Identifier: adamsillustrated00ryea (find matches)
Title: Adam's illustrated guide to Rye (with map) : Winchelsea, Northiam, Camben-on-Sea, and all places of interest in the neighbourhood
Year: 1900 (1900s)
Authors:
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Publisher: Rye : Adams
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Internet Archive

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s; such an extensive habitation, with such a labyrinth ofrooms, requiring a guide to point them out, as they seemto be formed in such strange, out of the way nooks andcorners ; and then such a forest of timber in the roofs andattics underneath, extensive enough to accommodate awhole regiment of soldiers, and indeed many may haveoccupied them in times past, for it was once an Inn,known by the sign of the Alermaid, which gave its nameto this street, superseding its former one of Middle Street.The antiquarian gem of the house is an old room orna-mented with a well-carved wainscot, and having a chimneypiece of Caen stone with a profusion of roses engraventhereon, indicative of its Tudor age, while barely visible tothe naked e)e, is a date in Roman numerals indicating itto have been put up some time in the early part of the16th century. Dr. Rawlinson, a celebrated antiquary, who died a.d.1755, speaking of the Mermaid Inn, at Rye, says that hesaw on liangings in this house these lines : —
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GUIDE TO RYE. 91 Tis Concorde kepes a realme in stable staye,But Discorde bryngs all kyngdoms to decaye.Since God is just, whose stroke delayed loung,Doth light at last, with payne more sharpe and strong.Tyme never was, nor never, I think shall be,That truth, unshent,* might speake in all thyngs free.Spend not more thy time in idleness,But ply unto good voyages. * Unshent means unblamed. In the olden times such inscriptions were often writtenround the cornices of rooms in private houses instances, ofwhich, we beheve, were to be found in several parts ofSussex, indicating, as we should suppose, that they werethe property of families of some consequence, and hencewe conclude that the house, of which we are speaking, wasoriginally a private one, but at what particular period itwas converted into an Inn, or ceased to be one, we cannotpretend to determine ; however, this much we do know,that it was an Inn a.d. 1636, for when Mr. Thomas Pea-cock built and endowed the Grammar School of Rye,

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