Reviews for Pubs & Inns of Britain 2010

The average rating for Pubs & Inns of Britain 2010 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-12-13 00:00:00 Thomas Wittkoski Although written almost 300 years ago, Daniel Defoe's narrative has a freshness about it and reads extremely well today. This was the first of 17 tours he made around England, each of them duly recorded, and in this volume he sets off from Stratford in east London to tour Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. He carefully describes the places he visits and adds historical detail to give each place its own character as for instance early in his journey he tells us that a little beyond the town of Barking, on the road to Dagenham, 'the Gunpowder Treason Plot was at first contrived, and that all the first consultations about it were held there'. He speaks of the fishing industry in Colchester and how the town majored in oysters - I first encountered Colchester's penchant for oysters when Blackpool played Colchester in an FA Cup tie and supporters from the town turned up with bags of oysters - and how, when the town was under Roman rule and was called Camolodunum, Boadicea , who had been badly ill-treated by the Romans, overpowered and killed around 80,000 Romans and destroyed the colony. And then Defoe gives us great detail about the siege of Colchester during the English Civil War, quoting from a contemporary diary; the parliamentarians eventually won and shot to death two of the Royalist leaders. He tells of the harbour at Harwich, 'of a vast extent', where the Stour from Manningtree and the Orwell from Ipswich empty themselves and that he had seen as many as 'one hundred sail of men-of-war and their attendants and between three and four hundred sail of collier ships all in the harbour at a time'. He finds Ipswich to be somewhat decaying for when he first knew the town in 1668 it was 'so populous' with seamen when at any one time there would be '300 chaldron of coals' and the local corn was gathered in and shipped around this country and to other parts of the world. He informs us that there are 'not so many Quakers here as at Colchester and no Anabaptists of Antipredo Baptists'; at least for the last two named there was no meeting house. Moving on to Sudbury he states, 'I know nothing for which this town is remarkable, except for being very populous and very poor.' But it does have 'two members to Parliament, though it is under no form of government particularly to itself other than as a village, the head magistrate whereof is a constable'. From there he returns north-west by Lenham to visit St Edmund's Bury, 'a town famed for its pleasant situation and wholesome air' where Segebert, king of the East Angles, had built a religious house to which the body of St Edmund was taken thus increasing the pilgrimages to the said shrine. He speaks highly of the fair at Bury where not only is trade good but there are 'fine ladies' but he admits, 'most of them are loose women, which is a horrid abuse upon the whole country'! He also informs us 'the beauty of this town consists in the number of gentry who dwell in and near it' and that in 1447 a Parliament was held there and that during that Parliament Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, was murdered thus precipitating the dreadful war between the houses of Lancaster and York. He then returned from Bury by Stowmarket and Needham to Ipswich and on to Woodbridge and Orford. He regarded the former as having 'nothing remarkable' other than a market for butter and corn while Orford Haven was 'a very good harbour for small vessels, but not capable of receiving a ship of burden'. He felt that Dunwich with the 'still encroaching ocean' was threatened 'with a fatal immersion in a few years time', that Southwold was made famous 'for a very great engagement at sea, in the year 1672, between the English and Dutch fleets' and that a whole host of swallows regularly gathered there. He notes that 'in these parts are also several good market towns, some in the country and some in the other, as Beccles, Bungay, Harlston etc, all on the edge of the River Waveney'. And in the part of the county he calls High Suffolk he found it was very frequent 'for a farmer to have £1,000 stock upon his farm in cows only'. And so he moves on to Norfolk with its plethora of populous towns and with 120,000 people employed in the woollen and silk and wool manufactures of Norwich alone. He notes that prodigious numbers of herrings are caught in Yarmouth and moving north he recalls a night in 1692 (he thought that was the year) a fleet of 200 colliers was caught in a violent storm and over 1,000 people lost their lives. And mention of colliers it is noted that Lynn brought in more coals than any seaport between London and Newcastle. He speaks of Cambridge and its colleges, although he does state, 'It is scarce possible to talk of anything in Cambridgeshire and Cambridge itself; whether it be that the county has so little worth speaking of in it, or that the town has so much, that I leave to others'. He does mention the numerous rivers that empty themselves into the fens, noting that the rivers drain 13 different counties. Stourbridge is another place where there is a great fair where tradesmen from all over the country gather to sell their multifarious wares with hops being top of the bill. He says, 'as for the hops, there is scarce any price fixed for hops in England, till they know how they sell at Stourbridge fair'. And so he wends his way back to Stratford where his journey started, having given a thorough and diverting account of everywhere he had visited. It is a superb read and tells us much of the eastern counties in the 18th century.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-12-27 00:00:00 Derek Cheung Worth reading for occasional extraordinary insights into 18th century England, but disappointing in some respects -- too much information on the herring trade but almost no personal accounts of Defoe's journey or what he actually thought about the places he visited.