Probably the most interesting item at the “Maid’s Head” is the Jacobean bar, an exceptionally fine example of seventeenth-century woodwork, of marked architectonic character, and, as a bar, unique. Now that the courtyard to which it opened is roofed in, its preservation is assured, at the expense of the genuine old open-air feature, for which the modern lounge is a poor exchange.
Journeying from Norwich to the sea at Yarmouth, we find there, among the numerous hotels of that populous place, that highly interesting house, the “Star,” facing the river at Hall Quay. The “Star” is older than a first glance would lead the casual visitor to suspect; and a more prolonged examination reveals a frontage built of black flints elaborately, and with the greatest nicety, chipped into cubes: one of the most painstaking kinds of labour it is possible to conceive. The house, built in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, has been an inn only since about 1780. It has an interesting history, having been erected as the combined business premises and place of residence of one William Crowe, a very considerable merchant in his day, and High Bailiff of Yarmouth in 1606. The lower part of the premises was at that time the business portion, while the upper was that worshipful merchant’s residence; traders, both by retail and by wholesale, within the kingdom and overseas alike, not then having arrived at being ashamed of their business. How honestly proud William Crowe was of his position as a merchant we may still see, in the great and beautiful oak-panelled room on the first floor of his old house, the fine apartment now known as the “Nelson Room”; for there, prominently carved over the generous fireplace, you see the arms of the Merchant Adventurers of England, a company of traders of which he was a member. The oak-panelling here, reaching from floor to ceiling, itself beautifully decorated, is most elaborately designed in the Renaissance way, with fluted Corinthian pilasters, supporting grotesque male and female terminal figures. This noble room is now the Coffee-room of the hotel.
COURTYARD OF THE “MAID’S HEAD,” NORWICH SHOWING THE JACOBEAN BAR.
DOORWAY, “THE COCK,” STONY STRATFORD.
It should be said that the name of “Nelson” is purely arbitrary in this connection, for the “Star” has no historic associations with the Admiral. The name was given the room merely from the fact that a portrait of Nelson hangs on its walls.
In this posy of old inns, whose sweet savour reconciles the traveller to many hateful modern portents, mention must be made of the “George” at Odiham. At an inn styled the “George” you do expect, more than at any other sign, to find old-fashioned comfort; and here, at that little forgotten townlet of Odiham, lying secluded away back from the Exeter Road, with its one extravagantly broad and singularly empty street, and no historic memories much later than the reign of King John, you have a typical cheery hostelry whose white frontage looks coaching age incarnated, and whose interior surprises you—as often these old houses do—with oaken beams and Elizabethan panelled coffee-room and Jacobean overmantel. The fuel-cupboard, with finely wrought hinges, at the side of the fireplace, is as celebrated in its way, among connoisseurs of these things, as the Queen Anne angle-cupboard at the “New Inn,” New Romney. Not least among the attractions of the “George” is the beautiful old-fashioned garden at the back, looking out towards the meads and the trout-streams, that make Odiham (whose name, by the way, originally “Woodyham,” is pronounced locally like “Odium”) a noted place among anglers.
