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Title: The Old Inns of Old England, Volume II (of 2) - A Picturesque Account of the Ancient and Storied Hostelries - of Our Own Country
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George), 1863-1943
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Old Inns of Old England, Volume II (of 2) - A Picturesque Account of the Ancient and Storied Hostelries - of Our Own Country" ***
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.]
Many other pictorial inn-signs have of late years replaced the merely
lettered boards, and although the artists are not famous, or even
well-known, the average merit of the work is high. A particularly good
example is the double-sided sign of a little thatched rural inn, the “Cat
and Fiddle,” between Christchurch and Bournemouth; where on one side you
perceive the cat seated calmly, in a domestic manner, while on the other
he is reared upon his hind-legs, fiddle-playing, according to the
nursery-rhyme:
Hey, diddle, diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jumped over the Moon,
The Little Dog laughed to see such sport,
And the Dish ran away with the spoon.
Serious antiquaries--a thought too serious--have long attempted to find a
hidden meaning in the well-known sign of the “Cat and Fiddle.” According
to some commentators, it derived from “_Caton fidèle_,” one Caton, a
staunch Protestant governor of Calais in the reactionary reign of Queen
Mary, who could justly apply to himself the praise: “I have fought the
good fight, I have kept the Faith,” while in the rhyme it has been sought
to discover some veiled political allusion, carefully wrapped up in
nursery allegory, in times when to interfere openly in politics, or to
criticise personages or affairs of State was not merely dangerous, but
fatal. Ingenious people have discovered in the wild jingle an allusion to
Henry the Eighth and the Disestablishment of the Monasteries, and others
have found it to be a satire on James the Second and the Great Rebellion.
Given the requisite ingenuity, there is no national event to which it
could not be compared; but why not take it merely for what it is: a bundle
of inconsequent rhymes for the amusement of the childish ear?
[Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR CHRISTCHURCH.]
[Illustration: THE “CAT AND FIDDLE,” NEAR CHRISTCHURCH.]
From every point of view the revival and spread of the old fashion of
artistic sign-boards is to be encouraged, for it not only creates an
interest in the different localities, but serves to perpetuate local
history and legend.
A remarkable feature of the “Swan” at Fittleworth is the number of
pictures painted by artists on the old panelling of the coffee-room.
Caton Woodville painted a sign for this house, but it has long been
considered too precious to be hung outside, exposed to the chances of wind
and wet, and perhaps in danger of being filched one dark night by some
connoisseur more appreciative than honest. It has therefore been removed
within. It represents on one side the swan, ridden by a Queen of the
Fairies, while a frog, perched on the swan’s tail, holds a lantern, whose
light is in rivalry with a star.
On the other side a frog, seated in a pewter pot, is observed contentedly
smoking a “churchwarden” pipe while he is being conveyed down stream.
CHAPTER IX
QUEER SIGNS IN QUAINT PLACES
Thus did Horace Walpole moralise over the fickleness of sign-board favour:
“I was yesterday out of town, and the very signs, as I passed through the
villages, made me make very quaint reflections on the mortality of fame
and popularity. I observed how the ‘Duke’s Head’ had succeeded almost
universally to ‘Admiral Vernon’s,’ as his had left but few traces of the
‘Duke of Ormonde’s.’ I pondered these things in my breast, and said to
myself, ‘Surely all glory is but as a sign.’”
True, and trite. He might even, perhaps, by dint of scraping, have found
upon those old sign-boards whole strata of discarded heroes, painted one
over another. Vernon was, of course, the dashing captor of Portobello, in
1739. There were “Portobellos” and “Admiral Vernons” all over the country,
for some years, but one would need to travel far and search diligently
before he found an “Admiral Vernon” in these days. Six years only was his
term of popularity, and there was no renewal of the lease. The Duke of
Cumberland displaced him, and he, the victor of Colloden--little enough of
a hero--was painted out in favour of our ally, the “King of Prussia”
(Frederick the Great) about 1756. The “King of Proosher,” as the rustics
commonly called him, had an extraordinary vogue, and the sign is still
occasionally to be found, even in these days, when everything German is,
with excellent reason, detested. But, as the poet remarks, “all that’s
bright must fade,” and the greater number of “Kings of Prussia” were
abolished after the battle of Minden, in 1759, in favour of the “Marquis
of Granby.” The “Markis o’ Granby” is associated, in the minds of most
people, with Dorking, with the _Pickwick Papers_, and with the ducking in
a horse-trough of a certain prophet; but when the sign first became
popular, it stood for military glory. The Marquis himself was the eldest
son of the third Duke of Rutland: a soldier who rose to distinction in our
wars upon the Continent, became Commander-in-Chief, and at length died in
his fifty-eighth year, in 1779. There was another special appropriateness
in selecting him for a tavern sign; for he was one of the deepest drinkers
among the hard-drinking men of his age.
The actual labour of converting the Duke of Cumberland into the King of
Prussia, and his Most Protestant Majesty into the Marquis of Granby could
have been but small, for they were all represented in profile, and all
were clean-shaven, and wore a uniform and a cocked hat; and it is probable
that in most cases the sole alteration that took place was in the
lettering.
But the vogue of all other heroes was as nothing beside that of Nelson.
He, at least, is permanent, and the sign-boards in this significant
instance justify themselves. Other heroes won a victory, or victories, and
conducted successful campaigns. They were incidents in the history of the
country; but Nelson saved the nation, and died in the act of saving it.
This exception apart, nothing is so fleeting as sign-board popularity. The
hero of yesterday is sacrificed without a pang, and the idol of to-day
takes his place; and just as inevitably the popular figure of to-day will
yield to the hero of to-morrow. Would you blame mine host of the “Duke of
Wellington” because he changes his sign for that of a later captain? Not
at all; for we are not to suppose that the original sign was chosen from
any motive of personal loyalty. The Duke was selected because of his
popularity with all classes; for the reasoning was that the inn bearing
his name would secure the most custom. He was the last of the giants, and
no other military commander has come within leagues of his especial glory.
The sign of the “Duke of Wellington” long ceased to specially attract, but
it survived for many years because of his own greatness, and, inversely,
because of the smallness of the men who commanded our armies in the
Crimean War, at the end of the long thirty-nine years’ peace between
Waterloo and the Alma. It is true that there were, and still perhaps are,
inns and public-houses named after Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief in
the Crimea, but they were comparatively few. In short, the line of heroes
ceased with “the Duke,” and later generals have been not only
intrinsically lesser personalities, but have suffered from being engaged
in smaller issues, and under the eye of the “special correspondent,” whose
foible has ever been to criticise the general-commanding in detail, to
teach him his business, and show a gaping public what had been “a better
way” in attack, in strategy, or in tactics. Indeed, one sometimes doubts
if even “the Duke” himself would have become the great figure he still
remains had the “special correspondent” been in existence during his
campaigns.
The lineal successor of Lord Raglan and Lord Napier was Sir Garnet
Wolseley, who first adorned a sign-board at the close of his successful
campaign in Ashanti, in 1874. He was long “our only general,” and was such
a synonym for rightness and efficiency that he even gave rise to a popular
saying. “That’s all Sir Garnet” was for some years a Cockney vulgarism,
but after the fall of Khartoum, in 1885, it was heard no more. For two
reasons: the military knight had become a peer and his Christian name was
being forgotten; and the failure of his Nile Expedition to the relief of
Gordon broke the tradition of unvaried success.
The true story of a public-house at Dover--doubtless one of many such
instances--points these remarks. It was originally the “Sir Garnet
Wolseley,” and then the “Lord Wolseley,” and is now the “Lord Roberts.”
“Alas!” said the Chairman of the local Licensing Committee, in 1906,
“such is popularity!” He was evidently, equally with Horace Walpole, a
moralist.
Lord Roberts is now the risen star on the public-house firmament.
Sometimes Lord Kitchener shines with, and in a few instances has even
occluded, him.
But when does a sign begin to be “queer,” and where does the quality of
“quaintness” commence? Those are matters for individual preference, for
that which is to one person unusual and worthy of remark is to another the
merest commonplace. For my part, for instance, I regard the sign of the
“Swan” at Charing as decidedly unusual, and of the quaintness of the old
village of Charing there is surely no need to insist.
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” CHARING.]
It is essentially the business of a sign to be in some way queer, for by
attracting attention you also secure trade. The first problem of
sign-painters was to attract the attention and to reach the intelligence
of those who could not read--a class in times not so long since very large
and grossly ignorant. For their benefit the barber displayed his
parti-coloured pole, the maker of fishing-tackle hung out his rod and
fish, the hosier showed his Golden Fleece, and the pawnbroker the three
golden balls. In the same way the “Lions” of the various inns in town and
country were pictured red, white, black, or even blue, so that the
unlettered but not colour-blind should at least be able to use the sense
that nature gave them, and from the rival lions make a choice. But lions
were never familiar objects in the British landscape, and the
sign-painter, lacking a model, in presenting his idea of that “king of
beasts” often merely succeeded in picturing something that, unlike
anything on earth, was often styled by Hodge a “ramping cat.” In such a
manner the former “Cats” inn at Sevenoaks obtained its name. Its signboard
originally displayed the arms of the Sackvilles, with their supporters,
two white leopards, spotted black; but partly, no doubt, because the
painting was bad, and in part because leopards did not come within the
everyday experience of the Kentish rustic, the house became known by the
more homely name. The “Leather Bottle” was once a sign understood by all;
but in its last years that of the “Leather Bottle” public-house, in
Leather Lane, Holborn, became something of a puzzle.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “LEATHER BOTTLE,” LEATHER LANE. _Removed
1896._]
Perhaps the most ingenious and unusual sign it is possible to find
throughout the whole length and breadth of the country is that of the
little unassuming inn in Castlegate, Grantham, known indifferently as the
“Beehive” and the “Living Sign.” A sapling tree growing on the pavement in
front of the house has a beehive fixed in its branches, with an inscribed
board calling attention to the fact during those summer months when
foliage obscures it:
Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
“GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,
A lofty steeple and a living Sign.”
The beehive being generally occupied, the invitation to “explore” it is
perhaps an unfortunate choice of language. At any rate, the traveller is
much more likely to explore the house than the sign of it.
The “Pack Horse and Talbot” may now, by sheer lapse of time, be regarded
as a queer sign. It is the name of what was once an inn but is now a
public-house, on the Chiswick High Road, Turnham Green--a thoroughfare
which is also the old coach-road to Bath. The painted sign is a pictorial
allusion to the ancient wayfaring days when packmen journeyed through the
country with their wares on horseback, and accompanied by a faithful dog
who kept guard over his master’s goods. This type of dog--the “talbot,”
the old English hound--is now extinct. Probably not one person in every
thousand of those who pass the house could explain what the “Talbot” in
the sign means, or would think of associating it with the dog seen in the
picture.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BEEHIVE,” GRANTHAM.]
Another London sign that tells of manners and customs long since obsolete
is that of the “Running Footman,” Hay Hill, Berkeley Square, picturing a
gaily uniformed man running, with a wand of office in his hand. In the
middle of the eighteenth century it was as much the “correct thing” for
noble families to keep a running footman to precede them on their
journeys as it was for their Dalmatian dogs to trot beneath their
carriages. Those “plum-pudding dogs” finally went out of fashion about
half a century ago, but the running footmen became extinct half a century
earlier. Extraordinary tales were told of the endurance of, and the long
distances covered by, these men.
Everywhere we have the “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign whose origin still
troubles some people, who seek a reason for even the most unreasonable and
fantastic things, and lose sight of the fact that a whimsical fancy, a
kind of nursery-lore imagination, in all likelihood originated the sign,
which is probably not any debased and half-forgotten allusion to “Caton le
Fidèle,” the brave Governor of Calais, to “Catherine la Fidèle,” the
French sobriquet for the wife of the Czar Peter, or to “Santa Catherina
Fidelius,” but simply--the “Cat and Fiddle,” neither more nor less. The
rest of it is all “learned” fudge, and stuff and nonsense. Serious persons
will object that cats do not play the fiddle; but they do--in
nursery-land, where cows have for many centuries jumped over the moon and
the table utensils have eloped together, and where pigs have played
whistles from quite ancient times, a little to the confusion of those who
derive the “Pig and Whistle” sign from some supposed Saxon invocation to
the Virgin Mary: “Pige Washail!” ’Tis a way they have in the nursery,
which nobody will deny.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “PACK HORSE AND TALBOT.” TURNHAM GREEN.]
[Illustration: THE “RUNNING FOOTMAN.” HAY HILL.]
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “LION AND FIDDLE,” HILPERTON.]
In some cases the “Cat and Fiddle” has become the “Lion and Fiddle”:
notably at Hilperton, in Wiltshire, where a picture-sign represents a very
mild and apologetic-looking lion walking on his hind-legs, with his tail
humbly tucked between them, and playing a tune upon a fiddle--doubtless
something doleful, to describe the folly of giving trust.
At Moulsford, on the banks of the Thames, is the rustic inn displaying the
sign of the “Beetle and Wedge,” a puzzling conjunction, until we learn
that the “beetle” in this case is no insect, but a heavy wooden mallet,
and the wedge a wooden, iron, or steel instrument struck by it in
splitting timber.
[Illustration: THE “SUGAR-LOAVES,” SIBLE HEDINGHAM.]
At Sible Hedingham, in Essex, the sign of the “Sugar-loaves” strikes the
traveller as curious, both in name and in shape. Sugar-loaves, of course,
we never see nowadays, now that cube sugar prevails; and grocers no
longer, as they did of old, receive their sugar in pyramidical-shaped
loaves and cut it up themselves.
Manchester people are familiar with a very curious sign indeed: that which
hangs from the “Old Rock House” inn at Barton. On the sign is seen the
figure of a man wearing a “fool’s cap” and intent upon threshing corn, and
in his hands is an uplifted flail, bearing the mysterious inscription,
“Now Thus.”
The origin of this is found in the local story of how William Trafford, a
staunch Royalist, outwitted Cromwell’s soldiery. Trafford owned South
Lamley Hall, and when the troops of the Parliament were heard approaching,
he caused all his servants and farm stock to be stowed away in a remote
glen called “Solomon’s Hollow,” leaving him alone in the great house. When
they were all gone, he collected his jewellery and plate, and, having
buried them in a secret place, disguised himself in rough clothes, being
discovered when the Roundheads arrived threshing corn over the place where
the valuables were hidden.
As they entered the barn they heard him repeating mechanically at
intervals the solitary expression, “Now thus”; and although he was
questioned by the officers, who took him to be a servant, they could get
nothing else out of him, being at length obliged to depart, with the
belief that they had been talking to a harmless lunatic.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.”]
[Illustration: “UNCLE TOM’S CABIN.” BLUEPITTS, NEAR ROCHDALE.]
The De Traffords still live on this estate, whose wealth was thus saved by
their ready-witted ancestor.
It will be conceded that the “Boar” inn, more generally known as “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,” between Heywood and Castleton, on the Rochdale Canal, is not
only a queer sign, but a queer house, being nothing other than an old
passenger barge that used formerly to ply along the Bridgewater Canal,
between Heywood and Bluepitt.
The railway at last took away all the passenger traffic of the canal, and
the old barge, after many years of usefulness, ceased to run. It was
purchased by a man named Butterworth, who had it drawn on rollers to a
position some three miles from the “cut,” and built walls against the
sides, and roofed it over.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “OLD ROCK HOUSE” INN, BARTON.]
One of the finest and most artistic old signs in the country is that of
the “Three Horseshoes,” a little weather-boarded ale-house at Great
Mongeham, which is, in a contradictory way, quite a small village,
between Sandwich and Deal. It is a rare instance of the use of wrought
iron, not as the support of a sign, but as a sign itself, and is so
strikingly like a number of wrought-iron signs in Nottingham Castle
Museum, the work of that famous artist in iron, Huntingdon Shaw, who
wrought the celebrated iron gates of Hampton Court, that it would seem to
be a product of his school. The vogue of the artistic sign is returning,
and a good example of modern work in iron is to be found at Great
Missenden, in Buckinghamshire, where the “Red Lion” inn displays an
heraldic lion in silhouette, ramping on his heraldic wreath, and clawed
and whiskered in approved mediæval style.
[Illustration: THE “THREE HORSESHOES,” GREAT MONGEHAM.]
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “RED LION,” GREAT MISSENDEN.]
At Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, and at some other places, the sign of
the “Labour in Vain” is met with, representing two busy persons in the act
of trying to scrub a nigger white. The Stourbridge example shows two very
serious-looking maid-servants striving to perform that impossible task,
while the nigger, whose head and shoulders are seen emerging from a dolly
tub, has a large, superior smile, only sufficiently to be expressed by a
foot-rule.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “LABOUR IN VAIN.”]
Queer signs are often the product of ignorant alteration of old signs
whose original meaning has become obscured by lapse of time. The “Mourning
Bush,” for example, was a sign set up originally by a Royalist innkeeper,
grieving for the death of Charles the First. A bush, or bundle of twigs,
was at that time the usual sign of an ale-house, and he swathed his in
black. What if he could revisit this earth after these two hundred and
fifty years, and find that sign corrupted, at a little inn near Shifnal,
Shropshire, into the “Maund and Bush,” the sign representing a
hardy-looking laurel and a basket--“maund” being a provincialism for a
wicker basket!
