Pint Passport

Myth or fact?

Famous claims, checked against the record

Every one of these claims is repeated in guidebooks, on pub signs and in the press. We went and read the listing entries, the licensing records and the tree-ring surveys, and wrote down what they actually say. Legends are worth keeping; they are just not the same thing as evidence.

  1. The Mermaid at Rye has been an inn since 1156Whether the Mermaid at Rye has been an inn since 1156 turns on two questions, and the second is the interesting one. The 1156 dates the cellars, which Pevsner and the national register both put in the thirteenth century. The harder problem is at the other end of the story. Four published sources — Rye's own historian writing in 1847, a walking writer who went looking for the house in the 1870s, the cataloguers of the town's seventeenth-century trade tokens in 1889, and Rye Castle Museum reading the censuses — agree that the Mermaid stopped being an inn about 1770 and spent the following century as a private house and then as lodgings. It took guests again by 1901, was a private club from 1913, and was not allowed to install a bar until 1955. The building is magnificent and the smuggling is real. The unbroken line is not.Verdict · not supported
  2. The Angel and Royal at Grantham has taken guests since 1203The front page of the Angel and Royal at Grantham says it has taken guests since 1203 and calls the house reputedly England's oldest inn. The hotel's own history page, two clicks away, says something quite different and much more honest: there are no records of the Angel and Royal's exact origins. The county record describes what stood here as a camera of the Knights Templar — an estate house of the order, not a public inn — and Historic England dates the medieval front to the late fourteenth century, with the archway no earlier than 1370 because the heads carved over it are Edward III and his queen.Verdict · not supported
  3. The Bear in Oxford has been a pub since 1242The Bear in Oxford advertises 1242, and there really had been an inn called the Bear in Oxford by then. The documents behind it are unusually good: a bequest to St Frideswide's Priory in the mid-thirteenth century, a tenancy of 1277, a fire in 1421, a lease of 1432 under the name Le Tabard, and the sign changed to the Bear by 1457. All of it belongs to a large coaching inn on the High Street which was pulled about and converted into shops in 1801. The pub that now carries the date is the ostler's house round the corner, first licensed as a separate tavern — the Jolly Trooper — in 1774.Verdict · not supported
  4. The Olde Bell at Hurley has been an inn since 1135The Olde Bell at Hurley says it has been an inn since 1135, when it opened as the guest house of Hurley Priory, and it kept an 890th birthday on that reckoning in 2025. No document has been produced for the year, and two things sit awkwardly beside it. The priory was founded in 1086, not the 1130s, so the round number does not belong to its parent house. And the Victoria County History, surveying the village in 1923, describes the Bell as a two-storeyed half-timber building of the late fifteenth century — the same date the national register gives it. The tradition may still be right about the ground. Nothing yet dates the drinking.Verdict · unproven
  6. Henry V's plotters were tried in the Red Lion, SouthamptonThe upper room of the Red Lion on Southampton High Street is shown as the court where the Southampton Plot was tried in 1415, and is signed as Henry V's Court Room. The hall a visitor stands in was not built until the end of that century. No contemporary record places the hearing here, the accused were held in the royal castle where the king himself was staying, and the account historians actually follow puts the trial in that castle and in the king's presence. The room is a remarkable piece of medieval Southampton all the same, and it is on the 2025 register of heritage at risk.Verdict · not supported
  7. St Peter's in Salzburg has served guests since AD 803St Peter Stiftskulinarium in Salzburg says it has served since AD 803, which is the furthest back any house on this site reaches, and what the year rests on is a poem. Alcuin of York praised the beer in the cellar of St Peter's abbey in a verse printed as Carmen CXI in Ernst Dümmler's edition of 1881, and the abbey takes that as its founding year. The poem is real and the cellar in it is this cellar. What the poem does not describe is a house the public could drink in: the abbey's own chronology has outsiders coming in from 1720, and the right to sell beer bought only in 1803 — a thousand years after the verse and the same digits in a different order.Verdict · mixed
  8. Zum Roten Bären in Freiburg is Germany's oldest innZum Roten Bären in Freiburg calls itself Germany's oldest inn, and of the three German houses that claim the title it has the best paperwork — which is not the same as having paperwork for its own date. The 1120 on its sign is the year the dukes of Zähringen founded Freiburg, and what belongs to that year is the ground: the foundations and the three-storey cellar under the house were part of the Zähringer manor that stood here before the city did. The trade is documented in 1387, when a court paper calls Hanmann Bienger the landlord at the Red Bear. Of the rival claims, Miltenberg's rests on a pamphlet of 1865 whose sources are lost, and Seelbach's house is shut.Verdict · mixed
