Place Name
There has been a Crooked Billet pub – for a time Ye Olde Crooked Billet – since around the 1740s (and so could not, as some have suggested, been once owned by Thomas Cromwell’s father). Even then the original premises had to close for a while in 1794 when its owner Thomas Wray died. It remained shut until the 1830s when a William Williams “retailer of beer and coals,” reopened it. His timing came at a boom time for pubs as the recently passed Beerhouses Act of 1830, liberalised the regulations governing the brewing and sale of beer. By 1841 the Crooked Billet was one of nine such beer houses in the area. As for the name, it is a common enough one for public houses , with the historical inn sign featuring a crooked or bent branch, or billet, to indicate that it was a place where travellers could stop for food, drink, or lodging. The term billet in this context derives from an old French word meaning log or branch. In 1888 Young’s Brewery leased the pub, and bought the freehold in 1928.