A particularly haughty and exclusive establishment was the “Verulam Arms.” No common fellow who travelled by public conveyances was encouraged there. Only the lordly travellers who came in their own family coaches, or posted, ever sheltered beneath that condescending roof. The house remains, on the right-hand of Telford’s new road leaving St. Albans, but had, as an hotel and posting-house, the shortest of careers. Built between 1827 and 1828, another ten years saw the coming of the railway. With that event vanished the trade of the “Verulam Arms.” The house was soon closed, and has for fifty years past been a private residence. It is an extremely plain and uncompromisingly formal building in pallid brick, within railings enclosing a semicircular drive. It is said that the Princess Victoria stayed here once. Some portions of the once extensive stable-yards and coach-houses remain, but the greater part of the grounds was taken, as long ago as 1848, as the site for a Roman Catholic Church, an unfortunate building discontinued and sold before completion, and finally purchased and finished as a Church of England place of worship, as it still remains, with the title of Christ Church. It would be difficult to find a more hideous building.
THE “FIGHTING COCKS.”
But a far higher antiquity than can be shown by any other house in St. Albans belongs to a little inn called the “Fighting Cocks,” standing by the river Ver, below the Abbey. Its origin goes back to early monastic days, when the lower part of this curious little octagonal building was a water-gate to the monastery, and known as St. Germain’s Gate. Here the monks kept their nets, using the upper part as a fortification. That embattled upper stage disappeared six hundred years ago, and in its place the upper storey of the inn is reared, in brick and timber, upon the stone substructure. The inn claims to be the oldest inhabited house in the kingdom, and exhibited until recently the inscription:—
The Old Round House,
Rebuilt after the Flood.
Obviously, judging from that old sign, the distinction between an eight-sided and a round house was too subtle to be noticed. The “Rebuilt after the Flood” does not (seeing where the house stands, beside the river Ver) necessarily mean the Deluge.
The hanging sign has of late years become pictorial. On one side the Cocks are to be seen, a whirling mass of contention, and on the other the victor stands proudly over the prostrate body of the vanquished, and indulges in a triumphant crow.
XVII
We often read in romances of the villainous innkeepers of long ago, who were in league with highwaymen, and we generally put those stories down as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations of a bygone age. But there were many such innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and they were the highwaymen’s best sources of information. Such an one was the host of an inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated with Tom Garrett and another “road agent” working the highway between St. Albans and London, in an evil partnership. It is a pity that the sign of this inn is not specified; we should have gazed upon it with interest.