“PIFF’S ELM.”
The difficulty of resolving tradition into fact, of putting a date to legends and tracing them to their origin, is generally insurmountable. Let us take, for example, the “Old White Swan,” at “Piff’s Elm.” Casting a roving eye upon the map of Gloucestershire, I see by chance, between Tewkesbury and Gloucester, a place so named. It tells me vaguely of romance, and I resolve, at all hazards, to go to that spot and sketch, if sketchable, the inn I suspect to be there, and note the story that belongs, or should belong, to it. In due course I come to that lonely place, and there, to be sure, is an inn—once a considerable house on the old coaching and posting route between Cheltenham and Tewkesbury—and not only an inn, but a picturesque one, fronted with the giant stump of an elm—whether Piff’s or another’s, who shall say?
And Piff himself? Whether he was a highwayman or was murdered by a highwayman; or if he were a suicide who hanged himself from the elm associated with him, or a criminal gibbeted there, I cannot tell you, nor can any one else. Some stories say one thing, some another, and others still put quite different complexions upon it. In that choice of legends lurks romance itself, perhaps reduced from the highest realms of tragedy by the unfortunately farcical name of the mysterious Piff.
Equally romantic, and irreducible to cold-drawn fact, is the legend of King James and the Tinker, associated with the “King and Tinker” inn at White Webbs Lane, in what was once Enfield Chase. According to the tale, King James the First, hunting in the woodlands that surrounded his palace of Theobalds, lost himself, and, drawing rein at the inn—whatever then was the sign of it—encountered a tinker drinking a modest stoup of ale in the porch.
“What news, good fellow?” asked the horseman.
“No news that I wot of,” replied the tinker, “save that they say the King’s out a-hunting in the Chase to-day. I should like to see the King, although I suppose he’s very much like other folk.”
“So you’d like to see the King?” queried his Majesty.
“Ay, just for the sake of saying so,” replied the tinker.