THE INNKEEPER
“A seemly man our Hosté was withal.
For to have been a marshall in a hall.
A largé man he was with eyen stepe,
A fairer burgess is there none in Chepe;
Bold of his speech and wise, and well-y-taught
And of manhood him lackedé right naught.
Like thereto he was right a merry man.”
A model to all innkeepers was Our Hosté of the _Tabard_; a born leader of
men, quick to understand each man’s individualities, and full of kindly
sympathy for all. Ready of wit, he was ever careful to remove the sting
before it could rankle. A man of education, he could adapt himself to his
company and be skilful in devices for their comfort and recreation. Not
least of his many qualifications as a landlord was his presence of mind in
averting disputes by a judicious change of the subject.
We no longer send innkeepers to Parliament, nor do members of Parliament,
as a rule, undertake the personal superintendence of hotels, as they
often did in the fourteenth century. But the type of innkeeper portrayed
as Harry Bailey of the _Tabard_, in Southwark, is by no means extinct. You
may find him if you search well under many an old gable or Queen Anne
cornice--sometimes even in a smart new red-brick hotel. Nor is he lacking
on the great ancient trade routes that run right through Europe--not even
in those establishments recommended by Baedeker or Bradshaw--though the
new races of purse-proud tourists and Cook’s excursionists are fast
expelling him in favour of the servile and mercenary business manager. In
a humbler way, the village and wayside inns contain good men and true who
follow in the footsteps of Harry Bailey. Such inns, often kept by retired
tradesmen, blacksmiths or farmers, are a boon and a blessing to the
neighbourhood. They are not only a centre of recreation for the village
labourer; they tend also to educate and uplift him, ridiculous as the
assertion may seem to those who have never put on an old coat and tramped
through the by-ways into Arcady.
Diverse and sundry are the concerns in which the village innkeeper is
called upon to give advice. He is the arbitrator in disputes, he solves
weighty problems of rural etiquette. He knows the inner secrets of every
home and can weigh the respective merits of his clientele to a nicety. To
him it is that each one comes for help in trouble, social or financial,
and his charity is given irrespective of politics or creed, given
considerately as becomes a man of affairs, and without stint. The parish
clergy know him as a valuable ally, and it is not unusual to find him
acting as churchwarden. Nay, only the other day we saw a procession headed
by the worthy village publican carrying the cross, and a manful and
decorous crossbearer he proved himself.
It is surprising what good fellows innkeepers generally are, when one
considers all the difficulties surrounding their occupation. They are the
legitimate prey of every tax and rate collector. We know of one
middle-class beerhouse where the rent charged by the brewers is only £50 a
year, but which is rated at more than double that amount. The innkeeper,
for the purpose of taxation, is merged in the licensed victualler. He is
told that his business of selling fermented liquors is a valuable
monopoly, and a very heavy licensed duty is exacted for the privilege. Yet
he is expected to view with equanimity the dozens of bottles of beer,
wine and spirits passing his door in the trucks of the grocer, who by
virtue of a nominal licence can easily undersell him. Long after the hour
when he is bound by law to close, he hears the shouts of the bibulous in
the neighbouring political club; on Sunday mornings he sees a procession
of jugs and bottles issuing from this same untaxed establishment.
Blackmailed by the police, and spied upon by the hirelings of all kinds of
busybody societies, he goes to the Brewster Sessions in each year in fear
and trembling. The licensing justices must by law have no interest
whatever either in a brewery or a licensed house of any description, but
they may be, and frequently are, teetotallers. Every other subject of his
Majesty is entitled to plead his cause before his peers. The licensed
victualler, alone of all Englishmen since the days of Magna Charta, has to
submit to be tried by enemies who have sworn his ruin.
