Southwark retained its galleries on the north and east side of its yard until 1889, though a modern tavern replaced the south and main portion of the building in 1865-6.  This was a noted inn, bearing as its sign a badge of Richard II, derived from his mother Joan of Kent.  Jack Cade stayed there while he was trying to capture London, and another “immortal” flits across the stage, Master Sam Weller, of Pickwick fame.  A galleried inn still remains at Southwark, a great coaching and carriers’ hostel, the “George.”  It is but a fragment of its former greatness, and the present building was erected soon after the fire in 1676, and still retains its picturesqueness.

The glory has passed from most of these London inns.  Formerly their yards resounded with the strains of the merry post-horn, and carriers’ carts were as plentiful as omnibuses now are.  In the fine yard of the “Saracen’s Head,” Aldgate, you can picture the busy scene, though the building has ceased to be an inn, and if you wished to travel to Norwich there you would have found your coach ready for you.  The old “Bell Savage,” which derives its name from one Savage who kept the “Bell on the Hoop,” and not from any beautiful girl “La Belle Sauvage,” was a great coaching centre, and so were the “Swan with two Necks,” Lad Lane, the “Spread Eagle” and “Cross Keys” in Gracechurch Street, the “White Horse,” Fetter Lane, and the “Angel,” behind St. Clements.  As we do not propose to linger long in London, and prefer the country towns and villages where relics of old English life survive, we will hie to one of these noted hostelries, book our seats on a Phantom coach, and haste away from the great city which has dealt so mercilessly with its ancient buildings.  It is the last few years which have wrought the mischief.  Many of these old inns lingered on till the ’eighties.  Since then their destruction has been rapid, and the huge caravanserais, the “Cecil,” the “Ritz,” the “Savoy,” and the “Metropole,” have supplanted the old Saracen’s Heads, the Bulls, the Bells, and the Boars that satisfied the needs of our forefathers in a less luxurious age.

Let us travel first along the old York road, or rather select our route, going by way of Ware, Tottenham, Edmonton, and Waltham Cross, Hatfield and Stevenage, or through Barnet, until we arrive at the Wheat Sheaf Inn on Alconbury Hill, past Little Stukeley, where the two roads conjoin and “the milestones are numbered agreeably to that admeasurement,” viz. to that from Hicks’ Hall through Barnet, as Patterson’s Roads plainly informs us.  Along this road you will find several of the best specimens of old coaching inns in England.  The famous “George” at Huntingdon, the picturesque “Fox and Hounds” at Ware, the grand old inns at Stilton and Grantham are some of the best inns on English roads, and pleadingly invite a pleasant pilgrimage.  We might follow in the wake of Dick Turpin, if his ride to York were not a myth.