INGLE-NOOKS
The chimney-corners of the old rustic inns, in which the gossips lingered
late on bitter winter nights, have ever formed an attraction for writers
of the historic novel. There is no more romantic opening possible than
that of the village inn, with the spiced ale warming on the hearth, and
the rustics toasting their toes in the ingle-nook, what time the wind
howls without, roars in the trees, like the roaring of an angry sea, and
takes hold of the casements and shakes and rattles them, as though some
outcast, denied admittance, would yet force his way into the warmth and
comfort, out of the cheerless night. The warring elements, and the gush of
wind and driven snow following the opening of the door and the entrance
from time to time of other recruits for the ingle-nook, would make that
cosy corner seem, if possible, only the more desirable.
[Illustration: THE INGLE-NOOK, “WHITE HORSE” INN, SHERE.]
In fact, there is no more sure way of engrossing a reader from the very
first page than that of beginning on this note. He feels that something
melodramatic is in the wind, and pokes the fire, snuggles up in his
arm-chair, and prepares to be thrilled. The thrill is generally not
long in coming, for there was never--or, well, hardly ever--any romantic
novel where an ingle-nook occurs in which we do not presently find the
advent of the inscrutable and taciturn stranger who, after calling, “Ho!
landlord, a tankard of your best,” relapses into a bodeful and gloomy
silence, and piques the curiosity, and at the same time chills the marrow,
of the assembled company, and may turn out to be anything you please,
according to the period, from a king in disguise to a burglar on his way
to crack some lonely crib.
Most of the ingle-nooks are gone, and modern fire-places are installed in
their stead, conferring upon the survivors an additional measure and
esteem of respect in these times of a reaction in favour of the old
English domestic arrangements. One of the finest of these surviving
examples is that of the “White Horse” at Shere, an old-world inn in midst
of an equally old-world village. Shere is the most picturesque of those
rural villages--Wotton, Abinger Hatch, Gomshall, Shere, Albury and
Shalford--strung along the road that runs, lovely, under the southern
shoulders of the bold South Downs, between Reigate and Guildford. Modern
times have passed it by, and the grey Norman church, a huge and ancient
tree, and the old “White Horse,” have a very special quiet nook to
themselves. One would not like to hazard too close a guess as to the
antiquity of the “White Horse,” whose sign is perhaps the only new thing
about it--and _that_ is a picturesque acquisition. The inn is, of course,
not of the Norman and early English antiquity of the church, but it was
built, let us say, “once upon a time”; which sounds vaguely impressive,
and in doing so begins to do justice to the old-world air of the inn. The
fine ingle-nook pictured here is to be found in the parlour, and is
furnished, as usual in such hospitable contrivances, with a seat on either
side and recesses for mugs and glasses. A fine array of copper kettles and
brass pots, candlesticks and apothecaries’ mortars, together with an old
sampler, runs along the wide beam, and on the hearth are a beautiful pair
of fire-dogs and an elaborate cast-iron fireback.
A good ingle-nook, rather obscured by the alterations and “improvements”
of late years, is to be found in a low-ceilinged little front room at the
“Anchor,” Ripley, with a highly ornate fireback; and at the “Swan,”
Haslemere, we have the ingle-nook in perhaps its simplest and roughest
expression, rudely brick-and-timber built and plastered, with an exiguous
little shelf running along the beam, and above that a gunrack. The simple
fire-dogs are entirely in character, and have probably been here almost as
long as the ingle-nook itself.
[Illustration: INGLE-NOOK AT THE “SWAN,” HASLEMERE.]
The ingle-nook of the “Crown” inn at Chiddingfold exists, little altered,
although a little iron grate, now itself of considerable age, has been
built on the wide open hearth, with a brick smoke-hood over it. You see
again, on either side of the deep recess, above the side benches, the
little square cranny in the wall, handy to reach by those sitting in the
nook, and intended, in those bygone days when this cosy feature was still
in use, to hold the tankards, the jugs, and the pipes of those who here
very literally “took their ease at their inn.”
[Illustration: INGLE-NOOK AT THE “TALBOT,” TOWCESTER.]
In this room the curious may notice the copy of a deed, dated March 22nd,
1383, conveying the inn from one Peter Pokeland to Richard Gofayre; but,
although the “Crown” is a house of considerable antiquity, and mentioned
in that document, the existing house is not of so great an age as this,
and has been rebuilt, or very extensively remodelled, since then.
A fine ingle-nook, with ancient iron crane, is now a feature of the
refurnished “Lygon Arms” at Broadway, in Worcestershire, an hotel that in
these latter days has been carefully “restored” and so fitted out with
modern-ancient features by Warings, and some really old articles of
furniture, purchased here, there, and everywhere, that in course of time
posterity may agree to consider the whole house-full a legacy, as it
stands, of the old domestic economy of the inn-keeping of the sixteenth,
the seventeenth, and the eighteenth centuries.
At the quaint Kentish village of Sissinghurst, near Cranbrook, stands the
old “Bull” inn. It had a rugged ingle-nook occupying one side of the
taproom, and on the wall picturesquely hung a very old pair of bellows, a
domestic utensil now not often seen. In the corner of the room stood a
gigantic eight-footer “grandfather” clock. But the chief item of interest
was, without doubt, the roasting-jack over the hearth, with the date
“1684.” All this formed one of the most delightful old-world interiors,
until quite recently, but now the ingle is abolished and the ancient crane
sold to a museum.
A particularly good ingle-nook is to be seen in what is now a lumber-room,
but was once the tap-room of the “Talbot” inn at Towcester, the great
oaken beam spanning the fireplace being quaintly carved, in flat and low
relief, with the figure of that extinct breed of dog, the “talbot.”
[Illustration: THE INGLE-NOOK, “CROWN” INN, CHIDDINGFOLD.]