See the links to “The Old Inns of Old England Vol I & II “ which were published in 1906. They were written by Charles G. Harper who created the excellent pen and ink sketches in the book along with some unusual unique written content. Digitised copies can be viewed free of charge using these links below at archive.org along with downloading them if you wish all for free.
The
Old Inns of Old England Vol 1 1906
https://archive.org/details/cu31924070683929/page/n6/mode/1up
The
Old Inns of Old England Vol II 1906
https://archive.org/details/cu31924070683937/page/n17/mode/2up
For this blog post I have
looked at six Old Inns in the Vol II.
The Old Inns of Old
England are really odd books with peculiar content certainly not reading like a
normal travelogue which you sort of expect covering the Old Inns of Old England.
But this makes it even more eccentric to read and certainly very difficult to
extract into a more traditional format of being more thematically focussed. This
is what appeals to me about old books. But inevitably what always appeals to me
is the artwork with the truly wonderful pen and ink sketches by Charles G.
Harper. It is not surprising to learn he was a very accomplished artist who along
with publishing these self- illustrated travel books also published books on drawing
particularly pen and ink art.
Read his Wikipedia Bio
below.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_George_Harper
From Vol II only I have extracted six local Old Inns in the Midlands
Region of the United Kingdom covering Warwickshire, Worcestershire and
Shropshire. These have had added to the original text, drawings and photos an
up to date Google Screenshot and a Google Geotag so you can use Google
Street View to look in more detail around the inn locations. I have visited all
these locations and The White Swan in Henley in Arden acts as my local pub whilst
we use the Lygon Arms, Broadway for special family occasions. The Wheatsheaf in
Tewkesbury is now a second hand book shop and one of the places I buy my old
books after which we go for a drink in The Bell, Tewkesbury which we have visited
over the last 50 years being directly opposite Tewkesbury Abbey. We then walk
down to Tewkesbury Mill next to the River Avon Weir and then along this
backwater overlooking the Severn Ham. This whole area suffers amazing flooding
with often only the Tewkesbury Abbey on its little hillock kept in the dry. There
are amazing aerial photos showing the Tewkesbury Abbey sticking up in the
centre of a huge lake of water on its little hillock.
Apart from the Lygon Arms, which uses Cotswold Stone, all the other inns are Timber Framed Buildings (TFB) which is my favourite historical construction method displaying their own unique external wood patterns.
Use this free link to look at some of the Timber Framed Buildings of Kenilworth, Warwickshire, United Kingdom.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z_yEUap5muElUs0ZS4AfrcGnIFHgY60i/view?usp=sharing
These
Old Inns are :-
The
Swan, Knowle now a Library
The
White Swan, Henley in Arden now a Hotel and Inn
Lygon
Arms , Broadway now a Hotel and Inn
The
Bell, Tewkesbury now a Hotel and Inn
The
Wheatsheaf, Tewkesbury now a Second Hand Bookshop
Feathers.
Ludlow now a Hotel and Inn
Please Note
When you are reading the text this is copied from the 1906 book so it
reflects how things stood in 1906 and not today. (2024).
To use the Google Geotag click the Google Link, click the Red Pin and then select the Street View image normally on the bottom left of the screen. Navigate the Street View using the white arrows displayed over the Street View to locate the correct building.
The
Swan, Knowle
When the “Swan” at Knowle, near Birmingham, was
built, “ever so long ago,” which in this case was somewhere about the beginning
of the seventeenth century, the neighbourhood of Knowle was wild, open heath.
The country round about has long ceased to be anything at all of that nature,
but the village has until quite recently retained its rural look, and only in
our time is in process of being swallowed by the boa-constrictor of suburban
expansion. In a still rustic corner, near the church, the “Swan” stands as
sound as ever, and will probably be standing, just as sound in every
particular, centuries hence, when the neighbouring houses, built on ninety-nine
years leases, and calculated to last barely that time, will be in the last
stages of decay. The “Swan” has the additionally interesting feature of a very
fine wrought-iron bracket, designed in a free and flowing style, to represent
leaves and tendrils, and supporting a handsome oval picture-sign of the “Swan.”
http://www.google.com/search?q=52.3893830,-1.7350460
The
White Swan, Henley in Arden
According
to Graves, Shenstone, about 1750, visited a friend, one Mr. Whistler, in the
southernmost part of Oxfordshire, and did not particularly enjoy his visit, Mr.
