'Hells of intemperance': three of the worst pubs in Victorian Louth

The pubs of Louth feature frequently in the Victorian newspapers and court reports that I looked at in my Streets of Louth a few years back. Some of these establishments, like the Turks Head (arguably the oldest surviving inn in town) appear to have been fairly law-abiding places, seeing only occasional brushes with the law for minor infractions. Others, however, appear to have been rather more disreputable, and three of the most notorious of Louth's Victorian pubs are highlighted below.

(1) The Rag & Louse, Aswell Hole

The Rag & Louse was a Victorian beerhouse and 'tramp lodging-house' located in the Aswell Hole, down the horse-steps from Aswell Lane (now Aswell Street), a location it shared with an extensive spring-fed pool and number of brothels, according to the newspaper reports of the early to mid-Victorian period. It was officially called the Lord Nelson, but it appears to have been more usually known by the rather less salubrious name of the Rag & Louse. From the 1840s, it was run by Patrick Kayes—'a son of the Emerald Isle'—and his family, and it may have been related to the brewhouse and 'private brewery' that was located in the Aswell Hole in 1837, 'immediately adjoining the Aswell Spring'. The premises themselves must have been fairly extensive, as in 1851 there were 23 people staying in the establishment, including a large number of agricultural labourers and a beggar.

Aswell Hole, off Aswell Lane, showing the pool, spring and buildings here as they appeared in 1834 (plan by R. S. Bayley, 1834).

As a beerhouse, the Rag & Louse appears to have been just as pleasant as its name suggests. The newspapers of the time recorded it as the site of a considerable number of disturbances of the peace and it was described by one correspondent (William Brown) as 'notorious' for its bad behaviour, great noise and disorder, with stolen items being fairly regularly discovered in its rooms and drunken brawls erupting out into the Aswell Hole between its patrons. Of course, the Rag & Louse was not the sole cause of disturbances in Aswell Hole in the early and mid-Victorian period—the Hole was also the scene of a public brawl between the inhabitants of neighbouring Spring Gardens in 1846, and in 1848 six young men were each sentenced to two months hard labour for rolling a lighted tar barrel down the horse steps of Aswell Hole at 10pm at night! Nonetheless, one of the more disturbing incidents did begin there. In November 1865, an Irishman named Martin Monaghan, of Westgate Cottages on Irish Hill (now demolished), was charged by John Gibbons, 'a fellow-countryman and neighbour', with a 'most brutal and unmanly assault' that saw Monaghan bite off the whole of Gibbons' lower lip. The appearance of the victim in court was described as horrible, with the whole lip torn away. Apparently, Gibbons had been drinking in 'Pat Kaye's beer-shop in Aswell-hole' when the altercation started, although the final assault took place on Irish Hill, when Monaghan challenged Gibbons to a fight during which he took hold of Gibbons’ lip with his teeth and bit it off. Monaghan was, incidentally, fined only 30s for the injury to Gibbons (equivalent to around £109 today), which he paid and so avoided a short prison sentence.

The view up to Aswell Street from Aswell Hole in 2014 (image © Copyright Chris and licensed for reuse under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence).

The Rag & Louse was finally refused a renewal to its licence in 1869 and the property subsequently appears to have continued solely as a lodging house—it continued to play this role as late as 1901 and 1911, when it was still run by a member of the Kayes family and offered rooms to up to twelve patrons, including two Italians who were travelling with a piano organ!

(2) The Dog & Duck, Upgate

The Dog & Duck beerhouse was located almost directly opposite the chancel of St James’s Church, between Chequergate and Eastgate and had been newly built in 1832, its first landlord being one Thomas Wakelin. In 1846, Joseph Johnson was the landlord and he was charged by Sergeant Chapman and Police Constable Ryall with allowing prostitutes to assemble and drink in his beerhouse at night. The following year he appeared again before the court, when he was accused of resisting and refusing to admit two police officers into the Dog & Duck. The policemen entered the Dog & Duck on the night of the 5 January and attempted to go upstairs, at which point Johnson grabbed Police Constable Ryall around the neck to prevent him doing so, calling out "here's the police!" Forcing their way upstairs, the constables encountered around twenty men and prostitutes dancing, and the defendant's wife pulling other prostitutes into a bedroom. PC Ryall attempted to see into the bedroom to identify the prostitutes, but was refused entry. Joseph Johnson had apparently been charged with similar offences in the past, his beer house being one of 'notoriously bad character’, and he was fined £2 plus costs on this occasion—that is around £150 today, adjusted for inflation! By 1852, Johnson had been replaced by Benjamin Turner as the landlord of the Dog and Duck, but he seems to have been equally uncooperative with the police, being severely reprimanded by the magistrates on the 24 December 1852 for refusing to admit the police into his beerhouse and permitting drunkenness in the Dog & Duck.

The site of the former Dog & Duck, opposite St James's Church, Louth; the Dog & Duck was the second building visible on the left of the image. Photo © 2014 Google.