  9. The Bingley Arms has poured ale since AD 953The Bingley Arms at Bardsey advertises trade from AD 953, and the only year anyone can point at on the building is 1738, cut into a datestone above the original doorway. Historic England describes a mid-eighteenth-century West Yorkshire house consistent with that stone, the buildings archaeologist James Wright can find no source for the tenth-century date at all, and a Yorkshire trade directory of 1822 lists eleven trades at Bardsey without naming a publican among them.Verdict · not supported
  10. The Brazen Head has been a Dublin pub since 1198The Brazen Head on Lower Bridge Street says there has been a hostelry on its site since 1198. The earliest document anyone has produced is a property of that name linked to Richard Fagan in 1613; a grant of the timber house called the Brazen Head to James King follows in 1703, the Dublin historian John Gilbert puts an inn in this recess of Bridge Street from 1668, and the present building went up in the middle of the eighteenth century.Verdict · not supported
  11. The Crosskeys Inn was tree-ring dated to before 1654The Crosskeys Inn near Toomebridge is widely reported to have been tree-ring dated at Queen's University Belfast in 2010, placing its thatched building before 1654. No report of that work has been published or traced, only accounts of it; Northern Ireland's register of historic buildings dates the same house to between 1820 and 1839; and the earliest named licensee anyone has printed is from 1771. Two dates nearly two centuries apart, and one of them cannot be read.Verdict · disputed
  12. The George & Dragon in Beaumaris was built in 1410A rendered band across the front of the George & Dragon in Beaumaris carries the raised date 1410, and Cadw records it as an inscription rather than as a date for the building. Tree-ring dating commissioned for the Dating Old Welsh Houses project settles the question: the beams and joists came from oaks felled between the winter of 1536/7 and the spring of 1541, so the range went up around 1541, and the earliest record of drink being sold here is later still.Verdict · not supported
  13. The Groes Inn holds the first licence granted in WalesThe Groes Inn above the Conwy valley describes itself as the first licensed house in Wales, and the North Wales press dates the licence to 1573. No licence of that year has been published. What has been published is better than most Welsh pubs can show and is not the same claim: Cadw records the house as already an inn in 1578, when a court order names the tavarne y Groes, with a second mention in June 1580 — while a tree-ring test on its timbers failed to date them and suggested a much later building.Verdict · mixed
  14. The Skirrid Inn has been an inn since about 1110The Skirrid Inn at Llanvihangel Crucorney dates itself to about 1110 and advertises more than nine hundred years of trade. Cadw listed it in 1952 as a medieval house, then wrote into its own entry that both the medieval date and the oldest-inn-in-Wales claim are unlikely, and dated the fabric to the middle or later seventeenth century. The regional historic environment record and the Royal Commission agree, and the seventeenth-century face the inn presents to the road was largely built in the 1880s.Verdict · not supported
  15. The White Hart's records in Edinburgh go back to 1516The White Hart Inn in Edinburgh's Grassmarket dates its cellars to 1516, and so, unusually, does the statutory list: Historic Environment Scotland's entry states that records of the inn go back to that year without naming one. The tenement above was built by James Lithgow around 1740, the same body's national record classes the site as both a fifteenth-century inn and an eighteenth-century pub, and no document of 1516 has been produced by anyone.Verdict · unproven
  16. Sean's Bar is the oldest pub in the worldSean's Bar in Athlone dates itself to about AD 900, and the certificate Guinness World Records issued in 2004 named it Ireland's oldest pub rather than the world's. No record puts a drinking house on the site before 1738, and the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage dates the building to about 1725, as a coaching inn.Verdict · unproven
  17. The Porch House at Stow-on-the-Wold is England's oldest inn, founded in AD 947The Porch House at Stow-on-the-Wold claims to be England's oldest inn, AD 947, and the earliest appearance of that date the buildings archaeologist James Wright could trace is a newspaper notice of the sale of the business in October 1974. English Heritage, CAMRA and Wright himself all place the timber frame in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, find no inn on record before the eighteenth, and can find no trace of the radiocarbon test the claim rests on.Verdict · disputed
