Emerging from this narrow way, a broad street of inns and shops expands. On the left is the “Talbot,” an old inn with modern front, and with a long perspective of stables vanishing down its yard into the dim distance. The “Talbot,” it is thought, owes its present name to that Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who fought and died in the Battle of Northampton, eight miles away, in 1460. As the “Tabard,” it was purchased in 1440 by Archdeacon Sponne, a charitable Rector of Towcester, who gave it to the town, its rent to go in relief of taxation, toward paving, “or for other uses.” The good Archdeacon lies, under a gorgeous monument, in the church, and a fragment of stained glass bearing his shield of arms, with his name, “William Sponne” underneath, still remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot.” In what was once, in coaching days, the taproom, but now a store for empty boxes and such lumber, a relic of old times is left, in the wide stone chimney-piece carved with the figure of that old English hound, something between a foxhound and blood-hound—the talbot. Beside it is the date, 1707, together with the initials, “T.O.” and “G.S.” The story that Dean Swift halted often at the old house on his many journeys is likely enough, and a chair, said to have been used by him, is still a cherished relic. But another, and equally famous, hostelry claims attention. The “Pomfret Arms,” as it is now named, is the old coaching inn once known as the “Saracen’s Head,” the inn where Mr. Pickwick stayed the night after the wet post-chaise journey from Birmingham. “Dry postboys” and fresh horses had been procured on the way, at the usual stages at Dunchurch and Daventry; but as, “at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had done at the beginning,” Mr. Pickwick wisely decided to halt at Towcester, together with those undesirable companions of his, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen. “There’s beds here,” said Sam Weller, “everything clean and comfortable. Very good little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an hour—pair of fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans, ’taturs, tarts, and tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I might recommend.” At the moment when this conference was proceeding in the rain, the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” himself appeared, “to confirm Mr. Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment, and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the equally moral certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”