The “Coach and Dogs” sign at Oswestry, a queer variant of the more usual
“Coach and Horses” found so numerously all over the country, takes its
origin from an eccentric country gentleman, one Edward Lloyd, of
Llanforda, two miles from Oswestry, whose whim it was to drive to and from
the town in a diminutive chaise drawn by two retrievers.
The “Eight Bells” at Twickenham, in itself no more than a commonplace
public-house, has for a sign an oddly assorted group of eight actual
bells, apparently gathered at haphazard from various marine-stores, for no
two are exactly of a size. Hanging as they do from a wooden bracket,
projecting over the pathway, and showing prominently against the sky, they
help to make the not very desirable bye-lane picturesque. It is a lane
that runs down to the river, where the Twickenham eyots divide the stream
in two, and has not yet been levelled to the ordinary suburban
respectability of the neighbourhood. Waterside folk and other queer fish
reside in, and resort to it, and on Saturday evenings the usual beery hum
proceeding o’ nights from the “Eight Bells” develops into a spirituous
tumult, ending at closing-time with stumbling steps and incoherent
snatches of song, as the revellers, at odds with kerbstones and
lamp-posts, make their devious way home.
[Illustration: THE “EIGHT BELLS,” TWICKENHAM.]
At Bricket Wood, Hertfordshire, a Temperance Hotel displaying the unique
sign of “The Old Fox with His Teeth Drawn” may be seen. It was, until
1893, a rural inn called the “Old Fox,” but was then purchased by the Hon.
A. H. Holland-Hibbert, son-in-law of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and, like him, a
total abstinence enthusiast, who made the changes noted above. At his
house at Great Munden he has a collection of the signs of inns he has in
the same way converted.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “STOCKS” INN, CLAPGATE, NEAR WIMBORNE.]
The “Stocks” inn, at Clapgate, near Wimborne, displays a miniature model
of “stocks for three” over its porch, while the “Shears” inn at Wantage, a
rustic ale-house in an obscure corner of that town, with the odd feature
of a blacksmith’s forge attached, exhibits a gigantic pair of shears.
[Illustration: THE “SHEARS” INN, WANTAGE.]
A sign that certainly, if not in itself unusual, is nowadays in an
unwonted place, is that of the old “White Bear,” a galleried coaching inn
that stood in Piccadilly, on the site of the present Criterion Restaurant,
until about 1860. It is a great white-painted wooden effigy that is now to
be found in the garden of the little rustic inn of the same name at
Fickles Hole, a quiet hamlet on the Surrey downs to the south-east of
Croydon. To the stranger who first catches sight of it, this polar bear
among the geraniums and the sweet-williams is sufficiently startling.
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “WHITE BEAR.” FICKLES HOLE.]
At Nidd, Yorkshire, we have the odd sign of the “Ass in the Bandbox”; at
Brixham, South Devon, the “Civil Usage”; at Chepstow the “Old Tippling
Philosopher”; the “Cart Overthrown,” at Edmonton; the “Trouble House,”
near Tetbury; the “Smiling Man,” at Dudley. At Bridgwater, Somerset, the
pilgrim finds both the “Ship Aground” and the “Ship Afloat”; and a
somewhat similar sign, the “Barge Aground,” in those places of barges and
canals, Brentford and Stratford, at the western and eastern extremities of
London.
The “World Turned Upside Down” is the name of a large public-house in the
Old Kent Road and the sign of an inn near Three Mile Cross, Reading, where
a rabbit is pictured on one side with a gun, out man-shooting; while on
the other is a donkey seated in a cart, driving a man.
The sign “Who’d have thought it?” at Barking, is said to express the
surprise of the original proprietor at obtaining a licence; while the “Why
not?” at Dover is probably a suggestion to the undecided wayfarer to make
up his mind and have some refreshment. There are at least four of the
“Hark to!”--hunting signs: “Hark to Jowler” at Bury, Lancashire; “Hark to
[or “Hark the”] Lasher” at Castleton, Derbyshire; “Hark to Bounty,” at
Staidburn, and “Hark to Nudger,” at Dobcross, near Manchester.
Of signs such as “The Case is Altered” and the “Live and Let Live” there
is no end; nor is there any finality in the many versions of the incidents
that are said to have originated them. The real original story of “The
Case is Altered” is said to be that of the once-celebrated lawyer, Edward
Plowden, who died in 1584: to him came a farmer whose cow had been killed
by the lawyer’s bull. He was suspicious, as it seems, of lawyers, and came
cunningly prepared with a trap to catch him out.
“My bull,” said the farmer, “has gored and killed your cow.”
“The case is clear,” said the lawyer, “you must pay me her value.”
“I’m sorry,” then said the farmer, but with a contradictory gleam of
triumph in his eye: “I _should_ have said that it was _your_ bull killed
my cow.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Plowden, resignedly, “the case is altered.”
[Illustration: THE “CROW-ON-GATE” INN, CROWBOROUGH.]
Nowadays, many of these signs no doubt derive merely from an improvement
in the conduct of the house, indicating that better drinks and superior
accommodation are to be had within, the “Case is Altered” in such cases
being just a permanent form of the familiar and more usual and temporary
notice, “Under New Management.”
The popularity of the “Gate” sign has already been mentioned. An odd
variation of it is to be seen at Crowborough, in Sussex, where the
“Crow-on-Gate” inn, itself the _ne plus ultra_ of the commonplace,
displays a miniature gate with the effigy of a crow over it.
[Illustration: THE “FIRST AND LAST” INN, SENNEN.]
Land’s End, in Cornwall, is notable from our present point of view because
it possesses no fewer than three inns, or houses of public refreshment,
each one claiming to be the “First and Last House in England.” The real
original “First and Last” is the inn, so-called, that stands next to the
grey, weatherbeaten granite church in the weatherbeaten and grey village
of Sennen, one mile distant from the beetling cliffs of Land’s End itself;
but in modern times, since touring has brought civilisation and excursion
brakes and broken bottles and sandwich-papers to the old-time savage
solitudes of this rocky coast, there have sprung up, almost on the verge
of those cliffs, two other houses--an ugly “hotel” and a plain
white-washed tea-house--that have cut in to share this peculiar fame. The
tiny tea-house, where you get tea and picture-postcards, and are bothered
to buy shells, and tin and copper-bearing quartz, is actually the most
westerly, and therefore the “Last” or the “First,” according to whether
you are setting out from Penzance, or returning.
[Illustration: THE “FIRST AND LAST,” LAND’S END.]
The “Eagle and Child,” a sign common in Cheshire and Lancashire, is
heraldically described as “an eagle, wings extended or, preying on an
infant in its cradle proper, swaddled gules, the cradle laced or.” The
eagle is generally represented on inn-signs without the cradle. In the
mere straightforward, unmystical language of every day, the eagle thus
fantastically described is golden, the infant is naturally coloured, and
the swaddling is red.
The origin of this curious sign is found in the fourteenth-century legend
which tells how Sir Thomas de Latham was walking in his park with his
lady, who was childless, when they drew near to a desert and wild
situation where it was commonly reported an eagle had built her nest.
Approaching the spot, they heard the cries of a young child, and, on
bursting through thickets and brambles, the attendant servants found a
baby-boy, dressed in rich swaddling-clothes, in the eagle’s nest. The
knight affected astonishment; the good dame, unsuspecting, or, like the
Lady Mottisfont who, under somewhat similar circumstances, in one of Mr.
Thomas Hardy’s _Group of Noble Dames_, thought strange things but said
nothing, was wisely silent and accepted the “gift from Heaven.” As the old
ballad has it:
Their content was such to see the hap
That th’ ancient lady hugs yt in her lap;
Smooth’s yt with kisses, bathes yt in her teares,
And unto Lathom House the babe she bears.
Good lady! She soon learnt, in common with the countryside in general,
that the foundling thus “miraculously” given her was the offspring of her
husband and one Mary Oscatel; but the baby was adopted, was given the name
of Latham, and succeeded eventually to the family estates. In after years,
Isabel, daughter and sole heiress of this foundling, married Sir John
Stanley, ancestor of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby, who still bear the
“Eagle and Child” crest.
This custom of good knights casually finding infants when out walking with
their wives seems anciently to have been extremely common. A somewhat
similar incident is told of the infancy of Sir William Sevenoke.[7]
[Illustration: THE “EAGLE AND CHILD,” NETHER ALDERLEY.]
The old “Eagle and Child” at Nether Alderley, in Cheshire, is the property
of Lord Stanley of Alderley, but the licence was surrendered some thirty
years since, and it is now a farmhouse. A leaden spout-head bears the date
“1688,” but the house is obviously much older. A relic of old, unsettled
times is seen in the great oaken bar that serves to strengthen the front
door against possible attack and forcible entry.
CHAPTER X
RURAL INNS
Of first importance to the tourist who flits day by day to fresh woods and
pastures new are the rural inns that afford so hospitable and
unconventionally comfortable a welcome at the close of the day’s journey.
Unwise is he who concludes the day at populous town or busy city, where
modern hotels, pervaded by waiters and chambermaids, remind the Londoner
of the metropolis he has just left. Your old and seasoned tourist, afoot
or on a cycle, by himself or with one trusty, quarrel-proof companion,
avoids altogether the Big Town. He has been there, more often than he
could wish, and will be there again. His pleasure is in the village inn,
or the tavern of some sequestered hamlet; and he knows, so only his needs
be not sybarite, that he will be well served there.
Queer old places some of them are: bowered ofttimes in honeysuckle and
jessamine; sometimes built by the side of some clear-running stream; at
others fronting picturesquely upon the village green. How quaint their
architecture, how tortuous their staircases and sloping their floors, and
what memories they have gathered round them in their long career! Who, not
being the slave of mere luxuries intended to make a man eat when he has
no appetite, and to drink when he has no thirst upon him, does not delight
in the rural inn?
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HORSE,” WOOLSTONE.]
Many, like Canning’s “Needy Knife Grinder,” have--God bless you!--no story
to tell, and leave you, it may be, pleasantly vacant-minded, after long
spells elsewhere of close-packed mental effort. A welcome vacation indeed!
The “White Horse” at Woolstone, a queerly pretty little inn with a front
distantly resembling a Chippendale bureau-bookcase, is an instance. No
story belongs to the “White Horse,” which is tucked away under the mighty
sides of White Horse Hill, Berkshire, and additionally overhung with trees
and encircled with shrubberies and underwoods, and is finally situated on
a narrow road that presently leads, as it would seem, to the end of the
known world. The stranger stumbles by accident upon the “White Horse” inn
while looking for a way uphill to that ancient Saxon effigy of a horse
scored in the turf and chalk on the summit; and there, before he tackles
that ascent, he does, if he be a wise man, fortify himself against the
fatigue of much hard Excelsior business by that best of tourist’s
fare--ale and bread and cheese--in the little stone-flagged parlour.
Among memories of old rural inns, those of the “White Horse” are not the
least endearing; but the “Anchor” at Ripley has a warm corner in the
hearts of many old-time frequenters of the “Ripley Road,” who, when the
world was young and the bicycle high, made it their house of call every
week in the summer season, and wavered little in their allegiance to the
“Ripley Road” even in autumn and winter. Ripley, in the days of the high
bicycle and in the first years of the “safety,” was well styled the
“Cyclists’ Mecca,” for it was then the most popular place in the
wheelman’s world. On Saturdays and Sundays it was no uncommon thing to see
two or three hundred machines stacked in front of the “Anchor.”
[Illustration: THE “TALBOT,” RIPLEY. _Photo by R. W. Thomas._]
There were several reasons for this popularity: the easy distance of
twenty-three miles from London; the fine character of the road; and
certainly not least, the welcome extended to cyclists at the “Anchor” by
the Dibble sisters and brother in early days when all the world regarded
the cyclist as a pariah, and when to knock him over with a brick, or by
the simple expedient of inserting a stick between the spokes of his wheel,
was a popular form of humour.
The two inns of Ripley--the great red-bricked “Talbot” and the rustic,
white-faced “Anchor”--are typical, in their individual ways, of old road
life that called them into existence centuries before ever the cycle came
into being. The “Talbot,” you see at a glance, was the coaching-and
posting-house; the “Anchor” was the house where the waggoners pulled up
and the packmen stayed and the humbler wayfarers found a welcome. When
railways came, both alike fell into the cold shade of neglect, but came
into their own once more during those years of cycling popularity already
mentioned. Now that Ripley has ceased to be the popular place it was,
another reverse of fortune has overtaken them in common.
At Rickmansworth, which seems to be the battle-ground of Benskin’s Watford
Ales, Mullen’s Hertford brews, and the various tipples of half a dozen
other surrounding townlets, in addition to the liquors of its own local
brewery, there are extraordinary numbers of inns. How do they exist? By
consuming each other’s stock-in-trade? Or is the thirst of Rickmansworth
so hardly quenched? The inquiring mind is at a nonplus, and is likely to
remain so.
A romantic history, in the barley-brew sort, belongs to Rickmansworth; for
there, until a year or so later than 1856, by the wish of some pious
benefactor--heaven be his bed!--the local authorities every morning placed
a cask of ale by the roadside, at the foot of the hill, on the way to
Watford. If, however, it were no better than the very “small” and
ditchwater-flat ale that to this day forms the “Wayfarers’ Dole” at the
Hospital of St. Cross, near Winchester, its discontinuance could have been
no great loss.
There was a similarly great and glorious time at Hoddesdon, not so long
since but that some ancients still speak of it with moist eyes and
regretful accents, when beer was free to all comers. A brewer of that
town, one Christian Catherow--a Christian indeed--left a bequest by which
a large barrel of ale was placed in the High Street and kept constantly
replenished, for the use of all and sundry, who had but to help themselves
from an iron pot, chained to a post beside the barrel. Alas! in some
mysterious way the ale gradually deteriorated from good strong drink to
table-beer, then it became mere purge, and then small beer of the
smallest, and at last, about 1841--oh, horrible!--water.
[Illustration: THE “ANCHOR,” RIPLEY, IN THE DAYS OF THE DIBBLES AND THE
CYCLING BOOM. _Photo by R. W. Thomas._]
Apart from the “Swan” at Rickmansworth, with quaintly carved sign of a
swan, dated 1799, swimming among bulrushes, there are but two or three
important hostelries in the town; the others are chiefly ale-houses of the
semi-rustic type, most of them old enough and quaintly enough built to
seem natural productions of the soil. Among them the “Halfway House” and
the “Rose and Crown” at Mill End are typical; houses that are, above all
else, “good pull-ups” for carmen and waggoners, where a tankard of ale and
a goodly chunk of bread with its cousinly cheese are usually called for
while the horses outside are taking their nosebag refreshment. Both these
old houses are racy of the soil: the “Rose and Crown,” the older of the
two, but the “Halfway House” the most curious, by reason of its odd
arrangement of seats outside, with backs formed by the window-shutters
that were formerly--in times not so secure as our own--put up and firmly
secured every night.
[Illustration: THE “HALFWAY HOUSE,” RICKMANSWORTH.]
[Illustration: THE “ROSE AND CROWN,” MILL END, RICKMANSWORTH.]
Two rural inns, typical in their respective ways of rustic England, are
illustrated here. They neighbour one another; the one on the Bath Road at
the fifty-fifth mile-stone from London, before entering Newbury, and
being, in fact, the half-way house between the General Post Office,
London, and the Post Office in Bath; the other but two miles away, at
Sandleford Water, where a footbridge and a watersplash on the river
Enborne mark the boundaries of Hampshire and Berkshire. Sitting in the
arbours of the “Swan,” that looks upon the Bath Road, you may see the
traffic of a great highway go by, and at Sandleford Water you have the
place wholly to yourself, or share it only with the squirrels and the
birds of the overarching trees. There was once an obscure little Priory
here, whose every stone has utterly vanished.
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” SANDLEFORD.]
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” NEAR NEWBURY.]
[Illustration: THE “JOLLY FARMER,” FARNHAM.]
The “Jolly Farmer” inn at Farnham, where William Cobbett was born in 1762,
still stands and, overhung as it is with tall trees, and neatly kept, is
in every way, we may well suspect, a prettier place than it was in his
time. And it is, doubtless, in its way, now a higher-class house; a
general levelling up, in the country, of ale-houses, taverns and rustic
inns, being always to be borne in mind when we read or write of the
rustic wayside inns of a hundred years or so since. You may in these days
even play billiards, on a full-size table, at the “Jolly Farmer,” and
order strange exotic drinks undreamt of by the rustics of Cobbett’s day.
[Illustration: THE “BOAR’S HEAD,” MIDDLETON.]
Five and a half miles from Manchester, in the now busy township of
Middleton, the old rural “Boar’s Head” inn stands, fronting the main
street; a striking anachronism in that twentieth-century manufacturing
centre, looking out with its sixteenth-century timbered front upon modern
tram-lines and an unlovely commercialism. The projecting sign proclaims it
to be that now rare thing among inns, a “Free House.” The sight of that
inscription leads inevitably to the thought, how strange it is that in
this boasted land of freedom, in this country that freed the black slaves,
the “tied-house” system should be allowed, by which brewers can buy
licensed premises and insist that their tenants shall sell no other
liquors than those they supply. Pity the poor bondsman of a tenant, and
still more pity the general public condemned by the system to drink the
inferior brews that no one would dare to sell to a free man.
