What was the role of English Inns ?

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Inns had developed as institution in the later Middle Ages, and had supplanted hospitality in the abbey gatehouse or hospitium. Of all countries, England is richest in associations of this kind and abounds in many types of inns and different houses, like those on lonely countryside, or fronting village greens. Over the centuries, inns gradually took different roles, from the simple house for drink and sleep to a real place of social life.

Extraits

[...] What was the role of English Inns ? What was the role of English inn? Inns had developed as institution from the later Middle Ages, and had supplanted hospitality in the abbey gatehouse or hospitium. Of all countries, England is richest in associations of this kind, we can found many types of inns and different houses like that on lonely countryside, or fronting village greens During the centuries, inns take gradually different roles, from the simple house for drink and sleep to a real place of social life. [...]

[...] At a lesser scale, other events appearing, with increasing frequency in the middle of the eighteenth century were sponsored, promoted, or created by innkeepers. So, the inns offered appropriate space to the itinerant entertainer. Travel for pleasure became more common from the eighteenth century. There was a synergy of the inn and tourism. There was also the change of the habit, the evolution of the urban society, the evolution of the provincial town as the increasingly preferred locus of at least winter residence. [...]

[...] They also provided fundamental places of entertainment, and represented a forum for displaying new standards of sensibility, emergent institutions of social and moral improvement, and the development of the habermasian ‘public sphere', the epitome of bourgeois assertiveness. Numerous subscription libraries, assembly rooms, infirmaries, theatres, promenades and similar manifestations of these changing mores began with meetings and practice in provincial inns. So we can see that inns had several roles during the centuries. It passed from the simple accommodation with drink and food, to a real place of life, with these meeting, competition, and different events. Sources Beat Kümin, B. Ann Tlusty, The world of the Tavern, Public Houses in Early Modern Europe E. Richardson, H. D. [...]

[...] During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there was the gradual emergence of a bourgeois public sphere and also a great proliferation of new social forms of social association: club informal and formal, like freemasons, political association, artisan group, or simple friendly societies. These clubs need place for met, drink and eat. They choose rapidly inns for their meeting. The Inn has played an important part in English Literature. Chaucer and his band of pilgrims started the journey to Canterbury from The Tabard Inn. The Inn also played an important role in Shakespeare's England. Dickens also knew he could not portray the people without justice to the Inn whether it was a great coaching house or a humble ale house. [...]

[...] To the English, the inn is a place of entertainment, a kind of institution which from the earliest time has served as the mirror up to the Nature. The inn has played a large part in the domestic life of England down the centuries. We always associate the inn with a centre for social life for the English people. The inn had become a feature of social life in the fifteenth century. It then functioned as a kind of general office where men could foregather and transact business; it was a place of entertainment, not only for food and drink. [...]