(3) The Marrowbone & Cleaver, Queen Street

This short-lived but notorious beerhouse was located somewhere on Walkergate (modern Queen Street) and was run by Samuel Walker in the late 1830s. In March 1839, the Marrowbone & Cleaver was raided by the police, who had been informed that Walker was running it as a brothel by parents who told Police Constable Ryall that 'their children had been ruined by resorting to Walker's house'. When inside they found 16 prostitutes all aged between 13 and 18, according to the final reports, who were said to be dancing to the music of two fiddles along with a number of local 'bad characters'. One of the girls, Elizabeth Stone (who seems to have been 13 and, it is said, already 'diseased'), was apparently given a 'fatherly lecture' by the magistrate, Samuel Trought, Esq., before being sent back to the House of Correction, where she had been committed for a month as a prostitute; Walker, in contrast, was fined £5 and costs, equivalent to around £350 today, and then appears to have spent the following months trying to avoid paying his fine, apparently with some success.

Modern Queen Street; the exact location of the Marrowbone & Cleaver is unfortunately unclear. Photo © 2014 Google.

The Marrowbone & Cleaver had closed down by 1850, when it was operated as a lodging-house by James Marchant. However, despite no longer being a beerhouse, the building continued to cause trouble for local law enforcement. In that year, it was the scene of a three-hour fight between two families of lodgers who lived there and some of the local residents. According to newspaper reports, one of the lodgers (Michael Mitchell) was liberated from prison in the morning, where he had been incarcerated for drunkenness, and the lodgers then proceeded to have a celebration at the former Marrowbone & Cleaver involving rum and a fiddler. A row began which erupted into the public street and the resulting fight came to rapidly involve the local residents of the area, at its height encompassing around 20 people and implements ranging from mallets, chisels and kettles to saws, knives, irons and hammers! When the local police force appeared to break the fight up, the families retreated into the lodging-house, barricaded themselves in and then engaged in a battle with the police to prevent them from entering and arresting them, a battle they eventually lost.

The content of this page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2014, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission. It is based in part on my book, The Streets of Louth, which offers additional details on the early history of the streets and buildings mentioned above and is available to buy as a paperback.

Which is the oldest pub in Louth?

The pubs of Louth have often attracted attention from local historians, but when it comes to the question of which of them is the oldest, there's rarely any serious discussion: Ye Olde Whyte Swanne on Eastgate (or, simply, The White Swan, as it appears from the historical directories to have been usually called before the twentieth century) is usually crowned the uncontested winner of that title.

Ye Olde Whyte Swanne, Eastgate, Louth. The sign on the side claims that it was established in 1612, although in reality this is the date of its first appearance in the written record, rather than when it was established. Photo © 2014 Google.

There are, it has to be said, good reasons why this is the case, not least the fact that 'The Sign of the Swan' is first mentioned as a Louth inn in an archdeacon’s visitation of 1612 and the present building is believed to date from the seventeenth century. As such, the White Swan would seem to be clearly more ancient than its usual nearest competitor, the Wheatsheaf on Westgate, formerly 'the Sign of the Wheatsheaf' (as in 1764), which is said to have been founded in 1627 and whose oldest standing element is usually only assigned to the late seventeenth century. However, whether The White Swan is the only answer to the question of the oldest pub in Louth, as opposed to the usual one, is a rather more complicated question: to some degree it depends exactly what one actually means by 'the oldest pub in Louth'? If one means the pub that has existed longest in Louth in its current premises, then The White Swan/Ye Olde Whyte Swanne is probably the answer that is sought: the White Swan clearly fits this bill. However, if one means something else, then there are other candidates to be had!

The Greyhound Inn, Upgate, Louth. Photo © 2014 Google.

The first candidate is the Greyhound Inn, on Upgate. This inn is first mentioned by name in 1767, had previously traded as the White Hart from at least 1751 to 1766, and was the site of several interesting incidents reported in the early newspapers—for example, in 1833 the landlord of the Greyhound, Joseph Wilson, was ‘removing a great coat belonging to one of his guests’ when ‘a loaded pistol, which was in one of the pockets, went off, and he received the contents in his body, from the effects of which he died almost immediately’ (Hull Packet, 6 Dec 1833). Clearly, it doesn't have the written pedigree to convincingly challenge the White Swan as the pub that has existed longest in Louth in its current premises. However, if one wishes to know the site of the oldest possible inn or pub yet identified in Louth, excluding the requirement that it be continuously operating, then the Greyhound might well be the answer. The reason for this lies with archaeological excavations that were undertaken to the rear of the Greyhound Inn around ten years ago. As was noted in Streets of Louth, these excavations indicated that this area of Louth was occupied from the twelfth century onwards and that it lay on the edge of the medieval town, with arable fields and wooded areas being located close by. Finds made include a substantial quantity of twelfth- and thirteenth-century pottery, along with horse shoes and horse harness fittings, leading to the suggestion that the first buildings on this site were stables that were perhaps associated with an inn. This site continued in use for a period but appears to have been largely abandoned after the mid-fourteenth century, perhaps because of the Black Death, and was only reoccupied in the eighteenth century.

