It was ill work that destroyed the old “Star and Garter” inn, that stood, a picturesque brick and timber house in Cock Street (since re-named “Victoria Street”) until 1834. In that old house, on a night in 1642, Charles I. slept, on his way from Shrewsbury to London, to be intercepted, and his army defeated, at Edge Hill. The inn was rebuilt and opened again in 1836, with a make-believe “King’s Room,” a spurious bedstead, and such incongruities as portraits of the King and Cromwell on its walls. Beside these hostelries, and the “Coach and Horses” on Snow Hill, the old inns of Wolverhampton were of a minor sort, where the simpler business-men of those times repaired in the evening to drink a jovial glass and smoke a companionable pipe; to play bowls or quoits and enjoy themselves in what the present generation would consider a very free and easy, not to say low, manner. [Illustration: HIGH GREEN, WOLVERHAMPTON, 1826. _From an Old Print._] XI Perhaps the most striking way of picturing the great changes that have taken place in Wolverhampton in the course of a century is by comparing the different aspects presented by High Green at periods ranging from 1797 to modern times. It has had many changes. Only two features in the series of pictures have remained unaltered during that period: the handsome old brick houses at one corner have survived, and the noble tower of St. Peter’s still looks down upon the scene, as it has done for close upon five hundred years. The series opens with Rowlandson’s spirited drawing, showing the market in full swing. There are the butchers’ and other stalls; there you see a milkmaid, milk-pail on head, and the pack-horse of some country trader in the foreground. On the right hand is a picturesquely gabled, half-timbered shop, selling such incongruous things as toys and oysters: the building covered over with plaster and become an inn, long known as “Cholditch’s,” by the time the next view, taken in 1826, was drawn.