The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Picturesque Account of the Ancient and Storied Hostelries of Our Own Country

These unfortunate dogs acquired a preternatural intelligence. A humorous, but probably not true, story is told, illustrating this. It was at Bath, and some of them had accompanied their mistresses to church, where the lesson chanced to be the tenth chapter of Ezekiel, in which there is an amazing deal about self-propelled chariots, and wheels. When the dogs first heard the word “wheel” they started up in alarm; on its occurring a second time they howled dolefully, and at the third instance they all rushed from the church.

Strangely modern appear the grievances raised against innkeepers in the old times. The bills they presented were early pronounced exorbitant, and so, in spite of measures intended for the relief of travellers, they remained. Indeed, throughout the centuries, until the present day, the curious in these matters will find, not unexpectedly, that innkeepers charged according to what they considered their guests would grumble at—and pay.

The eighteenth-century locus classicus in this sort is the account rendered to the Duc de Nivernais, the French Ambassador to England, who in 1762, coming to negotiate a treaty of peace, halted the night, on his way from Dover to London, at the “Red Lion,” Canterbury.

For the night’s lodging for twelve persons, with a frugal supper in which oysters, fowls, boiled mutton, poached eggs and fried whiting figure, the landlord presented an account of over £44. Our soldiers fought the Frenchman; mine host did his humble, non-combatant part, and fleeced him.

This truly magnificent bill has been preserved, not, let us hope, for the emulation of other hotel-keepers, but by way of a “terrible example.” Here it is:

The Duke paid the account without a murmur, only remarking that innkeepers at this rate should soon grow rich; but news of this extraordinary charge was soon spread all over England. It was printed in the newspapers, amid other marvels, disasters and atrocities, and mine host of the “Red Lion,” like Byron in a later age, woke up one morning to find himself famous.

The country gentlemen, scandalised at his rapacity, boycotted his inn, and his brother innkeepers of Canterbury disowned him. The unfortunate man wrote to the St. James’s Chronicle, endeavouring to justify himself, and complaining bitterly of the harm that had been wrought his business by the continual billeting of soldiers upon him. But it was in vain he protested; his trade fell off, and he was ruined in six months.

Sometimes, too, there was a difference of opinion as to whether a bill had or had not actually been paid, as we see by the following indignant letter:

Then there was Dover, notorious for high prices. “Thy cliffs, dear Dover! harbour and hotel,” sang Byron, who bitterly remembered the “long, long bills, whence nothing is deducted.” The “Ship,” the hotel probably indicted by the poet, has long since disappeared, but that gigantic caravanserai, the “Lord Warden Hotel,” could at one time, in its monumental charges, have afforded him material for another stanza. Magnificent as were the charges made by overreaching hosts elsewhere, they all paled their ineffectual sums-total before the sublime heights of the account rendered to Louis Napoleon when Prince-President of France. He merely remarked that it was truly princely, and paid.

FACSIMILE OF AN ACCOUNT RENDERED TO JOHN PALMER IN 1787.

If, on the other hand, that famous coaching hostelry, the “Swan with Two Necks,” in Lad Lane, in the City of London, charged guests for their accommodation as moderately as the accompanying bill for stabling a horse, the establishment should have been popular. This bill, printed here in facsimile from the original, was presented, April 16th, 1787, to John Palmer, the famous Post Office reformer, and shows that only one shilling and ninepence a night was charged. Yet he was at that time a famous man. Three years before he had established the first mail-coach, and was everywhere well known, and doubtless, in general, fair prey to renderers of bills.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE “SWAN WITH TWO NECKS.”

The “Swan with Two Necks,” whence many coaches set out, until the end of such things, was often known by waggish people as the “Wonderful Bird,” and obtained its name from a perversion of the “Swan with Two Nicks”: swans that swam the upper Thames and were the property of the Vintners’ Company being marked on their bills with two nicks, for identification. Lad Lane is now “Gresham Street,” but, apart from its mere name, is a lane still; but the old buildings of the “Swan with Two Necks” were pulled down in 1856.

CHAPTER V

“What cosy old parlours in those days,” he exclaims, “low-roofed, glowing with ample fires and fenced from the blasts of the doors by screens whose folding doors were, or seemed to be, infinite! What motherly landladies! won, how readily, to kindness the most lavish by the mere attractions of simplicity and youthful innocence, and finding so much interest in the bare circumstance of being a traveller at a childish age! Then what blooming young handmaidens; how different from the knowing and worldly demireps of modern high roads! And sometimes grey-headed, faithful waiters, how sincere and attentive by comparison with their flippant successors, the eternal ‘Coming, sir, coming,’ of our improved generation!”

They all tell the same tale; those whose privilege it was to witness the meeting of the old order and the new.

“It was interesting,” says Mr. Locker-Lampson, writing of old times, “as the post-chaise drew up at the door of the roomy and comfortable hostel where we were to dine or sleep, to see Boniface and his better half smilingly awaiting us—Us in particular!—waiter and chamber-lasses grouped behind them. The landlady advances to the carriage-window with a cordial, self-respecting, ‘Will you please to alight.’ I remember that the landlord, who announced dinner, sometimes entered with the first dish and placed it on the table, bowing as he retired. Why, it all seems as if it were but yesterday! Now it is gone for ever.”

Yes, irrevocably gone. Most of the old inns are gone too, and in their place, only too frequently, the traveller finds the modern, company-owned hotel, with a foreign manager who naturally takes no interest in the guests he, as a matter of fact, rarely sees, and with whom no guest could possibly foregather. In the modern barrack hotel the guest must necessarily be impersonal—one of a number going to swell the returns. No one quite willingly resigns himself to being a mere number; it is, indeed, one of the greatest of the convict’s trials that he has lost his name and become identified only by a letter and a row of figures. Just in the same way, when we stay at hotels our self-respect is revolted at being received and dismissed with equal indifference, and there are many who would gladly resign the innovations of electric light and hydraulic lifts for that “welcome at an inn” of which Shenstone speaks. The philosophy of these regrets must, in fact, be sought in that illuminating phrase, “Us in particular.” We travellers are unwilling to be thought of merely as numbers identical with those of our bedrooms, and we like to believe, against our own better judgment, that the old-fashioned hosts and hostesses were pleased to see us; which of course, in that special sense, was not the case. But a little make-believe sometimes goes a great way, and we need never, unless we have a mind to distress ourselves, seek the tongue of humbug in the cheek of courtesy.

