CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
INDEX
THE OLD INNS OF OLD ENGLAND
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.
The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.
The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.
The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.
The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.
The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.
The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.
The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.
The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.
The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”
Cycle Rides Round London.
A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.
Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols. The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”
The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.
The Dorset Coast.
The South Devon Coast. [In the Press.
THE ROADSIDE INN.
THE OLD INNS
OF OLD ENGLAND
A PICTURESQUE ACCOUNT OF THE
ANCIENT AND STORIED HOSTELRIES
OF OUR OWN COUNTRY
VOL. I
By CHARLES G. HARPER
Illustrated chiefly by the Author, and from Prints
and Photographs
London:
CHAPMAN & HALL, Limited
1906
All rights reserved
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
PREFACE
It is somewhat singular that no book has hitherto been published dealing either largely or exclusively with Old Inns and their story. I suppose that is because there are so many difficulties in the way of one who would write an account of them. The chief of these is that of arrangement and classification; the next is that of selection; the last that of coming to a conclusion. I would ask those who read these pages, and have perhaps some favourite inn they do not find mentioned or illustrated here, to remember that the merely picturesque inns that have no story, or anything beyond their own picturesqueness to render them remarkable, are—let us be thankful for it!—still with us in great numbers, and that to have illustrated or mentioned even a tithe of them would have been impossible. I can think of no literary and artistic work more delightful than the quest of queer old rustic inns, but two stout volumes will probably be found to contain as much on the subject as most people wish to know—and it is always open to anyone who does not find his own especial favourite here to condemn the author for his ignorance, or, worse, for his perverted taste.
As for methods, those are of the simplest. You start by knowing, ten years beforehand, what you intend to produce; and incidentally, in the course of a busy literary life, collect, note, sketch, and make extracts from Heaven only knows how many musty literary dustbins and sloughs of despond. Then, having reached the psychological moment when you must come to grips with the work, you sort that accumulation, and, mapping out England into tours, with inns strung like beads upon your itinerary, bring the book, after some five thousand miles of travel, at last into being.
It should be added that very many inns are incidentally illustrated or referred to in the series of books on great roads by the present writer; but as those works dealing with Roads, another treating of the History of Coaching, and the present volumes are all part of one comprehensive plan dealing with the History of Travel in general, the allusions to inns in the various road-books have but rarely been repeated; while it will be found that if, in order to secure a representative number of inns, it has been, in some cases, found unavoidable to retrace old footsteps, new illustrations and new matter have, as a rule, been brought to bear.
The Old Inns of London have not been touched upon very largely, for most of them are, unhappily, gone. Only the few existing ones have been treated, and then merely in association with others in the country. To write an account of the Old Inns of London would now be to discourse, in the manner of an antiquary, on things that have ceased to be.
CHARLES G. HARPER.
Petersham,
Surrey.
September, 1906.
