THE " OSTRICH'' 99 



Home Coimties. Too remote from London for sub- 

 urban expansion to have affected it, the quaint street 

 remains much as it was a hundred, nay two hundred 

 years ago» The hist coach might have left yester- 

 year, so undisturbed appears to be the pLace. Tliere 

 are coachino;-inns here of vast size, rano;ino; from the 

 solid-looking '■' George " with " eighteenth century " 

 proclaimed plainly enough on its stolid face, back 

 to the "Ostrich," rambling, gabled, timber-framed, 

 Elizabethan. They would have you believe that 

 this house stands on the site of one of the old guest- 

 houses established in the eleventh, twelfth, and 

 succeeding centuries along the roads by the good 

 Churchmen of those times. The original s^uest- 

 house here, however, appears to have been a secular 

 foundation, for it is recorded that in 1106, a certain 

 Milo Crispin gave it — ''quoddam hospitium m via 

 Londonice apud Colehroc'' — to the Abbot of Abing- 

 don. The sign of the " Ostrich " is therefore a lineal 

 descendant of "Hospitium," via "Hospice" and 

 " Ospridge ; " for, as we have already seen, the letter 

 H has ever been a negligeable quantity. 



The original house is said by persistent traditions 

 to have been the scene of a dreadful series of abomin- 

 able murders something of the " Sweeny Todd " order. 

 The West of Enoland, even so far back as five 

 hundred years ago, was f^xmous for its cloth, and 

 along this road, with their bales and pack-horses, 

 journeyed the rich clothiers to and from the Loudon 

 market, halting in their tedious travels at the inns 

 on the way. The " Ostrich " was one of these, and 

 prospered exceedingly by the patronage of those 



