… Image [A posting inn] by Rowlandson, Thomas, 1787, Yale Digital Collections, OID 11791520. Image William Hogarth, ‘A coach stopping in the courtyard of John Shaw’s “Ram Inn” in Cirencester’, Welcome Collection, 39246i, 1790s. … late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a veritable ‘golden age’ of the inn. Inns, where coaches arrived and departed, were nodal points of the transport system. They offered rooms to stay overnight, food, and stables, and were often … & Lodgings Keywords Drinking Hospitality Travel In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period which John Chartres has called ‘the golden age of the British inn’ 1 , this institution fulfilled a number of rather diverse sociable …