What happened
The Royal Fountain stood at 16 St Margaret's Street and traded on a very long story: that Earl Godwin's wife lodged there in 1029 on her way to meet her husband home from Denmark, that Archbishop Lanfranc stayed while his palace was rebuilt in 1070, and that the four knights who killed Thomas Becket met there in 1170. The 1029 date was already being set in print in 1907, when a newspaper summary of George T Burrows's Some Old English Inns named the Fountain the oldest inn in England. The documentary trail is shorter and firmer. John Farley was master of the Fountain Inn before his death in 1792; licensees run in a continuous line from the 1790s; the house was renamed the Fountain Hotel in 1827 and the Royal Fountain by 1867; Dickens stayed in 1861. A German raid on Canterbury on 1 June 1942 destroyed it, and the licence went to the Abbot's Barton Hotel.
What is there now
Shops. The bombed ground was used as a car park into the 1980s, and the St Margaret's Street frontage now holds an entrance to the Marlowe Arcade. Nothing of the inn or its coaching yard survives.
Sources
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