[Illustration: _No. 222. Receiving a Stranger._]
[Illustration: _No. 223. Receiving a Guest._]
The old Anglo-Saxon feeling, that the duration of the chance visit of a stranger should be limited to the third day, seems still to have prevailed. A Latin rhyme, printed in the “Reliquiæ Antiquæ” (i. 91), tells us,--
_Verum dixit anus, quod piscis olet triduanus;_ _Ejus de more simili fætet hospes odore._
In towns the hospitality of the burghers was not always given gratis, for it was a common custom, even among the richer merchants, to make a profit by receiving guests. These letters of lodgings were distinguished from the inn-keepers, or _hostelers_, by the title of _herbergeors_, or people who gave harbour to strangers, and in the larger towns they were submitted to municipal regulations. The great barons and knights were in the custom of taking up their lodgings with these herbergeors, rather than going to the public hostels; and thus a sort of relationship was formed between particular nobles or kings and particular burghers, on the strength of which the latter adopted the arms of their habitual lodgers as their signs. These herbergeors practised great extortions upon their accidental guests, and they appear to have adopted various artifices to allure them to their houses. These extortions are the subject of a very curious Latin poem of the thirteenth century, entitled “Peregrinus” (the Traveller), the author of which describes the arts employed to allure the traveller, and the extortions to which he was subjected. It appears that persons were employed to look out for the arrival of strangers, and that they entered into conversation with them, pretended to discover that they came from the same part of the country, and then, as taking especial interest in their fellow-countrymen, recommended them to lodgings. These tricks of the burghers who let their lodgings for hire are alluded to in other mediæval writers. It appears, also, that both in these lodging-houses and in the public inns, it was not an unusual practice to draw people into contracting heavy bills, which they had not the money to pay, and then to seize their baggage and even their clothes, to several times the amount of the debt.