From a den of rebellion to a leading coaching inn
Parts of The Crown Hotel date from the early 1500s or earlier when they were built as the perimeter buildings of a large mansion by the Tancred family, one of the area’s wealthiest and most important landowners at that time. They built their great house on the corner of a significant road junction, where the Great North Road between London and Newcastle was crossed by a route connecting the cathedral cities of York and Ripon.
In 1569, the house was the venue for a rebellious war-council of northerners, led by the earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, who were intent on overthrowing the Protestant Queen Elizabeth in favour of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. The so-called Rising of the North was quashed before it began. Westmorland successfully fled abroad, but Northumberland was captured and beheaded at York. Their host in Boroughbridge, the elderly William Tancred, survived, but he and successive generations of his family continued to be oppressed by the state.
They were forced out of their Boroughbridge house, but managed to retain ownership, eventually letting it as an inn, from at least 1733, and possibly earlier. Around the 1740s or 50s, when the coaching era was just taking off around the country, The Crown Inn was completely redeveloped within the mansion house’s perimeter buildings. The great house was demolished and replaced with a very large block of carriage-houses and stables, with room for 100 horses. The Crown quickly became one of the largest and most important coaching inns on the Great North Road.
And thus, it continued for about 100 years until the 1840s when the arrival of the railways took the transportation of people, livestock, and goods away from the roads, leaving coaching inns like The Crown to depend almost entirely on local trade. Revival began in the 1920s when the advent of the motor car brought long-distance transport back to the roads, and especially to the main arterial routes like the Great North Road. The first of a series of major investments in The Crown, the addition of a ballroom and 15 new bedrooms, was completed in 1928. Later expansions took The Crown from strength to strength, so that even the re-routing of the Great North Road, now the A1, to by-pass the town in 1963, did not dent its continued success.