The landlord of a good coaching house was a very important person indeed. Not seldom he was a large owner of horses and employer of labour; a man of some culture and of considerable wealth. He was not only a good judge of wine and horseflesh, but of men and matters, and not merely the servant, but the self-respecting and respected friend, of the gentry in his neighbourhood. He was generally in evidence at his house, and he or his wife would have scorned the idea of appointing a manager to do their work. In those days, and with such men along the road, it was an established rule of etiquette for the coming guest to invite his host to take a glass of wine with him and to exchange the news. But the type has become quite extinct, and even their old houses have been either demolished or else converted into private residences. Such hosts were Mr. and Mrs. Botham, of the “Windmill” at Salt Hill; or the long succession of notable landlords of the “Castle” at Marlborough, on the Bath Road; such were Clark, of the “Bell,” Barnby Moor, and Holt of the “Wheatsheaf,” Rushyford Bridge, on the Great North Road,—to name but those.

They were men, too, of considerable influence, and, when equipped with determination, wielded a certain amount of power, and brought great changes to pass; as when Robert Lawrence, of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, by dint of great personal exertions, brought the line of travel between London and Dublin through Shrewsbury and Holyhead, instead of, as formerly, through Chester. He died in 1806, and the curious may yet read on his mural monument in St. Julian’s Church how he was “many years proprietor of the ‘Raven’ and ‘Lion’ inns in this town,” and that it was to his “public spirit and unremitting exertions for upwards of thirty years, in opening the great road through Wales between the United kingdoms, as also for establishing the first mail-coach, that the public in general have been greatly indebted.”

Almost equally forceful were some of the old-time proprietors of the “George” at Walsall. In 1781 Mr. Thomas Fletcher, one of an old and highly respected family in that town, gave up the “Dragon” in High Street and built the great “George Hotel.” He even procured an Act of Parliament by which the present road from Walsall to Stafford was made, thereby bringing Walsall out of a by-road into the direct line of traffic. He also caused the Birmingham road to be straightened and widened, and gradually brought coaching and posting through the town. His successors, Fletcher and Sharratt, were equally energetic. In 1823 they remodelled the “George,” giving it the classic-columned front that confers a kind of third-cousin relationship to the British Museum, with unappetising and gruesome thoughts of dining on fried mummy and kippered parchments. The columns, which are still very solemnly there—or were, a year ago—came from the Marquis of Donegall’s neighbouring seat of Fisherwick Hall, demolished about that time, and the placing of them here was celebrated by an inaugural feast, “the colonnade dinner,” presided over by Lord Hatherton, a great patron of the house.

Those wonder-working innkeepers also, in 1831, promoted the Bill by which the present Birmingham road through Perry Bar was made, superseding the old route by Hamstead and Handsworth church.

Unfortunately, those fine old innkeepers, whatever else they were, were not usually cultivators of the art of literary expression, and did not write their memoirs and reminiscences. Yet they could, had they chosen, have told an interesting tale of men and matters. Consider! They were in the whirl of life, and often knew personages and affairs, not merely by report, but at first hand. What would not the historian of social England give for such reminiscences? They would open the door to much that is now sealed, and would clothe the dry bones of mere facts with romance.

One such innkeeper, Mr. J. Kearsley Fowler, who kept the “White Hart,” Aylesbury, in the last few years of its existence, has, however, left us something by which we may see, described at first-hand, the life and surroundings of a first-class old coaching and posting inn between 1812 and those middle years of the ’60’s, when a few branch-road coaches were yet left, and the Squire and Agriculture were still prosperous.

He tells us, of his own knowledge, that the innkeepers had by far the largest amount of capital invested in the country towns, where, as men generally of superior manners and education, from their constant association with the leading nobility, clergy, and magistracy, they took a prominent position, both socially and politically, the leading houses being the head quarters, respectively, of Whigs and Tories.

The “White Hart” at Aylesbury was generally believed to have dated back to the time of Richard the Second, and in the time of the Wars of the Roses to have been the rendezvous of the White Rose party, while the “Roebuck” was affected to the Red Rose.

Until 1812 the “White Hart” retained its fine mediæval, three-gabled frontage, with first floor overhanging the ground-floor, and the second overhanging the first. Elaborately carved barge-boards decorated the gables. In the centre of the front was a great gateway with deeply reeded oaken posts and heavy double doors, which could be closed on occasion; but, in the growing security of the land, had scarce within the memory of man been shut to. Within was a spacious courtyard, partly surrounded by a gallery supported on stout oaken pillars and reached by a staircase. From this gallery, as in most other mediæval hostelries, the bedrooms and principal sitting-rooms opened. The “Coffee Room” and “Commercial Room” were at either side of the entrance from the street: the “Commercial Room” itself having, before the days of “commercials,” once been called “the Change,” and used, as asserted by local tradition, as the place where the principal business transactions of the town were conducted, over suitable liquor.

On the side opposite was the room called the “Crown,” where the collectors of customs and excise, and other officials periodically attended. In the “Mitre,” an adjoining room, the Chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln, and the “Apparitor” of the Archdeacon had of old collected, for three hundred years, the dues or fees of the Church. Another room, the “Fountain,” was perhaps originally a select bar. Running under the entire frontage of the house was the extensive cellarage, necessarily spacious in days when every one drank wine, and many deeply.

At the end of the yard was the great kitchen, and beyond it large gardens and a beautiful, full-sized bowling-green. Gigantic elms, at least three centuries old, bordered the gardens, which were further screened from outside observation by dense shrubberies of flowering shrubs, laburnums, lilacs, mountain-ash, acacias, and red chestnuts. Ancient walnut-trees and shady arbours completed this lovely retreat.

But this was not all. Beyond this very delightful, but merely ornamental, portion was an orchard stocked with fine apple- and pear-trees: codlins, golden and ribston pippins, Blenheim orange, russets and early June-eatings, Gansell’s bergamot pear, and others. Three very fine mulberry-trees, at least three centuries old, and of course a varied and extensive stock of bush-fruit, were included in this orchard, and in addition there was the kitchen-garden.

