INNS OF OLD ROMANCE

Romance, as we have already seen, was enacted in many ways in the inns of long ago. Love and hatred, comedy and tragedy, and all the varied moods by which human beings are swayed, have had their part beneath the roofs of the older hostelries; as how could they fail to do in those times when the inn was so essential and intimate a part of the national life? The romantic incidents in which old inns have their part are in two great divisions: that of old folklore, and the other of real life. To the realm of folk-tales belongs the story told of an ancient hostelry that stood on the site of the “Ostrich,” Colnbrook.

The decayed coaching town of Colnbrook, in Middlesex, seventeen miles from Hyde Park Corner, on the great road to Bath, is little changed from the time when the coaches ceased running through it, seventy years ago. Still do the old red-brick houses on either side of the narrow, causeway-like street wear their seventeenth, their eighteenth, or their early nineteenth-century look unchanged, and the solid, stolid red-faced “George” inn yet seems to be awaiting the arrival of the mail, or of some smart post-chaise nearing London or setting out on the second stage of the 105¾ miles to Bath.

Colnbrook is perhaps the best illustration of a coaching town ruined by railways that it is possible to discover, and certainly the nearest to London. How great its fall since those prosperous days of 1549, when it was incorporated as a market-town! Its charter was renewed in 1632, and, judging from the many houses in its narrow street built about 1700-1750, the prosperity of the place survived unimpaired for certainly considerably over another century. It is now merely a village, but, as a result of its former highway importance, still a place of inns. There are at least ten even now surviving; and it is quite safe to assume that any important-looking old house, now in private occupation, facing the long thoroughfare, was once a hostelry.

The “George,” already mentioned, although re-fronted at some period of the eighteenth century, is older within, and an old gable overlooking the stable yard even has a sixteenth-century barge-board surviving. Of rather more human interest is the decorative and spiky iron-work fixed on the ground-floor window-sills of the frontage, which clearly shows that the architect of the building, when he drew out his design, had forgotten the loungers of Colnbrook, and, in placing his sills at the height above the ground of the average chair, had unwittingly provided the lazy with seats in the most advantageous position. Hence the afterthought of the decorative but penetrative ironwork.But the oldest and most interesting building in Colnbrook is the “Ostrich” inn, whose long, gabled timber-and-plaster front, now partly divided up into shops and tenements, is clearly of Elizabethan date. It is picturesque, rambling, shabby outside, and shabby and darkling within, and the most satisfactory part of it is without doubt the little courtyard through the archway, where, turning round on the cobble-stones, you get a picturesque and a sunny view of steep roofs, dormer windows, dove-cot, and white-washed walls covered with grape-vines.

The present “Ostrich” is the successor of a much more ancient inn. There have been, in fact, several inns on this site. The first appears to have been a guest-house, or hospice—“quoddam hospitium in vi LondoniÆ apud Colebroc”—founded by one Milo Crispin, and given, in 1106, in trust to the Abbey of Abingdon, for the good of travellers in this world and the salvation of his soul in the next.

It would seem to be from this circumstance that the inn obtained its name, for it was early known as the “Ospridge,” a kind of orthographic half-way house between the former “hospice” and the present “Ostrich.”

If we may believe the old chroniclers’ statements—and there is no reason why we should not—the house became in after years a place of resort for guests going to and from Windsor Castle; and here the ambassadors robed themselves before being conducted the last few miles, and so into the Royal presence. Froissart chronicles four ambassadors to Edward the Third dining with the King: “So they dyned in the Kynge’s chamber, and after they departed, lay the same night at Colbrook.”

THE “OSTRICH,” COLNBROOK.How it happened that the inn kept its customers after the dreadful murders traditionally said to have been committed here by wholesale in the reign of Henry the First, certainly not fifty years after the hospice was given to Abingdon Abbey, there is no explaining. The ancient pamphlets that narrate the Sweeny Todd-like particulars do not enlighten us on that head.

The undiluted horror of the whole thing is exceedingly revolting, and one would rather not give a further lease of life to it, but that in an account of Old Inns their unpleasing story must needs be set forth, in company with their lighter legends. Moreover, the late sixteenth-century romance of Thomas of Reading, in which the story occurs, is by way of being a classic. It was written, probably in 1598, by one Thomas Delaney, and is a lengthy narrative of a wealthy clothier of that name, otherwise Thomas Cole. Characterised variously as “a fabulous and childish history,” and as “a mixture of historical fact and fictitious narrative,” it was, at any rate, a highly successful publication, for by 1632 it had reached its sixth edition, and eventually was circulated, broadcast, as a penny chap-book.

