1393 'n All That.......
So there I was.
Cradling a Thatchers outside Beccles' Kings Head pub, enjoying the warm sunshine, and observing several hard-hats destroy the interior of the once lauded Covent Garden fresh fruit & vegetable shop.
In wishing to take back control and make Britain great again, J.D.Wetherspoons Chief Executive Tim Martin has single-handedly destroyed the great British pub trade by purchasing a pub in every town, strangling it with corporate livery & questionable ethos, introducing 'pile it high & sell it cheap' global capitalist trading, and removing any local ties the establishment had with said town in the first place.
In Beccles he was expanding his operation by knocking through to the greengrocers, and building yet another pizza oven, in order to make Wetherspoons even sexier to a nation of confused millennials and over-entitled yet cautious pensioners.
It was the end of an era for the greengrocers that happily spilled colour & fragrance onto the pedestrianised walkway of this ancient Broads town.
But it was also the end of the town's individual & long-cherished image. Another global, profit-obsessed chain, replacing an institution that had served the community, with the community, and for the community for several hundred years.
The Kings Head would remain a local pub in all but name only.
My drinking partner, a true local and not a jumped-up 'blow-in' like me, observed the pub sign that once swung from the gibbet-like gallows on the corner of the building:
" That was the original pub sign. It'd been there for years.
Now it's just golden sign-writing in typical Spoon's font"
she grumbled into her Swedish blackcurrant Cider of Sorts.
The well-worn wooden sign displayed a chubby Henry VIII in full Reformation splendour. The paint had dulled over the years and cracks were beginning to show, but there was no doubt;
when this pub was first opened, it was to one of England's most famous kings that it doffed its coaching inn head & tricorn hat to.
Or did it?
In 1393, King Richard II issued a decree making it compulsory for ALL inns to have a sign, making it identifiable to the official royal ale-taster.
Why this position no longer exists we shall never know?
For this Tim Martin will be thankful.
According to Alfred Inigo Suckling's History & Antiquities of the County of Sufffolk, the Kings Head in Beccles has had a hostelry on the New Market site since 1668.
Cradling a Thatchers outside Beccles' Kings Head pub, enjoying the warm sunshine, and observing several hard-hats destroy the interior of the once lauded Covent Garden fresh fruit & vegetable shop.
In wishing to take back control and make Britain great again, J.D.Wetherspoons Chief Executive Tim Martin has single-handedly destroyed the great British pub trade by purchasing a pub in every town, strangling it with corporate livery & questionable ethos, introducing 'pile it high & sell it cheap' global capitalist trading, and removing any local ties the establishment had with said town in the first place.
In Beccles he was expanding his operation by knocking through to the greengrocers, and building yet another pizza oven, in order to make Wetherspoons even sexier to a nation of confused millennials and over-entitled yet cautious pensioners.
It was the end of an era for the greengrocers that happily spilled colour & fragrance onto the pedestrianised walkway of this ancient Broads town.
But it was also the end of the town's individual & long-cherished image. Another global, profit-obsessed chain, replacing an institution that had served the community, with the community, and for the community for several hundred years.
The Kings Head would remain a local pub in all but name only.
My drinking partner, a true local and not a jumped-up 'blow-in' like me, observed the pub sign that once swung from the gibbet-like gallows on the corner of the building:
" That was the original pub sign. It'd been there for years.
Now it's just golden sign-writing in typical Spoon's font"
she grumbled into her Swedish blackcurrant Cider of Sorts.
The well-worn wooden sign displayed a chubby Henry VIII in full Reformation splendour. The paint had dulled over the years and cracks were beginning to show, but there was no doubt;
when this pub was first opened, it was to one of England's most famous kings that it doffed its coaching inn head & tricorn hat to.
Or did it?
In 1393, King Richard II issued a decree making it compulsory for ALL inns to have a sign, making it identifiable to the official royal ale-taster.
Why this position no longer exists we shall never know?
For this Tim Martin will be thankful.