The curious late eighteenth-century addition to the “Boar’s Head,” shown
in the illustration, was once the local Sessions House, but is now the
Assembly Room.
[Illustration: THE “OLD HOUSE AT HOME” HAVANT.]
At Havant, adjoining the church, as may be seen in the illustration, is
an extremely ancient and highly picturesque inn, the “Old House at Home,”
enormously strong and sturdy, with huge beams criss-crossing in every
direction, and stout enough to support a superstructure several storeys
high, instead of merely two floors. It is as excellent an example as could
probably be found anywhere of a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century lavishness
of material and want of proportion of means toward ends. But that should
not make us grieve; no builder is guilty of such things to-day; let us
rather be thankful for the picturesqueness and the strength of it. Those
who axed these timbers out of the tree-trunks, and reared up this
framework, built to last; and those others who doubtless will some day
pull it down, to make way for modern buildings, will have hard work to do
so. It can never merely fall down. The history of it is told in few words.
It was not built as an inn, and was indeed originally the vicarage, and so
remained for some centuries.
An inn with a similar history to that just mentioned--although by no means
so humble--is the “Pounds Bridge” inn, on a secluded road between
Speldhurst and Penshurst, in Kent. As will be seen by the illustration, it
is an exceedingly picturesque example of the half-timbered method of
construction greatly favoured in that district, both originally and in
modern revival. It is, however, a genuine sixteenth-century building, and
was erected, as the date upon it clearly proclaims, in 1593. The singular
device of which this date forms a part is almost invariably a “poser” to
the passer-by. The “W” is sufficiently clear, but the other letter, like
an inverted Q, is not so readily identified. It is really the old Gothic
form of the letter D, and was the initial of William Darkenoll, rector of
Penshurst, who built the house for a residence, in his sixty-ninth year:
as “E.T.A. 69”--his quaint way of rendering “_aet._,” i.e. _aetatis
suae_--rather obscurely informs us. Three years later, July 12th, 1596,
William Darkenoll died, and for many years--to the contrary the memory of
man runneth not--the house he built and adorned with such quaint conceits
has been a rustic inn.
[Illustration: “POUNDS BRIDGE.”]
A house rural now that the old semi-urban character of the great road to
Oxford has, with the passing of the coaches and the post-chaises, long
become merely a memory is the great “George and Dragon” inn at West
Wycombe. West Wycombe once called itself a town, and perhaps does so
still, but it cannot nowadays make that claim convincingly. If we call it
a decayed coaching town, that is the most that can be conceded, in the
urban way; for to-day its every circumstance is rustic. The “George and
Dragon,” a glance at its upstanding, imposing front is sufficient to show,
was built for the accommodation of the great, or at any rate for those who
were great enough to be able to command the price of chaise-and-four and
sybarite accommodation; but the passing stranger would nowadays be
unlikely to secure any better meal than bread and cheese, and the greater
part of the house is silence and emptiness, while the once bustling yard
has subsided into that condition of picturesque decrepitude which, however
pleasing to the artist, tells of business decay.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “GEORGE AND DRAGON,” WEST WYCOMBE.]
It is, indeed, remarkable what picturesqueness lingers in the courtyards
of old inns. The front of the house may have been modernised, or in some
way smartened up, but the old gables and the casement windows are still
generally to be found in the rear, and sometimes the local church-tower
comes in, across the roof-tops, in a partly benedictory and wholly
sketchable way, as at the village of Dedham, near Colchester, where the
yard of the “Sun” inn and the church-tower combine to make a very fine
composition. A relic of the bygone coaching days of Dedham remains, in the
small oval spy-hole cut through the wall on either side of the tap-room
bay-window, and glazed, commanding views up and down the village street,
so that the approach of coaches coming either way might be clearly seen.
[Illustration: THE YARD OF THE “SUN,” DEDHAM.]
[Illustration: THE “OLD SHIP,” WORKSOP.]
Dedham, however, is very far from being exceptionally fortunate among
Essex villages, in retaining old inns. It is an old-world county, largely
off the beaten track, and offering few inducements to the innovator. Among
the many humble old Essex inns the “Dial House” at Bocking, adjoining
Braintree, is notable; for although it is now only an ale-house, the
elaborately panelled and sculptured Renaissance oak of the tap-room walls
indicates a bygone grandeur whose history cannot now be even surmised.
Local records do not tell us the story of the “Dial House” before it
became an inn. The sign, it should be said, derives from an old sundial on
the wail. A curious contrivance may be noticed in one of the old wooden
seats in the tap-room; a circular hole, with a drawer below. The purpose
at first sight seems mysterious; but it appears that this is the simple
outfit for that ancient, and now illegal, game, shove-halfpenny. A recent
visit discloses the fact that all the beautiful panelling of the “Dial
House” has now been sold and removed.
[Illustration: THE “OLD SWAN,” ATHERSTONE.]
The uniquely projecting porch of the “Old Ship” at Worksop, and the old
gabled house behind it, still keep a rustic air in the streets of that
growing town, just as the “Old Swan” at Atherstone, restored in a
judiciously conservative manner, will long serve to maintain memories of
the old England of four hundred years ago.
All the old inns of the decayed port of Sandwich have, by dint of the
fallen circumstances of that once busy haven, become, with all their
surroundings, rural. Golfers have of late years enlivened the surroundings
of Sandwich, and partly peopled the empty streets, but commerce has for
ever forsaken this old Cinque Port. In one of the most silent streets
stands the inn now known as the “King’s Arms,” although, according to the
date of 1592 on the richly carved angle-post of the building, and with the
additional evidence of the Royal Arms supported by the Red Dragon of the
Tudors, it was erected in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The grotesque
figure carved in high relief on the angle-post appears to be a Tudor
Renaissance combination of Sun-god and the great god Pan. The front of the
house is covered with plaster, but there can be little doubt that here,
beneath that coating, as in numberless other instances, a good
half-timbered construction awaits discovery. Already, when the “King’s
Arms” was built, Sandwich haven was being choked with the sand and shingle
brought by the Channel currents, and the seaport was seen to be doomed to
extinction. He was, therefore, a rash man who then built anew here, and
few indeed have been the new houses since then.
A characteristic old inn of Sandwich is the queer old house with peaked
gables, contemporary with the “King’s Arms,” bearing the sign of the “Malt
Shovel,” and exhibiting one of those implements of the maltster’s trade
over the doorway.
The fisher village of Mousehole, in Cornwall--whose name is a perennial
joy to visitors--possesses a manor-house turned inn; a private house made
public: if indeed it be not altogether derogatory to a picturesque village
inn to style it by a name more usually associated with a mere modern urban
drinking-shop.
[Illustration: THE “KING’S ARMS,” SANDWICH.]
Mousehole may be found a little to the westward of Penzance and Newlyn.
Like most of its fellows, it lies along the sides and in the bottom of a
hollow, where the sea comes in like a pool, and gives more or less shelter
to fisher-boats. No one who retains his sense of smell ever has any doubt
of Mousehole being engaged in the fish trade, for there are fresh fish
continually being brought in, and there are fish, very far from fresh,
preserved in the fish-cellars that are so striking a feature of the
place, in the olfactory way. In those cellars the pilchards that are the
staple of the Cornish fishery are barrelled until such time as they are
wanted for export to the Mediterranean, whence, it is commonly believed,
they return, in all the glory of oil, tinned and labelled in strange
tongues, “sardines.”
[Illustration: THE “KEIGWIN ARMS,” MOUSEHOLE.]
In midst of the crowded houses, and in the thick of these ancient and
fishlike odours, stands this rugged old inn, the “Keigwin Arms,”
remarkable for its picturesque exterior and for the boldly projecting
porch, supported on granite pillars, rather than for any internal
beauties. It survives, as it were, to show that not all manor-houses were
abodes of luxury, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
I do not know what the Keigwins blazoned on their old coat, for the sign
displays no armorial bearings, and the Keigwins were long since extinct.
But they were once great here and otherwhere. Here they were the squires,
and you read that in 1595, when the Spaniards, grown saucy and revengeful
after their Armada disaster of seven years earlier, came and burnt the
town while Drake and Hawkins and our sea-dogs were looking the other way,
Jenkin Keigwin, the squire, was killed by a cannon-ball, in front of his
own house.
[Illustration: THE “SWAN,” KNOWLE.]
[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “SWAN,” KNOWLE.]
When the “Swan” at Knowle, near Birmingham, was built, “ever so long
ago,” which in this case was somewhere about the beginning of the
seventeenth century, the neighbourhood of Knowle was wild, open heath. The
country round about has long ceased to be anything at all of that nature,
but the village has until quite recently retained its rural look, and only
in our time is in process of being swallowed by the boa-constrictor of
suburban expansion. In a still rustic corner, near the church, the “Swan”
stands as sound as ever, and will probably be standing, just as sound in
every particular, centuries hence, when the neighbouring houses, built on
ninety-nine years leases, and calculated to last barely that time, will be
in the last stages of decay. The “Swan” has the additionally interesting
feature of a very fine wrought-iron bracket, designed in a free and
flowing style, to represent leaves and tendrils, and supporting a handsome
oval picture-sign of the “Swan.”
[Illustration: THE “RUNNING HORSE,” MERROW.]
Surrey lies too near London and all that tremendous fact implies for very
many of its ancient rural inns to have survived, but among those that
remain but little altered the “Running Horse” at Merrow stands out with
distinction. It was built, as the date over the great window of the centre
gable shows, in 1615, and, in unusual fashion for a country inn, in a
situation where ground space is plentiful, runs to height, rather than to
length.
The frontispiece to this volume, “A Mug of Cider,” showing a
picturesquely gabled and white-faced village inn, is a representation of
the “White Hart” at Castle Combe, Wiltshire, without doubt the most
old-world village in the county, where every house is in keeping, and the
modern builder has never gained a footing. It is one of the dozen or so
villages that might be bracketed together for first place in any
competition as to which is the “most picturesque village in England.”
CHAPTER XI
THE EVOLUTION OF A COUNTRY INN
It was called simply the “Bear” inn, and had no idea of styling itself
“hotel.” Embowered in trees, it stood well back from the road, for it was
modest and shy. A besom was placed outside the door, and on it the yokels
who were the inn’s chief customers scraped off the sticky clay of the
ploughlands they had been tramping all day. The entrance-passage was
floored with great stone flags. On one side you saw the tap, its floor
sprinkled with sawdust, and on the other was a kind of sacred “best
parlour,” furnished with a round table loaded with the impossible,
unreadable books of more than half a century ago, and a number of chairs
and a sofa, upholstered in horse-hair. In the rear was the family kitchen,
“keeping-room,” and drawing-room, all in one.
The cyclist of thirty-odd years ago--only he was a “bicyclist”
then--sprang lightly off his giraffe-like steed of steel, and, leaning it
against the white-washed wall, called for food and drink. The landlady, a
smiling, simple, motherly woman, in answer to his inquiry, told him that
she and her family were just sitting down to dinner, and he could have
some of it, if he wished. No need to tell him what it was: for there was
a scent of hot roast beef which seemed to him, who had breakfasted light
and early, the most desirable thing on earth for a hungry man.
The landlady was for clearing the table in the sacred parlour and placing
his dinner there, but our early bicyclist was a man of the world--a kind
of secular St. Paul, “all things to all men”--and he suggested that, if
she didn’t mind, and it was no intrusion, he would as soon have dinner
with the family. “Well, sir,” said she, “you’re very welcome, I’m sure,”
and so he sat him down in company with two fresh-coloured daughters in
neat print dresses, and a silent, but not unamiable, son in corduroys and
an ancient jacket.
That was a memorable dinner. There was good ale, in its native pewter, and
the roast beef was followed by a strange but delightful dish--whortleberry
tart--and that by a very Daniel Lambert of a cheese, of majestic
proportions and mellow taste. The talk at table was of crops and the
likelihood of the squire coming back to live in the long-deserted
neighbouring mansion.
When he rose to go, and asked what he owed, the landlady, with much
diffidence, “for you see, sir, we ain’t used to seeing many strangers,”
thought perhaps tenpence would not be too much. That early tourist paid
the modest sum with enthusiasm.
Preparing to mount his high bicycle again, the whole family must needs
come to see him off. They had never before set eyes upon such a
contrivance, and wondered how it could be kept upright. “Come thirty miles
on it to-day!” exclaimed the landlady: “well, I’m sure! You’ll never catch
me on one of ’em.”
The bicyclist glanced whimsically at the stout, middle-aged matron, and
suppressed a smile at the thought.
The next season saw that early wheelman upon the road again. He was now
not the only one who straddled across the top of some fifty inches of
wheel, and, as the novelty of such things had worn off, the cottagers no
longer rushed to doors and windows to gaze after him. Perhaps he did not
mind that so very much.
He came again to the inn, and there he found subtle changes. Ploughmen and
clodhoppers in general were obviously now discouraged, for the besom had
disappeared. There was, too, a something of sufficiency in the manner of
the landlady, and one no longer would have desired to sit down to table
with her--nor she possibly have agreed, for the parlour had now lost
something of its sacramental detachedness, and had become a sort of
dining-room. Again roast beef, but cold, and whortleberry tart--with fewer
berries and more crust--and instead of the cheese that invited you to cut
and come again, a mere slice; while pewter was obviously reckoned vulgar,
for a glass was provided instead. The price had risen to one and six.
“Many bicycliss’ calls here now,” said the landlady. Behind a newly
constructed bar stood her son. His cords were more baggy at the hips and
tighter at the knees, and he obviously knew a thing or two: beside him was
one of the daughters, garishly apparelled.
In another year or so the village itself had changed. There was an
epidemic of mineral waters, and every aforetime simple cottager sold them,
professing to know nothing of the old-fashioned “stone bottle”
ginger-beer. The inn had now got a new window, something in the “Queen
Anne” way, that projected beyond the general building-line of the house
and converted what had been the tap into a “saloon” where two
golden-haired barmaids presided. The landlady had by this time got a black
satin dress, and was plentifully hung with gold chains. A highly varnished
suite of unreliable furniture from Curtain Road filled the dining-room,
whose walls were hung with the advertisements of pushful distillery
companies’ latest liqueurs. “Lunch,” consisting of a plate of indifferent
cold beef, some doubtful salad, bottled beer, a fossil roll, and a small
piece of American cheese, cost half a crown.
One phase alone remains of this “strange, eventful history.” The old-time
bicyclist, long since shorn of his first syllable--and of much else in
this vale of tears--comes now to his ancient haunt along a road thickly
overhung with dust-fog created by swift motor-cars, and finds a new wing
built, with--in the odd spirit of contradiction--an elaborate wrought-iron
sign projecting from it, proclaiming this to be “Ye Old Beare.” He
further learns that it has “Accommodation for Motorists,” sells petrol,
and boasts a “Garage and Inspection Pit.” An ostler, or a something black
and greasy in the mechanic line, leads his cycle away in custody into the
yard.
The landlady has now risen to the dignity of diamond rings, and the
dining-room to that of separate round tables, menus, serviettes and a
depressed and dingy waiter. Lager-beer, and something vinegary of the
claret order afford an indifferent choice, and if the house still
possesses a pewter tankard, it probably is cherished on some shelf as a
curious relic of savage times. The house professes to supply luncheons at
three shillings, but sweets and “attendance” are “extras.”
CHAPTER XII
INGLE-NOOKS
The chimney-corners of the old rustic inns, in which the gossips lingered
late on bitter winter nights, have ever formed an attraction for writers
of the historic novel. There is no more romantic opening possible than
that of the village inn, with the spiced ale warming on the hearth, and
the rustics toasting their toes in the ingle-nook, what time the wind
howls without, roars in the trees, like the roaring of an angry sea, and
takes hold of the casements and shakes and rattles them, as though some
outcast, denied admittance, would yet force his way into the warmth and
comfort, out of the cheerless night. The warring elements, and the gush of
wind and driven snow following the opening of the door and the entrance
from time to time of other recruits for the ingle-nook, would make that
cosy corner seem, if possible, only the more desirable.
[Illustration: THE INGLE-NOOK, “WHITE HORSE” INN, SHERE.]
In fact, there is no more sure way of engrossing a reader from the very
first page than that of beginning on this note. He feels that something
melodramatic is in the wind, and pokes the fire, snuggles up in his
arm-chair, and prepares to be thrilled. The thrill is generally not
long in coming, for there was never--or, well, hardly ever--any romantic
novel where an ingle-nook occurs in which we do not presently find the
advent of the inscrutable and taciturn stranger who, after calling, “Ho!
landlord, a tankard of your best,” relapses into a bodeful and gloomy
silence, and piques the curiosity, and at the same time chills the marrow,
of the assembled company, and may turn out to be anything you please,
according to the period, from a king in disguise to a burglar on his way
to crack some lonely crib.
