PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS (continued)

At St. Albans we have still something in the way of a pilgrim’s inn. St. Albans was, of course, the home of the wonder-working shrine of St. Alban, the proto-martyr of Britain, and by direct consequence a place of great pilgrimage and a town of many inns. Here is the “George,” one of the pleasantest of the old inns remaining in the place, with an old, but scarce picturesque frontage, relieved from lack of interest by a quaint sundial, inscribed Horas non numero nisi serenas, and a more than usually picturesque courtyard.

The house is mentioned so early as 1448 as the “George upon the Hupe.” In those times it possessed an oratory of its own, referred to in an ancient licence, by which the Abbot authorised the innkeeper to have Low Mass celebrated on the premises, for the benefit of “such great men and nobles, and others, as shall be lodged here.”

Let us try to imagine that inn, licensed for the sale of wine and spirituous liquors and for religious services! It seems odd, but after all not so odd as these mad times of our own, when public-houses are converted into missions, and ordained clergymen of the Church of England become publicans and serve drinks across the counter in the interest of temperance and good behaviour.[14]

No traces of that oratory now remain in the “George.” It is one of the most comfortable of old houses, and full of old panelling and old prints and furniture, but the “great men and nobles” have long ceased to lodge here, and it is now only frequented by “others.” The chapel was desecrated at the time of the Reformation, and was afterwards in use as part of the stables.

The carving seen in the illustration over the archway is no integral part of the inn, but was brought from old Holywell House in 1837, on the destruction of that mansion, of which it formed the decorative pediment.

The Church, as already shown, was the earliest innkeeper in those days when travellers travailed in difficulties and dangers; and semi-religious bodies often acted the same hospitable part. The Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem kept hostelries at various places, prominent among them the old house which is now the “Angel” at Grantham.

The “Angel,” in common with other inns of the same name, derived its sign in the far-off thirteenth century from a religious picture-sign of the Annunciation, and we may readily see how, in the fading of the picture, the rest of the group gradually sank out of sight, leaving only that bright announcing messenger visible to passers-by. Undoubtedly the “Angel” at Islington obtained its name in this way: staggering though the thought may be to those who know that merely secular public-house, in that roaring vortex of London traffic.

THE “GEORGE,” ST. ALBANS.

The attitude of greeting in the pose of the angelic figure led in course of time to such a sign being often called the “Salutation”: hence the various old inns of that name in different parts of the country were originally “Angels.”

The “Angel” at Grantham is a quaint admixture of ancient and modern. It was a hostel, and bore this name even so early as the reign of King John, for beneath its roof that monarch held his Court in the February of 1213. We do not, however, find anything nowadays so ancient in the “Angel,” for every vestige of the building in which that shifty and evasive monarch lodged has disappeared. This is by no means to say that the “Angel” is of recent date. It belongs in part to the mid-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—a more than respectable age. From the midst of the town of Grantham it looks out upon the Great North Road, and in truth, facing a highway of so great and varied historic doings, no building can have witnessed more in the way of varied processions. History, made visible, has passed by, in front of these windows, for at least five hundred years, beginning with the gorgeous cavalcades of kings and courts and armies going or coming on missions of peace or war to and from Scotland, and at last—what a contrast!—ending with the hotel omnibus to or from the railway-station, with the luggage of “commercials.”

THE “ANGEL,” GRANTHAM.

A very tragical incident in history was enacted in the great room, now divided into three, that once extended the whole length of the frontage on the first floor. Perhaps it was in the bay of the beautiful Gothic oriel window lighting this room that Richard the Third signed the death-warrant of the Duke of Buckingham, October 19th, 1483. That it was signed in this room we know. What was his manner when he put his hand to that deed? Did he declaim anything in the “off with his head; so much for Buckingham,” dramatic way, as we are led by Colley Cibber’s stage-version of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third to suppose he did? Or did he silently treat it as a matter of stern, imperious necessity of statecraft? Had he possessed the dramatic sense, he certainly would have mouthed some such bloodthirsty phrase, and, turning on his heel in the self-satisfied attitude of triumphant villainy we know so well, would have made a striking exit, as per stage directions, curling a villainous and contemptuous lip, in the manner that never yet failed to bring down the heartfelt hatred, and the hisses, of the gallery.

