Charles G. Harper

“ Of all this quasi-home life which belonged to the old inn of the past, the hotel of the present has not a trace. For certain forms of luxury the modern hotel is hard to beat. Thick carpets deaden the footsteps of stragglers through the corridors, and your boots, invariably kicked into infinities by midnight guests, do not—as they do in the older houses—fly noisily along the bare boards. The rooms are lighted with electric light, but usually set so high as to be useless for all purposes of reading or working. In the drawing-room are luxurious chairs of all shapes and sizes ”

“ A very curious and authentic relic of those old times is found in that secluded little inn, the “Green Man,” a most innocent-looking, white, plaster-faced house that seems a very bower of rustic simplicity and guilelessness, standing at Hatton—“Hatton-in-the-Hinterland” as one feels tempted to style it—a rural hamlet, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” tucked away in the beautiful orchard country between the angle formed by those branching Bath and Exeter roads westward of Hounslow town. ”

“ But the great building is still constructionally the house that fifteenth-century monk left, and how well and truly he built it, let its sound and stable condition, after four centuries and a half of constant use, tell.
Such modern touches as there are about this quaintly named “New” inn are the merest light clothing upon its ancient body, and the sitting-rooms and forty or so bedrooms, cosy and comfortable to us moderns, are but modern in their carpets and fittings, and in the paper that decorates their walls, in between the stout dark timber framing. ”

“ It was at once, in a sense—to compare old times with new—the hotel and railway-station of an age that knew neither railways nor the class of house we style “hotel.” It was the fine flower of the hostelling business, and to it came and went the carriers’ waggons, the early travellers riding horseback, and, in the course of time, as the age of wonderful inventions began to dawn, the stage and mail-coaches. Travellers of the most gentle birth, equally with those rich merchants and clothiers who were the greatest travellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, inned at such establishments. ”

“ We have, fortunately, in the British Museum, an illustration of such a house, done in the fourteenth century, and therefore contemporary with Chaucer himself. It is rough but vivid, and if the pilgrim we see drinking out of a saucer-like cup be gigantic, and the landlady, waiting with the jug, a thought too big for her inn, we are at any rate clearly made to see the life of that long ago. ”

“ 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? ”

“ They had not at first purposed to make a halt at that place, having planned to stay the night at Tan-y-Bwlch, where the inn commanded a view over a lovely wooded vale. The perils and the inconveniences of the vile road by which they had come faded into insignificance when they drew near, and they began to reckon upon the comforts of a good supper and good beds at Tan-y-Bwlch. They even disputed whether the supper should be chickens or chops, but all such vain arguments and contentions faded away when they drew near and a stony-faced landlord declared he had no room for them. ”

“ But, as far as mere name goes, most inns are “hotels” nowadays. It is as though innkeepers were labouring under the illusion that “inn” connotes something inferior, and “hotel” a superior order of things. Even along the roads, in rustic situations, the mere word “inn”—an ancient and entirely honourable title—is become little used or understood, and, generally speaking, if you ask a rustic for the next “inn” he stares vacantly before his mind grasps the fact that you mean what he calls a “pub,” or, in some districts oftener still, a “house.” ”

“ What visions of Early Victorian good-fellowship and conviviality, of the roast-beef and rum-punch kind, are called up by the title! The Pickwickian Inn was, in the ’30’s of the nineteenth century, the last word in hospitable comfort, and its kitchen achieved the topmost pinnacle of culinary refinement demanded by an age that was robust rather than refined, whose appetites were gross rather than discriminating, and whose requirements seem to ourselves, of a more sybarite and exacting generation, few and modest. ”

“ Southwell, whose hoary Minster has in modern times become a cathedral, has fallen into a dreamless slumber since the last of the coaches left the road, and as the traveller comes into its quiet streets, in whose midst the great Norman church stands solemnly, like some grey architectural ghost, he feels that he has come into a place whose last days of activity ended considerably over half a century ago. ”

“ In the country the pretty little inn, with its honeysuckled porch and scrambling profusion of climbing roses up to the bedroom windows, had an even more home-like character in its methods of dealing with its guests. Here the servants stayed on for years, till they grew to be as much part of the establishment as the four-poster hung with red moreen and the plated sconces for candles. ”

