coaching inns
From The Oxford Companion to Beer
were a vital part of the transportation system of Britain and mainland Europe for some 200 years, from the mid-17th century to the arrival of the railway. Coach travel became possible as a result of improvements to road surfaces. Teams of horses pulled stage coaches and mail coaches, stopping every 7 or 10 miles to change tired horses for fresh ones. The inns provided stabling for horses and food, drink, and accommodation for travelers. Some English towns had as many as a dozen coaching inns. There was intense rivalry between them to wring the highest charges from coach companies for the hire of horses and also to earn substantial amounts from wealthier travelers.
At first coaches were cramped and uncomfortable, but by the end of the 18th century sprung axles and lighter bodies made traveling more pleasant. Nevertheless, there was a rigid class system in operation, with four customers inside the coaches and up to a dozen outside or “up top,” sitting alongside the drivers. There were further improvements when the Royal Mail introduced faster coach services in the 1780s to speed letters and parcels around Britain. Improvements to the service meant greater business for coaching inns, which became places of bustling activity: ostlers groomed steaming horses, whereas landlords and large retinues of servants supplied food, ale, and beds to exhausted travelers.
According to one legend, it was the consumption of beer in coaching inns that gave rise to the term “cock and bull story.” In the town of Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire, central England, there were two coaching inns, the Cock and the Bull. Emboldened by tankards of ale, travelers at the inns told tales that grew steadily more exaggerated, to such an extent than any examples of absurd tales became known throughout the coaching system as “a load of cock and bull.”
Charles Dickens, whose life straddled both the coaching inn and the railway, has handed down to posterity some memorable images of the inns he visited on his extensive travels. Among those he stayed in were the Great White Horse at Ipswich, mentioned in The Pickwick Papers, and the Saracens Head in Snow Hill, London, where Nicholas Nickleby set out on his journey to Yorkshire. While in Yorkshire, Dickens also visited the New Angel in Doncaster, the George in Bradford, and the White Horse and Griffin in Whitby.
William and Dorothy Wordsworth were also great users of coaching inns as they traversed the country. Dorothy’s journal is full of references to inns and she waxed lyrical about the Black Swan in Helmsley, Yorkshire, which survives today: “My heart danced at the sight of its cleanly outside bright yellow walls, casements overshadowed with jasmine, and its low, double gavel-ended front.” The size and scope of coaching inns can be seen from the history of the George at Catterick in Yorkshire, which was run for some 40 years by Daniel Ferguson. His initials are cut in the stone of the lounge windows. His coaching business was substantial and he often had to employ ploughs and dray horses to work the coaches.
A rival inn in Catterick, the Angel, now demolished, had stabling for 100 horses. But these great inns, with their stables, cobbled courtyards, saloons, restaurants, and bedrooms, were swept away by the railway in the 19th century. Once it became possible to travel at great speed from city to city in a fraction of the time of a coach, the inns that stood on turnpikes and town centers succumbed to the power of the steam engine. Pubs and hotels, often called the Railway, were built alongside stations. Coaching inns were too large to be economic in the new age of steam and most were eventually demolished.
The area of south London known as the Borough was once packed with inns because pilgrims would begin their long treks to Canterbury Cathedral there. The Tabard featured as the starting point for the group of pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Today the only remaining coaching inn in the district is the George at 77 Borough High Street, London. It was once cheek-by-jowl with several other inns, including the Tabard, the Golden Lion, and the White Hart mentioned by Shakespeare in Henry VI and the place where the heroes of The Pickwick Papers first met Sam Weller. The George, now owned by the National Trust, which protects buildings of historic interest, was first mentioned in a survey of London in 1598, but it could be older. The George is often called an Elizabethan inn but the original buildings were destroyed by a fire in 1676, although they were faithfully recreated. It has a maze of small rooms, with dark oak paneling, benches, and settles. A gallery runs along part of the exterior and it is claimed that Shakespeare and other players performed from the gallery and the courtyard before the Globe Theatre was built nearby. The atmosphere of the George and its rivals was best described by Dickens: “Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories.”
The George, which could accommodate 80 coaches a week, was once much larger but two wings were pulled down in 1889 by the Great Northern Railway Company to make way for engine sheds at London Bridge Station. The railway finished off most coaching inns and severely truncated the George, one of the most famous of the breed.
The popularity of coaching inns created a great demand for ale and beer, a demand that often outstripped the ability of innkeepers to brew sufficient amounts. Roads out of London to the Channel ports and to the north of England contained dozens of large coaching inns for those leaving and arriving in the capital. Commercial or “common brewers” sprang up to supply beer to innkeepers to supplement their own brews. Visitors from continental Europe to London would have encouraged the move from unhopped ale to hopped bier or beer, which had become the norm in mainland Europe. The demand for hops from London brewers became so strong that hop merchants opened up for business in the Southwark area south of London Bridge: the road out of Southwark was the Old Dover Road—made famous by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities—which led to the hop farms in Kent. In 1868 the Hop Exchange was built in Southwark, almost opposite the George Inn, where fresh hops from Kent could be bought and sold. The exchange still stands and is protected as a “listed building” by the government as a result of its historic importance, although hops are no longer stored and sold there.
Two breweries, both called the Anchor Brewery, grew to a considerable size and fortune in the area around London Bridge and Southwark. Thrale’s Brewery, in which Dr Samuel Johnson was a shareholder, dates from the early 18th century. It closed following the death of its owner, Henry Thrale, in 1781 and merged with the rival Anchor Brewery founded by John Courage in 1787. Courage was taken over by members of the Barclay family, who also went into banking with some success. The name Courage was maintained and the Anchor Brewery survived until 1981 when its brands were transferred to a modern plant in Reading. Another substantial brewery in the London Bridge area was Jenners: the Jenner family is still active in brewing as the owners of Harvey’s Brewery in Sussex, close to Brighton.
In the city of Chester in Northwest England, the Golden Falcon was a leading coaching inn, with beer supplied by the Northgate Brewery, which closed in 1969. The Liverpool Arms in Chester, which still stands, was built next to the brewery. Until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the monks of Chester Abbey supplied local inns with ale.
This definition is from The Oxford Companion to Beer, edited by Garrett Oliver. © Oxford University Press 2012.