It is, however, to be sadly supposed that the King did nothing of that sort. He could not play to the gallery—for it was not there; he probably did not turn upon his heel, nor curl his lip, for the Stage, whence you learn the trick of these things, had not yet come into existence. And if you do but consider it, most of the great doings of the world, bloody or legislative, or what not, have been done—not, if it please you, “enacted”—without a due sense of their dramatic and spectacular possibilities. They all came in the day’s work, and the issues were too tremendous, the risks too great and impending, for the personages involved in them to enjoy the leisure for posing.

The old embayed stone frontage of the “Angel” has survived many a shock and buffet of Time, and, although the mullions of most of its windows have long since been removed, in the not unnatural demand for more light, the antiquity of the house is manifest to the most commercial, and least antiquarian, traveller. On either side of the Gothic archway by which you enter, the carved heads of Edward the Third and his heroic Queen Philippa still appear, and at the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a supporting corbel to the beautiful oriel window above, is a sculptured angel supporting a shield of arms.The historic “Angel,” scene of so many centuries of conviviality, has long been made to foster the cause of temperance. Indeed, for two hundred years past, ages before Temperance became a Cause with capital letters and capital endowments, the rent of the house went towards this object, under the will of one Michael Solomon, who, dying in 1706, directed that a sermon should be annually preached in Grantham church, “strongly denouncing drunkenness,” the cost to be met out of the rental of the “Angel.” But the most cynical stroke of chance befell in November, 1905, when the preacher of this counterblast against drink, paid for out of the profits of a licensed house, was the Reverend Gerald Goodwin, son of the chief proprietor of a prominent Newark brewery.

The “George,” at Norton St. Philip, claiming to have been licensed in 1397, has stirring history, as well as antiquity and beauty, to recommend it. You who are curious as to where the village of Norton stands may take the map of Somerset and presently, scanning the county to the south of Bath, discover it set down about seven miles to the south of that ancient city, in a somewhat sequestered district. The reason of so large and so grand a hostelry being in existence since the Middle Ages in so small a village is not, at the first blush, evident, and it is only when the ancient history of Norton itself is explored that the wherefore of it is found.

It seems, then, that the land hereabout was in those far-off times the property of the old Priory of Hinton Charterhouse—that old Carthusian house whose brethren were the best farmers, wool-growers, and stock-raisers of their time in the West Country. As early as the reign of Henry the Third the monastery was licensed to hold a fair here in May, on the vigil, the feast, and the morrow of the festival of SS. Philip and James; and again, in 1284, secured a charter conferring the right of holding a market at “Norton Charterhouse” every Friday, instead of, as formerly, at the bleak and much-exposed Hinton. In 1345 the Priory was further empowered to annually hold a fair on the feast of the Decollation of St. John at Norton: an institution that, although the Priory went the way of all its kind over five hundred and fifty years ago, remained a yearly fixture on August 28th and 29th until quite recent times. It was known locally, for some reason now undiscoverable, as “Norton Dog Fair.”

The fair in its last years degenerated into the usual thing we understand nowadays as a fair: a squalid exhibition of Fat Women and Two-headed Calves; a gaudy and strepitous saturnalia of roundabouts and mountebanks; but it was—or they were, for, as we have already seen, there were at one time two—originally highly important business conventions. The principal business then transacted was the selling of wool and cloth, and it was for the purpose of helping their trade as wool-growers, and for the benefit generally of their very lucrative fairs, that the monks of Hinton Charterhouse in the fourteenth century built as a hostel that which is to-day the “George” inn.

THE “GEORGE,” NORTON ST. PHILIP.For generations the merchants and wool-staplers exposed their wares and did their business in the street, or in a large upper room of the house, and long continued to do so when in course of time the whole thing had been altogether secularised.

