Three Mariners

On the south side of Fore Street, just two doors east of the Lodge, stands a building that is believed, according to Brooking Rowe in his history of Plympton Erle, “to have been granted by Thomas John to John Williams, alias Wilky, and Margery his wife, in 1400-1. Later,” adds Brooking Rowe, “it was a tavern with the sign of the ‘Three Mariners’.”

It is quite probable that the name came from a song popular in the reign of Henry VIII which opens with the words; “We be three poor mariners, Newly come from the seas; We spend our lives in jeopardy, while others live at ease.”

A common enough pub name around that time Pepys mentions the Three Mariners in Lambeth (June 1661), Hardy mentions another in the Mayor of Casterbridge and more recently actor Neil Morrissey bought an interest in the Three Mariners in Dylan Thomas’s Laugharne.