When the custom of seeking the shelter, as a matter of course, of the country mansion fell into disuse, so, conversely, did that of naming inns after the local Lord of the Manor come into fashion. Then, in a manner emblematic of the traveller's change from the hospitality of the mansion to that of the inn, mine host adopted the heraldic coat from the great man's portal, and called his house the "---- Arms." It has been left to modern times, times in which heraldry has long ceased to be an exact science, to perpetrate such absurdities as the "Bricklayers' Arms," the "Drovers' Arms," and the like, appropriated to a class of person unknown officially to the College of Heralds.
According to Fynes Morison, who wrote in 1617, we held then, in this country, a pre-eminence in the trade and art of innkeeping: "The world," he said, "affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a passenger comes the servants run to him: one takes his horse, and walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat, but let the master look to this point. Another gives the traveller his private chamber and kindles his fire, the third pulls off his boots and makes them clean; then the host or hostess visits him--if he will eat with the host--or at a common table it will be 4_d._ and 6_d._ If a gentleman has his own chamber, his ways are consulted, and he has music, too, if he likes."
In short, Morison wrote of English inns just anterior to the time of Samuel Pepys, who travelled much in his day, and tells us freely, in his appreciative way, of the excellent appointments, the music, the good fare and the comfortable beds he, in general, found.
But this era in which Morison wrote was a trying time for all innkeepers and taverners. The story of it is so remarkable that it repays a lengthy treatment.
In our own age it is customary to many otherwise just and fair-minded people to look upon the innkeeper as a son of a Belial, a sinner who should be kept in outer darkness and made to sit in sackcloth and ashes, in penance for other people's excesses. On the one side he has the cormorants of the Inland Revenue plucking out his vitals, and generally, if it be a "tied" house, on the other a Brewery Company, selling him the worst liquors at the best prices, and threatening to turn him out if he does not maintain a trade of so many barrels a month. Always, from the earliest times, he has been the mark for satire and invective, has been licensed, sweated, regulated, and generally put on the chain; but he probably had never so bad a time as that he experienced in the last years of James the First. Already innkeepers were licensed at Quarter Sessions, but in 1616 it occurred to one Giles Mompesson, the time-serving Member of Parliament for the rotten borough of Great Bedwin, in Wiltshire, that much plunder could be extracted from them and used to replenish the Royal Exchequer, then at a low ebb, if he could obtain the grant of a monopoly of licensing inns, over-riding the old-established functions in that direction of the magistrates.