Most of the ingle-nooks are gone, and modern fire-places are installed in
their stead, conferring upon the survivors an additional measure and
esteem of respect in these times of a reaction in favour of the old
English domestic arrangements. One of the finest of these surviving
examples is that of the “White Horse” at Shere, an old-world inn in midst
of an equally old-world village. Shere is the most picturesque of those
rural villages--Wotton, Abinger Hatch, Gomshall, Shere, Albury and
Shalford--strung along the road that runs, lovely, under the southern
shoulders of the bold South Downs, between Reigate and Guildford. Modern
times have passed it by, and the grey Norman church, a huge and ancient
tree, and the old “White Horse,” have a very special quiet nook to
themselves. One would not like to hazard too close a guess as to the
antiquity of the “White Horse,” whose sign is perhaps the only new thing
about it--and _that_ is a picturesque acquisition. The inn is, of course,
not of the Norman and early English antiquity of the church, but it was
built, let us say, “once upon a time”; which sounds vaguely impressive,
and in doing so begins to do justice to the old-world air of the inn. The
fine ingle-nook pictured here is to be found in the parlour, and is
furnished, as usual in such hospitable contrivances, with a seat on either
side and recesses for mugs and glasses. A fine array of copper kettles and
brass pots, candlesticks and apothecaries’ mortars, together with an old
sampler, runs along the wide beam, and on the hearth are a beautiful pair
of fire-dogs and an elaborate cast-iron fireback.
A good ingle-nook, rather obscured by the alterations and “improvements”
of late years, is to be found in a low-ceilinged little front room at the
“Anchor,” Ripley, with a highly ornate fireback; and at the “Swan,”
Haslemere, we have the ingle-nook in perhaps its simplest and roughest
expression, rudely brick-and-timber built and plastered, with an exiguous
little shelf running along the beam, and above that a gunrack. The simple
fire-dogs are entirely in character, and have probably been here almost as
long as the ingle-nook itself.
[Illustration: INGLE-NOOK AT THE “SWAN,” HASLEMERE.]
The ingle-nook of the “Crown” inn at Chiddingfold exists, little altered,
although a little iron grate, now itself of considerable age, has been
built on the wide open hearth, with a brick smoke-hood over it. You see
again, on either side of the deep recess, above the side benches, the
little square cranny in the wall, handy to reach by those sitting in the
nook, and intended, in those bygone days when this cosy feature was still
in use, to hold the tankards, the jugs, and the pipes of those who here
very literally “took their ease at their inn.”
[Illustration: INGLE-NOOK AT THE “TALBOT,” TOWCESTER.]
In this room the curious may notice the copy of a deed, dated March 22nd,
1383, conveying the inn from one Peter Pokeland to Richard Gofayre; but,
although the “Crown” is a house of considerable antiquity, and mentioned
in that document, the existing house is not of so great an age as this,
and has been rebuilt, or very extensively remodelled, since then.
A fine ingle-nook, with ancient iron crane, is now a feature of the
refurnished “Lygon Arms” at Broadway, in Worcestershire, an hotel that in
these latter days has been carefully “restored” and so fitted out with
modern-ancient features by Warings, and some really old articles of
furniture, purchased here, there, and everywhere, that in course of time
posterity may agree to consider the whole house-full a legacy, as it
stands, of the old domestic economy of the inn-keeping of the sixteenth,
the seventeenth, and the eighteenth centuries.
At the quaint Kentish village of Sissinghurst, near Cranbrook, stands the
old “Bull” inn. It had a rugged ingle-nook occupying one side of the
taproom, and on the wall picturesquely hung a very old pair of bellows, a
domestic utensil now not often seen. In the corner of the room stood a
gigantic eight-footer “grandfather” clock. But the chief item of interest
was, without doubt, the roasting-jack over the hearth, with the date
“1684.” All this formed one of the most delightful old-world interiors,
until quite recently, but now the ingle is abolished and the ancient crane
sold to a museum.
A particularly good ingle-nook is to be seen in what is now a lumber-room,
but was once the tap-room of the “Talbot” inn at Towcester, the great
oaken beam spanning the fireplace being quaintly carved, in flat and low
relief, with the figure of that extinct breed of dog, the “talbot.”
[Illustration: THE INGLE-NOOK, “CROWN” INN, CHIDDINGFOLD.]
CHAPTER XIII
INNKEEPERS’ EPITAPHS
In the long, long pages of the large collections of curious epitaphs that
have been printed from time to time, we find innkeepers celebrated, no
less than those of other trades and professions. The irreverent wags who
made light of all ills, and turned every calling into a jest had, it may
well be supposed, a fine subject to their hands in the landlords of the
village ale-houses.
To Richard Philpots (appropriate name!) of the “Bell” inn, Bell End, who
died in 1766, we find an elaborate stone in the churchyard of
Belbroughton, near Kidderminster, with these verses:
To tell a merry or a wonderous tale
Over a chearful glass of nappy Ale,
In harmless mirth, was his supreme delight,
To please his Guests or Friends by Day or Night;
But no fine tale, how well soever told,
Could make the tyrant Death his stroak withold;
That fatal Stroak has laid him here in dust,
To rise again once more with Joy, we trust.
On the upper portion of this Christian monument are carved, in high
relief, a punch-bowl and a flagon: emblems, presumably, of those pots
that Mr. Philpots delighted to fill. The inscription is fast becoming
obliterated, but the fine old “Bell” inn stands as well as ever it did, on
the coach-road between Stourbridge and Bromsgrove, with the sign of a bell
hanging picturesquely from it.
Collectors of epitaphs are, however, a credulous and uncritical race, and
are content to collect from irresponsible sources. All is fish that comes
to their net, and, so only the thing be in some way unusual, it finds a
place in their note-books, without their having taken the trouble to
search on the spot and verify. Thus, at Upton-on-Severn, Gloucestershire,
is supposed to be the following:
Beneath this stone, in hopes of Zion
Doth lie the landlord of the “Lion.”
His son keeps on the business still,
Resigned unto the heavenly will.
Vain is the search of the conscientious historian for that gem, or for its
variant:
Here lies the body of Matilda Brown,
Who, while alive, was hostess of the “Crown,”
Resigned unto the heavenly will,
Her son keeps on the business still.
It would, perhaps, be too much to say there was never such an epitaph at
Upton, but certainly there is not one of the kind there now.
[Illustration: INGLE-NOOK, “LYGON ARMS,” BROADWAY.]
A publican whose name was Pepper is commemorated by an odd epitaph in the
churchyard of St. John’s, Stamford. None of the funny dogs who indulged
in mortuary japes and quips and cranks could have resisted the temptation
of the name “Pepper,” and thus we find:
Hot by name, but mild by nature,
He brewed good ale for every creature;
He brewed good ale, and sold it too,
And unto each man gave his due.
In Pannal churchyard, between Wakefield and Harrogate, is the terse
inscription on Joseph Thackerey, who died November 26th, 1791:
In the year of our Lord 1740
I came to the “Crown”;
In 1791 they laid me down.
Presumably the idea the writer here intended to convey was that this
landlord of the “Crown” was “laid down” after the manner of wine in bins,
to mature.
At St. John’s, Leeds, are said to be the following lines, dated 1793, that
have a lilt somewhat anticipatory of the _Bab Ballads_ metres, on one who
was originally a clothier:
Hic jacet, sure the fattest man
That Yorkshire stingo made,
He was a lover of his can,
A clothier by his trade.
His waist did measure three yards round,
He weighed almost three hundred pound.
His flesh did weigh full twenty stone:
His flesh, I say,--he had no bone,
At least, ’tis said he had none.
The next, at Northallerton, seems to be by way of warning to innkeepers
at all disposed to drinking their stock:
Hic jacet Walter Gun,
Sometime Landlord of the “Sun”;
Sic transit gloria mundi,
He drank hard upon Friday,
That being a high day,
Then took to his bed and died upon Sunday.
Why did he, according to the epitaph, merely “die”? Surely, from the point
of view of an incorrigibly eccentric epitaph-writer, a man not only named
Gun, but spelling his name with one “n,” and dying so suddenly, should
have “gone off.” We are sadly compelled to acknowledge this particular wag
to be an incompetent.
If Mr. Walter Gun had been more careful and abstemious, he might have
emulated the subject of our next example, and completed a half-century of
inn-keeping, as did John Wigglesworth, of Whalley, who, as under, seems to
have been a burning and a shining light and exemplar:
HERE LIES THE BODY OF
JOHN WIGGLESWORTH,
More than fifty years he was the perpetual innkeeper in this Town.
Notwithstanding the temptations of that dangerous calling, he
maintained good order in his House, kept the Sabbath Day Holy,
frequented the Public Worship with his family, induced his guests to
do the same, and regularly partook of the Holy Communion. He was also
bountiful to the Poor, in private, as well as in public, and by the
blessings of Providence on a life so spent, died possessed of
competent Wealth,
Feb. 28, 1813,
Aged 77 years.
This was written by Dr. Whittaker, the historian of Whalley, who seems,
according to the last line of this tremendous effort, to have been
considerably impressed by the innkeeper’s “competent wealth,” even to the
extent of reckoning it among the virtues.
At Barnwell All Saints, near Oundle, Northants, we read this epitaph on an
innkeeper:
Man’s life is like a winter’s day,
Some only breakfast, and away;
Others to dinner stay, and are full fed:
The oldest man but sups, and goes to bed.
Large is his debt who lingers out the day,
Who goes the soonest has the least to pay.
Death is the waiter, some few run on tick,
And some, alas! must pay the bill to Nick!
Tho’ I owed much, I hope long trust is given,
And truly mean to pay all debts in heaven.
Worldly creditors might well look askance at such a resolution as that
expressed in the last line, for there is no parting there.
In the churchyard of the deserted old church of Stockbridge, Hampshire,
the curious may still, with some difficulty, find the whimsical epitaph of
John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s Head” in that little town, who died,
aged 67, in 1802:
And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?
Farewell, convivial honest John.
Oft at the well, by fatal stroke,
Buckets, like pitchers, must be broke.
In this same motley, shifting scene,
How various have thy fortunes been.
Now lifting high, now sinking low,
To-day the brim would overflow.
Thy bounty then would all supply,
To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry,
To-morrow sunk as in a well,
Content, unseen, with Truth to dwell.
But high or low, or wet or dry,
No rotten stave could malice spy.
Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise,
And claim thy station in the skies;
’Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,
Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.
Lawrence, the great proprietor of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, lies in the
churchyard of St. Julian, hard by his old inn, and on the south wall of
the church may yet be read his epitaph: “Sacred to the memory of Mr.
Robert Lawrence, for many years proprietor of the ‘Raven’ and ‘Lion’ inns
in this town, to whose public spirit and unremitting exertions for upwards
of thirty years, in opening the great road through Wales between the
United Kingdoms, as also for establishing the first mail coach to this
town, the public in general have been greatly indebted, and will long have
to regret his loss. Died III September MDCCCVI, in the LVII year of his
age.”
Not an innkeeper, but a brewer, was Thomas Tipper, whose alliterative name
is boldly carved on his remarkable tombstone in the windy little
churchyard of Newhaven. I make no sort of apology or excuse for including
Tipper’s epitaph in this chapter, for if he did not, in fact, keep an inn,
he at any rate kept many inns supplied with his “stingo,” and his brew was
a favourite with the immortal Mrs. Gamp, an acknowledged connoisseur in
curious liquors. A “pint of the celebrated staggering ale or Real Old
Brighton Tipper,” was her little whack at supper-time.
[Illustration: TIPPER’S EPITAPH, NEWHAVEN.]
Tipper was by way of being an Admirable Crichton, as by his epitaph,
written by T. Clio Rickman, you perceive; but his claim upon the world’s
gratitude was, and is, the production of good beer. Is, I say, because
although Tipper himself has gone to amuse the gods with the interminable
cantos of _Hudibras_, and to tickle them in the ribs with his own
comicality, his ale is still brewed at Newhaven, by Messrs. Towner Bros.,
and keeps to this day that pleasantly sharp taste, which is said to come
from the well whence the water for it is drawn having some communication
with the sea. This sharpness conferred upon it the “stingo” title. It is,
to all intents and purposes, identical with the “humming ale,” and the
“nappy” strong ale, so frequently mentioned by the Elizabethan and
Jacobean dramatists.
The carving in low relief at the head of Tipper’s tombstone, with vaguely
defined clouds and winged cherubs’ heads in the background, is a
representation of old Newhaven Bridge, that formerly crossed the Ouse.
Attached to the church of St. Magnus the Martyr, whose tall and beautiful
tower forms so striking an object in views of London Bridge, is a grim
little plot of land, once a churchyard green with grass and open to the
sunshine, but now only to be reached through the vestry, and hemmed in by
tall buildings to such an extent that sunshine will not reach down there,
and the earth is bare and dark. There stands the well-preserved stone to
the memory of Robert Preston, once “drawer”--that is to say, a
“barman”--at the famous “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. The stone was removed
from the churchyard of St. Michael, Paternoster Royal. Planted doubtless
by some sentimental person, a small vine-tree grows at the foot of the
stone.
[Illustration: PRESTON’S EPITAPH, ST. MAGNUS-THE-MARTYR.]
Among minor epitaphs that may be noticed to persons in some way engaged in
the licensed victualling trade, is that in the churchyard of Capel Curig,
on the Holyhead Road, to Jonathan Jackson, who died in 1848, and was “for
many years a most confidential waiter at Capel Curig inn.”
CHAPTER XIV
INNS WITH ODD PRIVILEGES
Here and there, scattered in the byways of the country, rather than
situated in towns, inns may be found that have some attribute out of the
common, in the way of privileges conferred or usurped. Thus, the licence
of the “White Hart” inn at Adwalton, near Drighlington, Yorkshire, has, or
had, the unusual privilege of holding the charter for the local fair,
granted by Queen Elizabeth in 1576 to John Brookes, the then landlord, who
under that charter held the exclusive right to levy tolls and direct the
entire conduct of the gathering.
This royal grant recalls a once-celebrated inn on a road in Derbyshire
greatly travelled in the coaching age. In a now lonely position on that
very bleak and elevated highway, the road between Ashbourne and Buxton,
stands the inn known as “Newhaven House.” A haven of some sort was sorely
wanted there in coaching days, and accordingly this great building was
ordained by the Duke of Rutland, one of those two overawing noble
landlords of the district, who had merely to say, in their off-hand
manner, “Let it be done,” for almost anything to be done, forthwith.
It was in the flamboyant days of George the Fourth that the “Newhaven” inn
arose, and his Majesty himself stayed one night “under its roof,” as the
guide-books carefully say, lest perhaps we might suspect him of sleeping
on the tiles. Those were the days when travelling Majesties still did
picturesque things, more or less in the manner of the Caliphs in the
_Arabian Nights_; and the great George, by some mysterious exercise of
kingly prerogative, granted the house a perpetual licence, by way of
signifying his content with the entertainment provided. That perpetual
licence must once have been a very valuable asset of the Manners family,
for the house was, in the merry days of the road, one of the
best-appointed and most thriving posting and coaching establishments of
the age; but in these times it is very quiet and very empty, save for the
great Newhaven horse- and cattle-fairs, in spring and autumn, now the two
red-letter days of the year for the once-busy hostelry.
From a perpetual licence to a licence for one day in every year is a
curious extreme, afforded by the village of King’s Cliffe, Northants,
where any householder, under the terms of a charter granted in the reign
of King John, may, if he so pleases, on the day of the annual autumn fair,
sell beer; provided that a branch of a tree is suspended over the doorway,
after the manner of the “bush” anciently displayed by the ale-stakes.
Among London suburban inns demolished in recent times and rebuilt is the
“White Hart,” on Hackney Marshes: that sometime desolate and remote place
of footpads and swamps. To-day “Hackney Marshes” is merely a name. Little
in the actual appearance of the place, unless it be in midst of some
particularly mild and wet winter, suggests a marsh, and the broad level
stretch of grass is, in fact, in process of becoming a conventional London
park. Through the midst of the Marsh flows the river Lea, and the several
“cuts” that have been at different times made for commercial purposes
divide up the surrounding wastes with foul, canal-like reaches.
[Illustration: “NEWHAVEN” INN.]
A very ancient cut indeed, and one now little better than a ditch, is that
of the Temple stream, made for the purpose of the Temple Mills, so called
from the manor having anciently belonged to the Knights Templars. The
site of the mills is still pointed out by the “White Hart.” The old inn
was said to have been built in 1514, and in after years was a reputed
haunt of Dick Turpin, that phenomenally ubiquitous highwayman who, if all
those legends were true, must have been no single person, but a syndicate,
and a large one at that. The house, which bore no evidence of
sixteenth-century antiquity on its whitewashed, brick-built face, was a
favourite resort of holiday-making East Enders, and, with its long, white
front and cheerful old red-tiled roof, seemed a natural part of the
scenery, just as the still-extant “White House” or “Old Ferry House” inn,
half a mile distant, does to this day. It was, however, wantonly rebuilt
in 1900, and replaced by a dull, evil-looking public-house that looks very
much down on its luck. The appearance of the old house suggested festivity
in the open-air tea and watercresses style; the new is suggestive only of
drinking across a bar.
But a long-existing privilege still belongs to the property, the landlord
being the proprietor of a private toll-bridge leading across the Temple
stream to Leyton. He exercises that right in virtue of some predecessor
having long ago repaired the broken-down passage when three parishes whose
boundaries meet here disputed and declined the liability. Accordingly,
although foot-passengers pass freely, a penny is levied upon a bicycle,
and upon each head of sheep or cattle, and twopence for carts, carriages,
motor-cars, or motor-bicycles, at the little hut where the tollkeeper
lounges in a very bored manner. Well may he look so, for although, in
exceptional times of holiday, the toll has been known to yield, once or
twice, so much as a pound in a day, five shillings is a more usual sum,
and there are many days in winter when threepence has been the sum-total
of the day’s revenue.