How we all love to see, on the stage, at least, if not in real life,
jovial, hearty old souls like Mine Host who entertained Falstaff at the
_Garter_, or old Will Boniface (first landlord to be so dubbed) of the
_Beaux Stratagem_. It is disappointing that Farquhar was such a wronghead
dramatist as to make all his interesting characters vicious. We cannot
believe this fat and pompous host with a wholesome faith in the virtues of
his brew could really have been a scoundrel or capable of conspiring with
footpads. No! Julius Cæsar was a better judge of fat human nature than
Farquhar! Depend upon it, Boniface slept after his potations the sleep of
an honest man. Just listen to him:
Sir, you shall taste my Anno Domini, I have lived in Lichfield, man
and boy, above eight-and-fifty years, and I believe have not consumed
eight-and-fifty ounces of meat.
_Aimwell._ At a meal, you mean, if one may guess your sense by your
bulk.
_Boniface._ Not in my life, Sir; I have fed purely upon ale; I have
ate my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.
_Enter tapster with a Tankard._
Now, sir, you shall see; your worship’s health; Ha! delicious,
delicious--fancy it Burgundy, only fancy it, and ’tis worth ten
shillings a quart.
_Aimwell_ (_drinks_). ’Tis confounded strong.
_Boniface._ Strong! It must be so; or how would we be strong that
drink it?
Hawthorne tried hard to find Mr. Boniface’s inn at Lichfield, but in vain.
He had to content himself with the _Black Swan_, once owned by Dr.
Johnson. Farquhar was careful not to indicate the particular inn referred
to, if it ever existed there. Not that the dramatists in bygone days lived
in fear of a libel action. Witness a farce by J. M. Morton, in which Mrs.
Fidget, the landlady of the _Dolphin_ at Portsmouth, is most cruelly
pilloried for her dishonesty and meanness. In “Naval Engagements” Charles
Dance portrays Mr. Short of the _Fountain_ in the same town as a scurvy
impudent rascal, taking advantage of customers who had spent the night not
wisely nor too well, to charge them for an unordered and unserved
breakfast. Short’s sanctimonious morality and his devices to detain
customers in a hurry, so that they are compelled to stay in the inn for
dinner, are a valuable humorous element of this play.
Fielding’s innkeepers are all exquisitely drawn, with the lifelike touches
of a fine student of human nature in its infinite variety. We love best of
all the host of that inn where Parson Adams met the braggart, untruthful
squire who offered him a fine living and endless other benefits without
the slightest intention of fulfilling his promises. Mine Host stands by
chuckling inwardly at the good jest when the squire undertakes to defray
the bill for the lodging and entertainment of the party. Nor does he lose
his good-humour when he finds next morning the joke turned against himself
and that the worthy curate has not a farthing in his purse.
“Trust you, master? that I will with all my heart. I honour the clergy too
much to deny trusting one of them for such a trifle; besides, I like your
fear of never paying me. I have lost many a debt in my lifetime; but was
promised to be paid them all in a very short time. I will score this
reckoning for the novelty of it; it is the first, I do assure you, of its
kind. But what say you, master, shall we have t’other pot before we part?
It will waste but a little chalk more; and, if you never pay me a
shilling, the loss will not ruin me.”
By way of contrast we are given the termagant Mrs. Tow-wouse, whose
ill-temper and selfish grasping ways were always counteracting her
easy-going spouse’s mild attempts in the direction of generosity:
“Mrs. Tow-wouse had given no utterance to the sweetness of her temper.
Nature had taken such pains in her countenance, that Hogarth himself never
gave more expression to a picture. Her person was short, thin, and
crooked; her forehead projected in the middle and thence descended in a
declivity to the top of her nose, which was sharp and red, and would have
hung over her lips, had not Nature turned up the end of it; her lips were
two bits of skin, which, whenever she spoke, she drew together in a purse;
her chin was peaked; and at the upper end of that skin which composed her
cheeks, stood two bones, that almost hid a pair of small red eyes. Add to
this a voice most wonderfully adapted to the sentiments it was to convey,
being both loud and hoarse.”
Surely such a picture is worthy of being beside Skelton’s description of
the frowsy ale wife of Leatherhead.
Dean Swift encountered a lady of the same contrary nature at the _Three
Crosses_, on the road between Dunchurch and Daventry. He left his opinion
of his hostess on one of the windows:
“To the Landlord.
There hang three crosses at thy door,
Hang up thy wife and she’ll make four.”