  18. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem has been an inn since 1189Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem has AD 1189 painted on its gable at Brewhouse Yard in Nottingham; Historic England dates the first record of a pub on the site to 1751, when it traded as the Pilgrim, and the painted crusader story to a landlord's new signage around 1910. The caves behind the bar really are much older than the pub.Verdict · not supported
  19. The Old Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell has served ale since AD 560No trading pub in the world claims to have served ale for longer than the Old Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell in Cambridgeshire, whose sign says AD 560 and for which no charter, licence or excavation report has ever been produced. The listed building is seventeenth-century with an earlier cross-wing, and the run of named licensees begins with the 1841 census.Verdict · unproven
  20. The oldest bar in America is the White Horse Tavern / the '76 House / McSorley'sThere is no one oldest bar in America: the oldest tavern building is Newport's White Horse Tavern, a house of 1652 with a tavern licence on record for 1687; the oldest tavern licence still attached to a trading business is Longfellow's Wayside Inn at Sudbury, granted to David Howe in 1716; and the longest unbroken run belongs to McSorley's in Manhattan, trading since about 1862, when John McSorley first appears in the New York city directories. Nothing in America can show unbroken trade from the seventeenth century.Verdict · mixed
  21. The Hope and Anchor in Hobart is Australia's oldest pubFour houses claim to be Australia's oldest pub — the Hope and Anchor in Hobart, the Bush Inn at New Norfolk, the Woolpack at Parramatta and the Macquarie Arms at Windsor — and each of them fails a different test. The Hope and Anchor rests on a chaplain's diary entry of 25 July 1807 that may not describe its site, and it was shut for six years to 2014. The Bush Inn's unbroken licence is contradicted by newspapers. The Woolpack moved across the road. The Macquarie Arms has the oldest documented opening, 31 July 1815 — and spent decades as a house.Verdict · disputed
  22. London's oldest pub is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese / the Prospect of Whitby / Ye Olde MitreHistoric England's 2025 review of London's oldest-pub claims gives the strongest one to the George Inn in Southwark, recorded as an inn on a map of about 1542 and rebuilt in 1677 after the Southwark fire. Almost every other famous London date turns out to be later than advertised, and several of the buildings were not pubs at all when their sign says they were.Verdict · mixed
  23. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is Nottingham's oldest pubThree pubs within ten minutes' walk claim to be Nottingham's oldest, and the strongest documents belong to the Bell rather than to the famous Trip or to the Salutation: a former mayor's bequest of 1638, over a timber frame tree-ring dated to about 1420. The Trip has the loudest date, 1189, and the oldest caves; the Salutation has timbers reported at around 1360 and almost no paperwork. Nobody can show a medieval licence.Verdict · disputed
  24. Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans has been a pub since AD 793Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans began as an abbey dovecote of about 1400 and is first recorded as an alehouse in 1756, under the name the Three Pigeons; Historic England traces the AD 793 date on its sign no further back than an early-twentieth-century postcard. The octagonal building was re-erected as a house by 1622 and took the Fighting Cocks name around 1800.Verdict · not supported

What a myth article does

Each piece above takes one claim — a date on a beam, a line in a guidebook, a certificate behind the bar — and goes looking for the document underneath it. It is not a debunking column: the legend is half of why anyone goes in, so it is told the way the house tells it, before the records are set beside it. Where an article says no document supports a date, that is a statement about the archive, not the landlord. Sessions books were kept unevenly and much has burned, so some of what we cannot corroborate may be right.

How a claim earns an article

A claim earns an article when its date is famous enough that you have met it, when the title is contested and the argument is the interesting part, or when the number turns out to have a surprising address. Historic England traces the AD 793 at St Albans to an early-twentieth-century postcard, and the crusader story at Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem to a landlord's sign of about 1910. New pieces go to the top, and the verdict on each card is the short version.

The pattern matters more than any single verdict: the fabric is usually genuinely old, the trading date later than the sign, the sign later still. How we grade the evidence sets out the tests, how historians date an old pub explains what a tree-ring date can settle, and the Top 100 by earliest record ranks what the documents support.