14 dated days · 14 dates in the month
August in pub history
14 days in August that somebody wrote down, spread across 14 dates of the month and 238 years — the earliest 26 August 1749, when a killing and a jury at Halifax, and the most recent 28 August 1987. 9 of them name a house with a page on this site.
1 August
1979
Bonnet's Tavern on the register
The Jean Bonnet Tavern at Bedford in Pennsylvania was certified on the National Register of Historic Places on 1 August 1979, entered under the name Bonnet's Tavern. The stone building is dated to about 1762 and the earliest record of drink sold there to 1779.
2 August
1784
The first mail coach
The experimental mail coach left Bristol for London at four in the afternoon on 2 August 1784 and arrived sixteen hours later, against the thirty-eight the post had been taking. Coaching inns kept the timetable that followed.
3 August
1971
The Black Bull at Moffat is listed
The Black Bull on Churchgate in Moffat was added to the list at category B on 3 August 1971. The inn dates itself to 1568; Historic Environment Scotland calls the standing building probably eighteenth-century, on the site of an earlier inn.
5 August
1963
The Salutation at Dover closes
Dover's Salutation closed on 5 August 1963 and was pulled down to widen the pavement, after more than three hundred years on the site. A lock-up shop took its place.
7 August
1978
The Angel at Addington is listed
The Angel facing the green at Addington was listed at Grade II on 7 August 1978, and the stables to the north-east of it the same day. The inn is said to date from about 1350, on a village lane close to the Pilgrims' Way.
8 August
1914
The Defence of the Realm Act
The Defence of the Realm Act received royal assent on 8 August 1914, four days into the war. Beer was watered and afternoon closing arrived; the requirement for a gap in permitted hours lasted in England until 1988.
11 August
1952
Ye Olde Salutation is listed
Ye Olde Salutation Inn at Nottingham was listed on 11 August 1952. Historic England's entry gives a sixteenth-century north part with cellars and attics under a jettied gable, and a mid eighteenth-century range to St Nicholas Street, heavily restored since.
13 August
1866
An innkeeper at Clachaig
The marriage register for the district of Glencoe and Appin calls Janet Maclennan an innkeeper at Clachaig on 13 August 1866. That entry, transcribed by the inn from the statutory registers, is the earliest record of the trade there that anyone has shown, against a claim of more than three hundred years.
19 August
1892
A plaque for the Green Dragon
On 19 August 1892 a commemorative plaque went up on the warehouse that had taken the place of Boston's Green Dragon Tavern, naming the spot as the secret meeting place of the Sons of Liberty. The tavern had been pulled down decades before, and the warehouse in its turn was cleared in the urban renewal of the 1960s.
23 August
1955
The Old Inn at Widecombe is listed
The Old Inn at Widecombe-in-the-Moor was listed at Grade II on 23 August 1955. Historic England reads a granite rubble house of the sixteenth or seventeenth century with later wings; CAMRA reports walls and beams in the middle of it said to be more than six hundred years old.
26 August
1749
A killing and a jury at Halifax
Peter Cartcel stabbed Abraham Goodsides after an argument at the Halifax tavern on 26 August 1749, six weeks into the settlement's first summer. The trial that followed is described as the first jury trial in Canada under British law.
27 August
1955
An argument about a plover
The first Guinness Book of Records was bound on 27 August 1955, 198 pages of it. Sir Hugh Beaver had the idea in 1951 after a shooting party, when no reference book could settle whether the golden plover was Europe's fastest game bird.
28 August
1987
The Crown at Lanlivery
Historic England designated the Crown Inn at Lanlivery on 28 August 1987, reading a house probably early seventeenth-century in origin with later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century work. The pub claims the twelfth century.
31 August
1900
Ölhallen 7:an opens on a Monday
Ölhallen 7:an opened on Monday 31 August 1900, in a new shop block at the corner of the square in Gothenburg. Its founder was August Andersson, who had waited at another Gothenburg inn on Basargatan.
Every entry above cites the record that carries the day and the month, because a founding year is not an anniversary: a house may have been pouring since 1189 and still appear here only on the day a clerk wrote something down. The whole archive holds 204 such days across 12 months — on this day in pub history opens on whichever date the site was last built for. How a date is weighed is on how we date a pub; the ones that do not survive checking are in myths, checked.
Updated 11 October 2026.