TAVERN RHYMES AND INSCRIPTIONS
Beer has inspired many poets, and “jolly good ale and old” is part of a
rousing rhyme; but much of the verse associated with inns runs to the
hateful burden of “No Trust.” Thus, along one of the backwaters in Norwich
city there stands the “Gate House” inn, displaying the following:
The sun shone bright in the glorious sky,
When I found that my barrels were perfectly dry.
They were emptied by Trust; but he’s dead and gone home,
And I’ve used all my chalk to erect him a tomb.
A metrical version, you see, of that dreadful tale, “Poor Trust is dead.”
Another version of the same theme is found at the “Buck and Bell,” Long
Itchington, Warwickshire, in the lament:
Customers came and I did trust them,
Lost all my liquor and their custom.
To lose them both it grieved me sore;
Resolved I am to trust no more.
A little public-house poetry goes a very long way. It need not be of great
excellence to be highly appreciated, and, when approved, is very largely
repeated all over the country. There was once--a matter of twenty years
ago--a semi-rural inn, the “Robin Hood,” at Turnham Green, exhibiting a
picture-sign representing Robin Hood and Little John, clad duly in the
Lincoln green of the foresters and wearing feathered hats, whose like you
see nowadays only on the heads of factory girls holiday-making at
Hampstead and such-like places of public resort. This brave picture bore
the lines:
If Robin Hood is not at home,
Take a glass with Little John--
a couplet that most excellently illustrates the bluntness of the English
ear to that atrocity, a false rhyme.
The experienced traveller in the highways and byways of the land will
probably call to mind many repetitions of this sign. There is, for
instance, one in Cambridgeshire, in the village--or rather, nowadays, the
Cambridge suburb--of Cherry Hinton:
Ye gentlemen and archers good,
Come in and drink with Robin Hood.
If Robin Hood be not at home,
Then stay and sup with Little John.
But, although such examples may be numerous, they cannot rival that very
favourite sign, the “Gate,” with its sentiments dear to the heart of the
typical Bung, who wants your custom and your coin, rather than your
company:
This gate hangs well
And hinders none;
Refresh and pay
And travel on;
or, as an American might more tersely put it, “Gulp your drink and git!”
That, shorn of frills, is really the sentiment. It is not hospitable; it
is not kindly; it would be even unwise did those who read as they run
proceed to think as well.
[Illustration: THE “GATE” INN, DUNKIRK.]
To catalogue the many “Gate” signs would be a lengthy and an unprofitable
task. There must be quite a hundred of them. Two widely sundered houses
bearing the name, each picturesque in its own way, are illustrated here:
the one, a rustic wayside inn near Dunkirk, on the Dover Road; the other,
picturesque rather in its situation than in itself, nestling under the
great Castle Rock in the town of Nottingham. The Nottingham inn is a mere
tavern: a shabby enough building, and more curious than comfortable. Its
cellars, and the kitchen itself, are hewn out of the rock, the kitchen
being saved from reeking with damp only by having a roaring fire
continually maintained. The shape of the room is not unlike that of a
bottle, in which a shaft, pierced through the rock to the upper air,
represents the neck. This extraordinary apartment is said to have
formerly been an _oubliette_ dungeon of the Castle. An adjoining inn,
similarly situated, has the odd sign of the “Trip to Jerusalem,” with a
thirteenth-century date.
[Illustration: THE “GATE HANGS WELL,” NOTTINGHAM.]
The exiled Duke of _As You Like It_, who, in the Forest of Arden, found
moral maxims by the way, “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
sermons in stones,” and so forth, would scarcely have gone the length of
hostelries; but there are stranger things in the world than even
moralising exiles dream of, and among the strangest are the admonitory
inscriptions not uncommon upon inns, where one would rather look to find
exhortations to drink and be merry while you may. Among these the most
curious is a Latin inscription carved, with the date 1636, upon an oak
beam outside the older portion of that fine old inn, the “Four Crosses,”
at Hatherton, near Cannock:
Fleres si scires unum tua me’sem,
Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies;
or, Englished:
Thou would’st weep if thou knewest thy time to be one month: thou
laughest when perchance it may be not one day.
A little grim, too, is the jest upon the sign-board of the “Chequer’s” inn
at Slapestones, near Osmotherley, in the North Riding of Yorkshire. It
reads:
Be not in haste,
Come in and taste.
Ale to-morrow for nothing.
But “to-morrow never comes.”
The Slapestones inn is not remarkable on account of its architecture.
