Old Country Inns of England

by Henry Parr Maskell; Edward W. Gregory

The “Woodman” Inn, Farnborough, Kent

The settle in some form or other is the best possible seat for the inn, particularly if space is limited. It might be pleasanter to have small tables and chairs, but in many an old building there is only enough room for a couple of long seats and a table. A long bench upon which people can sit in a row side by side is the best seat in existence for saving space. Light furniture is utterly unsuitable for inns. For one thing it is usually nothing like strong enough, and even if it be it commits an artistic sin in looking too fragile for its purpose. Take the respective merits of the very many forms in which the old Windsor chair has been made, and the modern bent-wood chair. Now the latter is without doubt the strongest seat for its weight which has been invented in modern times. It is one of the few successes in chair-making which can claim to be the direct outcome of scientific methods. It has absolutely no ancestors whatever, and can attach itself to no tradition. It is a bald product of the application of science to furniture, and when the Austrian inventor finally made it perfect he had achieved utility, nothing more, nothing less. The bent-wood chair is in pretty nearly every concert hall in the world. It has conquered completely the restaurants and cafés of the Continent, and it is to be seen often in old inns of the English countryside. Now, the last is a regrettable fact. The Austrian bent-wood chair or settee looks positively effeminate in the country inn with its thin polished legs, its slender-looking back, and perforated, mechanically made seat. Something is called for of a greater weight of timber, which shall look more in keeping with the building and more in accordance with the solid unimpassioned, phlegmatic way of life of rural districts. Let us have the chair or settle made by the village wheelwright or carpenter, rather than the product of an Austrian factory.

But in the Windsor chair we have a type which can certainly compete with bent-wood in strength if not in lightness. The Windsor chair, besides, is capable of much greater variety of form than the Austrian production. It has a tradition of its own and has as great a celebrity as its more modern competitor. It is heavier and sturdier. It savours somewhat of the kitchen, but although it cannot be regarded as the last word on art craftsmanship, it is not altogether unpleasant to look upon, and is much more comfortable in use than many a chair with greater pretensions to artistic appearance. It is still made by hand and costs very little. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the smaller inns contained many chairs, a few of which are still to be met with, simply made by the village joiner on the lathe. They had plain wooden seats, and there was very great diversity of “members” in the turned rails. They called for comparatively little skill to make, and beyond their bare proportions showed small ingenuity in making the form comfortable for the body. Frequently they had rush seats. Within recent years chairs of this kind have been sought for and made the base of many extremely interesting seats, designed and constructed by modern craftsmen.

The oldest form of inn table is the trestle. It dates back to the Middle Ages, and although nothing like so much used to-day, it still survives in many an old tap-room. It was originally even a simpler affair than it is now, being merely a board with movable trestles underneath. It could readily be moved and pushed away if space were required on special occasion. At the Plough Inn, Birdbrook, Essex, an old thatched house, is a red brick floored tap-room which contains several fine trestle tables and settles of simple design and perfect utility.

But the simple table, chair and settle, beyond which the public part of the inns of the Middle Ages and the smaller alehouses for centuries were unfurnished, except, perhaps, for a stool or backless bench, are nothing compared with the splendid legacy of sixteenth and seventeenth-century carved oak furniture still left to us in many of the historic hostelries in the shires. Later enthusiasm in collecting has no doubt been responsible for the fine specimens of furniture such as those to be seen at the Lygon Arms, Broadway, Worcestershire, and it is extremely difficult to say with certainty how many of the genuinely old pieces to be found in other famous inns originally belonged to the building. There is the Feathers, Ludlow, where in the beautiful old dining-room is a fine collection of furniture, hardly in accord with the period of the ceiling, the carved oak overmantel, and other permanent features of the room. The Jacobean and Chippendale chairs are the result of enlightened purchase in later days. One of the finest Jacobean staircases in an inn is that at the Red Lion, Truro.