“ The most interesting Dickensian inn, outside the pages of Pickwick, is the “Maypole,” in Barnaby Rudge.
There never existed upon this earth an inn so picturesque as that drawn, entirely from his imagination, by Cattermole, to represent the “Maypole.” You may seek even among the old mansions of England, and find nothing more baronial. The actual “Maypole”—when found—is a sad disappointment to those who have cherished the Cattermole ideal, and there is wrath and indignation among pilgrims from over-seas when they come to it. ”

“ This is, in short, to say that although the plaster decoration of the “Globe Room” is fine, it is neither so intrinsically fine, nor so original above all others, that it deserves so great an honour. The really supremely fine feature of the room is the beautiful Jacobean panelling in oak, now almost coal-black with age, covering the walls from floor to ceiling, and designed and wrought in unusually thorough and bold style. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No wealthy traveller, coming to his inn overnight in those far-distant times, with pistols fully loaded and primed, dared set forth again without narrowly examining his weapons, whose charges, he would be not unlikely to discover, had mysteriously been drawn since his arrival, and perhaps his sword fixed by some unknown agency immovably in its scabbard. You figure such an one, too hurried at his starting to look closely into his equipment, come unexpectedly in the presence of a highwayman, and, his armoury thus raided, falling an easy prey. ”

“ It is only an “inn” by courtesy, for, however interesting and picturesque the grimy, tottering old lath-and-plaster house may be to the stranger, imagination does not picture any one staying either in the house or in Cloth Fair itself while other houses and other neighbourhoods remain to choose from; and, indeed, the “Dick Whittington” [Pg 6] does not pretend to be anything else than a public-house. The quaint little figure at the angle, in the gloom of the overhanging upper storey, is one of the queer, unconventional imaginings of our remote forefathers, and will repay examination. ”

“ Home is the place where the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you are a document in a pigeon-hole—a number, not a person—an accident, not substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management. You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. ”

“ We travellers are unwilling to be thought of merely as numbers identical with those of our bedrooms, and we like to believe, against our own better judgment, that the old-fashioned hosts and hostesses were pleased to see us; which of course, in that special sense, was not the case. But a little make-believe sometimes goes a great way, and we need never, unless we have a mind to distress ourselves, seek the tongue of humbug in the cheek of courtesy.
The landlord of a good coaching house was a very important person indeed. Not seldom he was a large owner of horses and employer of labour ”

“ It was panelled from floor to ceiling in richly carved oak, set off with gilding, and embellished with the figures of Peace and Concord and the initials C R, while the ceiling was painted with nymphs and cherubim by Antonio Verrio.
Nothing has more changed from its former condition than the old inn which has become the modern hotel. ”

“ The “George,” after the fine old church—that church in which Tom Pinch played the organ—is the chief ornament of Amesbury, and that it was the inn meant by Dickens when he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit is in the village an article of faith which no visitor dare controvert or dispute in any way on the spot. Like the small boys who do not say “Yah!” and are not courageous enough to make grimaces until safely out of arm’s reach, we only dare dispassionately discuss the pros and cons when out of the place. ”

“ For one of the most entertaining examples of history enacted at an inn, we must shift the scene to Chester.
Among the ancient inns of that city, long since retired from the innkeeping business is the “Blue Posts,” a house in its day historic by reason of one dramatic incident: an incident so dramatic that it would almost seem to have been borrowed from the stage. It was the year 1558, the last of the reign of Queen Mary, of bloody memory, and Dr. Henry Cole, Dean of St. Paul’s, was come to Chester on his way to Ireland, where he had work to do, in the persecution of the Irish Protestants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, to fill some private purses over-full, you thus callously rebuild historic cities, their history becomes merely a matter for the printed page, and themselves to the eye nothing but a congeries of crowded streets where the motor-omnibuses scream and clash and stink, and citizens hustle to get a living. History, without visible ancient buildings to assure the sceptical modern traveller that it is not wholly lies, will never by itself draw visitors. ”

“ A pointer has pleasure in finding game, the terrier worries rats with eagerness and delight, and the bull-dog even attacks bulls with the greatest energy, while the poor turnspit performs his task with compulsion, like a culprit on a tread-wheel, subject to scolding or beating if he stops a moment to rest his weary limbs, and is then kicked about the kitchen when the task is over. ”

“ 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 [Pg 137] 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. ”

“ When the inn was closed for the night Slurk retired to the kitchen to drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet luxury of sneering at the rival print; but, as it happened, Mr. Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to the kitchen to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How ancient, by the way, seems that custom! Does any guest, anywhere, in these times of smoking-rooms, withdraw to the kitchen to smoke his cigar, pipe, or cigarette? ”