Tuesday 20 December: THE SARACENS HEAD, HERTFORD (Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Gerry Murphy, Elvis Pile, David Room, Steve Stott, Andrew Swift, John Westwood)
COMMENT: Christmas week and a big turnout braving the near-zero parking around the Saracens Head. We all made it. This was a nice small pub with a roaring fire (on the TV screen), decent pub food but a cliff edge attitude to real beer. When we arrived two of the three real ales were off. The Adnams which was still on was good, but I was on tenterhooks in case, for the first time in 50 pubs, the pub ran out of real ale while the Odyssians were in need. Well, I thought, at least it would teach the (many) latecomers to be on time. Sure enough, the Adnams did run out, but they immediately brought on Greene King IPA, so we all breathed again.
The Saracens Head is rather obviously a pub name that relates to the famous Crusades mounted by European Knights to reconquer the Holy land from the Muslims; nine crusades in all, between 1095 and 1271. (The Europeans characteristically called Arabs or Muslims "Saracens"). The name got into pubs in an oddly roundabout way. Most European noble families had members who went on crusade, including English noble families. On return from crusade, the family often incorporated a saracen's head into their coats of arms. Pub names and signs are, as we have seen before on the Odyssey, closely related to noble families and their coats of arms (think of the Red Lion and the White Hart for instance). In time the saracen's head migrated to pub names and signs in the same way as other elements from coats of arms.
All this may seem long ago and far away, but it isn't really. There are many reasons for the high degree of tension in our times, often erupting into actual violence, between many Muslims and the Western World. However, the memory of the Crusades in the Islamic world is not the least important of these reasons. The Muslims regard the Crusades, with considerable justification, as an aggressive and barbaric attack on them, their territory and their culture marked by appalling massacres and most brutal behaviour. Of course, as always happens, the Muslims in response behaved with similar brutality towards the Crusaders. Relations between the Christian West and the Islamic world, by no means always bad before the Crusades, plummeted to new depths during and after these religious wars. There is a good case for regarding the events of September 11 2001 as being just the latest round in a grim process in which the crusades provided one of the worst periods.
However, fascinating as all this is (to me at least) it has very little bearing on the Saracen's Head in Hertford. It's not an ancient pub at all, it only goes back to about 1845 when it was the tap for the long-vanished Crown Brewery, which stood behind it. In 1852 it was kept by Richard Skegg, plumber and glazier. (Glazing has a local history, Hertford Glass was close by.) Presumably someone just called the pub the Saracens Head because they liked the name! So much for history!
Tuesday, 20 December 2011
Monday, 12 December 2011
Pub Odyssey 49
Monday 12 December: THE WHITE HORSE HERTINGFORDBURY (Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Elvis Pile, David Room, Andrew Swift, Roger Toms)
COMMENT: The White Horse is definitely a hotel, not a pub, which was made clear to us when we had our meal and beers (fine, as usual) in a vast restaurant in which we were the only customers. If we had swept away the other empty tables we could have had a ballroom in which Andrew could have entertained us with a display of Salsa dancing. At least, he could have done if he had been on time instead of 40 minutes late as usual. Andrew being late and Roger Clarke never replying to his emails are two of the fixed points of Tewin village life and both got fully discussed along with the state of the world economy, Jeremy Clarkson's status as iconic oaf, Mike's bionic legs, and Chris Haden's future as Santa Claus.
Unsurprisingly, the White Horse was a coaching inn, a staging post on the road from Reading to Cambridge. It has a Georgian facade but bits of the building are more than 400 years old. Hertingfordbury, like Datchworth with its V1 last week, makes a contribution to the strangeness of English history, in this case a grim story. In the churchyard is the unmarked grave of Jane Wenham, often stated to be the last person sentenced to death for witchcraft in England- at a court in Hertford in 1712. Jane, fortunately, was not hanged or burned. She was reprieved and later Queen Anne gave her a pardon. It is estimated that about 35,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe between 1450 and 1750, over a thousand of them in Britain. Between 75-80% of the victims were women. A woman, Janet Home, was executed in Scotland as late as 1727. So Jane Wenham was lucky to escape.