Whistler sending the poet’s servant off to stay at an inn, in order that the
man and the domestics of his own house should not gossip together. Shenstone
himself seems to have been a very unamiable guest, and one better suited to an
inn than to the house of a friend; for he grew disagreeable over being expected
to play “Pope Joan” in the evening with his friend’s children, and sulked when
he lost a trifle at cards. Then he would not dress himself tidily for dinner,
and snuffed and slouched to the inconvenience of every one, so that it is not
surprising to read of a coolness, and then quarrels, coming to estrange the
pair, resulting in Shenstone abruptly cutting short his visit. He lay,
overnight, on his journey home, at the “Sunrising” inn, and the next[Pg 300] morning, in an arbour, inscribed the famous
lines which now form the last stanza of “Freedom.”
“More
stanzas,” says Graves, “were added afterwards,” and he rightly adds that they
“diminish the force” of the original thought.
The
“Sunrising” inn, long since become a private mansion, and added to very
largely, has no relics of Shenstone. It stands, with lovely gardens
surrounding, on the very lip and verge of Edge Hill, and looks out across the
great levels of Warwickshire. In recent times the hill has becomes famous, or
notorious, for motor and cycle accidents, and the approach to it is heralded by
a notice-board proclaiming “Great Danger. Cyclists Dismount.” But in these days
of better brakes, very few obey that injunction, and ride down, safely enough.
Whistler died in 1754, when Shenstone,
remorseful, wrote, “how little do all our disputes appear to us now!”
Here, then, is the original story of the famous
inscription, but it does not necessarily prove that this melancholy poet did
not also inscribe it at Henley-on-Thames and elsewhere, notably at the “White
Swan,” at that quite different and far-distant place from the Thames-side
Henley, Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire; an old-fashioned house still in
existence, and claiming to date from 1358.
If the story of the “Red Lion” at the
Oxfordshire Henley be a myth, as it is held to be, it is one of very
considerable age, and one that has not only misled uncounted myriads of
writers, but will continue to do so until the end of time. There is no disabling
the flying canard, no overtaking the original lie, howsoever hard you
strive; and as the famous stanza really was at one time to be seen on a
window of the “Red Lion” (whether written there by Shenstone or another), it
really seems that there is a way out of the dilemma that probably has never
until now been considered. Shenstone resided on the Shropshire border, near
Henley-in-Arden, but on his journeys to and from London must often have stayed
at the “Red Lion,” Henley-on-Thames, then on one of the two principal
coach-routes; and it is quite probable that he was so pleased with the last
stanza of “Freedom,” and so satisfied with its peculiar fitness for inn
windows, that he inscribed it at both places, if not indeed at others as well.
http://www.google.com/search?q=52.2922664,-1.7801265
Lygon Arms, Broadway
Let
us, then, imagine ourselves at Broadway, in Worcestershire, and at the “Lygon
Arms” there. The village, still somewhat remote from railways, was once an
important place on the London and Worcester Road, and its long, three-quarter-mile
street is really as broad as its name implies; but since the disappearance of
the coaches it has ceased to be the busy stage it once was, and has become, in
the familiar ironic way of fortune, a haven of rest and quiet for those who are
weary of the busy world; a home of artists amid the apple-orchards of the Vale
of Evesham; a slumberous place of old gabled houses, with mullioned and
transomed windows and old-time vanities of architectural enrichment; for this
is a district of fine building-stone, and the old craftsmen were not slow to
take advantage of their material, in the artistic sort.
Many
enraptured people declare Broadway to be the prettiest village in England, and
the existence of its artist-colony perhaps lends some aid to their contention;
but it is not quite that, and although the long single street of the place is
beautiful in detail, it does not compose a picture as a whole. One of the
finest—if not indeed the finest—of those detailed beauties is the grand old stone
front of the “Lygon Arms,” built, as the “White Hart” inn, so long ago as 1540,
and bearing that name until the early part of the last century, when the
property was purchased by the Lygon family, whose head is now Earl Beauchamp, a
title that, although it looks so medieval, was created in 1815. In more recent
times the house was purchased by the great unwieldy brewing firm of Allsopp,
but in 1903 was sold again to the present resident proprietor, Mr. S. B.
