INNS WITH ODD PRIVILEGES
Here and there, scattered in the byways of the country, rather than
situated in towns, inns may be found that have some attribute out of the
common, in the way of privileges conferred or usurped. Thus, the licence
of the “White Hart” inn at Adwalton, near Drighlington, Yorkshire, has, or
had, the unusual privilege of holding the charter for the local fair,
granted by Queen Elizabeth in 1576 to John Brookes, the then landlord, who
under that charter held the exclusive right to levy tolls and direct the
entire conduct of the gathering.
This royal grant recalls a once-celebrated inn on a road in Derbyshire
greatly travelled in the coaching age. In a now lonely position on that
very bleak and elevated highway, the road between Ashbourne and Buxton,
stands the inn known as “Newhaven House.” A haven of some sort was sorely
wanted there in coaching days, and accordingly this great building was
ordained by the Duke of Rutland, one of those two overawing noble
landlords of the district, who had merely to say, in their off-hand
manner, “Let it be done,” for almost anything to be done, forthwith.
It was in the flamboyant days of George the Fourth that the “Newhaven” inn
arose, and his Majesty himself stayed one night “under its roof,” as the
guide-books carefully say, lest perhaps we might suspect him of sleeping
on the tiles. Those were the days when travelling Majesties still did
picturesque things, more or less in the manner of the Caliphs in the
_Arabian Nights_; and the great George, by some mysterious exercise of
kingly prerogative, granted the house a perpetual licence, by way of
signifying his content with the entertainment provided. That perpetual
licence must once have been a very valuable asset of the Manners family,
for the house was, in the merry days of the road, one of the
best-appointed and most thriving posting and coaching establishments of
the age; but in these times it is very quiet and very empty, save for the
great Newhaven horse- and cattle-fairs, in spring and autumn, now the two
red-letter days of the year for the once-busy hostelry.
From a perpetual licence to a licence for one day in every year is a
curious extreme, afforded by the village of King’s Cliffe, Northants,
where any householder, under the terms of a charter granted in the reign
of King John, may, if he so pleases, on the day of the annual autumn fair,
sell beer; provided that a branch of a tree is suspended over the doorway,
after the manner of the “bush” anciently displayed by the ale-stakes.
Among London suburban inns demolished in recent times and rebuilt is the
“White Hart,” on Hackney Marshes: that sometime desolate and remote place
of footpads and swamps. To-day “Hackney Marshes” is merely a name. Little
in the actual appearance of the place, unless it be in midst of some
particularly mild and wet winter, suggests a marsh, and the broad level
stretch of grass is, in fact, in process of becoming a conventional London
park. Through the midst of the Marsh flows the river Lea, and the several
“cuts” that have been at different times made for commercial purposes
divide up the surrounding wastes with foul, canal-like reaches.
[Illustration: “NEWHAVEN” INN.]
A very ancient cut indeed, and one now little better than a ditch, is that
of the Temple stream, made for the purpose of the Temple Mills, so called
from the manor having anciently belonged to the Knights Templars. The
site of the mills is still pointed out by the “White Hart.” The old inn
was said to have been built in 1514, and in after years was a reputed
haunt of Dick Turpin, that phenomenally ubiquitous highwayman who, if all
those legends were true, must have been no single person, but a syndicate,
and a large one at that. The house, which bore no evidence of
sixteenth-century antiquity on its whitewashed, brick-built face, was a
favourite resort of holiday-making East Enders, and, with its long, white
front and cheerful old red-tiled roof, seemed a natural part of the
scenery, just as the still-extant “White House” or “Old Ferry House” inn,
half a mile distant, does to this day. It was, however, wantonly rebuilt
in 1900, and replaced by a dull, evil-looking public-house that looks very
much down on its luck. The appearance of the old house suggested festivity
in the open-air tea and watercresses style; the new is suggestive only of
drinking across a bar.
But a long-existing privilege still belongs to the property, the landlord
being the proprietor of a private toll-bridge leading across the Temple
stream to Leyton. He exercises that right in virtue of some predecessor
having long ago repaired the broken-down passage when three parishes whose
boundaries meet here disputed and declined the liability. Accordingly,
although foot-passengers pass freely, a penny is levied upon a bicycle,
and upon each head of sheep or cattle, and twopence for carts, carriages,
motor-cars, or motor-bicycles, at the little hut where the tollkeeper
lounges in a very bored manner. Well may he look so, for although, in
exceptional times of holiday, the toll has been known to yield, once or
twice, so much as a pound in a day, five shillings is a more usual sum,
and there are many days in winter when threepence has been the sum-total
of the day’s revenue.
[Illustration: THE “VINE TAVERN,” MILE END ROAD.]
A similar right is said to belong to the “White House,” where a
substantial timber bridge spans the Lea itself, but it lies only on a
little-used bridle-path, and the right does not appear to be exercised.
The scene here has elements of picturesqueness, and could be made a good
subject in colour.
In October, 1903, the “Vine,” the old inn that had stood so long and so
oddly on “Mile End Waste,” was demolished. Although it had stood there for
three hundred years, there was not the slightest trace about the building
of any architectural embellishment, the front of it being merely an
extremely unlovely and ill-cared-for example of a London public-house,
while the back Was a weather-boarded relic of the vanished rural days of
the Mile End Road.
Like the fly in amber,
The thing itself was neither rich nor rare:
We only wondered how the devil it got there.
The manner of it may be guessed. In the old, easy-going days some impudent
squatter sat down on that wide selvedge of open space beside the road and
built the primeval hovel from which the “Vine” sprang, and in the course
of time, by the mere lapse of twenty-one years, acquired a title to the
site. Hence the isolated building, standing in advance of the general line
of houses. But, if the illustration be carefully scanned, it will be noted
that at some very much later period the then owner, much more impudent
than the original grabber of public, or “waste” land, seems to have stolen
an additional piece. This is evident enough, not only in the different
styles and periods of the building, but in the manner in which the little
attic windows in the roof are obscured by the addition.