Page:Mediaevalleicest00billrich.djvu/237

 preservation, and the room in which the King slept is so spacious as to cover the whole premises; it is situated on the first floor agreeable to a style of building at that time very common in most of our ancient inns."

Ireland made a sketch of the building, and another of the bedstead, about which he wrote:— "The bedstead from which the above sketch is made, is now in the possession of Mr. Alderman Drake, who purchased it for about forty shillings of one of the servants of the forementioned inn about twenty years ago. It is of oak, and richly carved with Gothic ornaments suitable to the taste of the time, but at what period it was made is not clearly ascertained, though a date, I am informed, appeared on one of the feet, when it was last taken down, but no person had the curiosity to notice it. When purchased by Mr. Drake much of the old gilding appeared about the ornaments. Some particulars of this bedstead, I also understand, are preserved in the records of the corporation."

Upon the death of Mr. Drake, who was Mayor of Leicester in 1773, the bedstead passed to his grandson, the Rev. Matthew Drake Babington, who gave it, in 1797, to Thomas Babington of Rothley Temple. In 1831, Professor Churchill Babington, to whom it then belonged, offered to sell it for £100 to the Corporation of Leicester, to be placed in the Town Museum. This offer was, however, declined; and the bedstead was afterwards purchased by Mr. Perry Herrick of Beaumanor. Mr. John Gough Nichols, writing in the Gentleman's Magazine for July, 1845, raised the objection that the bedstead then (and still) at Beaumanor, could not have been King Richard's because it is undoubtedly of Elizabethan workmanship. However, Mr. James Thompson, who examined it in 1872, reported that a distinction must be made between the bedstock or framework and the super-imposed bedstead, and he found that the carved and decorated portions of the bedstead were of the Elizabethan or Jacobean period, but the bed-stock itself he concluded to be of an earlier time. Hutton stated that Richard brought to the Blue Boar Inn his own bedstead, "of wood, large and in some places gilt. It continued there 200 years 189