Bear Hotel in 'Tudor' guide

The guide, billed as ‘A Tudor traveller’s guide to the best taverns in the land’ is published by The History Press this month.
The handbook to the nation’s most historic watering holes, written in Tudor style, describes The Bear Hotel as “a shining example of what an inn in our age ought to be, thanks to the honest upright folk who have managed its day to day running.”
It adds: “In 1537 the innkeeper, Robert Braybon, gave evidence in a case of highway banditry. His testimony was key to the conviction of three highwaymen who had lodged at the inn after holding up a merchant near Windsor.
“We are led to believe that Queen Elizabeth’s retinue stayed here in 1592 during one of Her Majesty’s progresses through the western counties and we imagine they were kept in great comfort but sadly one of her coachmen, a Mr Slie, died whilst here of a malady. There are surely worse
places to end thy days.”
It informs readers that the hostelry “began life as a hospice next to the Priory of St John and was used as such in 1464. Now an inn, it gets its name from former owners, the Earls of Warwick, who had a ‘Bear and Ragged Staff ’ on their coat of arms. Henry VIII passed the manor of Chilton Foliat, of which The Bear was a part, to five of his six wives. Only Anne Boleyn failed to own this much-beloved hostelry.”
The authors go on to reveal that binge drinking is not a new phenomenon - in 1552 alehouses had to get a licence for the first time as “intolerable hurts and troubles to the common wealth of this realm doth daily grow and increase through such abuses and disorders as are had and used in common alehouses.”
Even Thomas Wolsey, later the unfortunate Cardinal Wolsey, was reportedly once put in the stocks for being drunk.
As reported in the Hungerford edition of the Newbury Weekly News, The Bear Hotel has recently been bought by Old English Inns, a subsidiary company of Greene King brewery.