The Old Inns of Old England. Charles G. Harper

      THE LAST OF THE OLD GALLERIED INNS OF LONDON: THE “GEORGE,” SOUTHWARK.

       Photo by T. W. Tyrrell.

      The manners common to all classes in old times would scarce commend themselves to modern folk. We get a curious glimpse of them in one of a number of Manuals of Foreign Conversation for the use of travellers, published towards the close of the sixteenth century in Flanders, then a country of great trading importance, sending forth commercial travellers and others to many foreign lands. One of these handy books, styled, rather formidably, Colloquia et dictionariolum septem linguarum, including, as its title indicates, conversation in seven languages, was so highly successful that seven editions of it, dating from 1589, are known. The traveller in England, coming to his inn, is found talking on the subject of trade and civil wars, and at length desires to retire to rest. The conversation itself is sufficiently strange, and is made additionally startling by the capital W’s that appear in unconventional places. “Sir,” says the traveller, “by your leave, I am sum What euell at ease.” To which the innkeeper replies: “Sir, if you be ill at ease, go and take your rest, your chambre is readie. Jone, make a good fier in his chambre, and let him lacke nothing.”

      Then we have a dialogue with “Jone,” the chambermaid, in this wise:

      Traveller: My shee frinde, is my bed made? is it good?

      “Yea, Sir, it is a good feder bed, the scheetes be very cleane.”

      Traveller: I shake as a leafe upon the tree. Warme my kerchif and bynde my head well. Soft, you binde it to harde, bryng my pilloW and cover mee Well: pull off my hosen and Warme my bed: draWe the curtines and pinthen With a pin.

      Where is the camber pot?

      Where is the priuie?

      Chambermaid: FolloW mee, and I Will sheW you the Way: go up streight, you shall finde them at the right hand. If you see them not you shall smell them Well enough. Sir, doth it please you to haue no other thing? are you Wel?

      Traveller: Yea, my shee frinde, put out the candell, and come nearer to mee.

      Chambermaid: I Wil put it out When I am out of the chamber. What is your pleasure, are you not Well enough yet?

      Traveller: My head lyeth to loWe, lift up a little the bolster, I can not lie so loWe.—My shee friende, kisse me once, and I shall sleape the better.

      Chambermaid: Sleape, sleape, you are not sicke, seeing that you speake of kissyng. I had rather die then to kisse a man in his bed, or in any other place. Take your rest in God’s name, God geeue you good night and goode rest.

      Traveller: I thank you, fayre mayden.

      In the morning we have “Communication at the oprysing,” the traveller calling to the boy to “Drie my shirt, that I may rise.” Then, “Where is the horse-keeper? go tell him that hee my horse leade to the river.”

      Departing, our traveller does not forget the chambermaid, and asks, “Where is ye maiden? hold my shee freend, ther is for your paines. Knave, bring hither my horse, have you dressed him Well?” “Yea, sir,” says the knave, “he did Wante nothing.”

      Anciently people of note and position, with large acquaintance among their own class, expected, when they travelled, to be received at the country houses along their route, if they should so desire, and still, at the close of the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth, the custom was not unknown. Even should the master be away from home, the hospitality of his house was not usually withheld. From these old and discontinued customs we may, perhaps, derive that one by no means obsolete, but rather still on the increase, of guests “tipping” the servants of country houses.

      This possibility of a traveller making use of another man’s house as his inn was fast dying out in England in the time of Charles the Second. Probably it had never been so abused in this country as in Scotland, where innkeepers petitioned Parliament, complaining, in the extraordinary language at that time obtaining in Scotland, “that the liegis travelland in the realme quhen they cum to burrowis and throuchfairís, herbreis thame not in hostillaries, but with their acquaintance and friendis.”

      An enactment was accordingly passed in 1425, forbidding, under a penalty of forty shillings, all travellers resorting to burgh towns to lodge with friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the “hostillaries,” unless, indeed, they were persons of consequence, with a great retinue, in which case they personally might accept the hospitality of friends, provided that their “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.

      When the custom of seeking the shelter, as a matter of course, of the country mansion fell into disuse, so, conversely, did that of naming inns after the local Lord of the Manor come into fashion. Then, in a manner emblematic of the traveller’s change from the hospitality of the mansion to that of the inn, mine host adopted the heraldic coat from the great man’s portal, and called his house the “—— Arms.” It has been left to modern times, times in which heraldry has long ceased to be an exact science, to perpetrate such absurdities as the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” the “Drovers’ Arms,” and the like, appropriated to a class of person unknown officially to the College of Heralds.

      According to Fynes Morison, who wrote in 1617, we held then, in this country, a pre-eminence in the trade and art of innkeeping: “The world,” he said, “affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a passenger comes the servants run to him: one takes his horse, and walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat, but let the master look to this point. Another gives the traveller his private chamber and kindles his fire, the third pulls off his boots and makes them clean; then the host or hostess visits him—if he will eat with the host—or at a common table it will be 4d. and 6d. If a gentleman has his own chamber, his ways are consulted, and he has music, too, if he likes.”

      In short, Morison wrote of English inns just anterior to the time of Samuel Pepys, who travelled much in his day, and tells us freely, in his appreciative way, of the excellent appointments, the music, the good fare and the comfortable beds he, in general, found.

      But this era in which Morison wrote was a trying time for all innkeepers and taverners. The story of it is so remarkable that it repays a lengthy treatment.

      In our own age it is customary to many otherwise just and fair-minded people to look upon the innkeeper as a son of a Belial, a sinner who should be kept in outer darkness and made to sit in sackcloth and ashes, in penance for other people’s excesses. On the one side he has the cormorants of the Inland Revenue plucking out his vitals, and generally, if it be a “tied” house, on the other a Brewery Company, selling him the worst liquors at the best prices, and threatening to turn him out if he does not maintain a trade of so many barrels a month. Always, from the earliest times, he has been the mark for satire and invective, has been licensed, sweated, regulated, and generally put on the chain; but he probably had never so bad a time as that he experienced in the last years of James the First. Already innkeepers were licensed at Quarter Sessions, but in 1616 it occurred to one Giles Mompesson, the time-serving Member of Parliament for the rotten borough of Great Bedwin, in Wiltshire, that much plunder could be extracted from them and used to replenish the Royal Exchequer, then at a low ebb, if he could obtain the grant of a monopoly of licensing inns, over-riding the old-established functions in that direction of the magistrates.

      Giles Mompesson was no altruist, or at the best a perverted one, who put his own interpretation upon that good old maxim, “Who works for others works for himself.” He foresaw that while such a State monopoly, under his own control, might bring a bountiful return to the State, it must