Russell, and so has achieved its freedom and independence once more. The “Lygon
Arms,” however, it still remains, its armorial sign-board displaying the
heraldic coat of that family, with their motto,Ex Fide Fortis.
The
great four-gabled stone front of the “Lygon Arms” gives it the air of some
ancient manor-house, an effect enhanced by the fine Renaissance enriched stone
doorway added by John Trevis, an old-time innkeeper, who flourished in the
reigns of James the First and Charles the First, and whose name, together with
that of his wife, Ursula, and the date, 1620, can still be plainly seen. John
Trevis (or “Treavis,” as the name was sometimes spelled) ended his hostelling
in 1641, as appears by a rubbing from his memorial brass from Broadway old
church, prominently displayed in the hall of the house.
The
house has during the last few years been gradually brought back to its ancient
state, and the neglect that befell on the withdrawal of the road-traffic
repaired. But not merely neglect had injured it. The ancient features had
suffered greatly in the prosperous times at the opening of the nineteenth
century, when the stone mullions of nearly all the windows were removed and
modern glass and wooden sashes inserted. The thing seems so wanton and so
useless that it is difficult to understand, in these days of reversion to type.
A gas-lamp and bracket had at the same time been fixed to the doorway, defacing
the stonework, and where alterations of this kind had not taken place, injury
of another sort arose from the greater part of the inn being unoccupied and the
rest degraded to little above the condition of an ale-house.
All
the ancient features have been reinstated, and a general restoration effected,
under the advice of experts, and in the “Lygon Arms” of to-day you see a house
typical of an old English inn of the seventeenth century.
There
is the Cromwell Room, so named from a tradition that the Protector slept in it
the night before the Battle of Worcester. It is now a sitting-room. A great
carved stone fireplace is the chief feature of that apartment, whose beautiful
plaster ceiling is also worthy of notice. There is even a tradition that
Charles the First visited the inn on two or three occasions; but no details of
either his, or Cromwell’s, visits, survive.
Quaint,
unexpected corners, lobbies and staircases abound here, and ancient fittings
are found, even in the domestic kitchen portion of the house. In the
entrance-hall is some very old carved oak from Chipping Campden church, with an
inscription no man can read; while, to keep company with the undoubtedly
indigenous old oak panelling of the so-called “Panelled Room,” and others,
elaborate ancient firebacks and open grates have been introduced—the spoil of
curiosity shops. Noticeable among these are the ornate fireback in the Cromwell
Room and the very fine specimen of a wrought-iron chimney-crane in the
ingle-nook of a cosy corner by the entrance.
While
it would be perhaps too much to say that Broadway and the “Lygon Arms” are
better known to and appreciated by touring Americans than by our own people,
they are certainly visited very largely by travellers from the United States
during the summer months; the fame of Broadway having spread over-sea very
largely on account of the resident American artist-colony and Madame de
Navarro, who as Mary Anderson—“our Mary”—figured prominently on the stage, some
years since.
The Bell, Tewkesbury
When the author of John Halifax, Gentleman,
who had many years before become Mrs. Craik, died, in 1887, a monument was
fittingly erected to her memory in Tewkesbury Abbey Church, hard by the home of
her hero.
The “Bell” inn is a beautiful old building, of
strongly contrasted very white plaster and very black timbers. A blue and gold
bell hangs out as a sign in front. At the left-hand side an addition has quite
recently been made (not included in the illustration) to provide a
billiard-room and additional bedrooms.
http://www.google.com/search?q=51.9908123,-2.1615477
Other Tewkesbury Inns and The Wheatsheaf,
Tewkesbury
For the rest, Tewkesbury is a town full of
ancient buildings, built in those dark times of the warring Roses, when men
were foolish enough to fight—and to die and to lose all—for their principles.
