HOSPITALITIES OF "FRIENDS"--HARVEST ASPECTS--ENGLISH COUNTRY INNS;
THEIR APPEARANCE, NAMES, AND DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS--THE
LANDLADY, WAITER, CHAMBERMAID, AND BOOTS--EXTRA FEES AND EXTRA
COMFORTS.
I reached Saffron Walden at 4 p.m., notwithstanding my involuntary
walk of six extra miles in the morning. Here I remained over the
Sabbath, again enjoying the hospitality of a Friend. And perhaps I
may say it here and now with as much propriety as at any other time
and place, that few persons, outside the pale of that society, have
more frequently or fully enjoyed that hospitality than myself. This
pleasant experience has covered the space of more than sixteen
years. During this period, with the exception of short intervals, I
have been occupied with movements which the Friends in England have
always regarded with especial sympathy. This connection has brought
me into acquaintance with members of the society in almost every
town in Great Britain in which they reside; and in more than a
hundred of their homes I have been received as a guest with a
kindness which will make to my life's end one of its sunniest
memories.
On the following Monday, I resumed my walk northward, after a
carriage ride which a Friend kindly gave me for a few miles on the
way. Passed through a pre-eminently grain-producing district.
Apparently full three-fourths of the land were covered with wheat,
barley, oats, and beans. The fields of each were larger than I had
noticed before; some containing 100 acres. The coming harvest is
putting forth the full glory of its golden promise. The weather is
all a farmer could wish, beautiful, warm, and bright. Nature, in
every feature of its various scapes, seems to smile with the joy of
that human happiness which her ministries inspire. Here, in these
still expanses, waving with luxuriant crops, apparently so thinly
peopled, one, forgetting the immense populations crowded into city
spaces, is almost tempted to ask, where are all the mouths to eat
this wide sea of food for man and beast, softening so gently into a
yellow sheen under the very rim of the distant horizon? But, in the
great heart of London, beating with the wants of millions, he will
be likely to reverse the question, and ask, where can one buy bread
wherewith to feed this great multitude?
At Sawston, a rustic little village on the southern border of
Cambridgeshire, I entered upon the enjoyment of English country-inn
life with that relish which no one born in a foreign land can so
fully feel as an American. As one looks upon the living face of
some distinguished celebrity for the first time, after having had
his portrait hung up in the parlor for twenty years, so an American
looks, for the first time, at that great and picturesque speciality
among human institutions, the village inn of old England. The like
of it he never saw in his own country and never will. In fact, he
would not like to see it there, plucked up out of its ancient
histories and associations. In the ever-green foliage of these it
stands inwoven, as with its own network of ivy. Other countries,
even older than England, have had their taverns from time
immemorial; but they are all kept in the background of human life.
They do not come out in contemporaneous history with any
definiteness; not even accidentally. If a king is murdered in one
of them, or if it is the theatre of the most thrilling romance of
love, you do not know whether it is a building of stone, brick, or
wood; whether it is one, two, or three stories in height. No
outlines nor aspects are given you to help to fill up a rational
picture of it. Neither the landlord nor the landlady is drawn as a
representative man or woman. Either might be mistaken for a guest
in their own house, if seen in hat or bonnet by a stranger.
But not so of the English country inn. It comes out into the
foreground of a thousand interesting histories and pictures of
common life. In them it has an individuality as marked as the
parish church, couchante in its wide-rimmed nest of grave stones; as
marked in unique architecture, location, and surroundings. In none
of these features will you find two alike, if you travel from one
end of the country to the other; especially among those a century
old. You might as well mistake one of the living animals for the
other, as to mistake "The Blue Boar" for "The Red Lion." They
differ as much from each other in general make and aspect as do
their nominal prototypes. To give every one of their thousands "a
local habitation and a name" of striking distinctness, has required
an ingenuity which has produced many interesting feats of house-
building and nomenclature. Both these departments of genius figure
largely in the poetry and classics of the institution, with which
the reading million of America have been familiar from youth up.