And here we may be permitted to introduce an adventure of our own. A party
of three, we were engaged on a walk across the Dunes, near Nieuport, and
had lost our way. Flemish was the language of the district, and this in
its spoken form was a sealed book to all three. By and by we came to a
little roadside estaminet which we entered, and in correct exercise-book
French inquired the nearest way to Furnes. The proprietor replied by
placing before us three large glasses of the local beverage. It was a hot,
dusty day, we were thirsty and the beer light and harmless. So we drank it
and then again inquired the way to Furnes. For answer our glasses were
forthwith refilled. When we shook our heads in dissent, the obliging
caterer brought out in turn every different kind of bottle and brand of
cigar and cigarette the establishment could muster. It was no good. We did
not wish to drink or smoke.
He was perplexed and sat down for a few moments to scratch his head and
ponder over the puzzling problem. At last he decided to do what many wiser
men before have done when in a quandary: he called his wife. Maybe female
intuition might pierce into these mysteries where dull reason vainly
groped in darkness.
She came, pink and rosy as some glorious dawn, tripping as lightly as a
forty-eight inch waist and a weight somewhere near fourteen stone would
permit. After darting a scornful glance at her lord and master she turned
to us with a sweet smile. We asked in Parisian tongue the nearest way to
Furnes. In a trice she placed before us three pint glasses of Flemish
white beer. We manifested our disapproval very strongly; we did not want
any beer, and her husband watched and smoked his pipe with a cynical grin
as she brought us, in vain, the bottles and various other articles from
the shelves.
Then a brilliant idea occurred to one of the trio. After all, the Flemish
language is only a dialect of German! So in truly classic German he
inquired of the puzzled dame--Would she kindly tell us the nearest way to
Furnes?
A bright smile of intelligence illumined her features. She understood now
exactly what we wanted, and popping into the kitchen behind, she soon
returned with three steaming plates full of most delicious hotch-potch
soup. There were haricots, lentils, cabbage stumps, garlic, chicken bones,
sausages and other articles unidentified in that soup. But it was
appetising; we remembered that we were hungry from a long walk and sat
down and absorbed it with a good-will.
That woman, we know for certain, became our devoted friend from the
moment. She will never forget us. She demurred very strongly to our paying
anything for the refreshment, and tried hard to force three more pints of
that terribly mild beer on us before we left. Not only had we appreciated
her cooking at its fullest value--we had also proved her abilities as a
cosmopolitan woman of business--and, depend upon it, the fact has been
rubbed into her partner in life many times since then!
But of worthy, buxom good-tempered landladies there is always a plentiful
supply, faithful and true in the defence of their friends, like the good
widow McCandlish in “Guy Mannering,” or beneficent fairies, ready to
adjust the difficulties of eloping young couples and their several
guardians with the delicacy and tact of a Mrs. Bartick.[18] The fair sex
have usually all the business qualities for the conduct of a good inn, and
when with these are conjoined kindness of disposition the traveller is
blest indeed.
Once upon a time, so tradition hath it--there was a barmaid in a
Westminster tavern who married her master. After his death, she
continued to carry on the business, and had occasion to seek the advice of
a lawyer named Hyde. Mr. Hyde wooed and married her. Then Hyde became Lord
Chancellor and was ennobled as Lord Clarendon. Their daughter married the
Duke of York, and was the mother of Mary and Anne Stewart. So the landlady
of an inn became the grandmother of two queens. Most history books are
content to describe Lord Clarendon’s second wife as the daughter of Sir
Thomas Aylesbury; but the supporters of the traditional view maintain that
this was an invention of the Court Party.
[Illustration: The Recreation Room in the “Skittles” Inn, Letchworth]
We have not yet encountered an innkeeper exactly of the same type as old
John Willet, of the _Maypole_ at Chigwell, that “burly large-headed man
with a fat face, which betokened profound obstinacy and slowness of
apprehension, combined with a very strong reliance upon his own merits.”
