The great window, entirely constructed of oak, is the chief feature of the exterior, just as the noble room it lights is the principal object of interest in the house itself. The point most worthy of consideration here is that in this remarkably fine window, and in the room itself, you have an unaltered and unrestored work of the fifteenth century. In early ages the house was an inn with some ecclesiastical tie, and when it passed from the hands of the brotherhood (whoever they may have been) that once owned it, and became a secularised hostelry, it seems to have continued its career with very little alteration beyond that of adopting as a sign the “King’s Head”: that king doubtless originally Henry the Eighth himself. The house was, in the seventeenth century, one of the Aylesbury inns that issued tokens, for in museums and private collections are still to be found copper pieces inscribed “At ye King’s Head In Aillsburey, W.E.D. 1657.” There still existed, until comparatively recent times, traces of old galleries in the extensive yard, but modern changes have at last completely abolished them.
The fine room of which the great window forms one complete side was no doubt originally the common-room of the hostel. It is now the tap-room. A fine lofty hall it makes: oaken pillars, black with age, springing from each corner, based upon stone plinths and supporting finely moulded beams that, crossing in the ceiling, divide it into nine square compartments. The great window, divided by mullions and a transom into twenty lights, is of course seen to best advantage from within, and still keeps much of the original armorial stained glass.
CHAPTER VIII
HISTORIC INNS
It can be no matter for surprise that many inns have historic associations. Indeed, when we consider that in olden times the hostelries of town and country touched life at every point, and were once the centre of local life, it becomes rather surprising that not more tragic events, more treaties and conferences, and more plots and conspiracies are associated with such places of public resort.
Strange, mysterious plotters, highwaymen, and great nobles resorted to them, and, coming to things more domestic, there, under the inn’s hospitable roof, town councils not infrequently met in those times before ever “municipal buildings” were dreamed of, and conducted their business over a cheering, and inebriating, cup. Your inn was, in short, then at once your railway-station, club, hotel, reading-room and mart. There were distinct advantages, in the social sense, in all this. It meant good-fellowship when respectable townsfolk were not ashamed to spend a winter evening in the parlour of a representative inn, or play a game of bowls in summer on the bowling-green with which most such houses were once furnished, and the man who now glowers in unneighbourly and solitary way over his hearthstone, would expand, with such opportunities, into as good-natured a fellow as any of the olden time.
THE “REINDEER,” BANBURY.