According to Alfred Inigo Suckling's History & Antiquities of the County of Sufffolk, the Kings Head in Beccles has had a hostelry on the New Market site since 1668.
George Cocke was the landlord.
His latter day rivals across the road in The Falcon were the Balls.
(This never ceases to amuse!)
Although this is the first recorded note, we cannot completely dismiss the possible presence of an earlier inn, but the Great Fire of 1586 and the subsequent Not So Great Fires of the 1660s, have put paid to any tangible evidence.
Fellow Waveney Valley town Bungay also has a Kings Head hotel dating from the same time, and any early Victorian photographic evidence of the two, appears to show that they both had similar pub signs, with similar kings' heads painted on them.
So which of the kings was that image of ?
The one that the sign-writers were commissioned to bestow upon these much-favoured places of entertainment?
It's no secret that both Beccles and Bungay have had their run-ins with the monarchy over the years. The legendary Bigods (Sheriffs & Earls of Norfolk) regularly swapped sides in the 12th and 13th centuries, meaning their loyalties towards any of the first three Henrys, Richard the Lionheart, Bad king John, Stephen and/or Matilda, were stretched to say the very least.
The earliest photos on record (from the Reeve's brilliant Bungay To Beccles) appears to show a sign with just the text - KINGS HEAD HOTEL - in both 1900 and 1908.
Debra Watkins' marvellous blog Relics Of Beccles seems to confirm this with a 1910 photo, pre-dating Morlings Music Centre, that also shows text-only on the swinging board.
It's not until 1937, a year after the first ever (and last ever) Inn Signs Exhibition in London, that we find photographic evidence of a pictorial king's head on the pub's gables.
The brewers Youngs & Crawshay of Norwich put signs on both the Kings Head in Beccles, and in Bungay.
The image was of an early English king, stoic, bearded, crowned, and Plantagenet in style.
This was not Henry VIII!
So was it Edward I, 'Hammer of the Scots' and eradicator of the Jews?
(See Norwich's grim discovery in the old Jewish Quarter, now known as Chapelfield Shopping Centre).
Was it his feckless son Edward II, lover of Piers Gaveston and he of the hot-poker ending?
Was it the third Edward, victorious at Crecy and instigator of the Hundred Years War?
Could it have been a 14th century representation of East Anglia's King Edwy - or Eadwig the Land-Giver, who in the 10th century granted the backwater defence of Beccles to the monks of Bury St.Edmunds, resulting in land-grabs and herring-fortune battles between church, state and the Bigod aristocracy?
Or was it simply a painting of the 9th century Frankish hero Charlemagne, depicted on the Middle Ages popular playing cards as the King of Hearts?
Youngs & Crawshay closed their brewery in 1958, and with them disappeared any references to the heritage and history of the sign.
Francis Frith in 1960 shows us that the sign persisted after the closure of ale purveyors, but the weather-beaten wood was perished and almost illegible by then.
Then in 1963 along came a new sign!
The fore-runner to the good king Henry painting of yesteryear.
Along with AA & RAC approved livery, the pubs new landlords gave a makeover to the fascia, and there in all his childlike petulance and peasant-revolting ermine is.................... Richard II.
Not Shakespeare's villainous hunchback Richard III.
Not even Richard's uncle the Black Prince!
Pompous, arrogant, haughty, teenage scourge of the Barons, and enemy of Parliament, Richard II.
The man who made inn signs compulsory!
It seems fitting that Wetherspoons have continued with this pub.
Perhaps in years to come, drinkers will look at the discarded picture of Henry and wonder if it was a photo of Tim Martin?
Or maybe King Tim will have his own pub signs done?
A spicy chicken wing in one hand, a flagon of Bombardier ale in the other, and a strap-line that reads:
"I'm Tim Martin of the UK, I am, I am.
Twas me that broke with Parliament, Rome, the Franks & the Saxons.
Would you like to trade-up to a Drink & Meal Deal, and do you have a table number?"
