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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

COURTYARD OF THE “MAID’S HEAD,” NORWICH SHOWING THE JACOBEAN BAR.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.