270
THE GREEN BAG
demand. At the proper place on every main road of travel houses were devoted to the business of furnishing food, drink, and safe lodging to hungry and weary travelers. Thus out of the needs of the wayfarer and as an incident of travel from place to place grew the English inn. It was established to supply the needs of the traveler along his journey, to wit, to fur nish food and drink for man and beast, and rest and safety for the night. The inn was not the only accommodation which weary travelers might find in the course of their journey. The religious houses practised hospitality, and freely received certain classes of people. The nobles and magnates habitualh resorted to them for refreshment and were received both in consideration of their own bounty and as representatives of the class to which the community owed its foundation and its wealth. The very poor also were received out of mere charity, for hospitality to the poor was one of the first requirements of religion as it was understood in the Middle Ages. To the houses of the friars, there fore, rich and poor resorted for entertain ment; but the great middle class, the men who were able to pay their way, were not welcome there. If they had the means to pay for accommodation and were without special claim to favor, they must go to those whose business it was to care for them. The great houses of nobles and gentry were also open to travelers who were in need of entertainments, but there, too, it was as a rule only the rich and the poor who were expected to avail themselves of the private hospitality. Any one lost or benighted would of course be received; but the lord of the manor had no desire to compete with the innkeeper, who must make his livelihood from the wayfarer. Besides these private houses and the inn for necessary entertainment, the alehouse or tavern supplied incidental refreshment to the traveler, though primarily intended to serve another purpose. This house primarily
supplied the wants of the inhabitants of the place, for there the native found rest, heat, companionship, and beer. He could stay until the stroke of curfew, and then was turned out to find his way home as best he might, quarreling and fighting by the way, using his knife freely, or falling from his horse into a convenient stream, the easy prey for enemies and for robbers. "The law would not have a tavern haunted out of season," and the night time was out of season. The difference between the inn and the tavern is therefore obvious. The one was instituted for the weary traveler, the other for the native; the one furnished food that the traveler might continue his jour ney, the other furnished drink for the mere pleasure of neighbors; the one was open to the traveler for protection at night, the other turned its guest out at the very moment when he most needed protection, and left him to find it. if his remaining senses permitted him to do so, in his own home. It is xtnnecessary, therefore, to point out the fact that a tavern is not an inn, and that the innkeeper's duties do not extend to the tavernkeeper. Such being the course of life among way farers in medieval England, the inn was a natural outgrowth uf the conditions. The inn, the public house of entertainment, was naturally evolved from the private house. Any householder might receive a stranger for the night, as indeed in rural communities many householders are apt to do. If in the course of time one such householder came, either through the superiority of his own accommodation or by reason of the lack of competition, to receive all persons who in that village needed accommodation he would thereby have become an inn keeper. He would have done it perhaps gradually, without any distinct change marking the transition from the private householder to the public innkeeper; nor would the accommodation he offered be different in kind from the accommodation that would be offered by the private house
