CHAPTER VII.
"I will take mine ease at mine inn!"
What an element of coziness, hospitality, picturesqueness is introduced into the village by the inn! There is another side—but that we will not consider.
I know some villages from which the squire has banished the hostelry, and poor, forlorn, half-hearted places they seem to me. If there be a side to the village inn that is undesirable, I venture to think that the advantage of having one surpasses the disadvantages. What the squire has done in closing the inn he hardly realizes. He has broken a tradition that is very ancient. He has snapped a tie with the past. In relation to quite another matter, Professor G. T. Stokes says: "History is all continuous. Just as the skilful geologist or palæontologist can reconstruct from an inspection of the strata of a quarry the animal and vegetable life of past ages, so can the historian reconstruct out of modern forms, rites, and ceremonies, often now but very shadowy and unreal, the essential and vigorous life of society as it existed ten centuries ago. History, I repeat, is continuous. The life of societies, of nations, and of churches is continuous, so that the life of the present, if rightly handled, must reveal to us much of the life of the past."[5] So is it with the parish; and so the dear old village inn has its story of connection with the manor, and its reason for being, in remote antiquity.
I have gone to Iceland to illustrate the origin of the manor, I shall go to Tyrol to explain the beginnings of the village inn—that is to say the manorial inn with its heraldic sign, in contradistinction to the church house, with its ecclesiastical sign. Each has its history—and each derives from a separate institution.
INSIDE THE VILLAGE INN
From a painting by Robert Whale, a village carpenter, in the possession of F. Rodd, Esq., Trebartha