In the orchard were the cow-houses and piggeries, and the hospital for lame or ailing horses. A mill-stream ran at the bottom, and in the midst of it was a “stew,” a shallow pond for freshwater fish, in which was kept an “eel-trunk,” a strong iron box about four feet long and two feet wide and deep, perforated with holes. The lid of this contrivance was fastened with lock and key, and was under the charge of the man-cook, who was head of the servants. When eels were required for table, the trunk would be hauled up to bank by a strong iron chain, and emptied.

The stables had stalls for about fifty horses, and over them were lofts for hay, straw, and corn. Harness-rooms, waiting-room for the postboys, and an “ostry,” i.e., office and store-room for the ostler, were attached, together with chaise and coach-houses. The establishment of the “White Hart”—and it was typical of many others in the old days—covered from five to six acres.

The staff of such a house was, of course, large. Besides the innkeeper and his wife, both of them working hard in the conduct of the business, there were housekeeper, barmaid, man-cook, waiter and under-waiter, kitchenmaid, scullerymaid, chambermaid, laundress, housemaid, nurse, boots, ostler, tap-boy, first-turn postboy, and generally an extra woman: sixteen persons, whom the innkeeper had to lodge and feed daily, in addition to his guests.

The “White Hart” was re-fronted in a very plain, not to say ugly, manner in 1813, and finally demolished in 1863. Not even that most lovely and most famous feature of it, the celebrated “Rochester room,” was spared. This was a noble apartment, built as an addition to the back of the house in 1663 by the Earl of Rochester, as a return for a signal service rendered by the landlord in that time—perilous to such Cavaliers as he—the Commonwealth. It seems, according to Clarendon, that the Earl and Sir Nicholas Armour came riding horseback into the town one night and put up at the “White Hart,” then kept by a landlord named Gilvy, who was affected strongly in favour of Cromwell and all his doings. The local magistrate, hearing of the visit of the Earl, sent secretly to the innkeeper requesting him to detain the travellers’ horses the next morning, so that neither of them should be able to leave, pending an inquiry upon their business; but the thing was not done secretly enough. Probably one of the servants of the inn told those two guests of something ominous being afoot; at any rate, the Earl had Gilvy up and questioned him, and, telling him how probably the lives of himself and friend were in his hand, gave him forty Jacobuses and suggested that they should, without a word, depart that night. Clarendon expresses himself as unable to decide whether the gold or the landlord’s conscience prompted his next action. At any rate, Gilvy conducted the two fugitives from the inn at midnight “into the London way.” They reached London and then fled over sea, while the landlord was left to invent some plausible story to satisfy the Justice of the Peace, who in his turn was suspected by Cromwell of being a party to the escape.

At the Restoration, the landlord received a brimming measure of reward. He was thanked by the King, and the Earl built for him that noble room, forty-two feet long, by twenty-three wide, that was the pride and glory of the “White Hart” for just two hundred years. It was panelled from floor to ceiling in richly carved oak, set off with gilding, and embellished with the figures of Peace and Concord and the initials C R, while the ceiling was painted with nymphs and cherubim by Antonio Verrio.

Nothing has more changed from its former condition than the old inn which has become the modern hotel. The “George,” the “Crown and Anchor,” the “Wellington,” or the “King’s Head,” had an individuality which was never lost. There was a personal kind of welcome from the landlord and the landlady that simulated the hospitality of a friendly host and hostess, mingled with the attention of a superior sort of body-servant. You were not handed over to a number and a chambermaid, like a document in a pigeon-hole tabulated by a clerk; but the hostess herself showed you your rooms, and begged you to put a name to anything you might fancy. There was no general coffee-room then, save for commercial travellers and such social gentlemen as preferred even inferior company to solitude. There was no table d’hôte dinner other than the ordinary, between twelve and two, which was chiefly made for the convenience of travellers by the stage-coach, who halted here for change and refreshment. Even the ladies who might be on the road were served and kept apart from the, perhaps, doubtful gents below; and mine host himself brought in the first dish and set it on the table of the private room, which was as much de rigueur then for ladies as the copper warming-pan and the claret with the yellow seal, or the thick, deep red luscious port of old, ordered by the knowing for the good of the house.

In the country the pretty little inn, with its honeysuckled porch and scrambling profusion of climbing roses up to the bedroom windows, had an even more home-like character in its methods of dealing with its guests. Here the servants stayed on for years, till they grew to be as much part of the establishment as the four-poster hung with red moreen and the plated sconces for candles. And here everything was of perfect cleanliness, and as fresh as fragrant. The eggs and milk and butter were all sweet and new. Generous jugs of cream softened the tartness of the black-currant pudding or the green-gooseberry tart. The spring chickens and young ducklings had been well fed; the mutton was home-grown and not under five years; the beef was home-grown too, and knew nothing of antiseptic preparations or frozen chambers; and the vegetables came direct from the garden, and had been neither tinned nor carted for miles in huge waggon loads, well rammed down and tightly compressed. And all the meat was roasted before an open fire, diligently basted in the process, till the gravy lightly frothed on the browned skin, and the appetising scent it gave out had no affinity with the smell of fat on heated iron, which for the most part accompanies the modern roast in the modern oven. The linen invariably smelt of lavender or dried rose-leaves, of which big bags were kept among the sheets; but the washing apparatus was poor, and the illumination was scanty. Wax candles in silver or plated branched candlesticks, that vaguely suggested churches and sacraments, shed a veritably “dim religious” glimmer in the sitting-room, and appeared expensively under the form of “lights” in the bill—mistily suggestive of food for hungry cats.

Yet the old country inn had, and still has—for it is not wholly extinct—its charms that weigh against any little defect.

