Pub Odyssey 50

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!