Which is older?

What the game is asking

Each round shows two pubs — the name, the town, a picture of the front — and asks which has the older written record: not the older date on the sign, but the earliest document anyone has traced putting a drinking house on that spot. A founding date painted on a sign costs nothing and is rarely checked, while a licence, a rental or a court roll is what a historian will accept, and it usually turns up centuries later. You will recognise one of the two names more often than not, and that is the difficulty, because what you recognise is the claim. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem says 1189 and is first recorded in 1751; the Brazen Head in Dublin says 1198 and is first recorded in 1613.

Where the dates come from

Both years come from the pubs' own pages: the founding date the page carries — the house's own where the house states it, CAMRA's or a listing's where it does not — and the earliest year we can hand you a source for. A pub whose first record we have not traced cannot be judged on one, so it never comes up — the Skirrid Inn at Llanvihangel Crucorney claims 1110, and we have found no document to set beside it. Pairs are drawn only where the two records are at least fifteen years apart, so no round turns on a coin toss. How we date a pub explains the grades behind all of this.

Why the honest answer is sometimes neither

A first record is a floor, not a birthday. It says a house was serving by that year, not that it began in it, and what survives is partly an accident of which archive escaped fire and damp. The game can tell you which of two pubs the paperwork reaches first; it cannot tell you which one started serving first, and for a good many pairs the truthful answer is that the evidence does not settle it. A late record is not a fraud and an early one is not a victory, only better documented. The arguments in full are in myths, checked, and how historians date an old pub sets out the method the grades follow.