Very little furniture of the Renaissance period, from the Elizabethan carved oak to the mahogany of the later eighteenth century, is peculiar to inns. An exception is the bar, which, of course, was a fixture and part of the inn structure. Our modern bar with its almost invariable ugliness, its row of vertical handles for drawing beer, and its aggressive cash register, is a poor survival of the Jacobean bar, an example of which is still in existence at the Maid’s Head, Norwich. It is worthy of recollection that the high stools which enable one to sit at a bar are quite of modern origin. Bar lounging evidently did not become a habit until the nineteenth century. People sat down and had their refreshments at ease.

A table which was sometimes found in Jacobean inns of the larger and more important kind was the one upon which the game of “shovel-board” was played. “Shovel-board” tables were very long, sometimes even as much as ten yards. They were about three feet or three feet six inches wide, and the game played resembles in principle our own deck billiards. Indeed the “shovel-board” table is thought to be the direct ancestor of the modern billiard table, without which, of course, no inn of any size nowadays is complete. The extreme vagueness of the early history of the game of billiards, however, scarcely justifies any dogmatic statement as to its relationship with “shovel-board.” A Charles II billiard table with a wooden bed, cork cushions, and corkscrew legs is in the possession of Mr. Robert Rushbrooke, of Rushbrooke, which seems to show that “shovel-board” tables and billiard tables existed at the same time. This, however, does not do away with the contention of those who assert that the modern game was elaborated from the simpler pastime beloved of Henry VIII and Charles II. The last long “shovel-board” table in an inn was definitely stated by Strutt, in his “Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,” to be at “a low public-house in Benjamin Street, Clerkenwell Green.” It was three feet broad and thirty-nine feet long.

As “shovel-board” tables were very expensive pieces of furniture, it is doubtful whether any but the most important inns ever had them. The game was played frequently on tables of much smaller dimensions, and the name of “shovel-board” is usually used nowadays to designate a particular form of extending table with hidden leaves. The long Elizabethan and Jacobean tables—rather mistakenly known as refectory tables—which stood on stout turned legs connected by thick rails, were ideal boards for the old game. At Penshurst are, at the present time, two of the finest specimens of long trestle tables in the country. They date from the early fifteenth century and measure twenty-seven feet long by three feet wide.

Innkeepers, of course, had to keep abreast of the times in the matter of furnishing, and in the coaching era the old hostelries were furnished in the latest and most approved fashion. Hence it is that the Georgian inns, where they have not been denuded of their treasures by enterprising collectors, or turned inside out by some unfortunately advised landlord who preferred Victorian horsehair and mahogany, still contain many interesting pieces of the time of Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and Sheraton. A warning may not be out of place to those who imagine that these famous names applied to furniture really indicate that the cabinet-making was done by the craftsmen themselves. Without unimpeachable documentary evidence, it is utterly impossible to ascribe any fine piece of mahogany to any one of the three great cabinet-makers of the eighteenth century. The names indicate nowadays certain periods which are fairly definitely fixed, and certain easily recognizable styles of work. In many an old inn you will see in the coffee-room or commercial room side tables, dining tables, card tables, chairs, settees, mirrors, long-case clocks, bureaux, and corner cupboards which may typify any or all of the great periods of the eighteenth century, and it is quite likely that down in the hall or in the corridors and kitchen you will discover specimens of Jacobean chests, gate-leg tables, dressers, a “bread-and-cheese” cupboard, perhaps, and other relics of even an earlier age. The fact was, of course, that pieces of furniture were bought as they were required, and when an inn had a history running well into two centuries it would have been remarkable indeed if a heterogeneous collection had not been got together. It is only the modern craze for collecting which has robbed the inn of so many of its treasures. The experts will tell you that the fact of a piece of furniture being old is no guarantee whatever of its worth, excepting whatever value may be attached to mere length of years. A joiner in the country, say in Shropshire or Yorkshire, might not make a piece of furniture for mine host of the Chequers or Blue Lion as well or in such good taste as would the first-class cabinet-makers of London. It is quite likely that he would invest it with some local character, and if this is well preserved in the piece it has its worth on this account alone. But country made Chippendale, Heppelwhite, or Sheraton furniture, although charming enough, has rarely any exceptional value. Wherever the contents of a large country house was offered for sale, the innkeeper as a man of some substance would buy, and it is this fact which explains in some cases the finds of really valuable furniture which have been made at old inns.