And when any of them come to travel in England, it will greatly
enhance their enjoyment to find that the pictures they have admired
and the descriptions they have read of the famous country inn have
been true to the very life and letter. All its salient features
they recognise at once, and are ready to exclaim, "How natural!"
meaning by that, how true is the original to the picture which they
have seen so frequently. If they go far enough, they will find the
very original of every one of the hundred pictures they have seen,
painted by pen or pencil. They will find that all of them have been
true copies from nature. Here is the portly-looking, well-to-do,
two-story tavern, standing out with its comfortable, cream-colored
face broadside to the street. It is represented in the old
engraving with a coach-and-four drawn up before the door, surrounded
by a crowd of spectators and passengers, some descending and
ascending on ladders over the forward wheels; some looking with
admiration at the scarlet coats of the pursy and consequential
driver and guard; some exchanging greetings, others farewell
salutations; ostlers in long waistcoats, plush or fustian shorts,
and yellow leggings, standing bareheaded with watering-pails at the
"'osses' 'eads;" trunks great and small going up and down; village
boys in high excitement; village grandfathers looking very animated;
the landlord, burly, bland, and happy, with a face as rotund and
genial as the full moon shining upon the scene; and those round,
rosy, sunny, laughing faces peering out of the windows with
delightful wonderment and exhilaration, winked at by the driver, and
saluted with a graceful motion of his whip-handle in recognition of
the barmaid, chambermaid, and all the other maids of the house. The
coach, with all its picturesque appointments, its four-in-hand, the
stirring heraldry of its horn coming down the road, its rattling
wheels, the life and stir aroused and moved in its wake,--all this
has gone from the presence of a higher civilisation. It will never
re-appear in future pictures of actual life in England. It is all
gone where the hedges and hedge-row trees will probably go in their
turn. But the same village inn remains, and can be as easily
recognised as a widow in weeds, who still wears a hopeful face, and
makes the best of her bereavement.
But that humbler type of hostelry so often represented in sketches
of English rural life and scenery--the little, cozy, one-story,
wayside, or hamlet inn, with its thatched roof, checker-work window,
low door, and with a loaded hay-cart standing in front of it, while
the driver, in his round, wool hat, and in his smock-frock, is
drinking at a pewter mug of beer, with one hand on his horse's neck-
-this the hand of modern improvements has not yet reached. This may
be found still in a thousand villages and hamlets, surrounded with
all its rural associations; the green, the geese, and gray donkeys
feeding side by side; low-jointed cottages, with long, sloping roofs
greened over with moss or grass, and other objects usually shadowed
dimly in the background of the picture. It is these quiet hamlets
and houses in the still depths of the country, away from the noise
and bluster of railway life and motion, that best represent and
perpetuate the primeval characteristics of a nation. These the
American traveller will find invested with all the old charm with
which his fancy clothed them. It will well repay him for a month's
walk to see and enjoy them thoroughly.
In these days of sun-literature, whose letters are human faces, and
whose new volumes are numbered by the million yearly, without a
duplicate to one of them, I am confident that a volume of these
English village inns of the olden school, in photographs, would
command a large sale and admiration in America, merely as specimens
of unique and interesting architecture. A thousand might be taken,
every one as unlike the other in distinctive form and feature, as
every one of the same number of men would be to the other.
The diversification of names, being more difficult, is still more
remarkable. Although the spread eagle figures largely as the patron
genius of American hotels, still nine-tenths of them bear the names
of states, counties, towns, or national or local celebrities. But
here natural history comes out strong and wide. The heraldry of
sovereigns, aristocracy, gentry, commercial and industrial
interests, puts up its various _arms_ upon hundreds of inns in town
and country. All occupations and recreations are well represented.
Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope
and play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations are
exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity.
Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it
justice in his hotel scenes. Things are put together on a hundred
tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral
world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association.
For instance, there is a large, first-class inn right in the very
heart of London, which has for a sign, not painted on a board, but
let into the wall of the upper story, in solid statuary, a huge
human mouth opened to its utmost capacity, and a bull, round and
plump, standing stoutly on its four legs between the two distended
jaws. Now, the leading idea of this device is involved in a
tempting obscurity, which leads one, at first sight, into different
lines of conjecture. What did the designer of this group of
statuary really intend to represent? Was it to let the outside
world know that, in that inn, the "Roast Beef of Old England" was
always to be found par excellence? If so, would a man's mouth
swallowing a bull whole, and apparently alive, with hide and horns,
tend to stimulate the appetite of a passing traveller, and to draw
him into the establishment? But leaving these ambiguous symbols to
be interpreted by the passing public according to different
perceptions of their meaning, how many in a thousand would guess
aright the name given to the tavern by these tokens? Would not
ninety-nine in a hundred say, "The Mouth and Bull," to be sure, not
only on the principle that the major includes the minor, but also
because the human element is entitled to precedence in the picture?