Indeed, with a box of toy bricks, as used in building operations conducted
in the nursery, you could readily contrive a likeness of it; but it has a
kind of local celebrity, both on account of the cakes baked upon its
old-fashioned hearth, and by reason of that fire itself, traditionally
said never to have been once quenched during the last 130 years. Moreover,
the spot is a favourite meet for the Bilsdale Hounds.
A former landlord of the inn at Croyde, near Ilfracombe, must have been a
humourist in his way, and probably had read _Pickwick_ before he composed
the following, which, like “Bill Stumps his Mark”--
+
BILST
UM
PSHI
S.M.
ARK
--is easily to be rendered into English:
Here’s to Pands Pen
Das Oci Al Hourin
Ha! R: M: Les Smir
Thand Funlet
Fri Ends Hipre:
Ign Be Ju!
Stand Kin
Dan Devils
Peak of No! ne.
The composition of this could have been no great tax on the tapster’s
brain.
More pleasing is the queerly spelled old notice displayed on the exterior
of the “Plough” at Ford, near Stow-on-the-Wold:
Ye weary travelers that pass by,
With dust & scorching sunbeams dry
Or be he numb’d with snow and frost
With having these bleak cotswolds crost
Step in and quaff my nut brown ale
Bright as rubys mild and stale
Twill make your laging trotters dance
As nimble as the suns of france
Then ye will own ye men of sense
That neare was better spent six pence.
The genuine old unstudied quaintness of it must, in the course of the
century and a half of its existence, have sent many scorched or
half-frozen travellers across Cotswold into the cosy parlour. Recently a
new and ornate wing has been added to the solitary wayside house, and the
poetic sign, sent up to London to be repaired, has come back, bravely
gilded.
Some very hard, gaunt facts are set forth on tavern signs; as on that of
the “Soldier’s Fortune,” at Kidderminster, where, beneath a picture of a
mutilated warrior, the passer-by may read,
A soldier’s fortune, I will tell you plain,
Is a wooden leg, or a golden chain.
This hero, however, is fully furnished with both.
When Peter Simple travelled down to Portsmouth for the first time, to join
his ship, he asked the coachman which was the best inn there, and
received for reply:
The Blue Postesses
Where the midshipmen leave their chestesses,
Call for tea and toastesses,
And sometimes forget to pay for their breakfastes.
The “Blue Posts” inn was burned down in 1870, but many who had known it
made a renewed acquaintance with the house in 1891, at the Chelsea Naval
Exhibition, where a reproduction attracted much attention. There are still
other “Blue Posts,” notably one in Cork Street, in the West End of London,
rebuilt a few years since. The sign is the survival of a custom as old as
Caxton, and probably much older, by which houses were often distinguished
by their colour. Caxton, advertising his books, let it be known that if
“any one, spiritual or temporal,” would purchase, he was to “come to
Westmonester into the almonestrye at the Reed Pale”; and there was in the
neighbouring Peter Street a “Green Pales” in the seventeenth century.
The modern building of the “George and Dragon,” Great Budworth, Cheshire,
has this admonitory verse over its doorway, the production of Egerton
Warburton, the late squire of Arley Hall:
As St. George, in armed array,
Doth the Fiery Dragon slay,
So may’st thou, with might no less,
Slay that Dragon, Drunkenness,
a moral stanza that has its fellow in a couplet carved upon an old oak
beam over the door of the rebuilt “Thorn” inn at Appleton, in the same
county:
You may safely when sober sit under the thorn,
But if drunk overnight, it will prick you next morn.
A similar moral tendency used to be shown by the sign of the “Grenadier”
at Whitley, near Reading, in the verse:
This is the Whitley Grenadier,
A noted house of famous beer;
Stop, friend, and if you make a call,
Beware, and get not drunk withal,
Let moderation be your guide,
It answers well where’er ’tis tried,
Then use, and don’t abuse, strong beer,
And don’t forget the Grenadier.
It was probably when the inn became a “tied” house that this exhortation
to drink moderately disappeared. It will readily be understood that a
brewery company could have no sympathy with such an inducement to reduce
their returns.
A frank invitation to enter and take your fill, without any further
stipulation, is to be seen outside the picturesquely placed “Bee-hive” inn
at Eaumont Bridge, between Penrith and Ullswater; in the words painted
round a bee-hive:
Within this hive we’re all alive,
Good liquor makes us funny;
If you be dry, step in and try
The virtue of our honey.
The same sentiment prevails at the “Cheney Gate” inn, between
Macclesfield and Congleton, on whose sign you read:
Stay Traveller, thyself regale,
With spirits, or with nut-brown ale,
while
Once aground, but now afloat,
Walk in, boys, and wet your throat,
says the sign of the “Ship” at Brixham, South Devon.