Of all this quasi-home life which belonged to the old inn of the past, the hotel of the present has not a trace. For certain forms of luxury the modern hotel is hard to beat. Thick carpets deaden the footsteps of stragglers through the corridors, and your boots, invariably kicked into infinities by midnight guests, do not—as they do in the older houses—fly noisily along the bare boards. The rooms are lighted with electric light, but usually set so high as to be useless for all purposes of reading or working. In the drawing-room are luxurious chairs of all shapes and sizes; in the reading-room papers of all colours, to suit here the red-hot Radical and there the cooler Conservative. The billiard-room attracts the men after dinner as—if in the country—the tennis-ground or the golf-links had attracted them through the day. The telephone does everything you want. Carriages, theatres, quotations, races, a doctor if you are ill, a motor-car if you are well—nothing within the range of human wants that can be ordered and not chosen comes amiss to the telephone and its manipulators. All the rough edges of life are smoothed down to satin softness. All the friction is taken away. A modern hotel is as the isle of Calypso or the Garden of Armida, where all you have to do is to make known your wants and pay the bill.

But it has not one single strain of Home in it. Home is the place where the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you are a document in a pigeon-hole—a number, not a person—an accident, not substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management. You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. Dinner is, of course, fixed, and you take it in masses together: or so took it, for in late years, especially in the first hotels of London, a revulsion of feeling has led to the long tables being abolished, and small ones installed, where, almost privately amid the throng, you and your little party may dine. As a rule the waiters are Swiss and the meat is foreign, the cook is a Frenchman and called a chef; and the materials are inferior. The vegetables are tinned, and oysters, lobsters, salmon, and hare in May follow suit. The sauces are all exactly the same in one hotel as in another, and much margarine enters into their composition. Electric bells emphasise the monotonous ordering of the whole concern, where as little character is expressed in the ring as in the number it indicates; and speaking-tubes sound in the corridors, like domestic fog-horns or railway whistles, calling the chambermaids or waiters of such-and-such a floor to listen to their orders from below. Wherever you go you find exactly the same things—the same order, the same management, the same appliances and methods. You arrive without a welcome, you leave without a farewell. Your character is determined according to the tips you give on parting, and an hour after you have gone your personality is forgotten. But, above all things, Heaven save us from falling ill in the modern hotel. No one cares for you, and no one even has the decency to make a pretence of doing so.

Sometimes, however, if you go somewhat out of the season, and before the rush of visitors begins, you get to a certain degree behind the scenes, and learn a little of the heart and humanity of the management. The chambermaid has time to have a little chat with you in the morning, and the head waiter gives you bits of local information both interesting and new. The manageress is not too busy for a few minutes’ gossip across the counter which separates her from the hall, and screens her off in a sanctuary of her own. And you may find her cheerful, chatty, kindly, and willing to please for the mere pleasure of pleasing.

In the monster hotels of London and the great cities, while there may yet be a “season”—a period of extra pressure and overcrowding—there is no such slack time as the giant caravanserais of holiday resorts experience.

The pioneer of the many-storeyed, “palatial” hotels, gorgeous with marble pavements, polished granite columns, lifts and gigantic saloons, was the “Great Western Railway Hotel” at Paddington.[11] Since that huge pile set the fashion, hundreds of others, huger and more magnificent, have been built at Charing Cross, Euston, St. Pancras, Marylebone and other London termini, with big brothers—in every way as big and well-appointed—in provincial towns. They are the logical outcome of the times, the direct successors of the coaching and posting inns that originally came into existence to supply the wants, in food and lodging, of travellers set down at the places where the coaches stopped. The final expression of the coaching hostelry is still to be seen in London, in instructive company with one of the largest of the railway hotels, in the Strand, where the “Golden Cross,” built in 1832, looks upon the “Charing Cross Hotel” of the South-Eastern Railway.

The management of a great modern hotel is no easy thing. It demands the urbanity of an ambassador, the marketing instincts of a good housewife, the soldier’s instinct for command, the caution of a financier, and a gift for judging character. All these things—natural endowments, or the result of training—must go to the making of an hotel-manager who has, perhaps, a couple of hundred people on his staff, and hundreds of guests, many of them unreasonable, to keep satisfied.

It has lately become a commonplace to say that cycling and the motor-car have peopled the roads again. The old coaching inns have entered upon a new era of prosperity by reason of the crowds of cyclists who fare forth from London along the ancient highways, or explore, awheel, the neighbourhoods of provincial towns. The “last” coach-driver, coach-guard, and post-boy, killed off regularly by the newspapers, still survive to witness this new cult of the wheel, and the ultimate ostlers of the coaching era, a bit stiff in the joints, shaky at the knees, and generally out of repair, have come forth blinking, from the dark and cavernous recesses of their mouldering stables, all too large now for the horses that find shelter there, to take charge of the machines of steel and iron and rubber that will carry you infinite distances without fatigue.

There are elements of both fun and pathos in the sight of an old ostler cleaning a muddy bicycle in a coach-yard from which the last coach-horses departed nearly two generations ago. As a boy, he started life in the place as a stable-help, and had scarce finished his novitiate when the railway was opened and the coaches dropped off one by one, after vainly appealing to the old-fashioned prejudices of their patrons to shun the trains and still travel by the highways. How he has managed to retain his place all this time goodness only knows. Perhaps he has been useful in looking after the horses that work the hotel ’bus to and from the station; and then the weekly market-day, bringing in the farmers with their gigs and traps from outlying villages, is still an institution. For such customers old George had, no doubt, the liveliest contempt in the fine old free-handed days of coaching; but this class of business, once turned over cheerfully to second- or third-rate inns, has long been eagerly shared here.

To watch him with a bicycle you would think the machine a sensitive beast, ready to kick unless humoured, for as he rubs it down with a cloth he soothes it with the continuous “’ssh-ssh, ’ssh” which has become involuntary with him, from long usage; while if indeed it can’t kick, it succeeds very fairly in barking his shins with those treacherous pedals. All the persuasive hissing in the world won’t soothe a pedal.

As for the motor-cars which are now finding their way into the old inn-yards, the old ostler stands fearfully aloof from them, and lets the driver of the motor look after the machine himself. The New Ostler, who will be produced by the logic of events in the course of a very few more years, will be an expert mechanic, and able to tittivate a gear and grind in a valve of a motor-car, or execute minor repairs to a bicycle, just as readily as an ostler rubs down or clips a horse.

CHAPTER VI

The Abbots and other dignified ecclesiastics were thus among the earliest innkeepers, but they conducted their business on lines that would be impossible to the modern hotel-keeper, for they commonly boarded and lodged their guests free of charge, confident, in the religious spirit of the time, that the offerings to be made at the shrines, which were the objects of those old-time painful journeys, would amply repay the costs and charges of their entertaining, and leave a very handsome surplus for the good of the Abbey.