According to this “pleasant and famous historie,” there was once upon a time, in the days of Henry the First, one Thomas Cole, a wealthy clothier of Reading, who was used frequently to travel on his business between that town and London. Commonly he journeyed in company with two intimate clothier friends, Gray of Gloucester and William of Worcester. He himself was a worshipful man, of honesty and great wealth, and was usually known as Thomas of Reading. The three would usually dine at the “Ostrich” on the way to London, and on the return sleep there. We are asked to believe that this business man, Thomas Cole, on such occasions gave the money he carried into the care of the landlady overnight, and that by this misplaced confidence he was marked down for destruction.

Jarman, the innkeeper, and his wife had long been engaged in what is rather delicately styled the “systematic removal” of wealthy guests, and had devised an ingenious murder-trap in the principal bedroom, by which the bed, firmly secured to a trap-door, was in the dead of night, when the house resounded to the intended victim’s snoring, plunged suddenly into a huge copper filled with boiling water, placed in the room below. He was then “polished off,” as Sweeny Todd himself would say, and should it happen that other guests of the night before asked after the missing one, they would be told that he had taken horse early and gone away.

The victim’s horse would be taken to a distance and disguised, his clothes destroyed, his body thrown into the Colne, or into the Thames at Wraysbury, and his money added to the fortune mine host and his wife were thus rapidly acquiring.

As Thomas Cole had business in London more frequently than his friends, it naturally followed that he sometimes went alone. On the first such occasion he was, according to the author of this “pleasant historie,” “appointed to be the fat pig that should be killed: For it is to be understood that when they plotted the murder of any man, this was alwaies their terme, the man to his wife, and the woman to her husband: ‘Wife, there is now a fat pig to be had if you want one.’ Whereupon she would answer thus: ‘I pray you put him in the hogstie till to-morrow.’”

He was accordingly given the room—the condemned cell, so to speak—above the copper, and by next morning would doubtless have been floating inanimate down the Thames, had not his friend Gray unexpectedly joined him in the evening. On another occasion his hour was nearly come, when Colnbrook was aroused at night by people riding post-haste from London with news that all Chepe was ablaze; and he must needs be up and away without sleeping, for he had interests there.

The innkeeper was wrathy at these mischances; “but,” said he, in a phrase even yet heard, “the third time will pay for all.”

Yet again the threatened clothier came riding alone, but in the night he was roused by the innkeeper himself to help quiet a riotous dispute that had arisen in the house over dice.

On another occasion he fell ill while staying at the “Ostrich,” or the “Crane,” as some accounts name the house, and had to be nursed; but the fifth time was fatal. Omens pursued him on that occasion, and many another would have turned back. His horse stumbled and broke a leg, and he had to find another, and when he had done so and had resumed his journey, he was so sleepy he could scarce sit in the saddle. Then, as he drew near Colnbrook, his nose began to bleed.

The happenings of the day depressed him when at last he had come to the inn. He could take nothing, and the innkeeper and his wife remarked upon it.

“Jesu, Master Cole,” quoth they, “what ails ye to-night? Never before did we see you thus sad. Will it please you to have a quart of burnt sack?”

“Willingly,” he rejoined; but presently lapsed into his former mood.

“I have but one child in the world,” said he, “and that is my daughter, and half that I have is hers and the other half my wife’s. But shall I be good to nobody but them? In conscience, my wealth is too much for a couple to possess, and what is our religion without charity? And to whom is charity more to be shown than to decayed householders? Tom Dove, through his love of jollity and good-fellowship, hath lost his all. Good my Oast, lend me a pen and inke, for straightway I will write a letter vnto the poore man, and something I will give him. God knows how long I shall live.”

“Why, Master Cole,” said the innkeeper, when shown what the clothier had written, “’tis no letter, but a will you have written.”

“’Tis true,” said Cole, “and I have but written that which God put into my mind.” Then, folding and sealing it, he desired his host to despatch it, and was not satisfied until he himself had hired the carrier. Then he fell a-weeping, and so went to bed, to the accompaniment of many other dolorous signs and portents. “The scritch-owle cried piteously, and anon after the night-rauen sate croaking hard by the window. ‘Jesu have mercy vpon me,’ quoth hee, ‘what an ill-favoured cry doe yonder carrion birds make;’ and thereupon he laid him down in his bed, from whence he neuer rose againe.”

