THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The inns of old time, serving as they did the varied functions of clubs
and assembly-rooms and places of general resort, in addition to that of
hotel, were often, at times when controversies ran high, very turbulent
places.
The manners and customs prevailing in the beginning of the eighteenth
century may be imagined from an affray which befell at the “Raven,”
Shrewsbury, in 1716, when two officers of the Dragoons insisted in the
public room of the inn, upon a Mr. Andrew Swift and a Mr. Robert Wood,
apothecary, drinking “King George, and Damnation to the Jacobites.” The
civilians refused, whereupon those military men drew their swords,
but--swords notwithstanding--they were very handsomely thrashed, and one
was placed upon the fire, and not only had his breeches burnt through in a
conspicuous place, but had his person toasted. The officers then, we
learn, “went off, leaving their hatts, wigs and swords (which were broke)
behind them.”
One did not, it will be gathered from the above, easily in those times
lead the Quiet Life; but that was a heated occasion, and we were then
really upon the threshold of that fine era when inns, taverns, and
coffee-houses were the resort, not merely of travellers or of thirsty
souls, but of wits and the great figures of eighteenth-century literature,
who were convivial as well as literary. It was a great, and, as it seems
to the present century, a curious, time; when men of the calibre of
Addison, of Goldsmith and of Johnson, acknowledged masters in classic and
modern literature, smoked and drank to excess in the public parlours of
inns. But those were the clubs of that age, and that was an age in which,
although the producers of literature were miserably rewarded, their
company and conversation were sought and listened to with respect.
When Dr. Johnson declared that a seat in a tavern chair was the height of
human felicity, his saying carried a special significance, lost upon the
present age. He was thinking, not only of a comfortable sanded parlour, a
roaring fire, and plenty of good cheer and good company, but also of the
circle of humbly appreciative auditors who gathered round an accepted wit,
hung upon his words, offered themselves as butts for his ironic or satiric
humour, and--stood treat. The great wits of the eighteenth century
expected subservience in their admirers, and only began to coruscate, to
utter words of wisdom or inspired nonsense, or to scatter sparkling quips
and jests, when well primed with liquor--at the expense of others. The
felicity of Johnson found in a tavern chair was derived, therefore,
chiefly from the homage of his attendant humble Boswells, and from the
fact that they paid the reckoning; and was, perhaps, to some modern ideas,
a rather shameful idea of happiness.
Johnson, who did not love the country, and thought one green field very
like another green field, when he spoke of a tavern chair was of course
thinking of London taverns. He would have found no sufficient audience in
its wayside fellow, which indeed was apt, in his time and for long after,
to be somewhat rough and ready, and, when you had travelled a little far
afield, became a very primitive and indeed barbarous place.
At Llannon, in 1797, those sketching and note-taking friends, Rowlandson
and Wigstead, touring North and South Wales in search of the picturesque,
found it, not unmixed with dirt and discomfort, at the inns. Indeed, it
was only at one town in Wales--the town of Neath--that Wigstead found
himself able to declare, “with strict propriety,” that the house was
comfortable. Comfort and decency fled the inn at Llannon, abashed. This,
according to Wigstead, was the way of it: “The cook on our arrival was in
the suds, and, with unwiped hands, reached down a fragment of mutton for
our repast: a piece of ham was lost, but after long search was found
amongst the worsted stockings and sheets on the board.”
Then “a little child was sprawling in a dripping-pan which seemed recently
taken from the fire: the fat in this was destined to fry our eggs in.
Hunger itself even was blunted,” and the travellers left those delicacies
almost untouched. Not even the bread was without its surprises. “I devoted
my attention to a brown loaf,” says Wigstead, “but on cutting into it was
surprised to find a ball of carroty-coloured wool; and to what animal it
had belonged I was at a loss to determine. Our table-cloth had served the
family for at least a month, and our sitting-room was everywhere decorated
with the elegant relics of a last night’s smoking society, as yet
unremoved.”
