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.