White Hart
Based on Wikipedia: White Hart
Walk into almost any English town, and you'll likely find a pub called the White Hart. It's the fifth most popular pub name in England—a remarkable fact when you consider that this name connects modern beer drinkers to a six-hundred-year-old political symbol, a deposed king, and one of the most turbulent periods in English history.
The story begins with Richard the Second.
A King's Personal Brand
In medieval England, noble families didn't have logos—they had badges. These weren't the same as coats of arms, which were strictly regulated and passed down through bloodlines. Badges were personal emblems, chosen to represent an individual's identity and allegiances. They were medieval branding, and Richard the Second was a master of it.
His chosen symbol was the white hart—"hart" being an old word for a mature male red deer. Why a white deer? The answer probably lies with his mother, Joan of Kent, known as "The Fair Maid of Kent." She was considered one of the great beauties of her age and came from the house of Edmund of Woodstock, whose heraldry included deer. Some historians suspect Richard was also making a pun on his own name: "Rich-hart."
We can see exactly what this badge looked like thanks to the Wilton Diptych, a small portable altar painting now in London's National Gallery. It's the earliest authentic portrait we have of any English king painted during his lifetime. In it, Richard kneels before the Virgin Mary and Christ child, wearing an exquisite jeweled brooch in the shape of a white hart. The deer is depicted lying down, with a crown around its neck and a golden chain attached to it—symbolizing how the hart was bound in service to the king.
But here's the detail that shows just how obsessed Richard was with his personal branding: every single angel surrounding the Virgin Mary in the painting is also wearing a white hart badge. The king had turned even the heavenly host into his supporters.
The Fall of Richard and the Rise of the Pub Sign
Richard the Second was not a successful king. He was deposed in 1399 by Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry the Fourth, and Richard died in captivity the following year—probably starved to death, though the exact circumstances remain unclear. His reign had been marked by extravagance, political miscalculation, and an autocratic style that alienated the nobility.
Yet his symbol survived him, spreading across England in an unexpected way.
Throughout the medieval period, inns and taverns began adopting the white hart as their sign. This might seem counterintuitive—why would businesses want to associate themselves with a failed king? The answer lies in how pub signs worked. Most of the population couldn't read, so businesses needed visual identifiers. A white deer on a sign was distinctive and memorable. It also carried a whiff of royal association without being treasonous—after all, Richard was dead, and the symbol had become somewhat detached from its political origins.
There's also a more practical explanation. Many of these early inns may have genuinely been connected to Richard's reign. He traveled extensively through his kingdom, and establishments where he stayed would have been eager to advertise that royal connection. Some may have been given the white hart badge directly by the king or his household.
A Tour Through England's White Harts
The sheer number of White Hart pubs still operating today is staggering, and many of them have histories reaching back centuries. Let's take a walking tour through some of the most notable.
Start in Bletchingley, a village in Surrey. The Whyte Hart Hotel there claims to have been founded in 1388—a year before Richard was deposed. In 1958, it was still so committed to tradition that Pathé News filmed a documentary segment there about archaic dishes and cooking methods that the hotel continued to use.
Move east to Brentwood, and you'll find what might be the oldest pub in that Essex town, dating to before 1480. Local legend suggests it got its name when Richard the Second passed through in 1392, possibly staying the night. The building evolved over centuries, becoming a coaching inn in the seventeen hundreds and, in a delightful detail, offering motor vehicle repairs by 1910. Today it operates as a nightclub and restaurant called the Sugar Hut—you might recognize it from the reality television program "The Only Way Is Essex."
In Canterbury, the White Hart has a Victorian facade, but look beneath it and you'll find something far older and more macabre. The pub sits on the site of Saint Mary de Castro, a church demolished around 1486. The church's mortuary is now the pub's cellar—and it still has the original body chute, the passage through which corpses were lowered down for preparation. The small park next door, crisscrossed by a diagonal path, was once the graveyard. Tombstones are still lined up against the wall.