All this was pretty bad, but perhaps even the baby in the dripping-pan,
the month-old table-cloth, and the hank of wool in the loaf were to be
preferred to what they had experienced at Festiniog. 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.
We can easily sympathise here with those travellers in search of the
picturesque, for we have all met with the like strokes of Fate. No doubt
the beauties of the view suddenly obscured themselves, as will happen
when you can get nothing to eat or drink; and probably they thought of Dr.
Johnson, who a few years earlier had held the most beautiful landscape
capable of being improved by a good inn in the foreground. But a good inn
where they cannot or will not receive you, is, in such a situation,
sorrow’s crown of sorrow, an aggravation and a mockery.
It was a tragical position, and down the sounding alleys of time vibrates
strange chords of reminiscence in the breasts of even modern tourists of
any experience. We too, have suffered; and many an one may say, with much
tragical meaning, “_et ego in Arcadia vixit_.”
Alas! for the frustrated purpose of Messrs. Rowlandson and Wigstead,
Tan-y-Bwlch could not, or would not, receive them, and they had no choice
but to journey three more long Welsh miles to Festiniog in the rain. It
sometimes rains in Wales, and when it does, it rarely knows when to leave
off.
Arrived there, they almost passed the inn, in the gathering darkness,
mistaking it for a barn or an outhouse; and when they made to enter, they
were confronted by an extraordinary landlady with the appearance of one of
the three witches in _Macbeth_.
“Could they have beds?”
Reluctantly she said they could, telling them (what we know to be true
enough) that she supposed they only came there because there was no
accommodation at Tan-y-Bwlch.
The travellers made no reply to that damning accusation, and hid their
incriminating blushes in the congenial gloom of the fast-falling night. It
was a situation in which, if you come to consider it, no wise man would
give “back answers.” You have a landlady who, for the proverbial two pins,
or even less, would cast you forth; and when so thrust into the
inhospitable night, you have seventeen mountainous miles to go, in a
drenching rain, before any other kind of asylum is reached.
Wigstead remarks that they “were not a little satisfied at being under any
kind of roof,” and the words seem woefully inadequate to the occasion.
There were no chops that night for supper, nor chickens; and they fed,
with what grace they could summon up, on a “small leg of starved mutton
and a duck,” which, by the scent of them, had been cooked a fortnight. For
sauce they had hunger only.
“Our bedrooms,” says Wigstead, “were most miserable indeed: the rain
poured in at every tile in the ceiling,” and the sheets were literally
wringing wet; so that, in Wigstead’s elegant phrasing, they “thought it
most prudent to sacrifice to _Somnus_ in our own garments, between
blankets”: which may perhaps be translated, into everyday English, to mean
that they slept in their own clothes.
They saw strange sights on that wild tour, and, in the course of their
hazardous travels through the then scarcely civilised interior of the
Principality, came to the “pleasant village” of Newcastle Emlyn,
Carmarthenshire, where they found a “decent inn” in whose kitchen they
remarked a dog acting as turnspit. That the dogs so employed did not
particularly relish the work is evident in Wigstead’s remark: “Great care
must be taken that this animal does not observe the cook approach the
larder. If he does, he immediately hides himself for the remainder of the
day,” acting, in fact, like a professional “unemployed” when offered a
job!
A familiar sight in the kitchen of any considerable inn of the long ago
was the turnspit dog, who, like the caged mouse or squirrel with his
recreation-wheel, revolved a kind of treadwheel which, in this instance,
was connected with apparatus for turning the joints roasting at the fire,
and formed not so much recreation as extremely hard work. The dogs
commonly used for this purpose were of the long-bodied, short-legged,
Dachshund type.
Machinery, in the form of bottle-jacks revolved by clockwork, came to the
relief of those hard-working dogs so long ago that all knowledge of
turnspits, except such as may be gleaned from books of reference, is now
lost, and illustrations of them performing their duties are exceedingly
rare. Rowlandson’s spirited drawing is, on that account, doubly welcome.
