The Sun Inn, Beverley

The claim

A timber-framed pub on Flemingate with a walled garden that looks across to Beverley Minster. Its 1530 comes from CAMRA's Hull and East Yorkshire branch rather than from the house: the pub's own history page is franker, setting out the cases for a sixteenth-century frame and a seventeenth-century one and leaving the question open. Historic England lists it grade II as probably sixteenth century, and had its timbers sampled in 2020 without a date coming out.

What the records show

The 1530 is CAMRA's. The Hull and East Yorkshire branch entry, surveyed on 14 February 2026, calls the inn mid to late medieval, possibly mid-fifteenth-century, with some parts confirmed as dating to 1530, and names no record for any of it. The pub's own history page makes no such claim and is unusually careful: it quotes the Royal Commission's survey of Beverley in the 1980s, which found no surviving timber-framed building in the town earlier than 1400, Pevsner's 'possibly of 16th-17th century' for the jettied front, and the first-floor joists laid on edge rather than flat — a practice uncommon until well into the seventeenth century, which would put the earliest possible date at 1600. It offers instead that the house was the Tabard, an inn named in sixteenth-century documents on the granting of Minster lands, the Sun having been three dwellings on Minster land. Historic England listed the building grade II on 2 July 1969 as The Sun Inn, Flemingate, with group value. The full list entry was read on 17 September 2026 and it is firmer than this page had been reporting: it dates the house C16 and late C18, flatly, where this page had it as probably sixteenth century — a hedge that is ours and not the register's, and it is corrected here. Its description is of the first floor half-timbered with herringbone brick infill, jettied on plain corbels that are the joist ends, with two reglazed sashes and a small leaded casement above and an early nineteenth-century shop front below, its reeded frame and paterae still there behind a plain window, beside two late eighteenth-century sashes; the roof is new and the interior altered. So the grade here is a judgement rather than an absence. A flat C16 in a list entry of 1969 is documentation of a kind, and on its own it would carry a grade B; against it stand the pub's own argument from joists laid on edge, Pevsner's sixteenth-or-seventeenth, the Royal Commission on the town's surviving frames, and Historic England's own tree-ring analysis of the ground-floor and roof oak, published in 2020, in which neither the two-sample site sequence nor any ungrouped sample could be securely dated. When the body that dated the fabric later sampled the same timbers and got nothing, the safer reading is that the age is not established, and the grade stays C.

What to look for inside

Called the oldest pub in Beverley by CAMRA's local branch
Timber-framed and jettied, listed grade II
Historic England's 2020 tree-ring sampling produced no date

Visiting

The Sun Inn is in Beverley, England, at Flemingate, Beverley HU17 0NP. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

suninnbeverley.co.uk Directions in your maps app