Many historic memories linger around that ancient and beautiful house, the “Saracen’s Head” at Southwell, in the Sherwood Forest district of Nottinghamshire. Southwell, whose hoary Minster has in modern times become a cathedral, has fallen into a dreamless slumber since the last of the coaches left the road, and as the traveller comes into its quiet streets, in whose midst the great Norman church stands solemnly, like some grey architectural ghost, he feels that he has come into a place whose last days of activity ended considerably over half a century ago. The “Saracen’s Head” was built in that interesting, but vague, period of “ever so long ago”; the nearest attempt at determining its age to which most chroniclers dare commit themselves. Whether the existing house is the same building as that of this name conveyed by the Archbishop of York in 1396 to John Fysher and his wife Margaret, does not appear, but there seems very little reason to doubt that, although greatly altered and added to from time to time, the present “Saracen’s Head” is, essentially, in its ancient timbering, the identical structure. The frontage of the inn, now as ever the chief inn of Southwell, little indicates its great age, for it is covered with a coat of grey plaster, and, were it not for the enormously substantial oaken doors of the coach-entrance, and the peep through the archway of the old courtyard, the casual wayfarer might pass the historic house by. [Illustration: YARD OF THE “SARACEN’S HEAD,” SOUTHWELL.] For it is historic, in an intimate and a melancholy way. Dismissing in a word the remote visits paid by Edward the First and Edward the Third to Southwell, when they are stated to have lodged at the “Saracen’s Head,” we come to the harassed wanderings of Charles the First over the distracted England of his time. That unhappy King well knew Southwell and the “Saracen’s Head.” They were associated with the opening and the closing scenes of his fight with Parliament and people, for he rested at the inn on August 17th, 1642, on the way to raise the Royal Standard at Nottingham on the 22nd; and at last, on May 5th, 1646, he abandoned the nearly four years’ struggle against fate, surrendering himself here to the Scottish Commissioners. Between those two fateful days he was certainly once at Southwell, and possibly more often.