to be an “elevated plateau, or
table-land”; and a plaguy ill-favoured, inhospitable place it is, too, yet
not without a certain grim, hard-featured interest in its starveling
acres, its stone-walled, hedgeless fields, and distant spinneys. It is
interesting, if only serving to show that to our grandfathers, who
perforce fared this way before railways, their faring was not all jam. Nor
is it so to the modern tourist who--_experto crede_--faces a buffeting
head-wind in an inclement April, and encounters along these weary miles a
succession of snow-blizzards and hail-showers: all in the pursuit of
knowledge at first-hand. The way avoids all towns and villages, and all
wayfarers who can shift to do so avoid this way; and you who must trace it
have but occasional cottages, often empty and ruinous, or a lonely
prehistoric sepulchral barrow or so for company--and they are not
hilarious companions. Your only society is that rarely failing friend and
comforter--your map, and here even the map is lacking in solace, for when
it ceases to trace a merely empty road, it does so chiefly to chronicle
such depressing names as “Starveall,” an uncomplimentary sidelight on the
poor land where neither farmers can live nor beasts graze; or others as
mysterious as “Petty France,” a hamlet with two large houses that once
were inns. “Cold Ashton,” too, is a name that excellently figures the
circumstances of the route. Even modern portents have a ghastliness all
their own, as when, noticing two gigantic, smoke-and-steam-spouting
ventilators, you realise that you are passing over the long Sodbury tunnel
of the new “South Wales Direct” branch of the Great Western Railway.
Beyond this, in a wooded hollow at the cross-roads respectively to
Chipping Sodbury and Chippenham, you come past the wholly deserted
“Plough” inn to the half-deserted, rambling old coaching-and posting-inn
of “Cross Hands,” where a mysterious sign, unexplainable by the innkeeper,
hangs out, exhibiting two hands crossed, with squabby spatulate fingers,
and the inscription “Caius Marius Imperator B.C. 102 Concordia Militum.”
What it all means apparently passes the wit of man, or at any rate of
local man, to discover.
Passing the solitudes of Dodington and Dirham parks, with the forbidding,
heavy, mausoleum-like stone lodges the old squires loved to erect as
outposts to their demesnes, and encountering a toll-house or so, the road
at last, three miles from Bath, dips suddenly down. You see, from this
eyrie, the smoke of Bath, the roofs of it and the pinnacles of its Abbey
Church, as it were in the bottom of a cup, and, ceasing your labour of
pedalling, you spill over the rim, into the very streets, feeling like a
pilgrim not merely from Gloucester, but from all the world.
Notable among the inns retired from business is the little “Raven” at
Hook, on the Exeter Road, before you come to Basingstoke. It ceased in
1903 to be an inn, and the building has since been restored and converted
into a private residence styled the “Old Raven House.” Built in 1653, of
sound oak framing, filled with brick-nogging in herring-bone pattern, it
has been suffered to retain all its old-world features of construction,
and thus remains an interesting specimen of seventeenth-century builders’
work.
[Illustration: THE OLD “RAVEN,” HOOK.]
But it is on quite another count that the “Raven” demands notice here. It
was the wayside inn at which the infamous “Jack the Painter,” the
incendiary of Portsmouth Dockyard, stayed on the way to accomplish his
evil purpose.
James Hill, a Scotsman, and a painter by trade, went under the assumed
names of Hind and John Aitkin. Visiting America, he there acquired a
maniacal hatred for England, and returned with the design of setting fire
to all our great dockyards, and thus crippling our resources against the
foreign foe. On December 7th, 1776, he caused a fire at Portsmouth
Dockyard that wrought damage to the extent of £60,000. Arrested at Odiham
on February 7th, 1777, he was very speedily brought to trial at
Winchester, and executed on March 10th, being afterwards gibbeted, a good
deal higher than Haman, at Blockhouse Beach, from the mizzen-mast of the
_Arethusa_, especially set up there for the purpose, 64½ feet high. One of
the choicest and most thrilful exhibits at the Naval Exhibition of 1891 at
Chelsea was a tobacco-stopper made out of a mummified finger of this
infernal rascal.
The derelict inns of the Exeter Road are not so numerous, but a striking
example is found at West Allington, outside Bridport, where the old
“Hearts of Oak” stands forlorn, a small portion of it in private
occupation and a long range of stables and wayside smithy gradually
becoming ruinous and overgrown with ivy. The old lamp remains over the
door of the inn, and in it, typical of this picture of ruin, the sparrow
has built her nest.
The most singular instance of an inn retired from business must surely be
that of the “Bell” at Dale, near Derby, but more singular still is the
circumstance of its ever having become a public-house, for the building
was once actually the guest-house of Dale Abbey. Since it ceased to be a
village ale-house, some seventy-six years ago, it has become a farm.
[Illustration: THE “HEARTS OF OAK,” NEAR BRIDPORT.]
The illustration shows the extraordinary features of the place: on the
right-hand the farmhouse portion, which seems, by the evidence of some
carving on the gable, to have been partly rebuilt in 1651, and on the left
the parish church, surmounted by an eccentric belfry, greatly resembling a
dovecote. The interior of this extraordinary and exceedingly diminutive
church--one of the smallest in England--is a close-packed mass of
timbering and old-fashioned, high, box-like Georgian pews. A little
churchyard surrounds church and farmhouse, and in the background are the
tree-covered hills that completely enclose this well-named village of
“Dale,” an agricultural outpost of Derbyshire, on the very edge of the
coal-mining and ironworks districts of Nottinghamshire.
Should the ancient hermit, whose picturesquely situated, but damp, cave on
the hillside used to be shown to visitors, be ever suffered in spirit to
return to his rheumaticky cell, I think he would find the scenery of Dale
much the same as of old, but from his eyrie he would perceive a strange
thing: a gigantic cone-shaped mountain in the near neighbourhood, with
spouts and tongues of fire flickering at its crest: a thing that fully
realises the idea of a volcano. This is the immense slag-heap of the
ironworks at Stanton-by-Dale, impressive even to the modern beholder.
Of Dale Abbey itself, few fragments are left: only the tall gable
containing the east window standing up gaunt and empty in a meadow, and
sundry stone walls of cottages and outhouses, revealing that once proud
house.
The “Falcon” at Bidford, near Stratford-on-Avon, associated with
Shakespeare, is now a private house, and the once busy rural “Windmill”
inn at North Cheriton, on the cross-country coach-road between Blandford
and Wincanton, retired from business forty years ago. It is remarkable for
having attached to it a tennis-court, originally designed for the
entertainment of customers in general and of coach-passengers in
particular. Waiting there for the branch-coach, travellers whiled away the
weary hours in playing the old English game of tennis.
[Illustration: THE “BELL” INN, DALE ABBEY.]
Perhaps the finest of the inns that are inns no more was the famous
“Castle” inn at Marlborough. It was certainly the finest hostelry on the
Bath Road, as the inquisitive in such things may yet see by exploring the
older building of Marlborough College. For that was the aristocratic
“Castle” until 1841, when the Great Western Railway was opened to Bath and
Bristol, and so knocked the bottom out of all the coaching and the
licensed-victualling business between London and those places.
[Illustration: THE “WINDMILL,” NORTH CHERITON.]
I have termed the “Castle” ‘aristocratic,’ and not without due reason. The
site was originally occupied by the great castle of Marlborough, whose
origin itself goes back to the remotenesses and vaguenesses of early
British times, before history began to be. The great prehistoric mound
that (now covered with trees) still darkens the very windows of the modern
college buildings was first selected by the savage British as the site of
a fortress, and is in fact the “bergh” that figures as “borough” in the
second half of the place-name. From the earliest times the Mound was
regarded with awe and reverence, and was the centre of the wild legends
that made Marlborough “Merleberg” or “Merlin’s town”: home of the great
magician of Arthurian legend. Those legends had never any foundation in
fact, and even the otherwise credulous antiquaries of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries dismiss them as ridiculous, but the crest
surmounting the town arms still represents the Mound, and a Latin motto
dedicatory to “the bones of the wise Merlin” accompanies it.
The mediæval castle of Marlborough that arose at the foot of this early
stronghold gave place to a splendid mansion built by Francis, Lord
Seymour, in time for the reception of Charles the Second, who halted here
on one of his progresses to the West. This was partly rebuilt and greatly
enlarged in the time of William the Third, and then assumed very much the
appearance still worn by the main building of the present College. In or
about 1740 the great mansion became the residence of Lady Hertford, under
whose rule the grounds were planted with formal groves of limes and set
about with yews trimmed into fantastic shapes, and further adorned with
terrace-walks and grottoes, intended to be romantic. She converted the
spot into a modish Arcadia, after the ideals of her time; and fashionables
posed and postured there in the guise of Watteau nymphs or old Chelsea
china-ware shepherds and shepherdesses, and imagined they were being rural
and living the Simple Life when, in fact, they were being most artificial.
The real Wiltshire peasantry, the true flesh-and-blood shepherds and
shepherdesses of the surrounding wind-swept downs, who lived hardly upon
rye bread and dressed in russet and homespun woollens, looked with
astonishment, as well they might, upon such folk, and were not unnaturally
amazed when they saw fine ladies with short skirts, silken stockings and
high-heeled shoes, carrying dainty shepherds’ crooks tied with
cherry-coloured ribbons, leading pet lambs combed and curled and scented,
and decorated with satin rosettes. Those Little Bo-Peeps and their
cavaliers, dressed out in equally fine feathers, were visions quite
outside their notions of sheep-tending.
Here my lady entertained great literary folk, among them Thomson of _The
Seasons_, and here, in one of the sacred Arcadian grottoes, he and my lord
were found drunk, and Thomson thereafter lost favour; was, in fact, thrust
forth in haste and with contumely. This, my brethren, it is to love punch
too well!
Something of my lady’s artificial pleasance still survives, although
greatly changed, in the lawns and the trees, now grown very reverend, upon
which the south front of the old mansion looks; but in some eleven years
after her time, when the property came to the Dukes of Northumberland, the
building was leased to a Mr. Cotterell, an innkeeper, who in 1751 opened
what had until then been “Seymour House” as a first-class hostelry, under
the style and title of the “Castle” inn. In that year Lady Vere tells how
she lay “at the Castle Inn, opened a fortnight since,” and describing it
as a “prodigious large house,” grows indignant at the Duke of
Northumberland putting it to such debased uses, and selling many good old
pictures to the landlord.
Cotterell apparently left the “Castle” almost as soon as he had entered,
for we find another landlord, in the following year, advertising as
follows in _The Salisbury Journal_ of August 17th, 1752:
I beg leave to inform the public that I have fitted up the Castle at
Marlborough in the most genteel and commodious manner and opened it as
an inn where the nobility and gentry may depend on the best
accommodation and treatment, the favour of whose company will always
be gratefully acknowledged by their most obedient servant George
Smith, late of the Artillery Ground. Neat postchaises.
[Illustration: THE “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.]
