WAYSIDE INNS AND ALEHOUSES

We have shown in previous chapters how the old English inn grew up almost always under some local authority—either the lord of the manor, the monastery, or the parish—and its conduct was regulated by legal enactments from the reign of Henry II onwards. The alehouse, on the contrary, might conduct its business as its owner pleased, subject only to the natural laws of supply and demand. Every householder was free to brew either for his own consumption or for sale, the one condition being that his liquor was wholesome and good. Among the crimes that incurred the punishment of the ducking-stool in the city of Chester during Saxon times was that of brewing bad beer.

In every manor there was held annually the assize of bread and ale, the two staple articles of diet which it was essential should be pure and of good quality. “Bread, the staff of life, and beer life itself,” not unknown as a motto on the signboards, is a saying that has come down to us from a prehistoric period. And modern science, as it seems, is inclined to endorse the maxim. Good old-fashioned wheaten and rye bread, made from the whole flour from which only the coarser brans had been sifted, built up the stamina of our forefathers. Their chief drink was ale brewed from barley or oaten malt. The small proportion of alcohol served as a vehicle for the organic phosphates necessary for the sustenance of strong nerves, while the ferment of the malt helped to digest the starch granules in the bread. Bread and ale are still the main diet of our labouring classes—but alas! stale, finely-sifted flour contains a very poor allowance of gluten, and chemically produced saccharine is destitute of phosphates. O, that our modern legislators would revive the assize of bread and ale!

In Arnold’s Chronicle, published by Pynson about 1521, the following receipt for making beer is given: “Ten quarters of malt, two quarters of wheat, two quarters of oats and eleven poundes of hoppys, to make eleven barrels of single beer.” Hops only came into use about the reign of Henry VII; previously ivy berries, heath or spice had been used as a flavouring for ale. Leonard Maskall, of Plumpton, a writer on gardening in the reign of Henry VIII, has the credit of acclimatising the hop-plant. He is also said to have first introduced carp in the moat at Plumpton Place. Hence the rhyme of which many versions are given:

However, hops are mentioned as an adulterant in ale in a statute of Henry VI; and about the same time mention of beer occurs in the accounts of Syon Nunnery, which were kept in English.

Every inn, large or small, once possessed its own brewhouse, and although wholesale breweries were established about the time of the Flemish immigration, at the end of the fourteenth century, home-brewed ale was commonly on draught fifty or sixty years ago. The White Horse at Pleshy, that village that boasts of knowing neither a teetotaller nor a drunkard, relied entirely on its home-brewed liquors up to within the last ten years, and the apparatus wherein they were prepared remains for the student of old methods to examine.

Home-brewed ale is still more commonly to be met with in some districts than many suppose. Even in the neighbourhood of the greatest brewery town in the world, Burton-on-Trent, there are small inns which rely upon their own brewing for the best of their ale. There is a very old brewhouse at Derby, at the Nottingham Castle Inn, into which any passer-by may step from the street and see, twice a week, a huge cauldron containing about a hundred and twenty gallons, bubbling and foaming in the corner. This brewhouse dates from the sixteenth century, and is one of the oldest buildings in the town; the Dolphin, whose licence dates from 1530, being another and perhaps older inn in the same neighbourhood.

White Horse, Pleshy

A legion of brewers are named in Domesday Book, mostly women, and manorial assizes show a preponderance of the fairer sex. The price of bread and ale was fixed by statute in Henry III’s reign, and it was the business of the Ale-tester to see that the measures were of standard capacity and stamped with some recognized official mark. Alehouses abounded everywhere, known by a long pole surmounted by a tuft of foliage. An Act of 1375 regulates the length of the ale-stake at not more than seven feet over the public way. The poles had a tendency to become over long to the deterioration of the timber structures from which they depended, as well as danger to travellers passing on horseback. At Guildford, and some other cloth centres, the alehouses were required to exhibit a woolpack for a sign.

