But this difficulty of travel and liability to be detained long on the
road were cheered by good inns, such as did not exist in the world
elsewhere. All the literature of the period reflects lovingly the
homelike delights of these comfortable houses of entertainment. Every
little village boasted an excellent inn, and in the towns on the great
thoroughfares were sumptuous houses that would accommodate from two to
three hundred guests with their horses. The landlords were not tyrants,
as on the Continent, but servants of their guests; and it was, says
Harrison, a world to see how they did contend for the entertainment of
their guests--as about fineness and change of linen, furniture of
bedding, beauty of rooms, service at the table, costliness of plate,
strength of drink, variety of wines, or well-using of horses. The
gorgeous signs at their doors sometimes cost forty pounds. The inns were
cheap too, and the landlord let no one depart dissatisfied with his bill.
The worst inns were in London, and the tradition has been handed down.
But the ostlers, Harrison confesses, did sometimes cheat in the feed, and
they with the tapsters and chamberlains were in league (and the landlord
was not always above suspicion) with highwaymen outside, to ascertain if
the traveler carried any valuables; so that when he left the hospitable
inn he was quite likely to be stopped on the highway and relieved of his
money. The highwayman was a conspicuous character. One of the most
romantic of these gentry at one time was a woman named Mary Frith, born
in 1585, and known as Moll Cut-Purse. She dressed in male attire, was an
adroit fencer, a bold rider, and a staunch royalist; she once took two
hundred gold jacobuses from the Parliamentary General Fairfax on Hounslow
Heath. She is the chief character in Middleton's play of the "Roaring
Girl"; and after a varied life as a thief, cutpurse, pickpocket,
highwayman, trainer of animals, and keeper of a thieves' fence, she died
in peace at the age of seventy. To return to the inns, Fyner Morrison, a