The location of the main inns and pubs mentioned in this past, against Bayley's 1834 plan of Louth; click the image for a larger version. Key: 1=The White Swan; 2=The Wheatsheaf; 3=The Greyhound Inn; 4='Ye Inne'; 5=The Blue Stone Inn; 6=The Turks Head; 7=The Blackmoor's Head (Image created by C. R. Green, using R. S. Bayley's 1834 plan of Louth).

If the Greyhound Inn therefore could be on the site of the oldest pub/inn yet identified in Louth, what of the oldest continuously operating pub or inn in the town, irrespective of the age of its current premises, another valid and important interpretation of the question 'which is the oldest pub in Louth?' It would be easy to assume that this would be the White Swan on Eastgate again, as it is first recorded in 1612 and appears to have operated continuously. However, there are several pubs or inns that were recorded earlier than this in the town, such as 'Ye Inne' that was located on Upgate in 1564—possibly on the site of the property to the south of Church House—or the Blue Stone Inn, which was located on the southern corner of Upgate and Mercer Row and was certainly functioning as an inn in 1677 and may well have been so in the sixteenth century too (it was said to have once extended back all the way to Kidgate and to have been the largest inn in the county until its closure in 1800: see Streets of Louth under Upgate for both of these inns).

Even more importantly, one of these ancient inns may well be still operating today, albeit in a building much younger than the business itself. The inn in question was known as the Saracen's Head and was located on Aswell Lane (now Aswell Street). This inn bore a classically medieval inn-name, referencing the Crusades, and was indeed first mentioned in the medieval period, in John Louth's will of 1459. In October 1536, it made another appearance in the surviving documentary record: it was in the Saracen's Head that John Franke or Frankishe, the Registrar of the Bishop, was apparently staying ahead of the Visitation of Louth in that month, and it was from there that he was dragged with his books into the Market Place by Nicholas Melton (‘Captain Cobbler’) and his company at the start of the short-lived Lincolnshire Rising.

The Turks Head, Aswell Street, Louth, arguably the site of the oldest continuously operating inn/pub in Louth. Although the current buildings belong to the modern era, the Turks Head likely continues the ancient Saracen's Head inn, which operated on Aswell Street in the medieval and early modern periods. Photo © 2014 Google.

With regard to the location and potential survival of the Saracen’s Head into the modern period, it seems reasonable to suggest that there is probably some sort of intimate relationship between the medieval and early modern Saracen's Head inn on Aswell Lane and the modern Turks Head inn, which stands on the north-eastern corner of Aswell Street. The Turks Head appears to be one of the few Louth inns and public houses to have survived since the eighteenth century without a name change—a characteristic it also shares, incidentally, with the Wheatsheaf and the White Swan—and it was clearly already a significant inn during the mid-eighteenth century, when Christian Frederick Esberger stayed at the ‘Turkshead’ three times in 1764. In light of the relatively early recording of the Turks Head (most Louth inns and pubs are not recorded until the last part of the eighteenth century or after); the stability of the inn’s name; the close resemblance of this name to that of the Saracen’s Head ("Turk's Head", as an inn-name, is usually considered an eighteenth-century variant of the medieval "Saracen's Head"); and the location of the inn on the corner of Aswell Lane at the front of the medieval tenement that originally occupied the whole of east side of Aswell Lane from Queen Street (then Walkergate) to the Aswell spring, it certainly seems credible that the modern Turks Head might represent a rebuilding and survival of the medieval and early modern Saracen's Head.

An alternative theory, promoted by R. W. Goulding a century ago, is that the now-demolished inn that once stood just a little further south on the same side of the Aswell Lane, where the Mr Chips’ takeaway now is, could have been a survival of the Saracen’s Head. Named variously the Red Lion, the White Hart and the Foresters’ Arms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was apparently known as the Blackmoor’s, or Black’s, Head before 1789, this being another eighteenth-century variant of the early "Saracen's Head" inn-name. Whilst it is certainly not impossible that this represents a continuing Saracen's Head, the lack of stability in the inn's name is noteworthy and the Turks Head looks like a more credible candidate if we have to choose. However, it is perhaps worth asking whether we really have to choose between these two inns at all. A better solution to the presence of two inns on the same side of Aswell Lane bearing names that are variants of the "Saracen's Head" is simply that the original medieval inn probably occupied the entirety of the medieval tenement here, from Queen Street to the Aswell spring (as the early Blue Stone Inn on Upgate/Mercer Row appears to have done too, see above), with both eighteenth-century inns then deriving from the original inn as its site was subdivided over time. After all, the current properties and businesses on both sides of Aswell Street all result from the subdivision of the two medieval tenements that the original Aswell Lane ran between, and such a scenario offers a plausible solution to the presence of both the Turks Head and the Blackmoor's Head on the same side of the road here—the Turks Head would, on this model, be the direct descendant of the medieval and early modern Saracen's Head inn, as it stands at the front of the original medieval tenement, whilst the Blackmoor's Head would be a secondary creation made at some subsequent point when the Saracen's Head tenement was split to create the properties facing onto Aswell Lane/Aswell Street.

The content of this page, including any original illustrations, is Copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2014, All Rights Reserved, and should not be used without permission. It is based in part on my book, The Streets of Louth, which offers additional details on the early history of the streets and buildings mentioned above and is available to buy as a paperback.