When the Warden of Merton College travelled with two of his fellows and four servants from Oxford to Durham in 1331, the season being winter, their average bill was 2d. for beds for the whole party, or for the servants alone, one halfpenny; at the town inns of fifty years later the price of a bed was one penny, and the increased comfort warranted the higher charge.[5] The private rooms, instead of being numbered, received names according to the subject portrayed on the tapestry hangings. This custom continued in old-fashioned inns up to quite recent times, and has served as the basis of stage humour of a sort:
Scene. A Country Inn.
Timothy. What rooms have you disengaged, Waiter?
Waiter. Why sir, there’s the Moon: but I forget—there’s a man in that.
Timothy. Eh! A man in the Moon! Oh then we’ll not go there.
Waiter. There’s the Waterloo Subscription, Sir; that’s full—there’s the Pope’s Head; that’s empty, etc., etc.[6]
In the minute books of the Grey Coat Hospital, a very valuable religious educational charity, we come across a rather startling entry. On Epiphany, 1698, “After prayers and sermon in church, the children and their parents dined in Hell.” Heaven and Hell were two public dining rooms adjoining the old Palace of Westminster, and so named either from the hangings or other pictorial decoration.