[Illustration: THE “VINE TAVERN,” MILE END ROAD.]
A similar right is said to belong to the “White House,” where a
substantial timber bridge spans the Lea itself, but it lies only on a
little-used bridle-path, and the right does not appear to be exercised.
The scene here has elements of picturesqueness, and could be made a good
subject in colour.
In October, 1903, the “Vine,” the old inn that had stood so long and so
oddly on “Mile End Waste,” was demolished. Although it had stood there for
three hundred years, there was not the slightest trace about the building
of any architectural embellishment, the front of it being merely an
extremely unlovely and ill-cared-for example of a London public-house,
while the back Was a weather-boarded relic of the vanished rural days of
the Mile End Road.
Like the fly in amber,
The thing itself was neither rich nor rare:
We only wondered how the devil it got there.
The manner of it may be guessed. In the old, easy-going days some impudent
squatter sat down on that wide selvedge of open space beside the road and
built the primeval hovel from which the “Vine” sprang, and in the course
of time, by the mere lapse of twenty-one years, acquired a title to the
site. Hence the isolated building, standing in advance of the general line
of houses. But, if the illustration be carefully scanned, it will be noted
that at some very much later period the then owner, much more impudent
than the original grabber of public, or “waste” land, seems to have stolen
an additional piece. This is evident enough, not only in the different
styles and periods of the building, but in the manner in which the little
attic windows in the roof are obscured by the addition.
CHAPTER XV
INNS IN LITERATURE
Inns occupy a very large and prominent place in the literature of all
ages. A great deal of Shakespeare is concerned with inns, most prominent
among them the “Boar’s Head,” in Eastcheap, scene of many of Falstaff’s
revels; while at the “Garter,” at Windsor, Falstaff had “his chamber, his
house, his castle, his standing bed and truckle-bed,” and his chamber was
“painted about with the Story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.”
It is difficult to see what the old dramatists could have done without
inns. In Farquhar’s _Beaux’ Stratagem_ we find some of the best dialogue
to be that at the inn at Lichfield, between Boniface, the landlord, and
Aimwell.
“I have heard your town of Lichfield much famed for ale,” says Aimwell: “I
think I’ll taste that.”
“Sir,” replies the landlord, “I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best
ale in Staffordshire; ’tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber,
and strong as brandy, and will be just fourteen years old the fifth day of
next March, old style.”
“You’re very exact in the age of your ales.”
“As punctual, sir, as in the age of my children. I’ll show you such ale.
Here, tapster, broach number 1706, as the saying is. Sir, you shall taste
my _anno domini_. I have lived in Lichfield, man and boy, above fifty
years, and, I believe, have not consumed eight-and-fifty ounces of meat.”
“At a meal, you mean, if one may guess your sum by your bulk.”
“Not in my life, sir; I have fed freely upon ale. I have ate my ale, drank
my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”
Izaak Walton, going a-fishing in the river Lea, was not ashamed to call at
the “Swan,” Tottenham High Cross, and drink ale, and call it “nectar.”
The history of the inns at which Pepys stayed would form an interesting
subject of inquiry. Few men of his time were better informed than he on
the subject of inns: large, small, dear, cheap, comfortable and
uncomfortable: they are all set forth in detail in his _Diary_. He more
than once patronised the “Red Lion” at Guildford, a far more important
house then than now. At that time it possessed very fine and extensive
orchards and gardens, and, according to Aubrey, could make up fifty beds,
and owned stables for two hundred horses. Imagination can easily picture
Mr. Pepys, during his stay in 1661, cutting asparagus for supper: “the
best that ever I ate in my life.”
Those gardens were long since abolished, and Market Street stands on the
site of them.
On June 10th, 1668, we find him sleeping at the “George,” Salisbury, in a
silk bed. He notes that he had “very good diet, but very dear,” and had
probably, overnight, when sleeping in that silk bed, been visited with
gruesome thoughts of the bill to follow the luxury. The bill was, as he
expressed it, “exorbitant.”
Insatiable curiosity in that old Pepys. Something, too, of childlike
wonder, infantile artlessness, and a fear of strange things, and the dark.
His inquisitiveness took him to the lonely giant ramparts of Old Sarum,
“prodigious, so as to fright me”; and thereabouts he and his party of
three ladies riding pillion found, and stayed at, a rustic inn, where a
pedlar was turned out of bed in order that our Samuel might turn in. The
party found the beds “lousy.” Strangely enough, this was a discovery
“which made us merry.” Every man to his taste in merriment.
And so, enjoying the full savour of life, he goes his way, as appreciative
of good music as of a good dinner, and a connoisseur alike of sermons and
of a pretty face. Did he ever outlive his lusts, and know all things to be
vanities, before his natural force had abated? or did the end surprise him
in midst of his worldly activities?
A transition from Pepys to Sir Roger de Coverley is easy and natural. The
old servant in Sir Roger’s family, retiring from service and taking an
inn, is one of Addison’s most pleasing pictures. To do honour to his
master, the old retainer had Sir Roger’s portrait painted and hung it out
as his sign, under the title of the “Knight’s Head.”
As soon as Sir Roger was acquainted with it, finding that his servant’s
indiscretion proceeded wholly from affection and good-will, he only told
him that he made him too high a compliment; and when the fellow seemed to
think that could hardly be, added, with a more decisive look, that it was
too great an honour for any man under a duke; but told him, at the same
time, that it might be altered with a very few touches, and that he
himself would be at the charge of it. Accordingly, they got a painter, by
the Knight’s directions, to add a pair of whiskers to the face, and, by a
little aggravation of the features, to change it into the “Saracen’s
Head.”
According to Pope, in his _Moral Essays_, it was at an inn that the witty
and sparkling debauchee, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, “the
most accomplished man of the age, in riding, dancing, and fencing,” died
in his fifty-ninth year, in 1687:
In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaster and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies--alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim.
A most complete picture of retribution in a moral essay, set forth in the
most denunciatory lines.
In the whole range of poetry there is nothing that so well lends itself to
a cold, calculated vituperation as the heroic couplet. You can pile detail
upon detail, like an inventory-clerk, so long as rhymes last; and thus an
impeachment of this sort has a very formidable air.
[Illustration: HOUSE WHERE THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM DIED, KIRKBY MOORSIDE.]
But it has been denied that the profligate Duke ended in such misery.
However that may be, he maintained his peculiar reputation to the last;
for, according to Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London, he “died between two common
girls,” at the house of one of his tenants in the Yorkshire village of
Kirkby Moorside. That house is still wearily pointed out to the insistent
stranger by the uninterested Kirkby Moorsiders, who, as Yorkshiremen with
magnificent thirsts, are uninterested, chiefly by reason of its being no
longer an inn; and, truth to tell, its old-time picturesque features, if
it ever had any, are wholly overlaid by furiously ugly modern shop-fronts.
Now, if it were only the “Swan,” some little way up the street, still, in
the midst of picturesque squalor, dispensing drink of varied sorts to all
and sundry, for good current coin of the realm, one might conceive some
local historic and literary enthusiasm. The “Swan,” however, has no
associations, and is merely, with its projecting porch, supported upon
finely carved but woefully dilapidated seventeenth-century Renaissance
pillars, a subject for an artist. The odd, and ugly, encroachment of an
adjoining hairdresser’s shop is redeemed, from that same artistic point of
view, by that now unusual object, a barber’s pole, projecting across.
The robust pages of Fielding and Smollett are rich in incidents of travel,
and in scenes at wayside inns, where postboys, persecuted lovers,
footpads, and highwaymen mingle romantically. The “Three Jolly Pigeons,”
the village ale-house of Goldsmith’s _She Stoops to Conquer_, must not be
forgotten, while the “Black Bear” in Sir Walter Scott’s _Kenilworth_, is
prominent. Marryat, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever,
Bulwer Lytton, all largely introduced inns into their novels. Dickens, of
course, is so prolific in his references to inns and taverns that he
requires special chapters. Thackeray’s inns are as the poles asunder from
those of Dickens, and are superior places, the resorts of superior
people, and of people who, if not superior, endeavour to appear so. In
short, in their individual treatment of inns, Dickens and Thackeray are
thoroughly characteristic and dissimilar. Thackeray’s waiters and the
waiters drawn by Dickens are very different. Thackeray could never have
imagined the waiter at the “Old Royal,” at Birmingham, who, having
succeeded in obtaining an order for soda-water from Bob Sawyer, “melted
imperceptibly away”; nor the preternaturally mean and cunning waiters at
Yarmouth and at the “Golden Cross,” in _David Copperfield_--own brothers
to the Artful Dodger. I don’t think there could ever have existed such
creatures.
[Illustration: THE “BLACK SWAN,” KIRKBY MOORSIDE.]
Thackeray’s waiters are not figments of the imagination; they are drawn
from the life, as, for example, John, the old waiter in _Vanity Fair_,
who, when Dobbin returns to England, after ten years in India, welcomes
him as if he had been absent only weeks, and supposes he’ll have a roast
fowl for dinner.
But in the amazing quantity of drink they consume, the characters of
Dickens and Thackeray are on common ground. Mr. Pickwick could apparently
begin drinking brandy shortly after breakfast, and continue all day,
without being much the worse for it; and in _Pendennis_ we read how Jack
Finucane and Mr. Trotter, dining at Dick’s Restaurant with Mr. Bungay,
drank with impunity what would easily suffice to overthrow most modern
men.
Washington Irving thought as highly of inns as did Dr. Johnson. “To a
homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he can truly call
his own,” he says, in a memorable passage, “there is a momentary feeling
of something like independence and territorial consequence when, after a
weary day’s travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into
slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire. Let the world without
go as it may; let kingdoms rise or fall, so long as he has the wherewithal
to pay his bill, he is, for the time being, the very monarch of all he
surveys. The armchair is his throne, the poker his sceptre, and the little
parlour, some twelve feet square, his undisputed empire. It is a morsel of
certainty, snatched from the midst of the uncertainties of life; it is a
sunny moment gleaming out kindly on a cloudy day; and he who has advanced
some way on the pilgrimage of existence knows the importance of husbanding
even morsels and moments of enjoyment. ‘Shall I not take mine ease in mine
inn?’ thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in my elbow-chair,
and cast a complacent look about the little parlour of the ‘Red Horse,’ at
Stratford-on-Avon.”
He was very speedily answered, No! for at that instant the chimes preluded
the stroke of midnight, and at the same time “a gentle tap came at the
door, and a pretty chambermaid, putting in her smiling face, inquired,
with a hesitating air,” whether that momentary monarch of all he surveyed
had rung. Of course she knew perfectly well he had not rung, and the
humbled autocrat of those twelve square feet was quite correct when he
“understood it as a modest hint that it was time to retire.” The Emperor
of the Inn Parlour accordingly abdicated immediately, lest a worse
thing--_i.e._, the possible turning off the gas at the meter--should
befall; and, his dream of absolute dominion at an end, went off to bed,
like a good boy, rather than the Crowned Head he had fancied himself.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON IRVING’S “THRONE” AND “SCEPTRE.”]
The “Red Horse”--the name is taken from the Vale of Red Horse in which the
town of Stratford-on-Avon stands--is still in being, and the “Washington
Irving Room” is even yet a shrine, of sorts. A shrine, however, none too
easy for the casual worshipper of heroes, or the amateur of literary
landmarks, to come to, for it is generally used as a private sitting-room;
and not the most sympathetic and easy-going of guests who has hired it for
that purpose is content to receive all day a stream of strangers bubbling
over with real, or affected, interest. It is a small room, measuring some
ten feet by fifteen, looking out upon Bridge Street. Nowadays the walls of
it are hung with portraits of Irving himself, of Longfellow, and others,
together with old views of the town; and a framed letter written by
Irving, and a silhouette of “Sally Garner,” daughter of the landlord of
that time, bring the place closely into touch with the _Sketch Book_. The
“Sexton’s Clock” stands beside the door, with a suitably inscribed brass
plate; but no longer may you wield that poker which was Irving’s
“sceptre,” nor sit in the chair that was, in his fancy, a throne; for the
poker is kept in the office of the hotel, and the chair, also with an
inscribed brass plate, is locked within a cupboard, through whose glass
doors you may see where it is jealously retired from touch. In short,
every thing that will harbour an inscription has one, not excepting the
poker itself, which has been engraved with the legend, “Geoffrey Crayon’s
Sceptre.”
The chambermaid who so obliquely suggested that it was time to go to bed,
and no doubt preceded him to Number 15, with candle and warming-pan, was,
we are told, “pretty Hannah Cuppage,” and we wish he had told us more
about her, instead of writing so much very thin description of
antiquities.
Poets--Southey apart, with his tragical _Mary, the Maid of the Inn_--have
not sung so frequently as might have been expected of the fair maids at
inns. Of this type of minstrelsy, Gay’s ballad on Molly Mog, daughter of
the landlord at the “Rose,” Wokingham, is best known:
Says my Uncle, I pray you discover
What hath been the cause of your woes;
Why you pine and you whine like a lover?
--I have seen Molly Mog, of the “Rose.”
O Nephew! your grief is but folly,
In town you may find better prog;
Half a crown there will get you a Molly,
A Molly much better than Mog.
But he will not hear anything of the kind:
I know that by wits ’tis recited
That women are best at a clog:
But I am not so easily frighted
From loving of sweet Molly Mog.
And so forth, for twelve more verses; when, having exhausted all possible
rhymes to “Mog,” he concludes, not before we are heartily tired of him and
Molly too.
The ballad was composed in the company of Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, the
four friends whiling away the dull hours of a rainy day at the inn by
capping verses in praise of Molly, “with pluvial patter for refrain.”
The verses were supposed to be the lament of the love-lorn young Squire of
Arborfield, the last of the Standens, who died through an unrequited
affection for her.
The beautiful Molly lived to the age of sixty-seven, and died a spinster,
in 1766. It should be added that the present “Rose” inn at Wokingham,
although itself of great age, and not unpicturesque, and an inn centuries
before coy Molly herself was thought of, has only in modern times adopted
the sign. The old “Rose” is the plain red-brick house opposite, now
occupied partly as an ironmonger’s shop.
Another Mary, maid--barmaid--of the inn, is sung in the modern song, “The
Belle of the ‘Rose and Crown’”; but no one would accuse that of being
poetry. How does it go?--
I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have ev’ry one,
I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have lots of fun.
They know me well at the County Bank,
Cash is better than fame or rank.
So, happy-go-lucky, I’ll marry my ducky,
The Belle of the “Rose and Crown.”
Let us hope, in all charity, that purse-proud bounder and the barmaid
married, and lived happily ever after.
Inns figure in various ways in literature. Daniel De Foe wrote a part of
_Robinson Crusoe_ at the “Rose and Crown” at Halifax, and at the “Royal
Hotel,” at Bideford, Charles Kingsley wrote _Westward Ho!_ During a
wakeful night at the “Burford Bridge Hotel,” near Dorking, Robert Louis
Stevenson imagined a highway romance in the tapping of an outside shutter
by some chance wayfarer at dead o’ night, and there Keats composed
_Endymion_.
The “Royal” is in many respects a notable house. The earliest portion,
dating from 1688, is the old mansion of one of Bideford’s merchant
princes, who flourished so bravely in the remote times when distance had
not been annihilated by mechanical invention and when each port had its
own rich and self-contained trade. The house compares well with the “Star”
Hotel at Yarmouth, whose history closely matches it. Here, at Bideford, a
finely carved oak staircase leads to rooms magnificently panelled and
furnished with moulded plaster ceilings designed in wreaths of fruits and
flowers, ascribed to Italian workmanship. The Drawing-room, in which
_Westward Ho!_ or a portion of it, was written, has an exceptionally fine
ceiling, of this type.
The great “Lion” inn on Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury, forms the scene of one of De
Quincey’s mystical rhapsodies. It is the house to which he came in 1802,
when, as a youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London.
He had walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after
nightfall. Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed
it for pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as
tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival
well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had his
shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the “Lion”
as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry friend
had performed that service for him, and here he was come to await the
arrival of that conveyance.
“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest of
the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a
pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and, it so
happened, with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before me
by obedient mutes, these were but ordinary honours, meant (as old
experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards
effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights
are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of
their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian
ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he is
recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders. I
have always looked upon this fine of 5_s._ or 7_s._ (for wax that you do
not absolutely need) as a sort of inaugural _honorarium_ entrance-money,
what in jails used to be known as _smart_ money, proclaiming me to be a
man _comme il faut_, and no toll in this world of tolls do I pay so
cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too customary a form to
confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the magnificent Grecian
phrase επομπ ευε moved pompously before me, as the holy-holy fire (the
inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved before Cæsar _semper_
Augustus, when he made his official or ceremonial _avatars_. Yet still
this moved along the ancient channels of glorification: it rolled along
ancient grooves--I might say, indeed, like one of the twelve Cæsars when
dying, _Ut puto, Deus fio_ (It’s my private opinion that at this very
moment I am turning into a god), but still the metamorphosis was not
complete. _That_ was accomplished when I stepped into the sumptuous room
allotted to me. It was a ball-room of noble proportions--lighted, if I
chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous chandeliers, not basely wrapped
up in paper, but sparkling through all their thickets of crystal branches,
and flashing back the soft rays of my tall waxen lights. There were,
moreover, two orchestras, which money would have filled within thirty
minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing only was wanting--viz., a throne,
for the completion of my _apotheosis_.
