Pub London's pubs had closed. The closures have been ascribed to factors such as changing tastes, rise in the cost of beer due to applied taxes and the increase in the Muslim population. Inns and taverns feature throughout English literature and poetry, from The Tabard Inn in Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" onwards. The highwayman Dick Turpin used the Swan Inn at Woughton-on-the-Green in Buckinghamshire as his base. Jamaica Inn near Bolventor in Cornwall gave its name to a 1936 novel by Daphne du Maurier and a 1939 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. In the 1920s John Fothergill (1876–1957) was the innkeeper of
The New Inn The New Inn The New Inn, or The Light Heart is a Caroline era stage play, a comedy by English playwright and poet Ben Jonson. "The New Inn" was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on 19 January 1629, and acted later that year by the King's Men at the Blackfriars Theatre. The original production was a "catastrophic failure...hissed from the Blackfriars stage..." An intended Court performance never took place, according to Jonson's epilogue to the play in the 1631 edition. Jonson was profoundly affected by the failure, and wrote about the affair in