Both these inferences, and all others I could fancy, are so dubious that I will not venture further into the meaning of this singular appellation given to a tavern.
Royston is a goodly and comfortable town, just inside the eastern boundary of Hertfordshire.

It has its full share of half-legible and interesting antiquities, including the ruins of a royal palace, a cave, and several other broken monuments of the olden time, all festooned with the web-work of hereditary fancies, legends, and shreds of unravelled history dyed to the vivid colors of variegated imagination.

It also boasts and enjoys a great, breezy common, large enough to hold such another town, and which few in the kingdom can show.

Then, if it cannot cope with Glastonbury in showing, to the envious and credulous world, a thorn-tree planted by Joseph of Arimathaea, and blossoming always at Christmas, it can fly a bird of greater antiquity, which never flapped its wings elsewhere, so far as I can learn.

It may be the lineal descendant of Noah's raven that has come down to this particular community without a cross with any other branch of the family.