Thursday 12 May: ROBIN HOOD AND LITTLE JOHN, RABLEY HEATH (Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Elvis Pile, Andrew Swift)
COMMENT: I've been slow to update the blog because the site has had technical problems, also I have been sunning myself in a beautiful Landmark Trust villa in Northern Italy built in the 1540s by the great architect Andrea Palladio but which lacked internet access. Even Palladio couldn't think of everything. So by the time I'm writing this the Robin Hood and Little John is a bit of a distant memory. However, distance does not fade the memory of Keeley, the fascinating (and very nice) barmaid at the RHLJ who those present were still remembering in the Woolpack a fortnight later. I doubt if Keeley is remembering us! Too old and too boring!
The RHLJ is a name which suggests great antiquity, conjuring up images of medieval men in tights running round Sherwood Forest, or at least of Errol Flynn, but it isn't necessarily so. There are apparently over 100 pubs of this name but many were created in the nineteenth century when sentimental nostalgia for the middle ages was as its height. However, this particular RHLJ is older; it was certainly in existence on 3 August 1801 when John Carrington, amongst other functions the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire, entertained his constables there. Admittedly the Chief Constable was a less grand function then than now, but if such an event happened in 2011 the taxpayer would probably foot the bill; in 1801 it appears Carrington paid for it himself. Progress isn't always a good thing.
The penalties of progress were also shown all too clearly by a framed newspaper cutting on the wall about John Derry, a local resident and RHLJ regular who on 6 September 1948 was the first man to fly faster than sound but who four years later was killed, along with 27 other people, when his plane crashed at the Farnborough Air Show.
Monday, May 16: RED LION, Digswell Hill (Chris Haden, Elvis Pile, Andrew Swift)
COMMENT: I missed this one, being in Italy, so not much to say. This Red Lion seems to have got lost in the crowd of all the other Red Lions (there were around forty of them in Hertfordshire in the nineteenth century!) It's obviously an old coaching inn on the Great North Road as are a remarkable number of the surviving pubs in our part of East Herts, but apart from that not much information.
Friday May 27: WOOLPACK, Hertford (Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Elvis Pile, Andrew Swift, John Westwood).
COMMENT: Signs of modern life at the Woolpack, an old Hertford pub which is on the site of the second brewery opened by McMullens (in 1832). The pub television screens were showing the test match and the conversation was about solar panels! Food was good standard pub grub and the solar panels must have been fascinating, we stayed there longer than any pub so far.
The Woolpack is a good name for a pub in an agricultural county (in the nineteenth century Hertfordshire ranked as one of the five or six leading agricultural counties in England). A woolpack is a large bale of wool prepared for carriage or sale. It's said to have weighed 240lbs. Hertford in the nineteenth century had an important regular agricultural market and I imagine the Woolpack, like other pubs in Hertford, played an important role for thirsty and hungry buyers and sellers on market day.
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