Chaucer’s description of pilgrimages made to Canterbury gives us a very good idea of the varied character of the crowds setting forth upon their journey to that most popular of shrines; and we learn from him and from many other contemporary sources that the bearing of these crowds was scarce what we should expect of miserable sinners, not only conscious of their sins, but humbly seeking that spiritual spring-clean—absolution. They were gay and light-hearted, reckless, and exceedingly improper, and rarely failed to deeply scandalise the innkeepers along the roads.

The “Tabard,” whence Chaucer’s pilgrims set out on that April morning in 1383, has long been a thing of the past. It was in 1307, one hundred and thirty-seven years after Becket’s martyrdom, that the Abbot of Hyde, at Winchester, built the first house, which seems to have been in two portions: one a guest-house for the brethren of Hyde and other clergy coming to London to wait upon that mighty political and religious personage, my Lord Bishop of Winchester, whose London palace stood close by, on Bankside; the other a more or less commercially conducted inn. When Chaucer conferred immortality upon the “Tabard,” in 1383, the lessee of that hostelry was the “Harry Bailly” of The Canterbury Tales, a real person, and probably an intimate friend whom Chaucer thus delighted to honour.

This was no mere red-nosed and fat-paunched purveyor of sack and other quaint liquors of that time, but one who had been Member of Parliament for Southwark in 1376 and again in 1379,[12] and was a person not only of considerable property, but a dignified and well-mannered man—better-mannered and of cleaner speech, we may suspect, than Chaucer’s pilgrims themselves:

Such a host, and no less a person, could have sat at supper with his guests, even with such gentles as the Knight and his son, the Squire, and the Lady Abbess; and thus only is he able to take charge of, and to assume leadership over, the party of twenty-nine on the long four days’ pilgrimage to Canterbury, and to reprove or praise each and all, according to his mind.

The “Tabard” derived its name from the sleeveless ceremonial heraldic coat, tricked out with gold and colours, worn by heralds. At a comparatively early date, however, the “science of fools,” as heraldry has severely been called, grew neglected, and “tabards” became little understood by common people. The sign of the house was accordingly changed to the “Talbot” about 1599; but even that has grown mysterious, and only folk with very special knowledge now know what a “talbot” was. In those days the meaning was well understood, and especially at inns, for it was the name of a fierce breed of dog—the old English hound, something between a mastiff and a bull-dog—kept chiefly by packmen to mount guard over their pack-horses and goods.

Both “Tabard” and “Talbot” are now nothing more substantial than memories. Little could have been left of the historic house in 1676, when the great fire of Southwark swept away many of the old inns. A newer “Talbot” then arose on the site, and stood until 1870: itself of so venerable an appearance that it was not difficult to persuade people of its being the veritable house whence Chaucer’s pilgrims set forth those many centuries ago.

The pilgrims only made Dartford the first night, a fifteen-miles’ journey that would by no means satisfy those inclined nowadays to follow their trail. We are not, however, vouchsafed any definite information as to Dartford, and the oldest portions of the existing “Bull” inn there are not, by perhaps two hundred years, old enough to have housed that miscellaneous party. But there was an inn, frequented by pilgrims, at that time upon the same site, and the “Bull” claims to be one of the oldest licensed houses in Kent—as well it may, for it is known to date back to 1450. In Chaucer’s time the landlord was, we are told, one Urban Baldock, himself a friend of the poet, and the source whence a great deal of information respecting pilgrims and their ways was gathered by him for The Canterbury Tales.

The oldest part of the “Bull” is the courtyard, galleried after the ancient style, but in these practical and in many ways unsentimental times roofed in with glass and used as a corn-market. Behind the carved wooden balusters of the gallery are the bedrooms, until late years largely given up to dust and cobwebs, but now rebuilt and again in use. Those who care for things that have had their day will think it fortunate that merely alteration, and not destruction, has been suffered here.

For the rest, the “Bull” at Dartford is Georgian, and its long brick front, with nine windows in a row, bears a strong family likeness to that of its namesake at Rochester. The bull himself, in great black effigy, occupies a monumental position among the chimney-pots, whence he looks down, like Nelson in Trafalgar Square, upon busy streets.

There have been happenings at the “Bull” in times much later than those of pilgrimage. On August 17th, 1775, a room off the gallery was the scene of an affray that led to Joseph Stacpoole, William Gapper, and James Lagier being indicted for shooting “John Parker, Esq.,” described as an Irish gentleman of fortune.

It seems that Joseph Stacpoole had lent John Parker and his brother Francis various sums of money, amounting in all to £3,000, and had very seriously embarrassed himself in doing so. He could not succeed in getting payment, and as he had good reason to suspect that the Parkers intended to abscond over sea, he followed them to Dartford, with his attorney and a bailiff. Hearing that they were staying with some friends at the “Bull,” Stacpoole sent Lagier, the bailiff, with a writ into the room they occupied, himself and Gapper following.

No sooner did the hot-headed Parker see the bailiff than he cried out, “Zounds! where are my pistols?” and one of his friends dashed out a candle with his hand and upset the only other. In this dim and dangerous situation the bailiff, mortally afraid for himself, cried out for help, and Stacpoole and Gapper came rushing in. Parker’s friends then seized Stacpoole by the collar, and seem to have shaken him so violently that they shook off the contents of a carbine he was carrying, with the result that Parker himself was shot through the body with three bullets. When that happened Parker’s brother fled to London, a Mr. Masterson ran downstairs, and a Mr. Bull, who had taken a prominent part in the collaring, was in so great a hurry that he jumped over the gallery into the yard.

The trial of Stacpoole and his two co-defendants did not take place until March 20th, 1777, when all were acquitted.