“The quality” loved to linger here on their way to or from “the Bath,” for
the inn, with its pictures, much of its old furniture, and its splendid
cuisine, was more like a private house than a house of public
entertainment. Every one who was any one, and could afford the luxury of
the gout and the inevitable subsequent cure of “the Bath,” stayed at the
“Castle” on the way to or from their cure: and there was scarce an
eighteenth-century name of note whose owner did not inscribe it in the
Visitors’ Book of this establishment. Horace Walpole, curiously examining
the winding walks the Arcadian Lady Hertford had caused to be made
spirally up the sides of the poor old Mound; Chesterfield, meditating
polite ways of going to the devil; in short, every great name of that
great, but very material, time. Greater than all others was the elder
Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of his greatness and importance he was not only
himself adequately aware, but was determined at all costs that others,
too, should be fully informed of it. It was in 1762, travelling to London,
that he came this way, suffering torments from the gout that all the
waters of Bath had failed to cure, and roaring with apprehension whenever
a fly buzzed too near his inflamed toes. He was either in no haste to
reach home, or else his gout was too severe to prevent him being moved,
for he remained for many weeks at the “Castle.” That prolonged stay seems,
however, to have been premeditated, for he made it a condition of his
staying that the entire staff of the inn should be clothed in his livery,
and that he should have the whole place at his own disposal. That was
exclusiveness, if you like, and the modern traveller who secures a
first-class compartment wholly to himself cuts a very poor, ineffectual
figure beside the intolerance of company shown by the great statesman. The
proprietor of the “Castle” must have required a large sum, thus to close
his house to other custom for so long a time, and to possibly offend more
regular patrons. In fact, the fortunes of the “Castle” as an inn ebbed and
flowed alarmingly even before the coaching age and coaching inns were
threatened with extinction by railways. Early in the ’20’s, the innkeeper
was Thomas Cooper, who found the undertaking of maintaining it too much
for him, and so removed to Thatcham, where he became proprietor of the
“Cooper Company” coaches. Cooper, however, was not a fortunate man, and
coaching eventually landed him in the Bankruptcy Court. He lived his last
years as the first station-master at the Richmond station of the London
and South-Western Railway.
In 1842, when the road, as an institution, was at an end, the “Castle” was
without a tenant, for no one was mad enough to entertain the thought of
taking a new lease of it as an inn, and the house was much too large to be
easily let for private occupation. At that time a site, and if possible a
suitable building also, were being sought by a number of influential
persons for the purpose of founding a cheap school for the sons of the
clergy: and here was discovered the very place to fit their ideal. The
neighbourhood was rural and select, and was so far removed from any
disturbing influence that the nearest railway-station was a dozen miles
away, at Swindon: the site was extensive and the building large, handsome,
and convenient. Here, accordingly, what is now Marlborough College was
opened, with two hundred boys, in August, 1843.
Many changes have taken place since then. The original red-brick mansion,
designed by Inigo Jones or by his son-in-law, Webb, stands yet, but is
neighboured by many new blocks of scholastic buildings, and the
enormously large courtyard which in the old days looked upon the Bath
Road, and was a place of evolution for post-chaises and coaches, is
planted with an avenue, down whose leafy alley you see the striking
pillared entrance of what was successively mansion and inn. Inside they
show you what was once the bar, a darkling little cubicle of a place, now
used as a masters’ lavatory, and a noble oak staircase of astonishingly
substantial proportions, together with a number of fine rooms.
[Illustration: GARDEN FRONT, “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.]
It was at the “excellent inn at Chapel House,” on the read to Worcester
and Lichfield, that Dr. Johnson, in 1776, was led by the comfort of his
surroundings to hold forth to Boswell upon “the felicity of England in its
taverns and inns”; triumphing over the French for not having in any
perfection the tavern life.
The occasion was one well calculated to arouse enthusiasm for the
well-known comforts of the old-time English hostelry. He had come, with
the faithful Boswell, by post-chaise from Oxford, on the way to
Birmingham; it was the inclement season of spring, the way was long, and
the wind, blowing across the bleak Oxfordshire downs, was cold. Welcome,
then, the blazing fire of the “Shakespeare’s Head”--for that was the real
name of the house--and doubly welcome that dinner for which they had
halted. Can we wonder that the worthy Doctor was eloquent? I think not.
“There is no private house,” said he, “in which people can enjoy
themselves so well as in a capital tavern.... No man but a very impudent
dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it
were his own; whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from
anxiety. You are sure you are welcome; and the more noise you make, the
more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you
are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do, who
are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they
please. No, sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by
which so much happiness is provided as by a good tavern or inn.”
The “Chapel House” inn took its name from a wayside chapel formerly
standing here, anciently belonging to the neighbouring Priory of Cold
Norton. At a later period, when education began to spread and the roads
were travelled by scholars and others on their way to and from Oxford,
Brasenose College took over the conduct of it, both as an oratory and a
guest-house for the succour of wayfarers along these then unenclosed and
absolutely lonely downs. A priest was maintained here until 1547.
Afterwards the site seems to have been occupied by a mansion built by
William Fitzalan, of Over Norton: a house that gave place in its turn to
the inn.
Few ever knew “Chapel House” inn by its real name. It doubtless obtained
the title from surviving traditions of Shakespeare having partaken of the
hospitality of the old guest-house, on his journeys between
Stratford-on-Avon and London. It is, indeed, singular how such traditions
survive in this neighbourhood, the “Crown” at Oxford being traditionally
the successor of the house where Shakespeare usually inned, and an old
Elizabethan mansion at Grendon Underwood, formerly an inn, a halting-place
when he chose another route and went by that village and Aylesbury to
London.
But guests at “Chapel House” no more knew the inn as the “Shakespeare’s
Head” than travellers on the Exeter Road would have recognised
“Winterslow Hut” by its proper title of the “Pheasant.” And now the great
coaching- and posting-inn has gone the way of all those other inns and
taverns where Doctor Johnson--that greatest of Samuels since the
patriarch--genuinely dined and supped and drank. Sad it is to think that
all the festive shrines frequented by him to whom a tavern chair was “the
throne of human felicity” have disappeared, and that only inns that were
contemporary with him, and _would_ have Johnsonian associations had he
ever entered them, survive to trade on that slender thread of
might-have-been.
As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming
of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were,
into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of
furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew
silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows
in webs; the very rats, with tears in their eyes for the vanished days of
plenteous corn and offal, were reduced to eating one another, and the last
representative died of starvation, with “sorrow’s crown of sorrow”--which
we know to be the remembrance of happier days--embittering his last
moments.
Why did not some student of social changes record intimately the last
lingering days of the “Chapel House” inn: why did no artist make a
pictorial record of it for us? It decayed, just as, centuries earlier, the
“Chapel” had done from which its name derived, stone by stone and brick
by brick, and there was none to record, in literature or in art, the going
of it. All we know is that it ceased in 1850 to be an inn, that the
remains of the house long stood untenanted; that the dependent buildings
became labourers’ cottages, and that the stables have utterly vanished.
[Illustration: “CHAPEL HOUSE” INN.]
What is “Chapel House” to-day? You come along the lonely road, across the
ridge of the downs, from Oxford, and find, just short of the cross-roads
to Stratford-on-Avon and Birmingham, to Banbury or Cirencester, past where
a milestone says “Oxford 18, Stratford-on-Avon 21, and Birmingham 43
miles,” a group of some ten stone-built cottages, five on either side of
the road, with the remains of the inn itself on the right, partly screened
from observation by modern shrubberies. A porticoed doorway is pointed out
as the former entrance to the tap, and the present orchard in the rear is
shown as the site of the greater part of the inn, once extending over that
ground in an L-shape. The house is now in use as a kind of country
boarding-house, where “paying-guests,” who come for the quiet and the
keen, bracing air of these heights, are received.
For the quietude of the place! How cynical a reverse of fortune, that the
busiest spot on the London, Oxford and Birmingham Road, where sixty
coaches rolled by daily, and where innumerable post-chaises changed
horses, should sink thus into slumber! The thought of such a change would,
seventy years ago, have been inconceivable; just as unthinkable as that
Clapham Junction of to-day should ever become a rural spot for picnics and
the plucking of primroses.
A curious feature in the story of “Chapel House” inn is that a small
portion of the house has in recent times been rebuilt, for the better
accommodation of present visitors. In the course of putting in the
foundations some relics of the old chapel were unearthed, in the shape of
stone coffins, bones, a silver crucifix, and some beads.
When evening draws in and the last pallid light in the sky glints on the
old casements of the wayside cottages of “Chapel House,” or in the dark
avenue, the spot wears a solemn air, and seems to exhale Romance.
London inns retired from business are, as may be supposed, comparatively
few. A curious example is to be found under the shadow of St. Alban,
Holborn, in “White Hart” Yard, between Gray’s Inn Road and Brooke Street.
It is the last fragment of an old galleried building, presumably once the
“White Hart,” but now partly occupied by a dairyman and a maker of
packing-cases. Local history is silent as to the story of the place.
Of all converted inns, there is probably no stranger case than that of the
“Edinburgh Castle.” It is not old, nor was it really and truly, in the
hearty, hospitable sense, an inn, although the landlord doubtless was
included in the all-comprising and often deceptive category of “licensed
victuallers,” who very generally do not victual you. The “Edinburgh
Castle” was, in short, a great flaring London gin-palace in Limehouse. It
has been described by a journalist addicted above his fellows to
superlatives--the equivalent in literature of nips of brandy “neat”--as
“one of the flashiest, most flaunting, sin-soaked dens in London,” which
is just so much nonsense. It _was_, however, a public-house on a large
scale, and did a big trade. It was ornate, in the vulgar, gilded
public-house way, and not what can properly be styled a “den.”
[Illustration: “WHITE HART” YARD.]
Those curious in conversions may easily see to-day what the “Edinburgh
Castle” was like, for its outward look is unchanged, and many an old
frequenter, come back from foreign climes--or perhaps only from H.M.
Prison on Dartmoor--shoulders his way in at the old familiar doors and
calls for his “four ’arf,” or his “two o’ brandy,” before he becomes aware
of the essential change that has come over the place. No more booze does
he get at the “Edinburgh Castle”: only coffee, tea, or the like--which do
not come under that head. The “Edinburgh Castle” has indeed been acquired
by the Barnardo Homes for the “People’s Mission Church.”
There are excuses for the mistake often made by old patrons, for the idea
of the management is to entice them in, in the hope of reforming them. But
if those old customers were at all observant they would at once perceive,
and make due deductions from, the odd change in the sign that still, as of
yore, is upheld on its old-fashioned post by the kerbstone. Instead of
proclaiming that So-and-So’s Fine Ales are sold at the “Edinburgh Castle,”
it now reads: “No drunkards shall inherit the kingdom of God.”
The sham mediævalism of this castellated house is a mean affair of grey
plaster, but the interior of the great building is surprisingly well
appointed. Mission services alternate with concerts and entertainments for
the people and drill-exercises for the Barnardo boys. The ex-public-house
is, in fact, whatever it may look like from without, a centre whence a
measure of sweetness and light is dispensed in an intellectually starved
purlieu.
CHAPTER IV
INNS WITH RELICS AND CURIOSITIES
Just as most cathedrals, and many ancient churches, are in these days
unconsciously looked upon by antiquaries rather as museums than as places
of worship, so many ancient inns attract the tourist and the artist less
as places for rest and refreshment than subjects for the pencil, the
brush, or the camera; or as houses where relics, curious or beautiful,
remain, of bygone people, or other times. Happy the traveller, with a warm
corner in his heart for such things, who comes at the close of day to a
house historic or well stored with such links that connect us with the
past.
There are, indeed, even in these days, when many a house has been
ransacked of its interesting features, to furnish museums and private
collections, still a goodly number of inns containing curious relics, old
panelling, and ancient furniture. Still, for example, at the “Green
Dragon,” Combe St. Nicholas, two miles from Chard, the fifteenth-century
carved oak settle of pronounced ecclesiastical character remains in the
tap-room, and beery rustics continue to this day to use it, even as did
their remote ancestors, the Colin Clouts of over four hundred years ago;
while at Ipswich, in the “Neptune” inn that was once a private mansion
before it entered public life, the fine Tudor dresser, or sideboard, with
elaborately carved Renaissance canopy and “linen-fold” panelling, is yet
left, despite the persuasions and the long purses of would-be purchasers.
