Interesting things in Wiltshire pubs (part 2)

Time to continue our tour of Wiltshire pubs that contain interesting things. From Avebury, let us journey further west (just under 15 miles by road) to Lacock. This village (or is it a town? It was given a market charter in the Middle Ages, which would technically make it a town even though there’s no longer a market) has remained unchanged for many years, with most of the buildings dating back to at least the eighteenth century. Lacock’s remarkably unspoiled appearance has made it a favourite with the makers of TV costume dramas, and it has appeared in plenty of those – Cranford, two versions of Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (to name but a few) were filmed here, while the stately home, Lacock Abbey (“the birthplace of photography”, for that was where William Henry Fox-Talbot took the first photograph, in 1835), was Wolf Hall in Wolf Hall as well as being used as part of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter films.

Lacock, which is almost entirely owned by the National Trust, has several pubs, including another Red Lion, but the one we’re interested in here is the George. As a pub name, the George also has more than one origin – either from St George or King George. The former has been recognised as the patron saint of England since the fourteenth century, although veneration of him in England goes back further. As for kings, there have been six of those but crucially that was the name of every King of Great Britain between 1714 and 1830 (starting with George I and ending with George IV), which is why the eighteenth century is sometimes known in this country as the Georgian period.

Inside the George in Lacock, we have our second unusual or interesting thing. In one of the rooms, there’s an old fire-place and in front of that is displayed an old spit or roasting-jack, as used for turning big joints of meat in front of open fires in the days before ovens. What is unusual about this one is that it was dog-operated, for it is linked by way of a pulley system to a large wheel in which a small dog was placed – the dog would run in the wheel, and that would in turn power the spit.

While such an arrangement seems odd at first, when you think about it it seems hardly surprising that people would have thought to get an animal to power the roasting-jack, for (as far as humans were concerned) being a ‘spit-boy’ was a low-paid, monotonous and – thanks to being up close to a roaring fire for long periods of time – uncomfortable job (see Tony Robinson’s TV series The Worst Jobs in History for more on this). Getting a dog to do it instead seems to have been a widespread practice by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – widespread enough for there to have been a particular breed of dog, long of body and short of leg, that was called the turnspit. Also known as the kitchen dog or the cooking dog, the breed does not seem to have been particularly well-documented, and it was more or less extinct by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, by which time automated roasting-jacks, powered by steam or by the hot air rising from the fire, were fairly widespread.