would have rejoiced to know the “Seven Stars,” and might have been moved to write a similar couplet, on how much so small a house could be made to hold.
CHAPTER II
THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF INNS
Inns, hotels, public-houses of all kinds, have a very ancient lineage, but we need not in this place go very deeply into their family history, or stodge ourselves with fossilised facts at the outset. So far as we are concerned, inns begin with the Roman Conquest of Britain, for it is absurd to suppose that the Britons, whom Julius Cæsar conquered, drank beer or required hotel accommodation.
The colonising Romans themselves, of course, were used to inns, and when they covered Britain with a system of roads, hostelries and mere drinking-places of every kind sprang up beside them, for the accommodation and refreshment alike of soldiers and civilians. There is no reason to suppose that the Roman legionary was a less thirsty soul than the modern soldier, and therefore houses that resembled our beer-shops and rustic inns must have been sheer necessaries. There was then the bibulium, where the bibulous boozed to their hearts’ content; and there were the diversoria and caupones, the inns or hotels, together with the posting-houses along the roads, known as mansiones or stabulia.
The bibulium, that is to say, the ale-house or tavern, displayed its sign for all men to see: the ivy-garland, or wreath of vine-leaves, in honour of Bacchus, wreathed around a hoop at the end of a projecting pole. This bold advertisment of good drink to be had within long outlasted Roman times, and indeed still survives in differing forms, in the signs of existing inns. It became the “ale-stake” of Anglo-Saxon and middle English times.
The traveller recognised the ale-stake at a great distance, by reason of its long pole—the “stake” whence those old beer-houses derived their name—projecting from the house-front, with its mass of furze, or garland of flowers, or ivy-wreath, dangling at the end. But the ale-houses that sold good drink little needed such signs, a circumstance that early led to the old proverb, “Good wine needs no bush.”
On the other hand, we may well suppose the places that sold only inferior swipes required poles very long and bushes very prominent, and in London, where competition was great, all ale-stakes early began to vie with one another which should in this manner first attract the attention of thirsty folk. This at length grew to be such a nuisance, and even a danger, that in 1375 a law was passed that all taverners in the City of London owning ale-stakes projecting or extending over the king’s highway “more than seven feet in length at the utmost,” should be fined forty pence and be compelled to remove the offending sign.