The innkeeper also was shaken by these ominous things, and would have spared his guest; but his wife was of other mettle.

“What,” said she, “faint you now?”—and showed him the gold that had been given into her care.

In the end they served the unfortunate Cole as they had many another, and threw his body into the little river that runs near by: hence, according to the old accounts, the name of the place, originally Cole-in-brook!

This last ridiculous, infantile touch is sufficient to discredit the whole story, and when we learn that, according to one account thirteen, and by the testimony of another no fewer than sixty, travellers had been, in like manner, “removed,” we are inclined to believe the whole thing the invention of some anonymous, bloody-minded pamphleteer, and care little whether the innkeeper and his wife were hanged (as we are told) or retired with a fortune and founded a family.

At any rate, one cannot understand the persistent attempt to connect the so-called “Blue Room” of the present house with the fatal bedroom. If there is any truth at all in the story of Master Cole, his tragical ending was accomplished in a house demolished eight hundred years ago; for we have it, in the words of the writer of Thomas of Reading, that “the King (Henry the First) commanded the house should be quite consumed with fire and that no man should ever build vpon that cursed ground.”

In the same manner, the recent attempts to connect Turpin with the “Ostrich” will not bear the least investigation.

YARD OF THE “OSTRICH,” COLNBROOK.

This ghastly story claimed, with such extraordinary zeal, by the “Ostrich” is by no means the only one of its kind, for many an old tale of horror has for its central feature the wicked innkeeper who robbed and murdered his guests. The most famous, and most revolting, legend is that included in the career of St. Nicholas of Myra, which serves to show that this licensed-victualling depravity was international. The true story of St. Nicholas is not miraculous, and is simply earnest of his good and pitiful nature. He entreated, and secured from Eustathius, governor of Myra, the pardon of three men imprisoned in a tower and condemned to die, and is often represented with a tower at the side of him and three mannikins rising out of it. In the course of time the tower became a tub, and the little men were changed into children, and those changes in their turn gave rise to a wholly fictitious story that fairly outranges all the other incredible marvels of the dark ages. According to this tale, an innkeeper, running short of bacon, seized three little boys, cut them up, and pickled them in a salting-tub. St. Nicholas, hearing that they had gone to the inn and had disappeared there, had his saintly suspicions aroused. He asked for the pickle-tub, addressed it in some form of words that unfortunately have not been preserved to us, and straightway the fragments sorted themselves out, and pieced themselves together, and the children went off to play.

A curious feature of the old frontage of the “Ostrich” was the doorway made in coaching times in the upper storey for the convenience of passengers, who were in this manner enabled to step directly into the house from the roofs of the coaches. There are those still living who remember this contrivance; but the space has long been filled in, and the sole vestige of it is an unobtrusive wooden sill resting on the timbering beneath the swinging sign.Romance, very dark and gory, clothes the memory of the “Blue Boar” at Leicester, a house unfortunately pulled down in the ’30’s of the nineteenth century. According to tradition, Richard the Third, coming to Leicester and finding the castle already dilapidated, stayed at the inn before the battle of Bosworth, and slept in the huge oaken four-poster bed which remained in the house until the date of its demolition. It was not only a bed, but also a treasure-chest, for in the time of one Clark, who kept the house in the later years of Queen Elizabeth and the earlier part of the reign of James the First, a great store of gold coin was discovered in the framework of it. Mrs. Clark, making up the bed hastily, shook it with more than usual vigour, when, to her surprise, a gold coin dropped out. Examination led to the discovery that the bedstead had a false bottom and that the space between was one vast cash-box. Clark did not at the time disclose the find, and so became “mysteriously” rich. In the course of a few years he was gathered to his fathers, and his widow kept on the house, but was murdered in 1613 for the sake of her gold by a maidservant, who, together with no fewer than seven men accomplices, was duly hanged for the crime.

“PIFF’S ELM.”

The difficulty of resolving tradition into fact, of putting a date to legends and tracing them to their origin, is generally insurmountable. Let us take, for example, the “Old White Swan,” at “Piff’s Elm.” Casting a roving eye upon the map of Gloucestershire, I see by chance, between Tewkesbury and Gloucester, a place so named. It tells me vaguely of romance, and I resolve, at all hazards, to go to that spot and sketch, if sketchable, the inn I suspect to be there, and note the story that belongs, or should belong, to it. In due course I come to that lonely place, and there, to be sure, is an inn—once a considerable house on the old coaching and posting route between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury—and not only an inn, but a picturesque one, fronted with the giant stump of an elm—whether Piff’s or another’s, who shall say?

