The grene busche that hangeth out
Is a sygne, it is no dowte,
Outward folkys for to telle
That within is wyne to selle.
While, however, the tavern has undergone but little change, the inn has. With our present Bible an inn is ever a lodging, and this was once the sole idea the term conveyed. It was not for casual callers by day, but for lodgers by night. Thus Chaucer in his ‘Knight’s Tale’ uses the verb—
This Theseus, this duk, this worthy knight,
When he had brought them into his cite,
And ynned them, everich (each) at his degre
He festeth them.
Until the fair or wake came on, as I have said, the community in the more retired nooks and corners of the country depended entirely on the mounted merchant. He it was who conveyed to them the gossip of the time. He it was, or one of his confrères, that brought them everything which in those days went under the category of small luxuries. The more lonely parts of the highway were infested by robbers. Hence the pack-horsemen and other mounted traders generally travelled in company, with jingling bell and belted sword—a warning to evil-minded roadsters. This was all the more necessary as they but seldom kept to the main thoroughfare. A straight line between the adjacent hamlets best describes their course. Such local terms as ‘Pedlar’s Way,’ or ‘Pedder’s Way,’ or ‘Copmansford,’ still found in various parts of the country, are but interesting memorials of the direct and then lonely route these itinerant traders took in passing from one village to another. The number of these roadsters we cannot otherwise speak of than as that of a small army. Many of them, so far as our nomenclature is concerned, are now obsolete, but not a few still survive. Amongst those of a more general character we find ‘Sellman’ or ‘Selman.’[[288]] From the old verb ‘to pad,’ which is still used colloquially in many districts, for the sober and staid pace the pack-horsemen preserved, we get our ‘Padmans’ and ‘Pedlers,’ or ‘Pedlars,’ once inscribed as ‘William le Pedeleure’ or ‘Thomas le Pedeler.’ It is of kin to ‘path.’ We still talk of a ‘footpad,’ who not more than two centuries ago would also have been spoken of as a ‘padder.’ So late as 1726 Gay, in one of his ballads, says—