[Illustration: THE KITCHEN OF A COUNTRY INN, 1797: SHOWING THE TURNSPIT
DOG. _From the engraving after Rowlandson._]
Turnspits were made the subject of a very illuminating notice, a
generation or so back, by a former writer on country life: “How well do I
recollect,” he says, “in the days of my youth watching the operations of a
turnspit at the house of a worthy old Welsh clergyman in Worcestershire,
who taught me to read! He was a good man, wore a bushy wig, black worsted
stockings, and large plated buckles in his shoes. As he had several
boarders as well as day-scholars, his two turnspits had plenty to do. They
were long-bodied, crook-legged and ugly dogs, with a suspicious, unhappy
look about them, as if they were weary of the task they had to do, and
expected every moment to be seized upon, to perform it. Cooks in those
days, as they are said to be at present, were very cross; and if the poor
animal, wearied with having a larger joint than usual to turn, stopped for
a moment, the voice of the cook might be heard, rating him in no very
gentle terms. When we consider that a large, solid piece of beef would
take at least three hours before it was properly roasted, we may form some
idea of the task a dog had to perform in turning a wheel during that time.
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.”
The work being so hard, how ever did the dogs allow themselves to be put
to it? The training was, after all, extremely simple. You first, as Mrs.
Glasse might say, caught your dog. That, it will be agreed, was
indispensable. Then you put him, ignorant and uneducated, into the wheel,
and in company with him a live coal, which burnt his legs if he stood
still. He accordingly tried to race away from it, and the quicker he spun
the wheel round in his efforts the faster followed the coal: so that, by
dint of much painful experience, he eventually learned the (comparatively)
happy medium between standing still and going too fast. “These dogs,” it
was somewhat unnecessarily added, “were by no means fond of their
profession.” Of course they were not! Does the convict love his crank or
treadmill, or the galley-slave his oar and bench?
The turnspit was once so well-known an institution that he found an
allusion in poetry, and an orator was likened, in uncomplimentary fashion,
to one:
His arguments in silly circles run,
Still round and round, and end where they begun.
So the poor turnspit, as the wheel runs round,
The more he gains, the more he loses ground.
These unfortunate dogs acquired a preternatural intelligence. A humorous,
but probably not true, story is told, illustrating this. It was at Bath,
and some of them had accompanied their mistresses to church, where the
lesson chanced to be the tenth chapter of Ezekiel, in which there is an
amazing deal about self-propelled chariots, and wheels. When the dogs
first heard the word “wheel” they started up in alarm; on its occurring a
second time they howled dolefully, and at the third instance they all
rushed from the church.
Strangely modern appear the grievances raised against innkeepers in the
old times. The bills they presented were early pronounced exorbitant, and
so, in spite of measures intended for the relief of travellers, they
remained. Indeed, throughout the centuries, until the present day, the
curious in these matters will find, not unexpectedly, that innkeepers
charged according to what they considered their guests would grumble
at--and pay.
The eighteenth-century _locus classicus_ in this sort is the account
rendered to the Duc de Nivernais, the French Ambassador to England, who in
1762, coming to negotiate a treaty of peace, halted the night, on his way
from Dover to London, at the “Red Lion,” Canterbury.
For the night’s lodging for twelve persons, with a frugal supper in which
oysters, fowls, boiled mutton, poached eggs and fried whiting figure, the
landlord presented an account of over £44. Our soldiers fought the
Frenchman; mine host did his humble, non-combatant part, and fleeced him.
This truly magnificent bill has been preserved, not, let us hope, for the
emulation of other hotel-keepers, but by way of a “terrible example.”
Here it is:
£ s. d.
