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Willful Reader,
As a continuation of minor histories of the old inns and alehouses of Chelmsford, allow me to blog a little upon an obscure old building that existed as a pub for the citizens of Chelmsford until 1807 – The Red Lyon*.
This history is a little more obscure than my previous post on the Black Boy Inn since I can’t find any other piece of research that documents this particular pub’s history. Therefore allow the accuracy of this post compensate for its sparseness, for almost every thing written here comes from first hand records.
The Red Lyon
The Red Lyon stood opposite the Black Boy Inn, roughly on the site where Marks and Spencer stands now. This part of Chelmsford was first built upon in about 1205, when it’s possible that a man called Ormund had a hall of some kind there. By the end of the medieval period two inns stood against each other on the site – the White Hart (recorded as early as 1419), and the Lyon (appears in records in about 1455). The Lyon was sold to one Richard Chelmesford in 1455 and later passed to William Scott, who sold it in 1538 to a relative of his, Jeffrey Scott. Some time in the next 20 years Jeffrey also obtained the White Hart next door, since the two inns were rented out together to a succession of different owners during the 1560s.
The inn was still called the Lyon in 1593, when one poor Abdias Maye was brought before a justice of the peace there to answer for his crimes. By this point the building was one of many properties acquired by the noble Petre family, and it was most probably them who renamed it as the Red Lyon in around about 1600 (although some records still use its old name of The Lyon for a long time afterwards.
It next appears as ‘the Redd Lyon at Chelmsford’ in a letter dated 25 April 1620, when the Earl of Warwick met there to discuss with various Justices of the Peace over raising money to pay for a gift for the King of Bohemia. If a more rare subject for a meeting ever occurred in Chelmsford I would be surprised.
Then the history of the inn goes quiet and does not appear again in records until 1700, when the inn belonged to Daniel Browne, and a decade later it had come to Robert Berriman. It seems to have been relatively un-noteworthy compared to several more successful taverns that flourished in Chelmsford in the 17th century, however, in that first decade of the 18th century it began a climb to importance. (Later images would suggest it was heavily remodeled in the second half of the 17th century.)
In 1711 it was used as a meeting place of the annual dinner for the Justices of the Peace of Essex – both the Red Lyon and the Black Boy Inn opposite were involved. Perhaps the food prepared by the cooks at the Black Boy were not quite up to the Red Lyon’s, since the next year it was the Red Lyon alone that was involved in the dinner.
One thing that seems to have been a regular occurrence, either at the inn or just outside of it in the street, was the auctioning off of the turnpikes or toll roads in Essex. The winner of this remarkable sale would have the right to charge rents at those places for people using the roads until the next auction.
The Red Lyon continued some success as an alehouse, hosting annual dinners for several small Chelmsford societies until the end of the 1700s. Sadly, though, by 1807 the fine old building was recorded as being used as private dwellings, having closed down and been divided into four properties. There is no evidence of a sale, and not a word of who the last owners of it were, but I hope I have somehow revived the history of an old local pub that hasn’t served a drink now for over two hundred years.
This was not the last time that a drink was enjoyed on this site, though, since the Queens Head seems to have stood there for a short while at the end of the 1800s.
*One thing of some interesting note that I’ve found so far researching pubs is that, unlike researching most other buildings or landmarks, the spelling of a pub’s name varies very little when spelling of all other words can be quite different. I can only put this down to a pub’s name being written up over the door, so anyone writing about it would copy down what the sign said, leading to a pub’s name being spelled constantly the same way for centuries.