Editor's Note: This description of English inns comes from Elihu Burritt, A Walk from London to John O'Groats, with Notes By the Way, 1864. Burritt was from Connecticut in the USA, but he spent a lot of time walking around England. His observations are pretty interesting. You might want to look up your favourite places and see what he has to say about them.

The Bull and What?

…that humbler type of hostelry so often represented in sketches of English rural life and scenery – the little, cosy, one-story, wayside, or hamlet inn, with its thatched roof, checker-work window, low door, and with a loaded hay-cart standing in front of it¹, while the driver, in his round wool hat, and in his smock-frock, is drinking at a pewter mug of beer, with one hand on his horse's neck – this the hand of modem improvements has not yet reached. This may be found still in a thousand villages and hamlets, surrounded with all its rural associations; the green, the geese, and gray donkeys feeding side by side; low-jointed cottages, with long, sloping roofs greened over with moss or grass, and other objects usually shadowed dimly in the background of the picture. It is these quiet hamlets and houses in the still depths of the country, away from the noise and bluster of railway life and motion, that best represent and perpetuate the primeval characteristics of a nation. These the American traveller will find invested with all the old charm with which his fancy clothed them. It will well repay him for a month's walk to see and enjoy them thoroughly.

…

The diversification of names, being more difficult, is still more remarkable. Although the spread eagle figures largely as the patron genius of American hotels, still nine-tenths of them bear the names of states, counties, towns, or national or local celebrities. But here natural history comes out strong and wide. The heraldry of sovereigns, aristocracy, gentry, commercial and industrial interests, puts up its various arms upon hundreds of inns in town and country. All occupations and recreations are well represented. Thus no country in the world approaches England in the wide scope and play of hotel nomenclature. Some of the combinations are exceedingly unique and most interesting in their incongruity. Dickens has not exaggerated this characteristic; not even done it justice in his hotel scenes.

Things are put together on a hundred tavern signs that were never joined before in the natural or moral world, and put together frequently in most grotesque association. For instance, there is a large, first-class inn right in the very heart of London, which has for a sign, not painted on a board, but let into the wall of the upper story, in solid statuary, a huge human mouth opened to its utmost capacity, and a bull, round and plump, standing stoutly on its four legs between the two distended jaws. Now, the leading idea of this device is involved in a tempting obscurity, which leads one, at first sight, into different lines of conjecture. What did the designer of this group of statuary really intend to represent ? Was it to let the outside world know that, in that inn, the ""Roast Beef of Old England " was always to be found par excellence ? If so, would a man's mouth swallowing a bull whole, and apparently alive, with hide and horns, tend to stimulate the appetite of a passing traveller, and to draw him into the establishment²?

But leaving these ambiguous symbols to be interpreted by the passing public according to different perceptions of their meaning, how many in a thousand would guess aright the name given to the tavern by these tokens? Would not ninety-nine in a hundred say, " The Mouth and Bull," to be sure, not only on the principle that the major includes the minor, but also because the human element is entitled to precedence in the picture? But the ninety-nine would be completely mistaken, if they adopted this natural conclusion. They would find they had counted without their host, who knows better than they the relative position and value of things. What has the law of logic to do with fat beef! The name of his famous hotel is "The Bull and Mouth;" and few in London have attained to its celebrity as a historical building. One is apt to wonder if this precedence given to the beast is really incidental, or adopted to give euphony to the name of an inn, or whether there is a latent and spontaneous leaning to such a method of association, from some cause or other connected with perceptions of personal comfort afforded at such establishments.

Accidental or intentional, this form of association is very common. There is no tavern in London better known than The Elephant and Castle, a designation that would sound equally well if the two substantives were transposed. Even the loftiest symbols of sovereignty often occupy the secondary place in these compound titles. There are doubtless a hundred inns in Great Britain bearing the name of The Rose and Crown, but not one, to my knowledge, called "The Crown and Rose." The same order obtains in sporting sections and terminology. It is always " The Hare and Hounds; " never " Hounds and Hare."

Dmitri Gheorgheni

13.05.19 Front Page

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