But the ninety-nine would be completely mistaken, if they adopted
this natural conclusion. They would find they had counted without
their host, who knows better than they the relative position and
value of things. What has the law of logic to do with fat beef?
The name of his famous hotel is "THE BULL AND MOUTH;" and few in
London have attained to its celebrity as a historical building. One
is apt to wonder if this precedence given to the beast is really
incidental, or adopted to give euphony to the name of an inn, or
whether there is a latent and spontaneous leaning to such a method
of association, from some cause or other connected with perceptions
of personal comfort afforded at such establishments. Accidental or
intentional, this form of association is very common. There is no
tavern in London better known than The Elephant and Castle, a
designation that would sound equally well if the two substantives
were transposed. Even the loftiest symbols of sovereignty often
occupy the secondary place in these compound titles. There are,
doubtless, a hundred inns in Great Britain bearing the name of The
Rose and Crown, but not one, to my knowledge, called "The Crown and
Rose." The same order obtains in sporting sections and terminology.
It is always "The _Hare_ and Hounds;" never "_Hounds_ and Hare."
This characteristic in itself is very interesting, and no American,
with an eye to the unique, would like to see it changed. But if the
more syntax of hotel names in England is so pleasant for him to
study, how much more admirable is their variety! He has read at
home of many of them in lively romance and grave history but he
finds here that not half has been told him. He is familiar with the
Lions, Red, White, and Black; the Bulls and Boars of the same
colors; the Black and White Swans and Harts; the Crown and Anchor,
the Royal George, Queen's Head, and a few others of similar
designation. These names have figured in volumes of English
literature which he has perused. But let him travel on the turnpike
road through country towns and villages, and he will meet with names
he never thought of before, mounted over the doors of some of the
most comfortable and delightful houses of entertainment for man and
beast that can be found in the world. Here are a few that I have
noticed: "The Three Jolly Butchers," "The Old Mash Tub," "The Old
Mermaid," "The Old Malt Shovel," "The Chequers," "The Dog-in-
Doublet," "Bishop Boniface," "The Spotted Cow," "The Green Dragon,"
"The Three Horseshoes," "The Bird-in-Hand," "The Spare Rib," "The
Old Cock," "Pop goes the Weasel." There are wide spaces between
these names which may be filled up from actual life with numbers of
equal uniqueness. But it is not in architecture nor in name that
the country inn presents its most attractive characteristic. These
features merely specialise its outward corporeity. The living,
brightening, all-pervading soul of the establishment is the
LANDLADY. Let her name be written in capitals evermore. There is
nothing so naturally, speakingly, and gloriously English in the wide
world as she. It is doubtful if the nation is aware of this, but it
is the fact. Her English individuality stands out embonpoint, rosy,
genial, self-complacent, calm, serene, happyfying, and happy. She
is the man and master of the house. She permeates it with her
rayful presence, and fills it with a pleasant morning in foggy and
blue-spirited days. She it is who greets the coming and speeds the
parting guest with a grace which suns, with equal light and warmth,
both remembrance and anticipation. It is not put on like a Sunday
dress; it is not a thin gloss of French politeness that a feather,
blown the wrong way, will brush off. It is not a color; it is a
quality. You see it breathe and move in her like a nature, not as
an art. Let no American traveller fancy he has seen England if he
has not seen the Landlady of the village inn. If he has to miss
one, he had better give up his visit to the Crystal Palace,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Abbottsford, or even the House of Lords, or
Windsor itself. Neither is so perfectly and exclusively English as
the mistress of "The Brindled Cow," in one of the rural counties of
the kingdom.
It would be necessary to coin a new word if one were sought to
contain and convey the distinctive characteristic of inn-life in
England. Perhaps _homefulness_ would do this best, as it would more
fully than any other term describe the coziness, quiet, and comfort
to be enjoyed at these places of entertainment. Not one in a
hundred of them ever heard the sound of the hotel-going bell, as we
hear it in America. You are not thundered up or down by a
vociferous gong. Then there is no marching nor counter-marching of
a long line of waiters in white jackets around the dinner table,
laying down plate, knife, fork, and spoon with uniform step and
motion, as if going through a dress-parade or a military drill.
