We checked the 100 oldest pub claims on this site against the documentary record, one at a time. Of the 100, 33 have a dated document of any kind behind them, 6 have a record that reaches the year claimed or precedes it, and the other 67 have nothing that anybody has yet been able to produce.
None of that is an accusation. A house repeating a date it inherited is not lying, and most of these years were first put into print by somebody long dead. The absence of a document is a fact about what survives in archives, not a fact about a building: registers burn, borough papers are thrown out in a clear-out, and a pub can be four hundred years old with nothing on paper to show for a single one of those years. What this page reports is the distance between two things — the year a house claims, and the year that can be produced — and it leaves the distance to speak.
What was checked, and what counts as a record
These are the 100 oldest claims the site holds, and every one of them names a year before 1500: the oldest is AD 560 and the most recent 1472. All 100 have a page of their own, so none has been held back by the rules that keep a thin page out of the index — this is the whole set rather than a sample of it. Ranked, mapped and sortable, they are the Top 100 oldest pubs in the world; this page is the arithmetic that falls out of them.
A record here means a dated document that puts drinking-house use on the site: a licensing roll, a borough rental, a manor court entry, a probate inventory, a dated deed, a tree-ring report. A pub's own history page is not one, and neither is a newspaper repeating it — both are evidence of what is claimed, which is a different thing and is recorded as such. The tests each date has to pass, and the three letters that come out of them, are set out in how we date and grade a pub. Across these 100 rows they give 7 at grade A, 11 at B and 82 at C, and the rest of this page is about what sits behind those letters rather than about the letters.
The records that reach their claim
A document from the year claimed, or from before it, exists for 6 of the 100. Oldest claim first:
- Taverne zur Krone, Dietikon — claims 1259, recorded 1259
- Jaškovská krčma, Těrlicko — claims 1268, recorded 1268
- Bremer Ratskeller, Bremen — claims 1405, recorded 1405
- Cantina Do Spade, Venice — claims 1448, recorded 1448
- King's Head, Aylesbury — claims 1455, recorded 1455
- U Medvídků, Prague — claims 1466, recorded 1438 (28 years before the year it claims)
The next best case is The George Inn at Norton St Philip, which claims 1397 against a first record of 1432 — 35 years later. That is close enough for the strongest grade, and it is still not the same thing as a document from the year on the sign.
Of those 6, 5 stand outside the United Kingdom — in Dietikon, Těrlicko, Bremen, Venice and Prague — while 79 of the 100 claims come from the United Kingdom. That is not a finding about who is honest. It is a finding about paper. A Hanseatic city council kept its own cellar and wrote down who ran it; a Bohemian estate recorded its taverns because they were taxed; Venice registered its wine shops. An English village alehouse of the same date was licensed by a justice whose rolls may or may not have come through the four centuries since. Where the civic record survives, a claim can be tested. Where it does not, it cannot be — and the house is no younger for it.
After those, there is no middle
The gaps between claim and record do not tail off gently. Of the 33 records, 7 land within 35 years of the claim they sit under. The next one is 179 years late. Nothing at all falls in between: no record on this list is between 35 and 179 years later than the year the house claims, which is where they would cluster if these were ordinary approximations that had drifted a little in the telling.
Of the 27 records later than their claim, the middle one is 409 years behind it; across all 33 rows that have a record at all, the middle gap is 376 years. Those are not the numbers of a rounding error. They are the numbers of a year that was arrived at some other way and then repeated until it was in every guidebook — a building date read as a licensing date, a family story committed to print, a house name that turned out to be older than the house standing under it.
The claims nobody can test
Of the 100, 27 claim a year before 1200. Of those, 11 have a document of some kind, and the nearest of them is 253 years later than the claim it is attached to. Not one claim to a year earlier than 1200 has a record anywhere near it.
That is a statement about documents and not about buildings, and it is worth saying twice. England's earliest surviving licensing records are sixteenth-century. Before them a drinking house appears in writing mostly when it collides with something else that was being written down: a manor court, a will, a tax, a killing. A house that kept out of trouble for three hundred years leaves no trace at all, and that — rather than invention — is the commonest reason a claim cannot be checked. How historians date an old pub sets out what a dating case is built from when the paper is missing: fabric, roof timbers, cellar vaults, the line of the street.
Century by century
Sorted by the century each house claims, the pattern is plain enough. The third column counts the rows with a document of any date; the fourth counts the rows whose document reaches the year claimed.
| Century claimed | Claims | With a record | Record reaching the claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6th | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 8th | 2 | 1 | 0 |
| 9th | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 10th | 4 | 1 | 0 |
| 11th | 6 | 1 | 0 |
| 12th | 21 | 7 | 0 |
| 13th | 20 | 4 | 2 |
| 14th | 26 | 8 | 0 |
| 15th | 19 | 9 | 4 |
Only 2 of the 9 centuries on that table hold a record that reaches its own claim: the 13th and the 15th. There is no mystery in the shape of it. The further back a claim reaches, the less of the paper that could have supported it was ever made, and the less of what was made is still there to read.
The four longest gaps
These are the widest distances on the list between a year claimed and a year that can be produced. Each is a well-known house with a well-known date, and each has its own page here setting out what the record actually holds.
- The Old Ferry Boat Inn, Holywell — claims AD 560, first recorded 1841. A gap of 1281 years.
- Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, St Albans — claims AD 793, first recorded 1756. A gap of 963 years.
- Sean's Bar, Athlone — claims AD 900, first recorded 1738. A gap of 838 years.
- The Bingley Arms, Bardsey — claims AD 953, first recorded 1738. A gap of 785 years.
Take the first of them. The Old Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell claims AD 560, and the earliest document anyone has produced is 1841. The legend behind that year is told in full on the pub's own page, and told warmly, because it is a good one and it belongs to the place. It is also not a date anybody can show you. The house may well be very old; the claim is simply not one that can be checked, and a page reporting it as a fact would be reporting a story as a record. The same holds for the other three: famous houses, famous years, and a first document centuries behind them.
Questions
- How many of the oldest pub claims are documented?
- Of the 100 oldest pub claims checked here, 33 have a dated document of any kind behind them and 67 have none that has been traced. A record reaching the year claimed, or preceding it, exists for 6.
- Does a missing document mean a pub is not old?
- No. It means nobody can show you the year. Licensing rolls, borough registers and parish papers survive unevenly, so a house can be four centuries old and leave nothing in writing. A missing record is a fact about the archive, not about the building.
- How far are the claims from the records?
- The distribution has no middle. Of the 33 records, 7 land within 35 years of the claim; the next is 179 years late, and the middle gap among the late ones is 409 years.
What would change these figures
One document each. A licensing roll, a rental, a dated deed, a probate inventory, a tree-ring report — anything that puts drinking-house use on a site earlier than the year shown here. Send it and it gets read, the grade moves if it holds, and the change is logged publicly with the date and what changed in the corrections log. Nothing can be paid for and no house can be moved up by asking, which is the only way a grade is worth anything.
If you keep one of these pubs, or work in the record office that holds its parish, you are a great deal closer to the answer than we are. Deeds, licences, an old survey, a written house history, a photograph with a date on the back: any of them can move a claim from tradition to record.
Every row behind this page is published — the two dates, the grade, the gap in years and each source cited — free to reuse with credit, in the OldPubs dataset. The arithmetic above can be run again on it, and if it comes out differently we would like to hear about that before anybody else does.
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