There are two evil fates constantly threatening the artistic work of our
forbears: the one the unappreciative neglect that threatens its very
existence, and the other the appreciation that, only too appreciative,
tears it from its accustomed place, to be the apple of some collector’s
jealous eye. To filch from old inn or manor-house, down on its luck, the
carved overmantels or panelling built into the place is as mean and
despicable a thing as to sneak the coppers out of a blind beggar’s tin
mug--nay, almost as sacrilegious as to purloin the contents of the
offertory-bag; but it is not commonly so regarded. For example, the
“Tankard” tavern at Ipswich, once the town mansion of no less a person
than Sir Anthony Wingfield, Captain of the Guard to Henry the Eighth,
possessed a grandly panelled room with a highly elaborate chimney-piece
representing the Judgment of Paris; but in 1843 the whole was taken down
and re-erected at the country house of the Cobbolds.
Still, fortunately, at the “Trevelyan Arms,” Barnstaple, the fine old
plaster fireplace remains, together with a good example at the “Three
Tuns,” Bideford; while doubtless numerous other instances will be borne
in mind by readers of these pages.
[Illustration: A “FENNY POPPER.”]
We deal, however, more largely here with relics of a more easily removable
kind, such, for example, as those odd pieces of miniature ordnance, the
“Fenny Poppers,” formerly kept at the “Bull,” Fenny Stratford, but now
withdrawn within the last year from active service, to be found reclining,
in company with the churchyard grass-mower and a gas-meter, in a cupboard
within the tower of the church. The “Fenny Poppers,” six in number,
closely resemble in size and shape so many old-fashioned jugs or tankards.
They are of cast-iron, about ten inches in length, and furnished with
handles, and were presented to the town of Fenny Stratford in 1726 by
Browne Willis, a once-noted antiquary, who rebuilt the church and
dedicated it to St. Martin, in memory of his father, who was born in St.
Martin’s Lane and died on St. Martin’s Day. These “cannon” were to be
fired annually on that day, and to be followed by morning service in the
church and evening festivities at the “Bull”--a custom still duly
honoured, with the difference that this ancient park of artillery has
recently been replaced by two small cannon, kept at the vicarage.
[Illustration: THE “BELL,” WOODBRIDGE.]
How far one of the old-fashioned hay and straw weighing-machines, once
common in East Anglia, but now growing scarce, may be reckoned a curiosity
must be left to individual taste and fancy; but there can be no difference
of opinion as to the picturesque nature of these antique contrivances. The
example illustrated here gives an additionally pictorial quality to the
“Bell” inn and to the view down the long street at Woodbridge. Cartloads
of hay and straw, driven under these machines, were lifted bodily by
means of the chains attached to them, and weighed by means of the lever
with the sliding weight, seen projecting over the road. The innate
artistry of the old craftsmen in wrought-iron is noticeable even here, in
this business-like contrivance; for you see clearly how the man who
wrought the projecting arm was not content to fashion it merely to a
commonplace end, but must needs, to satisfy his own æsthetic feeling,
finish it off with little quirks and twirls that still, coming boldly as
they do against the sky-line, gladden the heart of the illustrator.
[Illustration: THE “RED LION,” MARTLESHAM.]
There was, until recent years, a similar machine attached to the “King’s
Head” inn, at the entrance to Great Yarmouth, and there still exists one
at King’s Lynn and another at Soham.
A rustic East Anglian inn that is alike beautiful in itself and in its
tree-enshrouded setting, is the “Red Lion,” Martlesham. It possesses the
additional claim to notice of its red lion sign being no less interesting
a relic than the figurehead of one of the Hollanders’ ships that took part
in the battle of Sole Bay, fought between Dutch and English, March 28th,
1672, off Southwold. He is a lion of a semi-heraldic type supporting a
shield, and maintained carefully in a vermilion post-office hue.
That well-known commercial hotel at Burton-on-Trent, styled nowadays the
“Queen’s Hotel,” but formerly the “Three Queens,” from an earlier house on
the site having been visited at different times by Queen Elizabeth, Mary,
Queen of Scots, and Queen Adelaide, still displays in its hall the cloak
worn by the Queen of Scots’ coachman, probably during the time of her
captivity at Tutbury Castle, near by. Why he should have left it behind is
not stated; but as the garment--an Inverness cape of very thin
material--is figured all over with the particularly vivid and variegated
Stuart tartan--all scarlet, blue, and green--the conjecture may be
hazarded that he was ashamed any longer to wear such a strikingly
conspicuous article of attire in a country where it probably attracted the
undesirable attentions of rude boys and other people who, most likely,
took him for some mountebank, and wanted to know when the performance
began.
[Illustration: “DEAN SWIFT’S CHAIR,” TOWCESTER.]
The Holyhead Road, rich in memories of Dean Swift travelling to and from
Ireland, has, in the “Talbot” inn at Towcester, a house associated with
him. The “Talbot,” the property of the Sponne Charity since 1440, was sold
about 1895 to a firm of brewers, and a chair, traditionally said to have
been used by the Dean, was at the same time removed to the Town Hall,
where, in the offices of the solicitor to the feoffees of the Charity, it
remains. It will be observed that the chair was of a considerable age,
even in Swift’s time. An ancient fragment of coloured glass, displaying
the arms of William Sponne, remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot,”
and on a pane of another may be seen scratched the words “Gilbert Gurney,”
presumably the handiwork of Theodore Hook.
The “Bear,” at Esher, properly the “Black Bear,” is an old coaching- and
posting-house. Still you see, on the parapet, the effigies of two bears,
squatting on their rumps and stroking their stomachs in a manner strongly
suggestive of repletion or indigestion. Sometimes the pilgrim of the roads
finds them painted white, and on other occasions--in defiance of natural
history--they have become pink; all according to the taste and fancy of
the landlord for the time being. Whoever, that was not suffering from
delirium tremens, saw such a thing as a pink bear?
Among other, and less interesting, relics in the entrance-hall of this
house, the visitor’s attention is at once struck by a glass case
containing a huge and clumsy pair of jack-boots closely resembling the
type of foot-gear worn by Marlborough and his troopers in the long ago, at
Blenheim, Ramillies, and Malplaquet. They are not, however, of so great an
age as that, nor associated with warlike campaigns, for they were worn by
the post-boy who, in 1848, drove Louis Philippe, the fugitive King of the
French, to his refuge at neighbouring Claremont.
[Illustration: BOOTS AT THE “BEAR,” ESHER.]
Certainly unique is the “George and Dragon” inn at Dragon’s Green, between
Shipley and Horsham, in Sussex. Dragon’s Green (which doubtless derives
its name from the inn-sign) is among the tiniest of hamlets, and few are
those wayfarers who find their way to it, unless indeed they have any
particular business there. In fact, so out of the world is it that those
who inquire for Dragon’s Green, even at Horsham, are like to ask many
people before they happen upon any one who has ever heard of the place.
But who should have any business, save curiosity, at Dragon’s Green, it is
somewhat difficult to conceive. Since 1893, however, it has been the
bourne of those curiosity-mongers who have by chance heard of the
tombstone erected by the roadside there, in the front garden of the inn.
To the stranger who has never heard of this oddity, and comes unexpectedly
upon it, the sight of a solemn white marble cross in a place so generally
associated with conviviality is nothing less than startling. The epitaph
upon it reads:
IN LOVING MEMORY OF
WALTER,
THE “ALBINO” SON OF
ALFRED AND CHARLOTTE BUDD,
born Feby. 12th, 1867, died Feby. 18th, 1893.
_May God forgive those who forgot their duty
to him who was just and afflicted._
_This Cross was erected on the Grave in
Shipley Churchyard, and Removed by order of_
H. GORHAM (Vicar).
_Two Globe Wreaths placed on the Grave
by Friends, and after being there over
Two Years were Removed by_
E. ARKLE, Following (Vicar).
It seems, then, that this is to the memory of a son of the innkeeper, who
committed suicide by drowning, owing to being worried in some local
dispute. The Vicar of Shipley appears to have considered some portion of
the epitaph to be a reflection upon himself, and consequently, in that
Czar-like spirit of autocracy not infrequent in rural clergymen, ordered
its removal. The cross was thereupon re-erected here, and is so
conspicuous an object, and is attaining such notoriety, that the vicar has
probably long since regretted his not allowing it to remain in its
original obscurity. A great many efforts have been made by local magnates
of one kind and another to secure its removal from this situation, and the
innkeeper’s brewers even have been approached for this purpose, but as
the innkeeper happens to be also the freeholder, and the house
consequently not a “tied” one, the requisite leverage is not obtainable.
Although the house looks so modern when viewed from the outside,
acquaintance with its quaint parlour reveals the fact that one of the
oaken beams is dated 1577, and that the old fireback in the capacious
ingle-nook was cast in the year 1622.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” DRAGON’S GREEN.]
The “White Bull” at the little Lancashire “town” of Ribchester, which
still clings stoutly to the name of town, although it is properly a
village, since its inhabitants number but 1,265, has some ancient relics
in the shape of Roman columns, now used to support the porch and a
projecting wing of the building. They are four in number, of a debased
Doric character, and between six and seven feet high. They are said to be
remains of the temple of Minerva, once standing in the Roman city of
_Coccium_ or _Bremetennacum_ that once stood here, and were fished out of
the river Ribble that now gives a name to Ribchester.
[Illustration: THE “WHITE BULL,” RIBCHESTER.]
The effigy of the White Bull himself, that projects boldly from the front
of the house, is a curiosity in its own way, and more nearly resembles the
not very meaty breed of cattle found in toy Noah’s Arks, than anything
that grazes in modern meadows.
From Lancashire to Yorkshire, in quest of inns, we come to the cathedral
city of Ripon, and the “Unicorn” Hotel.
[Illustration: BOOTS OF THE “UNICORN,” RIPON.]
No inn could have possessed a greater curiosity than grotesque Tom Crudd,
who for many years was “Boots” at the “Unicorn,” and by his sheer physical
peculiarities has achieved a kind of eccentric fame. “Old Boots,” as he
was familiarly known by many who never learned his real name, flourished
from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, and lies, now that all
his boot-cleaning is done, somewhere in the Minster yard.
This extraordinary person was endowed by nature with a nose and chin so
enormously long, and so lovingly tending to embrace one another, that at
length he acquired the power of holding a piece of money between them, and
so turned his deformity to practical and commercial account. It was a
part of his duty to wait upon travellers arriving at the inn, to assist
them in taking off their boots. He usually introduced himself, as in the
picture, with a pair of slippers in one hand, and a boot-jack in the
other, and we are told that the company were generally so diverted by his
appearance that they would frequently give him a piece of money, on
condition that he held it between his nose and chin.
Other times, other tastes in amusement, and it is scarce possible that
modern travellers would relish such an exhibition, even if provided
gratis.
The “Castle Hotel” at Conway has an interesting and historic object, in
the shape of an authentic contemporary portrait of Dame Joan Penderel,
mother of the Penderel brothers of Boscobel, who secreted Charles the
Second in the “Royal Oak.” It came to the hotel as a bequest to the
landlord, from a friend who in his turn had received it from a man who had
bought it among a number of household odds and ends belonging to two old
maiden ladies of Broseley, connections of the Penderel family. It was
then, to all appearance, nothing more than a dirty old stretched canvas
that had long been used as “blower” to a kitchen fire; but, on being
cleaned, was found to be a portrait of a woman wearing an old-fashioned
steeple-crowned hat, and holding in her hand a rose. The portrait would
never have been identified, but fortunately it was inscribed “Dame
Pendrell, 1662.”
[Illustration: THE “RED LION,” CHISWICK.]
