The Feathers Hotel, ludlow
The Feathers Hotel is one of the best known hotels in the United Kingdom. It’s reputation, truly, is worldwide.
In 1983 the historian and author Jan Morris wrote in The New York Times: -
‘I dare say it is the most handsome inn in the world…everybody knows of it.
It is one of the prime images of olde England, Portrayed in posters and brochures wherever tourism is known. ‘
The heart of the hotel is an early 17th Century building. Which the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, has called - ‘The Prodigy of Timber framed houses’.
Recent research has shown that this early 17th Century building may have been built around the remnants of an earlier building.
The origins of the site have been traced to the early 16th Century when it belonged to Thomas Hackluyt of Eyton near Leominster, a relative of Richard Hackluyt, the Tudor geographer. Later in the 16th Century, the site was owned by Ludlow Tradesmen, including Richard Blashfield a wealthy clothier.
In the early 17th Century it came into the hands of Rees Jones, a younger son of a gentry farmer from Pembrokeshire who was forced to make his own way in the world. Rees built up a lucrative practice as an attorney at the courts of the council of the Marches.