These alehouses were of all sorts and sizes. There was the humble hedgeside cottage, looking like a mere sentry-box, illustrated in the fourteenth century MS.[9], where a hermit is being entertained by an alewife with a very large beer jug; or the little alehouse on the Watling Street, somewhere near Rainham, where Chaucer’s Pardoner dismounted to

before commencing his tale; or the establishment by Leatherhead Bridge, where Elinour Rummyng drove such a thriving trade, immortalised by the poet Skelton. Some of these larger alehouses were a cause of anxiety to well-disposed people, and no doubt the Church Houses were partly instituted with the idea of inducing the faithful to spend their time in a less disreputable manner. All kinds of bad characters resorted to the alehouse. Piers Plowman gives us a lurid picture of what went on there. How the glutton going to be shriven met the alewife and was induced to spend the afternoon and evening with

They drink deeply, joke coarsely and quarrels ensue.Finally the glutton is hopelessly intoxicated.

His wife and maid carry him home between them and he lies helpless through Saturday and Sunday, waking in bitter repentance at having missed his duties.[10]

From Skelton we learn how women came to pledge their wedding rings and husbands’ clothes

Hence the necessity for an Act in Henry VII’s reign which empowered justices to close alehouses notorious for bad conduct, and later, the first Licensing Act of 1552, requiring every alehouse-keeper to obtain the licence of two justices, and regulating the manner in which the business is to be carried on. By an Act of 1627, a fine of twenty-one shillings, or in default a whipping, was inflicted on the keepers of unlicensed alehouses, and on a second conviction imprisonment for one month. But none of these measures were enforced throughout the country, and they were easily evaded. Anyone was still free to sell ale in booths at fair time, and many trades had by custom the privilege to sell ale as a part of their business: for example, barbers and blacksmiths, whose customers required entertainment while waiting their turn. Two centuries after the first Licensing Act, the nation was still unconvinced on the subject of free trade in liquor. In a report on an inquiry made by Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex in 1736, it was shown that within the limits of Westminster, Holborn, The Tower and Finsbury (exclusive of London and Southwark), there were no less than 2,105 unlicensed houses. Spirits were retailed by above eighty other trades, particularly chandlers, weavers, tobacconists, shoemakers, carpenters, barbers, tailors, dyers, etc.

Barbers’ shops were once resorted to by idlers, in order to pass away their time, and a system of forfeits prevailed, nominally to enforce order, but in practice to promote the sale of drink. They are referred to in “Measure for Measure.”

Dr. Kenrick professes to have copied the following list of forfeits in a shop near Northallerton:

The Chequers, Doddington

As the restrictions on travelling gradually disappeared many of the alehouses developed into inns. As early as 1349, a statute of Edward III, requiring those who entertained travellers to be content with moderate prices, recognizes the class of Herbergers[11] or keepers of unlicensed hostelries. And these inns as a class are deserving of close study from the difficult problem of determining their exact age. Some of them may have existed as alehouses during the Saxon period; some may even stand on the sites of Roman tabernae.

The oldest of all inn signs of this class is the Chequers, found throughout England, but especially in the neighbourhood of old Roman roads. This sign is found on many houses at Pompeii, and was throughout Europe the common indication of a money-changer’s office. Hence our Court of the Exchequer, which concerned itself with the national funds and their collection. The chess-board was the most primitive form of ready reckoner; and as the innkeeper was the person best qualified to act as money-changer he readily undertook the business. Small tradesmen still send their assistants to the public-house when they require to change a sovereign. Many heraldic shields are painted with checks, and Brand, in his “Popular Antiquities,” suggested that the Chequers represent the coat of arms of the Earls of Warrenne, on the supposition that a member of this family in the reign of Edward IV possessed the exclusive right of granting licences. It is absolutely certain that no such licence was ever authorised. Nothing of the kind was ever attempted before Sir Giles Mompesson in the reign of James I; but, of course, some “chequers” may possibly have a heraldic origin.

The Chequers, Redbourne

Chaucer’s pilgrims put up at the Chequers on the Hope (i.e., on the Hoop) at Canterbury, and part of this inn still remains near the Cathedral gate. There was also a Chequers Inn at St. Albans, but it has now ceased to exist. Either may have stood on the sites of Roman inns; but with these as with the thatched Chequers on the Watling Street, near Redbourne, or the Chequers at Loose or Doddington, speculation is vain. Like the needy knife-grinder, whose breeches were so woefully torn during his drinking bout at an inn bearing the same name: “Story? God bless you, I have none to tell, sir!” is the universal answer to all our inquiries for any historical particulars beyond a century or two back.