The last picturesque incident in the history of the “Bull” took place in 1822, when George the Fourth came posting along the road and the post-boy stopped here to change horses. He had just asked Essenhigh, the landlord, who that “damned pretty woman” was whom he saw at one of the windows, and mine host had only just replied that it was his wife, when a hostile crowd, in sympathy with “the persecuted” Queen Caroline, who had died the year before, began to “boo” and howl at the King. “When gentlemen meet, compliments pass,” says the adage, and one Callaghan, a journeyman currier, thrust forward and roared out, in the face of the “First Gentleman in Europe,” “You are a murderer!” a remark which possesses the recommendation neither of truth nor politeness, and resulted, in this instance, in the outrageous Callaghan being punched on the head and felled to the ground by one of the King’s faction. The King himself drove off in such a hurry that the postboy fell off his horse on leaving the town.

The pilgrims’ hostels that once existed at Rochester are things of the past, but it seems not unlikely that the “George,” in the High Street, almost opposite the Pickwickian “Bull,” was once something in this nature, for although the modern frontage is absolutely uninteresting, not to say distressingly ugly, and although it is now nothing more than a public-house, the very large and very fine Early English crypt, now used as a beer-cellar, shows that a building of semi-ecclesiastical nature once stood on the site. The “George” is an old sign, the present house being built on the ruins of one destroyed by fire a hundred and twenty years ago.

The crypt, built of chalk, with ribs and bosses of Caen stone, is roofed with four-part vaulting, and is in four bays, the whole 54 ft. in length, by nearly 17 ft. wide, and 11 ft. high.

CRYPT AT THE “GEORGE,” ROCHESTER.

Beside the Dover Road, which is of course the pilgrims’ road from London to Canterbury, one mile short of Faversham town, stands the village of Ospringe, identified by some antiquaries as the site of the Roman station of Durolevum. Time was when those who made pilgrimage to Canterbury came to Ospringe through a water-splash, a little stream that flowed across the highway and no one thought worth while bridging. And so it remained, through the coaching age, until modern times. Now it is covered over, and Ospringe is at this day a quite remarkably dusty place.

There remain, built into the “Red Lion” inn beside the way, fragments of a “maison Dieu,” or God’s House, that stood here so early as the time of Henry the Second: a hostel established for the reception of travellers, and maintained for many years by the Knights Templars and Brethren of the Holy Ghost. Here travellers of all classes found a lavish hospitality awaiting them, and, so sparsely settled was the country in those centuries, that even kings were glad of this rest-house—and of others like it elsewhere. King John, who was for ever spoiling the Church, and bringing upon himself, and the country with him, Papal excommunications major and minor, and yet was always sponging upon abbots and their kind for board and lodging, had what is described as a camera regis here, which seems to modern ears to indicate that he practised photography, centuries before the invention of it. The camera in this case is, however, only the mediæval chronicler’s Latin way of saying that a room was kept for the King’s use.

A landed gentleman of the neighbouring Preston-by-Faversham, one Macknade by name, who died in 1407, left, among many other bequests, £1 to the “Domus Dei” of Ospringe, together with £10 for the repair of the highway between that point and Boughton-under-Blean. In this manner he hoped to be remembered in the prayers of travellers; and to the same end of bidding for Aves and paternosters for the repose of his soul, he bequeathed 20 pence to all prisoners in Kentish gaols, 12 pence to all debtors similarly situated, £23 to the minor religious houses of the county, and a larger sum to the principal abbeys. In addition to these items we find one of 10 cows, left to Preston church, for the purpose of maintaining a lighted taper at the Easter Sepulchre there. Let us hope his solicitude for his soul has not been without its due results.

The “maison Dieu” of Ospringe was disestablished long before the general ruin of such institutions was ordained, in the time of Henry the Eighth. In 1479 we find the place inhabited by two brethren, survivors of the eight who once welcomed and made good cheer for pilgrims; but they forsook it the next year, and in 1480-81 it was, as a derelict religious house, escheated to the Crown.

Canterbury itself was, of course, once full of such travellers’ rests. Chief among these was the inn called “The Chequers of the Hope,” at the corner of Mercery Lane, leading to the Cathedral; but, although the lower part of the walls and the mediæval crypt remain, the present aspect of the building is modern and commonplace. It is, in point of fact, a “Ladies’ Outfitting” shop.

Travellers in those centuries seem to have been in many ways well cared for. The hospitality of the “houses of God” and pilgrims’ halts, however, does but show the bright side of the medal, and implies a very dark reverse.

Good, charitable folks, as we have seen, were rightly sorry for wayfarers, and gave or bequeathed money for lightening the trials and tribulations of their lot. The Church itself regarded the succouring of all such as one of its first duties, and so granted all manner of ghostly privileges to such persons as would build causeways, improve roads, or establish hostels. The bargain seemed in those times a fair one, and induced many to give who would not otherwise have given. To buy absolution for gold, or a few days less purgatory by charitable bequest was good business; but we may wonder if those who thus purchased remission of sins or an “early door” into Paradise sometimes spared a pitying thought for those poor devils who had not the needful for such indulgences.

WESTGATE, CANTERBURY, AND THE “FALSTAFF” INN.

Day after day travellers—whose very name comes from “travail” = toil or trouble—journeyed amid dangers, and, when by mischance they were benighted, suffered agonies of apprehension. They intended only to “journey”—to travel by day, as the original sense of that word indicated—and were afflicted with the liveliest apprehensions when night came and found them still on the road. Toiling in the hollow roads, deep in ruts and mud, with terror they saw the sun go down while yet the friendly town was far away, and came at last, in fear and darkness, to the walled city, only to find its gates closed for the night. Every fortified town closed its gates at sunset; else, in those dangerous times, what use your gates and walls? As reasonably might the modern citizen leave his street door wide open all night, as the mediæval town not close its gates when the hours of darkness were come; and so those travellers and pilgrims who, from much story-telling, praying, or feasting along the road, arrived late at Canterbury, found the portals of Westgate sternly closed against them. Originally they were obliged to lie outside, under the walls or in the fields, instead of being made welcome at the comfortable hostels within, where a man might find jolly company in the rush-strewn hall, and for food and drink be free of the best; but, for the accommodation of such laggards, the suburb of St. Dunstan, without the walls of Canterbury, sprang up at a very early date, and to the custom they thus brought we owe the existence of the “Falstaff” inn, itself containing some fine “linen-pattern” panelling of the time of Henry the Seventh; but not, of course, the original house that, under some other name than the “Falstaff,” was early established for the entertainment of late-comers.