The “Cat and Mutton” inn, near the Cat and Mutton Bridge of the Regent’s
Canal, and facing London Fields, formerly had a pictorial sign with the
inscription on one side, slightly misspelled,
Pray puss, do not tare,
Because the mutton is so rare,
and on the other,
Pray puss, do not claw,
Because the mutton is so raw.
The “Cat and Mutton” is nowadays just a London “public,” and the
neighbourhood is truly dreadful. You come to it by way of the Hackney Road
and Broadway, over the wide modern bridge that now spans the silvery
waters of the Regent’s Canal, just where the great gasometers and factory
chimneys of Haggerston rise romantically into the sky and remind the
traveller, rather distantly, of Norman keeps and cathedral spires. How
beautiful the name of Haggerston, and how admirably the scene fits the
name!
Broadway is a market street, with continuous lines of stalls and
uninviting shops, where only the bakers’ shops and the corn-chandlers are
pleasing to look upon and to smell. The new and fragrant loaves, and the
white-scrubbed counters and brightly polished brass-rails of the bakers
look cleanly and smell appetising, and the interesting window-display of
the corn-chandlers compels a halt. There you see nothing less than an
exhibition of cereals and the like: to this chronicler, at least,
wonderfully fascinating. Lentils, tapioca, “bullet” and “flake,” blue
starch and white, haricot beans, maize, split peas, and many others. Split
peas, the amused stranger may note, are, for the “best,” 1½_d._ a pint,
the “finest”--the most superlatively “bestest”--2½_d._, while rice is in
three categories: “fine,” “superior,” or merely--the cheapest--“good.”
The neighbourhood is dirty, despite the enamelled iron signs displayed by
the borough authorities from every lamp-post--“The Public Baths and
Wash-houses are now open.” It is, in fact, a purlieu where the
public-houses are overcrowded and the baths not places of great resort.
The “Cat and Mutton” appears to do a thriving trade. That it is not
beautiful is no matter. On the side of the house facing the open space of
“London Fields” the modern sign, in two compartments, is seen, picturing a
cat “tearing” a shoulder of mutton lying on the floor, and again “clawing”
a suspended joint. The spelling is now orthodox.
A curious inscription on a stone let into the brick wall of the “George”
at Wanstead, hard by Epping Forest, is variously explained. It is well
executed, on a slab of brown sandstone, and reads as under:
[Illustration: TABLET AT THE “GEORGE,” WANSTEAD.]
The generally received story is that the house was at the time under
repair, and that, as a baker was passing by with a cherry-pie in a tray on
his head, for the clergyman, one of the workmen, leaning over the
scaffolding, lifted it off, unawares. The “half a guiney” represents the
cost of the frolic in the subsequent proceedings. Apparently, the men
agreed to annually celebrate the day.
The “George” was rebuilt 1903-4, and is no longer of interest. Nor does it
appear to be, as an example of the ornate modern cross between a mere
“public-house” and an “hotel,” so popular as before. The observer with a
bias in favour of the antique and the picturesque may be excused a certain
satisfaction in noting the fact that, in almost every instance of a quaint
old inn being ruthlessly demolished to make way for a “palatial”
drinking-shop, its trade has suffered the most abysmal--not the most
extraordinary--decline. Not extraordinary, because not merely the
antiquary or the sentimentalist is outraged: the great bulk of people, who
would not ordinarily be suspected of any such feeling for the out-of-date
and the ramshackle, are grossly offended, and resent the offence in a very
practical way; while the carters, the waggoners, and such-like
road-farers, to whom the homely old inns were each, in the well-known
phrase, a “good pull-up,” are abashed by the magnificence of polished
mahogany and brass, and resentful of saucy barmaids. The rustic suburban
inn did a larger trade with the carters and waggoners than might be
suspected, and the loss of its withdrawal in such cases is not compensated
for by any access of “higher class” business. We regret the old-time
suburban inn now it is too late, although we were perhaps not ourselves
frequenters of those low-ceilinged interiors, where the floor was of
sanded flagstones, and the seats of upturned barrels.
To name some of the many houses thus mistakenly, and disastrously,
modernised would be invidious, but instances of trade thus frightened
away are familiar to every one. It should not have been altogether outside
any practical scheme restoration, to repair, or even to enlarge, such
places of old association without destroying their old-world look and
arrangements; and this has in numberless instances been recognised when
the mischief has been irrevocably wrought.