The Coaching Inn Era
The golden age of White Hart pubs came with the coaching era, roughly from the late seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, before railways made horse-drawn travel obsolete. Coaching inns were the motorway service stations of their day—places where travelers could eat, sleep, and change horses on long journeys.
The old London to Salisbury road offers a perfect example. Along this route, you can still find a chain of White Hart pubs at Hook, Basingstoke, Worting, Overton, Whitchurch, Andover, Stockbridge, Gosport, and Salisbury itself. These weren't competitors—they were essentially franchises, spaced about a day's journey apart, offering reliable service to travelers who recognized the familiar sign.
Crawley tells a particularly good story about how demand outstripped supply. By 1668, a building that had started as a medieval Wealden hall-house had been converted into an inn called The Whyte Harte. But when the London to Brighton road was fully turnpiked in 1770—meaning it was upgraded and tolls were collected for its maintenance—coaching traffic exploded. The old White Hart couldn't handle the volume. It was sold in 1753, and the proceeds funded a new, larger White Hart Inn nearby, built around an early seventeenth-century timber frame. That pub still operates today under the White Hart name, owned by Harveys Brewery.
Murder, Poetry, and Civil War
Some White Harts accumulated darker histories.
In Edinburgh's Grassmarket, the White Hart has stood since the early sixteenth century. Its location, just a few hundred steps from where public hangings were carried out, made it popular with spectators who wanted a drink before or after watching an execution. The poet Robert Burns visited. So did William Wordsworth. But the pub's most notorious connection is to Burke and Hare, the infamous body snatchers who murdered at least sixteen people in 1828 to sell their corpses to medical schools. Some of their victims were found at the White Hart.
In Kingston upon Hull, the Olde White Harte has a room called the "Plotting Parlour" or "Oak Room," paneled in dark seventeenth-century wood. Local legend—though historians now consider it unlikely—claims this is where Sir John Hotham and his allies decided to refuse King Charles the First entry to the town in 1642, an act that helped precipitate the English Civil War and the First Siege of Hull. Whether or not the plotting actually happened there, the building itself is real and remarkable, Grade Two star listed for its Artisan Mannerist exterior and extensive wood paneling.
A different White Hart in Hull, on Alfred Gelder Street, built in 1904, became the haunt of the poet Philip Larkin. In 1977, he gave a talk there to the Jazz Record Society with the wonderfully dry title "My Life and Death as a Record Reviewer."
Literary Connections
The White Hart has inspired writers for centuries.
William Shakespeare mentions the White Hart Inn on Borough High Street in Southwark in "Henry the Sixth, Part Two." In the play, it serves as the headquarters of Jack Cade's 1450 Kentish rebellion—a bit of historical color that Shakespeare's audience would have recognized, since the real inn stood just south of London Bridge. That same Southwark White Hart later became famous as the place where Sam Weller meets Mister Pickwick in Charles Dickens's "The Pickwick Papers." The inn was demolished in the nineteenth century, but for hundreds of years it was one of the great coaching inns of London.
The American Western author Louis L'Amour set a scene at the Southwark White Hart in "Sackett's Land," his historical fiction taking place around 1600.
Perhaps the most intriguing literary connection involves T.S. Eliot and a Welsh village. For years, scholars of English literature puzzled over a couple of lines in his poem "Usk." In 2003, The Guardian reported the solution: Eliot wasn't writing about an animal at all. He was referring to the White Hart Village Inn in Llangybi, which he had visited while touring Wales in 1935. The old hostelry stands near the village well, once painted white and now in ruins.
That same Welsh White Hart has its own extraordinary history. First built in the early sixteenth century, it became the property of Henry the Eighth as part of Jane Seymour's wedding dowry. A century later, Oliver Cromwell supposedly used it as his headquarters in Monmouthshire during the English Civil War. The interior still contains eleven fireplaces from the seventeenth century, exposed beams, original Tudor plasterwork, and even a priest hole—a secret chamber where Catholic priests could hide during times of religious persecution.