We meet occasionally in other walks of life these small-minded individuals
whom chance has endowed with pride of place and the opportunity to
tyrannize over all around them. Like the sovereign owner of the ancient
hostelry with its “huge zigzag chimneys and more gable ends than a lazy
man would care to count on a sunny day,” not to speak of its diamond-pane
lattices and its ceilings blackened by the hand of time and heavy with
massive beams, they imagine that their reign will endure to the end. Is
there in all literature a more pathetic piece of writing than that in
which Charles Dickens depicts the humiliation of John Willet, when the
Gordon rioters invade the _Maypole_, and the fallen tyrant finds himself
“sitting down in an armchair and watching the destruction of his property,
as if it were some queer play or entertainment of an astonishing and
stupefying nature, but having no reference to himself--that he could make
out--at all?”
Innkeepers have been reckoned among the poets. John Taylor, the “Water
Poet,” so called because he commenced life as a waterman, and because so
many of his voluminous works deal with aquatic matters, kept a tavern in
Phœnix Alley, Longacre. Being a faithful royalist he set up the sign of
the _Mourning Crown_ over his house to express his sorrow at the tragic
death of Charles I, but was compelled by the Parliament to take it down.
He replaced it with his own portrait and the following lines:
“There is many a head hangs for a sign;
Then, gentle reader, why not mine?”
The episode is commemorated in a rhyming pamphlet issued by him at the
same time:
“My signe was once a _Crowne_, but now it is
Changed by a sudden metamorphosis.
The Crowne was taken downe, and in the stead
Is placed John Taylor’s or the _Poet’s Head_.”
Of Taylor’s works, the mere enumeration of which occupies eight closely
printed pages in “Lownde’s Bibliographer’s Manual,” the best known are his
“Prayse of Cleane Linen,” and “The Pennyless Pilgrimage,” descriptive of a
journey on foot from London to Edinburgh, “not carrying any money to and
fro, neither begging, borrowing or asking meat, drink or lodging.” In
1620, he made a similar journey from London to Prague, and published an
account of it.
Scarcely less eminent in his way was Ned Ward, the “Publican Poet,”
immortalised in the “Dunciad.” His works are scurrilous and coarse, yet
not to be despised by students of London topography in the reign of Queen
Anne. His writings in the _London Spy_ describe the London taverns and
inns of his day, and he produced several imitations of Butler’s
“Hudibras,” including a versified translation of “Don Quixote,” and
“Hudibras Redivivus.” The latter work obtained for its author the
privilege of standing twice in the pillory and of paying a fine of forty
marks. His inn stood in Woodbridge Street, Clerkenwell, and his poetical
invitation to customers includes a reference to the Red Bull Theatre,
close by, made famous by Shakespeare and Edward Alleyn, the founder of
Dulwich College:
“There on that ancient, venerable ground,
Where Shakespeare in heroic buskins trod,
Within a good old fabrick may be found
Celestial liquors, fit to charm a god.”
Very different was the side in politics favoured by Sam House, “the
patriotic publican.” Apprenticed as a brewhouse cooper, his active
industrious habits enabled him, when only twenty-five years of age, to
lease an inn at the corner of Peter Street, Wardour Street, Soho, called
the _Gravel Pits_, which name he changed to the _Intrepid Fox_, or _The
Cap of Liberty_. In 1763 he very warmly espoused the cause of John Wilkes,
and sold his beer at threepence a pot in honour of the champion of
freedom. Of unflinching political integrity, Sam House was in most
respects a well-meaning, good-hearted man, with but one reprehensible
vice--a habit of swearing most horribly, no matter what the company. Many
are the unprintable anecdotes related with regard to this failing, when
the most exalted personages were conversing with him. Another eccentric
feature of his character was illustrated when he had laid a wager with a
young man to race him in Oxford Road. Just when his victory seemed
assured, a mischievous wag in the crowd suddenly shouted, “D----n Fox and
all his friends, say I!” Forthwith Sam forgot all about his race, and
regardless of protests from his backers, turned round and administered a
sound drubbing to the blasphemer. This gave great amusement to the
spectators, but meanwhile his rival had passed the winning-post. Sam
cheerfully paid the penalty, consoling himself that he had lost the race
in a good cause, while avenging an insult to his political idol.