The Three Tuns

By Tallow Hall in Oxford stands the Three Tuns, the tavern of the aldermen. Vintner Robert Godsell serves his wine by the jug rather than the glass, and the men who sit over it are the men who govern the town's purse. It is understood in Oxford that the council's business is decided at these tables before the council ever sits, and a petitioner who wants an alderman's ear is better advised to look for him here than in the hall next door.

The house also keeps a club, and the club keeps a tally book in which money and its movements are written down with great care. Among the entries is the cabinet of guineas belonging to Mistress Honora Daventry, a corn factor's widow of Angel Way who still deals in bills; a club in London keeps the same account, and she can tell the story of every coin. This autumn the tally clerks of the Tuns have been following one guinea in particular, said to have left her cabinet to pay the last of her son's debts in Cockpit Lane, and they reckon it has changed hands three times since Michaelmas.

The house has lately been drawn into talk of another kind. Oxford's captain, Gilbert Cundall of Harrowden, went down with his knee turned under him in a college match, and it is whispered that the forward who landed on him had cashed a Cambridge bill in this very house a week earlier. No one has produced the bill, and the aldermen let it be known that they do not discuss football, but the story has done the house's custom no harm.