DOVER KENT ARCHIVES

Page Updated:- Monday, 08 April, 2024.

PUB LIST PUBLIC HOUSES Paul Skelton

Earliest 1540

Shephard and Lamb

Latest 1780s

(Name to)

Snargate

Folkestone

 

According to Michael David Mirams 1987 book "Kent Inns and Inn Signs", the pub changed name to the "Red Lion" about the 1780s and was built in about 1650 as a coaching inn. However, further information tells me that the premises was built in 1540 as a coaching inn where sheep drovers used to stay whilst transporting their stock from one village to the next.

 

From Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England.

This case may have simply been the misogynistic insult of a disgruntled alehouse customer, but its implication that sex could be had with female alehouse workers was not entirely unfounded - though more often than not it was serving maids, rather than alewives, who were thought to be sexually available. There were undoubtedly cases involving a degree of complicity and consent, but serving maids were treated by many male customers as "public property" for whom ‘attempts on their virtue seem to have gone with the territory’. This could lead to some terrifying experiences, including rape. In one appalling incident that occurred in an alehouse in Snargate, Kent, in 1598, five men were found guilty of sexually assaulting the alewife and her maids, and gang-raping one fourteen year-old maid who later died of her injuries - actions that were initially dismissed by the local JP as "but a trick of youth." The alehouse could, then, be pervaded by a sexually aggressive masculinity. A less dramatic but more commonplace feature of this was a culture of bragging about sexual conquests.

 

LICENSEE LIST

 

If anyone should have any further information, or indeed any pictures or photographs of the above licensed premises, please email:-

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LINK to Even More Tales From The Tap Room