Every pub with a page here has a badge. It shows the date the pub claims, the earliest date we could find in the records, and the grade we gave the evidence. It is free to use, you do not need to ask, and we will not withdraw it because you displayed it.
oldpubs.com/badges/<the pub's page name>.svg.What it says
The same thing the pub's page says, in one line: the claim, the record, and the grade. It does not say a pub is the oldest anything, because nobody can know that. It does not say a claim is false either — grade C means we could not find a document, not that there never was one.
It grades the evidence for a date, not the pub. It says nothing about the beer, the food, the welcome or the state of the building, and displaying it does not mean the pub endorses us or that we are connected to it in any way.
Few places will put it up, which is why it is worth something. A visitor who reads "claims 1189, first record 1751" and then walks into a genuinely medieval cellar is more impressed, not less.
How to use it
Copy this into your page, changing the pub name to yours. It is a plain image and a link: no script, no tracking, nothing loaded from us beyond the picture itself.
<a href="https://oldpubs.com/pubs/the-george-inn-norton-st-philip/">
<img src="https://oldpubs.com/badges/the-george-inn-norton-st-philip.svg"
alt="Checked by OldPubs: The George Inn claims 1397"
width="300" height="108" loading="lazy">
</a>The badge is an SVG, so it stays sharp at any size and weighs about two kilobytes. If your website builder will not take HTML, upload the file itself: right-click the badge above, save it, and link the image to your pub's page here by hand.
Changing what it says
The badge is generated from our data, so it changes when the data does. If you have a document we have not seen — a deed, a licensing entry, a rate book, a dated timber survey, a line in a parish register — send it and we will read it properly. Several grades have already moved that way.
What helps most, in rough order: a dated primary document naming the house or its keeper; a heritage listing entry we have missed; a dendrochronology or radiocarbon report with an actual report behind it; a local historian's published work with its own citations. What cannot move a grade, however often it is repeated, is another website saying the same date.
Write through the contact page. Every change we make is logged in the corrections log with what changed and why, including when the change is against our own earlier judgement.
The small print
- Free, for any pub with a page here. No fee, no account, no permission needed.
- A pub cannot pay to appear here, to move up the ranking, to change its grade or to have its claim described more kindly.
- The badge reflects the data on the day it is loaded. If a grade changes, the badge on your site changes with it — in either direction.
- Please link it to your pub's page here, so a visitor can see the working. That is the only thing we ask.
- The mark and the wording are ours; the badge is licensed for use by the pub it names, on its own website and print. Do not alter the dates on it.
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