A curious relic is to be seen to this day, chained securely to the
doorway of the “Red Lion” inn at Chiswick. There are, in effect, two
Chiswicks: the one the Chiswick of the Chiswick High Road, where the
electric tramcars run, and the other the original waterside village in a
bend of the river: a village of which all these portents of the main road
are merely offshoots. In these latter days the riverside Chiswick is
becoming more or less of a foul slum, but still, by the old parish church
and the famous Mall--that roadway running alongside the river--there are
old and stately houses, and quaint corners. It is here you find the “Red
Lion”; not an ancient inn, nor yet precisely a new: a something between
waterside tavern and public-house. It has a balcony looking out upon the
broad river, and it also displays--as do many other waterside inns--drags
and lifebelts, the rather grim reminders of waterside dangers. At hand is
Chiswick Eyot, an island densely covered with osier-beds; and hay- and
brick-barges wallow at all angles in the foreshore mud. The relic so
jealously chained in the doorway of the “Red Lion” is a huge whetstone,
some eighteen inches long, inscribed: “I am the old Whetstone, and have
sharpned tools on this spot above 1000 years.” Marvellous!--but not true,
and you who look narrowly into it will discover that at some period an
additional “0” has been added to the original figure of 100, by some one
to whom the antiquity of merely one century was not sufficient. This is
readily discoverable by all who will take the trouble to observe that the
customary spacing between all the other words is missing between “1000”
and “years.”
The whetstone has, however, been here now considerably over a century. It
existed on this spot in the time of Hogarth, whose old residence is near
at hand; and at that time the inn, of which the present building is a
successor, bore the sign of the “White Bear and Whetstone.” The stone then
had a further inscription, long since rubbed away, “Whet without, wet
within.”
The whetstone is thus obviously in constant use. And who, think you,
chiefly use it? The mowers who cut the osiers of Chiswick Eyot. It was for
their convenience, in sharpening their scythes--and incidentally to ensure
that they “wetted their whistles” here--that the long-forgotten tapster
first placed the whetstone in his doorway.
Among inns with relics the “Widow’s Son” must undoubtedly be included.
Unfortunately it is by no means a picturesque inn, and is, in plain,
unlovely fact, an extremely commonplace, not to say pitifully mean and
ugly, plaster-faced public-house in squalid Devons Road, Bromley-by-Bow.
The history of the “Widow’s Son” is a matter of tradition, rather than of
sheer ascertainable fact. According to generally received accounts, the
present house, which may, by the look of it, have been built about 1860,
was erected upon the site of a cottage occupied by a widow whose only son
“went for a sailor.” Not only did he, against her wishes, take up the
hazardous trade of seafaring, but he must needs further tempt Fate by
sailing on a Friday, and, of all possible Fridays, a Good Friday! Such
perversity, in all old sailor-men’s opinions, could only lead to disaster;
it would be, in such circles, equivalent to committing suicide.
[Illustration: THE OLD WHETSTONE.]
The widow, however, expected the return of her rash son on the anniversary
of his departure, and put aside a “hot cross bun” for him. Good Friday
passed, and no familiar footstep came to the threshold, and the days,
weeks, and months succeeded one another until at last Easter came round
again. Hoping fondly against hope, the widow put aside another bun for the
wanderer: in vain. Year by year she maintained the custom; but the son lay
drowned somewhere “full fathom deep,” and the mother never again saw him
on earth.
In the fulness of time she died, and strangers came and were told the
story of that accumulated store of stale buns. And then the cottage was
demolished and the present house built, taking its name from this tale.
And ever since, with every recurrent Easter, a bun is added to the great
store that is by this time accumulated in the wire-netting hanging from
the ceiling of the otherwise commonplace bar. Then the story is told anew;
not with much apparent interest nor belief in the good faith of it; but
sentiment lurks in the heart, even though it refuse to be spoken, and the
flippant stranger is apt to find himself unexpectedly discouraged.
On Good Friday, 1906, the sixty-eighth annual bun, stamped with the date,
was duly added to the dried, smoke-begrimed and blackened collection.
[Illustration: HOT CROSS BUNS AT THE “WIDOW’S SON.”]
We must perhaps include among inns with relics those modern public-houses
whose owners, as a bid for custom, have established museums of more or
less importance on their premises. Among these the “Edinburgh Castle,” in
Mornington Road, Regent’s Park, is prominent, and boasts no fewer than
three eggs of the Great Auk, whose aggregate cost at auction was 620
guineas. They were, of course, all purchased at different times, for Great
Auk’s eggs do not come into the country, like the “new-laid” products of
the domestic fowls, by the gross. The Great Auk, in fact, is extinct, and
the eggs are exceedingly rare, as may be judged by the price they command.
“Great,” of course, is a relative term, and in this case a considerable
deal of misapprehension as to the size of the eggs originally existed in
the minds of many customers of the “Edinburgh Castle.” In especial, the
newspaper reports of how Mr. T. G. Middlebrook, the proprietor, had given
200 guineas for the third egg in his collection, excited the interest of a
cabman, who drove all the way from Charing Cross to see the marvel. When
he was shown, reposing in a plush-lined case, an egg not much larger than
that of a goose, his indignation was pathetic.
“Where is it?” he asked....
“Wot? _Thet?_ ’Corl thet a Great Hork’s Hegg? W’y, from wot they tole me,
I thort it was abaht the size of me bloomin’ keb!”
But they have no roc’s eggs, imported from the pages of the _Arabian
Nights_, at the “Edinburgh Castle.”
One of the most cherished items in the collection is what is described as
“Fagin’s Kitchen,” the interior of a thieves’ kitchen brought from an old
house on Saffron Hill, pulled down some years ago. You are shown “the
frying-pan in which Fagin cooked Oliver’s sausages,” and “Fagin’s Chair,”
together with an undoubted “jemmy” found under the flooring, and not
identified with any Old Master in the art of burglary.
Down in the Vale of Health, on Hampstead Heath, the pilgrim in search of
cooling drinks on dry and dusty public holidays may find a public-house
museum that cherishes “one of Dick Turpin’s pistols”; a pair of Dr.
Nansen’s glasses; a stuffed civet-cat; the helmet of one of the Russian
Imperial Guard, brought from the battlefields of the Crimea; and the
skull of a donkey said to have belonged to Nell Gwynne: a fine confused
assortment, surely!
More serious, and indeed, of some importance, is the collection of
preserved birds, beasts, fishes, and insects, originally founded by the
East London Entomological Society, shown at the “Bell and Mackerel” in
Mile End Road. The exhibition numbers 20,000 specimens in 500 separate
cases.
In the same road may be found the public-house called “The 101,”
containing an oil-painting of three quaint-looking persons, inscribed,
“These three men dranke in this house 101 pots of porter in one day, for a
wager.” The work of art is displayed in the bar, as an inducement to
others to follow the example set by those champions; but the age of heroes
is past.
CHAPTER V
TAVERN RHYMES AND INSCRIPTIONS
Beer has inspired many poets, and “jolly good ale and old” is part of a
rousing rhyme; but much of the verse associated with inns runs to the
hateful burden of “No Trust.” Thus, along one of the backwaters in Norwich
city there stands the “Gate House” inn, displaying the following:
The sun shone bright in the glorious sky,
When I found that my barrels were perfectly dry.
They were emptied by Trust; but he’s dead and gone home,
And I’ve used all my chalk to erect him a tomb.
A metrical version, you see, of that dreadful tale, “Poor Trust is dead.”
Another version of the same theme is found at the “Buck and Bell,” Long
Itchington, Warwickshire, in the lament:
Customers came and I did trust them,
Lost all my liquor and their custom.
To lose them both it grieved me sore;
Resolved I am to trust no more.
A little public-house poetry goes a very long way. It need not be of great
excellence to be highly appreciated, and, when approved, is very largely
repeated all over the country. There was once--a matter of twenty years
ago--a semi-rural inn, the “Robin Hood,” at Turnham Green, exhibiting a
picture-sign representing Robin Hood and Little John, clad duly in the
Lincoln green of the foresters and wearing feathered hats, whose like you
see nowadays only on the heads of factory girls holiday-making at
Hampstead and such-like places of public resort. This brave picture bore
the lines:
If Robin Hood is not at home,
Take a glass with Little John--
a couplet that most excellently illustrates the bluntness of the English
ear to that atrocity, a false rhyme.
The experienced traveller in the highways and byways of the land will
probably call to mind many repetitions of this sign. There is, for
instance, one in Cambridgeshire, in the village--or rather, nowadays, the
Cambridge suburb--of Cherry Hinton:
Ye gentlemen and archers good,
Come in and drink with Robin Hood.
If Robin Hood be not at home,
Then stay and sup with Little John.
But, although such examples may be numerous, they cannot rival that very
favourite sign, the “Gate,” with its sentiments dear to the heart of the
typical Bung, who wants your custom and your coin, rather than your
company:
This gate hangs well
And hinders none;
Refresh and pay
And travel on;
or, as an American might more tersely put it, “Gulp your drink and git!”
That, shorn of frills, is really the sentiment. It is not hospitable; it
is not kindly; it would be even unwise did those who read as they run
proceed to think as well.
[Illustration: THE “GATE” INN, DUNKIRK.]
To catalogue the many “Gate” signs would be a lengthy and an unprofitable
task. There must be quite a hundred of them. Two widely sundered houses
bearing the name, each picturesque in its own way, are illustrated here:
the one, a rustic wayside inn near Dunkirk, on the Dover Road; the other,
picturesque rather in its situation than in itself, nestling under the
great Castle Rock in the town of Nottingham. The Nottingham inn is a mere
tavern: a shabby enough building, and more curious than comfortable. Its
cellars, and the kitchen itself, are hewn out of the rock, the kitchen
being saved from reeking with damp only by having a roaring fire
continually maintained. The shape of the room is not unlike that of a
bottle, in which a shaft, pierced through the rock to the upper air,
represents the neck. This extraordinary apartment is said to have
formerly been an _oubliette_ dungeon of the Castle. An adjoining inn,
similarly situated, has the odd sign of the “Trip to Jerusalem,” with a
thirteenth-century date.
[Illustration: THE “GATE HANGS WELL,” NOTTINGHAM.]
The exiled Duke of _As You Like It_, who, in the Forest of Arden, found
moral maxims by the way, “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones,” and so forth, would scarcely have gone the length of
hostelries; but there are stranger things in the world than even
moralising exiles dream of, and among the strangest are the admonitory
inscriptions not uncommon upon inns, where one would rather look to find
exhortations to drink and be merry while you may. Among these the most
curious is a Latin inscription carved, with the date 1636, upon an oak
beam outside the older portion of that fine old inn, the “Four Crosses,”
at Hatherton, near Cannock:
Fleres si scires unum tua me’sem,
Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies;
or, Englished:
Thou would’st weep if thou knewest thy time to be one month: thou
laughest when perchance it may be not one day.
A little grim, too, is the jest upon the sign-board of the “Chequer’s” inn
at Slapestones, near Osmotherley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It
reads:
Be not in haste,
Come in and taste.
Ale to-morrow for nothing.
But “to-morrow never comes.”
The Slapestones inn is not remarkable on account of its architecture.
Indeed, with a box of toy bricks, as used in building operations conducted
in the nursery, you could readily contrive a likeness of it; but it has a
kind of local celebrity, both on account of the cakes baked upon its
old-fashioned hearth, and by reason of that fire itself, traditionally
said never to have been once quenched during the last 130 years. Moreover,
the spot is a favourite meet for the Bilsdale Hounds.
A former landlord of the inn at Croyde, near Ilfracombe, must have been a
humourist in his way, and probably had read _Pickwick_ before he composed
the following, which, like “Bill Stumps his Mark”--
+
BILST
UM
PSHI
S.M.
