The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 1 (of 2): A Picturesque Account of the Ancient and Storied Hostelries of Our Own CountryHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Old Inns of Old England, Volume 1 (of 2): A Picturesque Account of the Ancient and Storied Hostelries of Our Own Country
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Social life and customs; Hotels -- England
The “Angel” at Bury St. Edmunds, the scene of many stirring incidents in
Chapters XV. and XVI., is an enormous house of very severe and
unornamental architecture, that looks as though it were an exercise in
rectangles and a Puritan protest in white Suffolk, dough-like brick,
against the mediæval pomps and vanities of the beautiful carved stone
Abbey Gatehouse, upon which it looks, gauntly, across the great open,
plain-like, empty thoroughfare of Angel Hill. This, the chief
coaching-and posting-house of Bury, was built in 1779 upon the site of a
fifteenth-century “Angel,” and the present structure still stands upon
groined crypts and cellars.
[Illustration: THE “ANGEL,” BURY ST. EDMUNDS.]
None may be so bold as to name for certain that tavern off Cheapside in
Chapter XX., to which the worried Mr. Pickwick “bent his steps” after the
interview with Dodson and Fogg, in Freeman’s Court, Cornhill. We know it
was in some court on the right-hand, or north, side of Cheapside; but, on
the other hand, we do not know how far Mr. Pickwick had proceeded along
that thoroughfare when Sam recommended, as a suitable place for “a glass
of brandy and water warm,” the “last house but vun on the same side the
vay--take the box as stands in the first fireplace, ’cos there an’t no leg
in the middle o’ the table, wich all the others has, and it’s wery
inconwenient.” Probably Grocers’ Hall Court is meant. It has still its
coffee-and chop-houses.
There it is that Tony Weller is introduced, and suggests that, as he is
“working down” the coach to Ipswich in a couple of days’ time, from the
“Bull” inn Whitechapel, Mr. Pickwick had better go with him. An incidental
allusion is made in the same place to the “Black Boy” at Chelmsford, a
fine old coaching inn, destroyed in 1857.
Mr. Pickwick was a good--nay, a phenomenal--pedestrian for so stout a man.
From Cheapside--fortified possibly by the brandy and water--he walked to
Gray’s Inn, there ascending two pairs of steep (and dirty) stairs, and
thence to Clare Market, and the “Magpie and Stump,” described as “situated
in a court, happy in the double advantage of being in the vicinity of
Clare Market and closely approximating to the back of ‘New Inn.’”
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE THE FOURTH TAVERN,” CLARE MARKET.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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