There is no bustle, no noise, no eager nor anxious look of served or
servants. Every one is calm, collected, and comfortable. "The
cares that infest the day" do not ride into the presence of that
roast beef and plum pudding on the wrinkles of any man's forehead,
however business affairs may go with him outside. No one is in a
hurry to sit down or to arise from the table. The whole economy of
the establishment is to make you as much at home as possible; to
individualise you, as far as it can be done, in every department of
personal comfort. You follow your own time and inclination, and eat
and drink when and how you please, with others or alone. The
congregate system is the exception, not the rule. It seldom ever
obtains at breakfast or tea. In many cases you have a little round
table all to yourself at these meals. But if there is a common
table for half a dozen persons, the tea and toast and other eatables
are never aggregated into a common stock. Each person if he is a
single guest, has his own allotment, even to a separate tea-pot.
The table d'hote, if there be one at all, is made up like a select
dinner party, rather early in the morning. If the guests of the
house are not directly invited, they are asked, in a tone of
hospitality, if they will join in the social meal, the only one got
up by the establishment at which the table is not mapped out in
separate holdings, or little independencies of dishes, each bounded
by the wants and capacities of the individual occupant.
The presiding and working faculty of a common English inn
distinguishes it by another salient characteristic from the hotels
of other countries. The landlady is, of course, the president of
the establishment, whether or not she calls any man lord in the
retired and family department of the house. But the actual
gerantes, or working corps, with which you have to do immediately,
are three independent and distinct personages, called the waiter,
chambermaid, and _boots_. If it were respectful to gender, these
might be called the great triumvirate of the English inn. No
traveller after a night's lodging and breakfast, will mistake or
confound the prerogatives or perquisites of these officials. If he
is an American, and it be his first experience of the regime, he
will be surprised and puzzled at the imperium in imperio which his
bill, presented to him on a tea-tray, seems to represent. In no
other business transaction of his life did he ever see the like. It
goes far beyond anything in the line of limited partnership he ever
saw. There is only one partial parallel that approaches it; and
this comes to his mind as he reads the several items on his bill.
When made out and interpreted, it comes to this: the proprietor,
the waiter, chambermaid, and boots are independent parties, who get
up a night's lodging and two or three meals for you on the same
footing as four independent underwriters would take proportionate
risks at Lloyd's in some ship at sea. Or, what would put it in
simpler form to an uninitiated guest, he is apparently first charged
for the raw provisions he consumes, and for the rent of his bed-
room. This is the proprietor's share. Then, there is a separate
charge for each of the remaining items of the entertainment,--for
cooking and serving up each meal, for making up your bed, and for
blacking your boots; just as distinctly as if you had gone out into
the town the previous evening and hired three separate individuals
to perform these services for you; and as if you had no right nor
reason to expect from the landlord a dinner all cooked and served,
but that you only bought it in the larder.
Now, this is a peculiarity of the English hotel system that is apt
to embarrass travellers from other countries, especially from
America, where no such custom could be introduced. I do not know
how old the custom is in Great Britain. Doubtless it originated in
the almost universal disposition and habit of Englishmen of dropping
gratuities or charity-gifts here and there with liberal hand, either
to obtain or reward extra service in matters of personal comfort, or
to alleviate some case of actual or stimulated suffering that meets
them. It was natural and inevitable that gratuities thus given to
hotel servants frequently to stimulate and reward special attention
should soon become a rule, acting upon guests like a law of honor.
When so many gave, and when the servants of every hotel expected a
gift, a man must feel shabby to go away without dropping a few
pennies into the hands of eager expectants who almost claimed the
gratuity as a right. The worst stage of the system was when the
expected gift was measured by your supposed position and ability, or
when the waiter or the chambermaid, flattering you with what
Falstaff would call an instinctive perception of your dignity, would
say with an asking and hopeful smile, "What you please, sir." Now,
that was not the question with you at all. You wanted to know how
much each expected, or how much you must give to acquit yourself of
the charge of being "a screw," when they put their heads and gains
together in conference and comparison after you were gone. So, on
the whole, it was a great relief when all these awkward
uncertainties of expectation were cleared up and rectified in the
system now usually adopted.