ARK
--is easily to be rendered into English:
Here’s to Pands Pen
Das Oci Al Hourin
Ha! R: M: Les Smir
Thand Funlet
Fri Ends Hipre:
Ign Be Ju!
Stand Kin
Dan Devils
Peak of No! ne.
The composition of this could have been no great tax on the tapster’s
brain.
More pleasing is the queerly spelled old notice displayed on the exterior
of the “Plough” at Ford, near Stow-on-the-Wold:
Ye weary travelers that pass by,
With dust & scorching sunbeams dry
Or be he numb’d with snow and frost
With having these bleak cotswolds crost
Step in and quaff my nut brown ale
Bright as rubys mild and stale
Twill make your laging trotters dance
As nimble as the suns of france
Then ye will own ye men of sense
That neare was better spent six pence.
The genuine old unstudied quaintness of it must, in the course of the
century and a half of its existence, have sent many scorched or
half-frozen travellers across Cotswold into the cosy parlour. Recently a
new and ornate wing has been added to the solitary wayside house, and the
poetic sign, sent up to London to be repaired, has come back, bravely
gilded.
Some very hard, gaunt facts are set forth on tavern signs; as on that of
the “Soldier’s Fortune,” at Kidderminster, where, beneath a picture of a
mutilated warrior, the passer-by may read,
A soldier’s fortune, I will tell you plain,
Is a wooden leg, or a golden chain.
This hero, however, is fully furnished with both.
When Peter Simple travelled down to Portsmouth for the first time, to join
his ship, he asked the coachman which was the best inn there, and
received for reply:
The Blue Postesses
Where the midshipmen leave their chestesses,
Call for tea and toastesses,
And sometimes forget to pay for their breakfastes.
The “Blue Posts” inn was burned down in 1870, but many who had known it
made a renewed acquaintance with the house in 1891, at the Chelsea Naval
Exhibition, where a reproduction attracted much attention. There are still
other “Blue Posts,” notably one in Cork Street, in the West End of London,
rebuilt a few years since. The sign is the survival of a custom as old as
Caxton, and probably much older, by which houses were often distinguished
by their colour. Caxton, advertising his books, let it be known that if
“any one, spiritual or temporal,” would purchase, he was to “come to
Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale”; and there was in the
neighbouring Peter Street a “Green Pales” in the seventeenth century.
The modern building of the “George and Dragon,” Great Budworth, Cheshire,
has this admonitory verse over its doorway, the production of Egerton
Warburton, the late squire of Arley Hall:
As St. George, in armed array,
Doth the Fiery Dragon slay,
So may’st thou, with might no less,
Slay that Dragon, Drunkenness,
a moral stanza that has its fellow in a couplet carved upon an old oak
beam over the door of the rebuilt “Thorn” inn at Appleton, in the same
county:
You may safely when sober sit under the thorn,
But if drunk overnight, it will prick you next morn.
A similar moral tendency used to be shown by the sign of the “Grenadier”
at Whitley, near Reading, in the verse:
This is the Whitley Grenadier,
A noted house of famous beer;
Stop, friend, and if you make a call,
Beware, and get not drunk withal,
Let moderation be your guide,
It answers well where’er ’tis tried,
Then use, and don’t abuse, strong beer,
And don’t forget the Grenadier.
It was probably when the inn became a “tied” house that this exhortation
to drink moderately disappeared. It will readily be understood that a
brewery company could have no sympathy with such an inducement to reduce
their returns.
A frank invitation to enter and take your fill, without any further
stipulation, is to be seen outside the picturesquely placed “Bee-hive” inn
at Eaumont Bridge, between Penrith and Ullswater; in the words painted
round a bee-hive:
Within this hive we’re all alive,
Good liquor makes us funny;
If you be dry, step in and try
The virtue of our honey.
The same sentiment prevails at the “Cheney Gate” inn, between
Macclesfield and Congleton, on whose sign you read:
Stay Traveller, thyself regale,
With spirits, or with nut-brown ale,
while
Once aground, but now afloat,
Walk in, boys, and wet your throat,
says the sign of the “Ship” at Brixham, South Devon.
The “Cat and Mutton” inn, near the Cat and Mutton Bridge of the Regent’s
Canal, and facing London Fields, formerly had a pictorial sign with the
inscription on one side, slightly misspelled,
Pray puss, do not tare,
Because the mutton is so rare,
and on the other,
Pray puss, do not claw,
Because the mutton is so raw.
The “Cat and Mutton” is nowadays just a London “public,” and the
neighbourhood is truly dreadful. You come to it by way of the Hackney Road
and Broadway, over the wide modern bridge that now spans the silvery
waters of the Regent’s Canal, just where the great gasometers and factory
chimneys of Haggerston rise romantically into the sky and remind the
traveller, rather distantly, of Norman keeps and cathedral spires. How
beautiful the name of Haggerston, and how admirably the scene fits the
name!
Broadway is a market street, with continuous lines of stalls and
uninviting shops, where only the bakers’ shops and the corn-chandlers are
pleasing to look upon and to smell. The new and fragrant loaves, and the
white-scrubbed counters and brightly polished brass-rails of the bakers
look cleanly and smell appetising, and the interesting window-display of
the corn-chandlers compels a halt. There you see nothing less than an
exhibition of cereals and the like: to this chronicler, at least,
wonderfully fascinating. Lentils, tapioca, “bullet” and “flake,” blue
starch and white, haricot beans, maize, split peas, and many others. Split
peas, the amused stranger may note, are, for the “best,” 1½_d._ a pint,
the “finest”--the most superlatively “bestest”--2½_d._, while rice is in
three categories: “fine,” “superior,” or merely--the cheapest--“good.”
The neighbourhood is dirty, despite the enamelled iron signs displayed by
the borough authorities from every lamp-post--“The Public Baths and
Wash-houses are now open.” It is, in fact, a purlieu where the
public-houses are overcrowded and the baths not places of great resort.
The “Cat and Mutton” appears to do a thriving trade. That it is not
beautiful is no matter. On the side of the house facing the open space of
“London Fields” the modern sign, in two compartments, is seen, picturing a
cat “tearing” a shoulder of mutton lying on the floor, and again “clawing”
a suspended joint. The spelling is now orthodox.
A curious inscription on a stone let into the brick wall of the “George”
at Wanstead, hard by Epping Forest, is variously explained. It is well
executed, on a slab of brown sandstone, and reads as under:
[Illustration: TABLET AT THE “GEORGE,” WANSTEAD.]
The generally received story is that the house was at the time under
repair, and that, as a baker was passing by with a cherry-pie in a tray on
his head, for the clergyman, one of the workmen, leaning over the
scaffolding, lifted it off, unawares. The “half a guiney” represents the
cost of the frolic in the subsequent proceedings. Apparently, the men
agreed to annually celebrate the day.
The “George” was rebuilt 1903-4, and is no longer of interest. Nor does it
appear to be, as an example of the ornate modern cross between a mere
“public-house” and an “hotel,” so popular as before. The observer with a
bias in favour of the antique and the picturesque may be excused a certain
satisfaction in noting the fact that, in almost every instance of a quaint
old inn being ruthlessly demolished to make way for a “palatial”
drinking-shop, its trade has suffered the most abysmal--not the most
extraordinary--decline. Not extraordinary, because not merely the
antiquary or the sentimentalist is outraged: the great bulk of people, who
would not ordinarily be suspected of any such feeling for the out-of-date
and the ramshackle, are grossly offended, and resent the offence in a very
practical way; while the carters, the waggoners, and such-like
road-farers, to whom the homely old inns were each, in the well-known
phrase, a “good pull-up,” are abashed by the magnificence of polished
mahogany and brass, and resentful of saucy barmaids. The rustic suburban
inn did a larger trade with the carters and waggoners than might be
suspected, and the loss of its withdrawal in such cases is not compensated
for by any access of “higher class” business. We regret the old-time
suburban inn now it is too late, although we were perhaps not ourselves
frequenters of those low-ceilinged interiors, where the floor was of
sanded flagstones, and the seats of upturned barrels.
To name some of the many houses thus mistakenly, and disastrously,
modernised would be invidious, but instances of trade thus frightened
away are familiar to every one. It should not have been altogether outside
any practical scheme restoration, to repair, or even to enlarge, such
places of old association without destroying their old-world look and
arrangements; and this has in numberless instances been recognised when
the mischief has been irrevocably wrought.
CHAPTER VI
THE HIGHEST INNS IN ENGLAND
As there are many inns claiming, each one of them, to be the “oldest,” so
there are many others disputing the point which is the highest situated. I
must confess the subject--for myself, at least--lacks charm. I know--how
can you help knowing it?--that to reach those eyries you must use
incredible efforts, scaling preposterous heights and faring over roads
that are, as a rule, infernally rough. And when you are come, in summer
hot, in winter searched through and through by the bitter blast
that--Shakespeare notwithstanding--is by a long chalk more unkind than
man’s ingratitude, to these unkindly altitudes, what, oh my brothers, do
you see? Without exception some plaguy ill-favoured shebeen, presiding
over starve-all fields at the best, but generally president over some
aching solitude that the hand of man--man being a reasoning animal--has
never sought to bring under cultivation. The best you can say of such
spots--and it is bad at the best--is that they usually command fine views
of better places, whence, you cannot help thinking, you were a fool to
come, and from which, you suspect, the innkeepers removed from
misanthropical motives, rather than from love of bracing air, or for the
mere idea of earning a livelihood.
The peculiar honour of being the highest-situated inn appears, after much
contention, to belong to the “King’s Pit,” usually called the “Tan Hill”
inn, in midst of a ghastly hill-top solitude in the North Riding of
Yorkshire, between Reeth and Barras. You get to it--I will not say most
easily and conveniently, for convenience and ease in this connection are
things unknown, but with less discomfort and fatigue--by way of Richmond,
and, when you have got there, will curse the curiosity that brought you to
so literally “howling” a wilderness. For there the winds do generally
blow, and, when they _do_, heaven send you have not to face them, for it
is a shelterless common where the “Tan Hill” inn stands in loneliness, and
not a tree or a hedge is there to break the stinging blast.
[Illustration: “TAN HILL” INN.]
Cheerfulness is not a characteristic of those who keep hill-top inns:
hence the suspicion that they are misanthropes who, hating sight or sound
of their kind, retire to such unfrequented spots, and, when the stray
traveller seeks refreshment, instead of weeping salt tears of joy, or
exhibiting any minor sign of emotion, grudgingly attend to his wants, and
vouchsafe as little information as they safely can.
The “Tan Hill” inn stands on the summit of Stainmoor, at a height of 1,727
feet above sea-level, and it is one of the most abject, uncompromisingly
ugly buildings that ever builder built. The ruins of a toll-house stand
near by, silently witnessing that it was once worth the while of somebody
to levy and collect tolls on what is now as unfrequented a place as it is
possible to conceive; but railways long since knocked the bottom out of
that, and for some years, until the autumn of 1903, the licence of the inn
itself was allowed to lapse, the house being first established for sake of
the likely custom from a coal-pit in a neighbouring valley, now abandoned.
The innkeeper lives rent free, with the half of his licence paid on
condition of his looking after that now deserted mine.
But there is one day in the whole year when the “Tan Hill” inn wakes to
life and business. That is the day of Brough Horse Fair, and the traffic
then is considerable: the only vestige of the former business of the road
now left to it by the Bowes and Barras Railway.
[Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR BUXTON.]
