Before we travelled to Cannock we had done a bit of research on the Four Crosses and discovered that it had a reputation for being haunted. In fact, I believe it had featured on TVs Most Haunted programme, although it's something I've never seen, and I think they used to hold some sort of ghost watch thing there. We asked Alan and he said that the cellar was the place to see (though he'd never seen a ghost himself), so that's where we headed next.
As you can see, not much down here,
And very low ceilings, I'm only 5 feet 5 inches tall (that's 1.65 metres to you young uns). But then in one corner we found this,
Now I don't believe in all this tosh but if I did, I'm not sure how confident I'd be of success using a Ouija board that somebody made out of an old pub table and a felt tipped pen. Just sayin'.
Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745), Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, visited The Four Crosses and was so taken aback by the landlord's wife's foul temper that he allegedly scratched a rhyme on a windowpane which read,
"Why hang four crosses at the door
Hang out thy wife, thou needs no more"which is supposed to be still there, but we couldn't find it.
Back outside though, we did find a couple of interesting things carved into the timbers. One was, presumably, the date the pub, or at least that part of it, was built.
And the other was part of a poem by Thomas More, In Mortis Diem Omnibus Incertum (The day of death which is known by no one)
It reads,
FLERES, SI SCIRES UNUM TUA TEMPORA MENSEM
RIDES, CUM MON SIT FORTISAN UNA DIES
which translates as
You would weep if you knew that your time was one month,
You laugh when perhaps there might not be one day left to you.
or in modern language,
If you knew that you only had one month to live, you would weep, but you don't know. So you laugh, yet you might have less than a day left.
Cheerful bugger, wasn't he?
Cheers!
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