COMMENT: The White Horse is definitely a hotel, not a pub, which was made clear to us when we had our meal and beers (fine, as usual) in a vast restaurant in which we were the only customers. If we had swept away the other empty tables we could have had a ballroom in which Andrew could have entertained us with a display of Salsa dancing. At least, he could have done if he had been on time instead of 40 minutes late as usual. Andrew being late and Roger Clarke never replying to his emails are two of the fixed points of Tewin village life and both got fully discussed along with the state of the world economy, Jeremy Clarkson's status as iconic oaf, Mike's bionic legs, and Chris Haden's future as Santa Claus.
Unsurprisingly, the White Horse was a coaching inn, a staging post on the road from Reading to Cambridge. It has a Georgian facade but bits of the building are more than 400 years old. Hertingfordbury, like Datchworth with its V1 last week, makes a contribution to the strangeness of English history, in this case a grim story. In the churchyard is the unmarked grave of Jane Wenham, often stated to be the last person sentenced to death for witchcraft in England- at a court in Hertford in 1712. Jane, fortunately, was not hanged or burned. She was reprieved and later Queen Anne gave her a pardon. It is estimated that about 35,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe between 1450 and 1750, over a thousand of them in Britain. Between 75-80% of the victims were women. A woman, Janet Home, was executed in Scotland as late as 1727. So Jane Wenham was lucky to escape.
Pub Odyssey 48
Monday 5 December: THE TILBURY, DATCHWORTH (Malcolm Allen, Chris Haden, Mike Horsman, Chris Parkinson, Elvis Pile, Andrew Swift, Rupert Stanley, Jeff Tipper, Roger Toms)
COMMENT: Back at the posh end of the market at the Tilbury, but a good occasion with excellent beer and food quickly provided for a big group; but not cheap. We were honoured by a guest appearance from the deviser of the "Pub Odyssey list" of 87 pubs, Chris Parkinson, who after the labour of drawing up the list wasn't able, because of work, to come to any of the first 47 meetings! Talk about labouring for the benefit of your fellow man and not yourself!
The Tilbury website is keen to tell you how good they are (and they are good) but doesn't tell you anything about the history of the pub. The pub's site at a crossroads would normally be a sign of great antiquity as would the fact that Datchworth is on a really old road, a Roman road in fact, from St Albans to Puckeridge. However, its not so simple. There was in the eighteenth century a pub called the "Tilbury Fort" near Datchworth church- named after Queen Elizabeth I's great speech to her troops at Tilbury on the Thames in 1588 as they waited to repel the Spanish Armada. In the early nineteenth century the licence was transferred to the current site and the pub then there, called the Three Horse Shoes, was renamed the Tilbury (God knows why). In 1975, again God knows why, the name was changed to the "The Inn on the Green". Now it's gone back to being the Tilbury. All a bit of a tangle and its hard to see who gained anything from it. But be it ever so remote, the connection is with Good Queen Bess and stuffing the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Datchworth has some other entertaining historical oddities. The last enemy-action incident of any kind on British soil in the Second World War occurred in Datchworth at 9am on 29 March 1945 when a V1 flying bomb struck a nearby field.
COMMENT: Back at the posh end of the market at the Tilbury, but a good occasion with excellent beer and food quickly provided for a big group; but not cheap. We were honoured by a guest appearance from the deviser of the "Pub Odyssey list" of 87 pubs, Chris Parkinson, who after the labour of drawing up the list wasn't able, because of work, to come to any of the first 47 meetings! Talk about labouring for the benefit of your fellow man and not yourself!
The Tilbury website is keen to tell you how good they are (and they are good) but doesn't tell you anything about the history of the pub. The pub's site at a crossroads would normally be a sign of great antiquity as would the fact that Datchworth is on a really old road, a Roman road in fact, from St Albans to Puckeridge. However, its not so simple. There was in the eighteenth century a pub called the "Tilbury Fort" near Datchworth church- named after Queen Elizabeth I's great speech to her troops at Tilbury on the Thames in 1588 as they waited to repel the Spanish Armada. In the early nineteenth century the licence was transferred to the current site and the pub then there, called the Three Horse Shoes, was renamed the Tilbury (God knows why). In 1975, again God knows why, the name was changed to the "The Inn on the Green". Now it's gone back to being the Tilbury. All a bit of a tangle and its hard to see who gained anything from it. But be it ever so remote, the connection is with Good Queen Bess and stuffing the Spanish Armada in 1588.
Datchworth has some other entertaining historical oddities. The last enemy-action incident of any kind on British soil in the Second World War occurred in Datchworth at 9am on 29 March 1945 when a V1 flying bomb struck a nearby field.
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