Between Macclesfield and Buxton--five miles from Buxton and seven from
Macclesfield--just, by about 1,500 yards--in Cheshire, although commonly
said to be in Derbyshire, stands the next highest inn, the “Cat and
Fiddle,” at a height of 1,690 feet. It is only a little less
dreary-looking a house than that of “Tan Hill,” and wears a weather-beaten
air earned by the fierce storms and snow blizzards to which it is in
winter exposed. The wooden porch and the double doors within are necessary
outposts against the wind. In the winter the inhabitants are sometimes
weatherbound for days at a time, and generally take the precaution of
laying in a stock of provisions. One may no more visit Buxton without
going a pilgrimage to the “Cat and Fiddle” than it would be reasonable to
visit Egypt and not see the Pyramids; and consequently, however lonely the
place may be in winter, it is in summer visited by hundreds of trippers
brought in waggonettes and brakes named after advertising generals and
other puffed-up bull-frogs of the hour. The manner and the expressions of
those trippers form an interesting study. You see, plainly enough, that
they are bored and disillusioned, and that they wonder, as they gaze upon
the hideous house, or over the wild and forbidding moorland and
mountain-peaks, or down into the deep valleys, why the devil they came at
all; but they are all slaves of convention, and merely wait patiently
until the time for returning happily comes round.
There surely never was so demoniac-looking a cat as that sculptured here.
Of the derivation of the sign there are, of course, several versions, the
local one being that the sixth Duke of Devonshire was especially fond of
this road, and used often to travel it with his favourite cat and a
violin!
The “Traveller’s Rest,” at Flash Bar, in Staffordshire, on the Leek to
Buxton Road, occupies the third place, at an altitude of 1,535 feet, while
in the fourth comes a house called the “Isle of Skye,” at Wessenden Head,
in Yorkshire, near Holmfirth, 1,500 feet.
The fifth highest inn is the “Traveller’s Rest,” at the summit of the
Kirkstone Pass, in Westmoreland, 1,476 feet above the sea, a very
considerably lower elevation; but you may still see on the front of the
inn its repeatedly discredited claim to be, not merely the highest inn,
but the highest inhabited house, in England--which, as Euclid might say,
“is absurd.” But what the situation of the Kirkstone Pass lacks in height,
it has in gloomy grandeur. Probably more tourists, exploring the
mountainous country between Ambleside, Windermere, and Patterdale, visit
the Kirkstone Pass inn than any other of these loftily placed
hostelries--the “Cat and Fiddle” not excepted.
[Illustration: THE “TRAVELLER’S REST,” KIRKSTONE PASS.]
The “Newby Head” inn, Yorkshire, between bleak Hawes and lonely Ingleton,
stands at a height of 1,420 feet; and the Duchy Hotel at Princetown, on
Dartmoor, in far distant Devonshire, seems to be on the roof of the world,
with its 1,359 feet.
CHAPTER VII
GALLOWS SIGNS
It is an ominous name, but the signs that straddle across the road,
something after the fashion of football goals, have none other. The day of
the gallows sign is done. It flourished most abundantly in the middle of
the eighteenth century, when travellers progressed, as it would appear
from old prints, under a constant succession of them; but examples are so
few nowadays that they are remarkable by reason of their very scarcity,
instead of, as formerly, by their number, their size, and their
extravagant ornamentation.
The largest, the costliest, and the most extravagant gallows sign that
ever existed was that of “Scole White Hart,” on the Norwich Road. The inn
remains, but the sign itself disappeared somewhere about 1803, after an
existence of 148 years, both house and sign having been built in 1655. Sir
Thomas Browne thought it “the noblest sighne-post in England,” as surely
it should have been, for it cost £1,057, and was crowded with twenty-five
carved figures, some of them of gigantic size, of classic deities and
others. Not satisfied with displaying Olympus on the cross-beam, and
Hades, with Cerberus and Charon, at the foot of the supporting posts,
James Peck, the Norwich merchant who built the house and paid for this
galanty-show, caused the armorial bearings of himself and his wife, and
those of twelve prominent East Anglian families, to be tricked out in
prominent places.[2]
[Illustration: THE “GREYHOUND,” SUTTON.]
It does not appear that Grosley, an inquiring and diligent note-taking
Frenchman who travelled through England in 1765, noticed this remarkable
sign, but so soon as he had landed at Dover he was impressed with the
extravagance of signs of all sorts, and as he journeyed to London took
note of their “enormous size,” the “ridiculous magnificence of the
ornaments with which they are overcharged, and the height of a sort of
triumphal arches that support them.” He and other foreigners travelling in
England at that period soon discovered that innkeepers overcharged their
signs and their guests with the utmost impartiality.
Misson, another of these inquisitive foreigners, had already, in 1719,
observed the signs. He rather wittily likened them to “a kind of triumphal
arch to the honour of Bacchus.”
It will be seen, therefore, that the surviving signs of this character are
very few and very simple, in proportion to their old numbers and ancient
extravagance. If we are to believe another eighteenth-century writer on
this subject, who declared that most of the inscriptions on these signs
were incorrectly spelled, inquiring strangers very often were led astray
by the ridiculous titles given by that lack of orthography. “This is the
Beer,” said one sign, intending to convey the information that the house
was the “Bear”; but the reader will probably agree that the misspelling in
this case was more to the point than even the true name of the inn. To
know where the beer is; _that_ is the main thing. Who cares what the sign
may be, so long as the booze is there? Swipes are no better for a good
sign, nor good ale worse for a bad.
The Brighton Road being so greatly travelled, we may claim for the gallows
sign of the “George” at Crawley[3] a greater fame than any other, although
that of the “Greyhound” at Sutton, on an alternative route, is very
well known. The once pretty little weather-boarded inn has, unfortunately,
of late been rebuilt in a most distressingly ugly fashion. The gallows
sign of the “Cock” at Sutton was pulled down in 1898.[4]
[Illustration: THE “FOUR SWANS,” WALTHAM CROSS.]
The “Greyhound” at Croydon owned a similar sign until 1890, when, on the
High Street being widened and the house itself rebuilt, it was
disestablished, the square foot of ground on which the supporting post
stood, on the opposite side of the street, costing the Improvements
Committee £350, in purchase of freehold and in compensation to the
proprietor of the “Greyhound,” for loss of advertisement.
At Little Stonham, on the Norwich Road, the sign of the “Pie”[5]--_i.e._
the Magpie--spans the road, while at Waltham Cross, on the way to
Cambridge, that queer, rambling old coaching inn, the “Four Swans,” still
keeps its sign, whereon the four swans themselves, in silhouette against
the sky, form a very striking picture, in conjunction with the old Eleanor
Cross standing at the cross-roads.
An equally effective sign is that of the rustic little “Fox and Hounds”
inn at Barley, where the hunt, consisting of the fox, five hounds and two
huntsmen, is shown crossing the beam, the fox about to enter a little
kennel-like contrivance in the thatched roof.
[Illustration: THE “FOX AND HOUNDS,” BARLEY.]
One of the most prominent and familiar of gallows signs is that of the
great, ducal-looking “George” Hotel at Stamford, on the Great North Road.
It spans the famous highway, and is the sole advertisement of any
description the house permits itself. There is nothing to inform the
wayfarer what brewer’s “Fine Ales and Stouts” are dispensed within, nor
what distiller’s or wine-merchant’s wines and spirits; and were it not for
that sign, I declare you would take the “George” to be the ducal mansion
already suggested, or, if not that, a bank at the very least of it. There
is an awful, and an almost uncanny, dignity about the “George” that makes
you feel it is very kind and condescending to allow you to enter Stamford
at all. I have seen dusty and tired, but still hilarious, cyclists come
into Stamford from the direction of London and, seeing the “George” at the
very front door of the town, they have instantly felt themselves to be
worms. Their instant thought is to disappear down the first drain-opening;
but, finding that impossible, they have crept by, abashed, only hoping,
like Paul Pry, they “don’t intrude.” Even the haughty (and dusty)
occupants of six-cylindered, two-thousand-guinea motor-cars with weird
foreign names, begin to look reverent when they draw up to the frontage.
The “George,” in short, is to all other inns what the Athenæum Club is to
other clubs. I should not be surprised if it were incumbent upon visitors
entering those austere portals to remove their foot-gear, as customary in
mosques, nor would it astonish to hear that the head waiter was the
performer of awful rites, the chambermaids priestesses, and to stay in the
house itself a sacrament.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE,” STAMFORD.]
It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the “George” at Stamford, in
common with the many other inns of the same name throughout the country,
derived the sign from the English patron saint, St. George, and not out of
compliment to any one of our Four Georges. The existing house is largely
of late eighteenth-century period, having been remodelled during those
prosperous times of the road, to meet the greatly-increased coaching and
posting business; and can have little likeness to the inn where Charles
the First lay, on the night of Saturday, August 23rd, 1645, on the march
with his army from Newark to Huntingdon.
In that older “George,” in 1714, another taste of warlike times was felt.
The town was then full of the King’s troops, come to overawe Jacobites.
Queen Anne was just dead, and Bolton, the tapster of the “George,”
suspected of Jacobite leanings, was compelled by the military to drink on
his bended knees to her memory. He was doing so, meekly enough, when a
dragoon ran him through the heart with his sabre. A furious mob then
assembled in front of the house, seeking to avenge him, and very quickly
broke the windows of his house and threatened to entirely demolish it, if
the murderer were not given up to them. We learn, however, that “the
villain escaped backway, and the tumult gradually subsided.”
At the “George” in 1745, the Duke of Cumberland, the victor of Culloden,
stayed, on his return, and in 1768, the King of Denmark; but I think the
most remarkable thing about the “George” is that Margaret, eldest daughter
of Bryan Hodgson, the landlord at that time, in 1765, married a clergyman
who afterwards became Bishop of London. The Reverend Beilby Porteous was,
at the time of his marriage, Vicar of Ruckinge and Wittersham, in Kent. In
1776 he became Bishop of Chester, and eleven years later was translated to
London.
In 1776 the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote of the “distracting bustle of
the ‘George,’ which exceeded anything I ever saw or heard.” All that has
long since given place to the gravity and sobriety already described, and
the great central entrance for the coaches has for many years past been
covered over and converted into halls and reception-rooms; but there may
yet be seen an ivied courtyard and ancient staircase.
Even as I write, a great change is coming upon the fortunes of the
“George.” The motorists who, with the neighbouring huntsmen, have during
these last few years been its chief support, have now wholly taken it
over. That is to say, the Road Club, establishing club quarters along the
Great North Road, as nearly as may be fifty miles apart, has procured a
long lease of the house from the Marquis of Exeter, and has remodelled the
interior and furnished it with billiard-rooms up-to-date, a library of
road literature, and other essentials of the automobile tourist. While
especially devoted to these interests, the “George” will still welcome the
huntsman fresh from the fallows, and hopes to interest him in the scent of
the petrol as much as in that of the fox.
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” FITTLEWORTH.]
It may be noted, in passing, that the “Red Bull” at Stamford also claims
to have entertained the Duke of Cumberland on his return from Culloden,
and that the “Crown” inn, with its old staircase and picturesque
courtyard, is interesting.
A small gallows sign is still to be seen at the “Old Star,” in Stonegate,
York, another at Ottery St. Mary, and a larger, wreathed in summer with
creepers, at the “Swan,” Fittleworth, while at Hampton-on-Thames the
picturesque “Red Lion” sign still spans a narrow and busy street.
[Illustration: THE “RED LION,” HAMPTON-ON-THAMES.]
The “Green Man” at Ashbourne, in Derbyshire, has a sign of this stamp.