The cyclist who comes to Norton St. Philip from Bath has a weary time of it, among the hills, by Odd Down, Midford, and Freshford; and only when he has come uphill to windy Hinton Charterhouse are his toils over, and the rest of the way easy. It is a broad, modern road, but the observant may yet see the disused Abbot’s Way going, narrow, and even more steep, over the fields, to the left hand; and we may well imagine the joy of the old travellers along it when they saw the grey church tower in the village, nestling in a fold of the hills, and heard those sweet-toned bells of Norton that still sound so mellow on the ear, and are the identical “very fine ring of six bells” that Pepys heard on June 12th, 1668, and pronounced “mighty tuneable.”

The “George” keeps unmistakable evidences of its semi-ecclesiastical origin, and the Gothic character of the solid stonework in the lower storey points to the latter half of the fourteenth century. The curious and exceedingly picturesque contrast between the massive masonry below and the overhanging timbered upper part has led, without any other evidence, to the conjecture that the house must at some time have suffered from fire, or otherwise been injured and partly rebuilt; but such instances of mixed methods in ancient building are numerous.

History of a romantic kind has been enacted here, for it was in the street of Norton St. Philip, that a furious skirmish was fought, June 26th, 1685, between the untrained and badly armed rustics of the rebel Duke of Monmouth, and the soldiers of King James, under command of the weak and vacillating Lord Feversham. The rebel peasantry, armed only with pikes, scythes, and billhooks, that day withstood and routed their enemies, and they held the village that night, Monmouth himself sleeping in one of the front bedrooms of the “George.” It was while dressing at this window the following morning that he was fired at by some unknown person desirous of earning the reward offered by James for the taking of his nephew’s life. The bullet, however, sped harmlessly by that preserver and champion of the Protestant liberties of the country: hence the invincible anonymity of the firer of that shot. Had Monmouth died thus, it is conceivable he would have come down to us a more manly historic figure.

The interior of the “George” is woefully disappointing, after the expectations raised by the noble exterior. It was obviously never ornately fitted, and long generations of neglect and misuse have resulted in the house being, internally, little better than a mere wreck, with the installation of a vulgar bar to insult the Gothic feeling of the place. The property now belongs to the Bath Brewery Company, and is not merely that abomination, a “tied house,” but is maintained in a barely habitable condition, the Company being reported of opinion that the Somersetshire ArchÆological Society—interested, as all archÆologists must be, in a house so architecturally and historically interesting—should restore the building. If that report be true, it is a striking example of colossal impudence.

On the ground-floor, the present Tap-room keeps a large fire-place with old-fashioned grate. Above, mounting by a stone spiral staircase to the first floor, is the room used by Monmouth (the one to the right hand in the view), and known as the “King’s Room.” Its door, floor, and walls are of the roughest, as also are those of the adjoining room. On the floor above, running the whole length of the building, under the roof, is the long room used by the old wool-merchants as their market: and a darksome and makeshift place, under the roof-timbers, it is, and must have been at the best of times. To-day the floor is rotten, and you must go delicately, lest you fall through to the next floor, and then through that to the ground, where only the explorer can feel secure.

It is the same tale of far-gone decay in the yard, to which you enter, as also to the house itself, by the great archway in the village street. It was always a small yard, but was partly galleried. The tottering remains of the gallery, with brewhouse below, are left, still filled with the enormous casks built in the brewhouse itself, and only to be removed by demolishing them. The rooms are mere ruins. If ever the interior and the yard of the “George” are restored it will be a great and an expensive work; but it is to be feared that, Norton St. Philip being an unlikely place for lengthened resort—visitors coming from curiosity from Bath for merely an hour or so—such a work will never be undertaken.

