The front of the “Luttrell Arms” has been very greatly modernised, with the exception of the ancient projecting stone porch, which still keeps on either side the cross-slits in the masonry, commanding the length of the street, whence two stout marksmen with cross-bows could easily defend the house. Above, the shield of arms of the Luttrells, carved in stone, displays their black martlets on a gold ground, and serves the inn for a sign. The beautiful carved oak windows in the courtyard somewhat resemble the great window of the “Old King’s Head” at Aylesbury. Here the view extends beautifully across the gardens of the inn, over the sea, to Blue Anchor. [Illustration: THE OLD WINDOW, “LUTTRELL ARMS.”] A curious seventeenth-century plaster fireplace overmantel, moulded in high relief, is a grotesque ornament to one of the bedrooms. It displays a half-length of a man with a singular likeness to Shakespeare, and dressed like a page-boy, in “buttons,” presiding over the representation of a very thin and meagre Actæon being torn to pieces by his dogs, which, in proportion to Actæon himself, seem to be about the size of moderately large cows. Two figures of women, with faces like potatoes, dressed in Elizabethan or Jacobean costume, flank this device, in the manner of caryatides. A number of somewhat similar plaster chimney-pieces are to be found in North Somerset and North Devon, notably a fine one at the “Trevelyan Arms,” Barnstaple: obviously all the handiwork of one man. At Norwich, a city of ancient inns that are, in general, more delightful to sketch and to look at than to stay in, we have the “Maid’s Head,” an exceptionally fine survival of an Elizabethan, or slightly earlier, house. It is an “hotel” now, and sanitated and electrically lighted up to twentieth-century requirements; and has, moreover, an “Elizabethan” extension, built in late Victorian times. But, in spite of all those modern frills and flounces, the central portion of the “Maid’s Head” still wears its genuine old-world air. That there was an inn on this site so early as 1287 we learn from the records of the Norwich Corporation, which tell how “Robert the fowler” was brought to book in that year on suspicion of stealing the goods of one John de Ingham, then staying at a tavern in the Cook Row, a street identified with Tombland, the site of the “Maid’s Head.” The reasoning that presumed the guilt of Robert the fowler seems to the modern mind rather loose, and the presentment itself is worded with unconscious humour. By this it seems that he was suspect “because he spends much and has nothing to spend from, and roves about by night, and he is ill thought of.” _Ergo_, as the old wording proceeds, “it must have been he that stole John de Ingham’s goods at his tavern in the Cook Rowe.” Relics of a building of the Norman period, thought to be remains of a former Bishop’s Palace, are still visible in the cellars of the “Maid’s Head.”