That fine old inn, which has added the sign of the “Black’s Head,” since
the purchase of a house of that name, is of a size and a respectable
mellowed red-brick frontage eminently suited to a road of the ancient
importance of that leading from London to Manchester and Glasgow, on which
Ashbourne stands. The inn figures in the writings of Boswell as a very
good house, and its landlady as “a mighty civil gentlewoman.” She and her
establishment no doubt earned the patronising praise of the
self-sufficient Laird of Auchinleck by the humble curtsey she gave him
when he hired a post-chaise here to convey him home to Scotland, and by an
engraving of her house she handed him, on which she had written:
“M. Kilingley’s duty waits upon Mr. Boswell, is exceedingly obliged to him
for this favour; whenever he comes this way, hopes for the continuance of
the same. Would Mr. Boswell name this house to his extensive acquaintance,
it would be a singular favour conferred on one who has it not in her power
to make any other return but her most grateful thanks and sincerest
prayers for his happiness in time and in blessed eternity. Tuesday morn.”
Alas! wishes for his worldly and eternal welfare no longer speed the
parting guest, especially if he “tips” insufficiently. As for “M.
Kilingley,” surely she and her inn must have been doing very badly, for
Boswell’s patronage to have turned on so much eloquence at the main.
CHAPTER VIII
SIGNS PAINTED BY ARTISTS
In the “good old days,” when an artist was supposed to be drunken and
dissolute in proportion to his genius, and when a very large number of
them accordingly lived up to that supposition, either in self-defence or
out of their own natural depravity, it was no uncommon thing to see the
wayside ale-house sporting a sign that to the eye of instructed travellers
displayed merits of draughtsmanship and colour of an order entirely
different from those commonly associated with mere sign-boards.
Fresh from perusing the domestic records of the eighteenth century, you
have a confused mental picture of artists poor in pocket but rich in
genius, pervading the country, hoofing it muzzily along the roads, and
boozing in every village ale-house. You see such an one, penniless,
offering to settle a trivial score by painting a new sign or retouching an
old one, and you very vividly picture mine host ungraciously accepting the
offer, because he has no choice. Then, behold, the artist goes his way,
like the Prodigal Son, to his husks and his harlots, to run up more scores
and liquidate them in the like manner; and presently there enters, to
your mental vision, a traveller whose educated eye perceives that sign,
and discovers in its yet undried and tacky oils the touch of a master. He
buys that masterpiece for golden guineas from the gaping and
unappreciative innkeeper, whose score was but a matter of silver
shillings; and he--he is a Duke or something in the Personage way--takes
that “Barley Mow” or “Ship and Seven Stars,” or whatever the subject may
be, tenderly home to his palace and places it, suitably framed, among his
ancestral Titians, Raphaels, or Botticellis.
That, I say, is the golden, misty picture of Romance presented to you,
and, in sober fact, incidents of that nature were not unknown; but that
they happened quite so often as irresponsible weavers of legends would
have us believe, we may take leave to doubt.
Artists of established repute sometimes, even then, painted inn-signs from
other motives. Hogarth, for example, that stern pictorial moralist, was
scarcely the man to be reduced to such straits as those already hinted;
but he was a jovial fellow, and is said to have painted a number of signs
for friendly innkeepers. The classic example of those attributed to him
is, of course, the well-known sign of the “Man Loaded with Mischief,” the
name of a public-house, formerly 414, Oxford Street.[6] The name was
changed, about 1880, to the “Primrose,” and the painted panel-sign
removed. In its last years it--whether the original or an old copy seems
uncertain--was fixed against the wall of the entrance-lobby. The picture
was one of crowded detail. The Man, another Atlas, carried on his back a
drunken woman holding a glass of gin in her hand, and had on either
shoulder a monkey and a jackdaw. In the background were “S. Gripe’s”
pawnshop, the “Cuckold’s Fortune” public-house, crowned with a pair of
horns, two quarrelling cats, a sleeping sow, and a jug labelled “Fine
Purl.” This scathing satire, peculiarly out of place in a drink-shop, was
“Drawn by Experience” and “Engraved by Sorrow,” and was finished off by
the rhyme:
A Monkey, a Magpie, and a Wife
Is the true Emblem of Strife.
A somewhat similar sign exists at the present time at Madingley, near
Cambridge.
[Illustration: THE “MAN LOADED WITH MISCHIEF.”]
The correctness, or otherwise, of the Oxford Street sign being attributed
to Hogarth has never been determined, but it is quite characteristic of
him, and all through Hogarth’s works there runs a curious familiarity
with, and insistence upon, signs. You find the sign of the “Duke of
Cumberland” pictorially insisted upon in his “Invasion of England,”
although it is merely an accessory to the picture; and in “Gin Lane,”
“Southwark Fair,” the “March to Finchley,” and others, every detail of
incidental signs is shown. This distinguishing characteristic is nowhere
more remarkable than in his “Election: Canvassing for Votes,” where, above
the heads of the rival agents in bribery is the sign of the “Royal Oak,”
half obscured by an election placard. In the distance is seen a mob, about
to tear down the sign of the “Crown,” and above the two seated and
drinking and smoking figures in the foreground is part of the “Portobello”
sign. A curious item in this picture is the fierce effigy of a lion,
looking as though it had been the figurehead of a ship, and somewhat
resembling those still existing at the “Star” inn, Alfriston, and the
“Red Lion,” Martlesham.
The classic instance of the dissolute artistic genius, ever drinking in
the wayside beerhouse, and leaving long trails of masterpieces behind him
in full settlement of paltry scores, is George Morland. He painted
exquisitely, for the same reason that the skylark sings divinely, because
he could not do otherwise; and no one has represented so finely or so
naturally the rustic life of England at the close of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth, as he. His chosen companions
were “ostlers, potboys, pugilists, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers”--the
last two classes, it may be suspected, less from choice than from
necessity. He painted over four thousand pictures in his short life of
forty-one years, and died in a “sponging-house” for debtors, leaving the
all-too-true epitaph for himself, “Here lies a drunken dog.”
He lived for a considerable time opposite the “White Lion” inn, at the
then rural village of Paddington, and his masterpiece, the “Inside of a
Stable,” was painted there.
Morland was no neglected genius. His natural, unaffected style, that was
no style, in the sense that he showed rustic life as it was, without the
“classic” artifice of a Claude or the finicking unreality of a Watteau,
appealed alike to connoisseurs and to the uneducated in art; and he might,
but for his own hindrance, have been a wealthy man. Dealers besieged him,
purse in one hand and bottle in the other. He paid all debts with
pictures, and in those inns where he was known the landlords kept a room
specially for him, furnished with all the necessaries of his art: only too
pleased that, in his ready-made fame, he should settle scores in his
characteristic way.
Oddly enough, although Morland is reputed to have painted many inn-signs,
not one has survived; or perhaps, more strictly speaking, not one of the
existing paintings by him has been identified with a former sign.
Morland died in 1824, and twenty years later one “J. B. P.,” in _The
Somerset House Gazette_, described how, walking from Laleham to Chertsey
Bridge, and sheltering at the “Cricketers,” a small public-house there, he
noticed, while sitting in the parlour, a painting of a cricket-match. The
style seemed familiar, and he at last recognised it as Morland’s.
Questioning the landlord, he learned that forty-five years earlier the inn
was the “Walnut Tree,” and that a “famous painter” had lodged there and
painted the picture. It grew so popular with local cricketers that at last
the name of the house was altered.
The stranger offered to buy, but the landlord declared he would not sell.
It seemed that he took it with him when he set up a booth at Egham and
Staines races, “an’ cricket-matches and such-like.” It was, in fact, his
trade-mark.
Mine host thought in shillings, but the stranger in guineas.
“How,” he asked, “if I offered you £10 10_s._?”
“Ah, well!” rejoined the publican: “it should go, with all my heart,”--and
go it did.
Thus did the purchaser describe his bargain: “The painting, about a yard
in length and of a proportionate height, is done on canvas, strained upon
something like an old shutter, which has two staples at the back, suited
to hook it for its occasional suspension on the booth-front in the host’s
erratic business at fairs and races. The scene I found to be a portrait of
the neighbouring cricket-green called Laleham Borough, and contains
thirteen cricketers in full play, dressed in white, one arbiter in red and
one in blue, besides four spectators, seated two by two on chairs. The
picture is greatly cracked, in the reticulated way of paint when much
exposed to the sun; but the colours are pure, and the landscape in a very
pleasing tone, and in perfect harmony. The figures are done as if with the
greatest ease, and the mechanism of Morland’s pencil and his process of
painting are clearly obvious in its decided touches, and in the gradations
of the white particularly. It cannot be supposed that this freak of the
pencil is a work of high art; yet it certainly contains proof of Morland’s
extraordinary talent, and it should seem that he even took some pains with
it, for there are marks of his having painted out and re-composed at least
one figure.”
The appreciation of Morland in his lifetime is well shown by a story of
himself and Williams, the engraver, tramping, tired, hungry, thirsty and
penniless, from Deal to London. They came at last to “the ‘Black Bull’ on
the Dover Road”--wherever precisely that may have been--and Morland
offered the landlord to repaint his faded sign for a crown, the price of a
meal. The innkeeper knew nothing of Morland, and was at first unwilling;
but he at length agreed, and rode off to Canterbury for the necessary
materials.
The friends eventually ran up a score a few shillings in excess of that
contemplated originally by the landlord, and left him dissatisfied with
his bargain. Meanwhile, artist and engraver tramped to town, and, telling
the story to their friends in the hearing of a long-headed admirer of
Morland’s work, he rode down and, we are told, purchased the “Black Bull”
sign from the amazed landlord for £10 10_s._
The story is probably in essentials true, but that unvarying ten-guinea
price is inartistic and unconvincing.
Richard Wilson, an earlier than Morland, fought a losing fight as a
landscape painter, and “by Britain left in poverty to pine,” at last died
in 1782. Classic landscape in the manner of Claude was not then
appreciated, and the unfortunate painter sold principally to pawnbrokers,
at wretched prices, until even they grew tired of backing him. He lived
and died neglected, and had to wait for Fame, as “Peter Pindar,” that
shrewdest and best of art-critics, foretold,
Till thou hast been dead a hundred year.
He painted at least one inn-sign: that of the “Loggerheads” at Llanverris,
in Denbighshire; a picture representing two jovial, and not too
intellectual, grinning faces, with the inscription, “We Three Loggerheads
Be.” The fame of this sign was once so great that the very name of the
village itself became obscured, and the place was commonly known as
“Loggerheads.” Wilson’s work was long since repainted.
But what _is_ a “loggerhead,” and why should the two grinning faces of the
sign have been described as “three”? The origin of the term is, like the
birth of Jeames de la Pluche, “wrop in mistry”; but of the meaning of it
there is little doubt. A “loggerhead” is anything you please in the
dunderhead, silly fool, perfect ass, or complete idiot way, and the gaping
stranger who looks inquisitively at the _two_ loggerheads on the
sign-board automatically constitutes himself the _third_, and thus
completes the company. It is a kind of small-beer, fine-drawn jape that
has from time immemorial passed for wit in rustic parts, and may be traced
even in the pages of Shakespeare, where, in Act II. Scene 2 of _Twelfth
Night_, it is the subject of allusion as the picture of “We Three.”
The “Mortal Man” at Troutbeck, in the Lake district, once possessed a
pictorial sign, painted by Julius Cæsar Ibbetson, a gifted but dissolute
artist, friend of, and kindred spirit with, Morland. It represented two
faces, the one melancholy, pallid and thin, the other hearty,
good-humoured, and “ruddier than the cherry.” Beneath these two
countenances was inscribed a verse attributed to Thomas Hoggart, a local
wit, uncle of Hogarth, the painter:
“Thou mortal man, that liv’st by bread,
What makes thy face to look so red?”
“Thou silly fop, that look’st so pale,
’Tis red with Tony Burchett’s ale.”
First went the heads, and at last the verses also, and to-day the “Mortal
Man” has only a plain sign.