In even worse case, from an archÆologist’s point of view, is the “George” at Winchcombe, in Gloucestershire; for it stands in the High Street of a busy little town, and has been disastrously altered in recent years by the brewers who own it. Brewers have no undue leanings toward historic or architectural sentiment, and in this instance their object was to fit their house for use as a commercial hotel. Accordingly, they caused the ancient stone face to be pulled down and have replaced it by an imitation timbered gabled front. Something of what the old front was like may be discovered at the back, where the date, 1583, may be seen on the stonework, together with an inscription to the effect that it was restored in 1706.

The “George” was originally built as a pilgrims’ inn by the Abbots of Winchcombe and Hayles, whose noted West Country shrines attracted many thousands of the pious and the sinful in days gone by. At Winchcombe they had the body of St. Kenelm, the Saxon boy-king who succeeded to the throne of Mercia in A.D. 822, and, according to legendary lore, was murdered at the instigation of his sister Cwoenthryth, who desired his place. Kenelm was but seven years of age, but already so pious, if we are to believe the story, that the poisons at first administered to him refused their customary effects, and there was nothing for it but to strike his head off. Piety, therefore, was not proof against cold steel.

YARD OF THE “GEORGE,” NORTON ST. PHILIP.His tutor, the treacherous Askobert, was induced to perform this act, in the lonely forest of Clent. To the astonishment of Askobert, a white dove flew from the severed neck and soared away into the sky. Naturally surprised by such a marvel, he nevertheless was not unnerved, and buried the body under a thorn-bush and went his way. Cwoenthryth in due course succeeded, and reigned for some two years, when the inevitable vengeance fell. It came about in a curious way—as do all these retributions in monastic legends. The Pope was celebrating Mass in his Cathedral of St. Peter when a dove that had been observed there poised itself over the high altar and dropped from its beak a piece of parchment inscribed, “In Clent in Cowbach Kenelm Kynge’s child lieth under a thorn, his head taken from him.”

This strange message was conveyed to England, and an expedition, formed of the monks of Winchcombe and Worcester, set off to the forest of Clent. Arrived there, the expeditionary force was guided to the thorn-tree by a white cow, and duly found the body. After disputing whose property it was to become, they decided that, as they were all wearied with the journey and their exertions, they should, every one, lie down and rest, the body to become the possession of those who should first arise. The Winchcombe men were first awake, and were well away over the hills with their prize before the monks of Worcester ceased from their snoring, yawned, opened their eyes, and found the treasure gone.

The miraculous power of St. Kenelm manifested itself on the way, for the men of Winchcombe, fainting on their journey for lack of water, prayed, for the love of him, to be guided to some spring; when immediately a gush of water burst forth from the hillside. Thus refreshed, they came into Winchcombe, where the wicked Cwoenthryth, whom later generations have agreed to name, in more simple fashion, Quenride, was reading that very comminatory Psalm, the 109th, wherein all manner of disasters are invoked upon the Psalmist’s enemies. There has ever been considered some especial virtue in reciting prayers and invocations backwards, and Quenride, having gone through the Psalm in the ordinary way, was proceeding to take it in reverse when the procession came winding along the street. At that moment her eyes fell out; and, to bear witness to the truth of the story, the Abbey of Winchcombe long exhibited, among the greatest of its treasures, the blood-stained psalter on whose pages they fell—which, of course, was convincing.

Can we wonder that, in those credulous ages, pilgrimage to Winchcombe should have been a popular West Country practice? And if not to St. Kenelm’s shrine, there was the peculiarly holy relic of the neighbouring Abbey of Hayles, where the monks treasured nothing less tremendous than a bottle of Christ’s blood. This in after years—as was to be supposed—was discovered to be a blasphemous imposture, the precious phial being declared by the examining Commissioners in the time of Henry the Eighth to contain merely “an unctuous gum, coloured.”

YARD OF THE “GEORGE,” WINCHCOMBE.

A pilgrims’ inn at Winchcombe was, in view of the crowds naturally resorting to either or both of these Abbeys, a very necessary institution, and for long the “George” so remained.

