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
Jamaica Inn 1845, was building a chapel at Bolventor to accommodate those who lived in the Jamaica Inn area. In 1865, Murray wrote that the inn was frequented in the winter by sportsmen and offered only rudimentary accommodations. The current building still includes the extension of a coach house, stables and a tack room added in 1778. The inn was owned for a period by the novelist Alistair MacLean. The Jamaica Inn's past notoriety as the pirates' den was known to Du Maurier three years before she wrote her book, when she had lived in the inn, and on the basis of