We had walked
past the Cross Keys many times on our way to the legendary
Packhorse,
down the hill a little way in South Stoke. My brother
and his Italian family are apparently greeted like
long-lost friends every time they go in here, and
consider it their local when they are in Bath, so
a visit was inevitable.... we just had to try it.
A pub guide book
we came across recently listed only two pubs in all
of Bath, the wonderful Old
Green Tree (on the National Historic Inventory)
and yes, the Cross Keys. What a bizarre book.
Looks nice enough
for a town pub from the outside, and it even has an
old stone block that was used to climb up to mount
horses (which you can see at the base of the pub sign
in the main picture here). In summer it gets a little
overgrown with flowers, so you may need to rummage
about a bit to find it. The pub has a nice enough
location, on a corner overlooking the first fields
of the countryside. But inside we found disappointment.
True, we went in the lounge side rather than the bar
side, but I could not see much sign of promise coming
from the other side either.
On the subject
of signs, what kind of a name is the 'Cross Keys'?
The keys in Cross Keys are those to Heaven's gate
held by St.Peter, and is another example of religious
pub names which were common before the Reformation,
such as the 'Trip to Jerusalem' in Nottingham, 'Samson
& Lion' in Birmingham, and the 'Bell & Cross'
in Clent. When Henry VIII split with the Catholic
Church, a host of King's Heads and Rose & Crowns
sprung up. This pub is clearly not of such antiquity,
probably more around the early 1900s.
So pub signs could
be said to reflect society, ever since 1393, when
King Richard II passed an Act making it compulsory
for alehouses to exhibit a sign, primarily to identify
alehouses to the official Ale Taster (there's a job
for that?!), but they soon became a useful method
of advertising. Pub signs were used before that, necessarily
so due to the high rate of illiteracy.
Pub names can
be important to a community. "Leave our village
pub names alone!" was the message from British
Member of Parliament Ian Taylor to pub landlords a
few years back. He rallied with local campaigners
to add his name to a petition from 320 residents in
the Thames Ditton and Weston Green areas in the south
of England when some diabolical chain messed with
a local pub. The petition read:
Ian Taylor promised
to ensure the petition was received by the pub owners,
the chain Fork & Pitcher.
What were the
marketing people thinking? First of all to come up
with a name as totally characterless as 'Fork &
Pitcher' (it sounds like the American gas station
chain 'Tank & Tummy'), and then to compound it
by destroying the locals' watering hole. And what
the heck is a fox doing on a river anyway? Barging
his way downstream with his vixen? A fox should be
in the woods or on the hill or something, not on the
river. Okay, so they had to incorporate the word 'river'
in there somewhere to clue people in on its location,
so why not the 'River Otter' or 'River Boat'? Or how
about 'The Albany'?
Or maybe I am
not accepting enough of appropriate change. Back in
Henry VIII's time, did people complain about the pub
names changing? "Hey! This pub has always been
the 'Mitre', you cannot go around changing it to the
'Kings Head'! What kind of a name is that anyway?
Just his head? What about the rest of him? It doesn't
make any sense! Now, Mitre, there's a good pub name,
a liturgical headdress, grand name for a pub!"
Probably not. Probably not.
Maybe we should
just be thankful that the marketing whizzes did not
decide on "Ye Olde Fox on the River" instead.
It would not have surprised me.