The “Falstaff” is a prominent feature of the entrance to Canterbury, and forms, with the stern drum towers of Westgate, built about 1380, as fine an entrance to a city as anything to be found in England. The present sign of the house derives from the instant and extraordinary popularity that Shakespeare’s Fat Knight obtained, from his first appearance upon the Elizabethan stage. The present “Falstaff” is a very spirited rendering, showing the Fat Knight with sword and buckler and an air of determination, apparently “just about to begin” on those numerous “men in buckram” conjured up by his ready imagination on Gad’s Hill. There is an air about this representation of him irresistibly reminiscent of that song which gave British patriots in 1878 the name of “Jingoes.” There are no patriots now: only partisans and placemen—but that is another tale. This Falstaff evidently “don’t want to fight; but by Jingo”—well, you know the rest of it.

SIGN OF THE “FALSTAFF,” CANTERBURY.

Not only pilgrims and travellers from London to Canterbury were thus looked after, but those also coming the other way, and thus we find a Maison Dieu established at Dover in the reign of King John by that great man, Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciary of England. A master and a staff of brethren and sisters were placed there to attend upon the poor priests and the pilgrims and strangers of both sexes, who applied for food and lodging. Kings cannot be classed in any of these categories; but they also are found not infrequently making use of the institution, on their way to or from France—and departing without a “thank ye.” The only one who seems to have benefited the Maison Dieu very much was Henry the Third, who endowed it with the tithe of the passage fare and £10 a year from the port dues.

It is scarce necessary to say who it was that disestablished the Maison Dieu. The heavy hand of Henry the Eighth squelched it, in common with hundreds of other religious and semi-religious institutions. At the time of its suppression the annual income was £231 16s. 7d., representing some £2,500 in our day. The master, John Thompson, who had only been appointed the year before, was an exceptionally fortunate man, being granted a pension of £53 6s. 8d. a year. The buildings were then converted into a victualling office for the Navy.

At last, in 1831, the Corporation of Dover purchased them, and the ancient refectory then became the Town Hall and the sacristy the Sessions House, and so remained until 1883, when a new Town Hall was built.

Similar institutions existed at others of the chief ports. At Portsmouth was the Hospital of St. Nicholas, or “God’s House,” founded in the reign of Henry the Third by Peter de Rupibus, Bishop of Winchester. It is now the Garrison Church. At Southampton the “Domus Dei” was dedicated to St. Julian, patron of travellers, and now, as St. Julian’s Hospital and Church, is in part an almshouse, sheltering eight poor persons, and partly a French Huguenot place of worship.

The Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury from Southampton and Winchester was never a road for wheeled traffic, and remained in all those centuries when pilgrimage was popular, as a track for pedestrians, along the hillsides. It avoided all towns, and thus precisely what those pilgrims who wearifully hoofed it all the way did for shelter remains a little obscure: although it seems probable that wayside shelters, with or without oratories attached to them, were established at intervals. Such, traditionally, was the origin of the picturesque timbered house at Compton, now locally known as “Noah’s Ark.”

Colchester was a place of import to pilgrims in old wayfaring times, for it lay along the line of the pilgrims’ trail to Walsingham. Among the inns of this town, and older than any of its fellows, but coyly hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries from sight, behind modern alterations, is the “Angel” in West Stockwell Street, whose origin as a pilgrims’ inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants, on the way to, or returning from, the road of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the road through and past Norwich, housed here, and misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It would, as already hinted, be the gravest mistake to assume pilgrims to have been, quâ pilgrims, necessarily decorous; and, indeed, modern Bank Holiday folks, compared with them, would shine as true examples of monkish austerity.

HOUSE FORMERLY A PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, COMPTON.

The shrine at Walsingham, very highly esteemed in East Anglia, drew crowds from every class, from king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of St. John of Colchester sheltered some of the greatest of them, while others inned at such hostelries as the “Angel,” and the vulgar, or the merely impecunious, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods.

Pilgrims would boggle at nothing, as was well known at the time. That they could not be trusted is evident enough in the custom of horse-masters, who let out horses on hire to such travellers, at the rate of twelvepence from Southwark to Rochester, and a further twelvepence from Rochester to Canterbury. They knew, those early keepers of livery-stables, that little chance existed of ever seeing their horses again unless they took sufficient precautions. They therefore branded their animals in a prominent and unmistakeable way, so that all should know such, found in strange parts of the country, to be stolen.

Ill fared the unsuspecting burgess who met any of these sinners on the way to plenary indulgence, for they would, not unlikely, murder him for the sake of anything valuable he carried; or, out of high spirits and the sheer fun of the thing, cudgel him into a jelly; arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how soiled was the old one. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity, and licence of the grossest kind were, in fact, the inevitable accompaniments of pilgrimage.

THE “STAR,” ALFRISTON.

Although East Anglia was in the old days more plentifully supplied with great monastic houses than any other district in England, the destruction wrought in later centuries has left all that part singularly poor in the architectural remains of them: and even the once-necessary guest-houses and hostels have shared the common fate. That charming miniature little house, the “Green Dragon” at Wymondham, in Norfolk, may, however, as tradition asserts, have once been a pilgrims’ inn dependent upon the great Benedictine Abbey, whose gaunt towers, now a portion of the parish church, rise behind its peaked roofs.

CARVING AT THE “STAR,” ALFRISTON.

The beautiful little Sussex village of Alfriston—whose name, by the way, in the local shibboleth, is “Arlston”—a rustic gem not so well known as it deserves, possesses a very fine pilgrims’ inn, the “Star,” a relic of old days when the bones of St. Richard of Chichester led many a foot-sore penitent across the downs to Chichester, in quest of a clean spiritual bill of health. Finely carved woodwork is a distinguishing feature of this inn, whose roof, too, has character of its own, in the heavy slabs of stone that do duty for slates, and bear witness to the exceptional strength of the roof-tree that has sustained them all these centuries. The demoniac-looking figure seen on the left-hand of the illustration is not, as might perhaps at first sight be supposed, a mediæval effigy of Old Nick, or an imported South Sea Islander’s god, but the figure-head of some forgotten ship of the seventeenth century, wrecked on the neighbouring coast, off Cuckmere Haven. Ancient carvings still ornament the wood-work of the three upper projecting windows, the one particularly noticeable specimen being a variant of the George and Dragon legend, where the saint, with a mouth like a potato, no nose to speak of, and a chignon, is seen unexpectedly on foot, thrusting his lance into the mouth of the dragon, who appears to be receiving it with every mark of enjoyment, which the additional face he is furnished with, in his tail, does not seem to share. The left foot of the saint has been chipped off. All the exterior woodwork has been very highly varnished and painted in glaring colours, from the groups under the windows to the green monkey and green bear contending on the angle-post for the possession of a green trident.

