Bars (Drinking establishments) -- England; England -- Social life and customs; Hotels -- England; Taverns (Inns) -- England
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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