Savage, barbaric times, happily gone for ever, to give place to the era of
argument and the amateur lawyer! In our own age you do not go forth and kill or
be killed, but simply “passively resist” and await the advent of the bailiffs
coming to distrain for the amount of your unpaid rates and taxes, confident
that, in any change of government, your party will in its turn be able to enact
the petty tyrant.
In those times, when men fought well, they
built with equal sturdiness, and the memory of their deeds beside the Avon
meadows, in the bloody Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, survives, side by side
with the fine black-and-white timbered houses they designed and framed, and
will survive centuries yet.
Tewkesbury is a town of inns. The “Hop Pole,”
among the largest of them, is a Dickensian inn, and so treated of in another
chapter; but besides it you have the great red-brick Georgian “Swan,” typically
a coaching hostelry, that is not quite sure of the titles “inn,” “hotel,” or
“tavern,” and so, to be certain, calls itself, in the boldest of lettering,
“Swan Hotel, Inn, and Tavern,” and thus has it all ways.
Probably the oldest inn of Tewkesbury is the
“Berkeley Arms.” There it stands in the High Street, as sturdily as ever, and
is in every timber, every casement, and in all the circumstances of uneven
flooring and tortuous stairways, so indubitably ancient that men who fought on
Yorkist or Lancastrian side in those contested meads by Severn and Avon in 1471
may well have slept beneath its roof the night before the battle, and considered
the place, even then, “old-fashioned.” Its age is so evident that for the sign
to proclaim it, as it does, in the modern pseudo-antique Wardour Street style,
“Ye olde Berkeley Arms,” is an impertinent inadequacy, comparable to calling
the Pyramids “large” or the Alps “hills.” It is much the same tale with the
“Wheatsheaf”; a little less hoary, perhaps, and certainly more susceptible to
pictorial treatment. It latterly has become “Ye,” instead of “The,” Wheatsheaf,
and has assumed a redundant “e” or so; but the equally old neighbouring “Black
Bear” fairly revels in the antique, and on a quite new sign-board proclaims
itself to be “Ye Olde Blacke Beare.” What a prodigal and immoral consumption of
that already poor, overworked letter “e,” already, as every compositor working
at case knows, the greatest in demand of all the twenty-six letters of the
alphabet!
http://www.google.com/search?q=51.9936360,-2.1571653
The
Feathers, Ludlow
Turn we now to Shropshire,
to that sweet and gracious old town of Ludlow, where—albeit ruined—the great
Castle of the Lords Presidents of the Council of the Marches of Wales yet
stands, and where many an ancient house belonging to history fronts on to the
quiet streets: some whose antique interiors are altogether unsuspected of the
passer-by, by reason of the Georgian red-brick fronts or Early Victorian
plaster faces that have masked the older and sturdier construction of oaken
beams. I love the old town of Ludlow, as needs I must do, for it is the home of
my forbears, who, certainly since the days of Elizabeth, when the registers of
the Cathedral-like church of St. Lawrence begin, lived there and worked there
in what was their almost invariable handicraft of joining and cabinet-making,
until quite recent years.
The finest old
timber-fronted, black-and-white house in Ludlow is the “Feathers” inn, in Corve
Street. There are many ancient and picturesque hostelries in England, but none
finer than the “Feathers,” and it is additionally remarkable for being as
exquisite within as without. You see its nodding gables and peaked roofs among
the earliest of the beautiful things of Ludlow, as you come from the
railway-station and ascend the steep Corve Street, that leads out of the town,
into Corve Dale.
Very little is known of
the history of the “Feathers.” The earliest deed relating to the property is
dated August 2nd, 1609, when it appears to have been leased from a member of
the Council of the Marches, one Edward Waties of Burway, by Rees Jones and Isabel,
his wife. Ten years later, March 10th, 1618-9, Rees Jones purchased the
fee-simple of the house from Edward Waties and his wife, Martha: other parties
to the transaction being Sir Charles Foxe, of Bromfield, and his son Francis,
respectively father and brother of Martha Waties. The purchase price of the
freehold was £225. In neither of those transactions is the house called the
“Feathers,” or even referred to as an inn; nor do we know whether Rees Jones
purchased the existing house, or an older one, on this site. It seems probable,
however, that this is the[Pg 22] original mansion of
some personage connected with the ancient government of the Welsh marches, or
perhaps the “town house” of the Foxes of Bromfield in those times when every
Shropshire squire of wealth and standing repaired for a season every year with
his family from his country seat to Shrewsbury or Ludlow; the two resorts of
Society in those days when London, in the toils, dangers, and expenses of
travelling, was so far removed that it was a place to be seen but once or twice
in a lifetime.
