_As for methods, those are of the simplest. You start by knowing, ten years beforehand, what you intend to produce; and incidentally, in the course of a busy literary life, collect, note, sketch, and make extracts from Heaven only knows how many musty literary dustbins and sloughs of despond. Then, having reached the psychological moment when you must come to grips with the work, you sort that accumulation, and, mapping out England into tours, with inns strung like beads upon your itinerary, bring the book, after some five thousand miles of travel, at last into being._ _It should be added that very many inns are incidentally illustrated or referred to in the series of books on great roads by the present writer; but as those works dealing with Roads, another treating of the History of Coaching, and the present volumes are all part of one comprehensive plan dealing with the History of Travel in general, the allusions to inns in the various road-books have but rarely been repeated; while it will be found that if, in order to secure a representative number of inns, it has been, in some cases, found unavoidable to retrace old footsteps, new illustrations and new matter have, as a rule, been brought to bear._ _The Old Inns of London have not been touched upon very largely, for most of them are, unhappily, gone. Only the few existing ones have been treated, and then merely in association with others in the country. To write an account of the Old Inns of London would now be to discourse, in the manner of an antiquary, on things that have ceased to be._ CHARLES G. HARPER. PETERSHAM, SURREY. _September, 1906._ CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTORY 1 II. THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF INNS 13 III. GENERAL HISTORY OF INNS 28 IV. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 42 V. LATTER DAYS 57 VI. PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS 76 VII. PILGRIMS’ INNS AND MONASTIC HOSTELS (_continued_) 117 VIII. HISTORIC INNS 144 IX. INNS OF OLD ROMANCE 188 X. PICKWICKIAN INNS 210 XI. DICKENSIAN INNS 265 XII. HIGHWAYMEN’S INNS 303 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS [Illustration] SEPARATE PLATES THE ROADSIDE INN _Frontispiece_ FACING PAGE THE LAST OF THE OLD GALLERIED INNS OF LONDON: THE “GEORGE,” SOUTHWARK. (_Photo by T. W. Tyrrell_) 32