Tea, coffee, and chocolate 1 4 0
Supper for self and servants 15 10 0
Bread and beer 3 0 0
Fruit 2 15 0
Wine and punch 10 8 8
Wax candles and charcoal 3 0 0
Broken glass and china 2 10 0
Lodging 1 7 0
Tea, coffee, and chocolate 2 0 0
Chaise and horses for the next stage 2 16 0
-------
44 10 8
=======
The Duke paid the account without a murmur, only remarking that innkeepers
at this rate should soon grow rich; but news of this extraordinary charge
was soon spread all over England. It was printed in the newspapers, amid
other marvels, disasters and atrocities, and mine host of the “Red Lion,”
like Byron in a later age, woke up one morning to find himself famous.
The country gentlemen, scandalised at his rapacity, boycotted his inn, and
his brother innkeepers of Canterbury disowned him. The unfortunate man
wrote to the _St. James’s Chronicle_, endeavouring to justify himself, and
complaining bitterly of the harm that had been wrought his business by the
continual billeting of soldiers upon him. But it was in vain he protested;
his trade fell off, and he was ruined in six months.
Sometimes, too, there was a difference of opinion as to whether a bill had
or had not actually been paid, as we see by the following indignant
letter:
Normanton near Stamford.
2{d} Sept{r} 1755.
Madam,
My Lord Morton Received a Letter from you of the 5{th} Aug{t}
inclosing a Bill drawn by you on his Lp for £6 1 11, and to make up
this sum p{r} your Account annexed to the above-mentioned Letter, you
charge twelve shillings for his Servant’s eating, for which he is
ready to Swear he paid you in full; then you charge for the Horses Hay
for 35 Nights notwithstanding you was ordered to send the horse out to
grass, and by the by when the horse came to London he was so poor as
if he had been quite neglected which seems probable as he mended soon
after he came here; at any rate you have used my Lord ill in the whole
affair, and if you or your Servants have committed any accidental
mistake either in the Lads Board or the horses hay pray see to rectify
it soon, because things of that sort not cleard up and satisfied are
very hurtfull to People in your publick way especially with those to
whom you have already been obliged, and who at any rate will not be
imposed upon. I am--
Madam--
Your humble sert
JOHN MILNE.
To
M{rs} Beaver
at the Black Bull
Newcastle
upon Tine,
free
Morton.
Then there was Dover, notorious for high prices. “Thy cliffs, _dear_
Dover! harbour and hotel,” sang Byron, who bitterly remembered the “long,
long bills, whence nothing is deducted.” The “Ship,” the hotel probably
indicted by the poet, has long since disappeared, but that gigantic
caravanserai, the “Lord Warden Hotel,” could at one time, in its
monumental charges, have afforded him material for another stanza.
Magnificent as were the charges made by overreaching hosts elsewhere, they
all paled their ineffectual sums-total before the sublime heights of the
account rendered to Louis Napoleon when Prince-President of France. He
merely remarked that it was truly princely, and paid.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF AN ACCOUNT RENDERED TO JOHN PALMER IN 1787.]
If, on the other hand, that famous coaching hostelry, the “Swan with Two
Necks,” in Lad Lane, in the City of London, charged guests for their
accommodation as moderately as the accompanying bill for stabling a horse,
the establishment should have been popular. This bill, printed here in
_facsimile_ from the original, was presented, April 16th, 1787, to John
Palmer, the famous Post Office reformer, and shows that only one shilling
and ninepence a night was charged. Yet he was at that time a famous man.
Three years before he had established the first mail-coach, and was
everywhere well known, and doubtless, in general, fair prey to renderers
of bills.
[Illustration: THE LAST DAYS OF THE “SWAN WITH TWO NECKS.”]
The “Swan with Two Necks,” whence many coaches set out, until the end of
such things, was often known by waggish people as the “Wonderful Bird,”
and obtained its name from a perversion of the “Swan with Two Nicks”:
swans that swam the upper Thames and were the property of the Vintners’
Company being marked on their bills with two nicks, for identification.
Lad Lane is now “Gresham Street,” but, apart from its mere name, is a lane
still; but the old buildings of the “Swan with Two Necks” were pulled down
in 1856.