The Hunt for the Oldest Pub in Britain

Nottingham's ancient pub brawl

A three pub row in Nottingham over which is the oldest in Britain is impressive stuff. The best part is that the claims appear to be utterly unresolvable.

It’s the best pub quiz ever. I simply had to go on a pub crawl of Britain’s oldest pubs and judge for myself.

The obvious place to start is the incredible, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, partly buried into the hillside of Nottingham Castle, half pub, half cave.

Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem c.1189

The road it stands on is called Brewhouse Yard, named after the brewhouse of the castle itself. As the castle was built in 1068, it is entirely possible that people have been drinking on the site for over a thousand years. On the exterior of The Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is painted the year 1189.

The year 1189 is important because this is the year Richard I, or Richard the Lionheart as history remembers him, came to the throne and immediately launched a crusade into the Holy Land. Hence the name of the pub, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is said to refer to the Crusades and one can almost imagine a knight, poised to follow the Lionheart, having a last pint before facing Saladin and the Saracens.

Unfortunately, dendrochronology undertaken by Historic England dated the timber structure of the pub to the early seventeenth century. The first reliable evidence of a pub existing on the site comes when the establishment was known as The Pilgrim in 1751. The change of name to Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem seems to have occurred around 1799.

Still, it is an atmospheric place and in its famous Rock Room is a Cursed Galleon, left in the pub by a departing sailor. It is rumoured that the last three people who attempted to clean the model galleon died in mysterious circumstances. Unsurprisingly, it lies undisturbed, covered in years of dust and cobwebs.

The Ye Olde Salutation Inn claims to have been serving pints since 1240. It is built on caves, but no one knows when these caves were in use from. However, the current building is said to have been built on the site of the ale house, the fabulously named The Archangel Gabriel Salutes the Virgin Mary.

Ye Olde Salutation Inn c.1240 (pic. David Lally)

Timbers inside the pub have been dated to around 1440 and there is evidence that a pub was in operation on the site in 1414. During the English Civil War (1642–1646 for those who didn’t pay attention at school) both factions established recruiting rooms in the inn, I presume the roundheads were in the tap room and the cavaliers in the lounge. This had the potential to be the pub brawl to end all pub brawls. ‘Come on, I’ll have your head on a pike’. It is rumoured that the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin sold his ill-gotten gains in the back room of the pub during the 1730s.

Our third contender is The Bell Inn. Inside the bar the year 1437 is inscribed in stained glass and dating evidence taken from timbers in the pub puts the construction date around 1440.

The Bell Inn c.1437

The Bell was definitely operating as a public house in 1638, making it the oldest of the three pubs with reliable evidence. The Bell Inn also had the last laugh when a Channel 4 TV programme, History Hunters, an offshoot of the popular Time Team, concluded that of the three, Ye Olde Salutation was the oldest building, but The Bell Inn had been the earliest in use as a pub.

A famous landlord of The Bell Inn was William Clarke. He became landlord in 1812. In the late 1820s he lost the use of one eye after being struck in the face by a fives ball on the court behind the pub. Despite this he went onto become probably the most famous cricketer you have never heard of.

Clarke married wisely. His wife was Mary Chapman, the landlady of the Trent Bridge Inn. Clarke saw the potential of a large field behind the pub. He had it enclosed and it became the Trent Bridge cricket ground and, from 1840, the home of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club. Today, it is one of the most revered cricket grounds in the world and regularly hosts international matches.

The second reason for Clarke’s fame was that in 1846 he formed the professional touring side the All-England Eleven. The players were selected from the cream of Victorian cricket, they exploited the spread of the railway network to play the game at a level previously unseen in many districts.

It has been argued that the influence of the All-England XI on the development of cricket was of inestimable value in converting what was a largely local pastime into a national sport. Of course, the commercialisation of cricket was not invented by William Clarke and the All- England XI, but as Derek Birley put it in his wonderful book A Social History of English Cricket, Clarke had ‘discovered the seam … the cricket industry, like the textile, had moved out of its cottage’.

Several imitators of the All-England XI were formed, and toured relatively successfully for a couple of decades: The United All England XI, the United South of England XI and the United North of England XI being the most prominent. W.G. Grace, never one to miss a commercial opportunity, toured with the United South of England XI. Part of the legacy of the All-England XI was the embrace of the commercial opportunities by not only the cricket clubs that hosted the itinerant eleven, but also printers, suppliers of marquees, caterers and publicans. The All-England XI players were among the vanguard of truly national sporting personalities in the context of commercialised team sport.