“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About three
hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest looked
out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds arising;
and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast laboratory of
hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting
wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful ‘sounds that live in
darkness’ (Wordsworth’s _Excursion_), never had I consciously
witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of a
solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to
me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections, and
the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these
reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even
horror....
“The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height,
brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of
associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting me,
afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself unavoidably
upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller side-rooms--meant
probably for cards or for refreshments. This single feature of the
rooms--their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness which had become
the exponent of that altitude--this one terrific feature (for terrific it
was in its effect), together with the crowding and evanescent images of
the flying feet that so often had spread gladness through these halls, on
the wings of youth and hope, at seasons when every room rang with
music--all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the dead hours of the
night were stealing along, all around me--household and town--sleeping,
and whilst against the windows more and more the storm was raving, and to
all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the deadliest condition of
nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high over which predominated
horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now
so wilfully precipitating myself.”
The circumstance that led to his being shown into the ball-room of the
“Lion,” was that of the house being under repair. That room is still in
existence, and a noble and impressive room it is, occupying the upper
floor of a two-storeyed building, added to the back of the older house
perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Lofty, as he describes it, and
lighted by tall windows, the feature of the two music-galleries and the
chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end
divided off from the greater saloon, and therefore disproportionately
lofty. The ball-room is additionally lighted from the ceiling by a domed
skylight. The moulded plaster decorations on walls and ceiling, in the
Adams style--that style which so beautifully recast classic
conventions--are exquisite, and even yet keep their delicate colouring, as
do the emblematic figures of Music and Dancing painted on the door-panels.
At rare intervals the room is used for its original purpose, and has a
fine oak dancing-floor, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year,
that of a commercial traveller’s stock-room.
The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down the
yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much chipped,
dirty, and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room of the
present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular apartments
adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the curious may
find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts and hatches to
upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a vanished
generation of John Bulls.
This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the
cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach-office remaining there,
unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out into
a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great
red-brick bulk of the ball-room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the
parapet, is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful
impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “OLD ANGEL,” BASINGSTOKE.]
The “Old Angel,” Basingstoke, associated with Jane Austen’s early days,
has for close upon thirty years ceased from being an inn, and is now quite
unrecognisable as a modern “temperance hotel.” In the rear, approached
nowadays through the yard of a livery-stable, the old Assembly Rooms where
she danced with the _élite_ of the county families of her day, may with
some difficulty be found by climbing a crazy staircase and pushing through
the accumulated cobwebs of years. There, on a spacious upper floor, is the
ball-room of a hundred years ago, now deserted, or but seldom used as a
corn-store.
The great “Royal George” hotel at Knutsford is associated with that finest
of Mrs. Gaskell’s works, _Cranford_, and the “White Hart” at Whitchurch,
on the Exeter Road, has reminiscences of Newman.
The “White Hart” is an inn typical of the coaching age along that western
highway, and repays examination. Dark and tortuous corridors, a
coffee-room decorated in barbaric colours, a capacious stable-yard, all
tell of the old days of the Exeter Mail. The inn stands in the centre of
the little town of narrow streets, where the Oxford and Southampton Road
crosses the road to Exeter, and was thus in receipt of a very great deal
of coaching business, travellers from Southampton or from Oxford changing
here and waiting for the West of England coaches. Here it was, perhaps in
the coffee-room, that the young clergyman who afterwards became a pervert
to Rome and figured prominently as Cardinal Newman, wrote the first verses
of the _Lyra Apostolica_, beginning:
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
It was on December 2nd, 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth, that
he found his inspiration here. He wrote, at the same time, to his mother
that he was waiting “from one till eleven” for the down Exeter mail. Ten
hours! Can we imagine any one in these days waiting even half that time
for a train? I think not even the most bizarre imagination could conceive
such a preposterous notion. But such were the experiences of our
grandfathers, travelling from branch roads to intercept the mails. With
such facts before us, we may well understand how it was the inns then
did such good business.
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART,” WHITCHURCH.]
Since 1857, when Dinah Mulock, at the age of thirty-one, wrote that
remarkably popular novel, _John Halifax, Gentleman_, the “Bell” inn at
Tewkesbury has been marked down for a literary landmark. For the “Morton
Bury” of that story is the Tewkesbury of fact, and a tombstone (long since
disappeared) in the Abbey churchyard gave her the name of the hero. It was
in 1852, on a chance drive into the town with a friend, to view the Abbey,
that Miss Mulock first thought of it as the background of a story, and
lunching at the “Bell” inn, close by the Abbey gates, decided her to make
that house the pivot of the tale. According to the landlord of that time,
it had once, before becoming an inn, been the house of a tanner; and thus
we find something of the framework of the story suggested. The resemblance
of the actual house to the home of Abel Fletcher, the Quaker tanner of the
story, is scarce to be followed, for it is only in the mention of the
bowling-green in the garden and the yew hedge, and the channels of the
Severn and the Avon at the end of it that the place is to be identified at
all. You find no mention of the fine old timbered front and its three
gables, nor of the initials “I K 1696” that probably indicate the owner
who restored the house at that date (for the building is certainly at
least a hundred and fifty years older), and altogether there is in the
pages of _John Halifax, Gentleman_, none of that meticulous topographical
care that many later novelists have been at pains to bestow upon their
works. But that matters little to the literary pilgrims in general, or to
the American section of them in particular, who flock to Tewkesbury for
sake of that very rare hero, John Halifax, whose like, one fears, never
walked this imperfect earth of ours. He is, in short, a lady novelist’s
hero, and all such, whether they be the military heroes of Ouida, with the
physique of Greek gods, and queer morals, or the never-say-“damn” young
men of the opposite extreme, have few points of contact with human beings.
John Halifax, however, has a brother in fiction, and may be found in Mr.
Thomas Hardy’s _Mayor of Casterbridge_, where he masquerades as a Scot,
under the alias of “Donald Farfrae.” He and Angel Clare, of _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_, are rivals for the distinction of being the least natural
men among all Mr. Hardy’s characters. Donald is not quite the perfect
gentle knight of Miss Mulock’s tale, but the same blood runs in the veins
of either.
When the author of _John Halifax, Gentleman_, who had many years before
become Mrs. Craik, died, in 1887, a monument was fittingly erected to her
memory in Tewkesbury Abbey Church, hard by the home of her hero.
[Illustration: THE “BELL,” TEWKESBURY.]
The “Bell” inn is a beautiful old building, of strongly contrasted very
white plaster and very black timbers. A blue and gold bell hangs out as a
sign in front. At the left-hand side an addition has quite recently
been made (not included in the illustration) to provide a billiard-room
and additional bedrooms.
[Illustration: THE “WHEATSHEAF,” TEWKESBURY.]
For the rest, Tewkesbury is a town full of ancient buildings, built in
those dark times of the warring Roses, when men were foolish enough to
fight--and to die and to lose all--for their principles. Savage, barbaric
times, happily gone for ever, to give place to the era of argument and
the amateur lawyer! In our own age you do not go forth and kill or be
killed, but simply “passively resist” and await the advent of the bailiffs
coming to distrain for the amount of your unpaid rates and taxes,
confident that, in any change of government, your party will in its turn
be able to enact the petty tyrant.
In those times, when men fought well, they built with equal sturdiness,
and the memory of their deeds beside the Avon meadows, in the bloody
Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, survives, side by side with the fine
black-and-white timbered houses they designed and framed, and will survive
centuries yet.
Tewkesbury is a town of inns. The “Hop Pole,” among the largest of them,
is a Dickensian inn, and so treated of in another chapter; but besides it
you have the great red-brick Georgian “Swan,” typically a coaching
hostelry, that is not quite sure of the titles “inn,” “hotel,” or
“tavern,” and so, to be certain, calls itself, in the boldest of
lettering, “Swan Hotel, Inn, and Tavern,” and thus has it all ways.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “WHITE HORSE,” MAIDEN NEWTON.]
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HORSE,” MAIDEN NEWTON.]
Probably the oldest inn of Tewkesbury is the “Berkeley Arms.” There it
stands in the High Street, as sturdily as ever, and is in every timber,
every casement, and in all the circumstances of uneven flooring and
tortuous stairways, so indubitably ancient that men who fought on Yorkist
or Lancastrian side in those contested meads by Severn and Avon in 1471
may well have slept beneath its roof the night before the battle, and
considered the place, even then, “old-fashioned.” Its age is so evident
that for the sign to proclaim it, as it does, in the modern pseudo-antique
Wardour Street style, “Ye olde Berkeley Arms,” is an impertinent
inadequacy, comparable to calling the Pyramids “large” or the Alps
“hills.” It is much the same tale with the “Wheatsheaf”; a little less
hoary, perhaps, and certainly more susceptible to pictorial treatment. It
latterly has become “Ye,” instead of “The,” Wheatsheaf, and has assumed a
redundant “e” or so; but the equally old neighbouring “Black Bear” fairly
revels in the antique, and on a quite new sign-board proclaims itself to
be “Ye Olde Blacke Beare.” What a prodigal and immoral consumption of that
already poor, overworked letter “e,” already, as every compositor working
at case knows, the greatest in demand of all the twenty-six letters of the
alphabet!
Among the various inns mentioned in Thomas Hardy’s novels, the “White
Horse” at Maiden Newton was exceptionally picturesque. “Was,” and is not,
for already, in the little while between the writing of _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_ and now, that fine old stone hostelry of the seventeenth
century has been pulled down, to make way for a smart new red-brick house,
all show and glitter. The old house was the original of the inn at
“Chalk-Newton,” where Tess breakfasted, on the way to Flintcomb Ash.
The “Carnarvon Arms,” Bloomsbury, in Besant and Rice’s _Golden Butterfly_,
to which the dog “Cæsar” leads Phillis so early in the morning, is the
“Guildford Arms,” at the corner of Guildford and Brunswick Streets: “The
door ... hung half open by means of a leathern strap.... A smell of stale
beer and stale tobacco hanging about the room smote her senses, and made
her sick and faint.... She was in a tavern--that is, she thought, a ‘place
where workmen spend their earnings and leave their families to starve.’”
Similarly, the “Birch Tree Tavern,” of the same authors’ _Seamy Side_, is
the “Bay Tree,” St. Swithin’s Lane. It is described in those pages as the
resort, in the quieter hours of the afternoon, when all the hungry diners
were gone, of Mr. Bunter Baker and a coterie of needy company-promoters,
always seeking to float impossible companies and impracticable inventions,
and so unfortunate as to be, themselves, convinced of the commercial value
of their preposterous projects.
CHAPTER XVI
VISITORS’ BOOKS
The Visitors’ Book is no new thing. In 1466, when a distinguished Bohemian
traveller, one Baron Leo von Rozmital, dined with the Knights of Windsor,
his hosts, after dinner, produced what they called their “missal,” and
asked for his autograph “in memoriam” of him. A little daunted, perhaps,
by so ill-omened an expression, but still courteous, the Baron complied
with the request, and wrote, “Lwyk z Rozmitala a z Blatnie.” This uncouth
autograph was not unnaturally looked upon with suspicion, and the Baron,
on leaving Windsor, found himself followed by the Knights, who made
inquiries of his retinue as to his real name. They suspected him to be
some impostor, or at the least considered him guilty of that kind of
foolishness which nowadays induces a certain class of visitor to sign
himself “Kruger” or the “King of the Cannibal Islands,” or, worse still,
to write down the name of the latest notorious criminal.
Foolishness is expected in a Visitors’ Book, and is not often wanting. In
the present writer’s own experience, when two friends who, oddly enough,
were named Rands and Sands, wrote their names in such a volume, the
waiter who read them there, half-apologetically, said, “No: your _real_
names, please, gentlemen.” Argument and assertion could not convince, and
in the end they wrote “Jones” and “Robinson,” which duly satisfied.
The Visitors’ Book of an inn usually contains little else than fulsome
praise of the establishment and a somewhat revolting appreciation of its
good cheer. Would-be wit and offensive scurrility are, as a rule, the only
other characteristics; but from all this heap of chaff and rubbish it is
possible to extract a residuum of fun and sprightly fancy. Many modern
tourists in the Lake District have, for instance, been amused--after their
own experiences around the steeps of Langdale Pikes--to read in the
Visitors’ Book of the “Salutation” at Ambleside the following piece of
poignant observation:
Little bits of Langdales,
Little bits of pikes,
Make the little tourists
Walk their little bikes.
Of the “Swan,” at Thames Ditton, Theodore Hook wrote, but whether in a
book there, or not, does not appear:
The “Swan,” snug inn, good fare affords,
As table e’er was put on;
And worthier quite of loftier boards,
Its poultry, fish, and mutton.
And while sound wine mine host supplies,
With beer of Meux or Tritton,
Mine hostess, with her bright blue eyes,
Invites to stay at Ditton.
Among the severe epigrams that guests have left behind them, none other is
so witty as that by Quin, written at the once famed “Pelican” inn, a
favourite Bath Road hostelry at Speenhamland, Newbury:
The famous inn at Speenhamland,
That stands beneath the hill,
May well be called the Pelican,
From its enormous bill.
Its monumental charges were long since ended, and where the “Pelican”
stood there are now only stables and a veterinary establishment.
Bathos, ineptitude, and lines that refuse to scan are the stigmata of
visitors’-book verse. There is no worse “poetry” on earth than that which
lurks between those covers, or in the pages of young ladies’ albums, the
last refuge of drivel and impertinence. People who would be ashamed to own
their verse elsewhere will write and sign it in a Visitors’ Book; and thus
we find, for example, at the “King’s Arms” at Malmesbury, the following,
signed by Bishop Potter of New York:
Three savages from far New York
Found rest, refreshment here;
And grateful for the King’s Arms,
Bear memory of good cheer.
All blessings rest on Hostess Jones,
And her good spouse as well;
Of their kind thought for tired bones
Our countrymen will tell.
Let us hope his divinity is better than his metrical efforts.
The interesting pages of Visitors’ Books are generally those that are not
there, as an Irishman might say; for the world is populated very densely
with those appreciative people who, whether from a love of literature, or
with an instinct for collecting autographs that may have a realisable
value, remove the signatures of distinguished men, and with them anything
original they may have written. Many years ago Charles Kingsley, Tom
Taylor, dramatist and sometime editor of _Punch_, and Thomas Hughes,
author of that classic, _Tom Brown’s Schooldays_, were staying at the
Penygwryd Hotel, on the summit of Llanberis Pass, North Wales, and wrote a
long set of verses in the Visitors’ Book; but the pages were stolen, long,
since, and now you do but come to that book by asking very nicely for it,
and then it is produced from a locked cupboard.
Here are the verses, the respective authors identified by the initials
over each. It will clearly be seen that those three were sadly in want of
occupation, and were wound up for a long run:
T. T.
I came to Penygwryd
With colours armed and pencils,
But found no use whatever
For any such utensils;
So in default of them I took
To using knives and forks,
And made successful drawings--
Of Mrs. Owen’s corks!
C. K.
I came to Penygwryd
In frantic hopes of slaying
Grilse, salmon, three-pound red-fleshed trout,
And what else there’s no saying;
But bitter cold and lashing rain,
And black nor’-eastern skies, sir,
Drove me from fish to botany,
A sadder man and wiser.
T. H.
I came to Penygwryd
A-larking with my betters,
A mad wag and a mad poet--
Both of them men of letters;
Which two ungrateful parties,
After all the care I’ve took
Of them, make me write verses
In Henry Owen’s book.
T. T.
We’ve been mist-soak’d on Snowdon,
Mist-soak’d on Glyder Fawr;
We’ve been wet through on an average
Every day three times an hour.
We’ve walk’d the upper leathers
From the soles of our balmorals,
And as sketchers and as fishers
With the weather have had our quarrels.
C. K.
But think just of the plants which stuff’d
Our box, old Yarrel’s gift,
And of those which might have stuff’d it
If the clouds had giv’n a lift;
Of tramping bogs, and climbing cliffs,
And shoving down stone fences
For spiderwort, Saussurea,
And Woodsia strensis.
T. H.
Oh, my dear namesake’s breeches--
You never saw the like--
He bust them all so shameful
A-crossing of a dyke;
But Mrs. Owen patched them
As careful as a mother,
With flannel of three colours--
She hadn’t got no other.
T. T.
But, can we say enough
Of those legs of mountain muttons?
And that onion sauce lies on our souls,
For it made of us three gluttons;
And the Dublin stout is genuine,
And so’s the Burton beer,
And the apple tarts they’ve won our hearts;
And think of soufflets here!
C. K.
Resembling that old woman
That never could be quiet,
Though victuals (says the child’s song)
And drink formed all her diet,
My love for plants and scrambling
Shared empire with my dinner;
And who says it wasn’t good must be
A most fastidious sinner.
T. H.
Now, all I’ve got to say is,
You can’t be better treated.
Order pancakes, and you’ll find
They’re the best you ever eated;
If you scramble o’er the mountains,
You should bring an ordnance map;
I endorse all that previous gents
Have said about the tap.
