At The Durham Ox

The story, according to the AA Book of British Villages, goes that sometime in the Middle Ages the Abbot of Glastonbury tried to seize revenues from the Parish priest, who succeeded in foiling him, and the bench ends were carved to celebrate the village’s victory.

The first shows a fox dressed in the abbot’s robes rounding up a group of animals and a flock of geese; in the second, the victims are shown in revolt, stripping the abbot of his robes and putting him in the stocks; and, finally, he is hanged, with the geese pulling on the rope.  To add to the insult, the abbot’s monks are carved with pigs’ heads. (AA Book of British Villages, pg 87)

In 1908 the carpenter J Morison from Taunton was commissioned by a young Viscount to reproduce the images, using finest English Oak, for his ancestral home.  Alas, he was a little presumptuous, as the house was not left to him!

In 1974 the previous owners of the Durham Ox, Mr and Mrs Clark, asked the local woodcarver, Derek Slater, to set each carved panel into oak frames, as we see now.  Derek also built the bar, which, at the time, was the largest piece of oak he had worked with.