The “Red Lion” at Hillingdon, near Uxbridge, has its small share in the troubled story of the Stuarts, although, to be sure, its plastered front is a thought too modern-looking. Here Charles the First, escaping from the besieged city of Oxford, lay the first night of his distracted wanderings through England that led him eventually to the end of his armed resistance, at Southwell.
THE “THREE CROWNS,” CHAGFORD.
The “Three Crowns” at Chagford, South Devon, now a favourite old-world haunt of tourists visiting Dartmoor, illustrates still another incident in that internecine warfare. It was originally a manor-house built in the time of Henry the Eighth by Sir John Whyddon, a native of Chagford, who went to London to seek his fortune, and, as a lawyer, found it. He became a Judge of the King’s Bench, was knighted, and we are gravely told that he was the first judge to ride to Westminster on a horse: his predecessors, and his learned contemporary brethren, had gone on mules.
In the troubled times of the Civil War, when Royalist and Roundhead disturbed even these remote nooks of the country, Chagford was attacked by the Royalists under Sir John Berkeley. In the street-fighting, according to Clarendon, “they lost Sidney Godolphin, a young gentleman of incomparable parts. He received a mortal shot by a musket, a little above the knee, of which he died on the instant, leaving the misfortune of his death upon a place which could never otherwise have had a mention in the world.” Ay! but that was written in days long before the appreciation of picturesque scenery had brought troops of visitors to Chagford.
Young Godolphin bled to death on a stone seat of what is now, as Charles Kingsley wrote, “a beautiful old mullioned and gabled Perpendicular inn.”
What was once the “great hall” of the old mansion is now a schoolroom. Both face the church, on the other side of the narrow street, as an old manor-house should do, and in summer time the gossipers lounge and talk, and interpolate their gossiping with loud horse-laughs, far into the night, greatly to the annoyance of visitors. Have I not heard, with these ears, the raising of a sash at some incredible hour, and the voice of some native of Bawston or N’York, exclaiming indignantly, “See yur, you darned skunks, clear out of it!” whereupon, with cat-calls and insults in the patois of Devonshire, fortunately not with ease to be understood by strangers from the U.S., that village convention has dispersed.
Many historic memories linger around that ancient and beautiful house, the “Saracen’s Head” at Southwell, in the Sherwood Forest district of Nottinghamshire. Southwell, whose hoary Minster has in modern times become a cathedral, has fallen into a dreamless slumber since the last of the coaches left the road, and as the traveller comes into its quiet streets, in whose midst the great Norman church stands solemnly, like some grey architectural ghost, he feels that he has come into a place whose last days of activity ended considerably over half a century ago.
The “Saracen’s Head” was built in that interesting, but vague, period of “ever so long ago”; the nearest attempt at determining its age to which most chroniclers dare commit themselves. Whether the existing house is the same building as that of this name conveyed by the Archbishop of York in 1396 to John Fysher and his wife Margaret, does not appear, but there seems very little reason to doubt that, although greatly altered and added to from time to time, the present “Saracen’s Head” is, essentially, in its ancient timbering, the identical structure.
The frontage of the inn, now as ever the chief inn of Southwell, little indicates its great age, for it is covered with a coat of grey plaster, and, were it not for the enormously substantial oaken doors of the coach-entrance, and the peep through the archway of the old courtyard, the casual wayfarer might pass the historic house by.