T. T.
Penygwryd, when wet and worn, has kept
A warm fireside for us;
Socks, boots, and never-mention-’ems,
Mrs. Owen still has dried for us;
With host and hostess, fare and bill,
So pleased we are that, going,
We feel, for all their kindness,
’Tis we, not they, are Owin’.
T. H., T. T., C. K.
Nos tres in uno juncti
Hos fecimus versiculos,
Tomas piscator pisces qui
Non cepi sed pisciculos,
Tomas sciagraphus sketches qui
Non feci sed ridiculos,
Herbarius Carolus montes qui
Nostravi perpendiculos.
T. H.
There’s big trout I hear in Edno,
Likewise in Gwynant lake,
And the governor and black alder
Are the flies that they will take,
Also the cockabondy,
But I can only say,
If you think to catch big fishes,
I only hope you may!
T. T.
I have come in for more of mountain gloom
Than mountain glory,
But I’ve seen old Snowdon rear his head
With storm-toss’d mist-wreaths hoary
I stood in the fight of mountain winds
Upon Bwlch-cwm-y-llan,
And I go back an unsketching
But a better-minded man.
C. K.
And I, too, have another debt
To pay another way,
For kindness shown by these good souls
To one who’s far away,
Even to this old colley dog,
Who tracked the mountains o’er,
For one who seeks strange birds and flowers
On far Australia’s shore.
Enough; _quantum sufficit_!
It was for lack of that natural outlet, the Visitors’ Book, that many
old-time guests had recourse to the window-pane. Unfortunately--or should
it not perhaps rather be a fortunate circumstance?--while pen and ink were
at command of every one, only a diamond ring would serve on glass; and not
every guest was so luxuriously equipped.
The classic instance of a window-pane at an inn being thus inscribed is,
of course, that of Shenstone’s writing the last stanza of his lines on
“Freedom” upon the window of an inn--generally said to be the “Red Lion”
at Henley-on-Thames. But who shall decide?
If we are to believe the account of Richard Graves, who knew the poet
well, and published _Recollections of Some Particulars in the Life of the
Late William Shenstone, Esq._, in 1788, the lines were first written in an
arbour of what used to be the “Sunrising” inn, on the crest of Edge Hill,
a house long since become a private residence.
According to Graves, Shenstone, about 1750, visited a friend, one Mr.
Whistler, in the southernmost part of Oxfordshire, and did not
particularly enjoy his visit, Mr. Whistler sending the poet’s servant off
to stay at an inn, in order that the man and the domestics of his own
house should not gossip together. Shenstone himself seems to have been a
very unamiable guest, and one better suited to an inn than to the house of
a friend; for he grew disagreeable over being expected to play “Pope Joan”
in the evening with his friend’s children, and sulked when he lost a
trifle at cards. Then he would not dress himself tidily for dinner, and
snuffed and slouched to the inconvenience of every one, so that it is not
surprising to read of a coolness, and then quarrels, coming to estrange
the pair, resulting in Shenstone abruptly cutting short his visit. He lay,
overnight, on his journey home, at the “Sunrising” inn, and the next
morning, in an arbour, inscribed the famous lines which now form the last
stanza of “Freedom.”
“More stanzas,” says Graves, “were added afterwards,” and he rightly adds
that they “diminish the force” of the original thought.
The “Sunrising” inn, long since become a private mansion, and added to
very largely, has no relics of Shenstone. It stands, with lovely gardens
surrounding, on the very lip and verge of Edge Hill, and looks out across
the great levels of Warwickshire. In recent times the hill has becomes
famous, or notorious, for motor and cycle accidents, and the approach to
it is heralded by a notice-board proclaiming “Great Danger. Cyclists
Dismount.” But in these days of better brakes, very few obey that
injunction, and ride down, safely enough.
Whistler died in 1754, when Shenstone, remorseful, wrote, “how little do
all our disputes appear to us now!”
Here, then, is the original story of the famous inscription, but it does
not necessarily prove that this melancholy poet did not also inscribe it
at Henley-on-Thames and elsewhere, notably at the “White Swan,” at that
quite different and far-distant place from the Thames-side Henley,
Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire; an old-fashioned house still in existence,
and claiming to date from 1358.
[Illustration: HENLEY-IN-ARDEN, AND THE “WHITE SWAN.”]
If the story of the “Red Lion” at the Oxfordshire Henley be a myth, as it
is held to be, it is one of very considerable age, and one that has not
only misled uncounted myriads of writers, but will continue to do so until
the end of time. There is no disabling the flying _canard_, no overtaking
the original lie, howsoever hard you strive; and as the famous stanza
really _was_ at one time to be seen on a window of the “Red Lion” (whether
written there by Shenstone or another), it really seems that there is a
way out of the dilemma that probably has never until now been considered.
Shenstone resided on the Shropshire border, near Henley-in-Arden, but on
his journeys to and from London must often have stayed at the “Red Lion,”
Henley-on-Thames, then on one of the two principal coach-routes; and it is
quite probable that he was so pleased with the last stanza of “Freedom,”
and so satisfied with its peculiar fitness for inn windows, that he
inscribed it at both places, if not indeed at others as well:
To thee, fair Freedom! I retire,
From flattery, feasting, dice and din;
Nor art thou found in homes much higher
Than the lone cot or humble Inn.
’Tis here with boundless power I reign,
And every health which I begin,
Converts dull port to bright champagne;
For Freedom crowns it, at an Inn.
I fly from pomp, I fly from state,
I fly from falsehood’s specious grin;
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an Inn.
Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lacqueys else might hope to win;
It buys what Courts have not in store,
It buys me Freedom, at an Inn.
And now once more I shape my way
Through rain or shine, through thick or thin,
Secure to meet, at close of day,
With kind reception at an Inn.
_Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think how oft he found
The warmest welcome--at an Inn._
Misquotation--sometimes a vice, occasionally a great improvement upon the
original--has constantly rendered the last two lines:
May sigh to think, he _still_ has found
_His_ warmest welcome at an inn;
and here, it seems, the use of posterity is the better.
Neither at the “White Swan” nor the “Red Lion” is the inscription now to
be found.
Dean Swift’s bitter jest, by way of advice to the landlord, scratched on a
window of the “Three Crosses” inn at Willoughby, on the road to Holyhead,
is certainly the next most celebrated. It runs:
There are three
Crosses at your door:
Hang up your Wife,
And you’l count Four.
Swift, D., 1730.
I have elsewhere,[8] and at considerable length, told the story of this
remarkable incident, and given a _facsimile_ of the still-surviving
inscription, so hesitate before reprinting it.
In imagination one sees that gifted man riding horseback on his journeys
between London and Holyhead, or Chester and Parkgate, on his way to or
from Ireland, halting overnight with his attendant at the rough inns of
that time, and leaving broadcast on the dim and flawed glass of their
windows humorous or spiteful comments upon anything that chanced to arouse
his criticism. You perceive him, waiting impatiently for breakfast,
scrawling malignant lampoons with his ring, or recording the stupidities
of his servant. The wayside taverns along that great north-westerly road
should still have such evidence of his passing, only glass is brittle, and
many a pane precious with those autographed records has accidentally
perished, while doubtless many another has long ago been removed by
admirers, and so become lost to the world.
One such was the pane at the “Yacht” inn at Chester, that hoary timbered
and plastered tavern whose nodding gables scarce uphold the story that
this was once the foremost hotel of this picturesque city. The Dean, then
at the height of his fame, halting here on his way into Ireland, was in
one of his companionable humours, and invited the Dean and the other
dignified clergy of the Cathedral to supper; but not one of them
acknowledged his intended hospitality. Deans, Canons, and Prebendaries all
agreed among themselves, or resolved separately, to ignore the
distinguished visitor, who, in his rage, decorated a window with the
couplet:
Rotten without and mouldering within,
This place and its clergy are all near akin.
On the whole, regarding this quite dispassionately, having regard to the
gross affront on the one hand and Swift’s malignant nature and very full
sense of what was due to himself on the other, it can hardly be said that
he rose to the heights of epigram or sank to the depths of abuse demanded
by the occasion. Here he surely should have surpassed himself, in the one
category or the other, or--even more characteristically--in both. We want
more bitterness, more gall, an extra infusion of wormwood, and feel that
this is an ineffectual thing that any affronted person, owning a diamond
and merely capable of writing, could have achieved. And, even so, the
historic pane itself has disappeared.
The guests at inns in the middle of the eighteenth century often did not,
it seems, disdain the walls; for in _Columella_, a curious novel of
travelling, published about that period, we read that the characters in it
found time on their journey “to examine the inscriptions on walls and
windows, and learned that the love of woman, the love of wine, and the
love of fame were the three ruling passions that usually vented
themselves” in this manner.
These were travellers who, come what might, determined to be
unconventional.
“When they came to an inn, instead of complaining of their accommodations,
or bullying the waiters, they diverted themselves with the humours of my
landlord, criticising his taste in his furniture or his pictures, or in
perusing the inscriptions on the walls or windows, or inquiring into the
history of the neighbouring gentry. In short, they had determined to be
pleased with everything, and therefore were not disappointed.”
At the inn where these original persons breakfasted the great patriot,
John Wilkes, had usurped the principal place over the parlour chimney.
Where they stopped to dine, the virtuous George the Third and the amiable
Charlotte had resumed their places in the dining-room, and “Wilkes was
only stuck up against the stable-door, and in the temple of Cloacina.”
Alas! poor Wilkes, to be subjected to such an indignity!
At one inn they found the inscription:
James Harding, from Birmingham, dined here, Sept. 29, 1763.
Button-maker by trade,
and there is your bid for fame. The other remarks they shamelessly quote
are all very well for eighteenth-century books, but they are not permitted
on the printed page in our own time.
There was once a poet of a minor sort who not only cherished a mania for
scribbling verse on the windows of inns, but was mad enough to collect and
print a series of these by no means distinguished efforts, which he
published under the title of _Verses written on Windows in several parts
of the Kingdom in a Journey to Scotland_.
This extraordinary person was one Aaron Hill, who “flourished” (as an
historian might say) between 1685 and 1750. If he is at all remembered
to-day, it is only as a friend of Pope, whose truest criticism presents
him as “one of the flying fishes, only capable of making brief flights out
of the profound.” He afterwards, with more friendship and less truth,
described Hill as attempting to dive into dulness, but rising unstained to
“mount far off among the swans of Thames.” How pretty! but he was in truth
the veriest goose, and his pinions ineffectual.
Hill wrote reams of rhymes, but few of them are poetry and fewer have any
power of entertaining. In 1728 he travelled in Scotland, and there--it is
an experience not unmatched nowadays--he encountered, while staying at an
inn in the Highlands, bad weather. Happily, not all who are weatherbound
in those latitudes scrawl their thoughts on windows, or poetic congestion
must long since have ensued. At that inn--_what_ inn or _where_ we are not
told, he accomplished his one excellent epigram, his solitary perfect
quatrain:
Scotland! thy weather’s like a modish wife;
Thy winds and rains for ever are at strife;
So Termagant a while her thunder tries,
And when she can no longer scold--she cries.
Other specimens of his quality do not exhibit the inspiration of those
lines, and indeed he is found to be too concerned with moral analogies to
please greatly, even in the best of them. Thus:
Where’er the diamond’s busy point could pass,
See! what deep wounds have pierced the middle glass!
While partial and untouching, all the rest,
Highest and lowest panes, shine, unimpressed:
No wonder, this!--for, e’en in life, ’tis so;
High fortunes stand, unreached--unseen the low,
But middle states are marks for every blow.
And again:
Whig and Tory scratch and bite,
Just as hungry dogs we see:
Toss a bone ’twixt two, they fight,
Throw a couple, they agree.
There is some just observation in that last, although how you are to give
a bone apiece, and at the same time, to Whig and Tory, would, as I
conceive the situation, be a difficult, not to say an impossible, matter
in our scheme of politics. When a Government comes into power, be it Whig
or Tory, or any other fancy label you please, it takes _all_ the bones,
and the other dog merely does the growling, until the times do alter.
With two more specimens we practically exhaust Hill’s well of fancy:
Tender-handed, stroke a nettle,
And it stings you, for your pains:
Grasp it, like a man of mettle,
And it soft as silk remains.
’Tis the same with common natures,
Use ’em kindly, they rebel:
But be rough on Nutmeg-graters,
And the rogues obey you well.
* * * * *
Here, in wet and windy weather,
Muse and I, two mopes together,
Far from friends and short of pleasure,
Wanting everything but leisure:
Scarce content, in any one sense,
Tell the showers, and scribble nonsense.
How true that last admission!
