The Old Inns of Old England - Charles G. Harper

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idea to that dissolute royal favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who succeeded in obtaining him a patent for a special commission to grant licenses to keepers of inns and ale-houses. The patent was issued, not without great opposition, and the licensing fees were left to the discretion of Mompesson and his two fellow-commissioners, with the only proviso that four-fifths of the returns were to go to the Exchequer. Shortly afterwards Mompesson himself was knighted by the King, in order, as Bacon wrote, “that he may better fight with the Bulls and the Bears and the Saracen’s Heads, and such fearful creatures.” Much virtue and power, of the magisterial sort, in a knighthood; likely, we consider, King and commissioners, and all concerned in the issuing of this patent, to impress and overawe poor Bung, and therefore we, James the First, most sacred Majesty by the grace of God, do, on Newmarket Heath, say, “Rise, Sir Giles!”

      The three commissioners wielded full authority. There was no appeal from that triumvirate, who at their will refused or granted licenses, and charged for them what they pleased, hungering after that one-fifth. They largely increased the number of inns, woefully oppressed honest men, wrung heavy fines from all for merely technical and inadvertent infractions of the licensing laws, and granted new licenses at exorbitant rates to infamous houses that had but recently been deprived of them. During more than four years these iniquities continued, side by side with the working of other monopolies, granted from time to time, but at last the gathering storm of indignation burst, in the House of Commons, in February, 1621. That was a Parliament already working with the leaven of a Puritanism which was presently to leaven the whole lump of English governance in a drastic manner then little dreamt of; and it was keen to scent and to abolish abuses.

      Thus we see the House, very stern and vindictive, inquiring into the conduct and working of the by now notorious Commission. In the result Mompesson and his associates were found to have prosecuted 3,320 innkeepers for technical infractions of obsolete statutes, and to have been guilty of many misdemeanours. Mompesson appealed to the mercy of the House, but was placed under arrest by the Sergeant-at-Arms while that assembly deliberated how it should act. Mompesson himself clearly expected to be severely dealt with, for at the earliest moment evaded his arrest and was off, across the Channel, where he learnt—no doubt with cynical amusement—that he had been “banished.”

      The judgment of the two Houses of Parliament was that he should be expelled the House, and be degraded from his knighthood and conducted on horseback along the Strand with his face to the horse’s tail. Further, he was to be fined £10,000, and for ever held an infamous person.

      Meanwhile, if Parliament failed to lay the chief offender by the heels, it did at least succeed in putting hand upon, and detaining, one of his equally infamous associates, himself a knight, and accordingly susceptible of some dramatic degradation, beyond anything to be possibly wreaked upon any common fellow. Sir Francis Mitchell, attorney-at-law, was consigned to the Tower, and then brought forth from it to have his spurs hacked off and thrown away, his sword broken over his head, and himself publicly called no longer knight, but “knave.” Then to the Fleet Prison, with certainty on the morrow of a public procession to Westminster, himself the central object, mounted, with face to tail, on the back of the sorriest horse to be found, and the target for all the missiles of the crowd: a prospect and programme duly realised and carried out.

      Mompesson we may easily conceive hearing of, and picturing, all these things, in his retreat over sea, and congratulating himself on his prompt flight. But he was, after all, treated with the most extraordinary generosity. The same year, the fine of £10,000 was assigned by the House to his father-in-law (which we suspect was an oblique way of remitting it) and in 1623 he is found petitioning to be allowed to return to England. He was allowed to return for a period of three months, on condition that it was to be solely on his private affairs, but he was no sooner back than he impudently began to put his old licensing patent in force again. On August 10th he was granted an extension of three months, but overstayed it, and was at last, February 8th, 1624, ordered to quit the country within five days. It remains uncertain whether he complied with this, or not, but he soon returned; not, however, to again trouble public affairs, for he returned to Wiltshire and died there, obscurely, about 1651. He lives in literature, in Massinger’s play, A New Way to pay Old Debts, as “Sir Giles Overreach.”

      CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

      THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

      The inns of old time, serving as they did the varied functions of clubs and assembly-rooms and places of general resort, in addition to that of hotel, were often, at times when controversies ran high, very turbulent places.

      The manners and customs prevailing in the beginning of the eighteenth century may be imagined from an affray which befell at the “Raven,” Shrewsbury, in 1716, when two officers of the Dragoons insisted in the public room of the inn, upon a Mr. Andrew Swift and a Mr. Robert Wood, apothecary, drinking “King George, and Damnation to the Jacobites.” The civilians refused, whereupon those military men drew their swords, but—swords notwithstanding—they were very handsomely thrashed, and one was placed upon the fire, and not only had his breeches burnt through in a conspicuous place, but had his person toasted. The officers then, we learn, “went off, leaving their hatts, wigs and swords (which were broke) behind them.”

      One did not, it will be gathered from the above, easily in those times lead the Quiet Life; but that was a heated occasion, and we were then really upon the threshold of that fine era when inns, taverns, and coffee-houses were the resort, not merely of travellers or of thirsty souls, but of wits and the great figures of eighteenth-century literature, who were convivial as well as literary. It was a great, and, as it seems to the present century, a curious, time; when men of the calibre of Addison, of Goldsmith and of Johnson, acknowledged masters in classic and modern literature, smoked and drank to excess in the public parlours of inns. But those were the clubs of that age, and that was an age in which, although the producers of literature were miserably rewarded, their company and conversation were sought and listened to with respect.

      When Dr. Johnson declared that a seat in a tavern chair was the height of human felicity, his saying carried a special significance, lost upon the present age. He was thinking, not only of a comfortable sanded parlour, a roaring fire, and plenty of good cheer and good company, but also of the circle of humbly appreciative auditors who gathered round an accepted wit, hung upon his words, offered themselves as butts for his ironic or satiric humour, and—stood treat. The great wits of the eighteenth century expected subservience in their admirers, and only began to coruscate, to utter words of wisdom or inspired nonsense, or to scatter sparkling quips and jests, when well primed with liquor—at the expense of others. The felicity of Johnson found in a tavern chair was derived, therefore, chiefly from the homage of his attendant humble Boswells, and from the fact that they paid the reckoning; and was, perhaps, to some modern ideas, a rather shameful idea of happiness.

      Johnson, who did not love the country, and thought one green field very like another green field, when he spoke of a tavern chair was of course thinking of London taverns. He would have found no sufficient audience in its wayside fellow, which indeed was apt, in his time and for long after, to be somewhat rough and ready, and, when you had travelled a little far afield, became a very primitive and indeed barbarous place.

      At Llannon, in 1797, those sketching and note-taking friends, Rowlandson and Wigstead, touring North and South Wales in search of the picturesque, found it, not unmixed with dirt and discomfort, at the inns. Indeed, it was only at one town in Wales—the town of Neath—that Wigstead found himself able to declare, “with strict propriety,” that the house was comfortable. Comfort and decency fled the inn at Llannon, abashed. This, according to Wigstead, was the way of it: “The cook on our arrival was in the suds, and, with unwiped hands, reached down a fragment of mutton for our repast: a piece of ham was lost, but after long search was found amongst the worsted stockings and sheets on the board.”

      Then “a little child was sprawling in a dripping-pan which seemed recently taken from the fire: the fat in this was destined to fry our eggs in. Hunger itself even was blunted,” and the travellers

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