Whether you be rich or poor, or whatever position or pretension be
attributed to you, the fees of the universal triumvirate are put
down specifically in black and white among the other charges on your
bill. As I hope these notes may convey some useful information to
Americans who may be about to visit England for the first time, it
may be of some use to them to state what is the usual rule in this
matter at the middle-class hotels in this country; for with those of
the first rank I never have made nor ever expect to make any
personal acquaintance. A moderate bill for a day's entertainment
will read thus:--
s.d.
Tea (bread and butter or toast) 1 0
Bed 1 6
Breakfast (rasher of bacon, eggs, or cold meats) 1 6
Dinner 2 6
Waiter 0 9
Chambermaid 0 6
Boots 0 3
----
Total 8 0
These are about the average charges at the middle-class hotels in
Great Britain. Generally the servants' fees amount to 25 per cent.
of the whole bill. These, too, are graduated to parts of days. The
waiter expects 3d. for every meal he serves; the chambermaid 6d. for
every bed she makes, and the boots 3d. for doing every pair of
boots, brogans, or shoes. You will pay these charges with all the
better grace and good-will to these servants when you come to learn
that these fees frequently, if not always, constitute all the salary
they receive for hotel service. Even in a great number of eating-
shops the same rule obtains. The penny you give the waiter, male or
female, is all he or she gets for serving you. Besides this
consideration, you get back much additional personal comfort from
these extras. The waiter serves you with extra satisfaction and
assiduity under their stimulus. He acts the host very blandly. He
answers a hundred questions, extraneous to the meal, with good-
natured readiness. He is a good judge of the weather and its signs.
He is well "posted-up" in the local histories and sceneries of the
place. He can give political information on both sides, incidents
and anecdotes to match, whether you are Tory, Whig, or Radical. If
you have a bias in that direction, he has or has heard some thoughts
on Bishop Colenso and the Tractarians. In short, he caters to the
humour and disposition of every guest with a happy facility of
adaptation; and the shilling you give him at the end of a day's
entertainment has been pretty well earned, if you have availed
yourself of all these extra attentions which he is prepared and
expecting to give for it.
The same may be said of the chambermaid. She is not the taciturn
invisible that steals in and out of your bed-room, and does it up
when you are at breakfast or at your out-door business--whom you
never see, except by sheer accident, as in the American hotel. She
is an important and prominent personage in the English inn. She is
a kind of mistress of the robes, and exercises her prerogative with
much conscious dignity and self-satisfaction; and, what is better,
with great satisfaction to yourself. No other subordinate official
or servant trenches or poaches upon her preserves. She it is who
precedes you up stairs with a candle, on a broad-bottomed brass
candlestick, polished to its highest lustre. She conducts you to
your room as if you were her personal guest, invited and expected a
month ago. She opens the door with amiable complacency, as if
welcoming you to a hospitality which she had prepared for you with
especial care, before she knew you had arrived in town. She invites
you, by a movement of her eyes, to glance at the room and see how
comfortable it is; how round and soft is the bed, how white and
well-aired are the sheets and pillows, how nice the curtains, how
clean and tidy the carpet, in short, how everything is fitted to
incline you to "rest and be thankful." And then the cheery "_good
night_!" she bids you is said with a tone that is worth the sixpence
she expects in the morning; and you pay it, too, with a much better
grace than could be expected from an American recently arrived in
the country.
And the "boots" is a character, too, unmixedly and interestingly
English, in name, person, appearance, and position. In the first of
these qualities he is unique, being called after the subject of his
occupation. He is an important personage, and generally has his own
bell in the dining-room, surmounted by his name, to be called for
any service coming within his department. And this is quite a wide
one, including a great variety of errandry and porterage, as well as
polishing boots and shoes. He is very helpful in a great many
different ways, and often very intelligent, and knows all about the
streets, the railway trains, the omnibuses, cabs, etc., and will
assist you in such matters with good grace and activity. He may
have got in the way of putting the H before the eggs instead of the
ham; but he is just as good for all that, and more interesting
besides. So you do not grudge the 3d. you give him daily for his
strictly professional services, or the extra 6d. he expects for
carrying your carpet-bag or portmanteau to the railway-station.
Thus, although this feeing of servants may seem at first strange to
an American traveller in England, and may occasion him some
perplexity and even annoyance, he will soon become accustomed to it;
and in making up the balance-sheet of the additional cost on one
side and the additional comfort on the other which the system
produces, he will come even to the mathematical conclusion, "if to
equals you add equals, the sums will be equals."