INDEX
Adelphi Hotel, Adelphi, i. 212, 264
Ale-stakes, i. 14-17
Anchor, Ripley, ii. 212, 242
Angel, Basingstoke, ii. 279
-- Bury St. Edmunds, i. 238
-- Colchester, i. 90
-- Ferrybridge, ii. 81
-- Grantham, i. 118-123
-- Guildford, ii. 57
-- Islington, i. 119
-- Stilton, ii. 48
Ass-in-the-Bandbox, Nidd, ii. 203
Barge Aground, Brentford, ii. 203
-- Stratford High Road, ii. 203
Battle, Pilgrims’ Hostel at, i. 97
Bay Tree Tavern, St. Swithin’s Lane, ii. 290
Bear, Devizes, ii. 8-16
-- Esher, ii. 116
-- and Billet, Chester, ii. 74
Bear’s Head, Brereton, ii. 62
Beaufort Arms, Bath, i. 254
Beckhampton Inn, i. 238
Bee-Hive, Eaumont Bridge, ii. 138
-- Grantham, ii. 192
Beetle-and-Wedge, Moulsford, ii. 195
Bell, Barnby Moor, i. 60, ii. 55, 81
-- Belbroughton, ii. 245
-- Berkeley Heath, i. 256
-- Dale Abbey, ii. 88, 90
-- Stilton, ii. 48-54
-- Tewkesbury, ii. 283-287
-- Warwick Lane, London, i. 30
-- Woodbridge, ii. 112
Bell and Mackerel, Mile End, ii. 129
Belle Sauvage, Ludgate Hill, i. 229
Berkeley Arms, Tewkesbury, ii. 288
Birch Tree Tavern, St. Swithin’s Lane, ii. 290
Black Bear, Sandbach, ii. 58
-- -- Tewkesbury, ii. 289
-- Boy, Chelmsford, i. 242
-- Bull, Holborn, i. 288-290
-- -- Newcastle-on-Tyne, i. 53
-- Horse, Cherhill, i. 232
-- Jack, Clare Market, i. 242-244
-- Swan, Kirkby Moorside, ii. 267
Blue Bell, Barnby Moor, i. 60, ii. 55, 81
-- Boar, Leicester, i. 202
-- -- Whitechapel, i. 291
-- Dragon, near Salisbury, i. 282-288
-- Lion, Muggleton, _i.e._ Town Malling, i. 226
-- Posts, Chester, i. 155-158
-- -- Portsmouth, ii. 137
Boar, Bluepitts, near Rochdale, ii. 197
Boar’s Head, Eastcheap, ii. 253, 261
-- Middleton, ii. 218
Boot, Chester, ii. 78
Bottom Inn, Chalton Downs, near Petersfield, i. 270-274
Buck and Bell, Long Itchington, ii. 130
Bull, Dartford, i. 79-82
-- Fenny Stratford, ii. 111
-- Rochester, i. 221-223
-- Sissinghurst, ii. 244
-- Whitechapel, i. 242, 245
Bull and Mouth, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, i. 228
Bull’s Head, Meriden, ii. 80
-- Greengate, Salford, i. 7
Burford Bridge Hotel, near Dorking, ii. 273
Bush, Bristol, i. 255
-- Farnham, i. 309
Capel Curig Inn, ii. 254
Carnarvon Castle, Chester, ii. 77
-- Arms, Guildford Street, ii. 289
Cart Overthrown, Edmonton, ii. 203
Castle, Conway, ii. 122
-- Marlborough, i. 60, ii. 8, 90-99
Cat and Fiddle, near Buxton, ii. 147
-- near Christchurch, ii. 181
Cat and Mutton, London Fields, ii. 139
Cats, Sevenoaks, ii. 191
Chapel House, near Chipping Norton, ii. 100-106
Cheney Gate, near Congleton, ii. 139
Chequers, Slapestones, ii. 134
-- of the Hope, Canterbury, i. 85
Civil Usage, Brixham, ii. 203
Clayton Arms, Godstone, ii. 30-34
Coach and Dogs, Oswestry, ii. 200
Coach and Horses, Chalton Downs, near Petersfield, i. 270
Coach and Horses, Isleworth, i. 276
Cock, Eaton Socon, i. 267
-- Great Budworth, ii. 69-71
-- Stony Stratford, ii. 43, 47
Cock and Pymat, Whittington, near Chesterfield, i. 181-184
County Inn, Canterbury, i. 291
Craven Arms, near Church Stretton, ii. 47
Cricketers, Laleham, ii. 167
Crispin and Crispianus, Strood, i. 292-295
Cross Hands, near Chipping Sodbury, ii. 85
Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, i. 295
Crow-on-Gate, Crowborough, ii. 205
Crown, Chiddingfold, ii. 242
-- Hempstead, i. 310
-- Oxford, ii. 101
-- Rochester, i. 223-225
-- Stamford, ii. 158
Crown and Treaty, Uxbridge, i. 161-169
Custom House, Chester, ii. 77
Dale Abbey, ii. 88-90
Dedlock Arms, i. 290
De Quincey, T., on old inns, i. 57, ii. 274-279
Dial House, Bocking, ii. 226
Dick Whittington, Cloth Fair, i. 4
Dolphin, Potter Heigham, i. 159
Domus Dei, Southampton, i. 90
Dorset Arms, East Grinstead, ii. 35
Duchy Hotel, Princetown, ii. 149
Eagle and Child, Nether Alderley, ii. 209
Edinburgh Castle, Limehouse, ii. 106-108
-- Regent’s Park, ii. 126-128
Eight Bells, Twickenham, ii. 200
Epitaphs on Innkeepers, ii. 245-254
Falcon, Bidford, ii. 89
-- Chester, ii. 74
Falstaff, Canterbury, i. 87
Feathers, Ludlow, ii. 18-25
Ferry inn, Rosneath, ii. 180
Fighting Cocks, St. Albans, i. 4
First and Last, Land’s End, ii. 206
-- Sennen, ii. 206
Fish and Eels, Roydon, i. 118
Flitch of Bacon, Wichnor, ii. 79
Fountain, Canterbury, i. 291
Four Crosses, Hatherton, ii. 134
Fowler, J. Kearsley, of the White Hart, Aylesbury, i. 62
Fox and Hounds, Barley, ii. 153
Fox and Pelican, Grayshott, ii. 180
Fox-under-the-Hill, Strand, i. 255
Garter, Windsor, ii. 261
Gate, Dunkirk, ii. 133
Gate Hangs Well, Nottingham, ii. 133
Gatehouse Tavern, Norwich, ii. 130
George, Amesbury, i. 283-287
-- Andover, ii. 16-18
-- Bridport, i. 180
-- Brighthelmstone, i. 181
-- Broadwindsor, i. 180
-- Colnbrook, i. 188
-- Crawley, ii. 152
-- Grantham, i. 267, ii. 55
-- Glastonbury, i. 107, 116
-- Greta Bridge, i. 268
-- Hayes Common, ii. 172
-- Huntingdon, ii. 47
-- Mere, i. 180
-- Norton St. Philip, i. 123-132
-- Odiham, ii. 44
-- Rochester, i. 82
-- St. Albans, i. 117, 119
-- Salisbury, ii. 263
-- Southwark, i. 31
-- Stamford, ii. 154-158
-- Walsall, i. 60
-- Wanstead, ii. 141
-- Winchcombe, i. 132-136
George and Dragon, Dragon’s Green, ii. 117-119
-- Great Budworth, ii. 137
-- Wargrave-on-Thames, ii. 176
-- West Wycombe, ii. 222
George and Vulture, Lombard Street, i. 213, 251, 264
George the Fourth, Clare Market, i. 242-244
God’s House, Portsmouth, i. 89
Golden Cross, Charing Cross, i. 213-220, ii. 72, 268
Grand Pump Room Hotel, Bath, i. 254
Great Western Railway Hotel, Paddington, i. 72
Great White Horse, Ipswich, i. 246-251
Green Dragon, Alderbury, i. 282-288
-- Combe St. Nicholas, ii. 109
-- Welton, i. 312
-- Wymondham, i. 95
Green Man, Hatton, i. 317
-- Putney Heath, i. 319
Green Man and Black’s Head, Ashbourne, ii. 159
Grenadier, Whitley, ii. 138
Greyhound, Croydon, ii. 153
-- Sutton, ii. 153
-- Thame, i. 160
Guildford Arms, Guildford Street, ii. 290
Halfway House, Rickmansworth, ii. 215
Hark to Bounty, Staidburn, ii. 204
-- Lasher, Castleton, ii. 204
-- Nudger, Dobcross, Manchester, ii. 204
-- Towler, Bury, Lancashire, ii. 204
Haycock, Wansford, ii. 80
Haygate Inn, near Wellington, Salop, ii. 80
Hearts of Oak, West Allington, ii. 87
Herbergers, i. 25
Hop-pole, Tewkesbury, i. 257, ii. 288
Horseshoe and Castle, Cooling, i. 295
Hostelers, i. 25
Hundred-and-One, The, ii. 129
Innkeepers, Epitaphs on, ii. 245-254
Isle of Skye, near Holmfirth, ii. 148
Jack Straw’s Castle, Hampstead Heath, i. 300-302
Johnson Dr., on inns, i. 43-46
Jolly Farmer, Farnham, ii. 217
Keigwin Arms, Mousehole, ii. 230
King and Tinker, Enfield, i. 205-207
King Edgar, Chester, ii. 72-74
King’s Arms, Lancaster, i. 299
-- Malmesbury, ii. 293
-- Salisbury, i. 180
-- Sandwich, ii. 228
King’s Head, Aylesbury, i. 141-143, ii. 38
-- Chigwell, i. 277-283
-- Dorking, i. 230
-- Stockbridge, ii. 249
-- Thame, i. 160
-- Yarmouth, i. 207, ii. 114
Labour in Vain, Stourbridge, ii. 199
Lamb, Eastbourne, ii. 57
Lawrence, Robert, of the “Lion,” Shrewsbury, i. 60, ii. 250
Leather Bottle, Cobham, Kent, i. 230
-- Holborn, ii. 191
Leighton, Archbishop, i. 29
Lion, Shrewsbury, i. 60, 297, ii. 250, 274-279
Lion and Fiddle, Hilperton, ii. 195
Lion and Swan, Congleton, ii. 65-67
Living Sign, Grantham, ii. 192
Load of Mischief, Oxford Street, ii. 162
Locker-Lampson, F., on old inns, i. 58
Loggerheads, Llanverris, ii. 168
Lord Crewe Arms, Blanchland, i. 136-140
Lord Warden, Dover, i. 54
Luttrell Arms, Dunster, ii. 37-40
Lygon Arms, Broadway, ii. 2-8, 244
Magpie, Little Stonham, ii. 153
-- and Stump, Clare Market, i. 242
Maiden’s Head, Uckfield, ii. 37
Maid’s Head, Norwich, ii. 40-42
Maison Dieu, Dover, i. 88
-- Ospringe, i. 84
Malt Shovel, Sandwich, ii. 228
Man Loaded with Mischief, Oxford Street, ii. 162
Marlborough Downs, i. 231-238
Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms, Manton, i. 232
-- Granby, Dorking, i. 230
Maund and Bush, near Shifnal, ii. 199
Maypole, Chigwell, i. 277-282
Miller of Mansfield, Goring-on-Thames, ii. 177
Molly Mog, ii. 271
Mompesson, Sir Giles, i. 37-41
Mortal Man, Troutbeck, ii. 169
Morison, Fynes, on English inns, i. 36
Music House, Norwich, i. 157
Nag’s Head, Thame, i. 160
Neptune, Ipswich, ii. 110
Newhaven Inn, near Buxton, ii. 255
New Inn, Allerton, ii. 80
-- Gloucester, i. 98-106
-- Greta Bridge, i. 268
-- New Romney, ii. 44
-- Sherborne, i. 106
Newby Head, near Hawes, ii. 149
Noah’s Ark, Compton, i. 90
Nutley Inn, ii. 36
Old Angel, Basingstoke, ii. 279
-- Bell, Holborn, i. 30
-- -- Chester, ii. 78
-- Black Jack, Clare Market, i. 242-244
-- Fox, Bricket Wood, ii. 201
-- Hall, Sandbach, ii. 58-62
-- House at Home, Havant, ii. 220
-- King’s Head, Aylesbury, i. 141-143, ii. 38
-- -- Chester, ii. 77
-- Leather Bottle, Cobham, Kent, i. 230
-- Magpies, Sipson Green, i. 317
-- Rock House, Barton, ii. 196
-- Rover’s Return, Manchester, i. 7
-- Royal Hotel, Birmingham, i. 258, ii. 268
-- Ship, Worksop, ii. 226
-- Star, York, ii. 158
-- Swan, Atherstone, ii. 227
-- Tippling Philosopher, Chepstow, ii. 203
-- White Swan, Piff’s Elm, i. 202-205
Osborne’s Hotel, Adelphi, i. 212, 264
Ostrich, Colnbrook, i. 188-201
Pack Horse and Talbot, Turnham Green, ii. 192
Peacock, Eatanswill, i. 230
-- Rowsley, ii. 25-29
Pelican, Speenhamland, i. 208, ii. 293
Penygwryd Hotel, Llanberis, ii. 294-298
Pheasant, Winterslow Hut, ii. 102
Pickering Arms, Thelwall, ii. 71
Pie, Little Stonham, ii. 153
Pied Bull, Chester, ii. 78
_Piers Plowman_, i. 16-18
Piff’s Elm, i. 202-205
Pilgrims’ Hostel, Battle, i. 97
-- Compton, i. 90
Plough, Blundeston, i. 290
-- Ford, ii. 136
Pomfret Arms, Towcester, i. 259-263
Pounds Bridge, near Penshurst, ii. 220
Queen’s Arms, Charmouth, i. 180
-- Head, Hesket Newmarket, i. 299
-- Hotel, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, i. 229
-- Burton-on-Trent, ii. 114
Raven, Hook, ii. 86
-- Shrewsbury, i. 42, 60
Red Bull, Stamford, ii. 158
Red Horse, Stratford-on-Avon, ii. 47, 269-271
Red Lion, Banbury, i. 146
-- Canterbury, i. 51
-- Chiswick Mall, ii. 123-125
-- Egham, ii. 53-56
-- Glastonbury, i. 116
-- Great Missenden, ii. 198
-- Guildford, ii. 262
-- Hampton-on-Thames, ii. 159
-- Hatfield, ii. 55
-- Henley-on-Thames, ii. 299-301
-- High Wycombe, i. 184
-- Hillingdon, i. 169
-- Martlesham, ii. 113, 165
-- Ospringe, i. 84
-- Parliament Street, i. 265, 290
Reindeer, Banbury, i. 145, 147-155, 169
Ridler’s Hotel, Holborn, i. 31
Robin Hood, Turnham Green, ii. 131
-- Cherry Hinton, ii. 131
Rose, Wokingham, ii. 271
Rose and Crown, Halifax, ii. 273
-- Rickmansworth, ii. 215
Rover’s Return, Shudehill, Manchester, i. 7
Row Barge, Wallingford, ii. 178
Royal County Hotel, Durham, ii. 55
Royal George, Knutsford, ii. 279
-- Stroud, ii. 82
Royal Hotel, Bath, i. 255
-- Bideford, ii. 273
Royal Oak, Bettws-y-Coed, ii. 172-175
Rummyng, Elynor, i. 19-24
Running Footman, Hay Hill, i. 255, ii. 193
Running Horse, Leatherhead, i. 18-25
-- Merrow, ii. 233
Salutation, Ambleside, ii. 292
Saracen’s Head, Bath, i. 266
-- Southwell, i. 172-180
-- Towcester, i. 259-263
Serjeant’s Inn Coffee House, i. 255
Seven Stars, Manchester, i. 6, 8-12
Shakespeare’s Head, near Chipping Norton, ii. 100-106
Shears, Wantage, ii. 202
Shepherd’s Shore, Marlborough Downs, i. 232-237
Ship and Lobster, Denton, near Gravesend, i. 296
-- Afloat, Bridgwater, ii. 203
-- Aground, ii. 203
Ship, Brixham, ii. 139
-- Dover, i. 54
Smiling Man, Dudley, ii. 203
Smoker, Plumbley, ii. 179
Soldier’s Fortune, Kidderminster, ii. 136
Sondes Arms, Rockingham, i. 290
Spaniards, Hampstead Heath, i. 256, 320-327
Star, Alfriston, i. 93-97, ii. 165
-- Lewes, ii. 37
-- Yarmouth, ii. 42-44, 273
Stocks, Clapgate, ii. 202
Stonham Pie, Little Stonham, ii. 153
Sugar Loaves, Sible Hedingham, ii. 195
Sun, Canterbury, i. 292
-- Cirencester, i. 180
-- Dedham, ii. 225
-- Northallerton, ii. 248
Sunrising Inn, Edge Hill, ii. 299
Swan and Bottle, Uxbridge, i. 165
-- Charing, ii. 188
-- Ferrybridge, ii. 81, 83
-- Fittleworth, ii. 159, 183
-- Haslemere, ii. 242
-- Kirkby Moorside, ii. 267
-- Knowle, ii. 231-233
-- near Newbury, ii. 216
-- Preston Crowmarsh, ii. 179
-- Rickmansworth, ii. 214
-- Sandleford, ii. 217
-- Tewkesbury, ii. 288
-- Thames Ditton, ii. 292
-- Town Malling, i. 226
-- with Two Necks, Gresham Street, i. 54-56
Tabard, Southwark, i. 77-79
Talbot, Atcham, ii. 80
-- Cuckfield, ii. 81
-- Newark, i. 308
-- Ripley, ii. 213
-- Shrewsbury, ii. 80
-- Southwark, i. 79
-- Towcester, ii. 115, 243
Tan Hill Inn, Swaledale, near Brough, ii. 145
Tankard, Ipswich, ii. 110
Thorn, Appleton, ii. 138
Three Cats, Sevenoaks, ii. 191
-- Cocks, near Hay, ii. 47
-- Crosses, Willoughby, ii. 303
-- Crowns, Chagford, i. 170-172
-- Horseshoes, Great Mongeham, ii. 197
-- Houses, Sandal, i. 308
-- Jolly Bargemen, Cooling, i. 295
-- Magpies, Sipson Green, i. 317
-- Queens, Burton-on-Trent, ii. 114
-- Tuns, Bideford, ii. 110
Town Arms, Eatanswill, i. 230
Traveller’s Rest, Flash Bar, ii. 148
-- Kirkstone Pass, ii. 148
Treaty House, Uxbridge, i. 161-169
Trevelyan Arms, Barnstaple, ii. 40, 110
Trip to Jerusalem, Nottingham, ii. 134
Trouble House, near Tetbury, ii. 203
Turnspit Dogs, i. 48-51
Turpin’s Cave, Epping Forest, i. 310
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bluepitts, near Rochdale, ii. 197
Unicorn, Bowes, i. 269
-- Ripon, ii. 121
Verulam Arms, St. Albans, ii. 79
Vine, Mile-End, ii. 259
_Vision of Piers Plowman_, i. 16-18
Visitors’ Books, ii. 291-308
Waggon and Horses, Beckhampton, i. 233, 237
Wellington, Broadstairs, ii. 47
-- Market Place, Manchester, i. 7
-- Rushyford Bridge, i. 60
-- Tewkesbury, ii. 287
Whetstone, Chiswick Mall, ii. 124
White Bear, Fickles Hole, ii. 203
-- and Whetstone, Chiswick Mall, ii. 123-125
-- Bull, Ribchester, ii. 119-121
White Hart, Adwalton, ii. 255
-- Aylesbury, i. 62-67, 140
-- Bath, i. 254
-- Castle Combe, ii. 234
-- Drighlington, ii. 255
-- Eatanswill, i. 230
-- Glastonbury, i. 112
-- Godstone, ii. 30-34
-- Guildford, ii. 55
-- Hackney Marshes, ii. 257-259
-- Scole, ii. 150
-- Somerton, i. 185-187
-- Southwark, i. 226-228
-- Whitchurch, Hants, ii. 280
-- Widcombe, i. 254
-- Yard, Gray’s Inn Road, ii. 106
White Horse, Eaton Socon, i. 267
-- Fetter Lane, i. 31, 219
-- Maiden Newton, ii. 289
-- Shere, ii. 241
-- Woolstone, ii. 211
White Horse Cellar, Piccadilly, i. 253
White House, Hackney Marshes, ii. 259
White Lion, Maidstone, i. 226
White Swan, Henley-in-Arden, ii. 300
Who’d Have Thought It, Barking, ii. 204
Why Not, Dover, ii. 204
Widow’s Son, Bromley-by-Bow, ii. 125-127
Windmill, North Cheriton, ii. 89-91
-- Salt Hill, i. 60
-- Tabley, ii. 179
Winterslow Hut, near Salisbury, ii. 102
Wizard, Alderley Edge, ii. 65-69
Wood’s Hotel, Furnival’s Inn, i. 31
World Turned Upside Down, Old Kent Road, ii. 204
-- near Three Mile Cross, ii. 204
Wright’s, Rochester, i. 223-225
Yacht, Chester, ii. 77, 304
_Printed and bound by Hazell, Watson & Viney, Ld., London and Aylesbury._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Great North Road_, 1901, vol. i., pp. 260-66.
[2] The sign of “Scole White Hart,” illustrated in _Norwich Road_, p. 265.
[3] Illustrated: _Brighton Road_, pp. 333, 337.
[4] Illustrated: _Brighton Road_, p. 295.
[5] Illustrated: _Norwich Road_, p. 256.
[6] It is now the “Dolphin,” and numbered 269.
[7] Cf. _The Hastings Road_, p. 82.
[8] _The Holyhead Road_, vol. i., pp. 244-7; _Stage Coach and Mail in Days
of Yore_, vol. i., p. 46.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Old Inns of Old England, Volume II (of 2) - A Picturesque Account of the Ancient and Storied Hostelries - of Our Own Country" ***
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