VERIFIED HISTORICAL CLAIM

Lavender-scented sheets in seventeenth-century inns

In an 1876 edition of his History of England, Thomas Babington Macaulay writes that in the seventeenth century a traveller might come upon a village public house, of the kind Walton had described, whose bed sheets were scented with lavender.

Scope

A historian's general description of seventeenth-century English inns, drawn from earlier writers such as Walton; it is not a record of a particular inn, and says nothing about bed linen today.

How this was found

Historical text. A published historical text, read on a digitised page; it records what was written when it was published.

Source: historical record · printed book.

This describes what kind of text the source is. What the claim itself covers is its scope, above; how SmellBook checked the claim, where it could, is the next section.

How this claim was checked

SmellBook checked this claim against the source's own words, so that the claim says no more than the source says. This checks what the source records, not whether what it records was true.

The statement the claim rests on was found word for word in the text of the cited page or chapter of the digitised source, fetched from the named service, and an editor read that whole text against every part of the claim. The passage is cited by its locator; SmellBook does not reproduce the passage. Source text from Wikisource (transcription of the page).

Historical passage checked

The History of England from the Accession of James II, Volume One, image 355 The scanned page has no printed page number in its transcription (an unproofread page of the 1876 edition), so it is cited by image.Describes the 17th century, as the passage states; not the present. Checked 2026-10-19.