Pub Odyssey 34

Wednesday 31 August:  EIGHT BELLS, OLD HATFIELD: (Mike Horsman, Elvis Pile, Steve Stott, Andrew Swift)

COMMENT:  This pub is a picturesque place in Old Hatfield.  (Old Hatfield retains charm and architectural interest. The more modern part part of Hatfield is a grim example of the horrors of twentieth-century urban planning.  If you wanted an example proving that a post-1945 town planner is best defined as a man who can spoil a field, look at Hatfield.)  We enjoyed the pub. The food was fine and very cheap, the beer fine, the barmaid nice and interactive.  So the visit was a success, which was a relief because the Eight Bells is in literary and historical terms one of the most interesting in Hertfordshire.  I wanted the pub to be good!

The "Victorian Web" website says it was built in 1226, which if true makes it the oldest building thus far.  The pub is from about 1630, another coaching inn right on the Great North Road which ran along Fore Street, beside the pub, till 1850 when the GNR was re-routed with the arrival of the railway. The pub was associated with the notorious highwayman, Dick Turpin, in the 18th century.  It seems to have suffered from "name inflation";  a map of 1760 describes it as the "One Bell"; later it was the "Five Bells"; later still the "Eight Bells" when the gloomy but impressive local church, St Etheldreda, got a peal of eight bells.

But the pub's main claim to fame relates to a man who never existed except in a novel, but is a bandit even more famous than Dick Turpin; the burglar Bill Sikes.  Sikes, as everyone knows, is a key character in one of the most famous novels in the English language, "Oliver Twist", by our old friend and drinking companion, Charles Dickens (see Pub Odyssey 14 ).   Dickens stayed at the Eight Bells on 27 January 1838 and used it in the novel.  After murdering Nancy in London, Sikes, fleeing the authorities, walks the 20 miles to what was then the small village of Hatfield and has an encounter in the pub with a crazy local character who sees bloodstains in Sikes' hat, after which Sikes flees back to London and eventual death.  Dickens was good at using local material in his novels.  Earlier, in 1835, when he was only 23 and making a living as a reporter, he had visited Hatfield to report on a big fire at Hatfield House in which the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, aged 85, burned to death.  The Hatfield House fire also features in "Oliver Twist".