The ways of the brewers with the old house have been already in part recorded and the destruction of much of interest deplored, but there still remains a little of its former state. There is, for instance, the great archway at the side, with the oaken spandrels carved with foliage and the initials R. K.; standing for Richard Kyderminster, Abbot of Winchcombe at some period in the fifteenth century. Through this archway runs the yard, down to the back of the town, and there is what is still called the “Pilgrims’ Gallery,” on one side. One scarcely knows which of the two courses adopted by the brewers with this old inn was the most disastrous: the actual demolition of the old frontage, or the “restoration” of the Pilgrims’ Gallery in so thorough a manner that it is, in almost every respect, a new structure. Nor does it, as of old, conduct to bedrooms, for that part of the house giving upon it has been reconstructed as a large room, available for entertainments or public dinners.

There is something peculiarly appropriate in the refectory of a monastic house becoming an inn. Such is the history of the “Lord Crewe Arms,” at Blanchland.

It is a far cry to that picturesque and quiet village, in stern and rugged Northumberland; but you may be sure that, however wild and forbidding the surrounding country, the site and the immediate neighbourhood of an ancient abbey will prove to be fertile, sheltered, and beautiful; and Blanchland, the old home of an Abbey of PrÆmonstratensian canons, is no exception to this rule.

Whichever way the traveller comes into Blanchland, he comes by hills more or less precipitous, and by moors chiefly remarkable for their savage and worthless nature, and it is a welcome change when, from the summit of a steep hill, he at last looks down upon the quiet place, nestling in a hollow on the Northumbrian side of the little river Derwent, that here separates the counties of Northumberland and Durham.

Down there, still remote from the busy world, the village is slowly but surely fading out of existence, as we learn from the cold, dispassionate figures of the Census returns, which record the fact that in 1811 the inhabitants numbered 518, while in 1901 they were but 232.

It is a compact little place. There is the ancient bridge, built by the monks, across the Derwent, still, in the words of Froissart, “strong and rapid and full of large stones and rocks”; and there are the church-tower, the old Abbey gatehouse, the “Lord Crewe Arms,” and some few houses, forming four sides of a square. “The place,” as Walter Besant truly says in his novel, Dorothy Forster, “has the aspect of an ancient and decayed college.”

Blanchland owes everything to its old abbey, conducted under the rules of the original brethren of PrÉmontÉ, and even derived its name of Blanche Lande from the white habits of the monks; just as Whitland in Carmarthenshire, took its name from a similar history.

The Abbey of Blanchland was founded here, at “Wulwardshope,” as the place was originally named, in 1163, and, rebuilt and added to from time to time, flourished until the heavy hand of Henry the Eighth and his commissioners ended it, in 1536. In all those long centuries it had remained obscure, both in its situation and its history; and was indeed so difficult to come to that tradition tells a picturesque story of mediÆval Scottish raiders failing to find the place and so returning home, when its situation was revealed to them by the bells the monks were ringing, to express joy at their deliverance. Alas! it was their own funeral knell the brethren rang; for, guided by the sound, those Border ruffians entered Blanchland, burnt its Abbey and slew the monks.

Shortly after the suppression of the Abbey under Henry the Eighth, the monastic lands became the property, and the domestic buildings of the Abbey the home, of the Radcliffe family, and afterwards of the Forsters, who, according to the wholly irreverent, and half-boastful, half-satirical local saying, were older than the oldest of county families, for “the Almighty first created the world and Adam and Eve, and then He made the Forsters.”

Blanchland was at last lost to that long-descended race by the treason of General Forster, who was concerned in the rising of 1715, and so forfeited his estates; and in 1721 the property was purchased by Nathaniel Crewe, Bishop of Durham, who at the age of sixty-seven had married Dorothy Forster, at that time twenty-four years of age.

THE “LORD CREWE ARMS,” BLANCHLAND.

The present inn, the “Lord Crewe Arms,” is a portion of the old refectory buildings on the west side of the cloister garth, but many alterations and additions have been made since those times, and the actual oldest part is the ancient monastic fireplace, very much disguised by later generations, and in the fact that it is now in use as the fireplace of the modern kitchen.