THE “GREEN DRAGON,” WYMONDHAM.

THE PILGRIMS’ HOSTEL, BATTLE.

The old pilgrims’ hospice of Battle Abbey still remains outside the great gateway, and now offers refreshments to those modern pilgrims who flock in thousands, by chars-à-banc, on cycles, or afoot, to Battle in search of the picturesque; or merely, in many cases, to complete the conventional round of sight-seeing prescribed for visitors to Hastings. It is a typically Sussexian building of domestic appearance, framed in stout oak timbering, and filled with plaster and rubble, and was probably built early in the fifteenth century.

The so-called “New” Inn, at Gloucester, when actually new, the matter of four hundred and fifty years ago, was erected especially for the accommodation of pilgrims flocking to the tomb of the murdered King Edward the Second, who, by no means a saintly character in life, was in death raised by popular sentiment to the status of something very like a holy martyr. He had been weak and vicious, but those who on September 21st, 1327, put him to a dreadful death in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle acted on behalf of others worse than he, and the horror and the injustice of it had the not unnatural effect of almost canonising the slain monarch.

The Abbot of St. Peter’s at Gloucester, John Thokey, when all others, fearing the vengeance of the murderers, dared not give the King’s body burial, begged it and buried it, with much reverence, within the Abbey walls. His Abbey, now the Cathedral of Gloucester, reaped unexpected benefits from the humane instincts of that good and pitiful man, for “miracles” were wrought at the “martyr’s” tomb, and abundant thank-offerings continued to flow in, and at last enabled the great Abbey to be rebuilt.

THE “NEW INN,” GLOUCESTER.

It became eventually a pressing need to provide housing outside the Abbot’s lodgings for the stream of pilgrims, and accordingly the New Inn was built in the middle of the fifteenth century (1450-1457) by John Twynning, a monk of that establishment, of whom we know little or nothing else than that he was, according to the records of his time, a “laudable man.” It remained until quite recent years the property of the Dean and Chapter of Gloucester.

The inn is reached through an archway in Northgate Street, and is arranged, as usual in mediæval inns, around a courtyard. Still the old gables look down upon the yard and, as of yore, the ancient galleries, rescued from the decay and neglect of some seventy years ago, run partly around first and second floors. Existing side by side with those antique features, the quaint windowed bar of the coaching era is now itself a curiosity. In short, mediæval picturesqueness, Jacobean carved oak, commercial and coffee-rooms of the coaching age, and modern comforts conjoin at the New Inn, so that neither a wayworn pilgrim, were such an one likely to appear, nor a seventeenth century horseman, nor even a Georgian coachman, redolent of the rum-punch that was the favourite drink in coaching days, would seem out of place.

Summer and autumn transfigure the courtyard into the likeness of a rustic bower, for it is plentifully hung with virginia-creepers, from amidst whose leaves the plaster lion who mounts guard on the roof of the bar looks as though he were gazing forth from his native jungle.

I do not know in what way John Twynning—or Twining, as we should no doubt in modern times call him—was to be reckoned laudable, but if he were thought praiseworthy for anything outside his religious duties it was probably by reason of the skill with which he built this pilgrims’ hostel. You perceive little of his work from the street, for at that extraordinary period when stucco was fashionable and plaster all the rage, the timbered front of the building was covered up in that manner, and so remains. But the great building is still constructionally the house that fifteenth-century monk left, and how well and truly he built it, let its sound and stable condition, after four centuries and a half of constant use, tell.

Such modern touches as there are about this quaintly named “New” inn are the merest light clothing upon its ancient body, and the sitting-rooms and forty or so bedrooms, cosy and comfortable to us moderns, are but modern in their carpets and fittings, and in the paper that decorates their walls, in between the stout dark timber framing.

The house is built chiefly of chestnut, traditionally obtained from Highnam, some three miles from the city; and everywhere the enormous beams, in some places polished, in others rough, are to be seen. In their roughest, most timeworn condition, they overhang the narrow passage now called New Inn (formerly Pilgrims’) Lane, where, at the angle, a most ornately carved corner-post, very much injured, exhibits a mutilated angel holding a scroll, in the midst of fifteenth-century tabernacle-work.

COURTYARD, “NEW INN,” GLOUCESTER.

As usual in these ancient inns with courtyards and galleries, plays and interludes were formerly acted here, and it is said that the accession of Queen Elizabeth was proclaimed on these flagstones.

That galleries open to the air, with the bedrooms and others giving upon them, were not so inconvenient as generally nowadays supposed is evident enough here, where they are still in use, as they were centuries ago. The only difference is that they are carpeted nowadays, instead of being bare floors.

A staircase from the courtyard leads up to the first-floor gallery, still screened off by the old open-lattice gates reaching from floor to ceiling, originally intended to prevent stray dogs entering.

Portions of the “New Inn” let off in the days of its declining prosperity have in modern times been taken back again: among them the large dining-hall overlooking the lane, for many years used as a Sunday school for the children of St. Nicholas parish, and other rooms looking upon Northgate Street.

In short, the old “New” inn impresses the beholder with a very insistent sense of being a live institution, a “going concern.” Most ancient inns of this character are merely poor survivals; archæologically interesting, but wan veterans tottering to decay and long deserted by custom. Here, however, there is heavy traffic down in the yard: the ostler is busy in his “Ostry” (the name is painted over the door), bells are ringing, people and luggage coming and going; the big railway parcel-office is as full of parcels as it could have been when it was a coach-office; appetising scents come from glowing kitchens, and to and from private rooms are carried trays of as good things as ever pilgrims feasted upon, at the end of their pilgrimage.