And Piff himself? Whether he was a highwayman or was murdered by a highwayman; or if he were a suicide who hanged himself from the elm associated with him, or a criminal gibbeted there, I cannot tell you, nor can any one else. Some stories say one thing, some another, and others still put quite different complexions upon it. In that choice of legends lurks romance itself, perhaps reduced from the highest realms of tragedy by the unfortunately farcical name of the mysterious Piff.

Equally romantic, and irreducible to cold-drawn fact, is the legend of King James and the Tinker, associated with the “King and Tinker” inn at White Webbs Lane, in what was once Enfield Chase. According to the tale, King James the First, hunting in the woodlands that surrounded his palace of Theobalds, lost himself, and, drawing rein at the inn—whatever then was the sign of it—encountered a tinker drinking a modest stoup of ale in the porch.

“What news, good fellow?” asked the horseman.

“No news that I wot of,” replied the tinker, “save that they say the King’s out a-hunting in the Chase to-day. I should like to see the King, although I suppose he’s very much like other folk.”

“So you’d like to see the King?” queried his Majesty.

“Ay, just for the sake of saying so,” replied the tinker.

“Mount behind me, then,” said the King, “and I will show you him.”

“But how shall I know him when I see him?”

“Easily enough. You will know him by his remaining covered.”

Soon the King came upon his retinue, all of whom promptly bared their heads. “Now, my friend, where is the King?” asked his Majesty, turning, with a smile, in his saddle.

“There’s only we two covered, and since I know I’m no king, I—O! pardon, your Majesty!” replied the now trembling tinker.

The King laughed. “Now,” said he, “since you have seen how a King looks, you shall also see how he acts,” and then, drawing his sword, he knighted the tinker on the spot; or, in the words of the brave old ballad:

Well may the mark of exclamation stand there, not only at the general improbability of such a thing, but at the preposterous idea of the niggard James the First being guilty of an act of unreasonable generosity. But one must not question the legend at the “King and Tinker,” where it is devoutly cherished. I have before me a four-page pamphlet, issued at the inn, wherein the ancient ballad is printed at length and surmounted, not very convincingly, by a woodblock in the Bewick manner, showing a number of sportsmen in the costume of George the Third’s time, about, in a most unsportsmanlike way, to ride over the hounds. In the distance is Windsor Castle. It will be conceded that, as an illustration of the King James and the Tinker legend, this is lacking in some of those intimate touches that would make the incident live again.

But the legend and the ballad are much older than the days of James the First. They are, in fact, to be found, on substantially the same lines, in most centuries and many countries, Haroun-al-Raschid is found, in the Arabian Nights, in circumstances not dissimilar: while the story of Henry the Second—or, as some versions have it, Henry the Eighth—and the Miller of Mansfield is another familiar parallel. There again we find the King riding away in the forest from his courtiers, only in that instance it is the Forest of Sherwood. He is given shelter by the miller, and shares a bed with the miller’s son, Dick. Next morning the agitated courtiers discover the King, who knights his host, “Sir John Cockle,” and eventually names him ranger of Sherwood, with a salary of £300.

From romance of this almost fairy-tale kind let us turn to the equally astonishing, but better established, story associated with the once-famed “Pelican” at Speenhamland, on the outskirts of Newbury. The Peerage, which has long appeared to exist almost exclusively for the purpose of scandalising staid folk by the amazing marriages of its members, included in 1744 a Duke of Chandos; Henry Brydges, the second Duke, at that time a widower. He and a friend, dining at the “Pelican” on their way from Bath to London in that year, were interrupted by an unwonted excitement that appeared to be agitating the establishment. Inquiring the cause, they were told that a man was about to sell his wife in the inn yard. “Let us go and see,” quoth the Duke; and they accordingly went forth into the courtyard and saw a handsome, modest-looking young woman enter, in the approved manner, with a halter round her neck, and led by her husband, who is described as a “brutal ostler.”

It was a remarkable instance of love at first sight. The name of this fortunate young woman was Ann Wells. The Duke bought her (the price is not stated) and married her on Christmas Day. She died in 1757, at Keynsham, near Bristol, leaving an only daughter, Lady Augusta, who married a Mr. Kearney.There remained until recent times a funeral hatchment in Keynsham Church on which the arms of this greatly daring Duke were impaled with those found by the Herald’s College for his plebeian wife: “three fountains (for ‘Wells’) on a field azure.”