Thursday, January 04, 2007

The Oldest Inn in England

Here's a rare photograph of me, standing in front of the Royalist Hotel in Stow. Some of the timbers of the Royalist have been shown by carbon dating to be over a thousand years old. The Guinness Book of World Records has, in fact, certified the Royalist as "the oldest inn in England." It was built as an inn in 987 by Aethelmar, the Anglo-Saxon Duke of Cornwall. In the battle of Stow, at the end of the English Civil War (see below), it was the headquarters of the Royalist forces, hence the name.

When we were in Salzburg in October, we ate dinner in the oldest Gasthaus in Europe, the Stiftskeller St. Peter (right), which was first mentioned as a restaurant in a document dated 803—making it at least 184 years older than the Royalist.

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