Guildford's inns have been famous for centuries. Guildford is the only town in Surrey which Camden mentions in his _Britannia_, as having good inns; John Aubrey remarks that they are "the best perhaps in England; the Red Lion particularly can make fifty beds, the White Hart was not so big, but has more noble rooms." John Taylor, the Water Poet, in his _Catalogue of Taverns in Ten Shires near London_, made in 1636, goes out of his way to mention particularly that Guildford "hath very faire Innes and good entertainment at the Tavernes, the Angell, the Crowne, the White hart, and the Lyon"; and Guildford only, of all the towns he mentions, has all its inns either still standing or represented under the same names, wholly or partially rebuilt. The Angel has kept more of what is old than the others, including a panelled hall with a seventeenth century clock, and some fine timber and brickwork best seen from the inn yard. Under the Angel, too, lies one of a pair of vaulted crypts which have puzzled all the archaeologists. The two crypts lie on opposite sides of the street, and are beautiful examples of fourteenth century work in chalk; in one of them, too, there was evidently once some fresco work, but that has nearly all been rubbed away. What were the crypts for? No one knows for certain. Mr. Thackeray Turner thinks they were without doubt the undercrofts of merchants' houses; but there is better reason for supposing that they are remains of some religious foundation, perhaps of White Friars. At one time there stood in the centre of the High Street, between the two crypts, the "Fyshe Crosse," which John Russell, the Guildford historian, tells us carried on its summit a flying angel carved in stone, and was erected by the White Friars in 1345. There is no evidence to prove that this was so, though it may have been; in any case, the "Fyshe Crosse" was demolished in 1595 as being abominably in the way of the street traffic. If the White Friars ever had a convent near the cross, possibly the Angel was originally their guest-house, afterwards turned into an inn.