Friday, May 30, 2008

Cross-Eyed Ramblings 2

By 1820 however, the pub had introduced 'pegging', and the clientele were once again 'Folk of heaving lung and stories told'. Pegging was a system whereby every wooden tankard had four holes in its handle and as diarist and local vicar Jack Fairbanks wrote at the time 'Manly and goodly' behaviour produced 'a tankard brimming and frothing to the top peg'. But behaviour of the sort associated with 'pirates and petty criminals' would see your peg placed at the bottom. Hence the landlord would 'take you down a peg or two'. Some thirty years later in 1850, the pub displayed its first ever pub sign and with it came it's first and final change of name. For years before Landlord Shad Reynolds had joked of 'Cross-eyed ramblers, forever returning so quickly to this place of rest' adding 'the stronger the ale served forth, the narrower eye and hastier return'. This new sign however caused much concern amongst villagers, who found the sign 'More akin to London Town than our peaceful hamlet'. 1876 produced the pubs second death, another closure and a rather muted murder enquiry. The fire of '76 was according to the newly published bi-monthly Village Life, either 'a prank gone horribly wrong' or 'a plot devilish to the bone and splint'. Landlady Joyce Fielding was upstairs fast asleep when 'the flames licked that wicked smile off her face and turned her laugh to cinder'. Police enquiries could provide no further evidence other than 'a gossipy village suddenly silenced by the death of a woman, already dead in the eyes of the many'.

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