Wayside inns needed no licence and were usually carried on by a hosteller who combined the occupation with that of farmer or tradesman of some kind. Where any old leases exist they are described merely as tenements or farms. Thus the Dorset Arms at Withyham, a very picturesque old shingled and barge-boarded inn, appears as “Somers’ Farm.” Only by accident do we find the name of one of the tenants, William Pigott, on a list of Sussex tavern-keepers in the year 1636.

The Three Horseshoes near Papworth Everard

When the sign of the Three Horseshoes occurs at the end of a rough difficult stretch of road during which a horse would often lose a shoe, it is probable that the inn grew up side by side with a blacksmith’s business, even when the smithy no longer exists. In a very lonely and exposed situation on the Ermine Street, where the road to St. Ives crosses near Papworth Everard, there is a thatched inn bearing this sign and also known as Kisby’s Hut. At Lickfold, about six miles from Haslemere, almost under the shadow of Black Down, the highest hill in Sussex, there is a cosy half-timbered Three Horseshoes, which has come down to our time practically unaltered since the day of its erection in 1642, and it is well worth examination. The roads around it are liable to be flooded, and it is a likely place for waggoners to pull up for repairs. But when disentangling the riddles of local history, we must not be led astray with obvious explanations. Many old coats of arms contain the three horseshoes. Indeed there is one inn on a manor once belonging to the Shelleys, where possibly the forgotten shield of the older Kentish branch of the family—the three escallops—has been repainted as three horseshoes.

The Horseshoes, Lickfold

The Plough and Harrow are both primitive emblems, and agricultural signs such as these point to a very high antiquity. The Plough at Kingsbury is supposed to be more than eight hundred years old.

At the Upper Dicker in Sussex there is an inn called the Plough, which is worth visiting by motorists on their way to the Star at Alfriston, especially as it will enable them to get a glimpse of Michelham Priory on an island in the Cuckmere close by. The tap-room of this inn has a generously-planned fireplace with an ancient fireback and dogs. Up till quite recently it was the custom to keep a fire constantly burning, and in the hottest weather the warmth of this fire was far from unwelcome owing to the thickness of the outer walls. This tradition of the ever-burning fire is a curious one, found in remote districts, and pointing to a time when the public-house was necessarily resorted to for purposes of this kind. At the Chequers Inn, Slapestones, near Osmotherly, in Yorkshire, the hearth-fire has been burning uninterruptedly for at least a hundred and thirty years.

Some inns now known as the Ship were possibly at one time the “Sheep,” as will be readily understood by those acquainted with rustic dialect. Shepherd and Crook, Load of Hay, Woodman, are all to be found in rural districts throughout England. The Wheatsheaf, whether it surmounts a fine old coaching house in a market town, or a little wayside inn far from the madding crowd, reminds us that we once could boast of the finest wheat culture in the world; while the Harvest Home pleasantly recalls the merry-making which concluded the ingathering of the crops.

In some country villages there are a very large number of small inns close together, perhaps three in a row. At Steeple Ashton, in Oxfordshire, there are thirteen, and at East Ilsley, in Berkshire, nearly as many to a population of about five hundred. The street seems almost to consist of public-houses. But it would be quite wrong to suppose that the inhabitants of these districts are unduly given to convivial habits. The reports of the petty sessions show that drunkenness is exceedingly rare. In Steeple Ashton division no charge of drunkenness has been heard for the past six years. Such villages are decayed market towns, which become important at the time of their periodical sheep fairs, when an army of graziers and shepherds from the distant downs must find board and lodging. For a week these inns are crowded with dealers in velveteen jackets, and grizzled veterans clad in those blue smock coats and slouched hats, which were once the universal dress of village labourers, with a shaggy bob-tail dog under every chair. When fair-time is over they are quite deserted.