Pannier, Cross Cheaping
On his official visit to Coventry in 1474 the four year old Prince of Wales was presented with a gilt cup, £100 and 100 marks at an address given to him outside the PANYER public house, Cross Cheaping. This is mentioned in the Coventry Leet book, page 393: "Also in the Croschepyng a-fore the Panyer, a Pagent [possibly the shearmen and taylors' pageant] and iij Kynges of Colen [Cologne] therein with other divers arraied and ij knyghts armed with mynstralsy of small pypis, and one of the Kynges havyng this speche under writtyn". One must ask, however, if this refers to the chair carrying the Prince, or an inn?
John Ashby has located in Coventry Collections an item dated 5th October 1646: "By the commissioners for redress of misemployment of charitable uses to Thomas Basnett et al to appear before them at "The Panyer", Coventry, on the 20th."
In 1719 we have: Constables. Presentments made (etc.) the fifth day of October Anno Domini 1719. Cross Cheaping Ward. November the 20, corn bout (bought) by Charles Higason before the marcat in the Panner yard. (A little explanation: The City markets were frequently held in inn yards. Buying before the market was an offence because it prevented the efficient operation of the market.)
Rosemary Hall has gather together a few facts concerning this pub, as follows:
On page 178 of a book called My dearest heart; the artist Mary Beale by Penelope Hunting, 2019, it says: "He (her son Bartholomew Beale) practised as a physician in Coventry where he had inherited a property called Pannyer from his great uncle John Beale (1587-1643) of the Stationers’ Company."
There is, in Lambeth Palace Library, a manuscript copy of a journal which tells how, on a journey in May 1597, Sir William Russell, Lord Deputy of Ireland, stayed ‘at the sign of the Pannier’ in Coventry.1
At the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust there is a reference to ‘A Declaration by Thomas Archer, deputy sheriff to Andrew Archer, that he will attend every Saturday at the Swan, Warwick, every Friday at the sign of the Pannyer, Coventry…’ 1
And at Coventry in the morning of 25 November 1535, it was discovered that proclamations and statutes that had been displayed in the market place had been torn down. An investigation identified the four men responsible; they had enjoyed a night of heavy drinking, starting at the tavern of a man called Rogers, going on to ‘the inn at the sign of the Pannier’, tearing down the proclamations, and ending at the Pannier.1
1 Colin Richmond: Journal of Historical Sociology Vol.1, Essays on the British state. ed. by Yoke-Sun Wong & Derek Sayer. Blackwell.
 Panniers were large baskets used for carrying foods such as bread, fish and fruit. The word comes from the Latin panarium, a bread basket. Later they were specifically the baskets on either side of a saddle on a pack horse. |