“‘Then,’ says I, producing the money, ‘just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.’
“The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen, and said something to his wife. She came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me.... They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning; and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.”
The “Blue Boar” in Whitechapel is referred to, and the “County Inn” at Canterbury, identified with the “Fountain,” where Mr. Dick slept. The “little inn” in that same city, where Mr. Micawber stayed, and might have said—but didn’t—that he “resided, in short, ‘put up,’” there, is claimed to be the “Sun,” but how, of all the little inns of Canterbury—and there are many—the “Sun” should so decisively claim the honour is beyond the wit of man to tell. It is an old, old inn that, rather mistakenly, calls itself an “hotel,” and the peaked, red-tiled roof, the projecting upper storey, bracketed out upon ancient timbers, are evidence enough that it was in being many centuries before the foreign word “hotel” became acclimatised in this country. One may dine, or lunch, or tea at the “Sun,” in the ghostly company of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, but although warm culinary scents may be noticed with satisfaction by the hungry pilgrim, he misses the “flabby perspiration on the walls,” mentioned in the book. True, it is a feature readily spared.
In the Uncommercial Traveller a reference to the “Crispin and Crispianus,” at Strood, is found. It is a humble, weather-boarded inn, whose age might be very great or comparatively recent. But, whatever the age of the present house, there has long been an inn of the name on this spot, the sign being referred back to St. Crispin’s Day, October 25th, 1415, when Agincourt was fought and won. The sign is, however, doubtless far older than that, and probably was one of the very many religious inn-signs designed to attract the custom of thirsty wayfarers to Becket’s shrine.
The brothers Crispin and Crispian were members of a noble family in ancient Rome, who, professing Christianity, fled to Gaul and supported themselves by shoemaking in the town of Troyes. They suffered martyrdom at Soissons, in A.D. 287. The sanctity and benevolence of St. Crispin are said to have been so great that he would steal leather as material for shoes for the poor; for which, did he live in our times, he would still be martyred—in a police-court, to the tune of several months’ imprisonment.
THE “CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS,” STROOD.
The picture-sign of the “Crispin and Crispianus” is said to be a copy of a painting in the church of St. Pantaléon at Troyes, and certainly (but chiefly because of much varnish, and the dust and grime of the road) looks very Old-Masterish. The two saints, seated uncomfortably close to one another, and looking very sheepish, appear to be cutting out a piece of leather to the order of an interesting and gigantic pirate.
A mysterious incident occurred in 1830 at this house, in the death of a man who had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham, and had afterwards tramped the country as a hawker. He lay here dying, in an upper room, and told the doctor who was called to him the almost incredible story that he was really Charles Parrott Hanger, Earl of Coleraine, and not “Charley Roberts,” the name he had usually been known by for twenty years. Although his life had been so squalid and apparently poverty-stricken, he left £1,000 to his son, Charles Henry Hanger.
The “Crispin and Crispianus,” in common with most other erstwhile humble inns, has experienced a social levelling-up since the time when Dickens mentioned it as a house where tramping tinkers and itinerant clock-makers, coming into Strood “yonder, by the blasted ash,” might lie. In these times, when the blasted dust of the Dover road is the most noticeable feature, and a half-century has effected all manner of wonderful changes, tramps and their kin find no harbourage at the old house, whose invitation to cyclists and amateur photographers sufficiently emphasises its improved status.