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The King’s Arms, Hemel Hempstead

OLD COUNTRY INNS

CHAPTER I

MANORIAL INNS

Which among the thousand of old inns to be met with on our country roads has a right to be called the oldest? There are many claimants. The title-deeds of the Saracen’s Head at Newark refer back to 1341. Local antiquaries cite documentary evidence to prove that the Seven Stars at Manchester existed before the year 1356. Symond Potyn, who founded St. Catherine’s Hospital for poor Pilgrims at Rochester in 1316, is described as “of the Crown Inn.” A Nottingham ballad relates the adventures of one Dame Rose who kept the Ram in that town “in the days of good King Stephen.” Then we have the witness of the German Ambassador to the comfort and excellence of the Fountain at Canterbury, when he lodged there in 1299, on the occasion of the marriage of King Edward I to Margaret of France. Nay, the legend runs that within its walls the four murderers of St. Thomas arranged the last details of their plot in 1170, and that the wife of Earl Godwin stayed at this inn in 1029. But what are all these compared with the Fighting Cocks at St. Albans, said to be the oldest inhabited house in England? A few years ago its signboard modestly chronicled the fact that it had been “Rebuilt after the Flood.”

Nevertheless, we can safely assert that no English inn has a history of more than 800 years, and that very few hostelries can trace their independent existence to a period earlier than the fourteenth century. Until the towns had acquired rights of self-government and trade had in consequence begun to expand, there was little occasion for inns. England under the Norman kings was a purely agricultural country with scattered villages where dependent tillers of the soil grouped their clay-walled thatched hovels around church and manor-house. Even ancient towns, with a record of a thousand years, were merely rather larger villages on a navigable river or a cross road. Foreign merchant ships were just beginning to call once more at the seaports on the chance of trade.

Travelling on the roads was attended with serious dangers and inconveniences. Robbers abounded, some not so courteous and discriminating as the legendary Robin Hood. Armed retainers at the tail of some noble lord’s retinue were occasionally not above a little highway robbery on their own account, and if the victim failed to beat off his assailant his remedy at law was precarious at best. Such a band, if sufficiently numerous, would even go so far as to attack the King’s officers sent in pursuit of them. The journey might at any time be brought to an abrupt conclusion because the travellers’ horses and carts were forcibly commandeered by the purveyor to the King or some great noble. The roads themselves were in a disgraceful state, full of deep ruts, holes and quagmires, quite impassable in wet weather; their repair was left to chance or the good-will of neighbouring owners. In the towns they were encumbered with heaps of refuse. The rolls of Parliament from the reign of Edward I onward contain numerous petitions for a regular highway tax.

A curious illustration of the lack of any systematic authority over the roads, even as late as the fifteenth century, is preserved in the records of the Manor of Aylesbury. A local miller, named Richard Boose, needed some ramming clay for the repair of his mill. Accordingly his servants dug a great pit in the middle of the road, ten feet wide and eight feet deep, and so left it to become filled with water from the winter rains. A glover from Leighton Buzzard, on his way home from market, fell in and was drowned. Charged with manslaughter, the miller pleaded that he knew no place wherein to get the kind of clay he required except on the high road. He was acquitted.[1]

Furthermore, all England was parcelled out into manors, each a little principality in itself presided over by a lord who in practice possessed summary rights over life and property within his domain. A stranger might be called upon to undergo a very searching examination to account for his presence in the neighbourhood. Most of the inhabitants were forbidden to leave the demesne without the consent of their lord. Not that this was a great hardship; the idea of a journey rarely occurs to the bucolic mind, and fully half the rural population of England in these days of cheap railway excursions are content to spend their lives within their native parish, or at any rate never venture beyond the market town.

In every manor there was a manor-house, the residence of the lord and the centre of the life of the community. It was usually quite a simple building on the main street near the church. Here were held the manor courts, view of frank pledge, assize of bread and ale and other quaint customs, some of which have come down to our own days. Hither at Hocktide and harvest would come the tenants and their wives, bringing their own platters, cups and napkins for their feast.

Such few travellers as were benighted on the road, small merchants or pedlars going to a local fair, a knight or squire on his way to court, Kings’ messengers and officials, would naturally put up at the manor-house. Hospitality was so rarely called for that it was willingly afforded, just as it is at an Australian homestead in the backwoods. One more sleeping place on the rushes in the hall, another seat at the common table—above or below the salt according to the hosteller’s estimate of the guest’s condition in life—was no great matter. Doubtless each in his own degree made his present to the hosteller in the morning; the butler in a country house still expects his solatium from the parting guest.

By the middle of the fourteenth century the roads had become more frequented, and it was no longer the fashion for the lord to reside in the comparatively humble manor-house. The cost of living had seriously increased; the nobility were impoverished by attendance at court, the foreign wars, and their crowd of retainers. So the lord retired to his more secluded castle or country seat, leaving strangers to be entertained at the manor-house by a steward who afterwards was replaced by a regular