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Royal Tunbridge Wells
where the Ring-doves coo above, whilst the lovers bill below and project all things in order to make themselves happy at the next merry meeting; and Gaming at the Groom-porters, where every one strives to win, whilst the box runs away with the money," Ward wrote. " Lodgings are so dear and scarce, that a beau is sometimes glad of a barn, and a lady of honour content to lie in a garret: the horses being commonly put to grass for the servants to lie in the stable. My landlord was a farmer, and his very outhouses were so full that, having sheared some sheep, he abated me half-a-crown a week to let the wool lie in my bedchamber. The most noble of their provisions is a pack-saddle of mutton and a wheat-ear pie, which is accounted here a feast for a Heliogabalus, and is indeed so costly a banquet, that a man may go over to Amsterdam, treat half a dozen friends with a fish dinner, and bring them back again into their own country almost as cheap as you can give yourself and your mistress a true Tunbridge Wells entertainment. The liquors chiefly produced by this part of the country are beer made of wood-dried malt, and wine drawn out of a birch-tree: the first is infected with 238 |
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