His latter day rivals across the road in The Falcon were the Balls.
(This never ceases to amuse!)
Although this is the first recorded note, we cannot completely dismiss the possible presence of an earlier inn, but the Great Fire of 1586 and the subsequent Not So Great Fires of the 1660s, have put paid to any tangible evidence.
Fellow Waveney Valley town Bungay also has a Kings Head hotel dating from the same time, and any early Victorian photographic evidence of the two, appears to show that they both had similar pub signs, with similar kings' heads painted on them.
(Kings Head Hotel, Bungay)
So which of the kings was that image of ?
The one that the sign-writers were commissioned to bestow upon these much-favoured places of entertainment?
It's no secret that both Beccles and Bungay have had their run-ins with the monarchy over the years. The legendary Bigods (Sheriffs & Earls of Norfolk) regularly swapped sides in the 12th and 13th centuries, meaning their loyalties towards any of the first three Henrys, Richard the Lionheart, Bad king John, Stephen and/or Matilda, were stretched to say the very least.
The earliest photos on record (from the Reeve's brilliant Bungay To Beccles) appears to show a sign with just the text - KINGS HEAD HOTEL - in both 1900 and 1908.
Debra Watkins' marvellous blog Relics Of Beccles seems to confirm this with a 1910 photo, pre-dating Morlings Music Centre, that also shows text-only on the swinging board.
It's not until 1937, a year after the first ever (and last ever) Inn Signs Exhibition in London, that we find photographic evidence of a pictorial king's head on the pub's gables.
The brewers Youngs & Crawshay of Norwich put signs on both the Kings Head in Beccles, and in Bungay.
The image was of an early English king, stoic, bearded, crowned, and Plantagenet in style.
This was not Henry VIII!
So was it Edward I, 'Hammer of the Scots' and eradicator of the Jews?
(See Norwich's grim discovery in the old Jewish Quarter, now known as Chapelfield Shopping Centre).
Was it his feckless son Edward II, lover of Piers Gaveston and he of the hot-poker ending?
Was it the third Edward, victorious at Crecy and instigator of the Hundred Years War?
Could it have been a 14th century representation of East Anglia's King Edwy - or Eadwig the Land-Giver, who in the 10th century granted the backwater defence of Beccles to the monks of Bury St.Edmunds, resulting in land-grabs and herring-fortune battles between church, state and the Bigod aristocracy?
Or was it simply a painting of the 9th century Frankish hero Charlemagne, depicted on the Middle Ages popular playing cards as the King of Hearts?
Youngs & Crawshay closed their brewery in 1958, and with them disappeared any references to the heritage and history of the sign.
Francis Frith in 1960 shows us that the sign persisted after the closure of ale purveyors, but the weather-beaten wood was perished and almost illegible by then.
Then in 1963 along came a new sign!
The fore-runner to the good king Henry painting of yesteryear.
Along with AA & RAC approved livery, the pubs new landlords gave a makeover to the fascia, and there in all his childlike petulance and peasant-revolting ermine is.................... Richard II.
(With thanks to Alamy).
Not 'Couer de Lion' Richard of the Crusades.Not Shakespeare's villainous hunchback Richard III.
Not even Richard's uncle the Black Prince!
Pompous, arrogant, haughty, teenage scourge of the Barons, and enemy of Parliament, Richard II.
The man who made inn signs compulsory!
It seems fitting that Wetherspoons have continued with this pub.
Perhaps in years to come, drinkers will look at the discarded picture of Henry and wonder if it was a photo of Tim Martin?
Or maybe King Tim will have his own pub signs done?
A spicy chicken wing in one hand, a flagon of Bombardier ale in the other, and a strap-line that reads:
"I'm Tim Martin of the UK, I am, I am.
Twas me that broke with Parliament, Rome, the Franks & the Saxons.
Would you like to trade-up to a Drink & Meal Deal, and do you have a table number?"
(We Three Kings........)
