THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND

CONTENTS

THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND

CHAPTER I

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—