John Crome, founder of the “Norwich School” of artists, known as “Old”
Crome, in order to distinguish him from his son, contributed to this list
of signs painted by artists. It is not surprising that he should have done
so, seeing that he won to distinction from the very lowest rungs of the
ladder; leaving, as a boy, the occupation of running errands for a doctor,
and commencing art in 1783 as apprentice to a coach-, house-, and
sign-painter. One work of his of this period is the “Sawyers” sign. It is
now preserved at the Anchor Brewery, Pockthorpe, Norwich. Representing a
saw-pit, with two sawyers at work, it shows the full-length figure of the
top-sawyer and the head and shoulders of the other. It is, however, a very
inferior and fumbling piece of work, and its interest is wholly
sentimental.
J. F. Herring, afterwards famous for his paintings of horses and farmyard
scenes, began as a coach-painter and sign-board artist at Doncaster, in
1814. He painted at least twelve inn-signs in that town, but they have
long since become things of the past.
Charles Herring never reached the heights of fame scaled by his brother,
and long painted signs for a great firm of London brewers.
However difficult it might prove nowadays to rise from the humble
occupations of house- or coach-painter, to the full glory of a Royal
Academician, it seems once to have been a comparatively easy transition.
All that was requisite was the genius for it, and sometimes not very much
of that. A case in point is that of Sir William Beechey, who not only won
to such distinction in 1793 from the several stages of house-painter and
solicitor’s clerk, but achieved the further and more dazzling success of
knighthood, although never more than an indifferent portrait-painter. A
specimen of his art, in the shape of the sign-board of the “Dryden’s
Head,” near Kate’s Cabin, on the Great North Road, was long pointed out.
The painting of sign-boards, in fact, was long a kind of preparatory
school for higher flights of art, and indeed the fashion of pictorial
signs nursed many a dormant genius into life and activity. Robert Dalton,
who rose to be Keeper of the Pictures to George the Third, had been a
painter of signs and coaches; Gwynne, who first performed similar
journey-work, became a marine-painter of repute; Smirke, who eventually
became R.A.; Ralph Kirby, drawing-master to the Prince of Wales,
afterwards George the Fourth; Thomas Wright, of Liverpool, and many more,
started life decorating coach-panels or painting signs. Opie, the Cornish
peasant-lad who rose to fame in paint, declared that his first steps were
of the like nature: “I ha’ painted Duke William for the signs, and stars
and such-like for the boys’ kites.”
The Royal Academicians of our own time did not begin in this way, and as a
pure matter of curious interest it will be found that your sucking painter
is too dignified for anything of the kind, and that modern signs painted
by artists are usually done for a freak by those who have already long
acquired fame and fortune. It is an odd reversal.
Thus, very many years ago, Millais painted a “George and Dragon” sign for
the “George” inn, Hayes Common. There it hung, exposed to all weathers,
and at last faded into a neutral-tinted, very “speculative” affair, when
the landlord had it repainted, “as good as new,” by some one described as
“a local artist.” Now even the local painter’s work has disappeared, and
the great hideous “George” is content without a picture-sign.
The most famous of all signs painted by artists is, of course, that of the
“Royal Oak” at Bettws-y-Coed, on the Holyhead Road. It was painted by
David Cox, in 1847, and, all other tales to the contrary notwithstanding,
it was _not_ executed by him, when in sore financial straits, to liquidate
a tavern score. David Cox was never of the Morland type of dissolute
artist, did not run up scores, paid his rates and taxes, never bilked a
tradesman, and was just a home-loving, domesticated man. That he should
at the same time have been a great artist, supreme in his own particular
field, in his own particular period, is so unusual and unaccountable a
thing that it would not be surprising to find some critic-prophet arising
to deny his genius because of all those damning circumstances of the
commonplace, and the clinching facts that he never wore a velvet jacket,
and had his hair cut at frequent intervals.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “ROYAL OAK,” BETTWS-Y-COED.]
The genius of David Cox was not fully realised in his lifetime, and he
received very inadequate prices for his works, but he was probably never
“hard up,” and he painted the sign-board of the “Royal Oak” merely as a
whimsical compliment to his friend, Mrs. Roberts, the landlady of the
house, which was still at that time a rural inn.
The old sign had become faded by long exposure to the weather, and was
about to be renewed at the hands of a house-painter, when Cox, who
happened then to be on one of his many visits to Bettws, ascended a short
ladder reared against the house and repainted it, then and there. The
coaching age still survived in North Wales at that period, and Bettws was
still secluded and rustic, and he little looked for interruption; but,
while busily at work, he was horrified by hearing a voice below exclaim,
“Why, it _is_ Mr. Cox, I declare!” A lady, a former pupil of his,
travelling through the country on her honeymoon, had noticed him, and
although he rather elaborately explained the how and the why of his acting
the part of sign-painter, it seems pretty clear that it was from this
source the many old stories derived of Cox being obliged by poverty to
resort to this humble branch of art.
In 1849 he retouched the sign, and in 1861, two years after his death, it
was, at the request of many admirers, removed from the outside wall and
placed in a situation of honour, in the hall of what had by that time
become an “hotel.”
The painting, on wooden panel, is a fine, bold, dashing picture of a
sturdy oak, in whose midst you do but vaguely see, or fancy you see, His
Majesty, hiding. Beneath are troopers, questing about on horseback. It is
very Old Masterish in feeling, low-toned and mellow in colour, and rich in
impasto. It is fixed as part of a decorative overmantel, and underneath is
a prominent inscription stating that it “forms part of the freehold of the
hotel belonging to the Baroness Howard de Walden.” Sign and freehold have
now descended to the Earl of Ancaster.
Behind that inscription lies a curious story of disputed ownership in the
painting. It seems that in 1880 the then landlady of the “Royal Oak”
became bankrupt, and the trustees in bankruptcy claimed the sign as a
valuable asset, a portion of the estate; making a statement to the effect
that a connoisseur had offered £1,000 for it. This at once aroused the
cupidity of the then Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, owner of the freehold,
and an action was brought against the trustees, to determine whose
property it was. The trustees in the first instance, in the Bangor
District Court of Bankruptcy, were worsted by Judge Horatio Lloyd, who
held that it was a fixture, and could not be sold by the innkeeper. This
decision was challenged, and the question re-argued before Sir James
Bacon, who, in delivering judgment for the trustees, said the artist had
made a present of the picture, and that it belonged to the innkeeper as
much as the coat or the dress on her back. He therefore reversed the
decision of the Judge in Bankruptcy; but the case was carried eventually
to the Supreme Court, and the Lords finally declared the painting to be
the property of the freeholder.
Their decision was based upon the following reasoning: “Assuming that the
picture was originally what may be called a ‘tenant’s fixture,’ which he
might have removed, it appeared that he had never done so. Therefore, the
picture not having been removed by the original tenant within his term, on
a new lease being granted it became the property of the landlord, and had
never ceased to be so.”
In these days of the revival of this, of that, and of t’ other, you think
inevitably of that very wise saying of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes: “The
thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is
that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WARGRAVE-ON-THAMES.
_Painted by G. D. Leslie, R.A._]
The most readily allowed excuse for anything in such times as these is the
plea that it is a revival of something that existed of old. That at once
sets upon it--little matter what it be--the seal of approval. Of late
years there has in this way been a notable revival of inn-signs painted by
artists of repute.
The oldest of these moderns is perhaps that of the “George and Dragon” at
Wargrave-on-Thames: a double-sided sign painted by the two Royal
Academicians, G. D. Leslie and J. E. Hodgson. In a gossipy book of
reminiscences Mr. Leslie tells how this sign came to be painted, about
1874: “It was during our stay at Wargrave that my friend Mr. Hodgson and I
painted Mrs. Wyatt’s sign-board for her--the ‘George and Dragon.’ I
painted my side first, a regular orthodox St. George on a white horse,
spearing the dragon. Hodgson was so taken with the idea of painting a
sign-board that he asked me to be allowed to do the other side, to which
I, of course, consented, and as he could only stop at Wargrave one day, he
managed to do it on that day--indeed, it occupied him little more than a
couple of hours. The idea of his composition was suggested by Signor
Pellegrini, the well-known artist of _Vanity Fair_. The picture
represented St. George, having vanquished the dragon and dismounted from
his horse, quenching his thirst in a large beaker of ale. These pictures
were duly hung up soon after, and very much admired. They have since had a
coat of boat-varnish, and look already very Old Masterly. Hodgson’s, which
gets the sun on it, is a little faded; but mine, which faces the north,
towards Henley, still looks pretty fresh.”
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WARGRAVE-ON-THAMES.
_Painted by J. E. Hodgson, R.A._]
Goring-on-Thames has a now very faded pictorial sign, the “Miller of
Mansfield,” painted by Marcus Stone, R.A. The Thames-side villages are
indeed especially favoured, and at Wallingford the sign of the “Row
Barge,” by G. D. Leslie, is prominent in a bye-street. The inn itself is a
very modest and very ancient place of entertainment. A document is still
extant which sets forth how the licence was renewed in 1650, when, owing
to the puritanical ways of the age, many other houses in the same town had
to forfeit theirs, and discontinue business. Once the property of the
Corporation of Wallingford, it seems to have obtained its unusual name
from having been the starting-point of the Mayor’s State Barge. With these
facts in mind, the artist painted an imaginary state barge, pulled by six
sturdy watermen, and containing the Mayor and Corporation of Wallingford,
accompanied by the mace-bearer, who occupies a prominent position in the
prow. G. D. Leslie also painted the sign of the “King Harry” at St.
Stephen’s, outside St. Albans, but it has long been replaced by a quite
commonplace daub.
[Illustration: THE “ROW BARGE,” WALLINGFORD. _Painted by G. D. Leslie,
R.A._]
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” PRESTON CROWMARSH.]
This does not quite exhaust the list of riverside places thus
distinguished, for “Ye Olde Swan,” Preston Crowmarsh, has a sign painted
by Mr. Wildridge. It overlooks one of the prettiest ferries on the river.
[Illustration: THE “WINDMILL,” TABLEY.]
[Illustration: THE “SMOKER” INN, PLUMBLEY.]
Two modern artistic signs in Cheshire owe their existence to a lady. These
are the effective pictures of the “Smoker” inn at Plumbley and the
“Windmill,” Tabley. They are from the brush of Miss Leighton, a niece of
the late Lord de Tabley. The “Smoker” by no means indicates a place
devoted with more than usual thoroughness to smoking, but is named after a
once-famous race-horse belonging to the family in the early years of the
nineteenth century. On one side of the sign is a portrait of the horse,
the reverse displaying the arms of the De Tableys, supported by two
ferocious-looking cockatrices.
The sign of the “Windmill” explains itself: it is Don Quixote, tilting at
one of his imaginary enemies.
[Illustration: THE “FERRY” INN, ROSNEATH.]
In 1897 the Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, designed and painted a
pictorial sign for the “Ferry” inn at Rosneath. It is only remarkable as
being the work of a Royal Princess. The three-masted ancient ship, or
galleon, is the heraldic charge known as a “lymphad,” borne by many
Scottish families, among them the Campbells, Dukes of Argyll.
Some three years later Mr. Walter Crane enriched the little Hampshire
village of Grayshott with a pictorial sign for the “Fox and Pelican,” a
converted inn conducted on the principles of one of the feather-brained
nostrums of the age.
[Illustration: THE “FERRY” INN, ROSNEATH.]
The name of the house commemorates Fox, the great Bishop of Winchester,
whose device was “A Pelican in her Piety.” It represents a pelican
guarding a nest of three young birds, and feeding them with blood from
her breast. The device is painted on one side of the board, and the name
of the house is inscribed on a scroll on the other.
[Illustration: THE “FOX AND PELICAN,” GRAYSHOTT
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