Tales from the White Hart
The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, best known for "2001: A Space Odyssey," wrote a collection of stories called "Tales from the White Hart." The book uses a framing device: all the stories are supposedly tall tales told during drinking sessions at a pub called the White Hart, located somewhere between Fleet Street and the Embankment in London.
The pub was fictional, but it was based on a real place—a pub called the White Horse where London's science fiction community gathered in the 1940s and 1950s. Clarke was playing with the tradition, inventing an imaginary White Hart as a setting for stories about impossible inventions and scientific improbabilities, told by unreliable narrators well into their cups.
Folklore and the Otherworld
Behind all these pubs and their histories lies something older still: the white hart as a creature of myth and folklore.
In English tradition, the white hart is associated with Herne the Hunter, a ghostly figure said to haunt Windsor Great Park. Herne appears as a spectral huntsman with antlers growing from his head, leading a pack of supernatural hounds. He's connected to the Wild Hunt, a motif that appears across European folklore—a phantom chase across the night sky, often seen as an omen of disaster.
White animals in general carry special significance in Celtic and British folklore. They're liminal creatures, belonging to the boundary between the ordinary world and the otherworld. To see a white hart was to glimpse something magical, something that didn't quite belong to everyday reality. In Arthurian legend, the pursuit of a white hart often leads knights into enchanted forests and supernatural encounters.
This folklore dimension adds another layer to Richard the Second's choice of symbol. By adopting the white hart, he was associating himself not just with nobility and heraldry, but with the numinous, the otherworldly. He was presenting himself as touched by something beyond ordinary kingship.
It didn't save him, of course. But the symbol he chose has outlasted his dynasty, his rivals, and the entire medieval world that created him.
The Survivors
Some White Harts have been remarkably resilient.
The White Hart in Saint Albans, built around 1500, is Grade Two star listed and appears in the Campaign for Real Ale's Register of Historic Pub Interiors. The White Hart in Witley, Surrey, is mostly Elizabethan but supposedly stands on the site of an Anglo-Saxon inn. It claims one of the oldest continuous pub licenses in England. In around 1875, the Victorian artist Myles Birket Foster painted its picture-board—the decorative sign—which now hangs in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Others have adapted to changing times. The Great House at Sonning, on the banks of the Thames in Berkshire, was once called the White Hart because Richard the Second's wife, Isabella of Valois, was kept prisoner in the village after his death. The White Hart in Havenstreet on the Isle of Wight sits near the Isle of Wight Steam Railway and has adopted a railway theme.
The tradition has even crossed the Atlantic. In Salisbury, Connecticut, the White Hart Inn is named after one of the Hampshire taverns. It has operated as a post-road inn since 1867, though the building dates to 1806. After closing and going up for sale in 2010, it was purchased in 2014 by an investor group and reopened with sixteen guest rooms, three dining rooms, a taproom, and artwork by Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and other contemporary artists displayed throughout.
The Name That Wouldn't Die
There's something remarkable about a brand that has remained recognizable for over six hundred years. Richard the Second has been dead since 1400. The monarchy he represented has been transformed beyond recognition. The coaching era that gave White Hart pubs their heyday ended nearly two centuries ago. Horse-drawn travel is a historical curiosity.
Yet walk through England today, and you'll still see that white deer on pub signs, still find rooms where travelers have eaten and drunk and slept for generation after generation. The symbol has outlasted its creator's reputation, outlasted the political system that gave it meaning, outlasted the practical function it once served.
Perhaps that's the real lesson of the white hart. Symbols have their own lives. They break free from their origins and accumulate new meanings—folklore, literature, community, continuity. A medieval king's personal brand became a network of coaching inns became a chain of local pubs became part of the English landscape itself.
The next time you pass a pub called the White Hart, raise a glass to Richard the Second. He was a failure as a king, but as a branding consultant, his work has proved immortal.