Similar epitaphs to the foregoing may be found in many churchyards in this country. In Micklehurst churchyard, an inscription runs thus:—
Life is an Inn, where all men bait,
The waiter, Time, the landlord, Fate;
Death is the score by all men due,
I’ve paid my shot—and so must you.
In the old burial ground in Castle Street, Hull, on the gravestone of a boy, a slightly different version of the rhyme appears:—
In memory of
John, the Son of John and
Ann Bywater, died 25th January,
1815, aged 14 years.
Life’s like an Inn, where Travellers stay,
Some only breakfast and away;
Others to dinner stay, and are full fed;
The oldest only sup and go to bed;
Long is the bill who lingers out the day,
Who goes the soonest has the least to pay.
The churchyard of Melton Mowbray furnishes another rendering of the lines:—
This world’s an Inn, and I her guest:
I’ve eat and drank and took my rest
With her awhile, and now I pay
Her lavish bill and go my way.
The foregoing inscriptions, comparing life to a house, remind us of a curious inscription in Folkestone churchyard:—
In memory of
Rebecca Rogers,
who died Aug. 22, 1688,
Aged 44 years.
A house she hath, it’s made of such good fashion
The tenant ne’er shall pay for reparation,
Nor will her landlord ever raise the rent,
Or turn her out of doors for non-payment;
From chimney money, too, this call is free,
To such a house, who would not tenant be.
In “Chronicles of the Tombs,” by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, published in 1857, it is stated respecting the foregoing epitaph: “Smoke money or chimney money is now collected at Battle, in Sussex, each householder paying one penny to the Lord of the Manor. It is also levied upon the inhabitants of the New Forest, in Hants, for the right of cutting peat and turf for fuel. And from ‘Audley’s Companion to the Almanac,’ page 76, we learn that ‘anciently, even in England, Whitsun farthings, or smoke farthings, were a composition for offerings made in the Whitsun week, by every man who occupied a house with a chimney, to the cathedral of the diocese in which he lived.’ The late Mr. E. B. Price has observed, in Notes and Queries, (Vol. ii. p. 379), that there is a church at Northampton, upon which is an inscription recording that the expense of repairing it was defrayed by a grant of chimney money for, I believe, seven years, temp. Charles II.”
In the burial-ground of St. Michael’s Church, London, was interred one of the waiters of the famous Boar’s Head Tavern:—