CHAPTER XII
HIGHWAYMEN’S INNS
There is no doubt that, in a certain sense, all inns were anciently hand-in-glove with the highwaymen. No hostelry so respectable that it could safely give warranty for its ostlers without-doors and its servants within. Mine host might be above suspicion, but not all his dependants; and the gentlemen of the high toby commonly learnt from the staffs of the inns what manner of guests lay there, what their saddle-bags or valises held, and whither they were bound. No wealthy traveller, coming to his inn overnight in those far-distant times, with pistols fully loaded and primed, dared set forth again without narrowly examining his weapons, whose charges, he would be not unlikely to discover, had mysteriously been drawn since his arrival, and perhaps his sword fixed by some unknown agency immovably in its scabbard. You figure such an one, too hurried at his starting to look closely into his equipment, come unexpectedly in the presence of a highwayman, and, his armoury thus raided, falling an easy prey.
These dangers of the wayside inns, and even of the greater and more responsible hostelries in considerable towns, were so well known that literature, from the time of Queen Elizabeth until that of the earlier Georges, is full of them. Indeed, that singular person, John Clavel, worthless and dissolute sprig of an ancient and respectable landed family in Dorsetshire, especially recounts them in his very serious pamphlet, the Recantation of an Ill-led Life, written from his prison-cell in the King’s Bench in 1627, and printed in the following year. He inscribes himself “Gentleman” on his title-page, and in his “discouerie of the High-way Law,” written in verse, proceeds to “round upon” his late confederates in the spirit of the sneak. All this was in the hope of a pardon, which he apparently obtained, for he was at liberty, and still renouncing his former evil courses, in 1634.
One of the important heads of his pamphlet, addressed to travellers, is “How a Traveller should carry himself at his inn.” His advice reads nowadays like that supererogatory kind generally known as “teaching your grandmother to suck eggs”; but when we consider closely that in those times knowledge was not widely diffused, and that to most people a journey was a rare and toilsome experience, to be undertaken only at long intervals and long afterwards talked of, John Clavel’s directions to wayfarers may have been really valuable. His pamphlet must, for some reason or another, have been largely purchased, for three editions of it are known.
Thus he warns the traveller come to his inn:
Oft in your clothier’s and your grazier’s inn,
You shall have chamberlains that there have been
Plac’d purposely by thieves, or else consenting
By their large bribes, and by their often tempting,
That mark your purses drawn, and give a guess
What’s there, within a little, more or less.
Then will they grip your cloak-bags, feel their weight:
There’s likewise in mine host sometimes deceit:
If it be left in charge with him all night,
Unto his roaring guests he gives a light,
Who spend full thrice as much in wine and beer
As you in those and all your other cheer.
But the classic and most outstanding literary reference to these dark features of old-time innkeeping is found in Shakespeare, in the First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The scene is Rochester: an inn yard. Enter a carrier, with a lantern in his hand, in the hours before daybreak.