In the fine drawing-room of the inn, formerly the ball-room of the Forster mansion, hangs a portrait of Lord Crewe, that time-serving reactionary sycophant under James the Second and would-be toady to William the Third. His public life was a version, on a higher plane, of that of the celebrated Vicar of Bray, and he succeeded admirably in his determination to stick to his principles—to live and die Bishop-Palatine of Durham; for as Lord Bishop he remained until his death, aged eighty-nine, in 1722, in the reign of George the Second.

But he well deserves the honour of the inn being named after him, for he left his wealth in various charities, the rent of the inn itself forming a portion of the income of the Crewe trustees.

Our ultimate example of a monastic hostel is found at Aylesbury, a town whose name would, to imaginative persons, appear at the first blush to indicate a happy hunting-ground for old inns; but although—Shakespeare to the contrary—there is usually very much in a name, the meaning is not always—and in place-names not often—what it would seem to be. Thus, Aylesbury is not the town of ale, but (a very different thing), Aeglesberge, i.e. “the Church Town,” a name it obtained in Saxon times, when the surrounding country was godless, and this place exceptionally provided.

At the same time, Aylesbury—the place also of ducks and of dairies—was once notable for an exceedingly fine inn: none other than the great galleried “White Hart,” first modernised in 1814, when its gabled, picturesque front was pulled down and replaced by a commonplace red-brick front, in the style, or lack of style, then prevalent; and finally cleared away in 1863, to make room for the existing Corn Exchange and Market House.

THE “OLD KING’S HEAD,” AYLESBURY.

Coming into Aylesbury, in quest of inns, one looks at that building with dismay. Was it really to build such a horrific thing they demolished the “White Hart”? How deplorable!Aylesbury is a town where, late at night, the police foregather in the reverberative Market Square, instead of going their individual beats; and there, through the small hours, they talk and laugh, hawk and spit, and make offensive noises, until the sleepless stranger longs to open his window and throw things at them. Happy he whose bedroom does not look upon their rendezvous! But this is merely incidental. More germane to the matter under consideration is the fact that, although the “White Hart” be gone, Aylesbury still keeps a remarkably fine inn, of the smaller sort, in the “Old King’s Head,” which, if not indeed a pilgrims’ inn, seems to have been originally built by some religious fraternity as a hospice or guest-house for travellers. Of its history and of the original building nothing is known, the present house dating from 1444-50. You discover the “Old King’s Head” in a narrow street off the market-place, and at the first glimpse of it perceive that here is something quite exceptionally fine. A sketch is, if it be any good at all, always worth a page of description, and so we will let the accompanying illustration take the place of mere verbiage. Only let it be observed that the larger gable and the window in it are new, having been rebuilt in 1880.

The great window, entirely constructed of oak, is the chief feature of the exterior, just as the noble room it lights is the principal object of interest in the house itself. The point most worthy of consideration here is that in this remarkably fine window, and in the room itself, you have an unaltered and unrestored work of the fifteenth century. In early ages the house was an inn with some ecclesiastical tie, and when it passed from the hands of the brotherhood (whoever they may have been) that once owned it, and became a secularised hostelry, it seems to have continued its career with very little alteration beyond that of adopting as a sign the “King’s Head”: that king doubtless originally Henry the Eighth himself. The house was, in the seventeenth century, one of the Aylesbury inns that issued tokens, for in museums and private collections are still to be found copper pieces inscribed “At ye King’s Head In Aillsburey, W.E.D. 1657.” There still existed, until comparatively recent times, traces of old galleries in the extensive yard, but modern changes have at last completely abolished them.

The fine room of which the great window forms one complete side was no doubt originally the common-room of the hostel. It is now the tap-room. A fine lofty hall it makes: oaken pillars, black with age, springing from each corner, based upon stone plinths and supporting finely moulded beams that, crossing in the ceiling, divide it into nine square compartments. The great window, divided by mullions and a transom into twenty lights, is of course seen to best advantage from within, and still keeps much of the original armorial stained glass.