Rees Jones seems to have
remodelled the mansion as an inn, and there is every likelihood that he named
it the “Feathers” in honour of Henry, Prince of Wales, elder brother of Charles
the First, who died in 1612; or perhaps in celebration of Prince Charles being,
in his stead, created Prince of Wales, in 1616, when there were great
rejoicings in Ludlow, and masques in “The Love of Wales to their Sovereign
Prince.” How more loyal could one be—and how more certain to secure custom at
such a juncture—than to name one’s inn after the triply feathered badge of a
popular Prince?
The door of the “Feathers”
appears to be the original entrance of Rees Jones’ day. No prospect of
unwelcome visitors bursting through that substantial oak, reinforced by the
three hundred and fifty or so iron studs that rather grimly spangle the surface
of it, in defensive constellation. Even the original hinges remain, terminated
decoratively by wrought-iron fleurs-de-lys. The initials of [Pg 23]Rees Jones himself—R.I.—are cut in the lock-plate.
The “Feathers” was the
local “Grand Hotel” or “Metropole” of that day, and was the resort of the best,
as may be perceived by the ancient fittings and decorations, carried out in all
the perfection possible to that time. From the oak-panelled hall you proceed
upstairs to the principal room, the Large Dining-Room, looking out, through
lozenge-paned windows, upon the ancient carved-oak balcony overhanging the
street.
It is a handsome room,
with elaborately decorated ceiling. In the centre is a device, in raised
plaster, of the Royal Arms of the reign of James the First, surrounded by a
star-like design of grapes and vines, decoratively treated; showing, together
with the free repetition of grapes and vine-tendrils over other portions of the
ceiling, that this symbolic decorative work was executed especially for the
inn, and not for the house in any former existence as a private residence.
The carved oak overmantel,
in three compartments, with a boldly rendered representation of the Royal arms
and supporters of Lion and Unicorn, is contemporary with the ceiling, and there
is no reason to doubt it having been made for the place it occupies, in spite
of the tradition that tells of its coming from the Castle when that historic
fortress and palace was shamefully dismantled in the reign of George the Third.
The room is panelled throughout.
Everything else is in
keeping, but it should not—and could not—be supposed that the Jacobean-style
and Chippendale furniture is of any old local association. Indeed, there are
many in Ludlow who remember the time when the “Feathers” was furnished, neither
comfortably nor artistically, with Early Victorian horse-hair stuffed chairs
and sofas of the most atrocious type. It has been reserved for later days to be
more appreciative of the value and desirability of having all things, as far as
possible, in keeping with the age of the house.
Thus, we are not to think
the fireback in this dining-room an old belonging of the inn. It is, indeed,
ancient, and bears the perfectly genuine Lion and Dragon supporters and the
arms of Queen Elizabeth, but it was purchased at the Condover Hall sale, in
1897.
The Small Dining-room is
panelled with oak, dark with age, to the ceiling, and the Jacobean carved work
enriching the fireplace is only less elaborate than that of the larger
dining-room. The old grate and Flemish fireback, although also genuine antiques,
were acquired in London, in 1898; but an old carved panel over the door,
bearing the arms of Foxe and Hacluit, two Shropshire families prominent in the
seventeenth century, is in its original place. The impaled arms are interesting
examples of “canting,” or punning, heraldry: three foxes’ heads indicating the
one family, and “three hatchets proper” that of Hacluit, or “Hackeluit,” as it
was sometimes written. The shield of arms is flanked[Pg 25] on
either side by a representation of a “water-bouget.”
Further upstairs, the
bedroom floors slope at distinct angles, in sympathy with the bending gables
without.
http://www.google.com/search?q=52.3685459,-2.
Feathers Hotel Ceiling Plaster Moulding
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